From a Future Edition
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                                     FROM A FUTURE EDITION

                          a transcript of an interview with the late
                                  Hilarius Hilaricon

             (An upper storey room in the offices of Grimm's Gardens News.       The
          interviewer relaxes in a lounge chair.        Seven feet above the floor,
          perhaps too close to an open window, looking like a white sheet seen side
          on in the air, floats the ghost of Hilarlus Hilaricon.      The interview is
          already in progress.)

          Int. - I'm sure the question every budding machinist would like to ask you
                  is: what's it like being a ghost?
          HH.-Very cold.
          Int. - I see.
          H.H.-  After a decade or so one becomes partly acclimatized, but the memory
                  of other times never fades.       Unlike oneself.
          Int. -  You fade?
          H.H. -  All ghosts do.     We are like variable stars.
          Int. -  Does this give discomfort?
          H.H. -  In the extreme.      Imagine yourself being turned into water then
                  poured down an open sink.      That is what it is like.
          Int. -  So there's a great difference between life and death?
          H.H. -  The difference is one of frequency: 1iving, we are often,
                  temporarily, dead; dead, we are permanently so.
          Int. -  So life's not entirely pleasant after life?
              (H.H. starts to rise higher and veers close to the window.)
          H.H. - What life?     It does give time for thougbt.     And experiment.       To
                  make oneself manifest.      Known,.   To focus on the material.       To
                  lift things, whee!
              (Behind the interviewer's head, a pencil detaches itself frorn a desk
              and orbits an angled lamp.)
          Int. - Lift things?
          H.H. -  Yes, that's how we learn.       It took me perhaps a century to master
                  the basics.     To acquire the concentration.
          Int. -  Do you ever haunt.?
          H.H. -  Memories haunt, not ghosts.       It is they that call us.       It was
                  here, they say, it was then.       It was him., it was her.     Memories.


                                 THE TALK GOES ON


         Int. - You paint a rather bleak picture, are there any ....
         H.H. - Joys?     There is a certain knowledge - a time to watch.     We see the
                 generations rise and fall, we see the cycles turning through the
                 years.    And we can lift things.
             (Another pencil rises from the desk and joins its twin in a perfect
             opposing orbit of the lamp.)
         Int. - Is it, do you think, a permanent condition?
         H.H. -  Does death last?     No-one knows.   There are those who fade and
                 never recur.    But what their fate is, that is a page we cannot
                 turn.
         Int. -  If I might pick-up on that image of a book , since The Ghost Machine
                 closed, do you have any final opinions on The Author?
         H.H. - I thought I knew him once.     But most knowledge lies in imagined
                 verity.    1 have studied His Work.      Examined it wtih care.   It is
                 worm-eaten with lacunae.      Its chronology is impossible to
                 establish.   The record it bequeaths is incomplete and
                 conjectural as the re-constructions of prehistory.         Its principal
                 figures are riddled with inconsistencies, its minor characters
                 evanescent as the hour.      If He ever existed then His legacy is
                 doubt: one can only conclude that the Work, the Universe as we have
                 it is a fiction - authored by contradiction on self-negation.     By
                 an Author who is part of that fiction too. If, for example, we are
                 all part of the Book, cogs in a Ghost Machine, having  knowledge of
                 that Book, how then can we act without foreknowledge      If the Book
                 is already written, how can we have free-will?      But yet we choose.
                 And our choices are founded on our ignorance.
         Int. - Could it be that our Book, The Book, is part of another, greater
                 Work, that we cannot see, cannot read?
         H.H. - It may be so.
         Int. -  Well, on another, lighter note, our younger machinists, I'm sure,
                 would like to know if ....
         H.H. -  There are any more adventures to be had?      Regions to explore?
                 Undiscovered bournes within the living machine?   It is relative to
                 the individual.     What is past to me is to come to others.      It
                 begins nowhere and ends nowhere, but in-between goes forward.
         Int. - Hilarius Hilaricon, thank you for this interview.
             (The ghost dissipates through the bright-lit window.      The pencils dance
              around their dark sun, like parts in a pointless machine.)