A Theory of Gravity

by Wycroft Taylor

  She said, “While it is not poisonous, I think it is mind-altering. Drinking this soup is part of what made it possible for me to learn their language as fast as I did. This plus the classes plus the wires they taped to my skull and chest. And I’ve had strange dreams. And my fear of being in the midst of such strange creatures went away.”

  He was very thirsty and hungry and drank the soup until the bowl was empty. Almost immediately, the creature that had poured the soup returned and made some growling and wheezing noises. “He wants to know if you want a second serving.” “Yes,” he said, “I’d like another bowl.” After she turned to the creature and made some wheezing and growling sounds to it, it proceeded to refill his bowl. But she demurred when the creature looked in her direction and made as if to dip the ladle in the tureen. She made sounds that must have meant that she had had enough; and the creature complied. It set the lid back on the tureen and returned to its place against the wall.

  Tapping his spoon against the side of the bowl, possibly as an aid to thinking, Peter leaned forward and said, “You know you told me a lot about being inside of a ramp and descending it, but you have not yet said how you got out of that ramp and into here. I found three doors, all with inscriptions on them. After drawing the inscriptions, I chose to open the third door because the space around the inscribed symbols had what looked to me like simple painted carvings of tulips, with the flowers red and the stems and leaves green. I opened that door and came out into this space and found the creatures waiting for me on the raised platform. Then I saw you.”

  She said, “You are right. I never got to the end of that part of the story. I’ll tell you now. There’s not much to it. I came to a place where the ramp simply came to a dead end at a wall that crossed it perpendicularly. About three feet up on the wall was a small door with a small inscription on it and two handles shaped like the capital letter ‘D.’ I have to admit that I was so anxious to try the door that I failed to make a drawing of that inscription.

  “Instead, I grabbed the two handles and tried pushing open the door. When that did not work, I began experimenting with turning the handles in different directions. Each time, I pushed on the door. Finally, I turned the handle on my left to the left and the handle on my right to the right. When I pushed on the door, it opened smoothly and easily. I climbed up to the doorway, walked across a short corridor, found another door like the first one, got that to open, and came out here.

  “There was a welcoming committee on the platform, exactly like the group you saw. The one in the center pointed to a chair. I went over to it and sat down. The one in the center proceeded to make some noises but, of course, I could not at that time make out a single word. It then pointed to the classroom. Two of the creatures came up beside me almost immediately after the first creature pointed, picked up my chair, carried me to the classroom, and set me down.

  “That soon and without any fanfare whatsoever or explanation (of course I was in no position to understand an explanation even if one had been given), my lessons commenced. That’s how I came out of the ramp and into this place. It took me about three months to learn enough of their language to communicate as well as you have seen me communicate. Every day I had soup. Every morning, wires were strapped to my body while I sat facing the instructor. Every evening, after drinking the soup, I was escorted to my bedroom.”

  Just as she said what she just said, the creatures lined up against the wall moved towards us and the table, picked everything except us up, and marched out of the dining room. The one in the front played that strange contraption like bagpipes as they marched out of the room. All bowed to us at a certain point.

  After they left, three bells rang. “They’re telling us to go to bed,” she said. “You have a bedroom now too. I saw them set it up. Shall we go?” She got up and held out her hand to him. He took it. Together, they strolled out into the large room and then around to a door on the other side of which was a long corridor that branched to his right as he looked down it. Doors lined both sides of the corridor. “Behind every one of those doors is a small room that can be turned into a bedroom suitable for whatever visitor arrives. As you can see, they are prepared to receive a lot of visitors though right now there is only the two of us.”

  She pointed at the first door on her left and the first door on the right. These are our bedrooms,” she said.

  Chapter 40: Bedrooms

  “I’ll show you your bedroom first and then mine.” She had a grey chain around her neck from which hung a piece of what looked like metal shaped something like a very small bowling pin. “They gave this to me,” she said, “Somehow, this little thing gets these doors to open.”

  She pulled the necklace with the chain attached out from beneath her blouse, from between her breasts. She then led him to a door on the right side of the corridor and proceeded to tap the base of the charm against section of the left side of the door that had a set of concentric circles lightly etched on the surface. She tapped the charm exactly three times. While doing that, she explained that the room had been prepared for him beginning just one day before and that she hoped he would like it. She then pressed her finger into the center of a pair of concentric circles painted with black outlines on the right side of the door. The outer circle was white. The inner one was dark green.

  The door opened automatically. He saw a nicely made up bed with a nightstand and a clothes rack. Side rooms opened out from the bedroom on the right side of the room. She moved behind him and pushed his back. “Come in and take a good look at your new home.”

  The first of the side rooms had his knapsack and folded up space suit inside of it. There was also a stout pole hanging horizontally between two cylinders set into the wall on either side having a larger circumference than the pole that ran from one side of the room to the other. Clothing hung from hangers from this pole. This was to be his closet and store room, he supposed. There was also a small table and chair set against the wall opposite the clothes rack which meant, he supposed, that he could also use the room as a small office.

  The next room on the right was a bathroom. The walls, ceilings, and floors were covered with white tile made possibly of some kind of synthetic plastic. He saw a toilet, a sink, and a small tub. Above the sink was a mirror. On a ledge below the mirror were carefully wrapped up packages which he assumed might contain things like soap, shampoo, mouthwash, toothpaste, and a toothbrush. Above the toilet, a silvery pole hung horizontally between two silvery rods that came out from the wall. Hanging from the pole were a couple of neatly folded towels. There was a little shag rug next to his bed on the same side as the door. On the other side of the door was a soft reclining chair and ottoman.

  Though there were no windows in the room, there was a large screen set into the wall next to the entrance door and opposite the bed. He also noticed, cut into the wall high above his head near the ceiling a brief inscription. Underneath the inscription, running clear across the room was a line of very small representations tulips or something that looked very much like tulips. The tulips were like those he found on the door he opened to get into this space. Like those, these were painted or dyed—red where the flowers should be and green where the stems and leaves were.

  After looking it all over, he said, “This is nice. In fact, it is amazingly nice. All the time I was inside of the maze, no accommodations were made for my sleeping. I had to curl up on the floor and try to sleep.

  “I concluded that the creatures who got me in there and forced me to wander around so aimlessly and hopelessly just did not understand anything about the need for humans for a private space let alone a private space that included room for sleeping and some kind of soft pad or mattress. I just did the best I could but I have to say that, having to sleep in such a makeshift and pathetic way as I did, fed into my despair.

  “But now I see that the creatures do understand that a human has a need for a private space however small where one can also sleep. I am surprised the creatures had enough
empathy to know what would make me comfortable.” He turned around and looked at her and, from the way she smiled at him, he understood that she had somehow gotten involved in the preparations. He took both her hands. He said, “You told them what to do. A lot of this came from you. Maybe all of it did. Thank you.”

  He pulled her close to him and wrapped his arms tightly around her and once again enjoyed the warmth and sensuality of what he was sure must be a beautiful warm body full of a wealth of consolations.

  While hugging him, she whispered in her ear. “At most, I advised them. They had ideas of their own based on some knowledge I don’t know how acquired of human psychology.

  “Still the first version of what they presented to me was oddly arranged and had no rooms on the side and consisted of nothing but a double-wide comforter placed on a recessed rectangular portion of the floor filled with something soft. I accepted what I got because I didn’t know the language but, once I learned enough of it to communicate in a primitive way, I made suggestions about how the bedroom might be improved. Every night thereafter, I found that my bedroom had been changed.

  “I drew other pictures. They made more improvements. Finally, we arrived at a design like the one you found. About two years after I arrived, they began telling me, “Another one of your kind is coming,” which was something I knew given my knowledge of rescue protocols and also given the fact that they had shown me the videos of you slogging through the maze.”

  “Again, I say, I owe you a great debt of gratitude for these creature comforts, however modest they are. Thank you, dear friend,” he said and, though he had not stopped hugging her, hugged her even tighter.

  She pulled away from him. “I’ll show you my bedroom,” she said. Together, they walked across the corridor to her bedroom. It was exactly like his; rather, it was a mirror image of his with the bathroom and closet on the left side and the bed, mirror, and screen moved over to the right side. She showed him everything.

  She said, “You didn’t show me your drawings. You can show them to me tomorrow, if you like. But I want to show you mine. She led him to her closet and to the desk that had been put in it and fished out two notebooks from the top drawer. She then opened first one notebook and then the second, going page by page, and stopping momentarily at each drawing. “Aren’t these strange?” she asked.

  He asked her, “I wonder: they taught you how to speak but did they also try teaching you how to read. If you or if the two of us learned how to decipher the hieroglyphs of letters or whatever these symbols are, we would be able to present the people back on Earth not with a problem, possibly not solvable by them, of decipherment but with the solution. Then, something they might not have been able to solve, despite having all of our drawings, would be definitively solved. We would be able to give them the answers. What a contribution that would make to knowledge back on Earth! Who knows what the implications might be for the translation not only of this language but of any other alien language that might come our way?”

  “You are right,” she said. “And I have felt very much the same way even from the very first moment I came out to this place and discovered that the creatures wanted only to teach me their language and something about their customs and had no intention of harming me (unless, of course, the soup and morning energy drink—I’ll tell you about that later, probably in the morning after the bells ring that tell us to head to class) that I am convinced partially serve to open our minds to their teaching have some kind of adverse long-term effect on us.

  “But, be that as it may, I doubt if they want to harm us over either the short-term or the long-term. And, with regard to that, we have no choice but to take our chances. Much the same thing exists on Earth. We take our chances with the food we eat and the liquid we drink without ever being sure of what any long-term adverse consequences there might be.”

  She pointed to the easy chair on the right side of the bed and said, “Why don’t you take a seat. We’ve been talking so long standing that I’m sure you feel both awkward and tired. Please, sit down on the chair. I’ll sit on the ottoman.” To be polite, he offered to sit on the ottoman but, when she insisted that he sit on the chair, he did so. She sat opposite him, smiled mysteriously, and said finally, “You cannot imagine how nice it is to have some company for a change. I’ve been all alone for so long.”

  “I can easily imagine,” he said. “I knew loneliness on Earth and loneliness once I awoke from my coma and loneliness while walking to the little building and loneliness once I entered that little building and loneliness inside of the maze.

  “Your presence is like a light switch that, once turned, shines the light of companionship and puts an end to the darkness of loneliness.

  “I’ve suffered from what loneliness there was to such an extent that I cannot begin to tell you how much it has meant to me to be with you these last few hours. It is as if your soul beats in rhythm with mine that some sixth sense of mine is able to detect.

  “More even than that, it is as if your soul has an aura wrapped around it that extends out beyond your body and soul at least as far as the walls of this room and, when I step inside of the space filled by your aura, I feel wonderful. There is consolation and peace in being inside of this place. Your presence, more than any words or gestures, fills me with peace.”

  She leaned forward and put her hands on his knees. “How beautifully expressed,” she said. I can see that you have poetry in you. Were you to write those words down and memorize them and rearrange them in lines that combine to make poetry, you’d have something very special to recite one night before we drank the soup. I think I would cry every time I heard it.”

  And, looking at her, he saw tears filling the corners of her eyes and reddening the white part of her eyes. He put his hands on the side of her head and stroked her hair for a while, saying, “poor dear, poor dear,” and then he pulled her face close to his and kissed her on the mouth. That was the first time he kissed her on the mouth. He had kissed her cheek when they first met, but now he had gotten beyond that. He kissed her on her mouth. And, while kissing her, he enjoyed feeling her lips pucker up and draw tight and kiss back with much passion.

  She said, “I don’t want you to go back to your room tonight. Stay with me. Don’t make me spend another night alone.”

  He wanted to talk to her some more about her classes and about where she was born and grew up when on Earth and how she felt after being trapped inside of the elevator room and how she felt afterwards. He wanted to ask her about “the choice” they had to make to which she had alluded at least three times. But now was not the time for any of that. There would be plenty of time for that, but now was not the time.

  He said, “I was hoping you would ask me to stay. For a while now, I was trying to build up enough courage either to ask you to let me stay here or to convince you to come to my room.”

  “Stay here,” she said very softly, her eyes very wide and very moist. “I love you.” “And I love you,” he said and leaned so far forward on his ottoman that he almost fell off of it. But he did not because he had his arms around her and, with her for support, felt he could not fall off either the ottoman or any cliff no matter how high.

  She stood up after a while, walked over to her door and closed it, and then walked to the other side of her bed. She then slowly took off all of her clothes and pressed a button on the wall next to her bed, which had the effect of dimming the lights. She then slipped into her bed beneath the coverlet and lifted the part of the coverlet that was closest to him. “Come here,” she whispered. When he hesitated, this woman that looked so beautiful to him looked as if she feared he’d reject her at the last moment. “Please,” she said.

  He took off his clothes and got so far as to put his knee on the bed. He was about to slip into the bed when it occurred to him that the creatures might be monitoring their activities and might mind their sleeping together. He asked, “What about the creatures? They might be watching us for all we know. And, if th
ey are or if they discover that my room was left empty all night long, they might not like this. They might punish us.”

  “They probably are watching. I think watching is most of what they do or intend. I don’t think they are into minding or punishing. Anyway, I don’t care about any of that. I’d go crazy if I thought about that kind of stuff too much. Let them watch if that’s what they want to do. Besides, we have these covers,” she whispered, her voice very husky, sounding almost sore and her gaze so bright and intense it burned into him much like he suspected a powerful laser might do.” “Come,” she said. “You have no idea to what extent I crave your company.”

  He slipped into the covers and put his arms around her and kissed her very tenderly and seemed to feel every square inch of her naked body with every square inch of his. He ran a hand down her back and across the crevice of her rear end. He touched her vagina. He touched each breast and wound up putting his hands around her just beneath her armpits.

  At some point the spasms came. And he fell asleep while she sat next to him and stroked his back and hair and cheeks. Then she slipped down beneath the covers and fell asleep.

  He woke up once in the middle of the night and gazed at the ceiling, wondering where Despair was now. He knew Despair was somewhere. He knew it wouldn’t die until he did. It was somewhere behind some wall or above some ceiling biding its time. “Who cares?” he said softly to himself, mimicking Sylvia’s reaction to his concerns about creatures’ watching. Then he sank into sleep and slept very deeply until awakened by three bells loudly ringing.

  Chapter 41: Morning

  He was dreaming of a time back on Earth when he was walking through a field of rye. The rye was nearly ripe. He walked through the high stalks with his hands brushing against the tops of the stalks. From time to time, he would pause, pick out a stalk on which the rye seeds that topped it were nearly ripe, pulled off the rye seeds, and chewed on a couple of them.