Green Planets (45 page)

Zooytes that had spent a billion years confined to the depths had suddenly been able to survive (and reproduce, and mutate) closer to the surface than ever before, and when they'd stumbled on a mutation that let them thrive in the presence of oxygen, they'd finally been in a position to make use of it. The ecopoiesis might have driven other native organisms into extinction, but the invasion from Earth had enabled this ancient benthic species to mount a long overdue invasion of its own. Unwittingly or not, the Angels had set in motion the sequence of events that had released it from the ocean to colonize the planet.
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Covenant's human modifications lead to a parallel set of planetary changes put into effect by the benthic microbes. Martin doesn't push the potential implications of this further, until he attends a conference and notices one of the paper titles: “Carla Reggia: ‘Euphoric Effects of
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Excretions.'” All at once, it hits him: this microbe could be responsible for religious feeling: “
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, Carla explained, excreted among its waste products an amine that was able to bind to receptors in our Angel-crafted brains. Since it had been shown by other workers (no one recognized me; no one gave me so much as a glance) that
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hadn't existed at the time of the ecopoiesis, this interaction was almost certainly undesigned, and unanticipated.”
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In this passage, Martin suggests that the religious experience of drowning has a material basis in waste products of the microbes. To put it crudely, Martin wasn't simply drowning in the holy love of Beatrice, he was drowning in the potent drug of
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excrement. Religious feeling moves from the sacred to the profane, a matter of absorbing abject products from ocean microbes.

This disturbing conclusion shakes Martin's faith in the reality of Beatrice, and in order to see if
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really does produce a sense of religious love, he travels to a holy bay of water known to have particularly high concentrations of the microbes. He pushes past local stewards guarding the sacred waters and lays down flat in the water, covering his face: “The love of Beatrice flooded into me, and nothing had changed: Her presence was as palpable as ever, as undeniable as ever. I
knew
that I was loved, accepted, forgiven.” Yet as he confirms the material cause of this feeling of love, he comes to the conclusion that “it said no more about my place in the world than the warmth of sunlight on skin. I'd never mistake that touch for a real hand again.”
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Beatrice, now a physical phenomenon like the warmth of sunlight on skin, is nothing mystical but the name given to an explainable, physical quality of Covenant's microbes. The
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microbes, understood as a source of “oceanic feeling” and spirituality, have in fact been at the surface—literal and figurative—all along. The potential readings have inverted: that which had been symptomatically read (religious feeling, transcendence) is now accessible for being read at the surface (level of observable scientific phenomena). That which was read as surface (the physical traits of microbes) can now be experienced as depth (feeling of religious love).

It would be easy to view this story as a straightforward narrative about science explaining away religious feeling. However, an important detail about sexuality, easy to forget after the revelation of the microbes, is key to understanding the changing conception of depth. Early on, Egan drops hints that sexual intercourse means not simply inserting but
exchanging
the phallus, which the people of Covenant call a “bridge.” When the Angels incarnated into new bodies, they designed the bodies with a bridge that could be passed between people. When a man had sex with a woman, she would take the bridge and he would grow a new vagina. Our first introduction to this is just prior to Daniel's wedding, when Martin meets another teenager named Lena. She proposes sexual intercourse and coaches him through it, clearly the more experienced partner. During the experience, Martin reflects: “It wasn't any better than my Drowning, but it was so much like it that it had to be blessed by Beatrice.”
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Martin's observation draws a clear parallel between sexual union, oceanic immersion, and spiritual connection with Beatrice. It also relates vaginal depth and oceanic depth, which immerses Martin as a male subject. Reading sexuality in “Oceanic” alongside its religious, scientific, and aquatic dimensions suggests a conception of “depth” as female, as capable of receiving a bridge.

While the characterization of water as a feminine element has ancient roots,
what is new is Martin's postcoital anxiety that ties together feminine depth, chemical penetration by microbes, and loss of his original phallus.
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After Martin and Lena both reach orgasm, Egan graphically describes the withdrawal where Martin's bridge breaks off and passes to Lena. Martin proposes marriage, but Lena declines and tries to assuage his feelings:

 

 

Lena's comment suggests that the people of Covenant are—sexually—similar to microbes: just as microbes laterally transfer genes,
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the people of Covenant pass the “bridge” from person to person, in what we might read as a queer act no matter which sexes it involves. In fact the whole concept of stable sexes falls apart at the notion of passing bridges and the widespread practice of male pregnancy. Marriage, then, becomes a way of tethering and securing a single “bridge” between two people, preventing it from wandering within larger networks. While it would be fair to question whether or not Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis—theorized on the relations of distinctly male and female bodies—would or should apply to the people of Covenant and their phallus-exchanging bodies, Martin's resolve to get back his original bridge is clearly a response to castration, the literal as well as symbolic loss of the phallus.

Much more could be said about sexuality and Egan's
novum
of a phallus-exchanging society in which men and women can equally bear children, but one conclusion we may draw involves the relation of depth to loss of the phallus, where feminine depth implies masculine vulnerability, castration, and existential crisis. We see this in a very physical way when Martin regains his bridge from Lena through intercourse, where she takes on the male role. The ocean microbes, symbolically allied with the feminine, also parallel Lena's role: they too penetrate through Martin's skin chemically and spiritually through their excretions. Thus, the ocean depths are not only a place where one penetrates, but a place where one is subject to chemical penetration by the drug-like excretions
of microbes. Martin's discovery of the effects of
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microbes fractures not only his relation to Beatrice and the Deep Church, but to the feminine that Beatrice, now aligned with microbes, symbolizes. Whereas Martin's initial sense of depth (joining the “Deep Church”) implied unity with Beatrice and the deepening of sacred knowledge, by the end of the story, the sacred “depths” have been rendered “surface” (the known, accessible, literal, secular), as Martin realizes there is nothing spiritual or transcendental beyond the physical ocean, only microbes producing their all-too-material excretions. To quote playwright Bertolt Brecht out of context, the ocean turns out to be “just depth” after all, the wellspring not of a mystical religious feeling, but only of microbes.
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For Martin, depth as “just depth” forestalls curiosity about any spiritual beyond. The ocean, no longer the sacred place of transcendence, becomes mundane, explainable.

Despite these revisions of depth as a place and a concept, I want to end on a final scene from “Oceanic” that recuperates the “oceanic feeling” as sense of unity and connection. “Oceanic” challenges us further to consider concepts of surface and depth not as anthropocentric, but as trans-species in origin. After the incident at the bay of concentrated microbes, Martin wanders over to the steps of a church to sit down in despair. A church member calls out to him and asks, “Do you need a room? I can let you into the Church if you want.” Martin declines, but as the man walks away, Martin asks him, “Do you believe in God?” The man hesitates before replying,

 

 

The man's offer of shelter is key. Because “Oceanic” ends on this extension of hospitality, we could say it offers an alternative possibility that an oceanic feeling doesn't have to be guaranteed by a divine being such as Beatrice. Instead, the oceanic feeling might be generated by human relations, a sense of home, of being together, anchored by human community, a situation where life isn't unbearable all the time. Although the source may change, the feeling might remain. However, since Martin declines the church member's invitation and extension of hospitality, it seems that the secular oceanic feeling is not a precondition of existence, but a conscious choice to develop community.

Another reading would be more radically ecological: the discovery that religious
faith is the product of microbial excretions chemically affecting humans suggests that spiritual depth depends on microbes; it is a relational, trans-species phenomenon that literally
does
connect Martin with his home planet in a physical and intimate way through a chemical that he takes out of the environment into his body. What oceanic feeling indicates then is not the holy presence of Beatrice, but the sublime presence of microbes as they affect human beings. Furthermore, the new ecological basis for oceanic feeling is fundamentally
unnatural
, since Covenant's
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bloom only happened as a response to human terraforming of the planet. In this way, “Oceanic” dramatizes a shift from an anthropogenic view of embodied metaphor to a more expansive sense of how nonhuman others might influence the way that human subjects experience embodiment and depth.
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Going beyond Lakoff and Johnson's thesis that human embodiment informs the metaphors we use to cognize our world, Egan's fiction opens the door to thinking about ways that nonhumans (microbes) might influence—or might already be influencing—human figurations and metaphors of depth. In this way, both science fiction and metaphor theory relate to the provocations of S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich's article “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography,” which calls on anthropologists and other humanists alike to consider how the lives and deaths of nonhuman organisms affect human social worlds. I read
Solaris
and “Oceanic” as narratives that suggest a practice of literary criticism that opens to multispecies relations, particularly sensitive to the ways that the metaphors we use depend on particular framings of ecological interconnection. If we take Egan's microbes seriously as coproducers of the depth, then we need to think about the trans-species creation of metaphorical meaning. This perspective suggests that the nonhuman already inheres in the human, where metaphor is not only informed by vertebrate embodiment but also by a multitude of other beings that live, die, and become with us in the world.

DEPTH AND ECOLOGIES OF METAPHOR

In this chapter, we looked at how
Solaris
moved away from a hermeneutics of suspicion (as practiced on Rheya), a model of reading that probes for the hidden or masked meanings of a text, and instead explored the possibility of “depth reading” as the co-creation of meaning practiced by two aware participants in a moment of mutual curiosity. This repositioned Kris Kelvin from being a distant observer on the surface looking down to being an immersed participant
in the process of deepening a relational knowledge between himself and the curious ocean wave he interacted with. “Oceanic” also built on this relational sense of meaning, continuing to move us away from a sense of the depths as a site of transcendent knowledge. Once Martin discovered the
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microbes and linked their pharmacological effects with the deep-water baptism he experienced as an adolescent, he lost faith in holy Beatrice. That which was deep (oceanic / religious feeling / sexual awakening) was exposed as surface (knowable, not transcendent, secular). Yet the ending of the story suggests that despite being knowable scientifically, Covenant's microbes still play a role as coproducers of “oceanic feeling”—the immanent ecological relation of members of a community.

Solaris
and “Oceanic” share a similar methodology: through the medium of science fiction, they denaturalize the relationship between literal and figurative depths. By experiencing relationships to the ocean depths other than that presumed by the “depth reading” metaphor (with the interpreter on top, and meaning hidden below), these texts offer alternative spatialities of interpretation by putting fictive protagonists and the reader in a different relationship with water. Note that both narratives end in the liminal space of the coastline, between solid ground and ocean:
Solaris
next to ocean waves, “Oceanic” at the site of a sacred bay. Ending in such a space of dynamic change and negotiation, these new relationships with water move us away from a hermeneutic practice that brackets out the observer and instead toward considering the relationality of knowledge production. A model of interpretation based on the terrestrial observer above is not inevitable just because it is in our way of speaking; these science fiction stories ask us to rethink the way that we position ourselves in relation to the waters, to others, and how the dynamic tidal space of contact might offer an alternate and more mutualistic space for interpretive practice and sensing ecologies of metaphor.
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