Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (25 page)

“Fur pins!” it snorted. “For pinning up fur.”

Then, except for another quote, again from Milton: John: “—with pins of adamant, and chains they made all fast—” it lapsed again, leaving me to wonder whether it suffered from too few diodes in its literary coverage or merely strove to serve my special tastes. Well, in any case, if I had to say one thing and one alone to describe the world of the qualitative it was that it lived by promises. Your world seemed to me most and above all a positive chain of them, and still does—could I, can I live that way, from link to link? Could I, can I—accept this universe? For I was by now already so qualitative that it scared me. In fact, at my present rate of becoming, it seemed to me that I was probably the most promising thing that had been around Here for a long time. Yet I didn’t in the least know just what it was I had in me. Not unlike—O intelligence, keep this from me! Oh why must One be so perceptive! Or was all the you-ness in the room pushing me to see it? Not unlike—a you.

But such is the nature of the brinks here, that it wasn’t until I edged toward the last item in the collection: item: one blue letter, not merely instructive but necessary—that I really saw the true nature of an abyss. You understand, of course, that owing to my former lack of weight and rate of speed on There, my experiences of abysses outside myself was nil. I had none of your talent for falling into them. Rather loftily, I had viewed my adventure here as a matter of adjusting myself to your calisthenic, plus learning to think in gender—all this to lead, as in the evolutional history of any species, to equipment I’d get by
wanting
it. What was evolution but getting what one asked for, provided one was willing to work for it? And according to your own information, cheerfully supplied to us, those conditions here which are commonly called “human” are indeed extremely stable—i.e. unlikely to produce for eons yet anything very different from what you are.

But why hadn’t you warned us that your what-you-are was so slinky and mercurial that all its lexicographers could go on for ages—and still didn’t know? Why hadn’t you informed us that two-ness of gender, for all it might be a first cause of conditions here, was only the beginning? That there were other dualities here—and worse—through which one must slide-glide, snap-crash, one’s outline meanwhile being plucked like elastic, as if one were swimming through hoops themselves interlocked and in turn lined with hooks which were hung with—hoops! That … hoops. Or didn’t you know—that you didn’t know? Dear
twos—
why had you not made it plainer to us that you were not our
exact
opposites!

To be fair, I suppose a genus can never be trusted in its view of its own genius. That is what other planets are for. Especially it can’t when it speaks of itself humbly. Arrogance can be weighed, even by the weightless, and we had, but what is one to do with humility except believe it, particularly when it coincides with one’s view of oneself? For we had heard You-yourselves, you see, soft-soft above the intercom not of course one of the little jobs here, but the inter-intercom-com—there being perhaps a few little abilities of ours we hadn’t told you about either. Decoding of interplanetary radio noise is perhaps not quite so difficult as you imagine; in fact, we could at times audit your private conversations at, in fact, all times. In fact, we had you bugged. And what else was one to think when one heard You mutter faithfully to yourselves over and over: “We have been excelled.” I suppose one shouldn’t believe all the interplanetary gossip one hears, either.

And now—back to me where I stand, an interplanetary runt, not formidable but still hopeful, though I am in the posture of perhaps all beings who think they know where they are going. I am gazing down.

Do all here know the abyss of a blue letter? I suppose so. So far, I knew only what I could read without bending—
par avion, aerogramme.
I didn’t even know that the blue makes it go faster. But, I saw the abyss, which on Hereto be as simple as I can—tends to be whatever-comes-next. (We have “nexts” of course, but since these are so much the same, the space between is negligible.) Yours, however—I not only saw the abyss; I saw what was waiting inside it. And all this before I had read what was inside the letter. For, you may recall that in my first virginal days here, fresh from One, I could only read
instantly,
the whole book being available to me at once. Even then, merely seeing
through
a book was slower than I could manage, my tendency being to arrive at the back cover before I had left the front one and of course not stop anywhere. Later on, I had slowed admirably, able to smear along almost as snail-like as any of your best readers. But naturally, to do this, in accordance with your usual compensations here, I had had to give up
seeing-through.

But now. Oh, I tried bending, and succeeded, in the process suspecting that trying to see through solids—to say nothing of tepids, gravids, liquids and perhaps even empties—was the way you yourselves learned to bend. After some moments of this exercise, I found myself supple enough now for any of your postures yet seen, and some I was on the brink of imagining. But my
seeing-through
days were apparently over. And meanwhile, you will have guessed the number two hook of my dilemma.

Oh, I had wanted to be a conscious mutant, had I! It seemed to me now that there must never have been a one of them here, no Paramecium on the bulge with his first nucleole, no amoeba skipping up the ladder of binary fission … none of them—from platypus to primate, none of them ever in such a pickle as I. There was the letter, still folded, still opaque and still unread—which was to tell me not only how I was to go, but to
whom.
It could be slit or steamed, smoothed and read in a trice by any a one of you. Ah, you versatiles. And here was I. As any a one of you might say in the airiest fooling (as so often you were to be heard saying it, careless of what poor envious runt of an intermediary-on-his-way-to-become-voluptuary might be listening from within library carrel or window)—how painfully often I was to have to hear you say it: Look—no hands.

It was possible, of course, that even the earliest cell creatures knew where they were going—subcutaneously aware even before acquiring a cuticle, as seemed to be the way here—after all, where does consciousness begin? I doubted, though, whether many of them had had my extra burden. I not only knew where I was going; I knew where I was. Had there ever been such a creature here before, one who—give or take a mile or two in the quibbling style you have here, by and large, inch for inch, back and forth and more or less—knew itself to be exactly:
half way?

The midpoint of a journey is exactly that one where one dreams of going back, jolly inconvenient though that may be—or perhaps because. Up to now, the hero I was to be had loomed ahead of me, the gathering sludge of my I-ness merely traveling alongside like dust motes round a cart. Now I saw, with the double vision which is endemic here, that the dazzling, unparalleled journey which still in conception soared ahead of me in the heavens, was also this bumps-a-daisy one I was actually already on, and that the Thing ahead, though still bloated in its great aura, was also me on my way.

Was it the dilemma of the blue letter alone that had stopped me? I gazed down at what I had acquired here, down into those semi-opaline depths of I-ness I was still empowered to half see through, quite as well aware as any of you that my very I-ness itself was what was giving me the power to despise or reject it. Did I want to go back home? Could I? Or, if I stayed, went on …

You must know that we do not come uninformed of the separate hazards here, it being only the combinations that were unimaginable—though, under the universal lockstep, even this didn’t mean we didn’t know they were there. Among the repugnancies long since listed by us was clothing. And already, such a host of minutiae were embroidering themselves starchily right
on
me, so covering over the truer-bluer qualities I thought I had come for, that I was chafing mightily—even before I had a stitch of outer clothing on. Come now; did I hate myself-to-be? Did I already despise the personality you and all that good-goddedness were intent upon? Could I bear to be I?

I stared down, very far down to qualitatives thus far acquired which I had expected to accept, if not wholehoggedly approve. To enumerate: I had some weightfulness and visibility, both rather precociously acquired. I had areas of vision, these not yet prominent, but I no longer wore it overall—and I had dropped my field. I had tasted gall, if only a tang of it. Not ten minutes after I had begun to feel arsy-versy—I had a behind. I could soften, melting to maybes and much more. I could walk around doors instead of into-through them, and by exercise had parlayed a mere bending-to-consider posture into a real sit-on-a-crack. And attached to all and every one of these were those little growthings of pain, streamers of joyness which, if left to populate with one another should develop in me an I which any a One would care to cultivate.

Against all this, such a terrible silliness, effectation and coyness—bumps-a-daisy!—where had I ever found such a word! There were two-nesses here that made all two-nesses seem trivial. I had already suffered such a rash of them as I could scarcely—

As I
could scarcely bear.
Thus, and as always with a double stroke, both your graces and my own dazzlingly near near-humanity were brought home to me. I had remembered much but this quality of yours I had forgotten. And if I could not bear, wouldn’t it be that I would have company in it? Perhaps, in a way strange to me but particular to yourselves, you too were a quadrille.

I was a pilgrim to all parts of you; that I now understood. Just as you couldn’t throw anything away here, I couldn’t pick and choose what I would have of you. Or, not right away. Meanwhile, the air around me seemed fairly dimpling with rationalities designed to keep me here. Maybe the mixture went so far here as even to cause straights and curves both to be present in the same person. Maybe even your straight individuals were partially curved—though not much, of course … and your curved ones, partly … though in even scantier proportion.

And maybe,
maybe.
Best of words, it was thou gavest me the guts to look down again at that letter! I gave the whole collection the old once-more. For whom was I grieving? For her sake of course, but with me a close second. We were such a company of two as did not go a-keeping every day in the week. Maybe one couldn’t go back even if one wanted to—even suppose Hubble’s Law to be correct, then the universe could be imagined to run backward, but who ever heard of it happening to anything so complicated as a person? Why, I wasn’t even sure that under such ticklish chances I even want—

—ed to.

I.

I had been an I for some days now, and had thought myself used to it. But to date, I had never before said that I was—I had never quite felt it. That I was a person.

I was a person. I was a person. I was a person.

Somewhere I knelt then, though I had no knees to do it with—what is a person, but that? I had no appendages but even if I was never to get them except inwardly I could learn them; once a One is a person, it cannot be taken away. I felt such a sense in me of my possibilities as is said to come back to you with coffee in the morning. With us, the cosmic emotion—that constant awe-awe—is like a great corm from whose oval our hands, if we had them, would slip eternally away. But with you, the little hangs onto the big, so that when the cosmic becomes a bore here, as it sometimes must, all sorts of rubs and scrapes, kisses and ridicules are here to hold it down for you, until your hands may once again clutch. Couldn’t it be the same for my personality, though I didn’t mean to equate it with the cosmos—or did I? (This is what comes of kneeling.)

The letter still stared at me with sweet complicity, as if it would shortly open for me if I stared long enough, though we both knew this to be unlikely. Objects are always being forced here to act symbolically; I hoped it would not be the same here for persons. On Ours and by the steadiest evaporation, we had become our own symbols, and needed none extra. But you were such a touching race, such a touch and go people.
Death is.

I thought of Her up there somewhere, my companion in uniquity, both of us in a way privileged witnesses to our own birth. The sunset had gone from the window, and for all its blood-and-ketchup—I know my reds rather well—I had begun to see its uses. Dark, dark was the world here, a winter garden. But I was the flower in the ground.

My first poem as a person, and I had no time to admire it. For I thought of her, up there in the far vault of the heavens, pegging away at her lessons, unaware of all she was not getting into. Nevermore to be opposite anything—and in a nevermore of which there was so much that no One had any greed for more of it. Unaware, still unaware; for despite all she knew of us, we are in the end as unimaginable as you. And up there, while she picked at her destiny, she would be thinking of all that was in store for me—and of me down here, picking at mine.

And hard upon this, I felt within me such a
breathing.
We have our diaphanous intake-outgo of atmospheres harmoniously rare, but this coarse ratchet which bent me near to splitting, which choked me near to gagging, or at least all the images of, as if I myself were the crater—good God, was I giving birth to myself, and prematurely? By the utmost strain of otherworldliness, I was able to exert every pore to breathe out again, without damage. I saw the letter respond with a sigh—and a slight crumple. It even half turned over. So finally, I understood what was wanted of me, and when the next fierce intake came, I hoarded it. I let it build, build, build, until it nearly rent me in two—but only nearly; until I could bear it—but scarcely. One gets born here every ten minutes, apparently—whatever one is. According to my needs, further needs would be thrust upon me. What would be useful here was a lack of control. And at last, at last; I let go.

The letter sheet shot up, danced, spun, then rolled, permitting me to see that it must already have been opened from the outset, the typed message on its other side glimmering over and over. Describing a final parabola—I blame the night breeze from the window—it made one more thwarting reversal—then with a shudder, flipped over and lay flat and blue—on its back.