Now the full force of his predicament hit him. He really was among people of a distant future age, and their thinking had changed even more than their bodily form. Hunting comparisons, he settled on the image of a convinced Christian from the Middle Ages set down in a twentieth-century community where nobody was bothered by the notion of living on a moving ball of rock instead at the fixed centre of the universe, where it was not considered in the least blasphemous to tamper with natural forms but on the contrary it was regarded as sensible and useful to modify and improve wild plants and even animals, to revise what that medieval person would think of as the handiwork of the Almighty, sacrosanct. He was pleased to have reached that image, for it offered a useful peg on which to hang the more unpleasant of his frustrations. There were many. Each passing day (not that he or anyone else to his knowledge was counting them) added to his sense of impotence and isolation.
At first he had been delighted by the sheer novelty of his experience. Then by stages he had grown angry at not being able to grasp everything he was shown. Occasionally he had been shocked, especially when he learned that eroticism had endured and was now integrated into several art-forms, to the point where there were adults whose equivalent of a career consisted in instructing children, from babyhood up, about the amatory potential of their bodies.
He knew a priori that this was another medieval-visitor reaction, but it cost him much effort to reframe his thinking. He had been intellectually aware that even in his own age love-making had largely been separated from procreation, and it was logical enough that in the long run the division should become effectively total.
But there were private reasons why he had never partaken of whatever benefits this situation entailed. After leading a bachelor’s life during his twenties and saying he was wedded to his work, he had been just about to marry when he was informed about his cancer. After which, of course, he had abandoned hope of any permanent involvement—wife, family . . . Too little time was left.
* * *
“Did you have regrets?” asked Orlalee.
They were on a hilltop overlooking a plain dotted with brilliant flowers, beyond which a stormcloud loomed blue as new-tempered steel. He could not remember how they came here.
He said, “Yes, I should have liked to bring up a child—one at least. But in another way, no. I made good use of what time I did have. I enjoyed myself, especially when I was finding out something new. In one respect I was unusually lucky. Ideas often came to me in dreams, and while most people’s dream-images turn out by light of day to be ridiculous, now and then mine proved to be sound, even important. Do you people still dream?”
“Of course.”
“Why ‘of course’ ?”
“It is in the nature of mankind to perceive unrealities as well as realities. You are a dream as much as you are a ghost, Lodovico. You are the fulfilment, the concretisation, of one of the oldest dreams humanity has ever had.”
“That being—?”
“The dream of the dead. The return of those who are no more. Those cut off before due time. Is it not there that one should seek the germ of the concept ‘ghost’ ?”
“That makes sense,” he conceded after a moment’s thought.
And then, unexpectedly, she asked, “Lodovico, how do you like being a ghost?”
Without realising how honest and unpremeditated his answer was going to be, he heard himself say, “Very well!”
“If the same occurred to me I think I would miss much. I should like to hear your reasons in the hope they will be accessible to me.”
“First tell me this. When you put on the—other-self, is it the end of something for you? The conclusion of a stage of life, for example?”
“Oh, yes.” There was something of sadness in her look. “It is exactly at the end of growth when we don them. To be full-grown is also to be dying; there is no boundary . . . Well?”
Lodovico pondered. At length he said, “Yes, I miss a lot, too. But much of what I miss is not to be regretted, like having a physical body that cancer could corrupt.”
“It does not do so any more,” Orlalee said. “But you do have a physical body.”
“What?” The shock was wrenching. “But—!”
“Look.”
She caught his arm in her thin but strong fingers, and clamped tight. After a moment she released him. Pale marks showed on his skin that took a minute or more to fade.
“I—” Lodovico put his hand to his forehead, giddily. “I. . .!”
“Yes, that is the word: I!” She was smiling, and suddenly she was not alone because Horad and Genua had joined them.
Horad said, “Congratulations, Lodovico. You are a reality to us. All those people now alive who have not personally met you have at any rate heard about you. Since you are present in the total awareness of the species, you exist.”
“But—!” Inchoate arguments flared in his mind, on such grounds as conservation of energy. How could the mere process of perceiving someone convert that someone from an impalpable phantom into a solid living being?
“Now I can do something I wanted to do before which wasn’t possible,” Orlalee said, and put her arms around him and kissed him in a manner which was indescribably ancient, all bar the taste of her, which was new.
After which all three made love to him and proved him real.
There was a moment when he felt it would be amusing to say, “I am become a perversion incarnate.”
But none of them got the point.
“Lodovico,” Genua said later, “you have now seen our world. Do you approve?”
“Of those things which I understand in it, yes. Every ideal of
