Since it is important that you understand what I am saying, let me give you an illustration. When I was alive and standing on the face of the Earth, I could see ahead of me and behind, but only as far as nothing got in the way. To see farther I had to rise higher; but the higher I rose the more distant what I saw became, and the harder to make out. Thus in space. So in time. I am on neither side of Chandrasekhar's other limit, but above it as you might say, and you would be astonished at how tiny you all look from here. Multiplying embryos in one direction. Moldering corpses in the other. And I am not always sure which way I am facing since, once you rid yourself of the myth of causality, it makes no difference at all.
—No."That is not true. It makes a difference.
I think the difference it makes will surprise you, for it is no more than public opinion. Let me find an analogy. You can, if you wish, paint your body green, dress in your wife's undergarments, and make indecent gestures before a mirror. Do you do this, ever? I wouldn't be surprised if you did, in the privacy of your own home. But if you were to do it, say, at a baseball game or in the middle of a veterans' convention, that would surprise me. You would not. You could. But you wouldn't, for you adapt to the conventions of the group. And so do we all. Even II The event that cost me my physical body gave me in exchange a kind of freedom I had never imagined, but for twenty years I stayed with my fellows and my progeny and was dragged along with them into their myths.
I could, of course, have followed my whilom wife Ann.
There was a good reason why I did not, however. The reason was simply cowardice. None of us dragonflies can ever come back, but once in a great while one of us—I am one—can see just a bit of the other side, and it terrifies me.
So when we came back to Earth I found a chance and I seized it. I escaped. I stole away from the children and the churls who were making them welcome and I roamed, ah, God, how I roamed this dusty planet!
It was not as much of an escape as I had hoped, because in spite of the best we had done the planet was still full of people, and all of them followed the causal myth. Wherever I was. Unseen guest at a lynching in Wheeling, W. Va., or riding a charcoal-burning bus down Fifth Avenue—also unseen—they were there. I found some pleasure in their pleasure, when they had any, and even in their pain; and then I decided to seek some lost familiar pleasures and pains of my own. Why not?
So I recreated some of the lost loves of my youth. There are ten thousand of them or so by now, including the childhood, the almost, and the ones I made up out of my own mind—the last category is far the most numerous. There was Jenny, classmate and briefly bedmate at I.I.T., all love and hunger to please; and just yesterday I stood by the overgrown weeds by the waterworks, for she was my Chicago love, and made her live again. She was in the water of Lake Michigan, under it, swimming toward me. I could see her twilit and distorted face under the ripples, upturned and afraid. I formed a current in the water that swept along the sides of the peninsula and drove her away. I fear for my soul that I let her drown, but of course she was not real. Not even as a standing wave. There was Sharon. When I did her it was only an abstraction, a sense of loss and deprivation, a stain on a pillow and a smear on a sheet; she hurt me, and I will not give her any life at all. Rosemary. She was my least and longest love, in the next seat in high school and for a quick screw two weeks before we boarded the shuttle orbiter, in a motel at Cocoa Beach. We saw each other, oh, a hundred times, over years, but only to go to bed and then claw wittily at each other afterward. I am sure she is deader than I now. I brought her back for a week this morning. When we kissed it was like dry bones clashing. So, all in all, since we came back from that very ingenious place we manufactured near Alpha to this very crude place of our origin, I have recreated fifty sexual partners of my youth, five real and the rest only wished for. It gives me no pleasure, less pleasure than when I amused the children by creating inch-high elephants and candy-colored Tiger tanks for them to play with. Amusing myself was harder. It gave me so little pleasure that I masked what I was doing, even to myself, as a "survey trip," to "scout out the lay of the land" and to "report back" to my kith on what structure survived in the compost heap we had made of a world.
But when I came to report, they were gone.
I knew they would be. There was no question in my mind that they would get in trouble with that oaf Jim Tupelo and have to flee. And I knew that they would not wait for me, for who worried about someone who is already dead? Not even I, who happen to be the corpse.
Ah, you say, trying to sound as though you are following this, but you still move and talk, so how can you be a corpse?
Well, *sigh*, I will explain. After I died, the particles that made up my physical body were so rearranged that they could no longer support each other, but something remained. This "I" is what remained, and "I" am a soliton. A soliton is like a wave. Not a wave wave—in the sense of surf on a beach, or the wiggling vibrations of light or sound—but what a matter wave would be if there were a matter wave that resembled a light wave. If you do not follow what I have just said then you need to go back to freshman physics. Solitons are not a theory. They are a fact. You can see soliton waves in water if, for instance, a big boat suddenly stops and you see the lump of water at its prow continue indefinitely. That is a standing wave. A soliton. It is nondissipative, and so am I.
You, on the other hand, are an instanton. An instanton is a soliton that does not survive very long, and that describes you to a T. You are a pattern, like a giant jigsaw puzzle. As long as the particles of your body exist in the proper geometrical relation to each other you also exist. When you sweep the pieces off the card table back into the box, you have reduced the pattern to randomness and it is gone. I am a persisting pattern, like the orographic clouds over a hill. Break me up if you can, but I will return. In order to be nondissipative, a wave's motion must be nonlinear, and I am that, too. Therefore I am here. While Jenny and Sharon and Rosemary— and you, too—are gone. Got it? Fine. Glad to clear that up for you.
But under certain conditions I can bring you back, you see. I had had enough of lost familiar joys. I sought a lost familiar misery instead, and his name was Dieter von Knefhausen.
So I elevated myself over the city of Washington, D.C., studying what you call the lay of the land. There it sprawled in the watery moonlight, here brooding Lincoln, there Washington's phallic shaft, there the cutesy gingerbread that celebrated Thomas Jefferson. The Potomac was a lot broader than it used to be. Foggy Bottom was Soggy Bottom. There were lights burning bright in the White House where Jimbo, no doubt, was screaming at his evaded aides, and a few others, here and there; and it was, in some sense, sad.
Time was when this city held the spark that stirred the world, for good or evil, when all those circles and avenues were solid with cars and each marble building held its thousand industrious tamperers with everything. It was not like that anymore. The world no longer respected the District, or feared it, either. It was just another weedy marsh, stretching from Arlington to the Maryland line, and if ever I have taken pleasure in the loss of the flesh it was when I heard the steady song of mosquitos all around.
Knefhausen was not buried in any Arlington. Not he. Not in view of the low status he enjoyed at the time of his death. It didn't matter. I knew where they had planted him, close enough. It was not strictly necessary for me to find his wretched remains to do what I wished to do, but I like to do things properly. One never knows what is "necessary," and so I sought out the wretched dog's trough where all the physical facts of the body of Dieter von Knefhausen lay, in the tangle of the White House rose garden. It was easy to find his grave. The tangled thorns grew two feet above the jungle around them: so his corpse found its function. I felt for him. I found him; and in a moment I had him there, as large as life, rising spectrally above the sodden turf.