science books and stop thinking of skins as skins. Mind you, they’d always known they were permeable to air and moisture and thoughts and feelings, but people wanted to hold onto the idea that everybody was something apart. The transcats made that hard.
“The Planners made me to scan the universe for transcats, to log every border between one thing and another, every way you could define it, cross-referencing each phenomenon for fifteen-billion light years in every direction. I was supposed to be a sieve. They were going to use me to pan the universe for transcats. They figured that then they could get rid of them somehow, or at least get out of their way… It’s leaving now… but, you know, you can’t.
“The Planners focused down their big n-dimensional hypostat guns on fragments of twenty or thirty cosmology mavens and astrographers, along with a tightrope walker I believe, for his particular concentration. They also hypostatted a number of ephemerides, yes, a bunch of technical beeohtees, and a part of Tycho Brahe, which they picked up in the dyne pool where the transcats like to feed.
“But they didn’t have their tech down, did they, all that non-dual transcat-think being so new to them? Any hypostat beam cuts back and forth through time and zigzags through space like a spastic’s backstitch. Some little girl in what’s left of Kenya, aseven year old snoozing, spooned against her mama’s belly in their cool thatch hut, was smack in the path of the hypostatic ray. And pow zingo! When you hear that nya-nya-nya nya-nya in my voice, why, it’s her.
“You can all relax now. The thing is gone.”
“It didn’t work then?” Big Man said.
“Naw. It was all wrong from jump. The transcats are in this soup so tight, the second you try to scan them, you hit a self-reference jam. They’re a part of your scanner, turns out, or your eye, or your discursive thinking. All you get is the little glimpses like what we just had here—a shimmy and a fast exit. Like quanta, you can never get the whole picture, because the measurement changes the data. I want my mommy.”
Tenacity’s tinny baby laugh stopped them. “Should we sound the all-clear?”
‘Scope shook rock dust off his lower waves. “Wait. I got a beeohtee in me. Listen up.” ‘Scope flexed himself into a perfect rectangle with narrow, horizontal stripes. In a moment, the stripes started pulsing, and the pulses were accompanied by sound:
* * *
ON THE LESSONS OF THE TRANSCATEGORICALS
(Being Chair Elect Wexler’s Installation Address
to City Planning,
In Plenary Session, November 30, 04 Post Transcat)
When the Second Orbital Anomaly was first discovered—some of you were still children then—the bankruptcy of the hard sciences had already become apparent to our leading minds. Physical studies had dead-ended in their own originating principles. The speed of light confined exploration and expansion to our immediate intragalactic neighborhood. Heisenberg’s relationship, the impossibility of determiningsubatomic events independently of an infecting observer, limited our manipulation of microcosmic phenomena. One saw increasingly detailed studies of decreasingly significant subjects, filling in the blanks of work done decades before. We could reach the outer planets, but could do little. We produced food we could not distribute. We perfected engines, and ran out of fuel. And meanwhile, world population was at the bursting point.
Then came the new Mercury Anomaly. The path of a planet in space-time, we found to our dismay, could be an appendage of a creature whose body extended across galaxies, with holes many parsecs in diameter and gaps millennia in duration. The transcategoricals, as is now common knowledge, could combine a phrase of music, a particular human jawbone, a black hole, all the entities of a certain mass or shape in the universe, and so on, in a single intelligent being, with whom communication began to be possible.
The
“The Planners made me to scan the universe for transcats, to log every border between one thing and another, every way you could define it, cross-referencing each phenomenon for fifteen-billion light years in every direction. I was supposed to be a sieve. They were going to use me to pan the universe for transcats. They figured that then they could get rid of them somehow, or at least get out of their way… It’s leaving now… but, you know, you can’t.
“The Planners focused down their big n-dimensional hypostat guns on fragments of twenty or thirty cosmology mavens and astrographers, along with a tightrope walker I believe, for his particular concentration. They also hypostatted a number of ephemerides, yes, a bunch of technical beeohtees, and a part of Tycho Brahe, which they picked up in the dyne pool where the transcats like to feed.
“But they didn’t have their tech down, did they, all that non-dual transcat-think being so new to them? Any hypostat beam cuts back and forth through time and zigzags through space like a spastic’s backstitch. Some little girl in what’s left of Kenya, aseven year old snoozing, spooned against her mama’s belly in their cool thatch hut, was smack in the path of the hypostatic ray. And pow zingo! When you hear that nya-nya-nya nya-nya in my voice, why, it’s her.
“You can all relax now. The thing is gone.”
“It didn’t work then?” Big Man said.
“Naw. It was all wrong from jump. The transcats are in this soup so tight, the second you try to scan them, you hit a self-reference jam. They’re a part of your scanner, turns out, or your eye, or your discursive thinking. All you get is the little glimpses like what we just had here—a shimmy and a fast exit. Like quanta, you can never get the whole picture, because the measurement changes the data. I want my mommy.”
Tenacity’s tinny baby laugh stopped them. “Should we sound the all-clear?”
‘Scope shook rock dust off his lower waves. “Wait. I got a beeohtee in me. Listen up.” ‘Scope flexed himself into a perfect rectangle with narrow, horizontal stripes. In a moment, the stripes started pulsing, and the pulses were accompanied by sound:
* * *
ON THE LESSONS OF THE TRANSCATEGORICALS
(Being Chair Elect Wexler’s Installation Address
to City Planning,
In Plenary Session, November 30, 04 Post Transcat)
When the Second Orbital Anomaly was first discovered—some of you were still children then—the bankruptcy of the hard sciences had already become apparent to our leading minds. Physical studies had dead-ended in their own originating principles. The speed of light confined exploration and expansion to our immediate intragalactic neighborhood. Heisenberg’s relationship, the impossibility of determiningsubatomic events independently of an infecting observer, limited our manipulation of microcosmic phenomena. One saw increasingly detailed studies of decreasingly significant subjects, filling in the blanks of work done decades before. We could reach the outer planets, but could do little. We produced food we could not distribute. We perfected engines, and ran out of fuel. And meanwhile, world population was at the bursting point.
Then came the new Mercury Anomaly. The path of a planet in space-time, we found to our dismay, could be an appendage of a creature whose body extended across galaxies, with holes many parsecs in diameter and gaps millennia in duration. The transcategoricals, as is now common knowledge, could combine a phrase of music, a particular human jawbone, a black hole, all the entities of a certain mass or shape in the universe, and so on, in a single intelligent being, with whom communication began to be possible.
The
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