worst of sins; therefore it is better to cut out one’s tongue than to speak the word ‘I.’
As this reality gripped me, I was transported in space and time. I shivered and opened my eyes to the mountain mists settling over Alexandar’s stone house on Simoom. I was in a tiny, bare, immaculate room with grey slate walls, and I looked at a young boy kneeling in front of me. I was Alexandar of Simoom, and the boy was Soli.
‘Do you see?’ the Tycho asked me. And he placed in my mind Alexandar’s memory of his son’s austere, bitter education:
‘Do you understand, Leopold? You must never say that word again.’
‘What word, Father?’
‘Don’t play games, do you understand?’
‘Yes, Father, but please don’t slap me again.’
‘And who do you think you are to be worthy of punishment?’
‘Nobody, Father … nothing.’
‘That is true, and since it is true, there is no reason for you to be spoken to, is there?’
‘The silence is terrible, Father, worse than being punished. Please, how can you teach me in silence?’
‘And why should you be taught anything at all?’
‘Because mathematics is the only true reality, but … but how can that be? If we are really nothing, we cannot create mathematics, can we?’
‘You have been told, haven’t you? Mathematics is not created; it is not a thing like a tree or a ray of light; nor is it a creation of mind. Mathematics is. It is all that is. You may think of God as the timeless, eternal universe of mathematics.’
‘But how can it … if it is … I just don’t under –’
‘What did you say?’
‘I don’t understand!’
‘And still you profane. You won’t be spoken to again.’
‘I, I, I, I, I … Father? Please.’
I did not understand how the Entity had acquired the memories of Alexandar of Simoom. (Or perhaps they were Soli’s memories?) Nor did I learn how She knew so much of the even stranger realities of the autists and the brain-maiming aphasics. Strange as these realities were, however – and it was very strange to enter the internal, self-painted thoughtscapes of an autist – they were human realities. Human thought is really all the same. Thoughts may differ from person to person and from group to group, but the way we think is limited by the deep structures of our all too human brains. This is both a curse and a blessing. We are all trapped within the bone coffins of our same brains, imprisoned in thoughtways evolved over a million years. But it is a comfortable prison of familiar white walls, whose air, however stale, we can breathe. If we would escape our prison only for an instant, our new way of seeing, of knowing, would leave us gasping. There would be glories and excruciating beauty and – as I was soon to learn – madness.
‘Okay,’ the Tycho said to me, ‘you grasp Alexandar of Simoom and Iamme, the solipsist. And now, the alien realities.’
The Tycho – or rather the phased light waves that were the Tycho – began to blur. The redness of his round nose deepened into violet as the nose itself broadened into a bristly snout. Like a piece of pulled clay, the snout stretched out into a long, supple trunk. His forehead bulged like a bloodfruit swollen with rotten gases, and his chin and jowls hardened into a boxlike organ lined with dozens of narrow, pinkish slits. Suddenly, his robe vanished like smoke. His naked body began to change. Balls of round muscle and brown and scarlet fur replaced the Tycho’s grey, sagging flesh. His ponderous testes and membrum withered like seaweed and shrunk, vanishing within the red fold of skin between the thick legs. I waited and stared at the alien thing being born within the pit of my ship. Soon I recognized her for what she was: an imago of one of that gentle (if cunning) race known as the Friends of Man.
The alien raised her trunk, and the pink slits of her speech organ vibrated and quivered, released a rank spray of molecules. I smelled esthers and ketones and flowers, the stench of rotting meat mingled with the sweetness of snow dahlia. In a way, with her trunk entwined with the blue helix of a master courtesan, she reminded me of Soli’s friend (and, some said, mistress) Jasmine Orange.
Behold Jasmine Orange.
I beheld Jasmine Orange through her own eyes: I became Jasmine Orange. I was at once Jasmine Orange and Mallory Ringess, looking at an alien through human eyes and, through my trunk, smelling the essence of a human being. Suddenly, my consciousness left my human body altogether, and there were no colours. I watched the scarlets and browns of my fur fade to light and dark grey. I looked across the pit of my ship and saw a bearded, young, human pilot staring at me; I saw myself. I listened for the sound of the Entity’s voice, but there was no sound inside or out because I was as deaf as ice. I did not really know what sound was. I knew only smell, the wonderful, mutable world of free-floating scent molecules. There was jasmine and the tang of crushed oranges as I spoke my lovely name. I curled my trunk, sucking in the fragrance of garlic and ice-wine as I greeted the human, Mallory Ringess, and he greeted me. How alien, how bizarre, how hopelessly stupid seemed his way of representing single units of meaning by a discrete progression of linear sounds, whatever sounds really were! How limited to put sounds together, like beads on a string! How could human beings think at all when they had to progress from sound to sound and thought to thought one word at a time like a bug crawling along the beads of a necklace? How very slow!
Because I wanted to speak with the pilot Ringess, I raised my trunk and released a cloud of pungent odours that was to a human sentence what I supposed a symphony must be to a child’s jingle. But he had no nose and he understood so little. Yes, Ringess, I told him, the scent-symbols are not fixed as, for example, the sounds in the word ‘purple’ are fixed; they do not always mean the same thing. Isn’t meaning as mutable as the smells of the sea? Can you sense the configuration of the minute pyramids of mint and vanilla bean and musk in this cloud of odours? And the meanings – do you know that the smells of jasmine and olathe and orange might mean, ‘I am Jasmine Orange, the lover of Man,’ or, ‘The sea is calm tonight,’ depending on the arrangement and the proximity of the unit pyramids to the other molecules of scent? Can you grasp meaning as a whole? And the logic of structure? Do you understand the complexities of language, my Ringess?
Ideas blossom outward like arctic poppies in the sun growing into other ideas crosslinked and connected by pungent association links, and link to link the smells of roasting meat and wet fur flow outward and sideways and down, and blend into fields redolent with the sweet perfume of strange new logic structures and new truths that you must inhale like cool mint to overwhelm and obliterate your bitter, straightforward ideas of logic and causality and time. Time is not a line; the events of your life are rather like a jungle of smells forever preserved in a bottle. One sniff and you’ll sense instantly the entire jungle rather than the fragrances of individual flowers. Do you understand the subtleties? Do you dare open the bottle? No, you have no nose, and you don’t understand.
He understands all that the structure of his brain will let him understand.
I understood that a man who dwelt too long inside an alien brain would go mad. I closed my eyes and shook my head as I pinched my nostrils shut against the mind-twisting smells flooding the pit of my ship. My eyes, my nostrils! – when I opened them, I was human again. The alien imago was gone, though the aftersmells of vanilla bean and wormwood
