Where I now live, for example, on Sanduleak, the surface temperature is three or four hundred times what it is on Earth or Mars. Since Sandy went supernova and contracted to a neutron star, it’s a thousand degrees Kelvin?in the shade! That makes things go pretty fast. By Earth scale, a decent life span for a citizen on Sandy is maybe a quadrillionth of a second. It feels like a long time here. You’d think a bridge like that could never be gapped, that Earthers and Sanduleans could never communicate, and you’d be right except that, in this man’s universe, there is no absolute standard. We have a sliding scale. And I mean sliding!
The Earther Protagoras had it right:
Man is the measure of all things.
Well, not Man, but Mind really, not to be anthropocentric. All those scales and numbers and laws of science are just hypostatizations of something that actually belongs to the realm of Mind. Mind made them. Mind measures them. Mind compares, adjusts, interprets, changes. That’s what the epochй is all about, for example. That’s why Shaman was such an imminent threat even from a couple hundred million miles away, even if it had been light-years away?c is not the top speed in this man’s universe, not when you can do an epochй. Nature is a lot less rigid than that, believe me.
Look at linguini.
27. Dualism
“Mel, is that you, Mel? Abu al-Hawl?” Sarvaduhka was whispering into my hindquarters, the pyramid of Chephren at his back, and in between, Lila Kodzi and two camels tethered to a rock. “I can’t believe I drove you in my VW Squareback on Route 40. Is this you? Izzy says you are the Father of Terrors from before the pharaohs and that you have shepherded the dynonucleic acid ancestors out of the primal soup down to modern Homo sapiens such as I myself, Sarvaduhka, that you are the progenitor of all life on Earth. Izzovision. Is this the truth? You did not appear this way to me in New Mexico or Texas. I hope I did not offend you, Great One, by anything I may have said or done at that time, Om Shantih.”
Lila said, “Sir, you’re talking to a big stone.”
Sarvaduhka ignored her. “Izzy couldn’t make it, oh Terrible One. He is being held by the authorities here. They think maybe he is a terrorist, but Izzy says not to worry. He asked me to give you this message, Ineffable Ancient Great One.
“Number One, he apologizes that his gambit did not work exactly as planned . . .”
“Number One, Number Two!” Lila Kodzi slapped Sarvaduhka on the shoulder. “He’s been rehearsing this all the way from Cairo. Number One, Number Two! Bah! There is only Number One! Is this not so, Ancient Greatness? All is the divine holy Christ Nature, and the divine holy Christ Nature is one.” Now she whispered into the clefts of my badly mortared posterior.
The sound and light show had reached the reign of Cheops. People here seemed to consider that fairly ancient. They should have seen the first lungfish. They should have seen the nucleotides I netted from the asteroid belt, how I landed them and nursed them, turned them inside-out, left-to-right, and said to Myself, “Let us make Man.” That, they could more justly have called “ancient.”
“Quiet, whore!” Sarvaduhka said. Lila grumbled. Sarvaduhka went on. “Number One, Izzy wanted the Sanduleans to save you from Shaman, but not to take you so far away from Earth. So, that didn’t work out so well, and he is sorry, Greatness.”
“He’s right here,” Lila said. “What?far away? Obviously, you are a dualist.”
“I am not a dualist. I am your employer. You don’t know what you are talking about, Lila. The Mel Bellow person is in outer space somewhere.”
“I thought you said he was the Sphinx now.”
“Yes and no.”
“Dualism.”
“Quiet, whore!” Sarvaduhka honeyed his voice. “Number Two, Izzy requests that you employ your vast powers to bring Johnny Abilene to El Giza. This appears to be the only way that you can be saved from eternal slavehood to Shaman, who is also Tuthmosis IV.”