She was silent, sitting with downcast eyes. ‘You appreciate the curious parallel between it and us. We live as it does, under a dome…’ Seeing she was thinking something out, I said nothing. I liked her face and her sensibility in my globe. For once, she was not being prickly; that too I liked. We certainly were parked in a lonely part of the universe.
Looking up smartly, she said, ‘Tom, I admire you and your gallant attempt to make us all better people. Of course it won’t work. I am an example of why it won’t work – I was born with an obstinate temper.’
‘No, no. Something may have made you obstinate. You’re … you’re just the sort of person we need in Utopia. Someone who can think and … feel…’
As if I had not spoken, she said – she was looking into a dark corner of her room – ‘Oh, Chimborazo is conscious right enough. I feel it. I felt it when we were there, right by it. I feel it now.’
‘We got a CPS, certainly. But… I fear that if there is a mentality at work under its shell, then human understanding has to change. It must change.’ I stared down at the digits on my watch, ever flickering the seconds of life away. ‘If there is life on Earth’s neighbour, then the universe must be a great hive of wildly diverse life. As if intelligence was the natural aim and purpose of the universe.’
‘Yes, if consciousness is not simply a local anomaly. But that is too anthropocentric, isn’t it? I came on such ideas too recently to know. Me with my Abo background.’ Some of her old scorn sounded in her voice. And then, as if in contradiction, her thought took off. She said about this thing on our doorstep that perhaps in its solitude, in its stony centuries of meditation under its camouflaging shell, it had come to comprehend universals that had never even impinged on human skulls. The human race had always been driven by a few imperatives – hunger, sex, power -and lived by diversity; maybe – just maybe – the unity of this huge thing was proof of a vastly greater strength of understanding…’
She sighed. ‘Beau’s here with me, Tom. He’s sleeping. He does not feel Chimborazo’s presence as I do. Oh, we’re so limited … Maybe its unity is proof of a greater understanding. Something gained through the chilly expanses of time – what we comprehend as time, anyway – until it has reached perfect knowledge and wisdom. Does that sound like wishful thinking?’ She laughed at herself.
‘Suppose it was like that, Kathi. Would we be able to converse with it? Communicate? Or would its understandings put it for ever beyond our conceptual reach? “What we comprehend as time” – there’s an example … So it’s to us a kind of god – totally without interest in anything outside itself.’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that…’
She put her hands to her cheeks in a gesture I had seen her use before. ‘It’s that time of night when imaginations run away with themselves. Could be it’s just a freak mollusc, stranded on a failed planet that long since yielded up its essence … Tom, go to sleep! I wish I were there to talk to you, closely…’
Her face faded and was gone.
I could not sleep. The conversation lingered in my mind. My head ached; I felt stifled.
I staggered out of my chamber in search of company, and barged without knocking into Choihosla’s apartment.
Youssef Choihosla was kneeling on a small mat, his forehead to the floor. A dim lamp stood nearby.
I halted in the doorway. Choihosla looked up with a brow of thunder. He began a stream of abuse, biting it off when he recognised me.
‘Tom? You look ghastly! Come in, come in. What’s up? It’s “X” hour.’
He rose as I entered. I said, ‘You were in the midst of prayer. I’m sorry to break in.’
‘Allah is great. He will forgive an interruption. Come and sit down.’
I sat weakly and he brought his great bulk close and also sat, hands on knees. I spoke of my confusion of mind, brought about by the thought of the unknown life form not far away from us. He confessed that his prayer – ‘largely wordless’ – had been seeking reassurance for the same reason.