From: Gooch McCracken
Category: Amis
Date: 8/18/99
Time: 9:16:59 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.97
*Night Train* is another Martinian exercise in cosmological anti-anthropocentrism. Richard Tull theorized about it. The janitor on Mars articulated it. And Jennifer Rockwell possibly killed herself because of it.
FROM *THE INFORMATION*: "Richard was summarizing his latest project, a big bold book he never wrote called *The History of Increasing Humiliation*...For human beings, the history of cosmology is the history of increasing humiliation...From geocentric to heliocentric to galactocentric to plain *eccentric*. And getting bigger all the time: not at its steady rate of expansion but with sickening leaps of the human mind. And prepare yourself for another blow, another facer: the multiplicity---the infinity, perhaps---of *other* universes."
FROM *THE JANITOR ON MARS*: "We learned that the Infinity Dogs had seeded life on Mars---and on Earth, Jupiter and Ceres---for a purpose. We were middens. That's all. Middens...Down on Earth, in Africa, the male rhinos all take a dump beyond the waterhole? On Columbus's island of Hispaniola the squinting Carib lines shells on the bank of the riverbed? To demarcate territory? That's a midden. And that's all we were: a message from the Infinity Dogs to a type-r power called the Core Raiders, saying: Keep Out. I have since learned that both Infinity and Core are merely the errand boys of the type-l agency called the Resonance. Which in turn owes tribute to a type-j imperium call the Third Observer...When your scientists talk about their great moments of revelation---a feeling of pleasant vacuity followed by a ream of math---they're usually describing a telepathic assist from Mars...You're uncomfortable with that? Come on. That's the least of it. Welcome to middenworld."
FROM BAX DENZIGER IN *NIGHT TRAIN*: "You'd think that it would be desolating to learn that the earth was merely a satellite of the sun and that you'd lost your place at the center of the universe. But it wasn't. On the contrary. It was energizing, inspiring, liberating. It felt great to be in possession of a truth denied to each and every one of your ancestors. We don't act like we know it, but we're now on the edge of an equivalent paradigm shift. Or a whole series of them. The universe was still the size of your living room until the big telescopes came along. Now we have an idea of just how fragile and isolated our situation really is."