THE INFORMATION

sun was white you had no trouble at all believing in black holes, in singularities. Because this ordinary star already looked half blistered out of space-time.

Mandated to hang around and deal with all the fallout from the circus thing, the publicity boy was catching a later flight. Therefore Richard would be traveling first class, up there with Gwyn. With Gwyn, who had to make some early interviews at the next city along.

'We're all a little discombooberated here,' said the stewardess.

Richard told her that he was all right.

'Ah,' said Gwyn, 'an English breakfast.'

'Coffee for you, sir? Coffee for you?'

'Have you got any brandy?'

'Any?'

'Brandy?'

Finding out how many kinds of skin and hair the world had, Richard looked out of his porthole all the way to the Pacific, while Gwyn capably slept. All the way, over the waffle fields and hanks of french toast sprinkled with confectioner's sugar, over salt lake, pious plain, desert, more desert, mountain, valley, and then the coniferous ridges of the continent's edge, all the way from tundra to taiga.

He thought the circus crowds in the Kafka story were probably right, to turn away from the hunger artist, from Der Hungerkunstler, who just lay there half buried by the straw in his cage, fasting, plangently not eating; the crowds were probably right to favor the panther which replaced him. Because the panther had no sense of servitude or even captivity, and carried freedom around inside its own body (somewhere in the jaws it seemed to lurk). In the photographs Kafka always looked so amazing, so amazed, perpetually spooked, as if he kept seeing his own ghost in the mirror.

When they landed they were given an additional hour, enplaned, on the ground. A technical matter, or a slave revolt; not even Gwyn could find out which-Gwyn, whose interviews were being stacked above him in the sky like tiers of jets . . . Richard had come to know the landscapes of airports-which were landscapes of the incomplete. Not the interiors, with their popcorn smell and cheerful yellow popcorn light, which were landscapes of incessant addition. The tacked-on Bs and Cs and Ds, the proliferating lego of elbow and kneejoint; and for every sundered couple there wag another kissing thirstily at six in the morning, and for every weeping granny there were familial burgeonings elsewhere-feasts of cousins. Planes moved at the same speed but the human travelers had different rhythms, hurrying, ambling, sprinting, sprawling. Outside,though, the landscape insisted on incompletion. The empty crew buses and stationary forklifts, the prefabricated portakabins. And then headless trucks and cabless wheel sets, staircases pointing upwards but leading nowhere, the joints of amputated corridors, stranded on the tarmac, both ends leading nowhere, insisting on the incomplete.

'We're just going to be thinking out loud here.'

'Bear with us. Okay? Okay. Amelior …'

'Now. For us to care about this community, what we need is for it to be … threatened from outside.'

'So we care.'

'So we care.'

'The community is threatened, if we're going to go with the eco thing, by … I don't know. Okay. Shoot me. Killer rats. Mutant rats.'

'Please. Keep it human. The community is threatened …'

'By Nazi bikers. The Klan. I don't know.'

'Way-wait. Solomon-Solomon's up on the hill, tilling it or whatever. With Padma and Jung-Xiao. Baruwaluwu shouts out! And Solomon sees …'

'The dust trail.'

'The dust trail?'

'Of the Nazi bikers.'

'Way-wait. A construction company plans to …'

'Build a highway through …'

'Wants to turn the community into a …'

'A chemical warfare facility.'

'A casino.'

'A bioengineering plant. Which gives us the eco thing. Do we want the eco thing?'

'Where they make mutant cattle.'

'Mutant cattle?'

'Mutant . . . pigs. You know, like a block long with no head. Or mutant rats.'

'For the military. And Solomon …'

'Figures out…'

'How to fuck them up. Way-wait.'

Not even in his sweatiest dengues and beri-beris of facetious loathing had Richard ever seriously considered that he would one day be asked to face the prospect of a Gwyn Barry movie sale. But there they sat, Richard and Gwyn, on a sofa in a luxurious prefab within the Millennium precinct of Endo Studios, Culver City, in Greater Los Angeles. SoL.A. had brought fresh horror, and in the form of a double bill. Amelior Regained had been optioned. But Amelior was a firm sale.

'Yeah,' Gwyn had said the previous evening in the hotel. 'Millennium are doing it. Hey,' he added to the publicity boy, newly arrived, and emerging plumply from the shower, 'I don't want this to break until the Profundity thing is all straightened out.'

The publicity boy looked at him.

'People will think I don't need it,' said Gwyn in a wronged voice. 'You know. Rich wife related to the Queen. Back-to-back best-sellers. Movie deals.'

'Rock videos.'

'Rock videos. They're bound to ask me about movie deals here. I've already been asked about nine times.'

'Just say there's been movie interest.'

'Okay. Yeah, that's good. Movie interest is good.'

Richard still couldn't figure it. No matter how degraded or talentless, every work of art belonged to a genre. And the Amelior books belonged to the literary Utopias. There had been plenty of movies about failed Utopias and anti-utopias, but there had never been a movie about a nice Utopia, where everyone was happy all the time. Whole movies about nudist colonies, early Kulturfilmen, the iron jawlines of socialist realism: Utopia, in the cinema, belonged to propaganda and pornography. Besides, the big thing about Amelior, as a joint, was that it was cleansed of all incident-cleansed, too, of sex, violence, conflict and drama.

Such thoughts had evidently occurred to the three-person development team gathered there in the wheeled bungalow to toss ideas around in Gwyn's presence. The two guys wore complicated sports gear- reversible wetsuits. The woman wore a plaid skirt and a white blouse; and she smoked.

'Wouldn't it be better,' said Gwyn, who, in this pre-Profundity period, had yet to commit to writing the screenplay, 'if you made the conflict internal?' Gwyn opened his hands and fell silent again.

'Let's run with it. Like Gupta's one of them.'

'A Nazi biker.'

'No. A bioengineer.'

'Gupta? Way-wait. Solomon …'

'Why always Solomon?'

'Okay. Abdelrazak…'