The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [29]
I suggested, in counterargument to LeBov, that Murphy’s children were not Jewish, were they, and yet apparently they carried the toxic language as well.
Murphy nodded, perhaps too slowly.
“LeBov isn’t blaming Jewish children,” he said, carefully. “This isn’t about blame. He has profound respect for them. How can you not appreciate that kind of power? His diagnosis is medical, not political. How can we not be curious about where this thing started?”
“I thought you were suggesting that curiosity was pointless.”
“Well, maybe LeBov has a reason. Sometimes you say something unbelievable in order to promote a new idea. You build authority that way, and possibly it’s better to be doubted than believed. It is more productive to be doubted. What good is it when people believe you?”
Reading LeBov would catch me up on things, explained Murphy, but I had to be careful not to be misled. There was too much conflicting information, too many doctored broadsides attributed to him, loaded with unverified ideas. The speech cautions making the rounds, for instance, against I statements, against certain rhetoric deemed to be more toxic, attack sentences, that sort of thing, were probably not LeBov’s cautions. Even if it was possible, said Murphy, that an ultra-restricted language, operating according to a new grammar, might finally be our way out of this.
Which meant, what, that the vague worries and rules of someone who might not exist were now being called further into question?
It didn’t help that no one knew much about who LeBov really was.
Or maybe, Murphy speculated, it did help, and that was precisely the point. Maybe the best leaders are the ones we cannot really know. The misinformation coming out of Rochester wasn’t exactly an accident, he felt, but a fairly advanced strategy. They knew exactly what they were doing up there at Forsythe.
“In some ways, misinformation can be more useful at a time like this.”
I could not follow this reasoning.
Word on LeBov, said Murphy, as a for instance, was that he was childless. He was a woman. He was a teenager. Anthony LeBov was two people, a father and son. LeBov had made himself forget the English language, he self-induced aphasia through high dosages of Semantiril, or he took scheduled breaks from listening, reading, all comprehension.
Nothing was verified, but Rochester was certain, if you wanted to know where the good thinking was getting done. This was news coming out of Rochester. Forget Rochester. Rochester didn’t mean what you thought it did, said Murphy. It was said that LeBov participated in the Minnesota trials, the lab work in Denver, some study in Dunkirk of which he alone survived.
LeBov, went the story, had a chamber upstate. LeBov did cryptography. Most of the work now was in the wilted alphabet, which wasn’t even its real name. I was sure I had misheard this, but I didn’t want to interrupt. Until the world’s vocabulary got pumped through a kit, and no one could even agree on which kit to use, we wouldn’t know anything.
“The solution is in scripts, don’t you think?” he asked. It wasn’t a question for me. “Visual codes. Except not the ones we know. The ones we know are already causing problems. Reading is next. It’s not even next. It’s now.”
We had to prepare for a time, said Murphy, when communication was impossible. This thing started with children, but you were a fool to think it would stop there. Some of us were fools anyway.
“You’ve heard of the flame