Chapter 31 Chapter VII

I found none.At the same time that Helena and I were divorcing, I quit Zen spirituality.At the time, the bills had piled up like a hill, and I had to liquidate most of my stocks, long-term investments.Helena took her share and that's all I had left (I was not only naive but in love and she called her lawyer to draw up the marriage contract... stupid me.). In the end, I started cutting back on my expenses, cut my teleportation, and fired my robot servants, and even then I was facing a financial crisis. So I went to see Tyrena Greenwing Fei. “No one wants to read poetry,” she said, flipping through a thin volume of Psalms I’d written over the past year and a half.

"What do you mean?" I asked. "Isn't 'The Dying Earth' a poem?" "'Dying Earth' was just a fluke," Terena said.Her nails are long and curved, painted green in the latest Chinese fashion; they wrap around my manuscript like the claws of some chlorophyll beast. "It can be sold because the subconscious mind of the public is willing to accept it." "Perhaps the subconscious of the masses is willing to accept this." I said.I'm starting to get a little annoyed. Terena smiled.The laughter was not pleasant. "Martin, Martin, Martin," she said, "this is poetry. You're writing about Heaven's Gate, the Caribou Herd, and it's all about loneliness, displacement, pain, and cynicism about humanity. "

"So what?" "That said, no one would pay to watch someone else suffer," Terena sneered. I turned away from her desk and walked to the far side of the room.Her office occupied the entire four hundred and thirty-fifth floor of the Hyperline Spire, in the Babel area of ​​the Whale Tit Center.There are no windows, and the entire circular room is open from floor to ceiling, shielded by a solar-powered containment field, and there is no glimmer of light to be seen at all.It's like standing between two gray plates suspended between the sky and the earth.I looked at the crimson clouds half a kilometer below, between the small pinnacles, and it made me feel arrogant.Terena's office has no doors, no stairs, no elevators, no magnetic lifts, and no floor doors: no connection to the other floors at all.The way to get into Tyrena's office was through the five-sided teleporter, the thing that shimmered in mid-air and looked like an abstract holographic sculpture.While I was feeling overbearing, I suddenly thought about what would happen if the tower caught fire and the power failed.I said, "Are you saying you're not going to publish it?"

"Not at all," laughed my editor. "You're making billions of marks for Superline, Martin. We'll publish it. All I'm saying is: nobody's going to buy it." "Nonsense!" I exclaimed. "While not everyone appreciates good poetry, there are plenty of people who will read it and make it a bestseller." Terena didn't laugh again, but her green lips turned up slightly. "Martin, Martin, Martin," she said, "the literate population has been declining since the days of Gutenberg. In the 20th century, in so-called industrial democracies, the percentage of people who read a book a year was 100%. Neither. At that time, smart machines, data networks, and user-friendly environments had not yet appeared. By the time of the exile, 98% of the population of the Overlord felt that there was no reason to read. So they did not would fuck their share and learn how to read. And now it's even worse. There are more than 100 billion humans on the Ring, and less than one percent of them bother to hand out any printed material, and the ones who read Even less."

"The Dying Earth has sold almost three billion copies," I reminded her. "Hmm," Terena said, "that's the Pilgrim's Progress effect." "What effect?" "The Pilgrim's Progress Effect. When... When! - Seventeenth-century Old Land, Colonial Massachusetts, where every decent family had to keep a copy of The Pilgrim's Progress in their home. But, my God , nobody reads that book. Same goes for Hitler's and Stukatsky's "The View Through the Eyes of a Beheaded Child." "Who was Hitler?" I asked. Terena smiled slightly. "A politician in the old place wrote a little stuff. It's still on sale now...Superline will update the copyright every 138 years."

"Well, look," I said, "I'm going to spend a few weeks polishing up my Psalter and putting my best into it." "Wonderful." Terena laughed. "I guess you'll edit it for me like last time, won't you?" "Not at all," Terena said. "There's no homesickness this time, and you can write whatever you want." I squint. "You mean I can write blank verse this time?" "certainly." "What about philosophy?" "Let's write." "Test chapter?" "Can." "You're going to publish what I wrote?"

"Completely correct." "Is it possible to sell it?" "Probably not a bit of shit." What I called "a few weeks to polish my Psalms" turned into ten months of obsessive-compulsive labor.I shut down most of the rooms in the house, and only opened the tower study in Tianjin Sibing, the exercise room in Luthers, the kitchen, and the bathroom raft in Infinitus.I work ten hours a day without a break, then take a break, do some physical activity, eat a meal, take a nap, and then return to my desk for another eight-hour stint.It was like five years ago, when I was recovering from a stroke, it would sometimes take an hour, or a day, for a word to find itself, for a thought to take root in the soil of language.And now, that process is even slower than it was then, a painful search for the perfect word, the most precise rhythmic structure, the funniest image, the most ineffable analogy to the most elusive emotion.

Ten standard months later, I was done, and I finally understood an old adage to the effect that a book or poem is never finished, only discarded. "What do you think?" I asked Terena as she flipped through my first draft. Her eyes were dismal brown disks, the style of the week, but that didn't hide the tears.She wipes off a drop. "It's beautiful," she said. "I tried to imitate the style of the classical writers," I said, suddenly a little shy. "You did it, great." "Heaven's Gate Episode" is still not perfect," I said.

"It's perfect." "This poem is about loneliness," I said. "It's lonely." "Do you think it's ready?" I asked. "It's perfect...it's a masterpiece." "Do you think it will sell?" I asked. "No fucking way." They plan to publish 70 million hard copies of the "Psalms" in the first edition.Superline advertised on the data network, placed holographic TV commercials, delivered software inserts, and managed to entice best-selling authors to tout it, making sure it was reviewed in the New York Times Book Edition and Whaleheart Review.Usually, it's spending big bucks on advertising.

The Psalter sold 23,000 hard copies in its first year of publication.Of the transmission price of twelve marks, I get a ten percent royalty.Superline has paid me an advance payment of two million marks, and I have earned back 13,800 marks for them.In the second year, 638 copies of the hard copy were sold; none of the data network discounted copies were sold, and there were no holographic movie purchases, and no book tours. "The Psalter" failed to sell, and the negative reviews came to the fore: "Obscure...outdated...not in keeping with today's trends," says Time Books. "Mr. Silinas has written the ultimate play with no communication at all," writes Whaleheart Review's Urban Capri. "He's indulging himself in bombastic indulgence," Marmont Hanli of "All Internet Moment!" delivered the final coup de grace, "Oh, whoever wrote this shit poem—no French reading. Don't try."

Tyrena Greenwing Fei didn't seem to take it seriously.Two months after the first review and hard pass profit announcement, one day after my thirteen days of drinking, I teleported to her office and sat down in the black foam chair, which squatted In the center of the room, like a velvet panther.The legendary thunderstorm in the center of Whale is underway, majestic lightning bolts resounding through the blood-stained sky, just opposite the invisible containment field. "Take it easy," Terena said.Her outfit was this week's fashion, including the black-tip hairstyle, which rose half a meter high over her brow; Bottom nudity. "The first edition only totaled 60,000 fax transmissions, not much left." "Didn't you say that you plan to spend 70 million yuan?" I said. "Yeah, um, but after Hyperline's resident AI read it, we changed our minds." I sink more and more into the foam. "You don't even like artificial intelligence?" "The AI ​​liked it a lot," Terena said, "and then we decided that people wouldn't like it." I sit up. "Can we sell to the technical core?"