Starburst

28

SOMETIMES I WALK AMONG YOU IN A FORM OF FLESH AND sometimes hover like an airy cloud. My name is Willis Becklund, and I died twenty years ago. More or less. I don't mean more or less twenty years, I mean more or less "ago." When you stand where I stand it is not easy to see what is "ago."

Since it is important that you understand what I am saying, let me give you an illustration. When I was alive and standing on the face of the Earth, I could see ahead of me and behind, but only as far as nothing got in the way. To see farther I had to rise higher; but the higher I rose the more distant what I saw became, and the harder to make out. Thus in space. So in time. I am on neither side of Chandrasekhar's other limit, but above it as you might say, and you would be astonished at how tiny you all look from here. Multiplying embryos in one direction. Moldering corpses in the other. And I am not always sure which way I am facing since, once you rid yourself of the myth of causality, it makes no difference at all.

—No."That is not true. It makes a difference.

I think the difference it makes will surprise you, for it is no more than public opinion. Let me find an analogy. You can, if you wish, paint your body green, dress in your wife's undergarments, and make indecent gestures before a mirror. Do you do this, ever? I wouldn't be surprised if you did, in the privacy of your own home. But if you were to do it, say, at a baseball game or in the middle of a veterans' convention, that would surprise me. You would not. You could. But you wouldn't, for you adapt to the conventions of the group. And so do we all. Even II The event that cost me my physical body gave me in exchange a kind of freedom I had never imagined, but for twenty years I stayed with my fellows and my progeny and was dragged along with them into their myths.

I could, of course, have followed my whilom wife Ann.

There was a good reason why I did not, however. The reason was simply cowardice. None of us dragonflies can ever come back, but once in a great while one of us—I am one—can see just a bit of the other side, and it terrifies me.

So when we came back to Earth I found a chance and I seized it. I escaped. I stole away from the children and the churls who were making them welcome and I roamed, ah, God, how I roamed this dusty planet!

It was not as much of an escape as I had hoped, because in spite of the best we had done the planet was still full of people, and all of them followed the causal myth. Wherever I was. Unseen guest at a lynching in Wheeling, W. Va., or riding a charcoal-burning bus down Fifth Avenue—also unseen—they were there. I found some pleasure in their pleasure, when they had any, and even in their pain; and then I decided to seek some lost familiar pleasures and pains of my own. Why not?

So I recreated some of the lost loves of my youth. There are ten thousand of them or so by now, including the childhood, the almost, and the ones I made up out of my own mind—the last category is far the most numerous. There was Jenny, classmate and briefly bedmate at I.I.T., all love and hunger to please; and just yesterday I stood by the overgrown weeds by the waterworks, for she was my Chicago love, and made her live again. She was in the water of Lake Michigan, under it, swimming toward me. I could see her twilit and distorted face under the ripples, upturned and afraid. I formed a current in the water that swept along the sides of the peninsula and drove her away. I fear for my soul that I let her drown, but of course she was not real. Not even as a standing wave. There was Sharon. When I did her it was only an abstraction, a sense of loss and deprivation, a stain on a pillow and a smear on a sheet; she hurt me, and I will not give her any life at all. Rosemary. She was my least and longest love, in the next seat in high school and for a quick screw two weeks before we boarded the shuttle orbiter, in a motel at Cocoa Beach. We saw each other, oh, a hundred times, over years, but only to go to bed and then claw wittily at each other afterward. I am sure she is deader than I now. I brought her back for a week this morning. When we kissed it was like dry bones clashing. So, all in all, since we came back from that very ingenious place we manufactured near Alpha to this very crude place of our origin, I have recreated fifty sexual partners of my youth, five real and the rest only wished for. It gives me no pleasure, less pleasure than when I amused the children by creating inch-high elephants and candy-colored Tiger tanks for them to play with. Amusing myself was harder. It gave me so little pleasure that I masked what I was doing, even to myself, as a "survey trip," to "scout out the lay of the land" and to "report back" to my kith on what structure survived in the compost heap we had made of a world.

But when I came to report, they were gone.

I knew they would be. There was no question in my mind that they would get in trouble with that oaf Jim Tupelo and have to flee. And I knew that they would not wait for me, for who worried about someone who is already dead? Not even I, who happen to be the corpse.

Ah, you say, trying to sound as though you are following this, but you still move and talk, so how can you be a corpse?

Well, *sigh*, I will explain. After I died, the particles that made up my physical body were so rearranged that they could no longer support each other, but something remained. This "I" is what remained, and "I" am a soliton. A soliton is like a wave. Not a wave wave—in the sense of surf on a beach, or the wiggling vibrations of light or sound—but what a matter wave would be if there were a matter wave that resembled a light wave. If you do not follow what I have just said then you need to go back to freshman physics. Solitons are not a theory. They are a fact. You can see soliton waves in water if, for instance, a big boat suddenly stops and you see the lump of water at its prow continue indefinitely. That is a standing wave. A soliton. It is nondissipative, and so am I.

You, on the other hand, are an instanton. An instanton is a soliton that does not survive very long, and that describes you to a T. You are a pattern, like a giant jigsaw puzzle. As long as the particles of your body exist in the proper geometrical relation to each other you also exist. When you sweep the pieces off the card table back into the box, you have reduced the pattern to randomness and it is gone. I am a persisting pattern, like the orographic clouds over a hill. Break me up if you can, but I will return. In order to be nondissipative, a wave's motion must be nonlinear, and I am that, too. Therefore I am here. While Jenny and Sharon and Rosemary— and you, too—are gone. Got it? Fine. Glad to clear that up for you.

But under certain conditions I can bring you back, you see. I had had enough of lost familiar joys. I sought a lost familiar misery instead, and his name was Dieter von Knefhausen.

So I elevated myself over the city of Washington, D.C., studying what you call the lay of the land. There it sprawled in the watery moonlight, here brooding Lincoln, there Washington's phallic shaft, there the cutesy gingerbread that celebrated Thomas Jefferson. The Potomac was a lot broader than it used to be. Foggy Bottom was Soggy Bottom. There were lights burning bright in the White House where Jimbo, no doubt, was screaming at his evaded aides, and a few others, here and there; and it was, in some sense, sad.

Time was when this city held the spark that stirred the world, for good or evil, when all those circles and avenues were solid with cars and each marble building held its thousand industrious tamperers with everything. It was not like that anymore. The world no longer respected the District, or feared it, either. It was just another weedy marsh, stretching from Arlington to the Maryland line, and if ever I have taken pleasure in the loss of the flesh it was when I heard the steady song of mosquitos all around.

Knefhausen was not buried in any Arlington. Not he. Not in view of the low status he enjoyed at the time of his death. It didn't matter. I knew where they had planted him, close enough. It was not strictly necessary for me to find his wretched remains to do what I wished to do, but I like to do things properly. One never knows what is "necessary," and so I sought out the wretched dog's trough where all the physical facts of the body of Dieter von Knefhausen lay, in the tangle of the White House rose garden. It was easy to find his grave. The tangled thorns grew two feet above the jungle around them: so his corpse found its function. I felt for him. I found him; and in a moment I had him there, as large as life, rising spectrally above the sodden turf.

"Why, it's Dr. Becklund," he said, after he had blinked at me for a moment—self-possessed devil! "What a great pleasure, my dear Willis! I had thought you were dead."

"So I am, Kneffie. So we both are, and what else is new?"

He peered at me with that opaque, nearsighted smile I had seen so often, in Huntsville and at the Cape and all the places in between, masking whatever quick reassessments were going on in his mind. He was even uglier than he had been at the launch. He was also quite shabbily dressed. They had not valeted him well in his ultimate prison, and of course the natural chemistry under the swampy ground had not improved his appearance. "So 1 have died," he said, nodding as he comprehended and accepted the position. "To be sure. It is only what I had expected. And yourself, my dear Willis?"

"Even deader. Or at least, I have been dead longer, though perhaps not as thoroughly."

He gave me the ghost of that tolerant smile, the look of being apologetic that masked his utter confidence that he had never had anything to apologize for. A Peace rose bobbed annoyingly through his mouth as he spoke. "I do not think I quite understand. If we are not alive then, please, what are we?"

"We are nonlinear equations, Kneffie, and it is not important that you understand. I didn't rouse you to answer your questions but for you to answer mine."

"To be sure." He pursed his lips. Decay or none, he still possessed that broad, clear brow, so awfully and proudly the mark of the master race, and he smiled with the expression of a person addressing an inferior whom it is not yet time to chastise. "Please do ask what you will, my dear Willis," he said warmly.

"I shall," I said, but the truth was that I was not sure how to proceed, although I had formed the questions a hundred thousand times: What is it like to be a dragonfly, rather than a worm? What does Chandrasekhar's other limit look like from the far side? But I could not concentrate for, among other reasons, the rose was still annoying me. He had moved slightly and now it was dipping in and out of his ear.

That at least I could deal with. I gave us both substance. He sprang away as his form took flesh and the rose's thorns ripped across his cheek. "That was wickedly done!" he cried, rubbing the wound.

"I have done it to myself too, old man," I said, since the thorns had found me; but the experience was interesting as well as painful and I let it stand. "Be grateful that you can feel at all," I advised.

He glowered at me, then quickly controlled himself. It was the old, known Kneffie who rapped: "Your questions, then, if you please."

"Very well." I glanced about the dim and moonlit jungle, as though there were someone who might hear this Wal-purgis conference, before I plunged in. "1 want to know if, after you died, you were judged?"

Knefhausen looked at me opaquely, and then at the blood on his fingers. "What a curious question," he murmured, ripping the lining out of a pocket to wipe his hand clean before he replied. "But I understand the curiosity, it is only that it is strange coming, from a person in your position. Nevertheless! The answer is that I have no recollection of meeting the Herr God. I have no recollections at all, after coughing very severely and feeling very ill, until I saw you standing here."

"Not even—" I hesitated.

"Not anything at all," he said firmly, "and certainly no sort of what you would call 'judgment.' What would I be judged for, my dear Willis?"

I had thought I was past anger, but even as a revenant he was insufferable! "You have the arrogance to ask me that, Knefhausen?"

"Ah, I see," he said, nodding, "you refer to my experiment. To be sure. One can see that, from the point of view of the subject, the exercise was, what shall I say, quite disconcerting—"

"Disconcerting!"

He stood up to my anger. "Disconcerting, yes! As a subject, one could not enjoy it, naturally. But the purposes, dear Willard! The sublime purposes! It was purely an experiment, conducted with great ends in view, and you must admit that it succeeded for you yourself are the proof. Judge me? Of course, if you wish! Anyone may judge me, but the success of the experiment, that is my defense!" It would have been sensible of him to stop there, but the old peacock could not help but preen: "To be sure," he smirked, "one does not expect the schoolboy to welcome the birch."

"Shut up!" I shouted—not only in words.

So, of course, he could not help but shut up as ordered. He stood frozen there, neither wave nor motion, while I calmed myself down.

It was a temptation to send the old bastard back to his grave!

Dead or alive, Knefhausen was a slippery and evil person—enough to piss off a preacher, as we used to say; enough, enough, to anger as dead a person as I. The fact that I have lost the flesh does not mean that I do not feel its fury. Throb of blood in the temple, rush of adrenaline, trembling of the building of rage—I feel them all; if I am an illusion I create for myself, at least I create it in all details.

Even feeling rage is better than feeling nothing. Any feeling is welcome, when you have known very few for some time. It was like the physical circumstance of my having given us flesh. I itched. My skin stung where the roses had pricked. The back of my neck was a target for blood-seeking bugs. (And what did they gain from that?)

An orgasm, after all, is nothing but the explosive easing of an almost unbearable itch. These itches I could end at any moment, by dissolving away the flesh; so I could almost enjoy them.

Not, however, so tranquilly that I did not want to hurt von Knefhausen. I took my revenge. "You are an arrogant son of a bitch," I told him, "so try a little humility." And I caused him to shrink to half his height and twice his breadth. I lengthened his nose to a Roman hook worthy of the worst posters of his childhood.

"Vot? Vot?" he gasped. "Vot are you doink to me?"

"I'm teaching you a lesson, Knefhausen," I told him, pleased with my joke.

He clapped a hand to his forehead. "Oy veh! Lessons I need, a dead person already?"

"It doesn't matter what you need. A lesson is what you're going to get."

He shrugged immensely, and I could see the half-snarl fading into his usual opaque smile. What control! "So ven is comink de lessons, bubbeleh?" he demanded.

"You bastard," I said, but what was the use of anger in this situation?

"Such a mensch," he sneered. "One deader plays tricks on another!" " "All right," I said. "I'll let you off the accent, but I won't change the way you look. I want to discuss something with you."

"Thank you," he said stiffly, squinting to look at his nose. "But you have no grounds for this. It is unjust to charge me with the deeds of others, which took place when I was only a child. Still! You are the person in authority, is that not so? And so I must play this game by your rules. Tell me then what you want of me."

I said unwillingly, "I want to know what to do."

"Do? My dear Willis! Whatever you wish, of course! In what respect?"

"I would like to help these people," I said, "and I don't know how."

He nodded slowly, his fingers feeling the shape of his nose and lips. "I too wanted to help these people," he said. "And with your help I believe I did. Do you follow me? No? Let me explain. It is necessary to cut in order to cure, and I was willing to cut. The world you left—-with my assistance—was on the verge of destroying itself. It had almost no hope of surviving. I made the assumption that the knowledge that could be gained—by you!— from my little experiment might in some unpredictable way save it. And so it did! You made the final cataclysm impossible. Now are you going to throw away your success?"

"Our success? What success is that, man?"

"The chance to remold the world!" he cried grandly, the Prussian voice no longer sounding strange out of those thick caricatured lips. "The world is yours now, Willis, to form aright! Peasants and petty tyrants—there is no force on Earth that can prevent you from bringing a wonderful new order to the human race! Peace and wisdom and the fruits of the mind, in tranquility, for a thousand years!"

And suddenly my little game was turning out poorly. We were on no mountaintop, but that devil was offering me everything!

I resolved to end the game. It was simply done: "Go away, Dieter," I ordered—again, not only in words.

So the tears dried, the triumph on the hideous face turned into an apprehensive, placatory half-smile. The smile turned into fear, and became transparent, and so did all of him.

And then the last of him was gone—I do not think it is profitable to ask the question "where?" Back into my own memory, maybe. Once again a revenant, returning to his dissolving corpse under the roses . . . perhaps. ( But he had left a seed in my mind, and I could not help but feel it grow.

The poison in the pill was its truth. I could not deny it. If I wanted the world reborn, I could give it parturition-— " with Eve and Jeron and the others if I chose, and they did. Or without them, by my sole self.

I rose up into the sky over Washington, D.C., and hung there for a long time, as the Earth turned and at last the eastern sky softened into pearl gray.

I do not like being instructed by myself. Yet I had been taught a lesson by Dieter von Knefhausen, or by the simulacrum I had created out of memory and rage. Should I follow it? Should I grasp the sorry scheme of things entire —I had already shattered it to bits, with Shef's help, and the remolding would be easy. And if I did, would what came then be only another construction of my mind?

And there I was, back to the ultimate question. What is reality?

Maybe all the universe is only the other half of the inside of my mind. For sure Dieter's specter came out of my mind, and would not have existed without it.

So, when I spoke to him, who was I talking to?

Or—generalizing—who am I talking to when I talk to anyone, including you?