polyhedra. Take, for example, the plotted relations of quarks and leptons on a horizontal plane-displaced vertically proportional to their respective charges, they polarize the angular coordinates of an ideal cube! Think on that.'
'As blood is the bride to iron-he be right! Pull the electrode, and we be hard thinking on that.'
'Aye, and the void bites its tusks!'
The blue words vanished, and the air smelled all at once of boiled milk. I noticed that, beyond the drifting tufts of dandelion, the twilit sky was precise with stars. I felt the silence of the wind opening in me again, and then
darkness came on.
The fire-flower of numbers and words opened and closed around me time and again. And I found myself square-summing the real and imaginary parts of a field specifying spin states of particles, measuring angular momenta, and plotting straight lines in the Regge trajectory. 'Abstract geometry defines matter,' I heard myself say.
Then I performed conceptual rotations on the doublevalued quality of fermions-'You know, matter particles'-in an abstract superspace with anticommutators and revealed deep angular identity with the class of
bosons-'Force particles! Do you see what I'm saying? Geometry shows they are the self-same entity!'
I babbled about heterotic string theory and the summary familial group designated E8xE8, reflecting a generalization of crystal symmetries, a strictly abstract pattern produced by categorical requirements applying directly to the macroscopic and observable order of structures. 'Euclidean geometries are staring out from nature's apparent chaos. Salts, viruses, seashells, pinecones, honeycombs, galaxies, and galactic sheets hundreds of light- years huge!
Man-oh-man, it's just like the hermetics said:
As above, so below. Thetic geometries in purely abstract space informing real constituents of experience! Matter copulating with mind copulating with matter. It's obscene!'
I am a blue animal that trembles softly. I am a mind without a body calling to you. Can you hear me? Do you see my smile in my words, sad and evil? Sad because I am utterly alone. Evil because I am dead and yet I live. My voice radiates through space. Past lives drift by. The damned descend into the darkness. Can
you hear me? Listen. A dead man visits you. Listen to me-someone.
Look, this sounds like ranting to you. I know. I want to speak calmly,
rationally now. I want to say the truth as I've known it. I want to say a
story-my story. Say a said. And more. Say a body. Say a way back. Say at least a place. Say something. But no one hears me. Do you hear me?
'Mr. Charlie?' A youthful, genderless voice spoke. 'Can you hear me?'
A surge of darkness woke me. I felt the old, delusive joy that I was dreaming and I was about to wake to my former life. My wife would be asleep next to me, and I would wake her and ignore her grogginess to yammer about my nightmare.
'Mr. Charlie, I know you're awake.'
The viscid barbs of the jellyfish's tentacles burned the length of my left
arm, my heartvalves clogged with sili-cates, and my blood turned to coral. I was dead. Whereupon the stars drag their darkness into a future without me. .
'I am going to activate your visual cortex now, Mr. Charlie. I need to talk with you.'
Rays pierced my blindness, cutting blackness into swatches of vision, and I
saw that I was apparently suspended midair, for I could look down and see that I had no body. A spongy, circular floor was directly below me. Outside its perimeter, tiles of tessellated turquoise and black marble supported swerves of amber that, after a moment, I saw were chairs and a long table. An adolescent girl sat at the table with a gold stylus in her hand. Her hair was the color of
a violin, slant-cut across her left eye, cropped high over her small right ear, and highlighted with a few tiny firepoints of gemdust.
She touched the stylus to a moonpiece, a silver shadow-smudged disc compact as a watch face, and the clarity of my vision sharpened. I saw the vague line of
her eyebrows, the topaz light in her tight stare, the carats of sweat on her forehead and upper lip, the cilia rimming her nostrils, the pulsebeat in her throat, the faceted lump of her Adam's apple-and realized that she could be a he.
He touched the stylus again. My vision pulled back, and I saw him or her sitting in a swerve of amber, wearing black silk pajamas with red dragon-veins.
I looked away, surveying where I was: Slabs of jasper circled us like dolmen rocks, the spaces between them paned with crystal sheets flecked with mica. I peered upward into a boiling light of dust motes towering into thermals of acid clouds. The warm air smelled of jasmine. 'Where am I?'
The hermaphrodite touched the stylus to the moonpiece on the amber table and told me, with lips not in synch with what was spoken: 'You are dead.'
Blue words squiggled in the air before me:
702-gram heart with a moderately dilated right atrium and a 0.3-0.5-cm hypertrophic right ventricle with focal fibrosis; the terminal episode originated in the left ventricle with its 1.5-cm hypertrophy and 5 x 4-cm anteroseptal and 9 x 7-cm posterolateral infarctions. Cause of death: arrhythmia. Subject: Outis, Charles.
At the sight of my name, a strand of razor wire seemed to thrum in my gut, and
I reflexively looked down and immediately snapped my gaze back up, brutally aware I had no gut. 'What's happening to me?'
