“Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”
He goes through the familiar movements and the girl makes the familiar responses. His eyes are closed; his face presses against the side of her neck. He can hear, but only faintly, the quiet comments of those who watch from the depths of pools: the comparisons, the contrasts, the criticisms, the clarifications. Occasionally he can feel the coldness of the water slicing through the sweet warmth of the girl’s soft skin. His seed streaks forth. Her muffled moans of gladness climb in pitch, turn ragged at the edges, shred and sever, and slowly subside. The gleaming dark eye of the ceiling winks. A breeze blows through the fading walls. The motel is shimmering and beginning to dissolve. Urgently he battles to keep it together. He clasps the girl, kisses her, whispers words of love. They congratulate each other on the intensity of their shared emotions and on the truth and beauty they have discovered in one another’s souls. This is love, he tells his silent watchers. The eye winks again. He is slipping away, he is being drawn back from this. He continues to resist. He staples himself to reality with thick authoritative phrases: Gross National Product, Reciprocal Trade Agreement, Roman Catholic Hierarchy, German Federal Republic, Eastern Daylight Savings Time, United States Postal Regulations, Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, American Federation of Labor. It is no use. The center cannot hold. The girl dwindles and diminishes beneath him, her breasts deflating, her internal organs becoming gaseous and puffing out through her bodily orifices, until nothing more than her two-dimensional image lies on the bed, a mere filmy coating clinging to the rumpled sheets. Then that too is gone. He clutches the mattress, unwilling to let himself be drawn back, yet aware of the inevitability of his defeat. The building around him disappears. He glimpses his car parked nearby, and runs to it, but it vanishes. The paved courtyard has been unpaved. The telephone poles, billboards, newspaper vending machines, and ornamental junipers are gone. He feels fire in his chest. He is drowning. He is sinking deeper and deeper. His body is being transformed. He slips toward the lower reaches of the dark pool, and there is Quoi, massive, thoughtful, grateful. Clay can no longer remember the shape of the girl’s face. The taste of her on his lips is increasingly bland. The memories are going. The demonstration is over.
7
At last he leaves Quoi’s pool. It has been peaceful and instructive there, and except for a few rebellious impulses coming upon him at unexpected moments, he has adapted well both to his metamorphosis and to the static nature of his submerged existence. He has enjoyed his frequent communions with Quoi, and his view, through Quoi, of the other members of Quoi’s species around the world. But now he knows it is time to go. He rises to the surface and hovers there a moment, head down and back bent, summoning his strength; and with one quick convulsive thrust he flips himself up out of the water.
He lies gasping on the shore for what seems like a long time, as the water drains from his system. He decides he is ready to admit air to his lungs, but when it rushes in it scorches him terribly, and he expels it. More cautiously, he imagines his head englobed in glass, and allows the molecules to part with great precision, so that one little blip of air slips through, and then another, and then another, and then the helmet is full of holes and the stream of air is continuous and he is breathing it normally. He stands. He offers himself to the sunlight. He wades out a few feet into the pool and peers down, trying to find Quoi and say goodbye, but all he can see is a dark uncertain mass far below. He waves to it.
As he walks away, he sees Hanmer sitting in a cup-shaped black flower of giant size.
“Freed from captivity,” Hanmer says. “Breathes the air again. You were missed.”
“How long was I gone?”
“Long enough. You were enjoying it down there.”
“Quoi was courteous. A good host,” says Clay.
“If we hadn’t called you, you would never have left it,” Hanmer says, a pout in his voice.
“If you hadn’t let the goat-men chase me, I wouldn’t have fallen into the pond in the first place.”
Hanmer smiles. “True. A hit, a very palpable hit!”
“Where did you get that line?”
“From you, of course,” he says blandly.
“You wander in and out of my mind as it pleases you?”
“Of course.” Hanmer leaps lithely from the floral cup. “In a manner of speaking, Clay, you’re a figment of my imagination. Why shouldn’t I invade your head?” He trots over to Clay, puts his face close, and says, “What was that old Quoi doing with you?”
“Teaching me about love. And learning from me.”
“You could teach it?”
“Love as it was in my era, yes. How it was for us.”
Colors flash across Hanmer’s face. He closes his eyes a moment. “Yes,” he says finally. “You told it everything, didn’t you? And now it’s all over the world, every Breather knowing everything about you. You shouldn’t have done that.”
“Why?”
“You can’t go spewing your secrets everywhere. Have some discretion, man. You have obligations to me.”
“I do?”
“As your self-appointed guide,” Hanmer says, “I have certain claims on any revelations you may care to make. Remember that. Now come with me.”
Hanmer walks off, showing his crossness in the choppiness of his stride. Clay, irritated by his companion’s peremptory manner, is tempted not to follow. But too many unanswered questions clog his throat; he rushes after Hanmer, catching up with him in several minutes. They walk silently side by side. Ahead of them stretches a double wall of flat-topped red bluffs, between which lies a narrow plain. The dominant vegetation of the plain is a wavy ribbonlike plant that rises from the soil in a series of individual leafless fronds three or four feet high; the fronds are soft, fluttering in the breeze, and they are so nearly transparent that Clay has difficulty seeing them except at certain angles. They remind him of strands of clear seaweed surging with the tides. When he nears them, the plants fill briefly with color, flooding with a deep wash of reddish-purple that just as swiftly ebbs toward transparency. Only after he is actually walking in the grove, picking his way between one timid plant and its neighbor, does Clay realize that Ninameen, Serifice, Bril, Angelon, and Ti are camped among the fronds.
“Is this all you ever do?” Clay asks Hanmer. “Loll around in the sun, wander from valley to valley, dance, change sexes, hold rituals, tease strangers? Don’t you study things? Put on plays? Tend gardens? Compose formal music? Examine the great ideas?”
Hanmer laughs.
“You’re the summit of human evolution,” Clay says forcefully. “What do you do? How do you fill all your thousands and millions of years? Is dancing enough? Quoi called you Skimmers; I think it thought you were shallow. Did Quoi misjudge you? What is there about you that lifts you above plants and animals? Is the texture of your life as simple as you’ve let me think it is?”
Hanmer turns. He rests his hands on Clay’s shoulders. His scarlet eyes seem sad. “We all love you,” he says. “Why are you so agitated? Take us as we come.”
Ninameen, Ti, and the other Skimmers spring up about Clay, chattering like happy children. All but Angelon are in the male form. He has no difficulty, this time, in recognizing them. “Why were you with the Breather so long?” Serifice demands. And Bril asks, “Were you angry with us?”
Hanmer says, “He is troubled because we live forever.”
Serifice frowns. His nostrils flicker, his mouth clacks. He touches Clay’s elbow and says, “Explain death.”
“Why should I explain anything? What do you explain to me?”
“Hostility!” Ti cries. “Belligerence!” He sounds delighted.
“No, really,” says Serifice softly. “I want to know. Will this make it better?” And he changes to the female form. Serifice rubs her little breasts against his side. “Tell me about death,” she murmurs, stroking his chest. He thinks of the blonde girl panting and gasping as he nails her to the motel-room bed, and he is not stirred by
the grotesque golden-green alien creature wriggling alongside him. Bulbous red eyes. Universal joints. Flat fishy face. Child of man many times removed. “Death,” Serifice purrs. “Help me understand death.”
“You’ve seen death here,” Clay says, avoiding Serifice’s caresses. “The spheroid—suddenly withered in its cage. That’s death. An end of life. What can I say?”
“It was only temporary,” Serifice objects.
“But it was death, while it was happening. If you want to know about it, why not ask the spheroid?”
“We did,” Ti says. “It didn’t understand what we meant.”
“It was gone,” Angelon says, “and then it came back. It couldn’t tell us anything more than that.”
“Neither can I. Look: suppose I pull a fish out of a stream and eat it. The fish dies. That’s death. You stop being what you are. You aren’t aware of anything going on afterwards.”
“A fish isn’t aware of much even during,” Serifice objects.
Bril says, “How often did people like you die?”
“Once. Only once. When you stopped, you didn’t start again.”
“Is that the way it was for everyone?”
“For everyone.”
“You, too, then?”
“I was caught by the time-flux before I died. At least, I think so. As far as I can tell you, I was still alive when I was taken from then to now. So I’m no expert on death.”
“You saw others die,” Serifice persisted.
“Occasionally. But it wasn’t educational. Their eyes no longer saw. Their hearts no longer beat. They didn’t breathe, think, move, talk. I have no idea what it felt like to them, either the dying or being dead.”
“Didn’t you feel their absence?” Serifice asked.
“Well, yes, if they were people you knew closely, or someone famous, some artist or doctor or statesman who was in a way a part of your own life. You were aware that something was missing. But millions of unknown strangers died every day, too, and there wasn’t any impact at all on those who didn’t—”
“They went out of the world. Those who hadn’t gone would naturally feel their absence. Yes?” Bril asked.
“No. Look, are you asking me if we were all connected, like the Breathers are, like I suppose you are, so that one man’s death diminished all of us? We weren’t. I mean, except in a metaphorical sense. We were each of us an island. When we heard about someone’s death, and it was someone we had known directly or indirectly, we felt a loss, yes, but we had to be told, we had to have the information given to us in words, do you follow me?”
They stare at him solemnly. White tongues slide across their thin lips. They drive the tips of their fingers into the soft soil in a plain gesture of dismay.
“You do follow me,” he says, seeing their sudden somberness. “Of course you do. If Hanmer can pull a line of Shakespeare out of my head, you can pull the nature of the human condition out, too. You don’t need to ask me all these questions. You understand.”
“Tell us,” Angelon says, kneeling with head bowed between thighs, “what it was like to live knowing that you would have to die.”
He considers that. At length he says, “Most people came to terms with that fairly well. They accepted it as something beyond their control. The thing to do was to pack as much life as you could into the time you had, to waste none of it, to find someone to love and something to build, to win your immortality the best way you could, by creating something or by creating someone, and keeping yourself healthy so you could extend your life as long as possible. And actually I think the time given was enough for almost everyone. Toward the end, I suspect, a normal man had had all he wanted of it; his body was slowing down, and probably he was sick a lot of the time, even in pain pretty often—you know what sick is? You know pain?—and he was just going through the same old routine, bored with it, the getting up and the eating and the working and the sleeping, and his family was grown and gone from him, and, well, I suspect the end wasn’t that much of a hardship. Of course, there were the thinkers and the artists who felt they still had more to give the world, and they didn’t want to go, and there were the ones who stayed alert and vigorous into old age, and had so much more to see, and those who had curiosity in them like a fire, wanting to know what would happen next year and the next and the next and on into eternity, and they resented going too. And also there were plenty who were taken too soon, before they had even started living, the ones killed in accidents or carried off by childhood diseases or shot up on the battlefield, you know, and there was real injustice there. But by and large, I think that after sixty or seventy years, the average human being was ready to go, and didn’t take it as a terrible affront to his ego to be turned off. Is any of this comprehensible to you?”
“Sixty or seventy years?” Serifice says.
“The usual lifespan. Eighty wasn’t unusual. Some made it to ninety. More than that, a few.”
“Sixty or seventy years,” Serifice says. “And then you stop forever. How beautiful. How strange. Like flowers! Now I see you clearly. Your suffering. Your wonder. Your distance. Clay, we love you more. You give us such pleasure!” She claps her hands. “Look, now! In your honor, Clay: I will attempt to die.”
“Wait,” he gasps. “Listen—no—”
She sprints away, through the field of waving transparent stalks. The other Skimmers, smiling serenely, move closer to Clay, who stands watching her in bewilderment. Several of them touch his skin. They make some minor rearrangement within him so that he can see as they see, and he perceives the sixness of them, the sextuple unit Ti-Bril-Hanmer-Angelon-Ninameen-Serifice, their souls quivering in a single shining suspension.
Spider-fashion, using dozens of busy legs, Serifice scrambles up the sheer face of the red bluff to the left. She loses patience in the last dozen yards of the climb and simply drifts to the top, coming to rest nine feet above the ground, perched on a clear gleaming spike of air. She begins to spin on her vertical axis. The rest of the sixness commence a singing, so that a yellow cloud of music forms around Serifice, punctuated by quick red slashes of discord. Serifice flings her arms wide. Her face is transfigured by joy. Her axial velocity increases. Her angular momentum mounts. In her turning she spins a glass web that tugs him inexorably toward the sextuple unit of Skimmers. He can barely see her now, except at odd moments, when she intercepts the sunlight at the precise intersection and bursts into glittering visibility, a whirling vortex of ecstatic consciousness. She spins. She spins. She spins. She spins. She spins. She spins. Now, as she whirls ever more giddily, the essential reality of her starts to break up. She eddies randomly from the female form to the male. She! He! She! He! Her! Him! Her! Him! Hers! His! Hers! His! She! She! She! He! He! He! We! They!
“No, Serifice,” he screams.
The four syllables, as they leave his anguished lips, turn to cords of fine glass strung with prismatic beads, and, flying outward from him, form lines that leap across the gulf to Serifice. But he cannot snare her. The yellow song of the sixness now is shot through by the snub-nosed blue bolts of a song that is Serifice’s alone. She! He! She! He!
Pop.
The fabric of the air ruptures and there is a sharp swooshing sound as something sweeps through. Clay sinks to the ground, rubbing his forehead in the pebbly soil and clutching, for support, two of the gently waving transparent fronds. An insistent thought drums at his temples: Five. Five. Five. Five. Five. Where is Serifice? Serifice has gone to discover what death is like. Ninameen, Ti, Bril, Angelon, and Hanmer remain. Thunder rumbles. The sky turns orange. Serifice is gone, and a whiplash resonance from her vanishing trips him into wild oscillation, making him tumble end over end until the valley and its tender seaweeds melt away and he dangles above a blistered desert, all red and orange and white in the searing sun, with hissing crackles of static rising from its tortured sands. There he hangs, confronting the fact of Serifice’s suicide, until Hanmer, in the female form, finds him and softly brings him back to
his proper place. “What of Serifice?” he asks, and Hanmer whispers, “Serifice is learning about death.”
8
He is inconsolable. He did not cause it, but he feels that the guilt is his, having stirred in Serifice an irresistible curiosity about the phenomenon of inevitable termination of existence, and he trembles for the damage he has done to the sixness. All through a long day he mopes apart, kicking at the soil, awakening sleeping trees, tossing pebbles across ravines. The others confer. At length Ti comes to him and says, “Will you let me make you happy again?” She is in the female form.
“Leave me alone,” he mutters, thinking she is offering her body.
Ti understands. Fluttering hastily over to maleness, he says, “I can show you something interesting.”
“Show me Serifice.”
“Serifice has gone from us. Why do you mourn her this way?”
“Someone has to mourn. I’ve had more practice than any of you.”
“You make us unhappy with your mourning. Is death so terrible that you must tarnish the sky with sadness?”
“She had all of forever to live. She didn’t have to go.”
“Which makes her going all the more beautiful,” says Ti. He presses Clay’s hand firmly between his. “Come with me and let me divert you. We’ve gone to some effort to find a way of cheering you. It would distress us if you refused what we have.”
Clay shrugs, assailed by this new dimension of guilt. “What is it?”