Console?
The thing comes up.
You have no choices, says the female voice.
Oh, great. This again. Has the whole thing crashed? Did those men do something to this place that means I just can't access anything anymore?
You have one new message.
What?
You have one new message.
Can I get the message? There's no response. Where's the little envelope that you click on? What is the equivalent here? How do I retrieve a message in the Troposphere? Who would have left me a message, anyway? For a second I imagine some brown paper package with red, green, and black wires coming out of it: a bomb from my enemies. But this doesn't make me feel anything at all and I remember that this is what I like so much about this space: no hot, no cold, no fear.
Something now glows in the console and I notice that's it's Apollo Smintheus's mouse-hole. I didn't notice it before, but it's there now: sitting between what looks like Valhalla and something called the Primrose Tea Shoppe. Am I supposed to go in there? I do want to see Apollo Smintheus. I switch off the console and walk through the white archway and into the room I recognize from before: the empty tables and shelves and the nest in the corner. There's no sign of Apollo Smintheus. I walk through to the other room. The fire is out and there's no one here. But there is a booklet lying on the table.
A Guide to the Troposphere, it says on the cover. By Apollo Smintheus.
Is this the message? I open the booklet.
You now have no new messages, says the console.
So the booklet is the message. OK. I sit down on the rocking chair and begin reading. The whole document is only about three pages long, but the script is large.
The Troposphere is not a place.
The Troposphere is made by thinking.
(I am made from prayer.)
The Troposphere is expanding.
The Troposphere is both inside your universe and outside it.
The Troposphere can also collapse to a point.
The Troposphere has more than three directions and more than one "time."
You are now standing in the Troposphere but you could call it anything.
The thought is all thought.
The mind is all minds.
This dimension is different from the others.
Your Troposphere is different from others'.
You achieve Pedesis via proximity in
Geography (in the world)
Tropography (in the Troposphere)
Ancestry (in the mind)
The choices the Troposphere gives you relate to proximity alone.
(Except when information is scrambled.)
You can jump from person to person in the physical world (but only if the person is at that moment vulnerable to the world of all minds.)
You can also jump from person to ancestor in the world of memory.
This is all memory.
The Troposphere is a different shape from the physical world to which it (loosely) corresponds. For this reason it is sometimes more efficient to travel in the Troposphere and sometimes more efficient to travel in the physical world (see diagram).
Disclaimer: This diagram is a scaled-down version of a higher-dimensional calculation. It will be correct for journeys of a short or noncomplex nature. Pedesis that takes the ancestral route over many generations will (probably) lead to inaccuracies.
Note: Units of distance/time in the Troposphere work out as roughly 1.6 times that of their equivalent in the physical world. An "hour" in the Troposphere will last for 1.6 physical-world hours, i.e., ninety-six minutes.
Converting time to distance should be done in the usual way.
Distance is time in the Troposphere.
You cannot die in the Troposphere.
You can die in the physical world.
"You" are whatever you think you are.
Matter is thought.
Distance is being.
Nothing leaves the Troposphere.
You could probably think of the Troposphere as a text.
You could think of the Troposphere that you see as a metaphor.
The Troposphere is, in one sense, only a world of metaphor.
Although I have attempted it here the true Troposphere cannot be described.
It cannot be expressed in any language made from numbers or letters except as part of an existentiell analytic (see Heidegger for more details).
The last point could have been clearer. What I mean to say is that experiencing the Troposphere is also to express it.
End.
Chapter Eighteen
Back on my bed and it's only just gone midnight. I have to try to write down as much as possible of Apollo Smintheus's document before I forget it. I have to be able to think about it in the real world. What does it all mean? The thought is all thought. The mind is all minds. Is that what the Troposphere is? All minds? Perhaps I already knew that. Perhaps that's what I suspected. If that's the case, is the city in my mind so big that it has a little shop or house or, indeed, castle for every consciousness in the world? What were all those castles about, and why were they all shut? What is consciousness? Do worms have it? They must, if mice do. If I wanted to get in the mind of a worm in Africa, how would I go about that?
One thing is clear. Time does work differently in the Troposphere. I don't quite understand what distance/time travelled in the Troposphere is, but it seems obvious that when you come out of it, more time has passed than when you were inside. The first thing I do is draw out the diagram as I remember it. It's basically Pythagorean theorem. It's Pythagorean theorem but applied to space and time. I struggle to recall all the popular science books I've read over the years. Gravity works in a similar way, doesn't it? Isn't that what Newton said: The force of gravity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between two objects multiplied by their masses? But there's nothing in Apollo Smintheus's document about mass. It's all about distance and time. Indeed, he seems to be suggesting that, in the Troposphere, distance is the same thing as time. I know that's true in the "real" universe as well. It's called space-time. But you don't notice it in your normal life. You can't mess around with time by taking a trip to the shops, or even a trip to the moon. If you want to mess with time you have to fly away from Earth very fast in a spaceship, and keep travelling at something close to the speed of light without accelerating or decelerating. Then, if you come back, you'll find that "more" time has passed on Earth relative to you in your spaceship. What seems to happen in the Troposphere is the opposite of this. Or is it in fact the same? My stomach grumbles. I'm going to have to eat again soon.