curled like a seared insect, my eyes rolled up, dead moons, and the wind's big silence whistling louder. Oh, yes, I was dead-I think...
'Faith, love, and hope are all in the waiting,' said one of the sexless voices. 'Mr. Charlie, can you wit what we say? Blink, blink, blink.'
A hot light hurt my face and refracted into spectral halos. 'Behold-the sign!'
'Nay. The retinal tissue hurts. He squints. Let him be gone. Remove the electrode.'
A dizzy darkness seized me, and I plunged again into the secret sea, where a woman with breasts like peaches was bending closer...
Only in sex do we do what we mean, do we give what we in actual fact are.
A thousand gaudy butterflies burst through my brain. And I was alone again in the secret sea, the spelled sound of her wrought breathing all that remained of her. Until, like a cloud blown from a sunset, she appeared under me this time, looking over her naked shoulder languorously, both hands splayed across the muscles of her raised hips...
The salacious dream burst into darkness, and a childlike voice spoke: 'Pregestation rituals! Speak no more on them. Hear me! We would know no more
of that. Tell us not of the salt mine in the blood, the match-head clitoris, the cobra head of the penis, vixen and rakes, the gates of mine thighs-these lewd truths that kindle the beast. Speak no more on them, we say! Instead speak, Mr. Charlie, of the mind-do tell of the relations of psyche and physics.'
I startled alert, out of a dreamless void. The sex-obsessed sequences that had gone on interminably were gone. The weird voices were back-different ones this time. I tried to speak and managed to say: 'Who? Who are you?'
'Stink and wonders! He be witful. What profit him to cry?' 'We be Friends.'
'So be our calling, Mr. Charlie. We be Friends of the Measuring Class Not of
Niels Abel.'
'What?' I didn't understand. 'Where am I?'
'You be Mr. Charlie in the lock-hole, at the hinge-split of the world.' 'Huh?'
'Wold I, nold I.'
I was utterly confused. 'I can't see,' I complained. 'I'm blind. Who are you? Where am I?'
'Spark his eyes, say I.'
Briefly, sight returned to me-though I wished it hadn't. I was lying on a mirror-polished floor, cinnabar red, and reflected in it was my face-or not my face, not the features I remembered, but something like a hog-nosed snake with lidless human eyes peering from sea-anemone stalks and the pink cauliflower of brain matter all encased in a gel pod and chrome net. That was me? A scream roiled within me but could find no way through the cage of my shock. What had happened to the gift of my face? Where were my limbs, my torso? I huddled in the hut of my heart, stared meekly upward and saw-among tufts of dandelion seed lifting into the green air, human figures in transparent armor and, beyond them, the polished floor running toward vermilion sandstone arches and the antlers of dusk. Suddenly, my mind felt fragile.
'He be hearty, all right, and wind in his whiskers, as well!'
One of the armored figures had said that and gestured at me. I peered more closely at-it: It had a face of black glass or gelatin, flexible, expressive, a teenager's face, boy or girl, I couldn't tell. The lake of its dark features was placid, clear enough that I could see the cumulus cloud of its brain enlarging with the thunder of a dangerous thought. 'Wax me mind! He be witful for sure.
Ho-Mr. Charlie, hear me! We Friends of the Measuring Class Not of Niels Abel would know a thing: Tell us of the relations between psyche and physics,' and then, leaning closer, not sure I understood: 'mind and matter. Ken you that?'
'I don't understand,' I whined, unnerved by all that was happening to me. 'Please-help me.'
'He be witless in the ways,' the figure closest to me said over it's glass-plated shoulder to the others. 'I were wrong about him.'
'The electrode be the way. Use it.'
A four-fingered hand manipulated something above my line of sight, and a ticklish pain trilled through me. Abruptly, I saw shimmery blue words scrolling across my field of vision, and I heard a voice very like my own saying, 'The expressions of energy, matter, forces, and fields are functions of an abstract
geometry. That is the relation of matter and mind.' 'Stink and wonders!'
'Wax me mind!'
I couldn't stop myself. I went on to say, 'The discipline of physics is pure geometry. Matter is pure mind. Of course, when we think of geometry, we presuppose the spatial configurations of form or the temporal harmonics of sound. Yet geometry in itself is neither spatial nor temporal. It loans itself only secondarily to such descriptions. Geometry is first of all a purely noetic system of rates, ratios, intervals, agreements, and alignments. Its components exist independent of things measured, an abstract typology, a strictly internal self-description.'
'Say more, Mr. Charlie! Wit us wise of matter and mind.'
And so I did. Just as before, when I was adrift in the secret sea of erotic images, now I hovered in an airy space of words and numbers, only this time what I was experiencing floated across my vision, outside my body. The figures in transparent armor had gathered around me, and I could see the thunderhead thoughts behind their rapt faces as the blue words vapored by: 'Spin, interval, charge, and moment are discrete properties, defined in integer and half-integer values, rational functions and ratios, or nonconstructable numbers functioning
as constants. Sure, we've been duped before by illusory geometries-like Pythagorean intervals, ideal Euclidean properties, and Kepler's harmonics of planetary orbits-so it's natural to be leery of physics as geometry. Nevertheless, mapped schematically, mass, coupling constant, spin, angular momentum, and charge generate
