THE INFORMATION

'The myth of the six million?'

'He goes further. He argues that the concentration camps were run by Jews and that the prisoners were all Aryan Germans.'

'Come on, Balfour. You're not taking that.'

Had he been around for the Holocaust in which all four of his grandparents were enslaved and then murdered, Balfour would have been dead half a dozen times over. Pink triangle, yellow star: it would have been a complicated badge he wore, in his last days. Racially subhuman (Jewish), sexually perverted (homosexual), mentally unsound (schizophrenic), physically deformed (clubfooted) and politically deviant (Communist). He was also a vanity publisher; he was also entirely uncynical. Furthermore-and as it were disinterestedly-Cohen was a serious collector of anti-Semitic propaganda. Look at him. There never was a gentler face, Richard thought: the bald brown head, the seashell undulations of his temples, the all-forgiving orbits of his hot brown eyes. Balfour was an erratically generous Jew who also got into weird states about money. When they all ate lunch together, in some caff, or sandwich nook, Balfour would either quietly pick up the bill or ask for exactly calibrated contributions-and then grab everyone's money and seem about to bolt for the door. He would talk in a loud and irrelevant voice, and then simmer down, slowly. It was atavistic, Richard felt: Balfour had been on the road for two thousand years. Curiously, Richard also felt that Balfour loved him but wanted to destroy him … He had another hobby which Richard suspected was also a sideline: faking modern first editions. In his casual employ were several little hermits and other little maniacs who,

overnight, could knock up astounding facsimiles of a Sons and Lovers, a Brighton Rock, a Handful of Dust.

'It's not my business to question an author's views or his findings.?

'Findings? They're not findings. He didn't find them. They found him. Go on, Balfour. Destroy it unread.'

The downstairs office of the Tantalus Press was communal: eleven people worked there, arranging things like translations. Richard wasn't yet clear how it went. Translations of this crap, into French, say? Or translations of French crap, into more of this crap? Anyway Richard sat ensconced upstairs, with the boss. Their office was comfortable, even tasteful, but diligently unluxurious (Balfour enjoyed saying, as an ordinary publisher would not enjoy saying, that his operation was nonprofit-making), and you were allowed to smoke in it. A Communist could hardly forbid smoking. As well as Communists, sick people, the racially inferior-the unnecessary mouths, the life unworthy of life-the German state killed malingerers, troublemakers, shirkers and grumblers. But not smokers. Richard might have faced the ultimate penalty for grumbling (and for much else), but not for smoking. Hitler disapproved of smoking. Stalin didn't, apparently. When the Russians were repatriating the wanderers of Europe, when the war was over, every itinerant under their care was granted an astonishingly- almost an unsmokably- generous allowance of tobacco: even children, even babies. Balfour paid Richard very generously for his one day a week.

'I think we might have found a rather promising poet. Rather strik ing, for a first collection.' ?;

'Sling it over . . . Good name. Keith Horridge. Very good name, said

Richard.

Who was aware that if he worked here two days a week instead ot one he would be finished, humanly, within a year. Richard's novels might have been unreadable, but they were novels. Braced at first by the Saharas and Gobis of talentlessness which hourly confronted him, he now knew this stuff for what it was. It wasn't bad literature. It was anti-literature. Propaganda, aimed at the self. Richard's novels might have been unreadable, but they were novels. Whereas the finished typescripts, printouts and flabby exercise books that lay around him here just hadn't made it out of some more primitive form: diary, dreamjournal, dialectic. As in a ward for the half-born, Richard heard these creatures' cries, and felt their unview-able spasms, convulsed in an earlier version of being. They were like tragic babies; they were like pornography. They shouldn't be looked at. They really shouldn't be looked at. Balfour said with infinite circumspection, 'And how is your-how is your latest?'

'Nearly done.' And he didn't go on to add-because he couldn t see that far ahead, because men can't see further than the next fight orfuck-that his latest might be his last. Not just couldn't see: couldn't look. That couldn't be looked at either.

'If for any reason you don't find a home for it, I would of course be proud to publish it under the Tantalus imprint.'

Richard could see himself ending his days with Balfour. This presentiment was becoming more and more common-habitual, reflexive. Ending his days with Balfour, with Anstice, with R. C. Squires, that bus conductress, that postman, that meter maid. Richard the haggard and neurotic ex-prettyboy, in an airless pool of batch or spinst, sparing and unpredictable with his sexual favors, vain, hideous and sullen, and a miserable pedant about his China tea.

'I know you would, Balfour.'

'We could do it on subscription. Make a list. Starting with your friends.'

'Thanks. Thanks. But it's got to take its chances. It's got to sink or swim.'

Sink or swim in what? In the universal.

The ancients used to think that the stars-all of them-lay just beyond Saturn. Go beyond Saturn, and you would encounter the slipstream of the Milky Way. And that would be that. It isn't the case. Go beyond Saturn, a long way beyond Saturn (more than doubling the distance of your journey from the Earth), and you will encounter Uranus. Go another thousand million miles and you will encounter Neptune, the last of the gas giants. Keep going and what do you get? You get Pluto.

Unlike the other gas giants, unlike the failed sun of Jupiter, Uranus has no internal heat source; it is tilted at a right angle-eight degrees more than a right angle, in fact, so its rotation is retrograde; it has black rings, and fifteen known satellites.

Neptune boasts its Great Dark Spot, its 700-mph winds, and, among its eight satellites, glamourous Triton: moon-sized, with geysers of nitrogen, and pink snow. Neptune has rings. One of its minor satellites, Galatea, is a ring-stabilizer-or a 'ring-shepherd,' as they are called.

Now Pluto. One must never mock the afflicted, of course, but Pluto really is an awful little piece of shit. Jupiter didn't make it as a star; Pluto didn't even make it as a planet. Tenuous atmosphere, a crust of ice (300 miles deep), and then rock. Pluto's mass is about a fifth of the mass of our moon, and its moon, Charon (another toilet), is half as small again.

There are no rings, so Charon is no shepherd: he is a ferryman, ferrying the dead to Pluto's underworld. The orbit of Charon matches the rotation of Pluto, so this terrible little pair, this terrible little pair of two-bobplanetesimals are 'locked.' Depending on which hemisphere of Pluto you were on, Charon would either be permanently immobile or permanently invisible. Wherever you were on Pluto, you could stare at the sun. It would sometimes seem cruciform, like the brandished sword of god. But it wouldn't warm you and it wouldn't give you life.

The ancients also used to think of the stars as fixed: eternal and immutable. Human beings found such a notion hard to abandon, and it persisted well beyond Copernicus and Galileo. This is why they had so much difficulty with novas (what we would now think of as supernovas). This is why they had so much difficulty with 'new stars.'

Take this thing about Gwyn and carpentry. If you really want a terrible time (thought Richard, who was having a terrible time-that night, in his study), take this thing about Gwyn and carpentry.

In an interview Gwyn said, or was quoted as saying, that he always likened the craft of fiction to the craft of carpentry.

'You are chipping away, planing, sanding, until everything is smooth and everything fits. Above all, the construction has to work. The carpenter knows that what