It had been a very good century for the people of Pallist. At its dawn they hadn’t known anything about anything, and by its conclusion they knew everything about everything.
They didn’t know anything about the sky. So they sent up balloons full of instruments and big metal tubes full of cameras and eventually small noxious capsules crammed full of bodies and then they felt satisfied enough to proclaim themselves experts.
They didn’t know anything about the sea. So they dragged it with great nets and diligently recorded and named the strange things that died, gasping, on the decks of their ships; and plumbed it with radars and sensors; and sent down small but invincible robots with fiendish sample jars and mechanical arms, and by the end of THAT they were confident that they could be called its masters.
As above, so below. Above and below were both known, so that put an end to that alright. And throughout the classrooms and lecture-halls and churches of Pallist there was a great satisfaction and reassurance, bordering on smugness. It was good to be in the know, and what was left to know? Five years left until century’s end and they had mastered it all.
This was very dissatisfying to adjunct-professor Hilbert. But nobody listened to him.
His colleagues wouldn’t listen to him because he was just an adjunct-professor. His students wouldn’t listen to him because he was still technically a professor. His administrators wouldn’t listen to him because he wasn’t their boss.
“How good it is, to know everything!” they would all say.
“Well, not quite EVERYTHING,” he told them.
“Yes indeed!” they all said. And then they went back to not even pretending to pay him any attention.
In retrospect, this might have been the last point at which someone could have easily done something. Five minutes of some generous stranger’s life and that would’ve been enough.
Well, maybe ten.
Fifteen?
***
Adjunct-professor Hilbert was going on sabbatical.
“You don’t get sabbaticals,” his administrators told him. “You’re an adjunct-professor.”
“It’s very, very, very important,” he told them earnestly. “I’m on the cusp of finding out everything we don’t know about everything.”
“We know everything about everything already,” they told him.
“No we don’t.”
“You’re fired.”
He left the building unusually determined and cheerful for a man who’d just gotten sacked without leave, but nobody was paying attention to ex-adjunct-professor Hilbert. This had its advantages, because he got to bring home all his personal belongings and also some interesting odds and ends from a few of his former colleagues’ laboratories.
Nobody suspected Hilbert. How can you suspect someone that doesn’t exist?
***
Ex-adjunct-professor Hilbert’s husband was worried about him.
“I’m worried about you,” he told Hilbert.
“That’s nice,” said Hilbert, who was up to his elbows in something on top of their roof under a downpour at midnight. “Can you bring me some tea, please? It’s a bit nippy.”
Ex-adjunct-professor Hilbert’s husband – whose name was Bernie – sighed and groused and called him out very thoroughly inside his head but still went ahead and got him some tea.
“What does this thing do again?” asked Bernie as he handed Hilbert his tea (chacomale, with a squirt of lamenn).
“Oh, it finds things,” said Hilbert. “Things nobody’s paid attention to; things we don’t know anything about.”
“But we know everything about everything,” said Bernie. “We know everything about everything above us, and we know everything about everything below us. What else is there?”
“The horizon,” said Hilbert.
“What about it?”
“What indeed,” said Hilbert smugly. Then he chugged his tea and sent Bernie back with the mug and responded to further questioning by pretending he was deaf, something that he was very fond of despite being thirty-five and in possession of perfectly adequate health and genes.
Bernie felt bad about this later, but realized (correctly) that there hadn’t been any chance in hell he could’ve changed his husband’s mind. Everyone needs someone to ignore, even the most ignorable of us – and once they’ve found them, they never let go.
***
Of course, Bernie wasn’t the only person who had a chance to be let in on some of the details of what was afoot. Careful retracing of Hilbert’s weekly routine allowed for some witnesses to be found after the fact.
“Distances should be clear,” he said. “Precise. Measurable. None of this – this – this perspective helps with that. Lies and nonsense, all of it! Look at my finger – see? Does it REALLY seem smaller now that it’s farther away? Look at it again – see? Does it REALLY seem bigger now that it’s closer.”
“Please get your finger out of my face, sir.”
“This is very important! It’s about the TRUTH!”
“Sir, you need to let go of the cart. It belongs to the store.”
“The TRUTH! And that’s why I need this grocery cart. To give us all the truth. To damn the illusions that reality has swathed us in. To eat away at the ignorance that has stultified our collective consciousness like a wet warmed blanket. To show us all what we’ve been missing!”
“Let. Go. Of. The. Cart.”
“MURDER!” screamed Hilbert. “HELP!” And while the stockswoman was busy calming down the startled flocks of senior citizens and rubberneckers that heard THAT nonsense, ex-adjunct-professor Hilbert absconded with his grocery cart.
It had been one of the only ones without a sticky wheel, she recalled. That really sucked.
***
The neighbours complained. The hammering was going on too long and loudly, to say nothing of the chainsaw. Very strongly-worded and stern letters were left on Hilbert and Bernie’s doorstep by the bushel, and Bernie read them thoroughly before forwarding on the most persuasive to Hilbert, who shredded them for use as insulation in the cryonic compartment of his mechanism, which now covered their entire roof and was beginning to ooze off its sides like melting ice cream.
“What is that thing?” inquired their next door neighbour suspiciously. Her name was Beetrace, and she was very old and very tolerant of weirdness. But she preferred it to be happening somewhere else, to someone else.
“A tool,” called down Hilbert.
“What for?”
“To murder the horizon.”
“Oh,” said Beetrace.
Then she went back indoors and called the police. They thanked her for her time and said they’d send someone over as soon as they got around to it, which was never.
***
Four months later the science reporters and chief editors of the Alembic, the Macroscope, the Files Quarterly, and every paper of Pallist received a letter.
Dear sirs and madams and all others.
This night I will pierce the final, unknown veil of ignorance that pervades our great land: the one that is so comfortable and known to us that we cannot perceive of its limitations. I speak, of course, of the horizon. Too long has it hidden our world from itself through this paltry medium of ‘distance.’ What the hell is distance anyways? Garbage, that’s what. A needless constraint forced upon our eyes and minds by curvature and deceit!
I, ex-adjunct-professor Boran Hilbert, intend to discard that deceit. Tonight. History is in the making at eight o’clock. Be there promptly, please. And bring some cameras.
All of the recipients immediately sorted it into their trash without reading past the first headline, with the exception of the Beddergle Bugle, which needed a local interest column and had about four hours left to get it filled.
So they sent Stipley, who was the youngest and least likely to complain aloud about it.
The traffic was bad and Stipley had to stop for gas, and thus was history preserved. He arrived five minutes past in a terrible wheezing mess and had to stop and catch his nerves and get out his notepad and pen and go back for his pen and find it under his car’s seat and forget where his notepad was and find it in his left hand and swear for about thirty seconds and then he found the ladder leading up to the roof and had just put his hand on it when something went ‘bzop.’
It wasn’t a sound. It was a feeling that ran through Stipley‘s hand and the ladder and the house and the ground and the air and everything, absolutely everything.
He said it made his nose ache, or at least the space that comprised his nose, which he insisted to his grave was quite different.
Then the ladder made sense.
It made perfect sense. Stipley could see every bit of it in direct relation to every other bit of it and its precise position in everything in every way, and it was the worst thing he’d ever seen.
So he looked at the house.
He saw that too. Perfect position. Perfect location.
Stipley, who at this point didn’t much care if he got fired, staggered away from the horrible, horrible, horrible place he’d been five minutes late to, towards his car, which might take him away. He fumbled at the door-latch, confused by how he could see its exact proportions from every angle and that every angle was both everything and nothing, and in an effort to tear his eyes away from the angst of seeing something so boring and familiar turned into something so alien he made the grave mistake of looking up.
The Hilbert family home was atop a small hill that trailed down towards the lake. It had a good, long view, and Stipley saw every inch of it.
Every particle of it.
Every place in it.
Every house, every tree, every leaf, every bit of asphalt, every speck of pavement, every (temporarily comatose) squirrel, every pebble, every wave. And then his eyes crawled upwards, inexorably, and he saw that the horizon was gone.
Or more precisely, dead.
So Stipley saw all the way. Mercifully for only a few seconds before he blacked out, but they were the longest seconds of his or indeed anyone else’s life. Not that time or space meant much to him on that evening.
***
At some point the machine went ‘bzip’ and everything went back to normal. Bernie, who’d been napping, woke up with a start and went up to the roof to check on Hilbert.
He wasn’t there anymore. He was the most not there anyone had ever been.
***
It was a very, very sober dawn the next morning. Some people sat in bed with their eyes shut; some made very strong tea (baronet bakely, with a splash of milt) and went outdoors to stare at the sky as hard as they could. Some just fidgeted with their pens. Everyone was thinking far too hard about not thinking about it. And throughout the classrooms and lecture-halls and churches of Pallist there was a great terror and nervousness, bordering on hopelessness.
In the end, things didn’t go back to normal because normal is a negotiated subjectivity that doesn’t truly exist unchangingly but flows from the past into the present and towards the future only within human perceptions. But Pallist’s perceptions of it never did go back to the way they’d been, and they never took as much pride in what they knew about the worlds above and below.
The machinery that was taken from ex-adjunct-professor Hilbert’s roof was incomprehensible, besides the shopping cart. It was returned, and it still didn’t have a sticky wheel, but it would only ever go in straight lines and was eventually donated to a museum because the lines were too straight to make sense and it drove four separate shoppers into nervous fits.
Beetrace died in her sleep two days before the machine was turned on. It probably had nothing to do with it.
Bernie remarried six months later to a nice man who listened to him.
The Beddergle Bugle had the most important exclusive ever known. Six months later the paper folded, but Stipley had already quit and gone to live in a valley somewhere.
Not one person ever claimed that they knew everything again. Or spoke of the notion as if it would be good.
Nobody blamed Hilbert. How can you blame someone that doesn’t exist?