Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (11 page)

Anders’s great white booby head, flushed pale yellow by a light in the ceiling just above him, moved totally, as it always did, to observe him; none of his features ever seemed to make use of themselves separately; perhaps this helped give power to the brain. “It’s not my beckyar-r-d. But just where are the controls—on that hurdy-gurdy?”

“What do you mean, Anders?” The provost. “You don’t think—”

“Don’t think.” The head moved left, right, slowly. One wouldn’t have been surprised to see its fontanelle winking. “Notice.”

“Ah,
yes,
Tippy, I get you. Stop me if I’m wrong.” As always, Meyer’s richly psychological voice sounded as if it were demonstrating—or ratifying, from a constant pool of agreement—the omnipresence of social goodwill. “It’s ve-ry responsive, isn’t it. It waits.”

“For wha-at?” But Lila’s faintly gushed scream, now that Linhouse had heard that coffee shop change, seemed to him a pretended one—even if she herself didn’t know it. It encouraged him to step forward on the rostrum.

“Perhaps the literal directions given me might be of use,” he said. “I don’t know a rap about electronics of course, or even if that’s how—or even where this thing—but it’s occurred to me that it must work at least partly on temperature. This hall—perhaps I neglected to say that this hall was specified. As you know, it’s very delicately thermostated, among other things. And the room where I was asked to, er … pick up this thing, happens to be an air-conditioned one, very specially done for a private house. It’s the room where Jamison kept his artifacts.” Sad shards of a primal afternoon, afternoons. And a long couch, that still soars.

“Let me read you the directions,” he said. He read them.
Keep it company … Once the mechanism is moved, it must be allowed to regain equilibrium overnight, or for at least five hours, at a temperature of 71°. An hour beforehand,
r
aise the temperature in the hall to 74.6°. Please be exact about that. Afterwards, you have only to
—et cetera. He even read to them with excerpts here—the part that specified a live secretary.
Tape won’t do. Nothing electrical.
“And it just occurred to me, I know I’m sticking my neck out, among all of you—but that it just might be keyed to—body temperature.” Fool that he was, he even glanced inadvertently at the secretary.

And in the very moment of performing his function, knew almost for certain, with the surest misery he’d had yet—what his function might be. To keep it light. Keep it light. Keep it light, and Jack’s the one to do it. For in the surf of snickers which were at once politely stifled, the hall’s acoustic, equally delicate, brought up to him a “
Warm
bodies?’ and a “The
back
room?”

She’d required a physicist, and maybe she’d got one, but for this end of it, a classicist was doing fine. Keep it light, that’s the way she would do it, the way they all would, with God knows what embroidery on the side. Keep it a frivol. Send Jack.

From the pit, no problem to a man of his height, Sir Harry stretched out an arm, not to anyone’s rescue, though Linhouse at first thought so. In the stage light, his long fingers, parched but strong, and heavily graced with a marriage ring, tested the aura of the—hurdy-gurdy—but did not touch its tawed leatherskin, or lift its sections. What a specimen he was, with his guardsman’s length of limb topped by that craggy Epstein head—a man to the
nth
of his powers and his age. He lowered toward the assembly, clearly seeking out Anders, and finding him—by Anders’s heavy, crystal “noticers.” “Yes,” he said. “Ye-es, it’s—” He stretched his jaw, as if for a joke. “Set for—people.”

“—kah!” With this gasp of disgust, Anders sat down.

The assembly sat heavy with embarrassment, remembering both who these two were, what heraldic listings followed their separate names in all the peerages of science—and perhaps who they themselves were. Looking out on the spelled hall, on faces sucked by its fluorescence, Linhouse, though he knew most of them, found them hard to distinguish one by one in any live, idiosyncratic character; they seemed momentarily more and more like rows of dummy claque, a house of cardboard personages ready to be skittered by some wind.

The gizmo suddenly gave a whirr, a small, comforting, anciently mechanical one—exactly the pre-chime snuffling made by the clock Linhouse’s mother perversely kept at odds with the Chelsea statuary and
japonerie
in her drawing room—a cheap Hartford pendulum, farmhouse mantel clock, from home. What it said next was said so softly that only Sir Harry, head cocked both to it and the hall, like the impresario of a trained-animal act, might hear. He blinked, but said nothing.

“What did it say?” Linhouse whispered.

“A dedication.”

He was determined to count for
something,
here. “What?”

“You already know it. The simple formula for
—the infinite ellipse, or elliptois.”

Linhouse shook his head. They were all like that, these men, even this one who still seemed—and took care to proclaim himself?—a nineteenth-century one. They were no longer expected to know Greek beyond a tag or two that might have slipped into their concerns sideways. But when it came to
their
formulae, they expected
him—
Ah. He suddenly did what he could do—put two and two together.

Behind them both, the machine now spoke softly but distinctly. “—ay
^M
+ n = bx
^M
(a _ x
^N
).” As far as Linhouse, with his mathematical lacks, could tell, it spoke excellent—French.

And now, on the crest of the great book, a second disc lay back, a new one arose. “Journal from Ellipsia,” it said, in English again.
“On!”

The lights dimmed, theatrically. Old ruses, old stratagems, returned to him, from Xenophon? Farther, much farther. Who would know that he had not dimmed the lights? What separate authorities could not be gathered here?

Beside him now, Sir Harry called clearly into that lulling pink-dark. “What say, Anders?” The call stretched as if across an abyss. “What sa-ay? Are they going to be exactly like us?”

As Linhouse’s eyes accustomed themselves, the old man’s face emerged again beside him. It was, he thought, a finished face, in the triumphant sense of the word. Death could merely abstract from it, and nothing be added, not even a tear.

“Yes,” it said, to itself now. “On.”

O
N, ON, ON AND
on,
on;
and on, and on, on. The paradox about distance is that quite as much philosophy adheres to a short piece of it as to a long. A being capable of setting theoretical limits to its universe has already been caught in the act of extending it. The merest cherub in the streets here, provided he has a thumbnail—and he usually has ten does this every day. He may grow up to be one of their fuzzicists, able to conceive that space is curved, but essentially that is,
elliptically
—he does nothing about it. He lives on, in his rare, rectilinear world of north-south gardens, east-west religions, up-and-down monuments and explosions, plus a blindly variable sort of shifting about which he claims to have perfected through his centuries, thinks very highly of, and, is rather pretty in its way and even its name:
free wall—
a kind of generalized travel-bureaudom of “across.” It follows that most of his troubles are those of a partially yet imperfectly curved being who is still trying to keep to the straight-and-narrow—and most of his fantasies also. His highest aspiration is, quite naturally, “to get a-Round”; his newest, to get Out.

And he will too, though in his current researches he may have reached only so far as the Omega particle. In the phenomenology of all peoples, the mind slowly becomes curved.

At least that is what Ours are matriculated to, and I had seen nothing to contradict this, during my all-to-brief sojourn in Bucks. Ah, what a mentor was there, was mine, though except for once, I never saw—as she taught me to say—Her!

As I taxied once again along the upper solitudes, trying not to arrive instantaneously at destination—which is of course Our main problem here—I thought of Her with considerable leaning. Leaning is to Us what yearning is to You—but that story will emerge later. The hardest thing to learn here—and still not mastered—is how to get about pornographically.

Meanwhile—and what a concept that is to a being accustomed to Ever—like standing
á 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 irising 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 radio-telephonic 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 One-ness constantly. They are indeed a touching people.)
Hobbs.

At the point where I reentered 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 a 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 sightsee 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 centerwards. 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-emphasized. But as we airfeed, which is as close as I can get to what we
do
do, we are often suffused with a generalized 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.