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.