Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (12 page)

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 color-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.

“And we—” I answered. “No, no,” I corrected myself—at the time, I could give the responses only by rote. “One begs pardon. And
You
—”

It
was
hard. At home of course, collectively we referred to ourselves as Ours, not too far afield from the practice here. But if One of us encounters One of us, the form of mutual address remains One. There is no transmogrification into “You-ness.” The rule to remember for Us—She commented later that the very sound of it soothed the irritations of this world—is that One and One are One. We have Our plural, but singly we are the same. Never, never, does One and One make Two.

“Oh, la, la!” She said. “
One
begs pardon?” Over the intercom there came a mutter:
Comme c’est chic, ça,
perhaps not intended to be heard.

“We beg pardon,” was my limp answer. Oh, it’s all very laughable, once one has the language of any Elsewhere as completely as you will have noted yours is now mine; how I can skip flealy from uppercase to lower, in the pronoundest sense of any occasion. But memory still pains. Those first tingles of the singular!

“Come, come,” said the intercom, but softly. She was ever kindly.
“N’ayez peur, mon vieux … mon fils … ma soeur …?”
There was even a giggle. After all, there were certain perplexities on her side—what, after all, was my
gender?
And I could not help her. If we in Ellipsia have gender, or once had—there is a myth to the effect that we once had, and that it still may be recovered—it lies deep to-down the inconscious. I know that there is hope—that just as the crustaceans regenerate limbs lost to the sharks of time, so we—But I could not help her then. I did not know.

“Come now.”

To say what was next expected of me took more than a moment, in which the very veils of my finer flesh rent themselves … or congealed? Then, our rote habits and disciplines being very useful here, as they knew, I was able to say it: “I”

This was the crux of it. Even now I sometimes lose the ego-ness that is needed to make that feeling—that moment when the One rouses from the everslump of curve—and stands up
straight.
When the One becomes: a one. Even now, I am prone to give the old, collective answer.

“
I
beg pardon,” I said dutifully.

“Bon,”
She said. “So far, so good. But it would be even more perfect if you say, ‘I beg
your
—’ Eh?”

As I had soon learned, She is never quite satisfied—this is why they make good teachers. Though this may give them trouble when they visit us, much as they may think from here that they will want to move forevermore only in the Circles of Satisfaction. Once, when I had questioned her very seriously, She had answered: No, to be fair, not to be satisfied was a characteristic of
both
halves of Them. Though it would not have been polite to tell her so, I was glad to have some slight fears allayed. For consider: even at home I had after all been One not content with Our circle—and if that should by any chance be an indication of gender, then—No, I did not wish it, somehow. And somehow, I did not think—No. I couldn’t be. Good God—Marie had taught me that phrase. Good God—suppose I should be a Marie!

“Oh, sorry!” I said now, absently. “That’s what I should have said of course. ‘I beg
your—
But I’m afraid I rather lost the train of thought. Please remind I. What was I begging pardon
for?
”

I never knew where in that great glass house their side of the intercom was located, being more than content to keep to the room specially prepared in advance for me. This was more on my part than a natural contentedness of disposition. For, until I had undergone the full program, including—besides dispensing entirely with the electrical barrier we switched off only secretly at home—Weightfulness, Visibility, and above all how to reduce Instantaneity—it was dangerous for me not to; language was only the first stop. So I was quite reposed to be where I was, learning their seasonal changes, snow to sprout, as I could view them in the great woodpile that pressed against the glass, accustoming myself to this uneasily irregular countryside, after Our calmly monolisting Ovaloid—I had no idea how half-cognate you and we are, until I saw your Sea. But at the time, I couldn’t get over how stock-still, relatively speaking, everything seemed to be here. In the one non-glass wall, there were shelves holding books of instruction in an electro-braille not unlike records we have preserved, plus some enormous blown-up photostats of the greater carnivores and herbivores, all this to serve until my inner gyrations reduced themselves to the needs of print. Now and then, animals and insects of the minor domestic sort were patrolled across the glass, in a reverse of zoo—or perhaps, in order to show me the causality here, they were let fly to dog me of themselves. For, after Two-ness, there comes the other great thing to learn about a variable world in a state of semi-decontrol—that they here cannot wholly distinguish between the tides of causality and accident. Even when dealing with objects, one has to distinguish between these two hallmarks very carefully, since matter here comes in such an onslaught of forms. So, as yet they have not learned how to so classify events here. That is why, at home, every effort is made to have Events take a circular continuity. For, neither have we.

At this moment, for instance, there was such absolute silence over the intercom that I even wondered whether, in the daily sessions where my pair of mentors, working together from the office, had me practice how to plod time-space as they do, slowly, courting every possible friction instead of avoiding it—whether, by intent or not, they hadn’t drained so much instantaneity from me that they were already gone.

“Mentor!” I said. I had never had this feeling before; of course, most that they have here, I had never had. Loss? A kind of fleshly desolation. “Mentor!” I said again, and then, pleading, the word that she had now and then let me use on a Saturday.
“Mère!”

Silence. It hurts—the vacuum’s first, puckering awareness of what it is. I began to understand more of what it would mean for a One to try to become a “one,” or even to live in that world. To grow all the feelings I would need, could I do it; could I bear it? All these to be coursing undictated, tiger after lamb, lamb after tiger, through the beautiful, flickering glades that the beings here must have inside them?—It had not yet been thrust upon me that, according to my needs, these pains would be thrust upon me. According to my needs.

Then the intercom vibrated, stuttering under the timbre of the message it carried. The walls of the room, being non-conductive glass, held me fast, bordering my instantaneity, else what a vast, electrical spreading might not have occurred? As it was, Her words went right through me.

“Cheri!”
She said.
“Cheri.”

Yes, the words went through me, and dispersed themselves. And somewhere within, a little of their irradiation clung. Little by little, by such exercises, is weightfulness learned.

“Cheri,
I suppose you know what you’ve done?”

“What?” I could not have phrased it, but I already knew. That too is a feeling!

“You’ve learned it. You’ve done it. You ’ave said it as we do, without thinking. The ‘I.’”

Yes, I knew I had learned it, plus something else with it, as yet undefined. For this was the paradox between our worlds, that whereas in
my
world, where all the Ones of Ours undulate so steadily together, it might be thought that the energy so collected would allow us to learn many things at once, such is not the case. We are too quick for horizons. At home, we can learn only one thing at a time—that being, generation after generation, what we are. But with you, who can both move and stand still just slowly enough to be variable, nothing is ever learned without a little physic of something else clinging to it, perhaps to adjudicate, perhaps to beguile. Oh adaptability! Oh, impossible not to praise each of us, but you, who have been Two and now are “one,” perhaps a little more. For it is my opinion that your complications exist to comfort you in your solitude.

“Yes, I know,” I answered then, “but please, let’s not think about it just yet. Let’s go back to giving the responses shall we?”

But sadly, both of us knew that the lesson was over; that almost all of them were, between us. At home, in the curved stream which almost counterfeits Ever, any direction is amiable, but here, in this bigotedly back-and-forth place—
got it!
This was the extra bit of medicament. In this place, it’s damnably hard, if not impossible, to go back.

Yet, sadly-angry, I tried. “And whereas,” I said, in the catechism, “whereas the Ones in Ellipsia can only lean together in contemplation of their Sameness. And whereas the Twos here on Hearth have so outbeasted tranquility in their couple-ations—”

Yes, I was already growing
unalike,
like them. Moreover, like them, willy-nilly, I tried. And sadly-angry too.
See it?
These bittersweet antitheses are the bases of all feeling.

“Remember what I told you,” She said. “Repeat it, perhaps. Repetition is
still
your comfort.”

I repeated it. That once I reach “I-ness,” our dialogue is over. That I will shortly become visible, more and more so, this being the progress of all fleshly studies. At which point I must leave here,
sans—”

“Sans delai.”
How soft the intercom’s voice was now.

“For I will now start a new dialogue. Or rather, a
second
one. Which will teach me how One and One make Two-ness.”

“Bravo,” She said.

“And that—” I hesitated, half hoping. “And that this dialogue is to be—with another person. Not with you.”

“Vraiment.”
Confusing her days—that is, her languages—was often with her a sign of emotion.

“Madame—” I thought it best to be formal. At home, with every spawning from the great crater of Matrix where lie the lava pools that continuously and perfectly, in direct relationship of gravity and material, bubble Us upward, thousands of Us, One and One, there are always a few of the newborn who arrive colder in temperature than the rest. Often, these are to be seen gathered around the crater, shivering. The rule was to ignore these orphans, and until now, I had. “Madame … would it not be possible to … stay … and have this dialogue with … with
you?”
I concentrated a minute.
“Avec
…
toi?”

Her answer came crisply, in the other language. “I have my own development to consider. Have you forgotten my remarks on that?”

That our dialogue was not as One-sided as it had come to seem to me. That, according to our joint great idea, she had her own Elsewhere to consider.

“To tell the truth,” I said humbly, “I had. It must come with I-ness.”

I heard her laugh. Is it possible that only a small string-box inside them makes such a sound as that, and not a whole choir of the cells? So she says.

“But this new
one
will be of which kind?” I asked. Remember that as yet all the more recent knowledge I had of them was abstractly radio signal, though by an ever more intimate connection. From a galaxy at the farther red shift of the spectrum … to Here, was already so immense an accomplishment—or so microscopic, to use an antique word—that the measurements of what we have done must occupy both ends of the project for eons. For there too, our worlds a little resemble. Act first, then consider. There too, we are a little cognate.

“Will it be another She?” I said.

“All our members are She’s.” She had never before said this. “Sympathizers of the … other sort … may exist, but for safety’s sake are not encouraged.” And then she said what in Ours is supposed to be merely unthinkable, but here is almost certainly cruel. “Since you have no gender—what difference does it make to you?”

Yes, they are a little untrustworthy. Even She.

“Difference is what One is here to learn,” I answered, not so humbly, indeed feeling more I-ness than ever before. “It has even crossed the mind that One might acquire it.”