“Baby, I just don’t know.”
Her face was directly above mine. She smiled and the colors within her glimmered and blinked, making me feel as if somewhere within my chest hung a sloppy lower class of beast that I myself was carrying.
“After all, Baby,” she went on, “it could be that in my world something like myself was split into two people. Ooo, or ten people”
I had to look away. My God, her merciless speculations. My knees buckled as soon as my feet hit the white slate.
“Baby, when I was alive, I could have been schoolteachers and dogs and….”
But at last we did meet up with others of her kind.
There, what a spectacle. In a wanton symphony of talk, Ul ‘Lyu and her countrymen bobbed on the air, catching riffs of excitement off each other until I cried out that my arms were killing me. I was set down, gently, but thereafter the conversation riffed on, rattled on, astonished me on and on. Never mind that, when they rested against the tough ivory landscape, Ul ‘Lyu and her fellow-talker looked as ordinary as two scoops of ice cream stuck on a kitchen counter. Nor did it matter that some had female faces and some — yes, at first it cut me deep to see — had male faces. Together they improvised as if the physical universe was no more than a choice of walls and rougher surfaces they might bounce off without end. They began, say, with how my arms must have felt when I’d said they were killing me. Then the two impossible creatures were just gone. From sodomy to bananas, from the Arabian look of a certain cathedral to the way the mind goes black under the pressure of a thumbscrew. Talk, talk, talk. I would put in what I could. I’d try to be good company. But always, soon, I’d be left behind, literally a hanger-on.
And so I began to think long thoughts. Because what could you count on, with these people? “Good company” in the usual sense meant nothing here. Nor did “love” itself. The others in this world, yes, shared Ul ‘Lyu’s puzzling familiarity with the details I recalled from my own universe. Sodomy, yes, and bananas. But their connections left me dizzy. More than once, they left me disgusted. Therefore what could I rely on, what could I trust, in such bewildering party chit-chat? Hanging beneath their talk, I began to wonder what I was worth.
Now, these bad moments always had an end. After the worst and most stupefying conversation, after I hung drained and positive I’d made the wrong choice, then with a particular extra beauty in her voice Ul ‘Lyu would thank her friend and, always, lift me away. With us would rise my nincompoop of a heart. Oh Ul ‘Lyu, you may not have known your principle, but I knew mine. We flew; we flew. Timeless freefall. The bee and the rose set loose together. Flying again, I could ask:
“Ul ‘Lyu, why do you stay with me?”
Stay with me: oh was I a cripple. I still lacked the strength to ask straight out whether she loved me.
“Don’t be silly,” she’d say. “I stay with you because you’re different.”
But that wasn’t an answer. In fact Ul ‘Lyu, for all your ability to talk, it wasn’t you who gave me the answer.
Lost in a romantic vertigo as I was, I didn’t notice just when the faraway roar of overlapping heavens stopped. Only, as I dreamed along to the calliope hum of her belly, during one flight or another, I noticed the familiar noise was gone. Ul ‘Lyu’s world had broken clear of my own. I had become, in short, truly dead. Then began the visits by other dead worlds.
I couldn’t say just how many visits there were. Ul ‘Lyu and I remained capable of entertaining ourselves, despite my doubts. We didn’t tour every last one of these traveling cemeteries. But unquestionably the number of dead worlds passing through hers was high. Two destroyed ways of living, it seems, emit compatible fields of magnetic despair. When Ul ‘Lyu’s stony place ran into mine, that was an accident. But actual dead worlds mingle often. For myself, the numbers alone told the story: awesome numbers, sobering numbers, deeply upsetting stuff. Far more universes had collapsed and been set free than I would have thought possible. And now to feel repeatedly the form of their sadness, to blink as clouds of ghosts darkened our sunstruck flights, to watch the hammered shapes of catastrophe pass again and yet again over the badlands below…. Let me describe only one.
Out of nowhere, once, a seeming warehouse-full of colored streamers, party streamers, started to pass “upwards” through the white rock. They kept rising, past Ul ‘Lyu and myself, till they disappeared into the sky. Unfortunately, however, we couldn’t communicate with whatever creatures gave life to this swiveling forest of celebration. They didn’t speak. But after a while I discovered I could tear off strips of their souls for myself. In my hands the bits of green or gold or orange streamers still made no sound, gave no word. But they wriggled and flipped over comically. When I let them go these strips of color again leapt into the sky, and again took up their rising, even as they continued to wriggle and twist. So we passed the time, in a never-ending New Year’s Eve. For those rare days I enjoyed a superiority over Ul ‘Lyu, simply because I had fingers and a thumb. But then came the moment when the first streamer finished passing through. Then we saw the way it tapered off into an elongated wet tip. Then we recalled how, at the start of their visit, the “upper” ends of these creatures’ bodies had been bulbous, permeable like a sponge, and also wet. Wet beginning, wet end. At last we understood. Ul ‘Lyu’s world had been penetrated by a universe of enormously long tears.
“No!” I cried after the discovery. I buried my hands deeper than ever in Ul’Lyu’s jelly. “No no no. What have I done?”
“You were cruel,” my mysterious lover said. Mysteriously neutral again and yet mysteriously forgiving me. “Destructive and cruel, Baby.”
But that one case isn’t enough. That one case provides only the woeful melody of these passersby; it lacks the startling coloration added by the mind’s orchestra at each new visit. Let me describe another.
We saw also a type of dead which came not from somewhere in deep space but from out of a history I recognized. Not from dead worlds, that is, but from dead civilizations on my own world. One such group crossed the landscape here in the form of statues, statues of men only, half-rising from chambers of marble or alabaster. My own history, dead and wandering! Now all right, yes, I could understand the theory involved — or I could after I’d done with my shameful screaming and carrying on round and round the top of another small butte. In time, I could understand how these statues represented a philosophy, a system of gods, that had passed out of existence. Yet I thought further. Might I not once have worshipped these marble gods myself? And, stranger stilclass="underline" since the intense worship of a given principle creates its own heaven, then the number of heavens could go on forever. There could be a heaven for one soul alone.
No. No those two cases together also fall way short of the whole effect, the percussive attack of surprise after surprising visit, the counterpoint of horror and lunacy. And the numbers. Let me describe them all. In my memory, clustered around Ul ‘Lyu and myself, these dead souls appear like nothing so much as an overbearingly lit-up bar-&-grill at sundown. Among the slick stains of spilled brew and the rotating advertisements, I can identify, glumly, the workaholic commuters and city types, the skanks and nerds and the ones merely bent out of shape, and I watch them all getting a buzz on during Happy Hour. Happy, oh yes, happy. For not only did Ul ‘Lyu waltz through these visitors with her customary light step — that much I’d expected, that much I loved her for. Also, strangest and worst of all, these blasted cinders of a former belief claimed to be more or less happy. If they could talk, their tune was always more or less the same.