“That is not clothing. It is self. It is an example of the principle which you already know about: the one which imposes that you be conscious of self before we can perceive you.”
Lodovico struggled gallantly after that concept.
“You mean you could not have perceived me unless I’d been a conscious being instead of a dead corpse.”
“A dead corpse can be made easily from common substances.”
He gave up. Seeing his bafflement, Genua—who was also with him, as usual—attempted another route.
“We have made calculations,” she said. “In your time, persons died commonly after fewer than a hundred revolutions around the sun. We live much longer. When age begins to erode our memories, we arrange to have ourselves remembered by what appears to you to be a garment. It is a version of one’s own personality that permits growth to begin all over again. Progress from one self to another may continue for thousands of years, though of course the first and final personalities would not recognise each other.”
“These—these ‘other-selves’ are independent entities, then?”
“No, they are wholly dependent. They are reflections, they are objectified echoes, never more than copies of the persons to whom they belong. You, on the other hand . . .”
Abruptly the implications of that curtailed sentence came storming in on Lodovico’s mind. The world grew dark for an instant. When he could see clearly again, he found Horad was there too.
“Yes,” said Horad in a grave and sympathetic tone. “That is what you are: the first such reflection of a self which belongs to someone who was born and lived his life in what to us is the far-distant past.”
For a while after that revelation, there had to be an interruption in his exploration of this new age. But he made a good recovery and was able to go on.
There were no more cities. When he asked his companions how many human beings there were now they surprised and indeed alarmed him: they paused long enough to count . . . And could not quite agree on whether it was more or less than thirty million.
People lived far apart, yet did not actually live anywhere. They were forever on the move, deciding that the mood they happened to be in deserved that climate, that season, that landscape, and acting on the conclusion.
Certainly they had homes. He was entertained at several and admired them extravagantly, for they were beautiful in ways that combined the supreme architectural achievement of literally hundreds of civilisations. He could not even try to keep track of all the cultures, long-vanished now, from which he was being shown relics. Occasionally he thought he recognised something as Egyptian or Assyrian or Greek; when he inquired, he was given names he had never heard, Uglardic or Canthorian or Benkilese. . . .
Most agreeable of the survivals was the custom of celebrating by sharing food and drink, and beyond that scents and changes in the atmosphere which were sometimes more alarming than enjoyable, though all those around him seemed to know how to appreciate them. Feasts were held in his honour. He found he could taste, though he could draw no nourishment from, the miraculous dishes placed before him.
(“You can eat, of course, since you are after your own fashion a person,” Horad said. “But you need not. You are sustained by our awareness of you, and everyone you meet will make that existence stronger. We advise that you should eat if only because, perceiving that you do, we and everybody will find it easier to regard you as a real individual. If you enjoy the flavours, textures and scents, so much the better. We think of you as one who can.” And he discovered the assumption was correct, though the logic behind it was still dream-like, tantalising, elusive.)
Art had lasted, but had spawned branches he could not see the purpose of. There was nothing for him in a communal ceremony which structured silence for a day and a night and a day, except boredom. Unable to become weary, he perforce witnessed the whole of it, and when the audience (?) roused and dispersed they were beaming with pleasure and showered compliments on the person who was part-host, part-administrator.
The going?
Belatedly he wondered about it, and realised that there was none. There was being here—interlude—being there, which automatically became here instead. He asked about it, and Genua said, “Again it is a talent which you possessed, but did not know of it because in your time there was nothing to provoke its operation. I cannot explain it; no one could. You must feel it as it is happening. Then in a little while you will go alone, without the help of me or Orlalee or Horad. If I were to say to you, ‘Contract in succession the following muscles, which I point out on this chart, in each alternate leg, and then relax them in this precise order, and then to keep your balance do this and that with the muscles in your torso, arms and shoulders . . .’ Well, how many steps would you take in a day? Be patient. Soon enough you will have the principle in your bones.”
He was secure enough now to essay a joke. He said, “What bones?”
Also there was the counterpart of work. This above all was as he had dreamed it might be, shorn of repetitive drudgery, free from commercial pressures: a series of acts undertaken at places where people came together for purposes of production, knowing always why they did what they did and informed about the benefits they were giving to others. He spent days and days watching fascinated as even very small children conjured useful objects (or at any rate objects he was told were regarded as useful, though he did not understand their function) from plants, from banks of clay, from roiling streams foul with sulphurous stench and dung-brown silt. He was running out
