Beneath her, flying beneath her, I wondered. Free. Then was that why I felt…? And I wondered further. Just how, exactly, did I feel, just how was I beginning to feel, about Ul ‘Lyu?
“But this place of yours, Baby, well. It’s different. It’s like a fog inside a box, isn’t it? And then you have those little gray booths at one side—ooo! Oh-oh-ooo!”
I had turned my wrists over, inside her. She always cooed and yelled this way while I inserted my hands deep enough for another dangling flight. And this time I was deliberately tickling her, making her scream, to distract us both from the smoky sameness of my slow world.
“Just checking the suction, Ul ‘Lyu,” I called up.
And I turned my wrists back and forth till the muscles grew hot. Ul’Lyu warbled like a piano. The rest of that flight, at least, passed in conversation about safer subjects.
But the trick of course didn’t work forever. No. Compared to Ul ‘Lyu I was a cripple with tricks. There came a later flight. Then despite hours of tickling, my persistent bird, my singleminded passenger pigeon, you wouldn’t be distracted.
“Your system, Baby,” she said then, “the amazing thing about it is that it takes so much time.”
And there she had touched the hard heart of the matter. I suppose I knew she would sooner or later. The great problem of living between lives as I am is simply how leadenly and blankly it stretches on. We have no way of telling the time here, but we wait a long time. And yes, “we,” yes there are others here, a group as good or bad as any, I suppose. But the company’s no help, in the last analysis. We all share nothing but the vacant density of prolonged anticipation. And “down” there, in the physical realm, every act holds meaning. Spider or slap-happy teenager, every living thing moves by significant steps to a significant end. Whereas “up” here all meaning turns to smoke. We wait. I do not know what goes on in those gray stalls at the edge of our depot, but I do know that we ghosts have fought like murderers in order to get an assignment that wasn’t even ours to begin with. Since our assignments aren’t written down but instead simply told to us, since therefore we hear our names only as they echo through the gloom, confusion can arise. I myself once actually tore out the legs of another here, when I’d thought it was my name the Powers had called. I’d torn out the other’s legs and left him there, like something out of a sadistic cartoon. But that assignment turned out to be in fact for him; the name I’d heard was his. I was told to wait.
“And were you punished,” Ul ‘Lyu asked when I told her about the fight, “during your next lifetime?”
I didn’t remember. Bits of dream may linger, but who can recall the date of the night?
“You should have been punished, Baby. You were violent and cruel.”
Ah, is it surprising, is it any surprise at all, what happened once Ul ‘Lyu broke my grim orbit? After the preposterous roar which shattered the air when her world rammed mine, the birdbath dropping into the compost heap, then I rushed off to find any distraction. And there I found, not just distraction, but my whole life and death put to question:
“On your world,” she had asked, that first time, “what’s the principle for recycling souls?”
Ul ‘Lyu, we never stopped asking. Soon I never wanted to stop asking. I felt how it was to ride beneath you. I saw how even the limits of my smoky hall could seem aired out by new possibilities. I heard you say violent and cruel, but in a voice as nimble as the carnival colors that glimmered always beneath the pale jelly of your soul. In a voice that conveyed only the most neutral meanings of the word, cruel. So I fell in love with Ul ‘Lyu.
If she’d wanted to fly dead-on into the next star due to explode, I couldn’t have said no. But she enlarged the circle of our flights together only slowly. She handled me with care, keeping within the borders of my world. Still for all our talk, for all her wicked grins and for all my many hints at my own feelings, we never told each other outright that we were in love. We traveled and gabbed, no more. And then one time, touring the periphery of my depot, we passed again the point of contact, where the two eternities were jammed together. There, ah there, I saw how Ul ‘Lyu’s place was going eventually to get free of my own. It would roll around the edge.
So Ul ‘Lyu and I paused, hanging above the point of collision. Together we observed how the lip of her heaven advanced against the rough edge of my hell. We came to see the certain precise amount advanced, always, over a certain regular period. We came to see, in other words, the grinding sameness of Time itself. Before I knew what I was doing I’d lifted my face away from that terrible watch-works and started begging Ul ‘Lyu to get me out of here, get me out of here.
“What, Baby?”
Her face loosened itself and rolled down towards mine.
“Ul ‘Lyu, I love you!” And so I’d said it. “I want to leave my life! The same waiting and nothing matters, the same waiting for the same, same world — I hate it, Ul ‘Lyu! I want to live in your world forever!”
“Oh.”
She became thoughtful. The hum inside her increased. I felt the hard places, the iron places, emerging from within again. But I said nothing. I’ve learned how to wait. Besides, the more Ul ‘Lyu considered, the more the suction holding me in place evaporated, and it took all my energy to grip the solid edges of what she became. Soon I lost the strength to keep my head up. I thought: I’ve told her, but she’s never told me. Again I saw below me that pitiless turn and turn.
But then — between one slipping handhold and the next — the suction returned. Ul ‘Lyu’s body rippled against the hairs on my arm again. I lifted my face and found hers, smiling.
“Okay,” she said.
Ul ‘Lyu turned and plunged into her atmosphere. Beneath, I dangled without a care in any world. I even swung back and forth in order to experience more completely the freedom, the trippy looseness — and in order to set my love caterwauling, once more, as my wrists turned. Meanwhile gradually the dust of the collision dispersed. First shimmering then stark, I saw Ul’Lyu’s world.
It was not gelatinous, like her. Just the opposite. The ground beneath our flight turned out to be a badlands of sheetrock, with canyons and buttes absolutely razor-edged. Fierce magnificence; I will never forget it. Unlike my murmuring indoor death, this one was crystal, exposed to the weather, silent. The single feature against the ivory strictness of those rises and falls was a repeated series of stiff lines, chiseled into the rock. I never learned their purpose, those lines. But we would cross them at regular intervals, since they ran everywhere, even up the sides of the tallest butte. Going past these markings, always at the genial pace of a tourist, Ul ‘Lyu and I resembled a hawk carrying a rabbit as it flew across a row of telephone wires, the bird slowed by its heavy prey.
When my arms grew tired, she preferred to rest on top of a butte. Her flying ability, so far as I could tell, never suffered wear and tear, though she would occasionally plump herself onto the rock next to me. Then, the usual gabbing. And my usual lame steering clear of the one question I wanted most to ask. Through all our early talks and flights, also, the grinding borders of our two worlds continued to sound, distantly. But we went a long time, over whole continents of her lined place, before we ran into others like Ul ‘Lyu. Yes, they were very few, these round creatures. Even during my most lonesome waiting, my own way of life had not seemed so unpopulated.
“I suppose,” I said once, as she lowered me towards a butte-top, “loneliness could be part of your principle. Your principle for living and dying.”