Among those who came to congratulate and thank him, he nearly did not recognise Horad because his other-self was more striking now, more disturbing to the vision . . . even though Lodovico had grown to accept that its essence was his. Natural human flesh clearly could not take the punishment he had consented to endure. Therefore . . .
To Horad he put a question which went some short distance towards relief of his frustration; from Horad he received an answer which sustained him on the rest of his journey.
He said, “How is it that you people have drawn so much from the little I was able to convey in words?”
And Horad explained, “It is long past your epoch, Lodovico. For us, communication is not confined to speech. No more, to be candid, was it for you; for the most part, it seems, you imagined that it was, but in practice what you took for misunderstandings were very often the result of someone understanding another person ‘only too well.’ ”
With a final dry coda: “That phrase has no equivalent in any modern language, because in this tongue we are speaking there is the facility to make quotation-marks.”
All of which was a supreme achievement by an admirably evolved modern mind, a condensation into a few sentences of millennia-worth of reflection and analysis.
And because he understood this brief reply with such clarity even though it belonged to a much later age than his own, Lodovico was able to convince himself that the people of today were worth suffering for.
He went again. Again. Again.
They grew afraid. It had not been calculated that he should become obsessed with his travels to unsurvivable environments. Whenever they tried to tell him he had done enough, however, he ranted and raved until they let him depart one more time.
By stages they became resigned. They had created him. He was now himself. The creators had long ago lost control. It remained to derive what data they could from having him to talk to, or simply be with. Mad, wild, primitive, berserk?
Unique.
But offering—still miraculously offering—reports that others could study and transform into comprehensible, and thus into fascinating, information.
It had been a long time, as the psychic evolution of the human species went, since there was anything their ancestors might have termed news . . .
They therefore tolerated it that he should learn: yes, they grow in Jupiter and Neptune and Uranus! Variously, from viciously to vicariously! (What does it mean? It means itself because no human ever before perceived it!)
As it became less than a marvel to him, for after all it was merely a not-Earth event and belonged to this universe, to this galaxy, this planetary system (shrinking by orders of magnitude with each review), he was able to describe his experiences in plainer terms.
In Uranus a creature ate him, fifty thousand miles long, and he survived. This among a million other recollections.
Naturally.
Neptune was the place where a sort-of-a-volcano was erupting icy lava at a yard per year and the nearby flora evolved to meet the threat and, as he watched, learned how to run at twice that speed. Again, among countless less communicable data.
As for Jupiter: there something greeted him, and told such a monstrous lie, he came home persuaded it must be true on some other axis of perception. But he did not at once insist that he should go back, preferring to postpone a second meeting with— whatever.
Whereas Saturn . . . He treasured that especially, not only for the methane-bergs and ammonia-bows and geysers, not even for the rings, but because whatever they were they were delicious and so proud of it and flattered to know their taste was being appreciated for the first time by a being from elsewhere. They had never realised that elsewhere was. It shattered their consciousness like the shell around an exploding chick (but there were neither chicks nor shells for them because they were distinctly other and had he not been immortal tasting them—and being able to accept they were delicious—would have done much more than simply kill him) # because of which there were potentially several trillion qualifications to any statement he was able to bring back and obviously it was futile to struggle with the# NATHELEES they went looking for other consumers. It was a hurriness. By the end of his visit none were left but there was no need to regret the extinction of their species because they provided a symbol intimating #how he knew he didn’t know but he #knew# and—and the hell with it# gone to find the stars whatever they may be in the hope-identical-with-conviction they also eat us well.
Nobody back on Earth liked that report. It was overshadowing. First time and they got it right, for a ridiculous purpose!
“But in what sense were they delicious?” demanded practical Orlalee, whom he had grown very much to like.
“In the sense they couldn’t help,” returned Lodovico. “They had evolved toward that goal for a billion years.”
“You being the collective percept of us all,” Genua mused, “we imagined you would bring back information we could understand.”
“Especially,” Lodovico suggested with a moue, “because I belong to a less evolved age, and you comprehend my total consciousness.”
“Perhaps,” Horad said, “we’d have done better with a consciousness derived from our time.”
“But you could not,” Lodovico said. “You could not have recreated a personality as complex and modern as your own. I am at the lower limit of what you can derive from yourselves and externalise. Do not blame me, therefore, for my shortcomings; they are yours.”
When they did not
