Pages 489–491
"PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY Y.D.A.U. ... STILL": back to the Arizona outcropping after a long silence, torch-fires now rotating in a ring around the bonfire on the desert floor below. A short, quiet installment — Marathe and Steeply only — that opens with the night's most loaded question, asked softly: "Do you ever think of viewing it?" What follows is an inventory (who holds which copies of the Entertainment), a report on U.S. testing, and the first real theory of how the thing works. All conversation; the prose still leans French.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Master vs. Read-Only (p. 489) — the copy taxonomy: only a Master (the "Copy-Capable" item of p. 486) can spawn duplicates; Read-Onlys just kill their viewers singly.
- CPCP (p. 489) — an Albertan anti-O.N.A.N. cell; the acronym arrives unexpanded, and the scene's contempt ("wackos") is all you get.
- razzles (p. 490) — seizure raids; kin to the "razzle-dazzle" idiom of the serial's first installment (pp. 87–93).
- Kenbeck pacemaker (p. 490) — the hardware from p. 470, earlier tonight; here you learn what stopped it.
- holography (p. 491) — real tech: 3-D images built from laser interference; Virginia's developing theory of the samizdat.
- Annulateur (p. 491) — French: an annulation man; annular-fusion work has been Concavity background since the early O.N.A.N. lore (p. 64ish).
- ALGOL / Fourier (p. 491) — a real antique programming language; the real mathematics of waves. Desai wants to hunt one inside the other.
After you read: three things
1. The temptation question, and where Marathe's mind goes. Steeply presses tête-à-tête — family be damned, one look "to see what's all the fuss," a head-cock Marathe finds "consummately U.S.A." Marathe answers only "I have not been tempted" — while privately replaying his father answering a ringing videophone whose advertising pulse stopped his Kenbeck pacemaker (p. 490). Unsolicited transmission killed his father. The scene never connects the dots out loud; it trusts you.
2. April's question, November's answer. Nobody, Steeply says, is known to hold "this alleged Master copy from the DuPlessis burglary"; the A.F.R. has at least a Read-Only; Tine's Input/Output boys test "24-dash-7," and the cells presumably run their own tests — "Willing volunteers in chairs." You have just watched, three pages ago in November, exactly who is hunting a Master and how (pp. 483–486). The book put these two scenes side by side on purpose; read them as one exchange.
3. A theory of the lethal film — and its dismissal. The samizdat's maker was "a cutting-edge optics man," builder of "reflecting panels for thermal weapons, and an important Annulateur" — a résumé that should sound very familiar. Flatto's guess at the mechanism: neural density plus selective realism, "the density plus the realism might be too much to take" (p. 491). Then Marathe's one-line door-slam on all of it: "M. Fortier finds the theories of content irrelevant."
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.