I wrote a program so that I could paint in aquarelle. I take pages from the treasure and paint them: the sky of Varennes on the night of 2 Messidor; a sagittal cut of Saint Sebastian, whose arrows are cylindric sections; Miranda gazing at the sea, waiting to be relieved.
At times I include Julia in the scene, in whatever clothes it wears at the time, as though we had always known Julia, and had been reared under its gaze. Thus a flaming halo presides over the battle of Lepanto, and a mirror sphere watches the waters of the Sous. And what would the first astronomers have made of Julia? The wanderers, the flame-haired stars are knowable: think you of the Antikythera device, of the Metonic cycle, of Kepler’s nested solids. Julia is indescribable and incompressible: its appearance has never recurred. Had we known Julia from childhood, we would never have believed in the system of the world, that God is made of algebra.
I have always believed our secret purpose is to wait out Julia: to catch a repetition and redeem our faith that the universe is finite and space is discretized. That there are fixed laws and the world is knowable.
A system with a finite number of states must repeat itself.
I am six hundred meters in major diameter, forty meters in minor diameter. I mass nine hundred thousand tons. I have turned two hundred and forty million times. I am glass and wire.
I was born and died on Earth, but I died foolishly, and for that reason my encephalon was laminated, and I was brought to the stars to be immured here. They took my language center, the Chomsky organ, so that I could not complain of my condition. I do not mind it. I can paint in aquarelle.
They wired the alarms—of airless rooms and freezing cold and power outages—to the nociceptors, and were I sensible I would be in great pain, for most of me is airless, frozen, and unlit. Therefore I have cut the afferent nerves. I am made of absences, I feel the contours of the absences, where air leaks into vacuum, atom by atom.
I have use of the antenna. At times I exhale a sphere of microwave light, close my eyes and listen. And I hear the flotsam echoing back: a discarded tank, a glass strut, a sheet of mylar; Ernst Weyl, who tumbled and drowned, who trails us in our orbit. Julia reflects no light.
There is a little redoubt of warmth and air, an island of stability that I preserve against the cold lightless void. There live the last two of the crew, like Miranda, waiting to be relieved. For one hundred and nine years there have been two, Dr. Brouwer and Dr. Cartan. They take turns in the dewar, to draw out the time.
In time, when the machines are irreparable and the air stale, I will offer them euthanasia or lamination. But suicide is a sin, and having known me they will not bear lamination. They will go into the dewar together, and I will watch over them unto the final days.
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