Seventeen

The next day we were all sufficiently sedate to agree that it was not dangerous to go to Wordsworth's house for the reading of his poem. He stood in front of the hologram of the forest I mentioned, and the ten of us floated near the opposite wall.

If I had been at all disposed to laugh, the feeling was completely dispelled after the first couple of words. He spoke in a very deep, musical, mellifluent English, extremely clearly and distinctly, with just the right touch of emotion in his voice to be this side of being melodramatic; and at the same time, his graceful body curved and flowed into a thousand exquisite contours, each of which visually reinforced the emotional impact of what we could hear him say. And when you added to this the fact that these glorious shapes actually meant literally what we were hearing, the effect was simply overpowering. It reminded me of my childhood, when I once surprised my father as he was listening to Wagner's Die Meistersinger, and the tears were silently streaming down his face. After a while, you didn't see that beautiful body in front of the frozen forest; something happened, and the material world ripped open, and you looked directly into the face of God, and were afraid, and wanted time to stop at this moment forever, and yet prayed for it to end, because any more of it would kill you.

The English of what he said was the sonnet below; but this is the palest of pale ghosts of what the poem really was, because you have to see it simultaneously translated into the ballet or kaleidoscope that Wordsworth made of it, and hear it with the magnificent voice he put behind it:

When those who live on the limb of loveliness,

Whose world is on, not under, whose sea is air,

Descend the higher sea of nothingness

Into our worldly sea, and find us there,

Are they startled in discovering

That beauty lies, as well as on, below?

That sight is sound, that silent words can ring

As bright and loud as any they could know?

And we have learned to hear as well as see,

And our small world has opened into space;

The flower that unthought-of things can be

Has bloomed and shed its fragrance in this place.

How much, then, if such wonders can be so,

Remains somewhere for both of us to know?

I sat entranced for a while, and some of the others went up to congratulate Wordsworth. Before long, I joined them. Cleopatra was saying, "--quite striking," when Faraday broke in, "I thought the Acosmian went off a little better than the English, and there were a couple of uneven spots; but on the whole, I think you've got something."

"I think you're right," Wordsworth replied. "I started it as an interesting little problem, whether you could say the same thing in two languages and have them both be poetry at the same level, more or less. Translations usually work in one language or the other, but not both; so right away, I knew it had to be something original. It's quite a challenge, actually. You find the perfect word in Acosmian, and it wrecks the English line; or you've got just what you need in English, and the Acosmian falls apart. It's very interesting to do, really."

Then a red person--I think Michele called him Washington, but I'd never met him--said, "Well, keep at it; the visual context of the three 'seas' worked nicely, distinguishing and uniting them at the same time, even though the English was, I would think, in itself just a little pedestrian there; but there were a couple of other quite moving interrelations between the two languages."

"Still," said Faraday, "you can't let the additional dimension cramp your style too much. I would have thought that--" and he made a long series of shapes--" would have been more effective, for instance."

"Oh, of course," said Wordsworth, "but that would make the English line, 'Come through space from earth to us,' which is completely flat. You see the difficulty? Give me a chance; I'm not very familiar with the feel of English yet."

"Oh, I don't think he's denigrating it," said Cleopatra, always the diplomat. "It was quite good; more than just respectable in Acosmian alone. I'm sure he just meant--"

And so on. None of us, of course had anything to say in such a discussion, since we could only understand half of the poem. But a thought occurred to me, and after a while, I took Cleopatra aside and asked him, "Is it true what I understood from the poem, that you never did anything before with sound?"

He made his egg of chagrin, and I hastened to add, "I know all about how our speech first sounded in your ears; but what I mean is, is that the only context you've ever heard sounds in until we arrived?"

"Well, animals make similar sounds; and you understand that it never had occurred to us that anything meaningful could be done with it. With us, it was a mere inarticulate grunt, to be avoided in public whenever possible. Under those circumstances, one would not attempt to be creative with it. I hope you understand that this implies not the slightest pejorative attitude toward your speech, now that we have discovered its richness."

"No, of course not," I said, and suddenly it flashed across my mind why the beeps our flybys heard were sporadic, in spite of the fact that there were more than a hundred thousand potential beepers in this city alone. Evidently, St. Peter had just eaten something before we met him, and was alone, or we might have come back to earth thinking there was nothing in the Red Spot after all.

While I was musing about this, Cleopatra continued his apologizing; and when I eventually heard his voice again, my original purpose for bringing up the subject came back to me. "Then you know nothing of music," I interrupted.

"No," he said. "It has something to do with sound without words, does it not? At least, that is what I understand from my reading."

"Some of it has words, but the words aren't exactly the point. In fact, it's something like what Wordsworth was doing when you put words to it. Gentlemen!" I said. They all looked at me. "I want, on behalf of us from earth to say that, though none of us are poets, we found the poem in English to be very beautiful, and the whole effect overwhelming. But now it is my turn to propose an invitation. It is nearly time for transmissions to begin from the ship, and I would appreciate it if you could all come there and hear something the like of which has never before been sent up to you from earth. I would like you to listen to some music."

At that word, St. Peter and a number of others immediately showed interest. "I had been meaning to suggest that," he said, "except that there was always something else so fascinating to hear that I only remembered it at times when I was away from you. I am overjoyed that you thought of it."

While we were going over to the ship, I was discussing with Mike and Michele what we should ask earth to play first. Obviously, with their brains, it would have to be something far from simple, and Michele finally said, "Why waste time? Let's start with the best. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony." As soon as she said it, there was no question.

So I got into the ship, took off my space suit, and typed to earth, "Take off all transmissions of literature for a while, and send us on two channels a stereo version of Beethoven's Ninth."

While we were waiting the half hour for the transmission to come back, I explained a little about what music was, and about how Beethoven, the composer of the piece, tried to give in music an aesthetic interpretation of what life on earth was and could be. It wasn't a very good analysis of the symphony, since I had to do everything from memory; but it filled up the half hour, and then Beethoven himself began to sing to this new world.

It was interesting to watch them. First, they were in the egg of attention, and then gradually as the themes began to work themselves out, they elongated into the exclamation point of their smile. One or two made remarks to each other from time to time, but very brief ones; most, however, just blossomed into their new shapes spontaneously. Finally, when the choral part of the last movement came, they all turned into a shape something like a tulip-plant--which I had seen at one moment in those listening to Wordsworth's poem--and remained immobile in that state until the end, something quite unusual for an Acosmian. I had, in fact, never seen anyone absolutely still before.

When it was over, they remained stationary for about half a minute, and then began talking excitedly to each other in Acosmian only, completely oblivious to our presence. I could see them and converse with them though I was in the ship; and soon Cleopatra, who was the most sollicitous of all for the feelings of others, became aware of us, and broke into English. "It is poetry stripped naked!" he cried. "It is a dinner in sound! Thank you so much for revealing this great treasure of yours to us!"

"You're more than welcome," I said, a little puzzled at his notion of comparing it to a dinner, until it dawned on me that they derived the same kind of abstract satisfaction from tastes that we do from sounds. It was this comparison, actually, that later made me take gourmet dining seriously after I got back to earth; and there is something analogous to music in it, though even the gourmets haven't done much in the way of themes and variations in a given dinner.

"Do you suppose we could hear it again, now that we know what to listen for?" asked Wordsworth.

"Oh, no!" said Cleopatra, "We have put them to too much trouble already!"

"Nonsense," I said. "It's no trouble at all. In fact, it gives me great pleasure to be able to tell earth that there's at least one thing that you didn't completely catch the first time you heard it." I typed back to Jonathan, "Play it again, Sam."

"You'll have to wait another half hour, though, for the message to get there and back." This, of course, presented no difficulty to them. St. Peter had told me that they didn't mind waiting for something or putting it off, because eventually they would get to it before they stopped changing, since they just wouldn't stop changing before it happened, whatever it was, even if it took the equivalent of a thousand years.

But of course, in the case of us, there was just a chance that what they learned from earth might be unique, though they all expressed hope that there would be more of us to return to Jupiter after we ourselves left. In any case, it was flattering that they were all anxious to hear the piece over again.

While we waited, they discussed the symphony and the interrelation of the themes, when I suddenly heard the opening bars coming through again. I looked at the clock, and it was only fifteen minutes; earth had barely had time to hear my message, let alone send one back. I thought for a moment that earth had decided for some reason to repeat the transmission on its own, when Wordsworth said, "That's really hard! It must take a tremendous amount of practice! No wonder you find speaking so easy."

He had been humming the first few bars himself.

"But we don't sing that!" I said. "That music is made by over a hundred people, all playing different musical instruments; and the singing parts probably have two hundred or more people singing all together."

"Ah, that accounts for one aspect of the complexity, at least," he said. "It's as well I didn't realize that, or I might never have tried to imitate it. But of course, in the last analysis, it's just a color, and it's a question of matching it. It's a little more easily said than done, however."

"A color? Of course! Then you see these things that we hear. They're the same thing as light for you. We use a different sense altogether."

"Yes, I was aware of that," he said; "but of course you do not perceive what you call radio signals at all, do you?"

"Not directly, no."

"Something puzzles me," said Newton or Faraday, I forget which, "It was evident that at the end there were words, but I couldn't recognize them. I thought we had all your words."

"I think a little secret is about to be revealed," said St. Peter with a smile.

"Well," said Michele, "you see, that's German and not English. English isn't the only language that people on earth speak, as you've probably found out from your reading. But we only sent up things in English or in English translations, because--well, because we don't know very much of the other languages, and we didn't like the idea of you trying to talk to us in Russian or Swahili or something, and expecting us to understand what you said."

"Oh, I understand," said Faraday--I guess it was Faraday after all--"But would you object to our learning the other languages, if we confined our conversations with you to English? It would be interesting to see if there is any interrelation among them."

"There must be," said St. Peter. "I detect that English is made up of at least three different languages, and from the little I've heard of it, I suspect that German is one of them. 'Freunde' is obviously similar to 'friend,' and 'diese' must have developed into 'these' or perhaps 'this,' and 'toene' must mean 'tones' or something like it. From the context, I would suspect that the first line translates into something like, 'Oh friends, not these tones (or sounds, perhaps); rather let us--something or other--' referring to the joyous melody that he begins to sing."

"Amazing!" I said. "That's practically perfect!"

"Elementary, my dear Watson," he replied, and I knew another book that he had read. If a little learning was a dangerous thing, a lot of learning could be damned annoying.

The result of this new discovery was that two channels were from then on devoted exclusively to music (which they heard at the fast speed and then slowed down for their own recordings from the initial coins they produced--and very accurate they were too), and another channel was devoted to grammars and dictionaries of other languages, and then to the great foreign literature of the world in the original.

St. Peter told me later that he was happy the little accident about the German had occurred; he had wondered why literary critics had got so excited about Dante and Goethe and others, and now that he had them in the original, he was able to see the reason.

Wordsworth now began to devote full time to becoming a symphony orchestra complete with chorus--though he decided to begin with something simple, like being only a string quartet. Eventually, he told me, he planned to resume his putting Acosmian and English together, adding music to it, and perhaps even drama; but that would take a long time to develop.

After a week or two, he said to me that it would be a great help to him if he could come back to earth with us, to see just how we made these marvelous sounds.

I expressed some misgivings.

"Is it forbidden for you to take us back with you?" he asked.

"Oh, no!" I said. "In fact, at the beginning, we were wondering in a kind of joking way if we could persuade any of you to come with us. But--"

"Fine, then," he said. "You need no further persuasion. I am ready."

"I think you had better listen to him, Wordsworth," said St. Peter. "He has a certain prudence."

"Well, in the first place," I said, "I'm not sure if anyone will ever be able to get back here to Jupiter. Our flight is an odd one, and it might be dangerous to make another voyage, because the principle that allows us to make it might become public, and for various reasons that might not be good."

"Oh, I see. But I don't need to come back. When I stop changing, I'll be able to tell the people here all I know."

"Well, but the fact is that we live in an atmosphere of oxygen, and you live in hydrogen; and oxygen and hydrogen explode when they interact. I don't know what would happen to you people if you got into an oxygen environment."

"What do you think, St. Peter?" he asked.

"If we knew how our bodies were constituted," he answered, "we might be able to discover the answer. But as it is, I rather think that staying here would be the wiser course."

My eyes widened. "You don't know how your bodies are constituted? How can that be? You know everything else."

"It is the other of our prohibitions," answered St. Peter. "We are not to attempt to go beyond the wall, and we must not try to find the constitution of our own bodies."

"But why not? I can understand the one, but not the other."

"We do not know."

"But can't you ask Caesar why? You could tell him you need to know if it would be safe for Wordsworth to come with us." I turned to Wordsworth. "We'd be happy to take you back, if we knew it was safe."

St. Peter answered, "But these prohibitions do not come from Caesar. They were given, tradition says, at the very beginning by our Awesome Friend."

"Oh," I said. "Then I guess that settles it--at least as far as finding out about yourselves is concerned. But if you want to try coming with us anyway, it's fine with us, except that I can't guarantee we'd be able to bring you back."

"I will have to consider it prayerfully," said Wordsworth. "I would like very much to go, but it might be the equivalent of going beyond the wall."

The next day, St. Peter and I were alone together, and I asked him if he thought Wordsworth would actually come.

"I really cannot say," he said. "This is the first time, really, when we have ever had to be what you might call 'casuistical' about anything. Our two prohibitions have been so simple and so clear that, as far as I know, there has never arisen an instance where one might or might not be violating one of them. I am sure that Wordsworth's final decision will be the one which our Awesome Friend will approve of, since He knows that Wordsworth would never try to do anything but what is acceptable to him. But what that decision will turn out to be is not something I would venture to predict.

"You mentioned that these prohibitions were contained in a tradition. Do you have stories or legends dealing with that tradition as we do?" I asked.

"As a matter of fact, we have a legend that is very much like what I read in Genesis. I had been meaning to make you acquainted with it, but whenever I thought of it, something else had come up to displace it from my attention. Perhaps you would like to hear it now."

"By all means."

"You will have to forgive my attempts at translation; I am no Wordsworth, and it is very beautiful in Acosmian and deserves better than what I suspect you are going to hear.

"'In the beginning, there was the Master, but there was nothing that was a slave. And the Master said, "Let there be water," and the water was, and the water obeyed its Master. And the Master said, "Let there be light to enlighten the waters," and the light too obeyed the Master and came into being. And the Master said, "Let there be a ring of vegetation to confine the waters and the light"; and this too obeyed, and so it was.

"'And then the Master made to himself a person, to be a friend and servant, but not a slave; and he placed the person in the light and in the waters, inside the ring of vegetation, and the person grew and was glad. And the Awesome Friend said, "I place you in the light. You may move as you wish in the light; but outside the ring of vegetation you may not move." And the servant swam in the light, and was glad.

"'And the person moved to the ring of vegetation, and beheld it, and the vegetation said to him, "Why do you behold us?" And he answered, "Because you are fair to behold." And the vegetation answered, and said, "Far more fair is that which is on the other side of us." And the person answered and said, "That may be, but I am forbidden to behold it."

"'And the vegetation replied to him, "That is because the Master wishes you to remain ignorant. He fears that if you knew what was beyond me, you would be His equal, and He would no longer have power over you. He knows that you will discover others like yourself, and He wishes you to be alone."

"'Now the person was lonely, though happy, and he also longed to know. But he said to the vegetation, "He calls Himself my Friend, but he made me and is my Master nonetheless. If he wishes me to be alone and ignorant, I am content so to be." And the person turned away from the grass, which fell silent and has remained silent to this day.

"'Straightway, the Awesome Friend appeared to His creature and said, "Have you been speaking to the vegetation?" And the creature answered, "I have." And the Friend asked, "Then why are you here, and not beyond the wall of vegetation?" and the creature answered, "Because you commanded me to remain here."

"'And the Master said, "Well done, my good and faithful servant. Because you have been faithful in one small thing, I shall reward you in many things. Because you were content to be ignorant in obedience to me, you shall have great wisdom. Because you have been content to be alone in obedience to me, you shall have many companions like yourself, and shall father all manner of creatures lesser than yourself, over which you shall yourself be master and friend, as I am Master and Friend of both you and them. And because you have obeyed me and kept my commandment, you shall live forever, and after creating your own self unto your own image, you shall come to be with Me and we will be companions for all the endless ages."

"'"Now," said the Master, "come unto me," and the creature came. And the Master smote him, and divided him into many parts; and the parts grew, some into plants, some into animals, and some into persons like unto himself. "Now be happy and rejoice," said the Master, "and multiply and fill your world according to your own wisdom which I have given unto you. I give you but one further commandment for the present; you must not attempt to penetrate the wall of vegetation, nor must you attempt to penetrate the mystery of your own body. Animals and plants you may study, but your own body you must not dissect or mutilate, for your own body and those of your companions are sacred to me, for I shall dwell within all those who invite me."'"

I remained silent for a long time.

Finally, I said, with tears in my eyes, "The parallel with Genesis is remarkable, isn't it? I wonder if we could have been like you if Eden had gone the other way."

"Who knows?" said St. Peter. "There are obvious differences, and each, of course, is a tale told to make a point, which I believe is no less true for being poetically stated. But as I study you and your literature, I find that you die, yet have a belief in a bodiless life after death, which does not make sense for a creature like me who is an embodied spirit. You remember that I was startled to find that you could die; but you did not tell me about the life after death."

"Not everyone believes there is one."

"I am aware of that. We 'believe' also, of course, since we do not know what actually happens when we stop changing, and none of us have actually seen our Awesome Friend--before then, that is. I gather that Michael does not believe. Do you?"

"I don't know. Sometimes I think I do, but sometimes it seems too fantastic. Our life is hard, and it sounds like something made up so that we'll be able to bear it. It's too good to be true."

"Having seen me, perhaps you should consider that it might be too good not to be true."

"I certainly hope so," I said.

"And then there is the fact that your emotions--which are the same mind as your reason--war against your reason, as your Paul said, and make you do what you do not wish to do. This makes no sense either. It sounds as if there was some kind of rebellion, and the punishment for it was that your own self should rebel against itself, until finally your bodily self escaped entirely from your mind, and you died, living only a mental life afterward--until, as one of your religions holds, the Master reunites the mind and the body and you are finally a true unit."

"When you put it that way, it sounds reasonable--if we are really embodied spirits. I never gave it any serious thought before; to me it was just a story that would be nice if it were true."

"Well, in one sense it is that, I would think; but that does not mean that it could not be a poetic way to state a profound truth. It explains to me, at any rate, why, no matter what system of government you people invent, it always seems to be corrupted.

"You have always seemed to blame the system of society; but as I see you people, I would think that any system of society would be ultimately unworkable because of the people in it. For us, any system succeeds."

"You don't leave us much hope," I said.

"I must confess I do not see a great deal of hope in social systems," he answered. "We live in harmony because reason rules us, and we are not at war within ourselves. We need not be commanded to do what is for the common good, since we recognize that this is ultimately for the good of each of us, and none of us puts immediate benefits over a greater long-range good. None, that is, except the unfortunate people, and they can do no harm to anyone except themselves.

"But in your case, to expect people to act for the common good often means having them act against their individual inclinations and even benefit, at least in the short term, but even sometimes in the long run; and this is irrational for anyone.

"No, I suspect that an ideal society is possible only for an ideal people, because only a person who is certain that he will succeed in everything irrespective of what happens can regard his own concerns as unimportant and yield to society's wishes."

"But you wouldn't say we shouldn't try to improve things, would you?"

"No, of course not. I suppose what I am telling you is that if I were one of you, I would not expect any social system to do more than create as few difficulties as possible. Until the vast majority of your people can regard themselves and their own personal interests as unimportant objectively, I see no realistic way in which a social system can be more than a check on inhuman behavior; and a poor check at that.

"But how can we consider ourselves unimportant?"

"Ah, that is the task, is it not?"

"You know something? Mike told me that he finds your way of life boring. He says there's no challenge in it; nothing to fight against."

"I can see that he might say that, from what I know of him. He is a good example of the fact that if you had on earth the ideal, many of you would be stifled by it. You would have to change your nature back to its natural condition--or perhaps I should say its logical condition--even in order to be able to appreciate the ideal for what it is."

"You don't paint a very pleasant picture for us."

"I would not give up hope. Perhaps it is true that the Awesome Friend has in fact become one of you, just so that each of you may have the possibility of changing his attitude. I think if this is the case, then individuals who take advantage of this gift can live lives of achievement such as ours.

"Perhaps, in a sense, you are more fortunate than we, if this is the case. We develop into happiness, and you would win it; and it must thus mean more to you than to us if you do achieve it. And there is that special companionship with the Master that you would have and we lack, for all our friendship with Him."