See Under by David Grossman (famous ebook reader TXT) 📕

The purpose of this system was never adequately explained. The inventor himself rarely spoke of it, and it is unlikely that anyone at the zoo would have been able to understand him if he had. Sergei said something vague about it to Otto, whose later discussions with Fried and Marcus gave rise to rather strange speculations. In a muddled, general sort of way, the three understood the system to be a means for stealing TIME [q.v.] based on a physically inexplicable phenomenon. Sergei’s structure consisted of a space surrounded by a ring of 360 slender mirrors (half a meter high each), set up on the lawn in a perfect circle, each mirror reflecting the one facing it, which in turn reflected another mirror, etc. Thus the circle formed a space infinitely intersected by the perpetual “motion” of light. The principle behind this singular “motion,” however, is unaccountable. It is almost certain that the inventor himself never really fathomed it from a scientific point of view. In any case, an unfamiliar dimension had clearly been created, which the inventor called “non-time.” This non-time had an amazing effect on any object that entered its confines, an effect which Kazik witnessed when the lunatics [see under: LUNATICS, VOYAGE OF THE ] found the strange mirrors gleaming in the moonlight like icy tombstones. Aaron Marcus tried to explain what the mirrors were for, but Kazik never fully understood. Then the apothecary gave a modest demonstration, a reconstruction of the one presented by the inventor himself more than two years before at the zoo. This same Sergei (Wasserman: “Registrar of the mysterious, amanuensis of the magical!”) had plucked a fresh red rose, still covered with dew like the perspiration on a woman’slip. Now Marcus plucked a rose, then carefully set it in front of one of the mirrors, waited an instant for the mirror to catch the reflection, and then quickly drew back. The rose flashed in one mirror after another; it passed from mirror to mirror at tremendous speed, was projected first as a primary reflection, then as a secondary reflection, and then as the eidolon of a reflection, the reflection of an eidolon … There was no end to it: red roses of luminosity bisected each other, merged briefly in a red glow, then dimmed and died. The circle teemed with live red roses, and in the process everyone began to see how “the rose itself,” that is, not the petals or stem or color or fragrance of any one particular rose but “the rose itself,” before it took on form and color and fragrance, glowing and dimming in all the mirrors, burned inside them like a flame and bound them to the moist, red, imperial rose-essence—all this in less than an instant, before the rose returned once more to the first mirror, whence it began the journey to its essence, quivering, blushing, and heaving its petals, then fading away. Only then did the ARTISTS [q.v.] breathe again. Aaron Marcus showed Kazik the rose in his hand: it had wilted, its petals dropping off at the slightest touch. The stem, too, crumbled to pieces. The band stared at the mirror in dread. Kazik said, “But-it-was-dead-all-along.”

Again they tried to make him understand. They told him that Sergei had tried to steal a few seconds of time to preserve in this glassy prison. Sergei, they guessed, had believed that for some reason a different variety of time, reverse time, collected within the circle of mirrors and extracted the “moisture” of ordinary time. Sergei had once told Otto feverishly that he was trying to eradicate both suffering and joy, “so people won’t suffer so much.” To make them more like sticks of furniture, like objects. This, apparently, is why he had tried to change the metaphysical status of human beings: to turn them into the only living creatures existing in the dimension of space but not time. One-dimensional beings, whose parts could be painlessly removed, just as one chair parts from another without sadness. A house crumbles without suffering. A torn page does not cry. He hoped this mysterious essence collecting in the circle—this non-time which caused reflected objects to shrivel and dissolve—would eventually be able to extract anything that interfered with one-dimensionality: memory, a sense of past and future, hopes, longings, ideals, experiences of pain and joy; in short, Sergei had tried to start a bizarre sort of revolution: to dethronetime and free all beings from what he once termed its “side effects.” In order to succeed, he believed he had to “concentrate” and “improve” the Sergeian time dimension in the system. To this end he sat with his Prometheus for many months and repeated the experiment with roses, fresh apples, mice, pieces of his own flesh, photographs from newspapers and old albums, and notices which Otto had snatched at his peril from the ghetto walls, lists of Jews transported from the Um-shlagplatz to die in Treblinka, love poems by Yorik Wilner (“A day hence/we will not meet; a week hence/we will not greet each other; a month hence/we will forget; and a year hence/we will no longer recognize each other; and tonight with a scream on a black river I almost raise the stone from the pit; hear me/save me; hear me/I love you; you hear me/I am too far away”). Sergei had likewise passed objects and bits of information of intimate personal value before the mirrors. Wasserman: “I called them ‘unplumbed possessions,’ like the big yellow leaf Sarah and I brought back from Paris, or Paula’s beauty mark, or the secret I kept in my heart: how Sarah’s right eyelid fluttered when we lay in each other’s embrace … Nu. Hcrr Neigel, what token of this sort would you bring to our Sergei?” Neigel was taken aback. He coughed, thought, rubbed his check. Only two or three weeks before, Neigel would have scoffed at Wasserman’s “softness.” But times had changed, and now he