Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology
From: Matt McIrvin <mmcirvin@world.std.com>
Subject: Re: Bizarre Australia Dream.
User-Agent: MT-NewsWatcher/3.2 (PPC Mac OS X)
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002 04:02:09 GMT
Organization: Matt and Samantha's Festival of Japery

While breaking my fast I became seized with an unaccountable urge to fashion my bacon and eggs into the form of Klein's Bottle, or the Hankie of Croesus, so called because all the bogeys in the world live within it. Imelda, lovely creature, was having none of it. "Dear Richard, you shall destroy your waistcoat!" she said, fluttering her eyelids charmingly. "And if the genuine Antipodal carpet becomes soiled, the Professor will have you out on the street posthaste!"

"Oh, the Professor," I said. "He hasn't even joined us for breakfast. Down there in the cellar, he'll never know the fascination of Klein's Bottle."

"DO I HEAR MY NAME TAKEN IN VAIN?" boomed an enormous voice from an unseen source.

"The Professor!" I said. "But how--"

"He has piezo-electrical speaking-tubes cunningly inserted beneath the wall-paper in each room," said Imelda. "Thus he guards my virtue."

Cursing my luck, I wished to have a harsh word or two with the Professor. Had he overheard me muttering of Imelda in my sleep? But the urge to twist the strips of bacon into a peculiar form, even one impossible in a space of three dimensions obeying the Laws of Euclid without cheating by baconistic self-penetration, kept pushing itself into the forefront of my mind. A strange celestial music seemed to play... was it but an idle reverie, or another of the Professor's piezo-electrical enchantments?

Before I could finish the thought, a trap in the floor gave way and I plummeted into the cellar!

"Have you wondered," said the Professor to my disheveled and bruised form on the hard stone flooring, "how I came to obtain my genuine Antipodal carpet?"

"I suppose that you bought it off some collector of imported antiquities," I mused, looking with unfocused eyes at the Professor's collection of half-working monstrosities: the Musical Boots, the Chromocycle, the Vibro-Everting Aetheric Portmanteau Antimacassar, all gathering dust from the looks of it... except for one shining engine made of coiled spring that I could not identify.

"Not at all! Not at all! Do you take me for a rich man? The carpets of Lacaille's Land are not for sale. They are given only to the worthy! They put them on the ceilings, you know. Only sensible for an antipodal country, in which I have traveled extensively... Where was I?

"Yes, yes. The people of Lacaille's Land model themselves upon the worthy Laputans of Dean Swift, and venerate the intellectual above all things. The trap-door flap in the rug already existed; in a Lacaillian home it would be used to observe the stars."

"A singular country," I lamely replied, essaying to stand with a certain amount of groaning.

"And you, young fellow, will see this singular country first-hand, by means of the device which I have constructed... the Telephene!"

He gestured toward the glittering mystery in the far corner, which was, somehow, now surrounded by fog and flickering blue light. It looked like nothing so much as a shining brass sclupture of a Horn of Plenty: a cone of coiled cable perhaps three feet in diameter and five in height. Within it was mounted a padded chair.

"The Telephene," said the Professor, "is modeled upon principles of recursive self-elaboration taught to me by the good Lacaillians upon my last trip to the Antipodes, three years ago. If you would be so kind as to direct your gaze to the very point of this Ouroboros of the Modern Age..."

I looked. "The coil narrows to a thin, twisted cable, and runs back up to the top..." There was something strange about what it did there.

"Where," said the Professor, "it becomes the very coiled cable of which the Telephene is made! The coil is made of a smaller coil, which is made of a smaller coil still, down to the Infinitesimal... and all of these coils are one and the same! If the Telephene were to uncoil, it would be of INFINITE LENGTH!"

It was at this point that I noticed the red-painted, heavy clamp of cast iron keeping the Telephene together, under what looked to be tremendous stress; a clamp designed to be unlatched by the pull of a single lever!...And I had an uneasy feeling about the prospect of climbing into that padded chair. O Imelda, I thought, will I ever see your angelic face again?

Whereupon the Professor, surely more thoroughly mad than even I had known before this fateful morning, called upon an unsuspected strength to haul me bodily into the chair. As he pressed a concealed electrical relay, a second trap-door opened above the first, in the ceiling of the breakfast-room, to let in the happy light of day; and then a tremendous shock and the loudest BOING Man ever heard knocked me insensible!

What I recall of my headlong flight as the Telephene uncoiled must necessarily be half dream or more, for I was not myself at that moment. It seemed to me that the air exploded from my lungs, that I would asphyxiate at any moment. The earth, blurred though it was, appeared as a great ball beneath me, painted up with continents like a drawing-room globe; and in a trice, as I was beginning to turn blue, there appeared Lacaille's Land, that scientificalistic oasis half-way between Australia and Tasmania, lit up with its sky-mounted tri-rails and electro-magnetic flares miles high.

I endeavored to orient the Telephene such that the shock of landing would but cause it to re-coil. When it did so, in a broad marble square lined with statues of the most modern philosophers, I nimbly jumped from the chair-- only to find that, without the cast-iron clamp, the re-coil was followed immediately a powerful recoil, and the Telephene leapt bodily into space, never to be seen again. I was trapped in Lacaille's Land without a cent in my pockets!

It was early evening here, on this opposite face of the globe, and the unfamiliar Antipodal stars glittered beyond the lights of the continent-city. As I gathered deep, thankful breaths, I was at first confused by the loss of the entire day without the passage of so much as ten minutes, and stared idiotically at the stellar display until I heard a voice behind me, in a broad accent like, but not exactly like, that of an Australian.

"Ah, a stranger to our stars! We have, you know, re-named all the constellations of the sky along modern principles: gone, the mythical creatures of a bygone age! Abolished, the bestiary fancies of sailors. We Lacaillians espy the Constellation of the Retort, the L-Tube, the Difference-Engine, the Air-Pump, the Microscope, the Ladder of Jacob, the Automaton, the Electro-Static Machine! We write our poems to the Galactical Solenoid, the Stellary Table of Logarithms! Or we don't write them at all, for we have machines that can write them for us!"

"Beg pardon," I said. "I'm new here and utterly lost. I answer to the name of N----, and hail from Boston in the East of America."

"I figured as much when I saw you arrive on your Telephene. You're a friend of my good friend Professor H----. He must have perfected it by now."

"Or almost perfected it, given the lack of a mechanism to retain it after landing....You know the Professor?"

"He is my oldest and dearest friend," said the stranger, "and I would

"And so," said my gracious host Percy, "what were Capitalists evolved ineluctibly into Ventural Capitalists, great money-faucets from which wealth could be extracted until only the Men of Ideas had control of it. Thus we obtained our great wealth."

"But how could such a system be sustained?"

"Through Four-Dimensional Accounting. When Lord Arthur Ponzarelli

filled the Great Hall of Aethero-Harmonics. As its mighty Geissler tubes shone with the actinic lightnings of a thousand auto-compositions, the piezo-electric diaphragms in homes throughout the land-- of which the Professor's were, I now knew, merely a pathetic imitation, a toy!-- sang forth with the latest fruit of the Magnetic Brain of Freed Music. A thrilling tune it was, beginning with strains reminiscent of "The Bonny Bonny Banks of Loch Lomond" and proceeding imperceptibly into a variant of the sprightly American ditty "She'll Be Coming Around The Mountains."

"And no man composed this amalgamation of delights?" I asked Percy.

"No man, nor no woman either. It was the sole invention of the Magnetic Brain. In this way we have freed music from man; reduced it to its basic role as a force of nature. Thus we pull music from the aether itself. Melody wants to be free. But we are not above profit; when our Universal Staveorium of All Possible Songs is complete, we shall further our researches with funding extracted from royalties in the benighted countries of the remainder of Earth."

But I listened no more to the Magnetic Brain, for a stranger music played once again in my mind, the same tune I had heard in Boston shortly before I tumbled into the Professor's study!

I should have been content in this strange city of wonders. Nevertheless, I still dreamt of the beauteous Imelda H-----, and in addition my strange dreams and urges of the Klein Bottle persisted still in Lacaille's Land.

Before dawn on the sixth, I opened my chamber's window to the sweet zephyrs of the city's scented industrial exhalation. Far below, but still far above the phosphorescent parks where occasional lovers still strolled at this hour, trundled a dirigible-assisted cargo tri-rail. I know not what strange force possessed me to abandon Percy's hospitality and leap onto its humming bulk, but leap I did; and roughly I fell upon the canvas back of the center dirigible. There I lay a moment, wondering where I was going. But my solitary vigil lasted only a few minutes, for a guard with plumed shako soon came upon me in his patrol of the dirigible's top surface, and shook me roughly, saying:

"Ahoy there! I know you! You're the fellow who jumped in by Telephene!"

"So I am," I said. "And if you were to throw me in the hoosegow at this moment, I would not blame you."

"Not at all... not at all! The tri-rail pulled along by this airship carries scientific cargo destined for the Klein Bottle on Edison Rock. We'd be honored to have you along-- it is your Professor's Telephene, grabbed in mid-flight by our aerial ace Smedley Octothorpe in his Dymaxion Insectopter, which forms the basis of the experiment!"

Soon we moored at Edison Rock, near the forbidding, uninhabited south shore of the island, named in honor of my native land's own wizard of invention. There, on a wind-blasted, elevated plain surrounded by shining brass measuring-instruments of all sorts, stood a Klein Bottle easily a hundred feet tall-- the very Hankie of Croesus of my idle fancies! It revolved and swallowed itself in stately, fluid fashion, supported by nothing in particular, and how it managed to exist without self-intersection taxed my visual and mental faculties. And from it issued the mysterious song of my brain, which I now knew to be truly the Song of the Klein Bottle!

"It came from out of space," said the Dirigible Guard. "We know not whence. We flatter ourselves to think that it wishes to share its elevated thoughts with we of superior human intellect. But it does nothing, nothing but play that infernal song. Some of our men have gone mad listening to that song. One did nothing for weeks but recite stations on the Boston-to-Cambridge tube line. But we persist."

Suddenly I knew what they were going to do. "You plan to enter the Klein Bottle with the Telephene of Professor H-----?"

"Indeed. Smedley Octothorpe himself was to ride it. The notion is that the Telephene may then propel one through time as well as through space, to a new Singularity of understanding transcending mere Mankind, in which ideas will accumulate faster than any man's ability to comprehend them. But old Smedley has called in sick today-- we can't figure out why..."

A strange courage swelled in my breast. "I shall ride the Telephene."

"You!-- But you're our honored guest, not an experimental aeronaut!"

"I beg your pardon!-- Have I not ridden the Telephene on its maiden voyage to your land?"

"I forbid it!" he said, and raised his fist to strike. But I was ready for his blow, having had some small experience brawling in the dives of my hometown, and soon got the better of the Dirigible Guard. "Sorry to do this, old chap," I said, and, wresting myself free of his grip, ran as fast as my legs would take me to the reassembled Telephene in its iron cradle, aimed squarely at the outside-in maw of Klein's Bottle. I leapt in the Professor's upholstered chair, grabbed the release lever, and gave a mighty pull! What Singularity awaited me, here in the mouth of Infinity?...

"He's coming to, the poor dear," I heard the lovely voice of Imelda say.

"We thought you had passed all understanding permanently," said the Professor.

I was back in Boston!-- in the Professor's guest bed, where I had stayed just before my trip on the Telephene!

"But... the Telephene... Lacaille's Land... the Klein Bottle! Was it then all a dream, a fancy concocted after I bumped my head on the good Professor's stone floor?" I said, happy to be back but chagrined at the Professor as well.

"No, no, my good man," said the Professor. "The Lacaillians told me everything. You reached the Singularity, traveled to Temporal Infinity, were transformed into a lambent sphere of coruscating flame in the laboratory of the Forger of Nebulae, and returned to reveal all the hermetic secrets of Creation to the good savants of Edison Rock. We thought we'd never get you back from that state, but fortunately my Professor H-----'s Patent Re-Incorporation Salts brought you round."

"Thank heaven for that!" said Imelda-- and suddenly her eyes sparkled with a glow that no Klein Bottle's Singularity could muster. Yes, it was good to be re-incorporated!

-- 
Matt McIrvin      http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/