Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (16 page)

And I. When Here, do as Here does. But be sure to emulate those who are in power. I must run no risk of having them confuse me with low-grade matter. It requires only a particular thought for us to discard our Field, the trouble being only that it is such a particular one, and illegal too. Perhaps it wouldn’t work as well here. Taking a cautious breath, I found that since the last time I had practiced this heresy, the wholesomely coarser air of Yours had so clogged the finer pores that I was enabled to sustain a thought without fairly recognizing that I was doing it—and that this furthermore seemed to add substantially to my weight. Sure enough, shortly I began to feel the familiar chilliness which always comes of lowering one’s protective field, and happening to shiver, this inched me slightly doorwards—and sure enough, the door inched slowly and equally toward me. Some thoughts must be illegal anywhere. For good measure, I made so bold as to half hum it, meanwhile keeping my real thoughts trolleying along a loftier neighborhood; there’s always some niche of the intelligence that one must keep to oneself.

“I am …” I murmured, “… I am … an Original.” This time the door didn’t budge. But by dint of trial I found that as I moved forward, and only under the influence of this, the door would move compatibly outward. What courtesy, even in inferior matter, here! Slowly, majestically dipping my angle at a nice compromise between a taking-this-for-granted and a thank-you, I inched myself along without accident, until the door and I were in equipoise. I was almost outside it. Outside, on Here.

By hook or crook then, I was almost safely through the second phase of my journey. For, awesome as the interstellar reaches may be to the lone traveler, or even to the caravan which must track those Saharas of cosmic dust, there had come a point in my journey when it was the destination which became the dread. Did they really have water in a liquid state? I could not survive without it. Should I have trusted them, when they reported themselves as beings with the same needs as I, molded by the same natural forces? Not that I was suspicious of their intent—but after all, they were only a third-generation star. Young as they were, must one not have a low view of intellectual powers which had taken all of their history to discover other presences, and the possible pulsings between them? Granted We and They had mutually significant symbols and meanings, but imagine Our dismay when informed that they still read and wrote! Could beings like Us, who are in Ourselves practically
all
electronic meaning, go backward as far as these beings on the other side of their “Milky Way” thought they had gone forward; could we mutate enough, and quickly so, to touch arc on their planet? To dare to do this, I had gone against all home Opinion. And so far, with the help of arrangements-in-waiting, plans had gone remarkably. But, as I peered outside that glass door, I remembered my misgivings just a few moments before landing. Behind me, improbably far along the empyrean reaches, Ours, that long teardrop of a planet, lay somewhere shrouded as I had last seen it, nestling deep in its filtered atmospheres, a jewel once upon a time massively wept. As I had reined in on Yours, a mere toy ball lost on its cloud stubble, waiting to be picked up again in play—my last thought had been: yes, I can land Here—but can I live?

Such thoughts as one can have behind a door here! Just beyond the threshold the air was heavy, but I reminded myself how much I myself had changed during my weeks here. When, by infinite creepings I found myself still alive and breathing, no more WHAM’s and the door still courteous, I made the last inch or two; behind me, the door modestly retired—and shut. I had no thought at the time of whether it would readmit me, or where I was going. All the prospect of your world was before me, terminated in the distance—according to the limits of sight here, to which mine was fast declining—by a pergola. I remained for some minutes as I was, faintly chilly, daring nothing, taking stock. I was Here. I was Outside. And I was naked as the day Yours are born.

If you could attach a tiny camera to the eye of the newborn here, would it bring back data more vital than those mechanisms that hit your moon? I doubt it, for there is so much more than sight at stake. To understand that first unfolding receptivity, the interpreters would themselves have to be reborn. In this way, and entirely opposite to Us, who slip upward already complete and serenely equal with our crater-watchers, you keep a constant spawning of what you call “ignorance.” And the drama of
learning
it away from itself, while it battles to get back to what it faintly dreams it surely knew, is what is here called “a life.” In my way I was at this moment analogous to your newborn; I was in fact seventy-eight inches of naked cornea, but of that moment when your world moved in on me so powerfully and I as powerfully mutated toward it, I retain only the memory of its collision and blend. Among all the impressions since, this vague memory—as of a lost difference at the back of “now”—is the least describable. Yet I feel as you do; if I could find it again I would have something of utter value. What I describe is the moment after.

Though this was my first free view of your world in what you so endearingly persist in calling the round, I was of course already window-bred to the gently mammary landscape before me, and to its verdure. This latter I had already seen in the photostats, often in forms fiercer and more variant; in fact it was by gazing thoughtfully back and forth first at these then through the window that I had gained a composite of what plant life is here. We too have our trees, archaically preserved under glass now, since with the reversal of atmosphere and our refinement of it, they and we are no longer in such a complementary gaseous relationship as they and you. Indeed, they are our living treasures, visited in museums as you do your dead ones. We like to watch their pause-poise. Other plants we have too, but never except under the most severe guard—as you occasionally guard flame. Grass, though known of—ah, indeed, indeed, indeed!—is forbidden, and hopefully extinct. For, in the seamlessness of our chemiformically paved cities, and under the ever-spreading, plastic mildness of buildings which have been taught to repeat themselves whenever necessary in units of fortified ground granite and repressed marble, we have been for some eons safe from sight of terra firma, but even in seamlessness, there is the very danger of seam.

So, it was no wonder that I gazed for minutes at that wilderness of chlorophyll which would have been both treasure and enemy at home. Although I was by now enough coarsened in my components to be able to amble along and under that green burning in mutual toleration, to do so would nevertheless be an act of daring. And still is, though, just as you do in the performance of unnatural acts, I have taught myself not to flinch. In any case, I cannot resist returning to what seem to me the most marvelous museums of those green forms—which even on Here too are not really random or rampant, but unutterably fixed in their pause-poise—and indeed may be the basic natives of eternal everywhere.

As I gazed there, already past that other crater-moment, I knew that the scene before me and around me was not the only one in your world; such a mistake I have never once made. I already knew that in and among all the delights or abysses of what you, when you have tamed it, called landscape, and we, when we have conquered it, terra firma, the elements are the same. Still I gazed. Just in the foreground of those changeable ozones they call air here, a smallish tree was turning over and over its paw-shaped leaves, gray to green, green to gray, palm up, palm down. Palm up, palm down, but any advances that were made between tree and me were mine, and at this I felt somewhere within me a certain squeezing. I stared on. Such jewels of the variable are offered you daily, and were now being offered me also—such jewels as I could never in essence hope to touch. Above the tree, in perfect ellipse, a cloud reigned. Pause-poise. Everything was moving here, and yet stood at
same.
One thing I have learned here which I never could have learned at home—where sameness never moves—and I think I did so at this moment. Palm up, palm down. People are the wilderness.

I looked away, and there, just entering the pergola, were two of them.

A
ND ONE, THOUGH OF
a certain meagerness, was a One of us.

I had no time more than to make out that the other figure, tall and shrouded in black, was certainly of another order—for at that same second, I unfortunately made a misstep.

Or rather, in my haste to meet them, I overstepped, not having properly learned how to bring my movements down to your scale.

It might be thought that creatures like us, able to transport ourselves at a rate that appears to you instantaneous, and across distances which to you are scarcely short of infinity, must be moving about all the time. Think again—and it will be obvious to you that the reverse side of our instantaneity is of course—a monumental stillness. That’s real balance and real personality as we see it, a personal whatness, not nearly as dependent as you on a personal where. Contrarily, You, still exploring the minutiae of distance, still road-building on both ground and air, are naturally obsessed with movement, from posture changes on up. I understand that the youth of Yours, in the days before they dreamed of motorbikes—and got them—used once to dream of seven-league boots. As a self-propelling creature, I in effect had these, and on Here you’re welcome to them; a circumference of twenty-eight thousand miles is simply not enough. It scares me even now to consider where I might have ended up, had I been without the preliminary training of the weeks in the glass house—possibly off the place altogether, and in some reach to whose beings even Outline is unknown. As it was, think as small as I tried to, in order to squeeze myself down to those miles which for me were as much the final particle as molecules were once those of your matter—!—they showed me a map later, where I landed.

Later, it was at first thought I had landed at Durham, but when I described the perch on which I had found myself, the consensus was, “Oh no, not
that
Romanesque!” Forms of buildings, and indeed many other inanimates, are intensively classified here, whereas even the muddical sciences make only the most simplistic classifications of people—not yet having decided, except in the most primitive ways, which is subordinate to which. And if things go as I hope for me here, that will be my lifework, to compile such a dictionary of people forms and natures as would be possible only for a one who remembers his One-ness. But that’s by the way. Let us return to my boots.

There exists, they told me, somewhere less to the north of my starting point than Durham, a cathedral town which, they added parenthetically, has one of the loveliest of medieval streets, most homogeneously preserved. (One learns to expect these stoppages of what they presume to call historical detail in the sublimest conversation.) Be that as it may, they have a town in which there is a cathedral called Ely, on the main tower of which there is a kind of heavenly veranda-porch, ledge or abutment, on which climbers may exit, to stand amid, above, below and on the stonework. From my description of the latter, this is where I found myself standing—whisko-flash—from Bucks. The street below, its roof peaks all very harmonious, appeared to be preserved in the way they later said, and the people too for all I know; I saw none of them, since it was raining. Water in a liquid form they had indeed. I had already seen their sea, of course, but had never in my life felt that luminous shiver-shine-spat on my integument. We are not that intimate with the elements. At first it was divine—under those tiny punctures, never had my skin felt so personally mine. But with the new ever comes the newer here. Though we do not have bodily temperature up to yours, I could swear that, hard by the tower there, while the gray winds swatted me to pinker, I had my first sensation of it. Meanwhile I poised there, not knowing either what to do next or how to assure my return to Bucks, having no idea of its direction, or as yet of any, on your scale. Surely they would be out signaling for me shortly, but the roving communications system we shared must be far too grandiose to pick up such a little mark as now was I. The clouds were higher above me than I was used to; as for the ozone, its extravagant blue had altogether disappeared. I even had a moment’s nostalgia, now that I had friends here, for that cloud-strewn evening when I had first landed, beaming in on a steady chatter of signals, bang on Bucks. Above all, I wished myself dry again, and no matter what reprimands might be my lot, in front of that pair whom five minutes past I had left at the pergola.

That pair, that forever ill-assorted pair! In that brief, snapped-off glimpse, what I aspired to be was nevertheless brought home to me. It is one circumstance to aspire to difference in general—a kind of yammer and snuffle to be something other than what one so boringly is. Miles across the ravine from this is that other circumstance, when one comprehends, in those layers of oneself beyond where the words are made, the truth of a difference which no effort of sight, touch or sound may ever bring more than tokenly nearer. Imagine one of your young, at that gorgeous second when, as still little more than a voice and a weaving of limbs, there is knitted into its flesh forever a sense of the difference between mere object-mass—and You.

From then on, I understood the nature of two-ness, at least where I, or a One like me, was one of the pair. I had only to recall that picture, imprinted in me as if all of me were total lens: one of Us, however poor a specimen, standing next to: however bundled, half seen and possibly unaverage also—one of You. From then on, I better than understood how a One and a one make Two; I began to take for granted that things were so and had always been; I began even to find it harder and harder to conceive that things had ever been otherwise … elsewhere. Along with every transition made, I have had to fight to remember it. For my greedy prayer, never told truly until this moment—neither sphere-to-sphere, nor to Mentor, nor to the lovely personage of the second dialogue—my greediest prayer is not to change wholly from a One to a one, but to stand somewhere on the Gibraltar of between. To stand in the suffer-tickle of all the various, and yet remember the Calm of the Oval, if not feel it.