THE INFORMATION

stolen it. Not from Thad Green. From Richard Tull. And Richard, as he typed, had been stealing it back.

There were witnesses. It all originated, as so much literature originated, from an incident featuring conversation and alcohol. It all originated from a symposium, which means 'drinking party': sym (with, together), plus potes (drinker). It all went back to a pub. Present also were Gina and Gilda. Richard was summarizing his latest project, a big bold book he never wrote called The History of Increasing Humiliation. In that same evening they spent almost half the advance.

'Literature,' Richard said (and it would be nice to write something like 'wiping the foam from his lips with his sleeve as the company fell silent.' But he was drinking cheap red wine and eating pork scratchings and Gina and Gilda were talking about something else)-literature, Richard said, describes a descent. First, gods. Then demigods. Then epic became tragedy: failed kings, failed heroes. Then the gentry. Then the middle class and its mercantile dreams. Then it was about you-Gina, Gilda: social realism. Then it was about them: lowlife. Villains. The ironic age. And he was saying, Richard was saying: Now what? Literature, for a while, can be about us (nodding resignedly at Gwyn): about writers. But that won't last long. How do we burst clear of all this? And he asked them: Whither the novel?

This was already more than enough, surely. Oh, it was pitifully plain what Gwyn had done. He had gone back to his bedsit and gathered his Brit.-Con. textbooks and his gardening manuals and sat down and written Amelior. But it went further. That wasn't really the key…

Supposing, Richard went on, flown with cheap red wine and an audience of three-supposing that the progress of literature (downward) was forced in that direction by the progress of cosmology (upward-up, up). For human beings, the history of cosmology is the history of increasing humiliation. Always hysterically but less and less fiercely resisted, as one illusion after another fell away. You can say this for increasing humiliation: at least it was gradual.

Homer thought the starry heavens were made of bronze-a shield or dome, supported by pillars. Homer was over long before the first suggestion that the world was anything but flat.

Virgil knew the earth was round. But he thought it was the center of the universe, and that the sun and the stars revolved around it. And he thought it was fixed.

Dante did too. Virgil was his guide, in purgatory, in hell: becausenothing had changed. Dante knew about eclipses and epicycles and retrogradation. But he had no idea where he was and how fast he was moving.

Shakespeare thought that the sun was the center of the universe.

Wordsworth did too, and thought it was made of coal.

Eliot knew that the sun was not at the center of the universe; that it was not at the center of the galaxy; and that the galaxy was not at the center of the universe.

From geocentric to heliocentric to galactocentric to plain eccentric. And getting bigger all the time: not at its steady rate of expansion but with sickening leaps of the human mind.

And prepare yourself for another blow, another facer: the multiplicity-the infinity, perhaps-of other universes.

So that's what you'd have to do. That's what you'd have to do, to make it all new again. You'd have to make the universe feel smaller.

Which is what Gwyn had done, Richard realized, as he typed out Amelior. Quietly, uninsistently, reassuringly. It provided the novel's only memorable phrase: 'the naked-eye universe/' That's what Amelior was the center of: the naked-eye universe.

Of course, in Gwyn's novels, there wasn't much talk of astronomy. There was talk of astrology. And what was astrology? Astrology was the consecration of the homocentric universe. Astrology went further than saying that the stars were all about us. Astrology said that the stars were all about me.

Richard wanted to know how Gwyn was feeling these days. He called him and said, 'How's your elbow?'

'Still bad,' said Gwyn.

'So no tennis. And no snooker, I suppose. But why no chess? I know. It's that nagging brain injury of yours. That niggle in the brain. Better rest it. Rub some Deep Heat into your hair when you go to bed.'

'Hang on a minute.'

Gwyn was sitting on the armchair near the window in his study. He was between interviews. He had fixed it with Publicity that they all came to him now. All he needed was a tennis court in the basement, and a couple of restaurants, and he'd never have to go out. Pamela knocked and entered. She named a monthly magazine and said that its people were here.

'Photographer?' he asked.

'Photographer.?

'They're early. Have them wait . . . Interviews,' he explained. 'Where were we?'

Richard said, 'We were talking about your brain.'

'Look, I'd better tell you that I've been deceiving you these past couple of years.'

'In what way?'

'I'm actually much better than you at games. Much better than you at tennis and snooker. Even chess. This sometimes happens, you know, after a great worldly success. There's a power rush. It overflows. Particularly into the, into the sexual and competitive spheres.'

'But you always lose.'

'That's right. I didn't want to win. I thought, you know, what with everything else, it might be more than you could handle. Losing at all games too.'

'Oh dear. It's happened. I always knew you had a rogue maggot loose in your brain. Twanging its way from chamber to chamber. Well. It's happened.'

'What's happened?'

'The maggot's had kids. Demi said you weren't yourself anymore. Not yourself. Whatever that might have been.'

'Listen. Clear a day for it. We'll have a triathlon. Bring a change of clothes. We'll play tennis. Then go and play snooker. Then I'll give you dinner here and we'll finish up with a couple of games of chess.'

'I can't wait. No excuses now. No checking into Intensive Care.'

'Listen. What was it exactly Demi said to you? About my work?'

'I've got it written down. On my typewriter. Gwyn can't write for toffee comma you know full stop.'

'You're sure she was talking about me.'

'I ran it by her the next morning. She said, 'Well he can't, can he?' And I said-'

'Clear a day.'

Gwyn stood up and walked toward the window and stared out. The world loved him, but the world loved him not. Poor Gwyn, and all this cognitive dis.

Outside, now, he didn't know where or how to look. The world said it loved him. So why was it stinging him in the corners of his eyes? He was the unrequited. The pink lips of the cherry blossoms were kissing him and mouthing his name, and whispering, and showing him the