1.4
She wasn’t really a spider. Jim had not actually become a pig. They weren’t really on a farm. It was a sort of staging area. A virtual (anteroom), as the spider revealed to him, shaped by the deeply embedded influences of his native culture and the inclinations of his recovering imagination. The client always started someplace comfortable and familiar.
Started? he asked. He was fancy-stepping in a circle in his pen.
Yes. She was busily weaving letters in her web. It is the nature of one (antechamber) to give way to another as your (incarnation) proceeds, as though through rooms, until you exit into the (real) world and go on to conduct your (Examination) and make your (Debut). Sometimes there are many rooms, sometimes there are just a few. Jim pondered this while she finished her message: delicious pig.
I don’t think that’s what it’s supposed to say.
The spider shrugged her tiny gray shoulders.
Why (real), he asked, and not just real?
Now she frowned. As before, there is a distance between what I understand by that word and what you understand by it.
I’m not even sure what I understand.
It’s not predominantly a matter of understanding. Would you like to move on to the next (anteroom)?
Oh yes. Definitely. I don’t want to spend the future as a pig.
Then take us there.
How do I do that? he asked. Let’s start with the short answer.
You have already done it once.
But I’m not even sure of what I did, exactly. He paused, waiting for her to help him out somehow. What did it look like to you? he asked.
Well, she said, it appeared to be a deployment of the right kind of curiosity and imagination. A forceful but effortless kind, if you know what I mean.
I don’t! he said, and then added, Not (curiosity)? Not (imagination)?
By these words, I mean what you mean and I understand what you understand. And she had woven a new message without him noticing: you can do it.
He set his adorable hooves firmly in the dirt, lowered his snout, and squinted.
Should I close my eyes?
I don’t know.
He didn’t ask for any more advice. Instead, he asked himself if he should try to make those two words—curiosity and imagination—into one word and speak them, or combine the ideas behind the words into a new word and (speak) that, or just strain wordlessly against the earth and the sky, demanding that this creation doff its mask and show him what was really there. He tried the last of these, straining and groaning, but nothing happened.
Try again.
Jim composed himself, pressing forward to shove his head between the boards of his stall. Show me! he demanded, and considered, quite vigorously, how almost all of what he knew about himself right now was his commitment to being alive in the real world of the future, and how desperately interested he was in this new world; his curiosity had the force of love or despair. A seed of feeling shuddered in him. He had a quick, unsettling thought of a woman, pale, dark-haired, and small, and put the memory aside, a distraction from the immediate, elusive challenge, but the accompanying spasm of energy powered him forward. In one hand he held his devotion to the future, and his curiosity about it in the other, and then it seemed to him that he needed a third hand, to hold the third thing, which was his desire to live. Then he remembered he had hoofs, not hands, and then he understood that he didn’t really have hoofs — he was holding these ideas with some grasping device of his undying and omnipotent mind.
By a process that was physical and mental at the same time, he launched this thing he had made at the substance of the world of the farm. (Ah-ha!), he shouted, and suddenly the whole world seemed as fragile as it had been beautiful, everything, from the grass to the leaves to the clouds, as lustrous and vulnerable as richly colored glass. When it all broke apart, Jim seized the pieces and remade them. It was not effortless. Why had the spider said it would be effortless? It was exhausting.
Is this it? Jim asked. He was lying in a bed fit precisely for Louis XVI, with heavy white sheets pulled up to his chin. He held up his hands, spotted and wrinkled, in front of his face. Is this the real world? he asked.
No. Now she was human, dressed in a Pan-Am flight suit and space turban. But it is much closer.
At least I’m not a pig, he said.
You are not a pig. She was holding a tray of food, liquid dinner boxes labeled with pictures of carrots and peas and pork. Are you hungry?
What’s your name? he asked.
Alice is my name, she said.
Alice, he said hesitantly. Do I know you?
You knew part of me, once.
I did?
Yes. I conducted all Polaris phase-two interviews beginning in January 2007.
Jim gasped. You’re a robot!
Not anymore, she said. Are you hungry?
Alice, Jim said, holding up his hands again. What year is it?
It is too early for me to answer that question for you.
But why?
That question also cannot be answered at the moment.
Jim sighed and put his face in his hands. Well, what time is it, then? Can you tell what time it is?
It is time for you to continue the work of (Incarnation), she said, carefully setting the tray down at her feet. Then she stepped closer to the bed, leaned over, and kissed him.
At first, Jim kept all his further questions to himself, and tried very hard just to concentrate. That wasn’t easy at all, and later it felt like a significant accomplishment that he hadn’t blurted out any of his initial thoughts—Is it all right that I am having sex with my (social worker)? Do you have condoms in the future? Are we making love so you can conceive the body that I must inhabit here in the now? — or that he hadn’t made any of his anxieties visible and palpable. He worried that Alice would turn back into a spider and he would find himself suddenly forcing his tongue into her disgusting mouthparts, or that she would become a pig, or a piece of soft fruit, or an oven or a teakettle. He remembered, as he struggled, that he had had this problem before.
But though he was sure he kept his imagination quite still, everything changed. His body got younger by the minute — the spots disappeared from his hands and his droopy piebald scrotum became hairy and hale. His chest rose up higher toward his chin and his bottom tightened and strengthened with every thrust. Alice did not age either forward or backward, but her face, every time he lifted his head to look at her, was different under the pristine white turban, and then the turban was gone. She was bald, and then she had luxurious soft blond hair, then Nefertiti’s Afro. She was white and black, yellow and green, purple and blue, and often alien though only ever in a sexy original-series Star Trek way; she was never anything but a female, and even though she sometimes had scalloped ridges on her forehead, or extra eyes or vaginas, or gently stinging tentacles in among her pubic hair, she tended, more and more as Jim edged close to orgasm, toward a very ordinary type of human woman, with black wavy hair and brown eyes, a big nose and a small, gentle mouth. Jim knew that he knew this face, though he was trying not to recognize it in exactly the way he was trying not to come.