Salman Rushdie - Grimus

The survival instinct lies buried deep in soft civilizations; in the peripatetic Flapping Eagle, it lay very near the surface, if somewhat weakened by his knowledge of his immortality. Now, when he was plunged into a world his senses told him could not exist, but which they also told him did exist, this instinct took him over. It did so in a very physical way. He could perceive a thing which was entirely himself but also not-himself assuming command of his faculties and gritting his teeth for him. It was a simple but overwhelming self-command to survive this. He was astonished and a little pleased at the strength of his own will. In extremis veritas .

WHERE THERE’S A WILL. The realization of his own power, of Virgil Jones’ meaning, dawned on him. Here was his way out, if his resolve was strong enough.

He began to practise. At his first attempt, a rose grew from the floor of the Place. (He could not think of it as his sister’s insides, especially as he had seen her disappearing down the fleshy corridor.) The rose died almost at once. He thought about this, and a second rose grew. It showed no signs of dying.

He looked at the floor, and it became solid. A carpet covered it, hand-woven in silk, with an Eye embroidered into the very centre. He used the eye to make windows. It glared at the red walls and they fell into order.

It was really quite an elegant room, even if the walls were a livid red. He felt almost proud of himself.

Outside the windows, Calf Mountain was beginning to form. He got as far as seeing the clearing, the forest around it, and even caught a glimpse of Virgil Jones, who seemed to come right up to one of the windows until his fleshy face filled it. There was a door in the wall, ebony-handled; all he had to do was open it and walk out and he would be well. Controlling the Dimensions was easy, if you knew what you were doing, he told himself cockily. He rather fancied he saw a look of respect in Mr Jones’ eyes.

The Gorf was feeling disappointed. He had locked himself to Flapping Eagle’s self , using the parasitic technique by which Gorfs communicated, and had fully expected a long, delectable time of Endimions-shuffling, which was the next best thing he knew to the Divine Game. But here was Flapping Eagle displaying an exceptional capacity for controlling the Endimions.

The Gorf decided to take a hand. After all, the Final Ordering of the island could wait a little longer-Flapping Eagle found the room dissolving as he reached for the door-handle. The shock wrecked his new-found confidence. The darkness descended. He was, for a moment, blind and giddy. The world seemed to spin rapidly. When his head cleared, the Abyssinians were squatting in front of him.

THE DANCE HAS had many functions. It has been a social icebreaker and a ritual cloudbreaker. It has been a mark of passion and a sign of hate. Stars have danced in young girls’ eyes and death has danced with its unwilling family. Today, in the hollow of a wood, with the green light of the leaves playing about his face, stark naked, a grim-faced fat man called Virgil Jones was dancing for the life of his new friend.

– Friend: he had repeated the word to himself a million times, he had whispered it into the ear of the unconscious Eagle to give him strength.

– You are the straw, Flapping Eagle, he had said, and I am the drowning man.

Last chances, like first chances, come only once. Virgil Jones was convinced that his last chance was upon him, A last chance to do, to help, to expiate the guilt and the uselessness that lay within him, rusting his insides; a chance to save instead of ruining.

A man who lives in tolerable comfort amidst extreme poverty learns in the end not to see the quagmire of hopelessness. It is a survival mechanism. In just the same way, Virgil Jones had shut out his past from his mind. He had come down the mountain and forgotten the blank terrors he had fled. They were still there, locked in his head, but he did not see them.

Now, for Flapping Eagle’s sake, he unlocked the prison and like Pandora’s uncontrollable sprites his memory came flooding out, grating painfully upon him as it emerged. He had forgotten the pain. So much had been numb for so long.

At first he had thought Flapping Eagle might have been strong enough, had been hardened enough by his long journeys to survive the Dimensions unaided. (But then he had forgotten their devastating power.) And for a moment Flapping Eagle’s eyes had sparked-he had almost pulled his mind away from itself. But he hadn’t been strong enough; and now there was only one thing to do.

Virgil Jones had to go in there, into the dimensions of another man’s mind, more dangerous even than one’s own, and guide him out. The alternative was a foregone conclusion. Flapping Eagle’s mind would overheat and in the end it would burn out, perhaps beyond all saving. As Virgil Jones’ mind had nearly destroyed itself. The worm biting its own tail would finally swallow itself.

Because the worlds that Calf Mountain and its Effect unleashed inside the head were not phantoms. They were solid. They could hit and hurt.

Virgil Jones had sat for an age, running his thoughts over the agonies of his past, when he had travelled the Dimensions, before the Effect had become too huge for him to handle, trying to clutch at the knowledge he needed. He knew that he had known it; that somewhere on his travels he had met-who?-someone-that knew the technique for locking on to the mind of another living being.

Virgil Jones had not told Flapping Eagle about his own travels. In his day he had rejoiced in those interdimensional trips. There had been the voyages to the real, physical, alternative space-time continua. So close, yet such an eternity away. And there had been his own annihilating journey into the Inner Dimensions, like the internal inferno which now clutched Flapping Eagle, which had left him hollow and impotent and lucky to be alive. And there was the third kind.

The bridge between the first two kinds.

With sufficient imagination, Virgil Jones had found, one could create worlds, physical, external worlds, neither aspects of oneself nor a palimpsest-universe.

Fictions where a man could live.

In those days, Mr Jones had been a highly imaginative man.

He fought his way past the unbearable memory of his breakdown, when the power became a monster which turned upon him and seared his mind, and came to the good times. He smiled. What worlds he had visited! What things he had learned! He recalled with admiration the sexual techniques of the Ydjac, the instinct-logic of the plant-geniuses of Poli XI, the tonal sculpture of the Aurelions. The pain was gone now; he was past the block, excavating his own history with the pleasure of the genuine archaeologist. And so he came, eventually, to the time he visited the Spiral Dancers.

Certain kinds of science aspire to the condition of poetry; and on the planet of the Spiral Dancers, a long tradition of scientist-poets had elevated a branch of physics until it became a high symbolist religion. They had probed matter, dividing it into ever-smaller units, until they found at its very roots the pure, beautiful dance of life. This was a harmony of the infinitesimal, where energy and matter moved like fluids. Energy forces came gracefully together to create at their point of union a pinch which was matter. The pinches came together into larger pinches; or else fell away again into pure energy, according to the rules of a highly formal, spiral rhythm. When they came together, they were dancing the Strong-dance. When they fell back into the Primal, they were dancing the Weakdance.

From this discovery came the religion of Spiral Unity. If everything was energy, everything was the same. A thinking being and a table were only aspects of the same force. It had been proven scientifically.