What happens afterwards, of course, can hurt, maybe worse than any pain that could ever reach you in the natural way, sparked off in your nerves by injury.
I was already gritting my teeth against the pain that I feared, but what came made any such feeble reaction quite irrelevant. I felt my head tearing apart, my thoughts shredded by a searing blast of pure agony, and I screamed.
To make things worse—there’s always some silly little thing which can make even the most horrible experience still worse—the last thing I heard before I lost contact with that reality was the sound of a gunshot.
30
I imagined myself to be Prometheus, chained to a rock, with an eagle’s claw raking and tearing my ribs, the talons lunging at my heart. I became Sir Everard Digby, plunging from the scaffold, and then to the ground as the rope was cut, still conscious as the executioner moved to castrate me, and tear the entrails from my belly. I fused my mind with the sensations of Damiens, stretching on the rack, limbs ripped with red-hot hooks, wounds tormented with molten lead, with boiling oil, with burning pitch, with sulphur, the horses straining with all their might at a body which would not tear. . . .
This was not mere melodrama, but an act of mental self- defence. I coped with the dangerously explosive firing of my neurons in the only way I could, by reconstructing even that most extreme of experiences into some kind of story, containing it with some kind of imaginative coherency.
I did not know what I was doing, but I was saving my life and my mind from a shock that might otherwise have destroyed them.
It is said, although it must be the product of the corrupt imagination of yellow journalism, that it took ten horses several hours to pull off Damiens’ limbs, one by one, even after his torturers had weakened his hip and shoulder joints by cutting partly through the ligaments, and that even then the man still lived, although unable to speak—and thus unable to repent of his sins and receive the last possible consolation. In my re-enactment of his drama, though, all this could be true, and was.
Reporters also said that Everard Digby was still conscious when they quartered him, but this is surely an observer’s insistence on wringing the last drop of permissible horror from the tale he has to tell, to make the point that no man at any time ever did or could have suffered quite as much as the man in question. When I became Digby, though, it was the Digby of legend that I became, and limits of plausibility did not concern my fantasizing mind.
There were, of course, no eyewitnesses to tell us of the sufferings of Prometheus, and no one therefore with a vested interest in magnifying the importance of the incident. Perhaps this made it easier to be Prometheus.
I report now on what happened to me not as an eyewitness but as a victim, and I find my own vested interests paradoxical. My memory is filtered; I cannot remember the pain, but have instead to imagine it, and now that I know that it was in some sense not real pain (nothing, after all, happened to my actual limbs and heart) I cannot imagine it quite as it was then. My description of it certainly seems hyperbolic—any description would seem hyperbolic—in view of the fact that I survived the experience. Nevertheless, I can assure you that I suffered—imagined, if you wish—extreme pain, and that I did indeed identify myself briefly with those lurid attempts to describe the worst sufferings ever undergone by human beings.
Put me down, if you like, as a hypochondriac.
The pain, as I withstood it, made me try with all my might to become smaller, to shrivel myself up and hide myself in insignificance. I tried to wrap myself up in my own substance, like a worm eating its own tail with furious appetite ... I tried to vanish into a fold of space like a starship into a wormhole or like some devious subatomic particle strutting its vain appearance across the infinitesimal stage of the fabric of space for some unimaginable fraction of a picosecond.
Amazingly, this cowardly move seemed to work.
The hurt dwindled as I shrank, and by the time I was no bigger, in my imagination, than an atom, I was no longer feeling pain. I felt curiously free; I was a world much tinier than a grain of sand, and there was a comfortable eternity extended within my hour. For the moment, though, I was paying no attention to anything outside myself.
Put me down, if you like, as an egotist.
Then, like the hero of some antique microcosmic romance, I suffered a kind of cognitive bouleversement, by which little and big were reversed. With a single elegant flip, like a move in zero-gee gymnastics, I became the whole universe, made of space and filled with stars, flowing as I expanded, clothed with a skin of paper-thin galaxies whose velocity of recession, relative to my stationary heart, was trembling on the brink of the magical c.
Inside me, streaming like amoeboid protoplasm, was a seminal fluid of nebular vapours, lusting for the vortical dance that would spin them into stellar spermatids, and the beating of my heart was the beating of the Heart Divine— the pulse and rhythm of Creation. Here too, there could be no pain, but only the crystal ecstasy of the music of the spheres.
Thus stabilized, safely, as some kind of persona no longer tied to my humanoid body and humanoid senses, I was ready to transfigure myself into some hypothetical corpus in which I might face other entities—in which I might be contacted.
Contact, after all, was what I was there for.
In the quaint romances of Old Earth, such intimate contacts as the one which I was set to make are usually uninhibited by the constraints of language. When the gods speak inside the heads of the heroes of myth; when the telepathic aliens make their crucial contact with the scientists of the twenty- first century; when the sentient computer programmes first get to mental grips with their wetware progenitors, it is generally assumed that barriers of language are burned away, and that the protagonist’s mind can automatically translate the messages which are being beamed at him into English— tortured English, sometimes, in the interests of dramatic effect, but English nevertheless.
In reality, alas, thought does not transcend language. When two humanoids meet, although they have not a word of any language in common, they may still hope to communicate with one another through gesture and mime, but when human and alien meet across some kind of neuro-artificial interface, brain-cell to silicon chip instead of eyeball to eyeball, it is not quite so easy. I presume that it is more difficult still when one of the parties seeking contact has not the least idea of what he can do in such a hypothetical matrix—so different from dear old spacetime!—or how to do it.
Take it from me, the business of contacting an alien intelligence through a direct neural hook-up is a bit like being required to appear on a TV quiz show immediately after being born, with horrible penalties to be exacted if the questions are not answered adequately.
Subjectively, I began to conceive of myself again as something approximately human-sized. What I was I cannot tell, and I assume that I was not provided with a shape or form; I only had to be a point of view. To what extent my own creativity was involved in the shaping of the environment which coalesced around me I cannot tell; I suspect that it was all done for me, but that those who formed it for the edification of my pseudo-sensory awareness drew upon the resources of my memory and imagination.
It was, if you like, a kind of dream—and thus, perhaps, amenable to some kind of psychological analysis, if only I knew how.