Chapter 3 — Calipers Lesson
~ 1 ~ Huddled together over cups of steaming coffee, Herbert, Het and Esther were meeting in the Student Union, the grey light of an overcast day falling dully on them through its windows.
Leading them to the table, Herbert had said, ”Ricardo dropped by my office late yesterday, and he told me the Telling Leaf entitles us to the highest degree of Clan assistance."
”What do we need, that they’re going to do for us?”
"First, Het, they’re going to provide some training by Miss Knox in the use of Makers’ Calipers. We’ll begin today.”
”So, Rhoda really is a Maker,” said Esther. “Het, she did talk with me about old family relationships in pre-War New Jersey—just as she promised me on that day when you introduced Ricardo."
"Yeah, I remember. What about it?" Het knew that Esther was eager to divulge some juicy details.
"Well, dear, Rhoda told me that your father, Oscar Nerzhin, and Rhoda's grandfather, Walter Knox, had some business dealings with each other before America got into the Second World War. What’s interesting is that those dealings had to do with Stalin.”
Esther saw Herbert’s sudden interest in the conversation.
Het, with some concern in his voice, asked, "With Stalin personally?"
“She didn’t say Oscar Nerzhin knew Stalin. She told me that on the Black Sea, Stalin himself inspected a seaplane that was built by her grandfather’s aviation company. Walter Knox was the plane’s pilot. Guess who was the aircraft’s copilot—and chief designer?"
"Not my father?"
"No, Het. It was Rhoda's father, Martin Knox.” Esther was watching Herbert, who was giving her his full attention.
"Did they sell seaplanes to the Russians?” Het asked.
"They sold something. Rhoda said only that Walter Knox’s company, Aeronauticas, established a factory in a hangar at a big Moscow airfield. She didn’t say what they manufactured there."
A flash of understanding lit Herbert's face. Esther’s response to his obvious desire to hear more about this was a barely-perceptible shake of her head as she glanced at Het. Herbert’s hint of a smile acknowledged Esther’s unspoken promise to speak with him about it later, privately. In truth, she knew little more to tell him about it, and she did not understand what could be behind Herbert’s interest.
The concerns expressed by Het were unlike Herbert’s. ”Did my father make money dealing with Walter Knox?"
"I'm afraid not, Het. Rhoda said Oscar’s compensation was in services received from Walter Knox."
Suspiciously, Het asked, "What were those ‘services’?"
"Free access to Aeronauticas airplanes for his personal use. And I think Oscar used Walter Knox's airplanes to seduce Winthy.”
“What?”
“He flew her to beautiful and exotic places in South America, in one of which I’m sure you were conceived. You’re in debt to Walter Knox for your existence."
“Shit! I should have heard Mom out!"
After exchanging a quick glance with Herbert, Esther asked, ”What did she say, Het?"
"My mom told me that everyone in the group sitting with us at dinner in Mickie’s-by-the-Sea was a person who commanded lethal force in one way or another—including Rhoda, or her family. Mom also told me that Alice's father is a Soviet Agent. I thought she was just trying to make her days with Oscar seem excit…”
“Here comes Miss Knox, herself,” interrupted Herbert.
Esther raised an eyebrow at Het. "Isn't it a small world?”
Herbert rose, greeting Miss Knox, and while he was discussing with her some details of the day’s agenda, Esther listened with one ear.
She reached over to touch Het's hand. "Don't bring up any of this with Rhoda yet,” she whispered. “I need to tell you more about what I think is going on. That's more important than old family politics right now."
Het nodded, agreeing.
After Herbert and Rhoda had ended their brief discussion, Herbert said enthusiastically to Het and Esther, "Miss Knox has kindly brought three sets of apprentice Calipers, one for each of us, so let’s take them to my Workshop. I, too, have things to learn, knowing only a little about the use of Calipers.”
Herbert picked up the large Calipers case and they hiked up the path from the Student Union, passing through the eucalyptus grove on their way to the Turret of the Keep. While they walked, Esther listened to the others discussing technical details of physical time and meta time differentials as related to Calipers. She heard them referring to such things as “Q” and “P”—Rhoda in a very formal and businesslike manner and Herbert continuing to address Rhoda as “Miss Knox”.
Watching the two men hanging on every word of Rhoda's stream of technical jargon, as though it were profound wisdom, Esther recalled that Rhoda had jolted Het earlier with a question about “Q”, and it seemed to her now that Rhoda truly understood the mathematical meaning of that jargon. Esther had skimmed the reports by Het and Scott to the Arch Foundation, which had been given to her by Mortimer Kane, and she knew that Herbert and Gabrielle had read them and probably understood them. She understood that Rhoda was making use of Het’s jargon to make it easier for them to understand whatever it was that she was telling them. How smart is that bitch?
Esther observed that Rhoda’s clothing that day was not meant to be glamorous, being styled like a mechanic’s short-sleeved overall and sewn from fabric which was suitably sturdy for work. It fit her body perfectly, however, both hiding and revealing Rhoda’s lovely figure, which was further accentuated by the subtle changes in the sturdy fabric’s dark, mechanics’-blue color as she moved—shifting from the deepest violet blue of the sky to the deepest blue-green of the sea.
She was struck by the beauty of the contrast between those deep blues and the copper-gold of Rhoda's abundant hair, which was braided and tightly coiled, low on the back of her head. The hairstyle was elegant, yet it also suggested that Rhoda was prepared to don goggles for serious work. Esther grinned to herself. Rhoda takes Rosie the Riveter to new heights! …Who is Rhoda? …Who am I?
When Esther had reported her discussions with Rhoda to Mortimer Kane, he had shown intense interest in the relationship between Oscar Nerzhin and Walter Knox. At that time, it had seemed to Esther that through Rhoda’s conversation with her, the “Knox empire” was extending some sort of offer to the “Arch empire”. She suspected that the real head of the Knox empire—controlling the Clan and its many business enterprises—was either Rhoda's father, Martin, or her grandfather, Walter. She thought it likely that Rhoda knew a great deal about their business, just as Esther knew well the many facets of the political machine controlled by her father, Isaac. Esther had not accepted Isaac’s offer to join him, with an opportunity to work her way quickly up the ladder. She had accepted Kane’s offer, instead, because it looked attractively mysterious and exciting to her—and it was not her father’s syndicate.
She was left, by her shocking discovery of Gabrielle’s place in the new scheme of things concerning Arch, in little doubt that Kane's organization (if it really was his) was no less powerful than Isaac's. Now she felt able to rise in both of the organizations, to become head of each. But, who was Mortimer Kane? Was he the head of Arch? He was undoubtedly the head of the Keep, but Esther knew that there was a higher power. She remembered the alacrity with which Kane had jumped to speak with Giselle, who was the voice of Alice—“God herself.” Was Alice the higher power? Was it Thersa? The Friend?
Esther was again feeling dubious about the existence of gods, but she thought that they might be ciphers for someone or something important. Since she had not touched base with Alberto in a while, she wondered if he was still working on his “Knox Aviation” story. Was everything that was happening to her, a part of his story?
Because her mind was whirling with these inconclusive thoughts about the power structure into which she was working her way, Esther barely noticed that she had walked into the chamber of the Keep which held the Wheeled Workshop, until she found herself standing with the others before the Workshop.
In the Stables in Switzerland, the opened Workshop’s wheels had sunk into the earthen floor, transforming the Wagon into a stage. Here, its wheels had remained standing firmly on the chamber’s floor ever since she and Het had opened the Workshop for Herbert. In the back of the Wagon, the stairs to the Front Gate had appeared, and the Wagon Workshop now looked too big to roll out of the chamber into which it had been carted.
They all mounted the three steps to the door in the Wagon’s “cabin” which was the Front Gate of the Workshop, and Esther saw that the Antechamber into which the Front Gate opened was a large, empty room with walls of rough-hewn oak planks. The Antechamber seemed somehow larger than the chamber of the Keep in which the Wagon was standing.
From within the Workshop’s Antechamber, the glowing entrance to its Inner Sanctum was not visible to Het and Esther. Rhoda saw it clearly, and Herbert saw it, too, but he pretended not to see it. Surprised but pleased to see that the Antechamber’s appearance was not at all as it had been when he had taken Witteric on a tour of it, Herbert thought that the Workshop’s Powers must be providing an empty Workspace to mislead Miss Knox. He felt confident that the Powers of his Wheeled Workshop had anticipated his needs.
After looking around, Rhoda said, “All appears to be in order here, so I’ll introduce you three right away to the elements of Calipers manipulation. I have two hours available for your first lesson.”
Het was brooding over the way in which Rhoda had spoken about his meta time theory while they were hiking up to the Keep. She had made only qualitative remarks about the equations that he and Scott had used, and about their estimations of parameters. She had described those as "in the ball park”, and evidencing a “feel” for some characteristic ratios concerning meta time variables. Rhoda had insisted that the Goth term "Province" had more explanatory power than the term “domain" which he and Scott had been using. What difference was made, he wondered, by the name of a category for a defined term? He was further annoyed by Rhoda’s claim that defined terms can miss the essence of the actuality which they were intended to represent. Does she not understand theory? There’s no God-given representation; what matters is the correspondence of the measurements on the system to the theory’s predictions. Now Het feared that, for the next two hours, Rhoda would pile upon them a whole lexicon of Makers’ mumbo jumbo, calling it a practical lesson.
Het knew nothing about the general plan of Makers’ Workshops. Esther, who had read about Workshops and their Calipers in Kane’s copy of the Touchstone, had made little sense of the modern German translations of the Old Goth words, each of which was discussed in a lengthly footnote. She was hoping that Rhoda would cut to the chase.
Herbert had a sure sense that neither the Comrade nor his Thane-gods were personally present within the Workshop. Their absence was a condition of the Pact to which Ingundis the Maker had been the Clan’s witness. That secret Pact between Herbert (Gesalec) and the Comrade was designed to guard the rights of the Friend, preventing the Clan, who were assisting in the fabrication of the Soma, from making it a booby trap for the Friend. To Herbert’s knowledge, neither Mortimer Kane nor the Friend knew of the Pact—by which Herbert truly possessed only a partition of the Workshop, although he fancied that he fully owned it.
~ 2 ~ At the Wheeled Workshop’s Front Gate, Rhoda had relieved Herbert of the heavy case of Calipers. She had carried it easily into the Antechamber and over to the glowing entrance to the Inner Sanctum. Now Herbert watched as she turned to face her students, with her back to the Inner Sanctum’s entrance. She lifted the case and released it from her hands, leaving it suspended in the air before her. At once, a finely-made stone workbench formed beneath the case. Its stone slab, on which the case rested, was supported by a slender stone pedestal beside which Rhoda set her purse on the floor. As she opened the case and slowly removed a pair of Calipers, Herbert, who had been startled when he realized that Rhoda must be in communication with the Powers of the Workshop, supposed that, as she was serving his purposes, that communication might be allowed by the Pact.
Esther, awed by the strange-looking Calipers, experienced a fascination like that of a biologist who is seeing an unusual creature for the first time. Esther had once observed, in the tiny well of swamp water on a slide under her microscope, something which she had not at first recognized. It was the tadpole-shaped cercaria of a liver fluke, settling itself and forming a cyst. She had read about the dreaded parasitic liver fluke, but she had never before seen one. The drop of water on her slide had come from a sample collected by her while wading on the edge of a swamp less than an hour earlier! Shuddering, she had removed her sneakers and dropped them into the garbage, then thoroughly scrubbed her hands, feet and lower legs, despite her knowledge that a cyst must be ingested in order for the creature to enter a person’s body. Simply thinking of them on her shoes or clothing, or anywhere on her body, had made her feel unclean.
Esther was shocked by the sight of the Calipers, in the same way that she had been shocked by seeing the parasite. Reacting in equal abhorrence, she felt that wearing the glove-like Calipers would cause her to feel unclean.
Het had recently dreamed about finding a living trilobite while scuba diving. In pursuing the animal, he had felt the thrill of discovering a living creature which had been thought to have become extinct hundreds of millions of years earlier. He had finally seized the foot-long creature as it scampered along the seafloor, and it had rolled up like a sowbug. As he had been securing it in the mesh collection bag attached to his weight belt, his moment of biologist’s glory had vanished with the ringing of his alarm clock.
Het’s first sight of the Calipers was a thrill like that of the trilobite dream, but his alarm did not wake him.
Rhoda said matter-of-factly, “We all need workbenches, so hold out your hands, palms down, at the bench height which is most comfortable for you.” Each of them held out his or her hands, which felt at once the smooth, cool surface of a stone workbench similar to Rhoda's.
Het saw his own image looking back at him in disbelief from his workbench’s polished surface.
Esther looked around at the Antechamber’s unadorned wood plank walls. “Rhoda, were these stone benches already here, only invisible?”
“Yes. There’s a lot more here than meets the eye, or hand. Your benches were present when you arrived, and now they’re visible and tangible. Space in a Workshop isn’t like space in the world that you know. …Well, let’s begin our lesson now, because time is always precious.”
On each workbench, Rhoda placed a pair of Calipers and a rectangular block of wood measuring about eight inches long and two inches on each side. The Calipers appeared to be woven from very fine strands of a leather-like material having a metallic sheen.
“These unpromising-looking, glove-like objects are Makers’ Calipers for beginners,” Rhoda confirmed. “Do not touch them yet, because they first need to be activated in the proper sequence, as I will demonstrate.” Each pair of Calipers looked like a pair of large, three-fingered, elbow-length gloves. “You will insert your thumb into the inner Calipers finger, your index and middle finger into the middle Calipers finger and your remaining two digits into the outer Calipers finger. Notice that the middle finger of each of your two Calipers arms is elongated, but the two middle fingers are shaped differently from each other. The arm with the spatula finger goes on your dominant hand, and the arm with the bullwhip finger goes on your other, non-dominant hand. The Calipers arms will adjust themselves to your size and handedness. Watch me pull on my Calipers, and you will see how they change and become active when both of them are in place. Be prepared to experience an initial confusing thrill when you don your own Calipers, and do not try to remove the Calipers before they have stabilized.”
Rhoda pulled her Calipers onto her arms and hands, and the limp middle fingers quickly straightened out and began an accelerating vibration which extended along her Calipers arms until each was visible only as a blur. The vibrations’ sound grew rapidly higher in pitch until it passed out of hearing range. After that, the two other fingers of each stabilized Calipers arm appeared out of the blur as a short, many-jointed metallic tentacle, and Rhoda remarked, “These Calipers do nothing positive for one’s physical appearance," wiggling her six Calipers fingers, "but they bring Powers from the Inner Sanctum into the Antechamber."
Rhoda had become a new kind of creature before the eyes of her students: The gloves had become contiguous with her arms, their metallic sheen blending smoothly into her bare arms and extending even into her face. The appearance of her two Calipers’ arms suggested large insect pincers when she held them up, and she was a terrifying sight to Esther. Het saw in this transformed Rhoda a faint but unnerving resemblance to the spook that he had seen in the stone cabin. Herbert (Gesalec) responded to Rhoda’s transformation in the way of a good violinist recognizing immediately a superior violinist—seeing Rhoda, for a moment, as the dangerously powerful and crafty Keen Maker that she was.
Het and Esther struggled with the "confusing thrill" of which Rhoda had warned them, as their Calipers stabilized. The two of them felt their Calipers’ activation as a current flowing from their bodies into the Calipers’ vibrating middle fingers, and they were plagued by auditory and visual distortions: The soft flow of air in the Antechamber sounded to Het like a roaring wind, and Esther saw only one big eye on Herbert’s face; he was like a mythical Cyclops. Rhoda talked them though the frightening experiences, assuring them that they would grow accustomed to the initial distortions, eventually not even noticing them.
Herbert, lying smoothly, said, “I had received only my first lesson with beginners’ Calipers, when the War put an end to my education as a Maker. The Calipers that I used were like these, but they felt not nearly so powerful.”
After their Calipers had stabilized, Het and Esther practiced moving their new hands and fingers. Rhoda warned the three of them not to try touching themselves or anything else with them until after she had made certain that their Calipers had stabilized. Esther thought that Rhoda’s careful use of her own Calipers to inspect her students’ Calipers, was like the checking of actors’ costumes before a live performance.
Then Rhoda explained to them, ”The sensory distortions that you’ve experienced are caused by a function of the Calipers which mobilizes and refocuses all of your senses so they can be applied principally through the Calipers’ middle finger of your dominant hand. You will hear, see, taste and smell through that finger, in addition to touching. So, the first skill that you need to master is that of alternating your senses between your dominant Calipers arm and your normal sensory mode. The distortions which you initially experienced were caused by the Calipers drawing the power of your senses into its own meta timeline.”
"Miss Knox, what, exactly, does that mean?” Het did not like Rhoda's use of his meta timelines in the way that she was insinuating.
“Dr. Kerrigan, our Calipers make their own meta timelines, using our senses and actions, but they do so in a sequence which does not align with our own personal timelines in using the Calipers.”
"Miss Knox, don’t you know that the assumption of independence of events along meta timelines is just a formal mathematical construction? There's no way that it applies to particular timelines."
Rhoda shook her head, walking over to the Workshop’s Front Gate. “Our personal timelines are naturally grounded in the physically unified timelines of our world. But our personal timelines, and the timelines of our Calipers within the Workshop and of any Devices that might be fabricated in this Workshop, are not physically unified. So, if, at the end of the lesson, we were to compare the sequence of events that each one of us has experienced, before we mellow back to the world, we will not agree on the order of those events. That’s why you can get lost in a Workshop. I warn you that if you were to walk several steps away from your bench, you would not be able to get back to your bench by retracing those few steps. Please do NOT try it!
"Now I will fabricate a Device that will fuse the Front Gate of this Workshop with the doors of the chamber in which the Workshop was standing before our lesson. Even though right now it will seem that this fabrication is an event happening early in our first lesson, after we have mellowed out of the Workshop, the Device’s fabrication will seem to be nearly the last event of our lesson. That’s an experience which will illuminate the independence of timelines.
Rhoda went to the Front Gate and reached her Calipers arms toward its opening. The Calipers began to vibrate like giant hummingbird wings. The three students watched the blur of vibrating Calipers extend through the Workshop’s Front Gate to the chamber’s steel doors, then draw the steel doors and the Front Gate together. Sensory vertigo again briefly struck Het and Esther.
After Rhoda’s Calipers had stilled, they were all looking at a set of two wooden doors which had replaced the joined steel doors and Front Gate. The new wooden doors stood ajar, opening directly into the very empty and very still hallway. The whole chamber had become the Workshop, which was now flush with the floor, wheeled no more.
Esther’s grim smile reflected her thought: We're learning to play with fire!
Het blinked. Wow! He doubted, however, that this fabrication event could later seem to have ended their lesson.
Esther asked, “Miss Knox, how can this moment become the last thing that happens here today?"
After a moment’s hesitation, Rhoda said, ”Let’s move on to the exercise. I want each of you to close your eyes and use only your non-dominant Calipers arm to touch the wooden block that I’ve placed on your workbench. Try to grasp it."
After a moment Esther exclaimed, "This is weird! I can feel that the object is wood, but I can't tell whether it's a toothpick or a small log! And my dominant left hand has gotten numb while my right hand has been busy.”
Het said, “I can’t even sense that it's wood. I can't feel the grain, or even its shape, and both of my hands are numb.”
“All right, my six-fingered students, keeping your eyes closed, please grasp the block again, using both hands."
Esther exclaimed, ”Oh, my God! My Calipers fingers are SEEING it!”
Het’s experience was like Esther’s, and he noticed immediately that his Calipers fingers’ magnified view of the wood was not that of a microscope’s narrow focal plane. He was seeing, on the cross-cut end of the wood block, the vastly-magnified ends of all of its individual wood fibers. Only a few of its fiber ends would be within a microscope’s viewing field at his high resolution. How am I seeing clearly so many at once, when they’re so magnified?
Herbert was impressed by the quality of the Calipers. He opened his eyes and stared at Rhoda. Then he quickly closed them, fearing that he might be giving himself away. He exclaimed, “It’s amazing!”
Rhoda glanced at him. "Het and Esther,” she said, “open your eyes. Now you can learn to focus your vision at will, using either your seeing Arm, or your eyes."
Het opened his eyes and was quickly able to do it. "You're right. But I’m not seeing the room normally through my seeing Arm. It’s like I’m really small or this block of wood is really big."
"Try looking at Dr. Schooner,” Rhoda suggested. “Dr. Schooner, please tell Dr. Kerrigan where you are.”
Het looked in the direction of Herbert’s voice. "Wow! Herbert, now I’m seeing you and the wood simultaneously, instead of having to look back and forth. It’s like I’m seeing the block of wood through a window that you’re standing beside. I think I’m getting the hang of this thing, Miss Knox. How does it work?"
"The over-all picture is simple, Dr. Kerrigan, but the details are very complicated. One arm of a Maker’s Calipers touches the open Edge of Doing, and the other arm touches the open Edge of Meaning for the object on the bench. You knew that it was a block of wood but you could barely feel it, when you were touching it with only one Arm and getting information only from the Edge of Meaning. But when you touched it with both Arms, you were receiving the energy of information from the Edge of Doing, too.”
“What do you mean by ‘open Edge ‘?” Herbert asked, trying to sound like an intelligent learner.
“That’s a good question, Dr. Schooner. When the Seam closes between the open Edges of Doing and Meaning, the relationship between Meaning and Doing becomes fixed in the nexus of events which are closed by the Seam. Those events then lie in the past. In our case, ‘the nexus of events’ is everything that we do during today’s lesson in the Workshop. Past, present and future within the Niche of the lesson are only partially established while we’re experiencing the lesson. They’re not yet sealed into the lesson’s past in an event order. When we’re in the process of mellowing back into Earth’s Province, the lesson will sort itself out, within the Workshop’s Province, as our remembered pasts. Then you’ll discover that my joining of the Workshop’s Front Gate to the Keep’s door and the hallway, happened at the end of the lesson.”
At the end of their lesson, Rhoda instructed her students not to remove their dominant-hand Calipers until after removing the Calipers from their other, non-dominant hand, and to leave their Calipers on their workbenches. Then they were to precede her, walking slowly, in single-file, through the Workshop’s new Front Gate and into the hall. In the hall, Het felt as though he had stepped from a rocking boat onto the solidity of land. Esther saw the doors transforming from wood to steel as she passed through, and she marveled at finding herself accepting the transformation as natural.
Herbert followed behind Esther, comparing the smoothness of the mellowing transition to that of his prior experience with the Wagon Workshop. Rhoda joined them, and she was closing the steel entrance doors to the Workshop’s chamber when Herbert asked, “Miss Knox, can you tell me what has happened to the undercarriage of my Workshop?”
“Yes, Dr. Schooner. Your Workshop is now fixed in place, and the undercarriage is stored somewhere in the Workshop, where, I’m sure, you’ll eventually locate it.”
To each of her three students, one after another, Rhoda gave a key to the new chamber doors, instructing him or her to use the key to unlock the chamber’s doors and look inside, then re-lock the doors. As they did so, each of them saw the inside of the Workshop’s Antechamber beyond the opened doors.
“Now, Dr. Schooner, please unlock these doors with the key which is regularly used to lock and unlock this chamber of the Keep.” He opened the doors, and they all saw a chamber which appeared to be as empty as it had been on the day before the crated Wheeled Workshop had been moved into it. The whole group went in and looked around, and Rhoda explained, “I fabricated a tectonic offset for the Workshop. Perhaps, Dr. Schooner, your uncle mentioned tectonic offsets to you. This tectonic offset achieves a very small temporal offset between Earth’s Province and the Workshop’s Province, so that there seem to be two different places in the same space. You are to maintain the emptiness of this chamber, because it is within the Plenum of the Workshop.”
“I don’t recall having heard of tectonic offsets,” lied Schooner.
“There’s no more time, today.” Rhoda was carrying the Calipers case, which now seemed smaller and lighter than it had when Herbert had hauled it from the Student Union for Rhoda, as the three beginner’s Calipers remained in the Workshop. “I advise you against using the Workshop on your own until we’ve completed a few more lessons,” she said. “Your keys cannot be duplicated or used by another person. Don’t lose them. You will be learning more about the many subjects that I’ve touched upon in your lesson, and I hope to schedule another lesson within a week.” Rhoda strode away toward the Keep’s exit.
