it is a haystack, but is it a needle |
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A primitive theatre director helped most. He accepted charge of the whole investigation because |
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-You know, this really looks like what I usually do: search for actors first, supply an idea for a scene, search for this or that, and from the beginning it's unclear to me what I'm doing. Ideas come later. -Have any of them arrived yet? -Whadda I know. This really should be some of the kind of global event, you know the stuff, happening all over the city, everyone goes out and improvises. The best is to kind of gather the natural dilettante actors for a great hide-and-seek game all over the city, with just nobody knowing who / what they search for, and that's the very juice of it. -You think it will work? -Don't know any other way. This is the only way we all know how to work, anyway. Follow our evolution: we were working people, then specialists, then multispecialists, and now we are like some kind of ancient Greeks: there's the ones who'll work, and we'll make speeches and performances. -Still, let's better work now. Should I call for the next? -Call. Give me a coffee, too. -Wouldn't it be too much? -It's just seventh. -Eleventh. Five more, then coffee. -My mother was right saying. -What's you said? -From a play of mine, autodoc's proverb. Call on |
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So the citizens of all the artful directions were parading on the screen
before the director. Coffee grew thinner as the time went, and more sedated
as well. More right ones among the candidates. Gradually, those who sent
their works instead of their faces dropped off (are you facing anything?),
then those with lunatic ideas (goodness me, nobody knows I can read the
symptoms from the voice), and then most of the formal-structural criticists.
Just a score of younger, rather extraordinary creatures of both sexes remained.
And ten tramps. They really don't exist, but there are those who almost
don't know where they live. Whole Lamster is their home; this had to be
used. One of them may remember where in his home some specially important
souvenir was mislaid. What souvenir? Who could know. |
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They were sent out to search. Alone, in twos, in threes. They went around town, mumbled incomprehensible destinations to the cabins (lest they managed to confuse them), reached unknown parts of town, changed directions without explainable reasons, reached all the back corners... And found lots of everything. Rusty machines on the floor above the library, looking like failed attempts to create a perpetuum mobile, as the plate said, whatever it may mean. A collection of memoplates (old name of pocket memor) with pictures of De Finich, which he allegedly deleted in creative anger. Murphy's laws carved in with a little laser into the water circulation plant wall. Remnants of the old model of transfer cabin door slider (no door now, a thin field of brightly shining fog is created instead). They have even found a beggar. First they thought he's an amateur sociologist; he turned out to be an incredibly shy guy who couldn't speak right, so the machines couldn't understand him, and he didn't dare address people, so he lived like this. The reports kept arriving. There were signs of people living in places nobody would ever think of, but almost all of them could be classified into some of possible ways of life and understood as such. After all, you could sleep in the street somewhere lower, it's warm and spacious and nobody would be surprised. Traces you left would confuse anyone. And the old archaeological rule was kept in mind: if you don't find things laid the way they'd have to be, watch the children play, it will become clear to you. |
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