Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (21 page)

“—and then, ah then I find myself in such a bramble.”

Bramble!

“Everything I look at, Marie; it touch me. And everything what I touch; it
look
at me.”

Yes, that’s the bramble, all right.

One after the other she described them, these blandishments. Little pictures flitted past me, small images struck as if with one molten drop of that organ which, as they tell it, beats like a brazen forge within them, magic unto itself in the center of their wilderness. What scenery they have within them, what landscape!

I could spare her those cherished sunsets, rather pale to me after such sun carillons as I had passed on my way Here, though I had begun to understand that delirium for the daily which can clang upon us once we know it is going—or it is gone. Her plaint about the plant-in-the-window left me cool also; I have already declared myself on plants; since they will outnumber us all there is no need to mourn. On the contrary, and though I might marvel politely here at grass which did not burn one, I would let it go at that, knowing what it still can do, left to its own.

But most of her apostrophes were to the smaller domestica, some so insignificant that they fell through the screen of my computation altogether unidentified. In the span of one day, according to her account, she had wept equally and uncontrollably both over memorabilia of the past and objects testimonial to such a present as can be caught here—from an ancient pumice stone, a piece of volcanic lava which under the strange inequity here had scraped her heel in the bath since her girlhood, to the patch of trillium on the way through the woods to the tower where all her scientific efforts were conducted—to the stockpot on the stove. This last, on whose to-and-fro, from organ to organ as it were, she rather dwelled on, did rather ticklishly affect me. But taken altogether, what—

“Sentiment!” said Marie.

Fool, semi-demi convertedly quavering fool! No! What
disorder!—
from which comes all their danger. Their tolerance for the inanimate here—on whose sneakiness we keep forever vigilant—is past believing. Whatever of it they do not positively venerate, or worse yet, even help to proliferate, they let run incontinently free, eventually to rise, mountains of it and they knew not why, in their own dreams. Enmity—as we already knew from certain faint tintinnabulations of our instruments—they keep for among themselves.

“Yes, sentiment,” said my mentor in her deepest voice yet. “Softens the tissues. But hardens the memory.”

“How low your voice has got!” Marie tittered. “Whereas mine … that is, One’s—”

Good God. No wonder I knew that pitch pipe of hers, its tinny “A.” It was also mine.

“You never did weep, Marie?” she meanwhile was saying. “During all that time?”

“You know quite well how busy one was, collating all that inform—all very well for you scientists, but some one has to org—”

“—and someone ’ave to ’ave money.”

“—ye-es. That’s a thing One has rather missed, on There. We do gamble of course, but only with the oddest curved little counters, designed to slip away of themselves as fast as accumulated. One does wonder if it wouldn’t be possible somehow to
immobilize—
”

Up there on my perch, I began to laugh in the very special way we do, of which even the so sensitive roof beneath me would not be aware. No, We may not feel, per se, and we may have but one carefully constructed climate, status-quo’d to such fine tolerances of the same as your engineers would not conceive. But we have our outlets, arrived at after such implosions and gravitational collapses of which all but the most trusted members of our steadied universe remain unaware. Miles out to star you can hear us in the laughing season. And even off-season one is soothed by the characteristic hum-tune of a planet always at a cool, cerebral bubble—the smooth, general laughter of the only very slightly counterfeit sublime.

Such a planet can take care of itself.

Indeed, I shouldn’t be surprised if,
ententes cordiales
to the contrary, emigration should after all take place only
One
way.

“—and remember, Marie, you’d so much sympathetic company, right up to the time you took to your groove. I would have found it
difficile
to explain to ’Arry—why all these international ladies so interest to walk to the old icehouse by the lake. ‘An ’ardy lot,’ was all ’e ever say. ‘An ’ardy lot you physic-culturists.’”

Fuzz fizz. I must do better with my vowels.

“Grenadiers in skirts, most of your lot,” said Marie. “Spies, I shouldn’t wonder. One’s most telling evenings were spent alone, with what I seem to remember was a good book. Can’t quite recall its name. But it was a good one.”

“
The
good one, Marie. I try it last evening. There.”

From the thud, it must have been a book from a very large pocket.

“One hopes it helped, dear.”

“Very settling,” said Mentor. “To the settled.”

“Ah?”

“But not if one hopes for an Elsewhere less like here.”

“Fancy. What could One have been thinking!”

“And certainly not if one hopes for one truly—original.”

Uh-oh. O-nathema. No wonder there’s trouble. But in the end She might do better than Marie, who will get only so far. She may be an obsessive of those higher orders which are often less obvious. She can laugh. And she has rather a strong sense of O.

“Is that a shadow up there?” said Marie nervously. “A rather large one?”

“Mebbee.”

It melted me. Maybe she knows I’m here, I thought. Maybe is such a melting word.

“They’re let run so free here,” Marie said crankily. “On There, the shadows are so beautifully
organized.
”

She’ll learn not to use
that
word.

“Marie …” She spoke now in the hoarsest whisper. “Marie, I lie to you. Last night, in the tower, I did empty out some of the pockets. And I weep; it is true. At the bottoms when I find ’ere a lorgnette, there a few ’airpins—I weep for what I am leaving, yes I weep. But in the end I go back to the telescope. For perspective, you need an atmosphere that warps; in the telescope, I tell myself, where there is only distance, maybe I shall be safe. ’Arry often say it, even on Palomar what is a telescope but a circle drawn around doubt?”

“Not on Ours,” Marie said eagerly. “Ours isn’t circular; Ours is ellip—”

Good God, let not these two get into philosophy.

“I know, I know. But let me demonstrate. The statement I just made, Marie—is that theory or heresy, in your part of the universe? Choose!”

I hoped Marie would give it to her proper. Here-sy is of course a statement with too much Here in it—to Us. For you, any statement is a the-ory which has too many holes of There. A statement is wherever a One or a You is standing.

“O,” said Marie. “On the One hand … On the One Other Hand … O.”

“You see! And you haven’t even got any hands.”

Despite which, the hammer and tongs atmosphere being what it seemed here, the odds were that
I
would soon develop them!

“Forty years in the movement,” said Marie. “And all gone to—While you were at your rosaries, what happened to your catechism?”

“I remember. I
still
remember!”

“Repeat it then.”

“Birth: bleed. Child: starve. Men: kill. Death:—”

“There!” cried Marie. “Could anything be more convincing? One sees
that
alternative. As against all the horrows of two-ness—”

“You interrupted me,” said Mentor quietly. In the silence, she cleared her throat. “Death: is.”

“Not on Ours,” said Marie eagerly. “We simply—”

“Let me interrupt
you.
Lacking the adhesives of personality, or the sharps and flats of suffering, you simply—”

“Elide!”

They both said it at once. Even the roof beneath me gave a small echo, and in its glass I saw a small vein develop, in sympathy perhaps with the sudden weight even I was feeling. Death?

“And I’m not sure—” said She very slowly. “I can’t make up my mind. Do I really want to avoid the one answer to which there is no question?”

Curved. Beyond all doubt—curved.

“Dear girl, what are you going to
do?
” This time Marie did manage a whisper. “All that black crepe! You’re not planning to commit …!”

“La, la, no, that package will keep. But thank you, Marie—did I ’ear per’aps ever so small … a
tendresse, pas pour moi
… but for
’ere,
per’aps a small feeling?”

Under me, both bundles moved inward, to a sound that seemed no more than a lisp of the cells. “A little.”

“Alors,
Marie … listen. Last night, I do my hypothesis,
these, hypothése;
it seem to me I am doing this all my life. Only now, does it seem odd that I am doing it in order to get to a place where I shall never be able to do it again. To concentrate, this time I look at ’Arry’s new star object, the brightest of nine, and my favorite—”

“Favorite! You are still—”

“Yes, I admit it. Personality to the end! Listen about this 3C-273, Marie. It is the nearest of the far ones. It is so far that what I was seeing last night ’appen before the birth of the solar system, yet it make so much brilliance that any amateur can pick it up in his speculum—And listen, Marie, this vary rhythmically, in thirteen-year cycles. Maybe the proper star for a woman? Hmmm?”

“You’re not thinking of—
still!
”

She gave a laugh alarmingly like one of ours. “’Ow nice to see that you can still not think—whatever you’re not thinking of. No … but—” She broke off. “Honest to God, what the matter with me? When I think of what we ’ave gone and done, the secondary sex, the unprofessional one—I ’ave such ’ot flashes of adventure. And then suddenly … an icicle grow in my throat, and stick there. I feel such a laugh coming on, of such frivol as I ’ave never—” She stopped short. “I think to myself, change-of-life, eh? Who should be surprise we are the ones to think of it?” Her voice bubbled. Then there came from her such a laugh, higher than Marie’s, not as supersonic as that chorus one hears in the season, but still cast to the all but disappearing pitch of it—the cool, aleatoric music of all answers which have no death in them to disturb us.

How did I know this? Where was I going, or coming? I looked down at myself, no discoverable change. Then I noticed that, beneath me, the solicitous crack had widened. I had forgotten about that subtle traitor, the inanimate—that counterspy, that informer. But now, within a small circumference around what was going on below, I could
see.

They were just down under—the gray figure and the black. Seeing often adds very little to the believing here—at least to a vision accustomed to rotating at the center of a cyclorama which in turn intersects Others of the same, all this united perspective—aerial, isometric and linear—of course operating as usual, as One.

But I could discern that one of the figures was standing relatively still, and one—though with a movement visible only to those trained to receive the perpetual molecular shimmer, was very slightly dancing. Difficult as it is to stand rock-still—there is no better word on this planet—the black figure was doing it. It is even possible that to a human I the figure of Marie may have been invisible. These dialogues are not unknown here.

“Listen—” said the dark figure again, who of course might not know that the listening attention of a One, cocked forever at the angle of the gyroscope, spins eternal. “Listen, Marie, what you see when you look the night sky?” And it spoke in two voices now, both the piping and the soft, the dark and the cool, like some oracle intent on ringing all the changes possible between One and Two, but unaware, of course—a sudden gust of my own laughter shook me—that above it, there peered the outsider, who was—I felt a slight flesh change. Could mutation come even while laughing? The outsider who was … I was. I was Three.

“I tell you what ’Arry see,” She said.

Three-ness is nothing compared to the passage from Oneness to Two-ness—a mere sophistication. I listened to her description of what a Harry saw—ah, the dears that these beings were, at least in their spare time! I watched him stumble out among the higher-speed environments to potter with his basic fizzical alphabets every evening:
“No,”
he said to himself, “matter could not be totally annihilated into energy;
yes,
the universe exploded
bang
into being thirteen billion years ago and is continuously expanding;
no,
it had no beginning, and,
steady there!,
will endure forever”—and I saw him fall like an apple, every generation of him, on the heads of those beneath.

Meanwhile, the black veils did not tremble, but from within the demand was repeated, not waiting for a reply. “I tell you what I see,” it said.

She did not see the horses of Apollo up there, not any more than the Harrys did; the romantic was no longer her line. But so bright was her description, charged with the scorn of non-seeing, I fancied I saw that classic heaven. What strength she had garnered, from not being merely
other
but always the
opposite!
Beneath me, she unrolled such a vast panorama of all the prospects she had never had, that I altogether forgot the staid picture to be seen through the crack below. This is your general power, to extend yourselves in a way we can never, by the airiest hazard and opine. And by that reverse grace which acts in all universes in some way, it is a power which comes to you by very virtue of not having a fixed Now.

So she described—with what she
said
was bitterness—the long range of circumstances she had never been fully allowed, had meanwhile greatly despised, and now hoped to leave behind her, forevermore. What experiences, what illimitable Urals of them, their peaks bloodstained or rain-bowed, she cast behind her—and ahead of me! (And what a strange “forever” they had here, which lacking even a moment’s tranquility must attach itself at once, greedy-greedy, to a “more.”)

I saw holocausts, hurricanes, tornadoes, some of which she
had
seen; despite her gender she had not been wholly underprivileged. I heard the plaint of children, not all of whom were hers, but all of whose cries were on her conscience—and dimly osmosed toward me, I thought I began to compute what was a child. The notion of “kill,” even within the species, I have never had trouble with (it being what we are in absolute reversal of, as we are from that other more melting opposite which we are forbidden to name). For, like you, we know from the crater what is forbidden us—in the way that all beings perhaps know the forces that have produced their particular shape.