Licking (or that was what it felt like) his lips (or what in this version of “I” now felt like lips), he said (or used whatever communication channel had been allotted him), “I think you must be people, but so much later than me that I don’t suppose you can tell me what the date is.”
For a very short time he was alone. The period elapsed was so brief by his standards, he might have dismissed it as an illusion but that on returning Horad said, “Excuse us, please. We were delighted by your response and wished to be-personal in conveying news of it.”
The hyphenation of “be-personal” was audible (?) to Lodovico; this was a clearly identifiable proof that the language he was speaking (?) was none of his own time.
And in the same thought came awareness of the truth that he must no longer say “own”; he could, however, say “former.”
Orlalee said, “We were particularly pleased that you have been able to express a significant truth. We are people, in part of the sense you would use the term. We are also much evolved past where you were. And if we were to try and give you a date, it might well be wrong by several thousand years.”
“Revolutions of the planet,” said Genua, “are not as important now as they were for you.”
Lodovico experienced a biting-lower-lip sensation. He felt real to himself; these people were talking to him as though he were real; yet when they tried to touch him they could not do what he could, locate solid substance.
It was not simple, but it was also not impossible to resolve the conundrum.
“You must have a means,” he said slowly, “of projecting an effigy, a counterpart, a simulacrum, of a personality for which you stumbled on sufficient data to make it seem real to itself and yet which you can only half-perceive. Perhaps you are having to force yourselves to believe in me, while I have no trouble accepting that I am here and now although I wished never to exist again.”
He clenched his fists.
“But being what you have made me, what am I—what can I do or be? Any world but mine must be illusion to me!”
“We could not ask permission in advance,” said Orlalee, who was both fairer-haired and darker-skinned than Genua. It was impossible to determine whether she was either in respect of Horad owing to the vagueness he sort-of-wore. “This was because until we did it there was nothing of which permission might be obtained. Now there is. We will accordingly accept your instruction if you say: desist!”
They waited.
Eventually he said, looking past them at the blank blue walls, “First tell me what I can and cannot do. Do I—do I eat? Drink? Sleep, suffer, become intoxicated?”
Still they waited, until he forced out the last part of the multiplex question.
“I feel weak, only half-real. Have you resurrected me so that I must face death a second time?”
“You are a collective percept,” Horad said. “As yet you are not strong because only we three perceive you. We hear you speak; it is not with sound. We see where you are, but it is not with light. We and you interact, but if we did not agree to perceive you there would be nothing.”
“Yet I perceive myself!” Lodovico burst out. “I am aware!”
“That is because without your perception of yourself there would be nothing for us to perceive. We did not choose that this be so; it turned out to be of the nature of the universe.”
He wrestled with that for a while and eventually gave a feeble shake of the head.
“We may have some difficulty here,” Orlalee said. “We are uncertain of the parameters you ascribed to a definition of consciousness’ in your age. We have faint echoes of certain theories, but no indication of which if any you subscribed to. Permit us to question you on this subject and by stages our explanations will become more lucid.”
“Ask away,” Lodovico invited, folding his arms on his chest.
“When you killed yourself,” Genua said, taking a step closer to him, “did you expect to re-awaken in a paradise or a place of torment?”
“I didn’t expect to wake at all,” was his prompt and emphatic answer. “Since boyhood I’ve been resigned to the fact that consciousness was a by-product of material existence. The fact that I seem to myself to be here, now, whenever and wherever the here-and-now may be, indicates that I must have been nearly right. You just told me that if I did not perceive myself you would have nothing to perceive, and moreover that I am a weak percept because no one apart from you three perceives me— Wait, I should re-phrase that. No one else is perceiving me.”
“Could that”—from Horad—“have been expressed in the language of your time?”
“Yes!” the answer snapped back. “When I said it I wasn’t aware of using a language I didn’t grow up with.”
Three smiles.
“Oh, we have chosen very well,” Orlalee said. “Faced with the logical contradiction of being aware when he is-and-knows-he-must-be dead, he makes statements concerning not the self which cannot be present but the self which he’s currently observing by being it. I judge that you, Lodovico, while surprised and startled at being imitated, are not angry.”
“Angry?” He pondered, or imagined or suspected or believed or [a thousand possibilities] that he did. Eventually he said, “No, I don’t think I have enough strength in the version of me which you three are perceiving to become angry. But in any case I
