Didn’t recall! She didn’t recall the very reason she’d lived? Then had these been children, on Ul ‘Lyu’s world? Now she hovered over me, even her laws of gravity an enigma. And those moments she’d spent thinking, the iron that had emerged at various places along her pale, gelatinous soul, that had intrigued me. Moreover, especially, there was the way the entire power struggle underlying our conversation had eluded her. That too….
Next, she asked my name. Trouble, I should have told her. Trouble for us both.
The principle, on my world? The system by which we recycle the living spirit? Ul ‘Lyu never grew tired of talking about it, and I never grew less than amazed that she didn’t know her own.
In my universe even some of those “down” there, in the physical world, are aware of the system. I can recall that when I was last a teenager (Ul ‘Lyu couldn’t get enough of these memories) there were some extremely dull books that described where people went when they died. These books proved to be correct. The dead, we dead, come first to a vast reassignment depot, like any immigrant. From there, from here, we are eventually cycled out again, as newborn physical types. Eventually, it happens eventually. All this is as reported in those dreary paperbacks, and one thing more as well. There exists a priority system for the re-entry. This system itself I never fully understood; nor do I now. But the principle behind the system, as I told Ul ‘Lyu, was and is clear. A good individual is rewarded and an evil one punished.
“Yes I see, Baby,” she would say, using the pet name she preferred to my own. “From here, it’s so easy to tell which was good and which was bad. But I wonder—”
And so soon, on one of our first trips together, my remarkable Ul ‘Lyu came to the tricky part of the business.
“But I wonder, Baby. You tell me you were always the same, the same person in every appearance, the same you are now?”
I didn’t answer. Though I understood her argument, I was already more interested simply in hearing her voice, its musical changes. And I loved to feel the electric hum within her. Because in order to speak with her this way, in order to be near her, I had literally to attach myself to Ul ‘Lyu. I had to sink my hands up to the wrist in her creamy essence. Beneath her surface tension I found nothing to hang onto, but if my hands were inserted far enough I would be held by the suction. Then Ul ‘Lyu would fly, over my glum landscape, as I dangled below.
“The same person, Baby? In all the different lives?”
I relented: “Yes, Ul ‘Lyu.”
“Then how could it ever be? Are you bad now? Are you good now? It’s impossible.”
I understood the argument. I’d often wondered how the same me could remember, though vaguely, so many types of experience. My last physical appearance, for example, was joyous, crackling, with everything I wanted given me at once. Even those dull and morbid books were the gratification of some rainy afternoon’s morbid state of mind. I died, that last time, on the night of high school graduation, in some devil-may-care catastrophe that I can’t now recall, something like a motorcycle accident. Direct, vicious living and dying — wonderful! Yet there were also darker hours, among my recollections. I had also once starved to death, my joints atrophied so I couldn’t move, following a lifetime wasted as a household spider.
“Yes, Ul ‘Lyu,” I repeated.
“But then besides, Baby, besides. It gets so complicated, ooo. How is it ever all worked out?”
And this argument, too, I’d heard before. Ul ‘Lyu again was quicker getting to the point than I’d expected, but the essential problem of a moral principle certainly is easy enough to grasp. What are the gradations of morality? What sins and good deeds, when tabulated together, translate into the blue housefly which dies of poison? What sort of good guy or bad guy becomes the reptile which suns itself brainlessly, eating flies of another color, till its cold heart stops? What moral formula will produce one particular casting out of the million million human types? These questions, this one question, is common here. But never once had I heard anyone talk it over the way Ul ‘Lyu could.
“Baby, please try to remember when you were a spider. Was it summer or winter when you died?”
“Winter.”
“Anything else? Please tell me.”
“All I can remember is stones, Ul ‘Lyu.” And in those few seconds of talk alone, the memory had devastated me with its sadness. “A winter of stones.”
“Okay. Okay I think I know what you were punished for. I think you might have been one of those men who rape little girls.”
I looked back up at her, startled.
“See the stones around you, Baby”—how could she use that nickname, talking about the things she was? — “the stones are so much bigger than you. And feel the sticky dirt of your web, sticky and oozing out from a hole under your belly….”
She frightened me. Right from these first flights of ours, Ul ‘Lyu could go on and on about the most hideous sufferings, about pain that would have my elbows flinching beneath her just to hear it. Yet she’d describe it all in that sweet-tempered voice of hers, as if it were cocktails on the lawn. I couldn’t take my eyes off her now, as she flew along talking about the most hateful life I could recall living. At the edge of my vision there passed the familiar gray stalls from which were handed out the physical assignments on my world. Yet it was Ul ‘Lyu who held me, who held my hands and eyes both. She frightened me, but she could talk. Every question she raised became a romp of meaning and sensuality.
“But now all your joints go stiff, Baby. Stiff. Think of eight steel rods growing out from your ribs.” And I had to think of these rods growing so heavy I could no longer stand, then so heavy I could no longer hold myself on all fours. “You are paralyzed as a spider, Baby, but still you inside.” So that finally as the dying insect I became in fact the little girl I’d formerly raped, trapped in the stiff hold of the hairy molester. “Think, Baby, think of the girl trapped under the enlarged, stiff….”
Yet even as she spoke these horrors, in the throes of her imagining, she performed a trick I always loved. Over the round surface of her body she rotated her face, until soon it came to rest above mine, very close. She could do this even when we flew “forwards”—that is, in the direction I was facing. She didn’t need to see where she was going.
“Ul ‘Lyu!” I had to shout. “There are so many possibilities with you around!” And then the rhyme: “You jewel-you, Ul ‘Lyu!”
She grinned, her face snug between my two buried wrists.
My own guess — my own way of avoiding the truth — was that her freewheeling attitude about the meanings and monsters of my physical life had something to do with coming, as she did, from a dead world. In this she was, after all, different from me. Truly dead worlds were the one important piece of information left out of those sober-sided books I’d read the last time I was a teenager. Other planets and moons had their dead too. And from time to time, after some vast cataclysm, a faraway place may cease to be. A sun may explode; there are wars. An infinite choice of destructions exists, so Ul ‘Lyu told me. Then after that apocalypse, the now heavily-populated realm of the dead would begin, naturally, to wander. During the lifetime of their particular physical world, those dead had of course remained “nearby,” if only in the way that on a clear night the stars are nearby.
“But after your point of reference goes away,” Ul’Lyu told me, “you’re free. You can go anywhere.”