Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (34 page)

The letter read as follows:

Chére
Janice
:

I have the honor to inform you,
ma luronne
, that we advance in the adventure. A One of us has already done the trick. I myself expect this to be the last letter I can personally write you. But for you too we have plans. An individual will shortly arrive as promise, to be your guest until One day. Your house is so conveniently near the plant! Guard yourself meanwhile; your turn will come. I yearn that we shall soon meet. We shall!

Ábientot!

Yours, in Ours—
et vogue la galére!

and then the bold, black signature

(E=MC
²
)

And then a postscript:
What he would say to this
, notre
Jamie!

“What is—a Jamie?” I asked.

“Someone—we both knew.”

“And a Harry?”

She hesitated. “Someone—
she
knew.”

“And a Jack?”

She gave me a sort of look. “You shouldn’t say
what,
” she observed. “You should say
who.
”

So quickly were we teacher and pupil.

“Not
who.
” I retreated a little. “I don’t yet fancy that word.”

She came up close to me then. Ah, pity! Almost I was tempted to have her call me it again—“poor.” I was no longer a constant, then; I too could differ. From myself! How narrow, how wide are these stages of being.

“Now,” she said, “don’t worry. Did I scare you? For a minute I did think, but only because of the letter, all I knew was a One was coming. But how could I possibly—you’re nothing like her, surely.”

“Don’t be too sure,” I said. “Likeness, with us, is
the
thing. Anyway,” I said with a flourish, “I’m leaving it. All that.” I gave a little spin, rather like hers. “
I
never really assumed—not for one minute. One mustn’t, you know. Thought can—” I broke off, throwing out a little mysterium of my own. “But for a minute I did think I might be haunted, you know. Possessed. I
have
had a little ragged breathing.”

“You mean, like a—like a succubus.”

“Well, yes rather.” Or like a comput-put.

“How very medieval of you.” And then all at once she burst out laughing, threw up her hands, clapped them to her head, looked wildly about her, fell flat on the floor, howling, and ended up sitting there, her knees clutched in a sort of arm-wreath, her face tilted toward me, while water in a liquid state, the daintiest of pearls of it, ran down of it. “Medieval. Of
you.
You being
who
you are, excuse the word. You being you, and in my own sitting room, on this positively excruciating day. I’m becoming juvenile. But what else is there to be. How should I greet you. If you were a Sunda Islander, I should know how. Or in Molucca, or Celebes. Or even the Kalahari, though that wasn’t our field. Or even if you were a Kwakiutl. I know twenty rituals, extinct and not, that might be more suitable. And I say to you, ‘How very medieval’!” And she was off again.

“I know very little history, of course,” I said—boasting.

“Nor I,” she said. “At least—of civilized peoples.”

She leaned back, arms still clasped round her knees, but her feet off the floor—and spun that way. I had never … their postures were—I was lost in admiration.

“From what I have heard,” she said, “yours must be very ancient indeed.”

How was I to tell her that even to mention that We had an historical age—that she had just committed a radical offense? What a bore it would be in any case, to spend valuable mutation time talking of our two societies as they once had been, or momentarily were. History has nearly ruined their mind—or sociology. “No,” I said wearily, “we are
constant.
” I hastily amended this. “Oh, do ask anything you like, of course. Any information you—it’s the least I can do. But these cross-cosmos assumptions have a way of—”

How was I to tell her that generalizations to the scale of Ours could not possibly fit in this sitting room, possibly not even on this star? Moreover, I myself, evermore charged or clogged with its atmosphere, was beginning even to feel an ennui for the interstellar aspects of our adventure, and a great favoritism toward focusing on my own. I spoke it aloud. “Let’s—talk about
us.
” I inched forward, an achievement in itself.

Her eyes certainly changed. Any passing waterfowl, deciding to descend, would have struck ice, on either side. Yet I had a secret feeling (a secret, and a feeling—Me!) that they were about to do what they had done before. Cry.

“Oh, I’m sure.” But now her voice didn’t match the eyes. Strange. “I’m sure we’ll just be two little innocents talking. While we wait.”

“Wait,” I repeated, indeed as mechanically as I could. In fact my voice, ambiguous too, made it seem an interrogation, when actually, having until now been able to talk in the purest of speech, I felt myself seized by that distressful ambivalvulence which always preceded a bad attack of my usual speech trouble.

“For One day,” she said.

I took refuge in formality, one of our set speeches. “One like you doesn’t have to wait. You’re One of the arrived.” It is merely a cordiality, not unlike those exchanged by old-fashioned Chinese.

At this she got up in one cavalier sweep, leaving the floor to warm itself as it could, and stood next at the window, looking bravely out. How they move here, in great draperies of what must be invisible emotion. It had never struck me before, but of course, here you were cousin to us also. You had your invisibilities, too.

But I saw it—and that she was suffering from some affront. For she had taken all of her with her, leaving me to contemplate only the behind. Certainly whatever scene was framed in the wondow, I mean window, didn’t frighten her but rather steadied her; perhaps this was why they kept a little distance always at hand. She spoke without turning. “I have to ask you a question, a rather rude one. Perhaps an impossible one, which is what I hope, and what I was led to believe. You look just like what I was led to believe, by the way. But …” And here she turned, her arms flung back like wings against the floss-white of the windows. “… what are you like …
inside?
”

Think back, all of you, to the moment when you first discovered that your own most private inmost parts, or your own perverse dreams thereof, or even the short words these dreams always go for—were
shared.

Who …
answers?

“Oh, I am sorry.” When I still made no reply, she even came forward. “Perhaps … it’s never even occurred to you.”

And
she
thought
me
innocent.

“Has it?” She came nearer.

I prayed for mutation to come to my aid, as it had sometimes done before. But the best it could do for me was nothing new. I did turn bright red. The room was quite fulled with it.

“Well, well,” she said. “And what does this mean … cross-cosmosly.”

Nearer, nearer she came, until in some tremor I remembered the compound word I had coined for them, for the she’s. “Oh, I do
hope,
” she said. “And I was led to believe—” When they hope, they are indeed beautiful.

She touched me again, again with a finger once more quickly withdrawn, and again she said the same. “How beautiful you are.”

We too. When we—hope.

Then she said, head now averted, and in the crisp voice I came to know as her anthropological one, the accent on these occasions rather donnish and Anglophile, “But we might as well get it straight at once, don’t you think. After all, you’re to live here. Do you
have
sex? I mean of course, are you a particular one?”

“Six,” I said, mechanically as before. It wasn’t merely that I never happened to have heard the word before, either as used to distinguish between organic beings—for which we say “gender”—or in its more colloquial usage, since we are never—colloquial. It was also that I could sense the onset of my attack.

“I beg pardon!” she said. “Did you say,
six?
”

“Om having—” I said. At times like this I am like a singer who hears perfectly well that he is singing flat. “I’m hovving a little—” I began again. “I’m hewing a lottle trouble—” And again. “Um having a little tribble with my—” I gave up, and shouted it. “Wuth me
vowels.
”

Her eyes went back to normal; that is—in that exquisitely
gemütlich, simpatico,
silly-unsafe way of theirs, they no longer matched. And again, they almost brimmed over. “Coo, Oy soy,” she said. Then she turned somewhat red, herself. “I mean, I say—I’m rather good at accents.” She grinned. “It’s me only clime to fime. I’ve done some recordings.
Counting to Ten in Twenty-five Amerindian Dialects
is one. Can you count?”

“If
curse
I can,” I said. “Win, toe, thray, fair, fauve—ohh damn. I mean—dumb. And also—dim.” My trouble was, I had more languages than would ever appear in her variorum, and all translatable into each other at once. To select a word was like trying to separate from a downpour one silver drop. But to burst of such things was against my nurture.

“It comes of being so oblong,” I said. “An isthmatic affluc-tion. And of not having the proper organs. At least, not yet.”

“Why, we could work on it,” she said. “I used to be rather good at remedial. In fact, it was my first job.”

I didn’t know what a job was, but no doubt it would come out later in the usual way of this world, the most eerie secrets here being hoarded for the very fun of unprising them.

“Oh, lively,” I said. “Perhips we could make a recording together.” I inched forward again, finding it so remarkable that I could, and I had never felt so colloquial before.
“Let’s!”

She half-inched backward, perhaps to show me that they moved to minute tolerances I never could achieve. But she was puzzled, clearly. “Just what did you mean by that,” she said slowly. “By—
not yet?”

I was astounded, disappointed, and probably a number of other things I failed to notice, though good God knows I was trying to fulfill my mission here and notice everything at once. By a little enamel clock on a bookshelf, I now estimated that my confession of a few minutes ago had taken at least fourteen of these, during which I had poured forth not only all the mystic legend of our gender, but also, though perhaps on the tremolo, my more practical hopes. She wasn’t deaf. She had indeed listened—to perfection. But she hadn’t heard.

The big things come so quietly here, at least to me. Nothing of what I felt as yet showed, or until I got a physiognomy of some sort, ever would. I had assumed that in a world where everybody knew about everybody else’s insides already, surely this would make for an extraordinary harmony in the personal presence of each of you. Not—(Come quietly, revelation.) Not that you were as badly off as I was—no, worse. For, candid and open as I was in heritage otherwise, it was only reasonable to suppose that when I came to full bloom as a person here, I would be
all
harmony. But you—(Ve-ery quietly, now.) How was I ever going to make my way here, under this situation! What price now, all the evidence I had amassed of you—why it was probable that you had no more real history or social science data than we did, once it got past either side of your epidermis. (Quietly.) From your out-sides, one simply hadn’t a clue of your ins.

It came to me that if I were going to get what I wanted, it would be only by the exercise, the secret exercise of my own supraterrestrial intelligence. The meaning of this now struck me full on. I’d bargained for a world with a different schema of living from ours, but had still taken for granted that it was a united one, somehow. But you must differ here even over the assumptions you took for granted—and if I had learned anything about you it was that you would do so in the weirdest parabolas, one from the other, others from others, others from one. And all this going on below the cuticle, which if it had a thousand hues couldn’t hope to reflect what went on below. But I could still count my blessings. By a parabola of intelligence impossible to you, I could imagine a place which would have all the assumptions, schemata and so forth, that you did—but
didn’t live by a one of them.
I was lucky I hadn’t hit there.

My interlocutor was watching me, almost subserviently now. How like lightning my mind moved in her presence! Even when she was silent, I was kept a-caper—and we had scarcely begun our dialogue. Her head rested now on her hand, against a pillow of bright curd-yellow, but the hair itself of a color I hadn’t been taught and should certainly enjoy asking the name of. Then there was the jointure of her sitting—a pleasure to study that also. So complicated it must be, to sit so, and so easy it looked when she did it, knee upon knee. Garments hinted a solution of how it was done, but kept one from seeing absolutely. But nevertheless, this sort of teaching had it all over the intercom. Mentor had done her best, but this person—

I stared at her. Was she a person? Or merely a super-intercom-with-images, an automaton placed here for my education—and probably a number of -ations I hadn’t yet heard of—as my guide to the full temporality and materialism of your world.

It was the first time I thought of her that conventionally. Though not the last.