The Best of Science Fiction 12

How I was to find out by myself what this test was for a few paltry minutes perplexed me, until it occurred to me that I need only put my trust in what I now had, and perhaps it would already be influential enough to instruct me how to test it. It was time for a little self-exhortation. "I am straight — " I said to myself, " very straight." And I am strong, perhaps not very, but ... quite? I feel certain that I am about to be — whatever it is that I am about to be.

After a few round-rubbings of this, I looked down at myself and found I had indeed worked up a glow. Why, I had no idea, I thought self-admiringly, that I was so hot-threaded! I must be getting pinker-blooded all the time. And though by now somewhat winded, and though it was well past the hour for my midday inflation, without pausing to so refresh myself, I went on, conjuring my image. "I am — whatever it is that carries its own weight, stands fast, and talks short. I intend to fight for my rites, I am a being of few words. Or as soon as I get over my initiation, I intend to be. I intend to act. And there isn't a curve in my body!"

This last wasn't true, of course; indeed, quite a large part of my statement was couched in words which were unfamiliar to me, but certainly must have swum up out of my own innerstink. But, if I were ever really to get over being an ellipse — that carefulest of beings bogged in the middle-mean — this was all part of it. "This is all part of it!" I almost shouted. Yes, I almost shouted. Up to then, you must understand, I had spoken only by means of an all-over surface vibration, but now this appeared to have localised itself somewhere above my diameter, narrowing its timbre but widening its volume. That I not only had a voice, but that its first real utterance was almost a shout, was not this enormously encouraging to what I had in mind?

And just then — I fell back, exhausted. Indeed, miserable to report, I fell back so thoroughly that I found myself far beyond my former angle, far gone past even an acute case of it — in fact, I was pure horizontal.

Now, ellipses, like the horses I had seen in some of the photostats, never lie down in this position; unlike you, they are never even caught dead in it. Pride goeth, I thought, lying there. How it would have alleviated my misery to know all the positions you are really capable of — that this was all part of it too. But at the time, all I could find was a whisper in which to excuse myself to my image. "It's because I don't know my own strength as yet," I said. Don't say as yet, came the caution. I spoke up, still with a sigh. "Rather, I am simply a being who doesn't know its own strength." When there was no reply, I took that to mean that I might continue in this vein. "Probably, I am a creature of such strength that it would be dangerous for me not to know the limits of it." Silence. "Maybe I ought to test my strengthhood, not for itself, but for the sake of the weaklings I will surely encounter." Quite a pause after this one, too. So at last I dared to say it. "Try me. What is the test for what I believe to be my — " But since I wasn't really sure whether it was character or gender I was applying for, I simply shouted again, this time, "Try me. You just try! " And found myself miraculously on my feet — that is, vertical — once more.

And not only that — even braver. I went round the room, and anywhere I met myself in the glass, which was everywhere, I said to it, "Come on now, think you know the test, huh; come on now, brother!" Brother. Where does one get those ideas? But when the answer came it was right from my authority in the glass there. It was only a whisper, quietly-firmly, as such answers should come, but I heard it. "Want to step outside? I dare you. Why don't you step outside, and just see ?"

And since my intended being was not one to refuse a dare, that was what I prepared to do. Greenhorn that I was, I even gathered up almost all my energy, under the impression that what had carried me afield and over the great transparencies would more than easy fade me through a wall. There was a door in the wall, a large, regally obvious one of about ten feet in height, but of course, as far as doors were concerned and staircases, too, or any of those playthings which cater to the appendages, I was an aristocrat and had never used one in my life, the same being true of my manner of dealing with obstacles, it never having occurred to me to go over or around one, instead of through . So I gathered myself for the elide, took a last look at my image — never pinker, never prouder — said jauntily, "I'll meet you outside!" touched the proper thought, and — WHAM.

How I lived to tell this tale must after all be some sort of durility test — I must have ricocheted from surface to surface, up, down and sideways, fully thirteen times, being saved only by the dimensions of the room, just big enough to permit me the barest air-interval of relief, between making connections. During which, as with your drowners here, much passed before me. I comprehended how thoroughly I had gone against everything my mentors had been at such pains to teach me — against all the friction, weightfulness and lethargy it had taken me months to acquire. Above all — and as if I had never heard of catechisms — I had totally forgotten how much more Here I now was than There. Only let me get through this, I prayed, I promised, and I'll never again forget the distance between a floor and a ceiling. And it's true. I've never had to stop to puzzle over that later; there's something to be said for the school of hard knocks. Then at last, I once again lay prone.

And so bruised was I in my humilities, that I made no effort to get up. Instead, I did what any One wounded in his veils does, I lay there dreaming, in repair ...

For what an exquisite relief it could be, this lying prone! Especially must it be regarded here, I mused, as that dear posture in which one smiles backward at the anxieties of yesterday, lulla-lulla, and can perhaps even anticipate a change of shape one might just have the luck to earn or fall into, on the morrow. Above me, on the shelves, were the picture books of all the fauna here down the geological ages, those great plates I had so pored over during my early incubation here, wondering which of those shapes would turn out to be Yours — and in time, in the foolness of time, perhaps Mine. Although at that period I had been unable to focus on the print of the descriptions, each large plate was accompanied by enough small ones to give me a fairly canny idea of each creature's habits, habitats and foods. Nothing gave any suggestion that all these magnificoes — I had after a few days persuaded myself not to regard them as terrors — did not exist simultaneously, our Now being so different from your little 'now'. My real shock at the sight of all this — all these waving waterfalls of mane, saurian extensions, anthropoid pugs, rhinoish craters and cattish patterns under which the pure oval had forever vanished — was not so much at the extremity of the exaggerations, as after a while an intense irritation, then a degrading melancholia, over the piffling scope of my own. How wee, shrunken and ignominous those defamatory little sins-against-the-curve such as I had been able to imagine. In the face of this grandeur, I was scarcely a pervert at all.

Once I had got over this, I had to buckle down to an important question: when presented a choice of all this imperial grab bag, which shape would I choose to become? Try as I did, I could raise no enthusiasm to be any of these creatures, much less that lyric rush of self-discovery which had been the lecher-hope of my small dreams. But the primer had certainly promised a change. For hours I pored over the herbivores and the carnivores, unable to decide between them, or to come to any conclusion other than that, if it were left to me, I should fancy a little fur. In the intervals, I searched in vain for pictures of that Lava-stream which must produce them, but although I kept forever coming upon mountains which almost lifted themselves from the page, and vegetation-rimmed tarns of a certain mystery, there seemed to be nothing akin to Our all-embracing system, and not much coherence that I could descry, to any. There was a day when, suddenly noticing a preponderance of eggs, I brooded over this at first wistfully, then almost angrily — they had promised more of a change than this . I had no choice really but to trust them.