IJ study archive

Scene 098: master copies temptation

Scene
98
Pages
489–491
When
night of 30 April / 1 May YDAU (2009) — text header 'PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY Y.D.A.U. … STILL' (p. 489); one installment of the single mountainside night
Where
mountainside shelf/outcropping northwest of Tucson, Arizona — Sonora Desert (the Marathe/Steeply night-dialogue serial); a ring of torch-fires rotating around the bonfire on the desert floor belowin: Mountainside outcrop above Tucson
POV
3rd person via Marathe (his syntax inflecting the narration)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 9)

Summary

After a long mutual silence on the outcropping — torch-fires now rotating in a ring around the bonfire on the desert floor below — Steeply quietly asks Marathe whether he ever thinks of viewing the Entertainment himself. The exchange inventories the samizdat's circulation: nobody is known to hold the Master allegedly taken in the DuPlessis burglary, but the A.F.R. has at least one Read-Only, the U.S. Office has several confiscated from Boston and Berkeley razzles, and every anti-O.N.A.N. cell save the despised Albertans is assumed to hold copies no one can safely study. Pressed on personal temptation — wife and kids be damned, just one look to see what the fuss is — Marathe deflects, privately recalling his father's death by a videophonic ad-call's pulse to his pacemaker: unsolicited transmission as literal patricide. Steeply describes Tine's round-the-clock Input/Output testing for nonlethal viewing conditions and the developing holography theory — the filmmaker was a cutting-edge optics man, and Flatto guesses the appeal is "density," a stage play's neural load with the screen's selective realism — to which Marathe returns the A.F.R.'s chilling doctrine: M. Fortier finds the theories of content irrelevant.

What to notice

The dialogue runs on two clocks: Steeply's opening question gets no reply, the talk drifts off into the copy census, and then "I have not been tempted" arrives minutes late — an answer to a question nobody is still asking, delivered the way the whole serial converses, on delay and at a distance. Marathe's real answer is never spoken at all: a soft cough into the fist opens onto the videophone memory, and buried in its middle is a guilt clause — the dead father "still holding a telephone Rémy had never been instructed to answer first, to check" — his immunity to lethal transmission explained by a family wound the enemy never gets to hear about. Steeply's probe lands closer than he knows: "Wife's condition be damned. Kids be damned." names, casually, the exact secret the dawn installment will open. The scene's real problem sits inside Marathe's one dry laugh — "Who can study the Entertainment while detached?" — a weapon knowable only by its casualties, which is why the night produces inventory instead of analysis. And notice the epistemic syntax as character: "It was not impossible that the young persons carrying the torches were dancing" — a mind that refuses to assert past its evidence, and that ends the installment converting even intimacy into product, as Marathe watches the feminine inflections gather and files it all away.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 489: header; prolonged silence; Steeply at the lip with bare arms crossed, soiled dress-back to Marathe; below, "a ring of smaller and palsied fires, persons carrying torches" rotates around the bonfire — possibly dancing.
  • p. 489: "Do you ever think of viewing it?" — Marathe doesn't reply; the copy inventory begins: even if the A.F.R. never recovers "this alleged Master copy from the DuPlessis burglary," they hold at least one Read-Only, as (it's assumed) does every anti-O.N.A.N. cell.
  • pp. 489-490: Brullîme reports the Albertan CPCP copyless; Steeply: "Fuck the Albertans… They're wackos" (their idea of a blow to the U.S. plexus is blowing up Montana rangeland).
  • p. 490: "I have not been tempted," Marathe says; Steeply presses tête-à-tête — wife's condition be damned, kids be damned, one quick look "to see what's all the fuss" — with a head-cock "of cynicism that seemed to Marathe consummately U.S.A."
  • p. 490: Marathe's interior memory — his father answering the ringing videophone, the advertising pulse stopping the Kenbeck pacemaker, the recorded ad playing on beside the dead man's ear between his mother's cries.
  • p. 490: U.S. countermeasures — "Rod the God Tine's got Tom Flatto's I/O boys running tests around the clock. 24-dash-7"; Marathe flatly recites Flatto's personnel file (Falls Church widower, child with cystic fibrosis) — an intelligence flex Steeply waves off ("Funny as an impacted follicle, Rémy").
  • pp. 490-491: Steeply surmises the cells run their own tests — "Or maybe you're willingly sacrificing your own. Yes? Willing volunteers in chairs… Wouldn't even want to think about how the A.F.R.'s conducting tests"; Marathe: "C'est ça."
  • p. 491: I/O tests target conditions for nonlethal viewing, not content; Virginia's developing theory is holography. In the section's continuation: "The samizdat" — the filmmaker as cutting-edge optics man, Hostile School, holography-as-assault pedigree; Marathe adds: maker of reflecting panels for thermal weapons, "an important Annulateur," optics fortune before film; Flatto's density theory (a stage play's "neural density" plus the viewer-screen's "selective realism" — "might be too much to take"); Desai's plan to hunt Fourier equations in the root code's ALGOL; Marathe's closer: "M. Fortier finds the theories of content irrelevant"; Marathe memorizes Steeply's birdlike head-cock and increasingly feminine inflections.

Themes in this scene

  • Entertainment and the Self: the Entertainment as inventory-able weapon — Masters vs. Read-Onlys, testing protocols, "willing volunteers in chairs"; and the temptation question made personal: could even the incorruptible operative resist one look?
  • Nationalism and O.N.A.N.: the copy-census maps the whole anti-O.N.A.N. insurgent ecology (A.F.R., CPCP, cells, razzles) against Tine's federal apparatus; intelligence dossiers traded as dominance display.
  • Film and Optics: the first sustained technical theory of the samizdat — JOI's holography/diffraction pedigree, the Hostile School, density-plus-realism as the lethal mechanism — the book letting optics explain (or fail to explain) the lethal cartridge.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Cross-cut irony with scene 097 (the book's own splice): on this April night Steeply wonders whether the A.F.R. will "ever even recover this alleged Master" — and the adjacent November scene shows them seizing the Antitoi shop to do exactly that; the razzle-confiscated Boston copies Steeply mentions (p. 490) are the same dissemination stream as the smiley-stamped display cartridges on Lucien's shelves (p. 483; n.205/n.301).
  • Marathe's father's videophone death (p. 490) completes the pacemaker thread planted in scene 096 (p. 470) and rhymes with both n.190's felony-murder pacemaker hypothetical (scene 095) and the videophony-collapse history (pp. 144-151): lethal unsolicited entertainment-tech is the family wound under Marathe's politics.

Forward

  • "Willing volunteers in chairs… sacrificing your own" anticipates Fortier's actual test regime at the occupied shop (pp. 722ff) and the A.F.R.'s plan to spread the Entertainment through willing American choice — the serial's choosing-your-master argument (scene 072, pp. 317-321) cashed out operationally.
  • The holography/density theory threads forward to Molly Notkin's interrogation account of the film's content (pp. 788-795, scene 159), Joelle's own account (pp. 938ff orbit, scene 178) of filming Madame Psychosis material with the wobbly auto-occluding lens, and the n.24 filmography's Infinite Jest entries; "an important Annulateur" ties JOI's optics to annular fusion (pp. 572, scene 114ff orbit).
  • "Fortier finds the theories of content irrelevant" states the A.F.R.'s instrumental doctrine that governs all their later choices (pp. 721ff Fortier sections, scene 145+) — and contrasts with the U.S. side's compulsion to understand the pleasure it cannot stop consuming.
  • Steeply's "consummately U.S.A." cynical head-cock and the temptation probe loop back to scene 096's cage line and forward to his father's MAS*H case study (pp. 638-648): each installment tests whether anyone — agent, nation, family — can decline the lever.

What links here Manuscript differences (1) · Timeline events here (17) · Connected from (15) · Passages quoted here (34) · Motifs (1)

Manuscript differences

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs