The Best of Science Fiction 12

Meanwhile — and what a concept that is to a being accustomed to Ever — like standing à point as the meteors of thought surge by! This place is simply teeming with time. Excuse me. It is scarcely my fault if everything you do here is so attractive. Meanwhile, I was having my own practical problems, as I elided in and out, intent on not overshooting the mountains of the Ramapo. Omega particles indeed, to say nothing of such heavinesses as the baryons, neutrons and protons into which they here have finally divided that grossity of theirs, the atom. Let them try iris-ing in, as I had done the first trip, from slightly more than thirteen billion light-years away, while receding therefore at more than the speed of light and hence invisible, on radiotelephone sources purporting to emanate from a nubbin of matter still acting flatly against its own spherical. On the darker side of which, for this my second trip, moonwise at their eleven o'clock (what a statement!), amid a smear of foothills, these directional signals would just probably be sending again, if She was able to arrange it, from apparatus just like that in Bucks — in an environ likewise named monosyllabically. (They yearn for our Oneness constantly. They are indeed a touching people.) Hobbs.

At the point where I re-entered their ionosphere, the dear curves of Our being — which they term 'body', and I must not forget to call 'my' — nearly reversed themselves, but thanks to the extreme elasticity of our mental curvature, these held. Shortly after, I entered that condition, common enough among us, which however sounds so regrettably silly in their language — and is indeed almost impossible to gauge in one where the amount of things so consistently takes precedence over their unanimity . There's no help for it. I became more Here than There. From then on it was easier; they tell me that things done for the second time here usually are. A 'second time' is one facet of their concept of two-ness that I had no trouble with, a kindly sign that the curves of our not quite cognate worlds do somewhere intersect. As I crossed, the far, reddish spectrum of Out There faded, gradually receded, whelmed by the increasing blue ozone of Right Here. From twenty thousand up, the daily height of their own traffic, once again their planet looked as extraordinary as any planet of the universe must look to the resident of another, up that close. Yes, I had done this before, experiencing no difficulty with their numerical progressions, and almost none with their time-sequences. It is only the two-ness of people that still gives me unutterable pause. In Bucks, I was told that monotheists here suffer almost the same tension over the many-goddedness which with us is so restful, all Our people being One.

I was told this by Marie, the mentor I found the less interesting, certainly not dear. Under less compelling circumstances, I should almost have dis-esteemed her, which with us is almost the end of negative emotion, opposite to the 'leaning' which is all but forbidden, and at about the same distance from the norm, which is 'to alike'. But here, it was their very difference — that word, that word — which excited me: two of them, two She's, and already so unalike. And as I was soon to know, this was nothing to another difference still to come. Which difference, they assure me, is to blame for all the others. Be that as it may, as I came in closer, almost to cloud, sure enough, I smelled it for the second time. Miles out to star, you can smell it, the sharp tang of the variability here.

I hope I am allotting the sense data correctly, that is, each to its proper organ. One of the purposes of the preliminary teaching session at Bucks was to instruct me in the art of doing this. To visit here, to sight-see as it were, would be impossible under any continuous fusion of the senses such as we have; luckily we do have, unified but not inextricably, all your five. Sight and hearing are with us of an acuity and extension which to you would be! — and smell also. How indicate this, the way we function, to the uncurved! Suffice to say that, by means of an unbroken concatenation, we hear space, see time, and smell thought, the whole process being a warning one, directed not outward toward enjoyment, but inward against change — any tendency toward this being immediately corrected centre-wards. As for the sense of taste, due to the nature of our sustenance (do I not do your technical language rather well?) this is necessarily de-emphasised.

But as we airfeed, which is as close as I can. get to what we do do, we are often suffused with a generalised but delicate carbonation. There remains — the sense of touch.

And here, since both Ours and the beings here are creatures of flesh, not only of the same plasms but almost of the same cellular structure, the natures of both do, in one respect, very affectingly resemble one another. Our flesh, within its integument, is said to be of the tenuosity of veils, capable of supporting the insupportable; an ichor — to your pork. But let there be humility on both sides. Because of Our lack of protuberance without, and Our imponderability within — in fact because of that very serenity of curve which suits us to distances of a continuum which to your asymmetry would not be habitable — we are under repulsion to surround Ourselves, each of Us, at least for domestic purposes, with an electrical field which bars us from any intimacy with objects, and — in theory — between Ourselves. Whereas you, by reason of the extraordinary conglomeration of extruded shapes, organs, compounds and ligatures, and above all weights common to every one of you — are deliriously bashable! According to my mentor, by almost anything or anyone, anywhere.

And is it not then remarkable, that under such separate states of affairs, across all the galaxies of consciousness, You and We should both suffer from an almost identical ... spiritual shame? In the final sense, then, do we not beautifully, elliptically — touch?

Which is what so excited both me and my dear mentor, and from the moment of my arrival in Bucks was the constant roundelay of all our conversation, this, because of the still fragile state of my sensibility, conducted entirely by intercom. (Until that fairly frightening adieu.) "Whereas — " said She, in the language agreed upon for Monday, Tuesday and Friday. Wednesdays and Saturdays she taught me to converse in her native one — too volatile by far. As beings of negative gravity or mass-gravity relation, we understandably ground better in the heavier languages. Sunday, her day off, she practiced her own Elsewhere. So it was, by such routines, they taught me a number of things at once — from Days of the Week to all the primary facts of Differential Experience: National, Linguistic and Individual — just as you teach your young to colour-count-read. I was even learning to daydream qualitatively, in tints and adjectives, and even with what I fancied might be, heroines, though as yet I had never seen one. Sunday is white gloomy, rich, British, and Protestant. Sunday is Marie.

"Whereas — " said my dear mentor. Though as yet I had not seen any of them of either kind, I imagined Her. Longitudinally oval, like myself — and pinkish too. But. But with a spot of difference somewhere. Where should it be — where? This was as far as I could go. I could never decide.

"Whereas — " She said, "the Ones in Ellipsia can only lean together, in sad-sweet contemplation of their Sameness — "

Ah, their She's, what teachers they are! Tongueless as I am, I found a vibration to answer her. "Where-ere-as!"

"And we," She said. It was still strange to hear her say 'we' in the sense of a two-ness or more-than-one, in contrast to the elliptic We — our only equivalent to her 'I'. In the very first lessons, when we could communicate in little more than signals, she had told me that I would graduate into comprehension here only when I fully understood the pronouns. As, in all their magnificent hierarchy, I now do.