The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

TWO TELEPATHIC LETTERS TO LORD KELVIN ALFRED JARRY

It is a long time since I have sent you news of myself; but I do not think you will have imagined that I was dead. Death is only for common people. It is a fact, nevertheless, that I am no longer on earth. Where I am I have only discovered a very short time ago. For we are both of the opinion that, if one can measure what one is talking about and express it in numbers, which constitute the sole reality, then one has some knowledge of one’s subject. Now, up to the present moment I knew myself to be elsewhere than on earth, in the same way that I know that quartz is situated elsewhere, in the realm of hardness, and less honorably so, than the ruby; the ruby elsewhere than the diamond; the diamond than the posterior callosities of Bosse-de-Nage; and their thirty-two skin-folds—more numerous than his teeth, if one includes the wisdom teeth—than the prose of Latent Obscure.

But was I elsewhere in terms of date or of position, before or to the side, after or nearer? I was in that place where one finds oneself after having left time and space: the infinite eternal, Sir.

It was natural that, having lost my books, my skiff of metallic cloth, the society of Bosse-de-Nage and Monsieur Rene-Isidore Panmuphle, bailiff, my senses, the earth, and those two old Kantian aspects of thought, I should suffer the same anguish of isolation as a residual molecule several centimeters distant from the others in a good modern vacuum of Messrs. Tait and Dewar. And, even then, perhaps the molecule knows that it is several centimeters away! For one single centimeter, the only valid sign for me of space, being measurable and a means of measuring, and for the mean solar second, in terms of which the heart of my terrestrial body beat—for these things I would have given my soul, Sir, despite the usefulness to me of this commodity in informing you of these curiosities.

The body is a more necessary vehicle because it supports one’s clothes, and through clothes one’s pockets. I had left in one of my pockets by mistake my centimeter, an authentic copy in brass of the traditional standard, more portable than the earth or even the terrestrial quadrant, which permits the wandering and posthumous souls of interplanetary savants to concern themselves no further with this old globe, nor even with CGS [centimeter gramme second], as far as measurements of size are concerned, thanks to MM. Mechain and Delambre.

As for my mean solar second, were I to have remained on the earth I still could not have been certain of retaining it safely and of being able to measure time validly through its medium.

If in the course of a few million years I have not terminated my pataphysical studies, it is certain that the period of the earth’s rotation around its axis and of its revolution around the sun will both be very different from what they are now. A good watch, which I would have had running all this time, would have cost me an exorbitant price, and, in any case, I do not perform secular experiments, have nothing but contempt for continuity, and consider it more esthetic to keep Time itself in my pocket, or the unity of time, which is its snapshot.

For these reasons, I possessed a vibrator better arranged for permanence and for absolute accuracy than the hairspring of a chronometer, one whose period of vibration would have retained the same value over a certain number of million years with an error of less than 1:1,000. A tuning fork. Its period had been carefully determined, before I embarked in the skiff, according to your instructions, by our colleague Professor Macleod, in terms of mean solar seconds, with the prongs of the tuning fork being pointed successively upward, downward and toward the horizon, in order to eliminate the least effect of terrestrial gravity.

I no longer had even my tuning fork. Imagine the perplexity of a man outside time and space, who has lost his watch, and his measuring rod, and his tuning fork. I believe, Sir, that it is indeed this state which constitutes death.

But I suddenly remembered your teachings and my own previous experiments. Since I was simply nowhere, or somewhere, which is the same thing, I found a substance with which to make a piece of glass, having met various demons, including the Sorting Demon of Maxwell, who succeeded in grouping particular types of movement in one continuous widespread liquid (what you call small elastic solids or molecules): a substance as plentiful as one could desire, in the shape of silicate of aluminum. I have engraved the lines and lit the two candles, albeit with a little time and perseverance, having had to work without even the aid of flint implements. I have seen the two rows of spectrums, and the yellow spectrum has returned my centimeter to me by virtue of the figure 5.892 x 10⁵ [wavelength of yellow light].

Now that we are happy and comfortable, and on dry land, as is my atavistic habit, since I carry on me the one-thousand-millionth part of a quarter of the earth’s circumference [one centimeter], which is more honorable than being attached to the surface of the globe by attraction, permit me, I pray, to note a few impressions for you.

Eternity appears to me in the image of an immobile ether, which consequently is not luminiferous. I would describe luminiferous ether as circularly mobile and perishable. And I deduce from Aristotle (Treatise on the Heavens) that it is appropriate to write ethernity.

Luminiferous ether, together with all material particles, which I can easily distinguish—my astral body having good pataphysical eyes—possesses the form, at first sight, of a system of rigid links joined together, and having rapidly rotating fly-wheels pivoted on some of the links. Thus it fulfills exactly the mathematical ideal worked out by Navier, Poisson, and Cauchy. Furthermore, it constitutes an elastic solid capable of determining the magnetic rotation of the plane of polarization of light discovered by Faraday. At my posthumous leisure I shall arrange it to have zero moment of momentum as a whole and to reduce it to the state of a mere spring balance.

Moreover, I am of the opinion that one could reduce considerably the complexity of this spring balance of this luminiferous ether by substituting for the linked gyrostats various systems of circulation of liquids of infinite volume through perforations in infinitely small solids.

It will lose none of its qualities as a result of these modifications. Ether has always appeared to me, to the touch, to be as elastic as jelly and yielding under pressure like Scottish shoemakers’ wax.

The sun is a cool, solid, and homogeneous globe. Its surface is divided into squares of one meter, which are the bases of long, inverted pyramids, thread-cut, 696,999 kilometers long, their points one kilometer from the center. Each is mounted on a screw and its movement toward the center would cause, if I had the time, the rotation of a paddle at the top end of each screw shaft, in a few meters of viscous fluid, with which the whole surface is thinly covered . . .

I was quite disinterested in this mechanical spectacle, not having found again my mean solar second and being distraught at the loss of my tuning fork. But I took a piece of brass and fashioned a wheel in which I cut two thousand teeth, copying everything which M. Fizeau, Lord Rayleigh, and Mrs. Sidgwick had achieved in similar circumstances.

Suddenly, the second was rediscovered in the absolute measure of 9,413 kilometers per mean solar second of the Siemens unit, and the pyramids, forced to descend on their threads since they found themselves, like myself, in the movement of time, were obliged to come into equilibrium, in order to remain stable, by borrowing a sufficient quantity of Sir Humphrey Davy’s repulsive motion; and the fixed matter, the screw shafts and the screw nuts disappeared. The sun became viscous and began to turn on its axis in twenty-five-day cycles; in a few years you will see sunspots on it, and a few quarter-centuries will determine their periods. Soon, in its great age, it will shrink in a diminution of three-quarters.

And now I am being initiated into the science of all things (you will receive three new fragments from two of my forthcoming books), having reconquered all perception, which consists in duration and size. I understand that the weight of my brass wheel, which I clasp between the hebetude of the abstract fingers of my astral body, is the fourth power of eight meters per hour; I hope, deprived of my senses, to recognize color, temperature, taste, and various qualities other than the six, in the actual number of revolutions per second . . .

Farewell: I can glimpse already, perpendicularly to the sun, the cross with a blue center, the red brushes toward the nadir and the zenith, and the horizontal gold of foxes’ tails.