The Best of Science Fiction 12

from Journal from Ellipsia Hortense Calisher

On, on, on and on, on; and on, and on, on. The paradox about distance is that quite as much philosophy adheres to a short piece of it as to a long. A being capable of setting theoretical limits to its universe has already been caught in the act of extending it. The merest cherub in the streets here, provided he has a thumbnail — and he usually has ten — does this every day. He may grow up to be one of their fuzzicists, able to conceive that space is curved, but essentially — that is, elliptically — he does nothing about it. He lives on, in his rare, rectilinear world of north-south gardens, east-west religions, up-and-down monuments and explosions, plus a blindly variable sort of shifting about which he claims to have perfected through his centuries, thinks very highly of, and, is rather pretty in its way and even its name: free wall — a kind of generalised travel-bureaudom of 'across'. It follows that most of his troubles are those of a partially yet imperfectly curved being who is still trying to keep to the straight-and-narrow — and most of his fantasies also. His highest aspiration is, quite naturally, 'to get a-Round'; his newest, to get Out.

And he will too, though in his current researches he may have reached only so far as the Omega particle. In the phenomenology of all peoples, the mind slowly becomes curved.

At least that is what Ours are matriculated to, and I had seen nothing to contradict this, during my all-to-brief sojourn in Bucks. Ah, what a mentor was there, was mine, though except for one, I never saw — as she taught me to say — Her!

As I taxied once again along the upper solitudes, trying not to arrive instantaneously at destination — which is of course Our main problem here — I thought of Her with considerable leaning. Leaning is to Us what yearning is to You — but that story will emerge later. The hardest thing to learn here — and still not mastered — is how to get about pornographically.

Meanwhile — and what a concept that is to a being accustomed to Ever — like standing à point as the meteors of thought surge by! This place is simply teeming with time. Excuse me. It is scarcely my fault if everything you do here is so attractive. Meanwhile, I was having my own practical problems, as I elided in and out, intent on not overshooting the mountains of the Ramapo. Omega particles indeed, to say nothing of such heavinesses as the baryons, neutrons and protons into which they here have finally divided that grossity of theirs, the atom. Let them try iris-ing in, as I had done the first trip, from slightly more than thirteen billion light-years away, while receding therefore at more than the speed of light and hence invisible, on radiotelephone sources purporting to emanate from a nubbin of matter still acting flatly against its own spherical. On the darker side of which, for this my second trip, moonwise at their eleven o'clock (what a statement!), amid a smear of foothills, these directional signals would just probably be sending again, if She was able to arrange it, from apparatus just like that in Bucks — in an environ likewise named monosyllabically. (They yearn for our Oneness constantly. They are indeed a touching people.) Hobbs.

At the point where I re-entered their ionosphere, the dear curves of Our being — which they term 'body', and I must not forget to call 'my' — nearly reversed themselves, but thanks to the extreme elasticity of our mental curvature, these held. Shortly after, I entered that condition, common enough among us, which however sounds so regrettably silly in their language — and is indeed almost impossible to gauge in one where the amount of things so consistently takes precedence over their unanimity. There's no help for it. I became more Here than There. From then on it was easier; they tell me that things done for the second time here usually are. A 'second time' is one facet of their concept of two-ness that I had no trouble with, a kindly sign that the curves of our not quite cognate worlds do somewhere intersect. As I crossed, the far, reddish spectrum of Out There faded, gradually receded, whelmed by the increasing blue ozone of Right Here. From twenty thousand up, the daily height of their own traffic, once again their planet looked as extraordinary as any planet of the universe must look to the resident of another, up that close. Yes, I had done this before, experiencing no difficulty with their numerical progressions, and almost none with their time-sequences. It is only the two-ness of people that still gives me unutterable pause. In Bucks, I was told that monotheists here suffer almost the same tension over the many-goddedness which with us is so restful, all Our people being One.

I was told this by Marie, the mentor I found the less interesting, certainly not dear. Under less compelling circumstances, I should almost have dis-esteemed her, which with us is almost the end of negative emotion, opposite to the 'leaning' which is all but forbidden, and at about the same distance from the norm, which is 'to alike'. But here, it was their very difference — that word, that word — which excited me: two of them, two She's, and already so unalike. And as I was soon to know, this was nothing to another difference still to come. Which difference, they assure me, is to blame for all the others. Be that as it may, as I came in closer, almost to cloud, sure enough, I smelled it for the second time. Miles out to star, you can smell it, the sharp tang of the variability here.

I hope I am allotting the sense data correctly, that is, each to its proper organ. One of the purposes of the preliminary teaching session at Bucks was to instruct me in the art of doing this. To visit here, to sight-see as it were, would be impossible under any continuous fusion of the senses such as we have; luckily we do have, unified but not inextricably, all your five. Sight and hearing are with us of an acuity and extension which to you would be! — and smell also. How indicate this, the way we function, to the uncurved! Suffice to say that, by means of an unbroken concatenation, we hear space, see time, and smell thought, the whole process being a warning one, directed not outward toward enjoyment, but inward against change — any tendency toward this being immediately corrected centre-wards. As for the sense of taste, due to the nature of our sustenance (do I not do your technical language rather well?) this is necessarily de-emphasised.

But as we airfeed, which is as close as I can. get to what we do do, we are often suffused with a generalised but delicate carbonation. There remains — the sense of touch.

And here, since both Ours and the beings here are creatures of flesh, not only of the same plasms but almost of the same cellular structure, the natures of both do, in one respect, very affectingly resemble one another. Our flesh, within its integument, is said to be of the tenuosity of veils, capable of supporting the insupportable; an ichor — to your pork. But let there be humility on both sides. Because of Our lack of protuberance without, and Our imponderability within — in fact because of that very serenity of curve which suits us to distances of a continuum which to your asymmetry would not be habitable — we are under repulsion to surround Ourselves, each of Us, at least for domestic purposes, with an electrical field which bars us from any intimacy with objects, and — in theory — between Ourselves. Whereas you, by reason of the extraordinary conglomeration of extruded shapes, organs, compounds and ligatures, and above all weights common to every one of you — are deliriously bashable! According to my mentor, by almost anything or anyone, anywhere.

And is it not then remarkable, that under such separate states of affairs, across all the galaxies of consciousness, You and We should both suffer from an almost identical ... spiritual shame? In the final sense, then, do we not beautifully, elliptically — touch?

Which is what so excited both me and my dear mentor, and from the moment of my arrival in Bucks was the constant roundelay of all our conversation, this, because of the still fragile state of my sensibility, conducted entirely by intercom. (Until that fairly frightening adieu.) "Whereas — " said She, in the language agreed upon for Monday, Tuesday and Friday. Wednesdays and Saturdays she taught me to converse in her native one — too volatile by far. As beings of negative gravity or mass-gravity relation, we understandably ground better in the heavier languages. Sunday, her day off, she practiced her own Elsewhere. So it was, by such routines, they taught me a number of things at once — from Days of the Week to all the primary facts of Differential Experience: National, Linguistic and Individual — just as you teach your young to colour-count-read. I was even learning to daydream qualitatively, in tints and adjectives, and even with what I fancied might be, heroines, though as yet I had never seen one. Sunday is white gloomy, rich, British, and Protestant. Sunday is Marie.

"Whereas — " said my dear mentor. Though as yet I had not seen any of them of either kind, I imagined Her. Longitudinally oval, like myself — and pinkish too. But. But with a spot of difference somewhere. Where should it be — where? This was as far as I could go. I could never decide.

"Whereas — " She said, "the Ones in Ellipsia can only lean together, in sad-sweet contemplation of their Sameness — "

Ah, their She's, what teachers they are! Tongueless as I am, I found a vibration to answer her. "Where-ere-as!"

"And we," She said. It was still strange to hear her say 'we' in the sense of a two-ness or more-than-one, in contrast to the elliptic We — our only equivalent to her 'I'. In the very first lessons, when we could communicate in little more than signals, she had told me that I would graduate into comprehension here only when I fully understood the pronouns. As, in all their magnificent hierarchy, I now do.

"And we — " I answered. "No, no," I corrected myself — at the time, I could give the responses only by rote. "One begs pardon. And You — "

It was hard. At home of course, collectively we referred to ourselves as Ours, not too far afield from the practice here. But if One of us encounters One of us, the form of mutual address remains One. There is no transmogrification into 'You-ness'. The rule to remember for Us — She commented later that the very sound of it soothed the irritations of this world — is that One and One are One ... We have Our plural, but singly we are the same. Never, never, does One and One make Two.

"Oh, la, la!" She said. "One begs pardon?" Over the intercom there came a mutter: Comme c'est chic, ça, perhaps not intended to be heard.

"We beg pardon," was my limp answer. Oh, it's all very laughable, once one has the language of any Elsewhere as completely as you will have noted yours is now mine; how I can skip flealy from uppercase to lower, in the pronoundest sense of any occasion. But memory still pains. Those first tingles of the singular!

"Come, come," said the intercom, but softly. She was ever kindly. "N'ayez peur, mon vieux ... mon fils ... ma soeur ... ?" There was even a giggle. After all, there were certain perplexities on her side — what, after all, was my gender? And I could not help her. If we in Ellipsia have gender, or once had — there is a myth to the effect that we once had, and that it still may be recovered — it lies deep to-down the inconscious. I know that there is hope — that just as the crustaceans regenerate limbs lost to the sharks of time, so we — But I could not help her then. I did not know.

"Come now."

To say what was next expected of me took more than a moment, in which the very veils of my finer flesh rent themselves ... or congealed? Then, our rote habits and disciplines being very useful here, as they knew, I was able to say it: "I."

This was the crux of it. Even now I sometimes lose the ego-ness that is needed to make that feeling — that moment when the One rouses from the everslump of curve — and stands up straight. When the One becomes: a one. Even now, I am prone to give the old, collective answer.

"I beg pardon," I said dutifully.

"Bon," She said. "So far, so good. But it would be even more perfect if you say, " 'I beg your — ' Eh?"

As I had soon learned, She is never quite satisfied — this is why they make good teachers. Though this may give them trouble when they visit us, much as they may think from here that they will want to move forevermore only in the Circles of Satisfaction. Once, when I had questioned her very seriously She had answered: No, to be fair, not to be satisfied was a characteristic of both halves of Them. Though it would not have been polite to tell her so, I was glad to have some slight fears allayed. For consider: even at home I had after all been One not content with Our circle — and if that should by any chance be an indication of gender, then — No, I did not wish it, somehow. And somehow, I did not think — No, I couldn't be. Good God — Marie had taught me that phrase. Good God — suppose I should be a Marie!

"Oh, sorry!" I said now, absently. "That's what I should have said of course. 'I beg your — ' But I'm afraid I rather lost the train of thought. Please remind I. What was I begging pardon for?"

I never knew where in that great glass house their side of the intercom was located, being more than content to keep to the room specially prepared in advance for me. This was more on my part than a natural contentedness of disposition. For, until I had undergone the full program, including — besides dispensing entirely with the electrical barrier we switched off only secretly at home — Weightfulness, Visibility, and above all how to reduce Instantaneity — it was dangerous for me not to; language was only the first stop. So I was quite reposed to be where I was, learning their seasonal changes, snow to sprout, as I could view them in the great woodpile that pressed against the glass, accustoming myself to this uneasily irregular countryside, after Our calmly monolisting Ovaloid — I had no idea how half-cognate you and we are, until I saw your Sea. But at the time, I couldn't get over now stock-still, relatively speaking, everything seemed to be here. In the one non-glass wall, there were shelves holding books of instruction in an electro-braille not unlike records we have preserved, plus some enormous blown-up photostats of the greater carnivores and herbivores, all this to serve until my inner gyrations reduced themselves to the needs of print. Now and then, animals and insects of the minor domestic sort were patrolled across the glass, in a reverse of zoo — or perhaps, in order to show me the causality here, they were let fly to dog me of themselves. For, after Two-ness, there comes the other great thing to learn about a variable world in a state of semi-decontrol — that they here cannot wholly distinguish between the tides of causality and accident. Even when dealing with objects, one has to distinguish between these two hallmarks very carefully, since matter here comes in such an onslaught of forms. So, as yet they have not learned how to so classify events here. That is why, at home, every effort is made to have Events take a circular continuity. For, neither have we.

At this moment, for instance, there was such absolute silence over the intercom that I even wondered whether, in the daily sessions where my pair of mentors, working together from the office, had me practice how to plod timespace as they do, slowly, courting every possible friction instead of avoiding it — whether, by intent or not, they hadn't drained so much instantaneity from me that they were already gone.

"Mentor." I said. I had never had this feeling before; of course, most that they have here, I have never had. Loss? A kind of fleshly desolation. "Mentor!" I said again, and then, pleading, the word that she had now and then let me use on a Saturday. "Mère!"

Silence. It hurts — the vacuum's first, puckering awareness of what it is. I began to understand more of what it would mean for a One to try to become a 'one', or even to live in that world. To grow all the feelings I would need, could I do it; could I bear it? All these to be coursing undictated, tiger after lamb, lamb after tiger, through the beautiful, flickering glades that the beings here must have inside them? — It had not yet been thrust upon me that, according to my needs, these pains would be thrust upon me. According to my needs.

Then the intercom vibrated, stuttering under the timbre of the message it carried. The walls of the room, being non-conductive glass, held me fast, bordering my instantaneity, else what a vast, electrical spreading might not have occurred? As it was, Her words went right through me.

"Chéri." She said. "Chéri."

Yes, the words went through me, and dispersed themselves. And somewhere within, a little of their irradiation clung Little by little, by such exercises, is weightfulness learned.

"Chéri, I suppose you know what you've done?"

"What?" I could not have phrased it, but I already knew. That too is a feeling!

"You've learned it. You've done it. You 'ave said it as we do, without thinking. The 'I' ... "

When a 'one' of the beings here first begins to suspect that he is acquiring a character, or as you like to say, firming one, the first thing he asks himself to do is to test it, in order to find out what it is. And in my progress toward becoming one of you, I was no exception. Since, at home, character is unmixed with gender, I was perhaps under even direr need to do so, being totally unable to distinguish between them. Perhaps both were acquired at one strike here, which would certainly be by far the most economical, I found myself dunking, then scalded myself for hanging on to an idea which was far too much like Us — such was not the style in which they would handle things in this marvellously spendrift world. They would certainly be more haphazard about something so important here. And there must be some prescribed one of their hazards which would be the proper test for what I now had.

How I was to find out by myself what this test was for a few paltry minutes perplexed me, until it occurred to me that I need only put my trust in what I now had, and perhaps it would already be influential enough to instruct me how to test it. It was time for a little self-exhortation. "I am straight — " I said to myself, "very straight." And I am strong, perhaps not very, but ... quite? I feel certain that I am about to be — whatever it is that I am about to be.

After a few round-rubbings of this, I looked down at myself and found I had indeed worked up a glow. Why, I had no idea, I thought self-admiringly, that I was so hot-threaded! I must be getting pinker-blooded all the time. And though by now somewhat winded, and though it was well past the hour for my midday inflation, without pausing to so refresh myself, I went on, conjuring my image. "I am — whatever it is that carries its own weight, stands fast, and talks short. I intend to fight for my rites, I am a being of few words. Or as soon as I get over my initiation, I intend to be. I intend to act. And there isn't a curve in my body!"

This last wasn't true, of course; indeed, quite a large part of my statement was couched in words which were unfamiliar to me, but certainly must have swum up out of my own innerstink. But, if I were ever really to get over being an ellipse — that carefulest of beings bogged in the middle-mean — this was all part of it. "This is all part of it!" I almost shouted. Yes, I almost shouted. Up to then, you must understand, I had spoken only by means of an all-over surface vibration, but now this appeared to have localised itself somewhere above my diameter, narrowing its timbre but widening its volume. That I not only had a voice, but that its first real utterance was almost a shout, was not this enormously encouraging to what I had in mind?

And just then — I fell back, exhausted. Indeed, miserable to report, I fell back so thoroughly that I found myself far beyond my former angle, far gone past even an acute case of it — in fact, I was pure horizontal.

Now, ellipses, like the horses I had seen in some of the photostats, never lie down in this position; unlike you, they are never even caught dead in it. Pride goeth, I thought, lying there. How it would have alleviated my misery to know all the positions you are really capable of — that this was all part of it too. But at the time, all I could find was a whisper in which to excuse myself to my image. "It's because I don't know my own strength as yet," I said. Don't say as yet, came the caution. I spoke up, still with a sigh. "Rather, I am simply a being who doesn't know its own strength." When there was no reply, I took that to mean that I might continue in this vein. "Probably, I am a creature of such strength that it would be dangerous for me not to know the limits of it." Silence. "Maybe I ought to test my strengthhood, not for itself, but for the sake of the weaklings I will surely encounter." Quite a pause after this one, too. So at last I dared to say it. "Try me. What is the test for what I believe to be my — " But since I wasn't really sure whether it was character or gender I was applying for, I simply shouted again, this time, "Try me. You just try!" And found myself miraculously on my feet — that is, vertical — once more.

And not only that — even braver. I went round the room, and anywhere I met myself in the glass, which was everywhere, I said to it, "Come on now, think you know the test, huh; come on now, brother!" Brother. Where does one get those ideas? But when the answer came it was right from my authority in the glass there. It was only a whisper, quietly-firmly, as such answers should come, but I heard it. "Want to step outside? I dare you. Why don't you step outside, and just see?"

And since my intended being was not one to refuse a dare, that was what I prepared to do. Greenhorn that I was, I even gathered up almost all my energy, under the impression that what had carried me afield and over the great transparencies would more than easy fade me through a wall. There was a door in the wall, a large, regally obvious one of about ten feet in height, but of course, as far as doors were concerned and staircases, too, or any of those playthings which cater to the appendages, I was an aristocrat and had never used one in my life, the same being true of my manner of dealing with obstacles, it never having occurred to me to go over or around one, instead of through. So I gathered myself for the elide, took a last look at my image — never pinker, never prouder — said jauntily, "I'll meet you outside!" touched the proper thought, and — WHAM.

How I lived to tell this tale must after all be some sort of durility test — I must have ricocheted from surface to surface, up, down and sideways, fully thirteen times, being saved only by the dimensions of the room, just big enough to permit me the barest air-interval of relief, between making connections. During which, as with your drowners here, much passed before me. I comprehended how thoroughly I had gone against everything my mentors had been at such pains to teach me — against all the friction, weightfulness and lethargy it had taken me months to acquire. Above all — and as if I had never heard of catechisms — I had totally forgotten how much more Here I now was than There. Only let me get through this, I prayed, I promised, and I'll never again forget the distance between a floor and a ceiling. And it's true. I've never had to stop to puzzle over that later; there's something to be said for the school of hard knocks. Then at last, I once again lay prone.

And so bruised was I in my humilities, that I made no effort to get up. Instead, I did what any One wounded in his veils does, I lay there dreaming, in repair ...

For what an exquisite relief it could be, this lying prone! Especially must it be regarded here, I mused, as that dear posture in which one smiles backward at the anxieties of yesterday, lulla-lulla, and can perhaps even anticipate a change of shape one might just have the luck to earn or fall into, on the morrow. Above me, on the shelves, were the picture books of all the fauna here down the geological ages, those great plates I had so pored over during my early incubation here, wondering which of those shapes would turn out to be Yours — and in time, in the foolness of time, perhaps Mine. Although at that period I had been unable to focus on the print of the descriptions, each large plate was accompanied by enough small ones to give me a fairly canny idea of each creature's habits, habitats and foods. Nothing gave any suggestion that all these magnificoes — I had after a few days persuaded myself not to regard them as terrors — did not exist simultaneously, our Now being so different from your little 'now'. My real shock at the sight of all this — all these waving waterfalls of mane, saurian extensions, anthropoid pugs, rhinoish craters and cattish patterns under which the pure oval had forever vanished — was not so much at the extremity of the exaggerations, as after a while an intense irritation, then a degrading melancholia, over the piffling scope of my own. How wee, shrunken and ignominous those defamatory little sins-against-the-curve such as I had been able to imagine. In the face of this grandeur, I was scarcely a pervert at all.

Once I had got over this, I had to buckle down to an important question: when presented a choice of all this imperial grab bag, which shape would I choose to become? Try as I did, I could raise no enthusiasm to be any of these creatures, much less that lyric rush of self-discovery which had been the lecher-hope of my small dreams. But the primer had certainly promised a change. For hours I pored over the herbivores and the carnivores, unable to decide between them, or to come to any conclusion other than that, if it were left to me, I should fancy a little fur. In the intervals, I searched in vain for pictures of that Lava-stream which must produce them, but although I kept forever coming upon mountains which almost lifted themselves from the page, and vegetation-rimmed tarns of a certain mystery, there seemed to be nothing akin to Our all-embracing system, and not much coherence that I could descry, to any. There was a day when, suddenly noticing a preponderance of eggs, I brooded over this at first wistfully, then almost angrily — they had promised more of a change than this. I had no choice really but to trust them.

So, when the dialogues started, I kept my own counsel, in time came to understand my delusion, and began to be taught my real profit. The shape I would sin under was not going to be left up to me; this they call resignation. Almost as with us, except for that subdivision which was still to be understood, there was One creature here only. And as I lay there now, I practiced ever newer dreams of this being, manufactured out of fresher, more sophisticated dissatisfactions — give or take a tusk or two, subtract a horn there. And after an hour or two of this pleasantest of siesta occupations, I made an accordingly new discovery. Posture! Perhaps only a One of an essentially gyroscopic people, used to the luxury of moving pavements in which trolley grooves We may incline all at the same comfortable angle, can appreciate how basic is posture here to the rhythms of philosophy, and indeed to the practice of ideals. How sensitively I was getting to understand you. It was not wholly comfortable then, to lie too long prone.

And no sooner had I discovered this, than I felt myself pulled powerfully upright, as eager for action as if I had just bounded out of the crater. At home, my line of action would have been ready for me; here it took only nominally longer for posture to suggest one. Carefully, very carefully this time, I approached the door. At this point in my education I had never really seen one up close; what has instantaneity to do with doors? Answer: it learns to reason itself through them, just as you, by reverse process, will soon find yourselves flashily able to do forever without them. At a certain distance, I found that, even when thinking the most lethargic thoughts and overcasting myself with the heaviest feelings I yet knew, there was still an unnatural tension between door and me, which boded ill. Then suddenly the source of it occurred to me; my electrical field was being opposed by another. Even their doors wear them, I thought. And perhaps not only their doors, perhaps all other objects which might offer resistance of any kind are required to be clothed so, while they themselves walk nakedly proudly among these obeisant; what aristocrats they are! And I — ?

And I. When Here, do as Here does. But be sure to emulate those who are in power. I must run no risk of having them confuse me with low-grade matter. It requires only a particular thought for us to discard our Field, the trouble being only that it is such a particular one, and illegal too. Perhaps it wouldn't work as well here. Taking a cautious breath, I found that since the last time I had practiced this heresy, the wholesomely coarse air of Yours had so clogged the finer pores that I was enabled to sustain a thought without fairly recognising that I was doing it — and that this furthermore seemed to add substantially to my weight. Sure enough, shortly I began to feel the familiar chilliness which always comes of lowering one's protective field, and happening to shiver, this inched me slightly doorwards — and sure enough, the door inched slowly and equally toward me. Some thoughts must be illegal anywhere. For good measure, I made so bold as to half hum it, meanwhile keeping my real thoughts trolleying along a loftier neighbourhood; there's always some niche of the intelligence that one must keep to oneself.

"I am ... " I murmured," ... I am ... an Original." This time the door didn't budge. But by dint of trial I found that as I moved forward, and only under the influence of this, the door would move compatibly outward. What courtesy, even in inferior matter, here! Slowly, majestically dipping my angle at a nice compromise between a taking-this-for-granted and a thank-you, I inched myself along without accident, until the door and I were in equipoise. I was almost outside it. Outside, on Here.

By hook or crook then, I was almost safely through the second phase of my journey. For, awesome as the interstellar reaches may be to the lone traveler, or even to the caravan which must track those Saharas of cosmic dust, there had come a point in my journey when it was the destination which became the dread. Did they really have water in a liquid state? I could not survive without it. Should I have trusted them, when they reported themselves as beings with the same needs as I, molded by the same natural forces? Not that I was suspicious of their intent — but after all, they were only a third-generation star. Young as they were, must one not have a low view of intellectual powers which had taken all of their history to discover other presences, and the possible pulsings between them? Granted We and They had mutually significant symbols and meanings, but imagine Our dismay when informed that they still read and wrote! Could beings like Us, who are in Ourselves practically all electronic meaning, go backward as far as these beings on the other side of their 'Milky Way' thought they had gone forward; could we mutate enough, and quickly so, to touch arc on their planet? To dare to do this, I had gone against all home Opinion. And so far, with the help of arrangements-in-waiting, plans had gone remarkably. But, as I peered outside that glass door, I remembered my misgivings just a few moments before landing. Behind me, improbably far along the empyrean reaches, Ours, that long teardrop of a planet, lay somewhere shrouded as I had last seen it, nestling deep in its filtered atmospheres, a jewel once upon a time massively wept. As I had reined in on Yours, a mere toy ball lost on its cloud stubble, waiting to be picked up again in play — my last thought had been: yes, I can land Here — but can I live?

Such thoughts as one can have behind a door here! Just beyond the threshold the air was heavy, but I reminded myself now much I myself had changed during my weeks here. When, by infinite creepings I found myself still alive and breathing, no more WHAM's and the door still courteous, I made the last inch or two; behind me, the door modestly retired — and shut. I had no thought at the time of whether it would readmit me, or where I was going. All the prospect of your world was before me terminated in the distance — according to the limits of sight here, to which mine was fast declining — by a pergola. I remained for some minutes as I was, faintly chilly, daring nothing, taking stock. I was Here. I was Outside. And I was naked as the day Yours are born ...