but where to begin-if you are not standing still, but skating across eternity
in total darkness, with meteor-like lights flashing all around you? I hunted
through myself for something to hang to, and found nothing. Then Ellen came to
my rescue.
"Remember?" she said. "When you first found me, I was lost like that; and I
found a way back."
She was not speaking out loud to me. She was not even talking in my miad, as
she had as I hung in space, normal space, just before I had come here. It was
the Ellen which had become a part of me, speaking to me out of a corner of
myself, as Sunday had come bounding back from death to hug me with nonexistent
paws, out of a corner of myself where he had been all this time, without my
realizing,
"If I did it, you can do it," Ellen-that-was-me said. "Do ft the way I did it
before. Take what there is, and build from there."
She was right, of course; and I drew strength from her. If she had been able
to do it once, she was able to do it again. Therefore, I could do it, as long
as she was part of me. I drew certainty from her and looked about once more at
what I had.
I had the darkness and the lights. The lights were totally incomprehensible;
but with Ellen's certainty that I could build with them, I started to watch
them. They were too momentary to form patterns... or were they?
I Seated, watching; and the watching became a studying. All that underwent
change fell into patterns of alteration, eventually. It was a long tune
resolving to my understanding, but finally, I began to see the elements of
patterns in the streaking lights. They were not entirely random after alL
If they had patterns, they were part of a larger identity in which such
patterns could be held, a larger identity which was the universe of their
context-whether that universe was as small as an atom of an atom, or larger
than all other universes put together. If this was so, then there was a
relationship between the universe that held them and the patterns that it
held.
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.
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"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 onry 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 bad 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. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]