“Except for a few moribund enclaves, community hi a general sense has dissolved. We still use the word and go through some of the forms, but they are nearly as empty as a fertility rite or an election would be. Today we are purely individuals. Our loyalties, if ‘loyalty’ has any meaning left, are to various and ever-varying configurations of personalities. Has this fact wholly escaped you?”
“Well, uh, well, no,” Patulcius floundered, “but—”
“I can offer you nothing in the way of work,” Theta-En-nea finished. “I doubt anyone anywhere can, any longer. However, if you care to stay a while in Oxford, we can talk. I think we might learn something from each other.”
For whatever help that may be to you afterward, she left unsaid.
8
THE WORLD abides. I am still I, bone, blood, and flesh, aware of the induction unit that enwraps me but also of walls and their views across the outside, silvery-hued turf, a fountain arcing in fractals, an enormous shell of diamond within which, I have heard, grows a new kind of comet-mining spacecraft, flashes in the sky as a weather control module implants energy, the allness exterior to me. So quiet is this room that I hear my breath go in and out, my pulse, the rustle of hair when my head moves on the couch. What happens to me is a waxing of interior cognizance until soon it is the outside that is the ghost.
I descend into myself. My whole past opens to my ranging. Again I am a slave, a fugitive, a servant, a leader, a companion; again I love and lose, bear and bury. I lie on a sunlit hillside with my man, the clover smell and buzz of bees are sweet to know, we watch a butterfly pass; it is gone, these five hundred years.
There are blurs, there are gaps. I am not sure whether lichen grew on yonder stone. Yes, quantum randomness gathers its tax—but slowly, and I can renew what matters, even as my body renews itself. A neuropeptide links to the receptor on a nerve cell…
Come, The thought is not mine. It becomes mine. I am conducted, I conduct myself, onward and inward.
Thus far went my training. Today I am ready for oneness.
I do not go into the network. Nothing moves but those fields, mathematical functions, that the world perceives as forces, particles, light, itself. In a sense the network enters me. Or it unfolds before me, as I before it.
My guide takes form. No shape walks beside me, no hand holds mine. Nonetheless I am conscious of the body, though it may lie halfway around the planet, hi the way that I am conscious of my own. His person is tall, slender, blue-eyed. His personality is blithe and sensuous. You were once Flora (I learn of you), he thinks to me. Then I will be Faunas. He would like us to meet afterward for purposes of exploration. That is the merest ripple through an intelligence born of a brain made flawless. He has the gift of sympathy too, that he may help a neophyte such as me begin to partake.
Timidly, then warily, then ardently I mesh the flow of my identity with his. Thereby I more and more know the entire linkage. I have studied an abstraction. Today I am in and of the reality. Currents go like billows, cresting, troughing, weaving new waves. From them spring figures many-patterned and crystalline as snowfiakes, brilliancies that expand outward through multiple dimensions, shift, nicker, dance in eternal change; and this is the language and the music that speak to me. Afar, immanent, core, outermost, the great computer sustains the matrices of our beings, vivifies them, sends them on then- orbits andTsummons them home. Yet it is at our behest. We are what happens, the oneness, the god.
We. Minds reach forth, touch, join. Here is Phyllis, my human teacher, who first accompanied me along the fringes. I have her self-image, small, dark, long-haired, though in dim wise because she is not thinking about her body. I recognize the gentleness, patience, toughness. Suddenly I can share her interest in tactile harmonics and microgravity laser polo. Her warmth embraces me.