Under Plum Lake

by Lionel Davidson

  He'd said if these parts had been damaged beyond repair he'd have had to “let me go”. He couldn't replace my parts. They had different parts. We were of different species.

  Dido told me the difference. (Either then or later, he told me.) He told me why they had no pain.

  He said I had pain to warn that something was wrong with my body. It was like a fuse in an electric system. If something went wrong, the fuse blew to protect the system. If I cut my hand, it hurt to warn that I'd damaged a part that could endanger my body — from loss of blood or infection. I could cut other parts of my body, that didn't endanger it, and they wouldn't hurt. I could cut my hair or my fingernails, and they wouldn't hurt.

  He said that with them everything was like hair and fingernails. No part of them could hurt. They always knew the state of their bodies in the same way that they always knew the time. He said right at that moment he could feel his brain and his kidneys and his liver. Nothing could go wrong with them that he wouldn't know about, and nobody in Egon could die of illness.

  I asked him what they did die of.

  He said they died if they broke vital parts that couldn't be replaced in time, or of old age.

  I asked why old age mattered if illness didn't.

  He said it was to do with Egon.

  We weren't talking then. We were using brain waves, to rest my mind. He'd told me about it. He said they used speech socially, but they didn't need to. With animals they only used brain waves. He said I was like an animal. I had a mind a bit like a dog's. A dog's mind was simple but interesting, because it knew more than you thought it knew. He said it was fun getting in a dog's mind when it dreamed. A part of you became the dog, to understand it. A part of him had just become me to understand me.

  He said the word Egon meant “life”. Or it could mean “mind”. He couldn't find the right word in my head. He said everything was a part of Egon, but a person's particular part was called his “ego”, and it wore out. It wasn't a physical thing so you couldn't replace it.

  He said Egon didn't mean just the world of Egon. The world of Egon was part of a larger Egon. The larger Egon was the galaxy of worlds, and Earth was just an ego in it.

  He saw I didn't understand.

  He said I'd better not try just now.

  He said I would understand. I'd understand when we had the last experience, and I'd rested long enough now, so we could have it.

  The last experience was under Plum Lake.

  This was the one he hadn't any words for.

  I think we went down then.

  I think I learnt the lot down there.

  23. The Timeless Caverns

  You don't swim down. You take a lift. The lifts go direct from the jetties to the caverns. There are scores of caverns, all connected. They have another world there. It's a world of beautiful light. There's a sky, and clouds, and some of the clouds almost bob on the ground. It's always spring or autumn, according to the part you're in. You can go from spring to autumn, and then into spring again.

  They have fantastic scenery in the caverns. There are wide landscapes with valleys and meadows, connected by winding paths with waterfalls and grottoes. There are airlocks through all the caverns to keep the water out. The air you breathe is from the springs.

  It's a dream land there. Fish swim in the air. You swim in it, or float. You take a weight-belt down with you, and to walk you have to pick up rocks and put them in your belt.

  The first thing you notice is that time has slowed. It's so slow, it almost stops. You feel your ideas forming. You feel each thought happening.

  We came to a clearing, and I saw angels sitting on a cloud, playing harps. Then I looked again, and it was giants, playing guitars.

  They were lounging on the cloud with their guitars. I couldn't move away. I just wanted to stay and listen. The notes didn't fade in the air. The old notes hung in the air with the new ones. The music seemed to go on for ever, like bells. But Dido drew me on. He drew me off the trail, up a hillside. We floated up. We floated into a grotto, and weighted ourselves, and drank from the pool there.

  He began telling me things without speaking. Everything got slower. His thoughts got slower.

  They were so slow, so simple, I found myself looking all over the thoughts, and examining them.

  He showed me Egon, and other worlds, and we drank more from the pool.

  Time practically stopped. There was so much time, it seemed limitless. Every moment came slowly along like a huge landscape, and in every part of it something was happening.

  I saw all history. I saw the distant past. I saw the world as one continent: its beautiful scenery, its glittering cities, its soundless rockets speeding between the cities and the stars. Then he showed me the present, and the people in the world above, huddled in their mountains and worrying. They worried about everything, the cost of things, their health, the danger of attack by other people. It was the present but it was so crude and primitive it looked remoter than the past.

  He brought it closer for me, and I saw myself being born. I saw myself as a baby. I saw everything I'd ever done. I've no time to put it now. They stop time there, so I couldn't tell it was passing; but he said it was, anyway, and we had to move.

  We moved to spring (it's autumn in the grottoes) and he told me the reason for the caverns. You stop your life there. You stop it where you want. You enter your mind and look at all you've ever done.

  In autumn you do it to see where your life has reached and to find out what you missed (because it's all there, even things you didn't notice at the time). And in spring you do it for fun, because everything is new again. Every sensation in the world becomes new. All the colours, the smells, the tastes, everything you ever felt, you feel for the first time again.

  It's lemon and primrose, the light in spring.

  I nearly went out of my mind in spring.

  We were in meadows sparkling with flowers. We were nosing through trees heavy with blossom. We were jumping, flying, rolling everywhere, and my senses reeled. I felt I'd been given the world to play in. I felt I'd been given my body as a present. I couldn't believe I owned my body. It seemed a fantastic thing to own. It could do so much and feel so much, and every part of it was marvellous. The whole world was marvellous. I couldn't take in enough of it. I couldn't breathe enough, or see or smell or hear enough.

  But he kept drawing me on. He said there was so much to do, and not much time to do it now.

  We did the jubal-racing, and the fishing. We went out of the caverns to the lake, and then back in, and I learnt the lot.

  First, the jubals: a jubal is a shark, a racing shark, and you ride it. Then fishing. In fishing, you don't catch fish. You become a fish. It's unbelievable. But even before that, there was him. He'd changed towards me. He'd changed since he thought he'd ended my life and felt my pain.

  Before, he'd treated me like a pet, like something to show off. But now he seemed . . . to love me. It's hard to explain it. I don't even understand it. But he wouldn't leave me for a moment. He kept looking at me and I felt him thinking my thoughts. And I suddenly realized something else. I saw that though he acted like a kid and could feel like a kid, he was old. He was a very old man. He was older than my grandparents, older than anyone I knew or had even heard of. He was looking after me.

  He wouldn't let me go in for the jubal-racing, so he didn't himself. We just watched, and I saw why he'd stopped me.

  They do it in the pure spring water. They have a race course that twists and turns, and it's full of the bubbling water. The sharks go crazy in it. They're trapped into five separate pens while the riders are lowered into the saddles and strapped on. Then the traps are raised, and the sharks take off. They take off like an explosion, and until the first bend you can't even see them. All you see is flying water, with something like five torpedoes in front. Then at the bend the course narrows so that they can't go round in a line and the tricks start.

  A shark is so fast and powerful it reacts like lightn
ing in any water. But in spring water, it's dynamite. All you could see was exploding water and torpedo shapes with riders bent flat over them. The riders were communicating with the sharks all the time, getting them to leap or dive, or even twist round to block other riders. And the orders had to be right first time for the sharks obeyed immediately, giving no chance for a change of mind.

  They went hurtling round the bend — under water, or on it, or even out of it — and hit the next wide stretch and a frantic struggle started. The obstacles began here — tunnels, and walls of rock that had to be leapt, and waterfalls that had to be dived. The sharks could go as fast as each other, so it wasn't just a battle of speed; it was a battle of wits — and of nerve.

  We were on a platform over the course, so we could see the whole thing; and I saw him jumping and twitching and clenching his fists, and I knew he wanted to race himself, so I told him to do it. But he said he wouldn't. He said we'd go fishing now.

  We got our fish suits — they have them in all sizes — and floated horizontally while they were fitted. They fit them very tightly. They fit gloves on your fingers and on your toes. They fit you into the exact shape of the suit, with every part of you in contact with it. It's a suit the shape of a fish, with a skin a quarter of an inch thick that has all the equipment. It has everything a fish has. It has scales and gills and fins and a tail, and every movement you make is translated into the movement a fish makes. The gills open and shut to let the water flow, and the equipment takes the air from it for you to breathe. You don't breathe a special way, like in a mask. You just breathe.

  He gave me a practice to see I'd got it, and we floated around a while in the air. Then he led the way to an airlock, and we went through. We went through to the bottom of the lake.

  I thought I had to be dreaming.

  It was totally incredible.

  It was like purple glass. It was like a purple glass lens. It was so clear I could see all twelve miles of it, from one end to the other. I could see right up in the sky, with the sky-divers circling high above. Even stranger, I could see both sides of me at once. I could see like a fish. I was a fish.

  Right away I was acting like a fish. I was making all the darting movements a fish makes. Every tiny movement of mine was converted into the powerful muscular motion of a fish. I could feel fish communicating all round me. I could feel Dido communicating with them. Everything came clear through the suit.

  I heard him laughing and he yelled, “Come on!” and did a streak up the lake. I streaked up it with him. I did a streak about three miles, without any feeling of tiredness, and only stopped then because I couldn't stop laughing. It's the gas. You feel crazy. You feel totally unreal. The world under the lake is round, round as a goldfish bowl, and you can see everything at once.

  I heard him laughing and he yelled, “Come on!” and did a flying, in water; doing whatever I wanted, without effort. And all my life was with me, all the moments that had happened and all the moments happening now, and every one of them seemed magic. I had a dizzy feeling I was seeing it for the first time; that all my life had been a game and I'd been playing it without knowing.

  A school of fish had streaked up with us, and they began playing with us. But we didn't seem to have done it more than a few minutes when he said we had to go. He said the gas was deceiving me, and we'd done it for hours, and now there was hardly any time left at all. He said we'd return to the caverns and he'd tell me everything now, and maybe I'd understand.

  So we did, and he told me.

  And I wish he hadn't now. I wish I hadn't heard it.

  24. The Billions of Worlds

  He said there were a thousand million stars in our galaxy, many with worlds. He said outside our galaxy there were a million million other galaxies, all with worlds, billions upon billions of worlds, like ours. He said our world was a ball of rock, and everything we had came out of the rock: the sea, the atmosphere, all the plants and creatures. They were made of it. Hot molten material had come out of the rock and the steam from it had formed the sea, and the minerals in the sea had formed life; all from the rock.

  He said it was still going on. The creation hadn't finished. The earth kept reproducing itself like any of the creatures it made. It kept making new material which came up as molten rock and nudged aside old used-up material, pushing it under again for remelting. When it nudged a “plate” carrying land you got earthquakes. But mainly you didn't because most of the earth was under water, so it mostly happened there.

  He said people above hardly knew about it yet. He said they knew hardly anything. He knew everything they knew above, and everything they ever had known. He told me how he knew it. He told me about their education in Egon.

  He said until they were sixty, they hardly had any. They just had sport and art. They learned all the sports and all the arts. (It's why they could do everything.) He said these were creative things so they had to be learned; you couldn't get them any other way, and it was all you actually did learn. Everything else was programmed direct to your brain. You got reading and writing fed to your brain, then communications and sciences and languages.

  He said there was only one language in Egon, but they did everybody else's. They did all the languages of the planet, and of animals, and of other planets. He said he'd got all French in half an hour and all the dialects of Asia in a week. He knew every language there'd ever been.

  I asked him what use they were, and he said none, but they didn't have to be, because once you started thought training you could use any language, anyway. He'd only had to touch my head and he knew all mine. And when he was older he wouldn't even have to do that; he'd just look at a person and know it. But you got the programmes to work your brain and grow your mind. That was the point of them, and actually it was the point of your life.

  He said your mind was your life, so the bigger one you could grow the more “life” you had. He said people above didn't understand it because they never grew up. They just grew old too fast, and died while they were children, with children's minds.

  He said their baby smashed violins because it was a baby, and all kids acted in a crazy way. But when their minds shaped up, at seventy or eighty, they began growing out of it; except people above couldn't because they didn't live enough yet to grow the right kind of mind.

  He said cave-men had the same kind of minds people had today, and they thought they knew everything. People always thought that. He said ten thousand years ago they thought it, and twenty thousand years ago. When you looked back you saw they knew practically nothing. And what they knew was mainly useless. Every few years they learned something that changed most of what they knew before.

  He said it had been the same in Egon. Egon had been discovered by a scientist called Glister, and they'd called the Glister Deep after him. He'd first discovered the Deep, and under it the Abyss, and then a way through that to the caves of Egon. He'd been looking for energy materials that hadn't yet come out of the Earth. They'd still used Earth for their energy then, and it was millions of years before they learned how to plug in directly to the sun.

  He said it was millions of years more before even the sun's energy wasn't enough and they thought they had to move to a bigger star. And it wasn't till after the mess-up, when the world had been re-made in Egon, that they learned they didn't need stars, either. Even the stars had to get their energy from somewhere . . .

  Everything he said, I was understanding. He wasn't even saying it. He just thought, and I knew it. He was showing me their sciences. He showed me light science.

  He said radio was a branch of light science. He said just as you sat in a house and tuned in the radio, you could sit and tune in light. You could do it anywhere. It's how they had the sun, moon and stars under the sea. They had the receivers fixed high in the roof of Egon. They had them tuned in directly above so that as the Earth turned they had night and day and all the seasons.

  He said you didn't have to tune in to right above, or even to the present t
ime. You could tune in to any time, to anywhere. He said when you saw a star, you were seeing how it looked hundreds or thousands of years ago. It took that long for its light to reach Earth. The light didn't stop because you saw some on Earth. It kept going past Earth, past planets, past other stars; it kept going all the time. Space was full of light from all time. It only looked black up there if you didn't have the equipment to receive it.

  He said in Egon they had the equipment built into everything. It was how the roads and buildings lit up; it was why the metal glowed. He said he had it on the submarine. He'd lit up the sea with it. He hadn't switched any lights on. He'd just activated the light in the sea.

  I wanted to ask about the submarine; about how he'd got it, and where he'd left it. But his mind was moving on. He said they had thousands of sciences, more sciences than I could imagine, like multi-gravity and anti-gravity. (It was how they kept the roof and the sea up.)

  He said you didn't have to know all the sciences, but when you were old enough they fed you a few to see what your mind wanted. Until it was 180 it hardly knew what it wanted, because it was still being made, and every mind was different.

  He said though minds were all different, brains were all about the same. Brain was just basic stuff. It was like quartz or silicon that could be activated electrically; except what activated a brain was thought, which was faster. He said if you radioed a message to a planet 300 light years away, it would take 300 years. But if you did it on thought the message got through immediately. He said all their messages went on thought. They had experts in their Thought Institute in permanent contact with space. Their brains were trained for it.

  He said a brain was basically a computer that was programmed to make a mind and then act for the mind. It couldn't do anything by itself. For instance, when a baby was born it saw everything upside down. It's why it had such a dopey look. It was looking through its eyes, and eyes were lenses, and all lenses saw things upside down. One of the first things a baby had to do was tell its brain to put things right way up, and that way the baby's mind took charge of its brain and started growing.