Sixteen

I couldn't decide whether to tell Michele about this new development or not, since she had enough trouble with Mike already, and there was no sense adding to it. In any case, if anyone were to try to wheedle out of Mike what his relationship had been with Janice, Michele would be the last person who ought to try--and given the kind of person she was, she might just jump in and ask, which would mess up everything if there was actually anything there to mess up.

I couldn't figure out a way to do any probing myself, unless I could somehow steer the conversation in a direction that allowed for a casual mention of Janice; but with Mike's being as stand-offish (even with me, now, for some reason) as he was, the likelihood that he'd get into a confiding mood was slimmer than ever. He apparently had Newton to tell his troubles to, just as I had St. Peter and Michele had Cleopatra.

As to the problem of Janice's leaving us a little present of some explosive somewhere, it worried me a good deal; but if it hadn't blown up by now, when we'd already extended our stay three weeks beyond what anyone could have figured would be our farthest limits, then it was in a position where it wasn't going to blow up. There was no sense getting the other two people into a tizzy because of it, and possibly wasting our time tearing the ship apart looking for something that wasn't there. Maybe Janice was just a dupe of these people, who thought she might be useful and found out she wasn't.

As soon as I got back outside, St. Peter noticed that I was preoccupied, and asked me about it; but I told him that it was basically just a personal matter.

"It has nothing to do with any difficulty we have brought upon you, I hope," he said.

"Oh, no!" I hastened to assure him. "It's connected with earth."

"I am sorry to hear it, both for your sake and ours," he replied. "It would be a great pleasure for me to assist you in alleviating any distress you might have. If ever I can help you in any way, please ask. Forgive me for stressing this, but please do; I don't want to add to your discomfort by alluding to the subject again, but I want to give you my assurance that we are ready and even eager to do whatever we can for you; and we might even be able to assist you in ways you might not realize."

"I'm sure of it, and if there's ever something I think you could help me on, I will ask. I really will."

"I'll be in a better position to help, of course, after I stop changing; though at the moment, I don't plan to do that for some time yet. Still, one can never tell. But you and I have become good friends, Paul; and since our condition is so different from yours, I'd like to tell you now, to prepare you for it, that if I stop changing and you are still alive, I can help you even on earth, or wherever you are. You see, after we stop changing, the whole lives of all our friends are eternally present to us; and though they cannot affect us, we can affect them; and our eternal gesture for their benefit appears to them at the proper time. It often occurs that at these moments, we appear to the people we are helping--though no one else can see us, of course."

I was dumbfounded by this revelation. "You mean," I said, "that I might be down there on earth twenty years from now, and suddenly see you floating in the air somewhere, giving me advice?" I pictured myself walking down the street with a couple of friends and saying, "Pardon me, there's a friend of mine from Jupiter over there, and he'd like to say a few words to me."

"Do not be alarmed," he said. "I will be circumspect if it happens. I am happy now that I told you, since it might startle you if you had had no warning."

"It certainly would have!" I said.

"Well, as I mentioned, the likelihood that I will stop changing before you die is rather slight. In any case, if what I seem to gather from some of your religious and philosophical treatises is true, then after you die, you and I will be together again eternally, as well as with all the rest of our friends. I find that very gratifying to contemplate."

"Well, I hope you're right," I answered. Even after so short a time--a matter of three and a half weeks--I was already beginning to look on parting with St. Peter and three or four of the other Acosmians with a good deal of regret. And we were already beyond half of our stay.

"Perhaps I can do something for you now," said St. Peter, musingly. "I would like to show you our church."

"You have a church?"

"Certainly. It is a building which, inside, has an atmosphere conducive to calmness of spirit, I think. We generally go there, in fact, when we decide to stop changing; it has a special room for that purpose; and the ambiance of the place tends to assuage any pains our friends might have because of our temporary separation from them."

"Do you worship in it?"

"Of course. That is its main function. We do not call the One we worship 'God,' of course; our name for him is"--and he made a series of shapes--"which roughly might translate into 'Our Awesome Friend.' Often we go there singly; but frequently also in groups; and on rare occasions, it is said, there is a call for everyone in the city to convene there. This has never happened in my lifetime, however, nor in the memory of anyone I know."

"It must be an immense building, then," I said, thinking of all the people there were in the city.

"It is our largest."

"Oh, you mean that huge stadium-like thing in the very middle of that beautiful courtyard by Cicero's house? The one that's the only building on its trunk?"

"Yes, that is the one."

"I was wondering what it was, and why you never mentioned it."

"Well, of course, it is sacred to us, and we do not like to show it simply as a curiosity; we have the attitude that someone ought to be properly disposed before he enters it, since, though in a sense our Awesome Friend is anywhere or everywhere, still in that place we relate ourselves most closely to Him. But I think your disposition is such that it might do you good to spend some time inside it."

"I'd be very grateful if you'd show me. I think you're right," I answered. I was worried, and not even sure if I had anything to be worried about, really. What I really needed was a meditative place to find peace of soul, so that I could think rationally again.

We wound about the streets, and came without much delay to the place. It was essentially a huge dome, rather like an Acosmian ceiling, but curving down parabolically to the level of the floor, which was more or less flat and horizontal--a circle which did not meet the walls, but left a rim wide enough for three people to pass abreast easily between the floor and the wall.

Once inside, I found that the floor was not really flat, but curved down toward the middle, so that the impression you got was rather like being inside an immense egg.

Like all churches, it made one want to talk in hushed tones. Floating about inside were fifteen or twenty Acosmians, obviously intent upon their prayer. Strangely, the inside of the building was even brighter than the outside; and this gave me an even greater sense of awe than I have ever experienced because of the dimness of the churches on earth.

There seemed to be a chamber at the very top, almost enclosed, but with an opening from which streamed a blinding white light. "That is the room we enter when we stop changing," said St. Peter. It was the only artificially lighted place in all of Acosmia, to my knowledge.

But the light inside the church proper was not white. There was white light fanning out from the room above; but there were other areas of the building where one found oneself in deep ultramarine, or brilliant scarlet, or green, or yellow; and I discovered that this effect was due to prisms set in the floor in a pattern that was the first syllable of the name of the Awesome Friend in Acosmian. This also was unique on Jupiter; nowhere else did I ever see anything transparent.

We spent almost an hour there, not saying a word, each lost in his own thoughts; and when I came out, I felt relieved, even though nothing had actually been resolved. Emerging, I asked about the prisms.

"Yes, they are beautiful, are they not?" said St. Peter. "Many generations ago, a famous chemist discovered how to make a transparent material. At that time, we were reconstructing the church, and he made those prisms with his material, which we then set in the floor. They seemed so appropriate that we decided that the material should be used only for that purpose, and so he destroyed the formula."

It was getting late, and I thanked St. Peter for bringing me to the church, and turned to go back home to the ship. When I got there, Michele, who was the other one not sleeping during this period, was obviously bursting with something she had found out.

"No, not now," she answered the look on my face, "because I want Mike to hear it too when he wakes up. Anyway, he has to hear it, because it involves an invitation."

She permitted herself meanwhile to listen to my description of the church, and of the strange implications involved in the state the Acosmians get into after they stop changing. She showed interest, and made the proper noises at the proper times, but all the while she had a little grin on her face; and while I was typing my report to earth, she indulged in a private giggle or two over the cards she was jotting notes on. I am often tempted to read that report I made; I am willing to bet it bears very little relation to what happened to me during the period, and it probably has some interesting variations on the English language.

Finally, we heard Mike moving above us, evidently going directly to get into his space suit and let himself out. "Mike!" she called. "Before you go, could you come down here a minute? I have some information that might be useful in new situations."

"What's this all about?" he said as he emerged from the now-always-open hatch of the space craft. I had expected him to be surly, but he just seemed interested.

"I bet I know at least one thing that's on that little coin St. Peter gave us for introducing ourselves to the people we meet; and I know why they think the way we talk is so funny."

"Why is it?"

"You'll have to let me lead up to this to get the beauty of it. Cleopatra asked me this morning if I'd mind taking a day off and going to a poetry recital with him. I said, 'Of course! I'd be delighted to go.' It was my first real date with an Acosmian, come to think of it.

"Anyway, right after I'd accepted, he got all apologetic, the way he does, and said that I might be bored, because I wouldn't be able to understand it; but Wordsworth--he's the one St. Peter showed us the house of that day, Paul--was a friend of his, and he rather rarely did such things, but he had an experiment in mind, and he'd like one of us to see a real Acosmian poetry reading first, just to get a first impression--and so on and so on, until I finally told him that I was really interested in going anyway, and it would be a relief to get away from biology for a while; and in the end I convinced him that I'd rather do it than anything else in the world, and he agreed to take me.

"Well anyway, just before we went into the little hall down the street--the one below Caesar's club, you know--he took me aside, and said, very politely, would I mind very much if we didn't talk when we were inside.

"Of course I said I wouldn't, thinking that he didn't want me to talk so he wouldn't be distracted; but he went all shapeless with relief, so I could see that there was something more to it. So I asked why he wanted me to be quiet, and he immediately got all embarrassed and speechless, and turned himself into an egg the way they do; and at first he wouldn't tell me anything at all, which made me more curious than ever.

"Finally, I told him that it seemed to me that there was something bad about what I was doing, and maybe I'd better not go in at all, and I'd let you people know that we were all supposed to keep silence whenever Acosmians had something important to say to each other, and he said, 'Oh, no! That is not it at all! Not at all! No--' these are his exact words '--it is just that, well, there will be some people there who have not met any of you, and if they should suddenly hear you speaking without being prepared for it, it might spoil the effect of the poetry for them.'

"Then it occurred to me that every time someone heard us talking for the first time they thought it was funny, and so I asked him about it, and he got embarrassed again, and finally said, 'Well, you see, we had never heard anyone speak in that way before, and in our culture, the noise you make is something we do that is not considered very polite. There is nothing evil or wrong about it, you understand, and there are other cultures which consider it not improper; but we were always brought up to think of it as--well, vulgar. And then to hear it used as a language, of course, amuses us at first. It is a silly prejudice; but we have it, and if a person is not prepared, he might take it wrongly, especially at a poetry recital.'

"So naturally I asked when they make these vulgar noises that we use for speech, and he hemmed and hawed and then said, 'It is a sound that we tend to make naturally after eating, especially if we have eaten overmuch.'"

Mike whooped and roared, and said, "You mean we talk by burping? Or farting, maybe! I suppose with them a burp and a fart would be the same thing. Fart me a play of Shakespeare, will you Paul?" He collapsed into hysterical laughter.

And then I thought of St. Peter, solemnly floating outside our ship, listening intently to Hamlet being played from earth on our fart-machine. It was too much.

It was several minutes before any of us could do anything but scream for help at how sore our sides were. We were all somewhat tense, I suppose, which added to the helplessness of the laughing fit.

Finally, after we had more or less subsided into groans and sobs, Michele managed to say, "It's all very well for you, but I had to keep a straight face in front of Cleopatra, or he would have been mortified to death; and I couldn't help myself, so I just turned off my radio so he couldn't hear me and tried to look solemn while I could feel the laughter coming out my ears!

"And we went into the poetry reading right away, and there was Wordsworth, in his yellow-green, slowly making himself the most beautiful pattern of shapes you could imagine, with his eyes following the general contours of his body, and--well, first of all, I'd be totally captivated by it, and that it meant something, but then I'd think what would happen if I said something, and then I'd realize that the patterns of dots all over him were his eyes, and I'd imagine looking around with your eyes all over your stomach, and I just couldn't stand it! I tried--"

"Stop! Stop!" screamed Mike. "Oh, it hurts! Oh, my side!"

That set us off again, of course. It was a good ten minutes later, with all of us totally exhausted, that Michele, after a dozen or so false starts which got us laughing again, was able to say, "Well, I hope we've got it all out of our systems, because it turns out that Wordsworth has been working on writing poetry in Acosmian and English at the same time, and he wants to invite us over to his house tomorrow (we referred to the periods outside the ship as "days") to give us a private reading, along with St. Peter and Cleopatra and Newton and a couple of others. It's really very beautiful, and if I hadn't had that silly notion of Cleopatra's in my head--" At this we all broke down briefly again, but finally, she continued, "No, I mean it; it's really entrancing. You wait till you see it."

Well of course, that day St. Peter must have thought me completely insane. Just the day before, I had been troubled and morose, and in need of the solace of the church; and that day, he'd say something, and I'd imagine him listening to philosophical farts from earth, and I'd collapse with helpless laughter.

Finally, I explained the situation to him, and we both agreed that it was mainly due to the strain we were under, and that it was a good thing we had a day before we had to go to the poetry reading, or we would have ruined the whole thing for everyone.

"Why didn't you tell us?" I asked.

"Well, at first we did not know how you would take it; and then later, it began to seem more natural for us to speak in this way, and we thought no more about it. And your language does have its beauty, however we might have originally regarded it. It just goes to show that physical functions in themselves are neither beautiful nor ugly; it all depends on the attitude we take to them."