“No, no,” said Willard, at once. “I accept the ‘he.’ Laborian might have invented a third pronoun, but it would have made no sense and the reader would have gagged on it. Instead, he reserved the pronoun, ‘she,’ for the Emotional. She’s the central character, differing from the other two enormously. The use of ‘she’ for her and only for her focuses the reader’s attention on her, and it’s on her that the reader’s attention must focus. What’s more, it’s on her that the viewer’s attention must focus in the compu-drama.”
“Then you have been thinking of it. “ She grinned, impishly. “I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t needled you.”
Willard stirred uneasily. “ Actually, Laborian said something of the sort, so I can’t lay claim to complete creativity here. But let’s get back to the Parental. I want to talk about these things to you because everything is going to depend on subliminal suggestion, if I do try to do this thing. The Parental is a block, a rectangle.”
“A right parallelepiped, I think they would call it in solid geometry.”
“Come on. I don’t care what they call it in solid geometry. The point is we can’t just have a block. We have to give it personality. The Parental is a ‘he’ who bears children, so we have to get across an epicene quality. The voice has to be neither clearly masculine nor feminine. I’m not sure that I have in mind exactly the timbre and sound I will need, but that will be for the voice-recorder and myself to work out by trial and error, I think. Of course, the voice isn’t the only thing.”
“What else?”
“The feet. The Parental moves about, but there is no description of any limbs. He has to have the equivalent of arms; there are things he does. He obtains an energy source that he feeds the Emotional, so we’ll have to evolve arms that are alien but that are arms. And we need legs. And a number of sturdy, stumpy legs that move rapidly.”
“Like a caterpillar? Or a centipede?”
Willard winced. “Those aren’t pleasant comparisons, are they?”
“Well, it would be my job to subliminate, if I may use the expression, a centipede, so to speak, without showing one. Just the notion of a series of legs, a double fading row of parentheses, just on and off as a kind of visual leitmotiv for the Parental, whenever he appears.”
“I see what you mean. We’ll have to try it out and see what we can get away with. The Rational is ovoid. Laborian admitted it might be egg-shaped. We can imagine him progressing by rolling but I find that completely inappropriate. The Rational is mind-proud, dignified. We can’t make him do anything laughable, and rolling would be laughable.”
“We could have him with a flat bottom slightly curved, and he could slide along it, like a penguin belly-whopping.”
“Or like a snail on a layer of grease. No. That would be just as bad. I had thought of having three legs extrude. In other words, when he is at rest, he would be smoothly ovoid and proud of it, but when he is moving three stubby legs emerge and he can walk on them.”
“Why three?”
“It carries on the three motif; three sexes, you know. It could be a kind of hopping run. The foreleg digs in and holds firm and the two hind legs come along on each side.”
“Like a three-legged kangaroo?”
“Yes! Can you subliminate a kangaroo?” “I can try.”
“The Emotional, of course, is the hardest of the three. What can you do with something that may be nothing but a coherent cloud of gas?”
Cathcart considered. “What about giving the impression of draperies containing nothing. They would be moving about wraithlike, just as you presented Lear in the storm scene. She would be wind, she would be air, she would be the filmy, foggy draperies that would represent that.”
Willard felt himself drawn to the suggestion. “Hey, that’s not bad, Meg. For the subliminal effect, could you do Helen of Troy?” “Helen of Troy?”
“Yes! To the Rational and Parental, the Emotional is the most beautiful thing ever invented. They’re crazy about her. There’s this strong, almost unbearable sexual attraction-their kind of sex-and we’ve got to make the audience aware of it in their terms. If you can somehow get across a statuesque Greek woman, with bound hair and draperies-the draperies would exactly fit what we’re imagining for the Emotional-and make it look like the paintings and sculptures everyone is familiar with, that would be the Emotional’s leitmotiv.”
“You don’t ask simple things. The slightest intrusion of a human figure will destroy the mood.” “You don’t intrude a human figure. Just the suggestion of one. It’s important. A human figure, in actual fact, may destroy the mood, but we’ll have to suggest human figures throughout. The audience has to think of these odd things as human beings. No mistake.”
“I’ll think about it,” said Cathcart, dubiously.
“Which brings us to another thing. The melting. The triple-sex of these things. I gather they superimpose. I gather from the book that the Emotional is the key to that. The Parental and Rational can’t melt without her. She’s the essential part of the process. But, of course, that fool, Laborian, doesn’t describe it in detail. Well, we can’t have the Rational and Parental running toward the Emotional and jumping on her. That would kill the drama at once no matter what else we might do.”
“I agree.”
“What we must do, then, and this is off the top of my head, is to have the Emotional expand, the draperies move out and enswathe (if that’s the word) both Parental and Rational. They are obscured by the draperies and we don’t see exactly how it’s done but they get closer and closer until they superimpose.”
“We’ll have to emphasize the drapery,” said Cathcart. “We’ll have to make it as graceful as possible in order to get across the beauty of it, and not just the eroticism. We’ll have to have music.”
“Not the Romeo and Juliet overture, please. A slow waltz, perhaps, because the melting takes a long time. And not a familiar one. I don’t want the audience humming along with it. In fact, it would be best if it comes in occasional bits so that the audience gets the impression of a waltz, rather than actually hearing it.”
“We can’t see how to do it, until we try it and see what works.”
“Everything I say now is a first-order suggestion that may have to be yanked about this way and that under the pressure of actual events. And what about the orgasm? We’ll have to indicate that somehow.”
“Color.”
“Hmm.”
“Better than sound, Jonas. You can’t have an explosion. I wouldn’t want some kind of eruption, either. Color. Silent color. That might do it.”
“What color? I don’t want a blinding flash, either. “
“No. You might try a delicate pink, very slowly darkening, and then toward the end suddenly becoming a deep, deep red.”
“I’m not sure. We’ll have to try it out. It must be unmistakable and moving and not make the audience giggle or feel embarrassed. I can see ourselves running through every color change in the spectrum, and, in the end, finding that it will depend on what you do subliminally. And that brings us to the triple-beings.”
“The what?”
“You know. After the last melting, the superimposition remains permanent and we have the adult form that is all three components together. There, I think, we’ll have to make them more human. Not human, mind you. Just more human. A faint suggestion of human form, not just subliminal, either. We’ll need a voice that is somehow reminiscent of all three, and I don’t know how the recorder can make that work. Fortunately, the triple-beings don’t appear much in the story.”
Willard shook his head. “ And that brings us to the rough fact that the compu-drama might not be a possible project at all.”
“Why not? You seem to have been offering potential solutions of all kinds for the various problems.”
“Not for the essential part. look! In King Lear, we had human characters, more than human characters. You had searing emotions. What have we got here? We have funny little cubes and ovals and drapery. Tell me how my Three in One is going to be different from an animated cartoon?”