Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (13 page)

And here I was definitely concealing. For We too, unanimous as we are, have Our myths, our legends, our hopes. And Our legend is that we are
not
of One neutral indivisibility. Mark you, this has nothing to do with individuals as governed—we aren’t political. Our myth, our angelic myth that consoles us when we too, even in all our lovely Oblong, shrink a little, a little droop, from normal convexity, is that a One of us, therefore all Ones, have within them a heavenly bit of gender, of which, under the Oligarchy of One, we are not supposed to know. And which, perhaps,
may be vestigial.
Yes, you and we are cognate, cognate beings all. For as you dream of one day rising to be like Us, we dream of once having been like You.

Our hope being, of course, that—perhaps under the aegis of One of us—each may discover his own gender.

“Indeed, you are getting on.” Her tone was almost Marie’s. “Don’t think we ’aven’t thought of it. We can only ’ope and trust that if anything can be done, proximity will do it. Reared by She’s, each of whom will do ’er best, there is a good chance that you might be one.”

“Ah.” Ah.

We both paused.

“You really think so,” I ventured.

“Mmm.” She seemed to be reflecting. “Well, it would be one way of preserving the balance ’ere.”

Balance, mind you. We of course are in a state of perfect equilipsium. What they call balance here is only a sort of jiggling. “But I thought you didn’t approve of Here. Then why maintain it?”

“We-ell—” Her tone was less Marie, but … I didn’t know what it was.
That’s
what it was. It was exactly a tone to induce such a feeling.

“Well,” She went on. “After life as a She here, then in turn, you people may wish to return There.”

“But then—” I almost cried it out. “But
then
—” Then where was all the even exchange which belonged to our idea? Our mutual idea. I was learning more about she-ness. No wonder they were the pioneers here. Their thinking is curved to begin with.

And further, on a rectilinear planet, or at least one organized to be so, wasn’t Her thinking a bit—? I couldn’t find a compound word to fit it, either in any of the languages I carried instant knowledge of as a One, or in either of the two I had slowed down enough to share with Her. And yet, as I brooded this, I felt the most peculiar … tenderosity. Was it even … a poke of gender? But
which!

“You’re right, Mentor,” I said. “It’s time for me to leave.”

And then a thought struck me. Dreadful ones so easily do here. “Not—it isn’t going to be Marie!”

She made that round sound again, though her next words were rather thin and stretched. “No, Marie’s development ’as been very
rapide
of late, in fact better than me. No-o—not Marie.” And then she made the cluck-tick which characteristically ended the lesson.

“Wait!” I said. “Not so fa—!
Pas si vite!
”

“Oh, la,
la!
” she said. “’Ow quick you learn to slow down, eh. You ’ave been a remarkable pupil.”

“Oh, I dunno,” I said. I hope always to cherish a certain loyalty. “Any One of Us might have done the same.”

In farewell, I hovered between the two languages. Having a choice was so—tiring.
Adieu?
“Good-bye,” I finally said. “And—we’ll always be friends, eh?”

Can an intercom
smile?
From the depths of the depths—or perhaps around the corner—it answered me.

“Au revoir!”

W
HEN SHE HAD GONE
,
I
was left behind. It was the first thing that struck me. And that it was not a mere matter of subtraction. These are the observations which must be immediately recorded by the traveler into an affective world, before his own flesh takes on the qualitative tinge of his surroundings. We, who are still incompletely numerical, shall be unable wholly to tell you the What of Us, just as You, frozen median between words and numbers, will never quite be able to give us all your Why. Between beings each so mixed as You and We, this is bound to happen. But primers are beautiful, even though they must always imperfectly soar. They are like the poetry which occurs here when thought thickens toward the curve, and with us, as the arc strains to remember the time when it was perpendicular.

In Ellipsia, when some of us leave, there are always some left behind, so it is less noticeable; we are people of concerted action, in an action-at-a-distance world. But this time, on being left, I found myself immediately extended in I-ness. I was immediately and suddenly provided with images of myself which were both outside me and beside me, hopping along in a sort of trio with
“I”
and always referring back to it. I was of course experiencing my first concentrated dose of your Right Hereness.

Conceive of it, the first time a being of such instantaneity as mine does this, as if a butterfly whose waverings are measured in light-years might arrest itself on the wee presto of one minute, and affix itself there. Less strange to you perhaps, who are trained to bear it from birth, but for me this sudden attack of “one-ness”—and before I had heard there might be a partial cure for it—was terrible in the extreme.

This is how it was. Before it becomes forgettable—this is how it is. I saw myself, a great, amorphous being, veiled within its own veils, lying in its glass cage. I could see the trees, and myself looking at them. This stage lasted for some time, peculiar, but only a tickle of suffering. Strangely enough, the cage was a help to me, dictating to me such boundaries as I must begin to have here. Finally, a squirrel approached the glass, one rounded corner of it, where the walls joined. From outside, he was at the lower left-hand corner, from within, at the lower right-hand. He stood there, like a signature—it was thus I learned those simple locations, to me so profound. After a while, he was joined by other small animals, not all of his kind, but some, so bringing it about that I did not make note of when he himself was gone—and so I acquired the idea of genus among them. Genera that were separate from me of course, who was still lying there. And this—was almost pleasant. As they continued to course before the glass, coming and going, I understood that this had been happening all the while, and that this rhythm was in its way also a helpful enclosure. Until now, I had not been seeing them, that was all. And then it happened. I sensed all their paired eyes at the glass, an army of them, seeing me: and looking out, seeing them—Mine. They were here in all their eyes to bring home to me how and what was human. The rending came then, such a flesh-clap to a plasm untrained to it. Here I am.

All considering, I came out of it pretty well, and quickly too, especially since the room was so lacking in any array of objects—your classic method by which to forget yourselves. I suppose curved objects would have been of less use to me, and my mentors were afraid, with reason, to subject me too bruisably to the square. Or perhaps it was by design that I was left thus alone, to complicate. For, exactly as with you, it was my confusions which went into action at once, to get me down off that dread apex of solitude. The trouble with me is that I had so many of them. And unlike you, all so primal.

The sense of variability, when it invades a One, is like a rape. Or so I conceive it. It makes one sick of philosophy, for one thing. For another, an exchange of shames takes place. Or rather, your shame becomes our pleasure. As, I assume, happens in reverse, when Unanimity attacks visitors to us. In any case, things with me became more concretized—though nothing to what they would be in the second dialogue.

Once I had calmed down, the glass once again nothing but a prospect of a view, its avenue however extended now toward a distant pergola hitherto unobserved—always something sneakily added!—I found myself able to do, be,
and
think a number of things at once, in a manner which was indescribably—well, you know. I was able to move about, daintily slow, just as you do, and in spite of having no feet, more or less as you do, and also in much the same
balance,
if you like, that you maintain with your surroundings—which you are able to maintain despite the fact that in a closed laboratory such as this room must have been, there would be no known experiment which could determine whether the force that is pressing the observer’s feet to the floor is gravity, or an upward acceleration of the laboratory. Ah you dears, imagine that!

To add to my pleasure, suddenly become aware of the shadows cached even in unmirrored glass, I was able, by a kind of grossly wide peekaboo-ing, to conceive of myself as of a certain height and axis, these later determined as of approximately seventy-eight inches end-to-end, circumference at waistline elliptically appropriate. At home, though we do not lack characteristic of a sort, we are an uncolorful, unselfconscious people. Looking upon myself now, I described a pinkness up to now seen only on the brink of imagination. I turned once or twice before the glass, seeing poised on its end, at an angle of not quite ninety degrees from the floor, a long, roseate form, full of senses which were by infinitesimals beginning to separate themselves, its surface smooth and continuous as the skin of a stone of perfected shape—clean, unmarred and closed, not an arc out of curve, and no orifice anywhere. It did not occur to me to quarrel with this. Altogether, my person seemed to me a not undistinguished one to represent its place of Origin.

The next complication then asserted itself—I began to brood over the conversation just past. When, across all the coaxials of unimaginability, your pulsings began to be received by us (and who shall say which one of us is the future of whose past?), it had been taken as a matter of little interest and not much honor; we had long been angling for recognition from a quarter rather more advanced. For, as some of Ours had long since calculated—if there was a uniform expansion of the universe, and if the motion of expansion were reversed into contraction, like a moving picture run backward, why then, the entire known universe would converge to a single point, indicating the hour of its birth. Ours have long since found themselves capable of peering past this theoretical birth of the universe, into the beyond. Yours, as you no doubt know, have long proclaimed that Nature forbids you ever to peer as far even as
that.
Indeed, Ours and Yours in that field lamentably resemble one another in blaming the limits of their own nature on Nature; We even have a school which miserably contends we shall never see beyond the beyond, to the Beyond.

But consider—in order that our attitude may be forgivable. Although it had taken you, according to my studies since arriving, from your Newton’s day down to this, to learn to send signals at all, and these suggestively childlike—it was borne upon us almost at once that you thought yourselves unique. A form of life that deems itself not merely the Highest but located on the Only deserves a rebuff or two—and there We were but half as culpable as You. Knowing in fact, according to such apperceptibilities as we were in command of, how crowded things already were—we forgot all about you. Even the total amount of radio noise emitted by your planet is so weak, so cosmicomically unimportant, it is no wonder that when your persistent nagging was once again reported to the Orifice, the tenor of Opinion should be, in Our idiom: “Silence in the Quorum house; the monkey wants to Quote.”

But then … ah, then!

Just as I was dwelling on that next eventuality, I caught a furtive movement outside the glass, in the far distance (sic!) near the pergola, a movement of figures which my astigmatism, still not reduced to scale here, and never by reason of my shape to disappear entirely, could not quite make out. Then they vanished, a reminder that I too must soon make my debut outside.

My thoughts returned to that next episode in our mutual history, romantic episode it must surely be called according to my education in your libraries, though this may have been rather too specifically confined to say for sure.

But fancy on it! Suddenly, out of the blue (you are sending primers by now) our lackadaisical receptors are aware that a new set of beings has taken over your sending stations. We of course think of these beings as a
set,
not being disposed to conceive of individual Ones, much less of differences in temperament among them. In contrast with the old set, this new set appeared to be—oh these compound words!—let us say
brightly-stupid,
where the former set had been
stupidly-bright.
The new climate of transmittance had therefore an aura of humility about it, which inclined at least One listener to listen further, longer, and somewhat apart from the incestuant stream of his follow beings.

And now comes the romance, or is it legend, or is it folklore? For is it not axiomic with you, in one or the other of these areas, that in time of Newtonal need, an ’ero (as She pronounced it) shall always appear? And ’e will be One, more than likely, from the first bubble of birth somewhat apart from the Others. Though, strangely enough, ’e will be in the end more touchable than any of them. And finally—’e will more than likely be a runt. This helps to develop temperament. On a genderless planet, said the primer, to develop a bit of temperament would be enough. And that was the story. For, across all the bent light-rays of contingency, One of us was able to do that.

I couldn’t help another peek in the glass, at my new limits. As yet, I had no idea as to what size a being of my new height would be considered here. To say nothing of that other definition of me which I wanted so badly to—
prove.
But I knew one thing. ’E ’ad done it. And ’e or she, ’e was Me.

So, via that lonely-lovely band of enthusiasts, my arrival here had been effected, with all arrangements neatly made. Because of the disparity between Our state of advancement and yours, details of the trip were most easily taken care of from Our end. The accommodation devised here, however, has been utterly ingenious—that is indeed your talent. From Here on in, the path to the climacteric of our adventure seemed immortally clear, even a path which, across the billarions between, might become well worn. And up to now—up to the moment when I turned modestly away from further self-ing, and toward the curved book-wall which held the great folios of electro-braille, and the blown-up photostats of all the dragons that have stalked their little globe—up to now, I had never: