What I had learned in my own universe could be the key here, also. Incomprehensible as this place was, the unity of every part of it with the whole, the identity of every part of it with the whole, might be certain here, as it had been where I came from. If this was so, I had to be a part of this universe and it had to be a part of me, simply because I was now in it. Therefore, its patterns had to be part of me also, as understandable as my own physical speech in action when I was back in my old body, because a part of the whole cannot be either strange or alien to the whole, as I had found.
“Now you see,” said Ellen-that-was-me. “And, since you see, all you have to do now is reach out and touch.”
She was right again. There was no cardinal here, perched on a bird feeder; and the golden light was lost and left behind in another infinity. But she was still right; there was nothing to stop me from reaching out and trying to touch, to connect with, that of which I was now a part.
I reached. I felt outwards for my identity with this place surrounding me, just as I had felt in my home universe. Identity was slow coming; but in the end, it turned out to be only one step more than I had needed to make in reaching out for identity with Obsidian and his peers.
I touched something. It was something, or some things, with an ability to respond. After that, it was only a matter of mastering the necessary patterns to communicate with them; and in this they met me halfway. Apparently—I say apparently, because the situation does not translate into words easily if at all—the distinction between living matter and nonliving matter was not the sharp division existing in our own universe. Instead, the important division was between those, or that, which had finite lifetimes and those who, or that which, did not; and the lights I had been watching were each a single lifetime, lighting up from the apparently brief moment of its birth until the moment of extinguishment at its death.
But what seemed so brief was not necessarily so. Looked at from another viewpoint, what seemed to me a momentary lifetime could have existed the equivalent of billions of years in our universe. Also, to live here was to communicate; so that, in the end, I myself lived to communicate and communicated by living. It was a long moment for me, because I had a large job in making them understand what I wanted them to know about us and our situation.
But the time came when I got through; and after that, no more time was needed. I was left, with my mission accomplished, but myself isolated.
The only way I had of telling that I had gotten the message to them was by the change I could observe in their patterns. For, of course, there was no way they could speak directly to me any more than I had been able to speak to them. Actually, the most I had been able to do had been to signal crudely in their direction; like someone on a hilltop waving flags to people in a valley far below, to direct their attention to a distant danger. It was not just the mechanism of communication that was lacking between them and me—it was the fact that not merely our thinking processes, but our very existences, were too different.
So, there I was successful, but stranded. I had no conception of what might now be left to me; for I had no conception of what I might be, here, in this different universe. It was possible that, here, I had an incredibly long life before me; a slow, almost imperceptible decay into extinction like that of some radioactive element with a half-life measured in millions of years. It might be that I was only seconds from extinction, but that the vastly different perception of time would make this into a practical eternity. It might be that I was truly immortal here and would exist forever, observing and apart from a universe filled with a life for which “alien” was an insignificant, inadequate word, but unable to end.
Curiously, none of these prospects bothered me. I had done what I had set out to do and, in the larger measure, I was content. The only sadness left in me was because I could not tell my own people that the message had been carried, the battle won. Battles, I ought to say; because in coming here, in managing to get my message through to the life of this place, I had finally got outside myself, finally seen myself in full reflection, and come to the inner understanding I had been trying to find all along.
My hunt had been nothing more than the human search for love. Only I had been afraid of finding it even while I was pursuing it. So I had made sure to create masks for all those I encountered, so that if I became attached to any of them, my attachment would be to the mask and not to the real being behind it. That way, if the person betrayed me, it did not matter, because I had never really known them anyway. There was no way the living person behind the mask could sink emotional hooks into my soul because it was to the mask I had committed myself. In retrospect, I had put a mask on my mother and sister. I had put masks on Swannee and Marie and Paula. Those whom I feared I might love I gave unlovable masks. Only to those I was sure were unable to love me did I give masks that I could love.
It was a fail-safe system. It was only when I forgot to use it that I got tripped up. The crazy cat and the idiot girl-who would have suspected in the beginning that either of them would be able to reach through and tear me up inside? True, I had wakened to the danger in the girl and tried to put a mask on her, but by that time, it was too late. Meanwhile, the crazy cat had already got to me. When he was killed, for the first time in years, I hurt; and, hurting, I came back to life, whether I wanted to or not.
Now I was grateful for that return to life, because what I had been doing was wrong. It was against instinct and could only have led me nowhere finally, but to a desiccated hell of sheer loneliness that was at the opposite end of the spectrum from the contented isolation in which I now hung. This way I was alive. The other way, I would have been dead. The golden light had been first to give me the answer; but then, I had still struggled against it.
39
I was in my own bedroom of the summer palace. For a moment, the terrible thought came that the whole thing had only been some sort of dream. But then, I knew better.
I looked around and saw Ellen, standing beside my bed with Porniarsk and Dragger.
“Hello,” I said to Ellen, and my own physical voice echoed strangely in my ears. “I’m back.”
“Yes,” she answered.
It was the sort of answer I would have expected from her. I lay there, savoring the familiar goodness of it, feeling warm and comfortable, while the three of them stood watching me with a careful concern, as if I were some sort of carefully brooded egg which was about to hatch and which might produce something strange. I thought over half a dozen things to say; decided against all of them and simply held out my arms to Ellen, who came and hugged me.
“How did I get back here?” I asked, finally, when she let me go. Outside of feeling as weak as dishwater, I seemed to be fine.
“We brought your body here right away,” said Dragger, speaking twentieth century English now, as well as Obsidian ever had. “Just as soon as we caught you. We were barely in time to keep your identity from going through the lens.”
I stared at her.
“No, you weren’t,” I said.
At that, Dragger looked embarrassed, like someone caught in a lie, which surprised me. I would not have thought it possible for her to show that particular reaction; and I would not have expected myself to be able to interpret it, if she had. But there was no doubt about what I was seeing now.
“At any rate,” she said, almost defensively, “we trapped your mental energy pattern in time to keep it from going through. Something else could have gone through, that was a part of you, though what it would be, there’s no way of telling.”