My instructions were to ignore those buildings with the most abracadabra on their frontals, and fix upon the one with the shortest, from the steps beneath whose portal I had only to follow the lane. But it was a touch-and-go business, to go round those inscriptions—many of them fouled up with the two-or three-dimensional heraldic shapes proper to their deities—and to do it at the right reading height. Sounds rose well here also, and at each I flattened myself behind some trumpeted cornice, or horn of plenty, or gargoyle. Crouched behind the bronze shield of Muckelfrae, I had about decided that those below were merely greeting one another as they passed. But while engaged in peering at the flat-steel facade of what from its chaste glyph appeared to be Gryzmyshm, I thought I heard someone call, “Aurora borealis?” and then an unmistakable, “Northern lights!” Quickly I hopped behind the carved grapes of Rapaprat, whenceforth the sounds died away. And from my perch there, across an agora momentarily deserted by footsteps and voices, I saw what I hunted. Bastard lettering edited by birdlime indicated a rather rundown hall and deity, but there was no mistaking it: SMITH.
A daring moment. I allowed myself to alight and stand under its portico, on the very steps. On them. For, by hops, I so descended the fourteen of them. With each, I felt myself lose a minim of my power to levitate, until it rested at a skim-graze from the ground, at which level—and waiting only for the dear fault of feet—it has since remained. So I lost in a trice, and even with joy, what, as I progress toward you and yours, it is sometimes said I may have cause to regret. There are compensations.
The lane pointed. A lane is a meander with trees, ending in one house which already will have been described. At least it is so in my experience. I took the meander. On the way, the trees did not burn. And when I reached the house—dark in front, but in the rear, just as described, a nimbus of light, pale but steadfast on the poplars—I found I had gathered enough weight to push gently inward the unlocked door.
Behind me, the white countryside shone in also; it was snowing. I was covered with the little roseflakes, snow-windows, and of course knew well enough that cliché of interstellar geophysics—how much they vary—which nevertheless seemed to me to carry difference too far. There is an element of the lapidary, a tendency toward the precious-precious, in your nature world’s insistence on non-sameness, and it is when I encounter it at such times that I yearn again for a world simple almost as a wave in swath and spirit, freed forever from the crystallography of detail.
Otherwise, there is nothing so human as opening in a door.
I remembered then that I was to ring a bell before entering, so located it, and pressed my newfound weight against that also. There was no answer, many times. This made me feel as if, in three minutes, I had become master of a virtuoso instrument which owned this one sad song for my ear only. Perhaps it is only after many non-answers of this sort, that one develops an ear. I leaned against the door. How strange that leaning should be how I am doomed to make my way here. The door opened slowly, halfway. Over the lintel, just the other inside of it, lay the blue letter.
It is the small things that shock, here. To a denizen of a civilization which generates four hundred million billion billion watts of power as compared with your four thousand billion, how could it be otherwise? How could the letter have arrived before I had, and once more be fresh, untattered? Slowly, I said to myself, take it slowly. Remember the snow-flake. This was a motto I was to say to myself often. For then of course, I looked down again and saw that this indeed was not the same. This letter, however blue-ly arrived, was not a letter to Bucks but from it, and not from the Janice but to her—I thought I knew from who. The other letter had given directions to my mentor as to how a One might come here. This message must announce my arrival here, the arrival of a One. But She, its author, was perhaps already out on There, far past any distances conceivable to the short minds here, far far past the spiral nebula in Andromeda, the Magellanic clouds. This time I was able to control the ragged breathing which visited me again but slower; how strange if grief, or what you more precisely call “regret,” should be the beginnings of a respiratory organ! Combined perhaps, with curiosity—for I was quite able to close the door behind me, and step inside. But it is the small things that shock.
And now, I was in. Previously, a One had fallen asleep on this planet, as once you used to do entirely, stretched slack on the green, numb in the bramble—outside. A One had seen from above your cities, churches, shops, highways and riverbanks—the green, and all the dark that overlay the green. And now a One saw his first private residence.
I do not know where to place this shock, for it has never much lessened. I could have wished that my pores would close again, but whether these had hardened now—or humaned—that anemone defense has never again been mine. (Up the ladder, I suppose.) Since I didn’t know where to look, or scarcely how, I had to look everywhere. I continued to shiver, for perhaps half an hour. Since I did so uncontrollably, I suppose this was up the evolutionary ladder too.
We don’t have aesthetic; that wasn’t my trouble. Neither would any kingly abodes, nor tapestried halls I saw later, had these come first, have reacted on me otherwise. As you yourselves say, beauty is relative. We live on that pinnacle where all appearances are relative together; as I have said in another connection, We Have What We Are. It would never occur to us to feel stuck with it. No, my trouble was—honesty. Ours.
Oh my non-opposites, I have a teaspoon of your perspective now! We have what must appear to you a far too candid civilization, gliding forever in one groove: Fear substance, suppress it, and never forget to do so in the knowledge of all. In curved life, there is this one lie which everybody honorably accepts. The rest is luster. At least, I suppose this to be the historical argument, long since buried with what it buried—we are all luminosity now. And for a one of us, however expectant, however half trained, to stand in any of your rooms is to suffer such shudders of substance, such gouts and corporeal bites of it as must in the end surely develop a venous system in me, or perhaps a nervous one—whichever carries double messages, and doubles back on itself to carry them.
For your rooms are chock-full of what you are half afraid of, and all half fawning, half at heel. Everywhere there is the threat to the body, in bulk of chair, in step from step, in sword-hung light. From one lurking apocalypse to the other, you move grooveless, on your own. And everywhere, only half suppressed, half acknowledged, you live with the threat to the mind. A window doesn’t annihilate distance—but frames it. In your antiquities, even in your meaner objects, the least of which may survive you, you live with your own death—and bear it. We are an almost dreamless people, but if ever we should start in large-scale, here would be our nightmare. For even the plainest of your rooms is stuffed to bursting with it, with threats held back by the nearest of margin, the thinnest of seal. In short, throughout all my almost life I had never seen such a prevalence of: seams.
In spite of which, everywhere I saw the brave shape of you, in the chair’s crushed pillow the implicit lean of you, in the doorknob a hint of your hand. Standing there, still shaking, I saw how you lived, not as we, by almost certainty, but by entente cordiale—the second word of that phrase being in itself already a little tipsy, not to be betted on as a sure thing even with your kind of boomerang money. Outside each of these rooms there was another room, a ghostly replica of lurks and shadows, as if refracted to one side. No doubt you differed among you as to which was the realer. I saw where to differ might be helpful. Fact was, you lived in both.
I stopped trembling at once. Nothing cures the panic of the moment quicker than a twinge from the ague that one knows will last for life. The room wasn’t such a threatening one really, indeed one so small and low that a wandering runt from abroad might even begin to be proud of his bearing—what great Lumpen my more imperial brethren would have found themselves here! The windows were flossed with white, and against these, and walls of the same, I would be just visible, a great fleshly vase of famille rose.
As I calmed, I could better take in that the seams, though many, were tensely controlled; nowhere were there any leering cracks. On one wall, a gilt bird clutched in its claws a mirror I saw was convex—a tribute to the new guest? I glided over to see myself in it, then looked quickly away. Curved beings should perhaps not look in curved mirrors. But I turned away with a new respect for leaving. It was one method of moving, here, by which means you moved from room to room and perhaps from person to person also. We are a more blithesome people, since, traveling always on ovaloid, we need never speak of leaving. We always arrive.
Another method was to have an aim, and damn the directions. World to world, this had got me here, and now, somewhat abashed in scope, it moved me forward through a succession of small cottage rooms which passed over me or rather propelled me, like the smallest chip in a kaleidoscope, and then left me to stand, hung with all my half-mortal weight, before a door described. The little back room. Within, I heard a noise.
I am without shame. I confess it. I mean that I admit without shame that for what seemed many minutes but may have been few I stood there, hearkening to the murmurs, the sobs and cries of a creation which had drawn me toward it through spiral upon spiral of this small and scarcely steadfast universe, from room to room of a small house. But now that I was here, Prometheus bared and palpitant for his experience … now I did not enter. The glass transom through which I heard it was several feet above me, but I think I would not have looked through it even had I still possessed my power to rise. I was on the brink of the greatest moment of divination of the journey between us, and now I wanted it to move forward, to see its mysterious lamp shine ahead of me still, just around the corner, only just down the line. A poet must never plumb his otherwordliness to the full. Every night, in a mummy of a book I had read before starting out, the eagle comes to eat the heart of Prometheus. A One of us had flown far. But who could be sure which of us—You or We—was not still Prometheus, demigod chained to his ledge? You were my eagle surely, my mystery—you must not disappoint. Like the bird on the wall of one of the rooms behind me, clutched in your claw you held your mirror, in it the blankness from which I must—become.
I waited. The light in which I was listening was a queer one. From some shrouded source inside that room, light must be falling in domino on trees outside that sent it wavering inward again through the window of this one, perhaps augmented by moon. This light, whose source I could not see—it was like a link. In it, I saw that I had grown a shadow, not quite as black as one of ours, but long. My shadow stretched ahead of me, pointing toward the door. Even I could fancy that, thin as a wish, it slipped inside there, unbroken. And from inside, surely something stole forward to join it, to warn. What fled from me, toward me? I waited. The noise of creation was over. All was silence within and without, unbroken. And in it, I heard the beating of my non-heart.
It was never to become a permanent acquisition; even as yet I hear it seldom, always strangely, betimes. And indeed, later study revealed that I had misread the legend; the eagle in the story was a vulture, who plucked at a liver, not a heart. But the anatomy of evolution is not for me to say, or how false gods, false images might yet breed me true. In any case, I was at that moment heartened enough, emboldened enough to step across my own image, along the track of my own shadow, and stand up to that door. Prometheus made clay images—true. But he modeled them after … I had never dared say it before. Men.
Inside that room, I said to myself, was privacy, an institution we took care not to have. Yet here it was managed, and on the matter of affairs which were really the most public on the planet. This was honesty as it should be—one truth for all, but dramatically hidden away, so that everybody was kept running after it. Including heroes from other planets, whose more classic intelligence, once mated—ah, that word—with your hot self-drama, already made for such an internal frisking and a lolloping of my carbonation, and a singing too, as might very well be a reasonable facsimile of blood. A circulation dizzied me, around one thought censor-centered. Inside there, there was: inside!
I must have melted through the closed door with the first and last exercise here of my old power to, for there I was on the reverse side of it, without even a suddenly to help squeak me through. My shadow, that gentle but still genderless companion, was there also—and from that day forward—like a faithful if rather boring friend who would never do anything one wouldn’t be seen doing oneself. But I had scant time for me and mine now, the room was so exciting; that state of affairs is what creation is. At the risk of your already knowing what was in it, and all about it, I cannot forbear to describe.
Its dimensions were some twenty by forty miles—pardon, feet—that is to say, almost imperceptible by our standards, but quite practicable, even luxurious, for you. And I saw at once, with that exalting recognition-of-the-divine which is inborn in life everywhere, that the room was not respectable. History was all over its walls.
We of course had long ago had to annihilate history, both for its bad examples and its equally sinister good ones—else how could we have achieved that constant we were all so rightly proud of: One Now indivisible, for all? To accomplish this, a world must agree to learn nothing from its past and expect no advancement from the future. For these we had substituted a simpler Out from the crater, and the final In. Museums for contraband history sprang up now and then among us but died quickly, because of being so many millennia afar from fact. It was safer to use present imagination, as we did with the poem-cans, and in the end more pleasurable. As a race, we of course know that we have been one and are going to be, but we waste no time adorning either of these cloudy boundaries, preferring to sink both our credentials and our potentials for the sake of a tranquility which is unique in the cosmos. It is by this means that we have eliminated government in the political sense, sociology, philanthropy and all the other bloody dynamisms which drag in the train of history and masquerade as hope. But history to us is the real villain, and we have therefore cut it off at both ends.
And how do we live and govern ourselves? Just as you do, but with less misconception as to how. We live under the ukases of our biology. We live by the law of the crater. Just as you do. In fact this is the whole attraction-repulsion between our two worlds. For, where your biology of two-ness predicts all the violent modulations which give you no rest, a luckier physiogonomy has produced that great, frictionless civilization of ours, all its slippery artifacts being made, spent and returned to Us without the taint of possession, all conquest of distance and mass made possible by such a vast diffusion of electrical sameness—and in the realm of sensation, that sweetly curving round which we call Now. And you, by the substitution of one critical and unfair letter of your alphabet: Non. I, in my fealty to both civilizations—ah, what an eminence, and a responsibility of course—would phrase it with more justice, and after one of your own philos-phers, called, I believe, Pluto. We Are. You—live.
And this room was crammed with it, hung and littered with all the subversions of history, and not even hidden or coyly suggestive, but in arrogant, radical display. Sullen caitiffs that the walls were, and the tables and even the ceilings, they somehow stood it. Stages of it were even labeled with cards, brashly cataloged in cabinets. Examples of all your qualitativeness appeared to be here. Color?—there was onyx or amber, carved or smoothed to commemorate; there was the puce and brown of dried combat, and tusks. Touchness?—there was Coptic silk and desert leather, straw and wood and shell from nowhere, and from here and there, fur. And bone. Also fossil sheaves and ears of grain for the taste, and bowls for the serving, and strung teeth for the chewing, along with those some paleolithic beans which now were beads. And everywhere, carved into little carnelians and scarabs that threaded you through the ages, or merely beached up on time like spermaceti, whether cast up from you or your animal cohorts I could not know—bone. All the potsherds of your personality were here. How you valued them, how you valued yourselves ever more in the piece than in the whole, I now s
aw—and shivered for it. And yet the tintinnabulation here—made without a sound, without a sound, and what other history could do this?—made me wish for the wherewithall to weep.
On one of the tables near me, a War Club of the Plains Indians lay crossed with a Gold Armband, Sutton Hoo. I had fancied a little fur, had I? It was here, pelted and done for, snarling but done for, on the floor. On another table, there was a clay replica of a fist whose broken fingers clasped air, whose palm had a hole in it, for what use I couldn’t guess. And on yet another, a Grave Ornament—Chilean or Peruvian made a vase of four arms, four legs, but only two heads, in a combination I had no time to get to the bottom of, but presumed was intended to hold flowers and grief. It didn’t matter. Above this, a mask hung, labeled New Guinea, on it such a howling laugh of anguish as who should classify? Could I ever learn to feel like that? If your classifiers couldn’t say all of you, or quite of you, or true of you, this I had already discovered—nor could I, it didn’t matter. You lived, and more. The room was fisted with your violence, clubbed with it—and masked. Even in my half-time heart I felt the thrum of it. I felt a violence for that violence. All that I wanted of your world was here. And more.
Even a perfume, for the fifth sense I had forgotten—and how well I could number now—drifted, fresh heavy light salt dark, indescribable. Anything worth investigating here seems so. But this was the place you were made. I’d try.
At the far end of this storehouse, the telltale lamp which had helped draw me here shone toward the patterned window and cast a light behind itself as well. A garment had been thrown over it, filtering its softness down to the exquisite, so that the rosy air fought with the dark to pay tribute to what I saw before me—an extraordinary tableau. Was that what one should call it? Without my mechanic companion to do the sorting, words of all languages floated toward me like feathers. What a representimo!—if that was a word. Or was it a charade? Or a charivari—no, that was noise.
Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel Page 24
