“Choose for me,” Clay says, and so he is transformed into an Awaiter.
12
He takes up residence in the moist cool mud. He is unable to move; the concept of having the power of motion is strange to him. He is content to remain embedded, drinking such nourishment as he needs through his fibrous roots, and watching the splendid rippling hues of the river as it flows past his dwelling. His fellow Awaiter lives not far away. Clay is constantly aware of the Awaiter’s thoughts: a great strength, a profound calm, a passionate intellect, and, pervading everything, a degree of rock-bottom melancholy, a sadness over the thingness of things.
He does not know how old the Awaiter is, and he swiftly sees that it would be foolish to ask, for time interests the Awaiter only for its negation. “We will study,” the Awaiter tells him, “the virtues of timelessness.” Nor does he dare inquire at what point in human history it was thought desirable to take on this form, and for what reason. He accepts all things passively. He has learned to expect infinite variety.
Passive is as passive does. “What is your goal?” he asks the Awaiter, and the Awaiter says, “To await.”
“Are there many of your kind?”
“Many.”
“Are you in contact with them?”
“Rarely.”
“Do you feel loneliness out here?”
“I feel freedom.”
Clay has exhausted his questions. He studies the river. His eyes are like antennae draining images from every side; he sees the mountains, the sea, the clouds, the clinging velvet mists. The sun rises and sets and rises and sets, but he does not integrate these changes with the idea that time is passing. They are mere phenomena of lighting. Time does not pass. Not-minute flows into not-minute, and the not-minutes mount into un-hours, which pile into anti-days and contra-weeks and non-months, and these into the antithesis of years and the converse of centuries. These intervals of timelessness are interrupted, occasionally, by some sluggish thought that makes its way by slow sticky drips to the depths of his consciousness. He is not offended by the new pace of things. It seems quite delicate and perfect and lovely to function this way, since he has the opportunity to examine every facet of a notion, turning it this way and that, rubbing it, tapping it, biting it, probing it. Frequently an entire negative span of non-eons elapses between each exchange of thoughts between himself and the Awaiter beside him. It is not necessary to speak a great deal. It is necessary only to think, and consider, and apprehend, and understand. He sheds much of the unneeded luggage of his mind. He casts off the fallacy of forward movement, the absurdity of striving, the inanity of aggressiveness, the idiocy of acquisitiveness, the error of progress, the misconception of speed, the aberration of pride, the hallucination of curiosity, the illusion of accomplishment, the mirage of consecutiveness, and a great deal more that he has carried about much too long. Firmly planted, amply nourished, fully content with his state, he passively masters dazzling universes of thought.
Among his new insights are such things as these:
All moments converge upon now.
Stasis contains and surrounds dynamism.
It is an error to imagine that there is a linear sequence of events.
Events themselves are mere clusters of random energy upon which we impose our erroneous sense of form.
To battle entropy is to pluck at one’s own eyes.
Every river returns to its source.
The only doctrine more spurious than that of determinism is the doctrine of free will.
Memory is the mirror of untruth.
To construct physical objects out of given sensory data is a pleasant pastime, but such objects are without verifiable content, and therefore unreal.
We must realize, a priori, that all a priori notions about the nature of the universe are inherently false.
There are no necessary conditions and no causal relationships; logic therefore is tyranny.
Once he has come to an intimate understanding of these premises, all restlessness leaves him. He is at peace. He has never been so happy as he is in the Awaiter form, for he realizes now that joy and sorrow are merely aspects of the same delusion, no more tangible nor significant than electrons, neutrons, or mesons. He can dispense with all sensation and live in an environment of pure abstraction: away with textures, colors, tones, tastes, and distinctions of form! He does not merely repudiate the messages of the senses; he denies their reality altogether. In this new atmosphere of tranquility he recognizes swiftly that the Awaiters must be considered the highest aspect of human life ever to evolve, since they are most fully in command of their environment. The fact that the human race continued to change after the development of the Awaiters is a trivial paradox, based on a faulty comprehension of the randomness of events, and he wastes little time analyzing it. These Skimmers, these Breathers, these Eaters, all these latter-day forms are pitiably unaware of their irrelevance to the non-structure of the non-universe.
He will never leave this place.
Curious strains develop in his complacency, however. His fellow Awaiter, for example, often radiates dull tolling tones of doubt that are oddly at variance with an Awaiter’s grasp of philosophy. The river sometimes rises and spews clouds of sparkling particles over the place where Clay is fixed in the ground; these floods momentarily block his sensory perceptions and leave him unduly troubled by the importance of perceiving. Though he transcends these difficulties, he is perturbed by a fundamental uncertainty of purpose that conflicts not only with his awareness of the nonexistence of purpose but with his awareness of the nonexistence of conflict. He passes this opaque point glibly without attempting to deal with it. Time timelessly elapses, shedding itself in a series of self-devouring concentric gray shells. He no longer knows whether he lives in the world’s evening or its morning. He does not return to a linear scheme of events until the day when an arrangement of textures and densities presents itself on the island where he has settled and succeeds in penetrating his isolation.
He perceives softness within hardness. He perceives an oval within a rectangle. He perceives sound within silence.
He hears a bristly voice saying, “Your friends seek you. Will you return to them?”
Clay allows this abstract cluster of coincidental phenomena to take on the illusion of reality. Now he perceives his resurrected companion, the spheroid. He observes the pink jellylike creature intersecting the shining metal bars of its cage. He says, “It is not true that I can understand your speech.”
“No barrier is eternal,” the spheroid says. “I am in tune now with the language of the era.”
“Why are you here?”
“To help you. There is a debt of gratitude upon me, for you are the one who returned me to life.”
“I deny the debt. Life and death are indistinguishable states. You merely were confused, and I illuminated you.”
“However that may be, do you want to stay rooted in the ground for the rest of time?”
“I travel as far as I please without leaving this place.”
“I would not injure you,” the spheroid says. “But I fear you are not your own master. I think you are in need of rescue. Do you remain in the sand of your own free will?”
“Let me explain about free will,” Clay says.
He speaks at length. While he does, the spheroid rolls closer to him. Clay has just reached an explication of the inner nature of the seeming linearity of circumstances when the spheroid extends a bright ring of golden radiation that slices into the ground on all sides of him. He is encompassed by this cone of energy. Deep in the moist sand it presses against the tips of his roots. The tapering point of him flattens on the bottom vertex of the cone. Halting his discourse, he asks, “What are you doing?” and the spheroid says patiently, “Rescuing you.” Clay is unwilling to be rescued. “Violation of my physical integrity,” he declares. “Arbitrary antisocial behavior. Contradicts the essentially nonviolent nature of this period of human history. Treason against my soul t
o act on my behalf against my wishes. I beg of you. You have no right. In the name of the debt you owe me. To be left as is. Amounts to rape. Let me. Why won’t you let me. Alone? This sphere of force. Compulsion as a weapon of man against entropy. Go. Away.” None of this moves the spheroid from its task. The cone of energy is rotating rapidly. The air sizzles and shimmers as ionization occurs. Clay becomes dizzy. He calls out in appeal to the Awaiter, who takes no action. Clay is rising. There is a sound as of the popping of a cork and he bursts from the sand. He lies at the edge of the shore, a giant stranded carrot, twitching his roots feebly and rolling his huge eyes around. “You misunderstand,” he tells the spheroid. “I had no wish to be removed. I had firmly accepted the passive state. This intrusion. The highest degree of resentment at. Unable to proceed with my former researches. Poor return for important favors received. Insist you restore. A moral issue.” The spheroid, humming eagerly, extends pseudopods of pink flesh to stroke Clay’s furrowed, fevered brow. A blue cloud settles about the uprooted transient. Tendrils of gray smoke slide into his pores. “Unforgivable,” Clay says. “Involuntary termination of metamorphosis. Sheer biological fascism.” The spheroid weeps. Clay is changing, now. He can feel the throb and surge. What form will I assume? Red gills, purple tentacles? Stale coils of flabby meat? Green knobs sprouting from crested skull? He stirs. He sits up. He is bifurcated again. Legs: and a soft tumble of organs between them. He has been resexed. Hands. Fingers. Ears. Lips. A garden of epithelium. Grumblings in his bowels; concealed microflora undergoing tidal ebb and flow. The war of the white corpuscles. He’s himself again.
Gratitude spills through him in an oily flood. The spheroid has saved him from his own passivity. He springs to his feet. He dances on the muddy flat. Joyfully he embraces the spheroid’s cage and receives several mild tingling shocks. “I would have stayed there till the end of time,” Clay says. “A vegetable.” The buried Awaiter tolls its disapproval of Clay’s shallowness. “Of course,” Clay adds, “I did gain some valuable insights into reality and illusion.” He frowns, and, pensively toeing the sand, tries to offer the spheroid an example. No insights come. That saddens him. Is it all gone, then, that wondrous torrent of philosophy, that gush of golden data? Was his awareness of illusion merely a delusion? He is momentarily tempted to crawl back into the sand and plug in, one more time, to that fount of elusive wisdom. But he does not. He knows how narrow his escape was. He feels great warmth and affection, almost a sexual love, for his rescuer. The innate humanity of all human things connects us, he knows. The spheroid is my brother who I must not reject. But the Awaiter tells him, sadly, “I too am human,” and Clay dissolves in guilt, knowing how cruel he is being. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “I have to make the choice. Wisdom isn’t enough. Experience counts too. Anyway”—a hopeful crumb of consolation—“I might come back. After I’ve seen more. It’s not a permanent leavetaking.” The Awaiter replies, “It hardly matters. You are in transit. Do as you please: your will is free.” The paradox sends Clay reeling. He nearly stumbles into the all-dissolving river. Landing on his knees a few feet from the flow, he crawls along the shore a short way and flattens himself, anguished, alarmed. The sky darkens. The sun dwindles. He jams his penis into the damp sand. He thrusts his fingers in. He takes a mouthful and grinds the particles between his teeth. Bits of sour quartz, furry silica, digested calcium, the excreted detritus of ages past lying on this shore, fragments of cities, highways, old space satellites, chunks of the moon, all lovingly tossed and shaped by the sobbing sea and flung up here—he wants to hug it all. The spheroid’s faint shadow falls on him. “Shall we go?” it asks. Clay squints up at it. “Where does your voice come from?” he demands. “You don’t seem to have a mouth. You don’t have any bodily openings at all. How the hell can you be human without bodily openings?” The spheroid replies gently, “Hanmer hopes for your return. Ti. Serifice. Ninameen. Angelon. Bril.”
“Serifice is dead,” Clay says, getting up, brushing the sand from himself. “But I’d like to see the others again. I didn’t really mean to wander away. Let’s go.”
13
They march northward, so far as Clay is able to determine. Since the spheroid is no conversationalist, Clay occupies himself with an attempt at a rational analysis of his experiences since awakening. He makes recapitulatory lists of categories. He tallies the varieties of so-called human forms that he has encountered; he checks off the metamorphoses he has undergone; he records the details of each of his voyages beyond the normal sensory capabilities of a twentieth-century man, and tries to discern whether those voyages were illusions or actualities. He examines such phenomena of this era as the ambiguity of sexuality and the impermanence of mortality. During this cool and clear-eyed assessment, carried out with no small effort of concentration, he pays little attention to his surroundings, and it is a while before he discovers how bleak and dismal a part of the world it is that he is now passing through.
Night has come; the full dreariness is hidden from him by darkness. But a faint depressing purple glow rises from the land, showing him enough. He is in a barren, flat wasteland, where the dry crusty ground crunches underfoot, and tiny angular pebbles stab the soles. Great sundered stony wedges command the horizon. He can see no plants, not even the typical spiky growths of deserts. An unpleasant buzzing sound, like the droning of flies trapped against a closed window, issues from gopher-hole openings underfoot; kneeling by one of these for closer listening, he hears the sinister hum curving and recurving in subterranean burrows. A sense of intolerable dryness prevails. The night sky is fouled with some sort of thin haze, masking the stars. He wonders if this is another of the hells on Earth on which Ninameen once told him, a cousin to Old. Is this the place called Empty? Is it Slow? Is it Heavy? Is it Dark? He picks his way carefully over the gritty basin of this purple plain, fearful of a stumble. This is no place for a naked man to walk by night.
“What is this place called?” he asks the spheroid, after a while. But the spheroid is as much of a stranger to this time and place as he is, and makes no reply.
Clay’s throat parches. His skin picks up a coating of fine rock dust. Whenever he blinks he feels his eyelids abrading his pupils. He becomes edgy and hyperwary, sensing imaginary monsters behind every boulder. What sounds are those? The whisper of a scorpion’s claws? The dragging of a spiked tail through the forlorn pebbles? The grinding of stones within a reptilian gut? But there is nothing here except night and silence. The spheroid, wheeling merrily onward, is far ahead of him now. Clay forces himself to double his pace, at the risk of cutting himself badly on the rocks in his path. “Wait!” he yells, hoarse, ragged-throated. “I don’t move on wheels. I can’t go that fast.” But the spheroid’s command of the language of the era seems to have expired; it takes no notice of his words, and soon is lost from view on the smoky horizon.
Stopping, Clay finds a patch of ground free from sharp stones and squats there. The purple glow—residual radioactivity, perhaps?—is too dim now to guide him, and he will not move on until morning. The risk of sliding into some talused ravine does not attract him. Would a compound fracture of the leg be as troublesome here as it would if he were traversing old Arizona? He does not know. Maybe the jagged white stick of bone would obligingly melt back into place after a time, and the shredded tissues of skin and flesh grow whole in a sweetly dreamlike way. But he does not wish to chance it. A bad dream can end, but not everything is a dream, even here, and he does not care to find himself suffering a genuine fracture in an unreal landscape. He will wait until he can see.
In the unsleeping night phantoms dance around him. Things flutter by dangling on fine metal wires. He hears groans and occasional sobs far away, and something that could be a chorus of large black beetles. The wind is cool and dusty. Transparent fingers tickle the channels of his mind, seeking entry. Slow spirals of pure fear congeal and twist about him. The haze across the sky disappears, possibly devoured by some entity in methodical traverse of the heavens, and
the unfamiliar stars blare forth. No comfort from them: our light set out for Earth, they insist, in the time of automobiles and hydrogen bombs, and it has been all this while on its way, buffeted by the dancing molecules between the galaxies, and here it is, and here you are. Poor naked fool. When will morning come? Is that a row of insects marching toward my toes? Why is the darkness so close to me?
The first strands of daylight, now. White-hot rods sliding into the sky. A hot wind out of the west. A smear of red on the horizon, sucking all the world’s moistness toward it. Dry. Dry. Dry. Ugly rustling sounds. Light. The sky is molten, all copper and brass and zinc, with drooping streaks of antimony, molybdenum, manganese, magnesium, and lead. Pools of tungsten splashing against the rocks. The dawn has a blinding brilliance. He turns away from it, clasping his forearms to his forehead and crouching like an unhappy red crustacean fleeing the pot. The air is a sea of refraction, in which the fundamental atomic structure of matter lies revealed as a series of interlocking circles of green and yellow and brown, turning on their hubs to create dazzling patterns of meshed interference rings. The world swerves on its track. Five primary colors that he has never seen before bombard his eyes. Can he give them names? What will he call this deep cool hue with the velvety walls? And this rigid rectilinear tone, so disciplined, so forbidding? This one is tentative and gentle; this, swollen and brutal; this, hushed and complex. The colors blend and mingle and occasionally clash. The full blaze of morning begins.
He understands now that he is in a desert where hallucinations rise like heat waves from the rocks. His mind is clear and his perceptions are exact; the imprecisions he experiences are in the environment, not in himself. But the distinction is a fine one. He walks slowly forward, anticipating traps.