Uncumber pins greater hopes on meeting someone who turns up in her chamber on a wrong number. There are quite a lot of wrong numbers, of course, since every inside person in the world has a holovision chamber, and they can all dial each other. The faces of unknown old men, young girls, and children appear briefly, then disappear as soon as they have discovered their mistake. Uncumber can picture the sort of face she yearns to tell everything to—a man’s face; young, but not too young; sympathetic; strong; idealistic. Few faces approaching this specification turn up on wrong numbers; and whenever one with even the remotest suggestion of suitability does, she somehow becomes confused and snaps at it, all red and gruff.
She goes through a wild phase of misdialling deliberately herself. But the results are painfully similar.
There is a way, of course, for getting round the rigid selectivity of social life, otherwise new relationships would never be formed: she should advertise on one of the human-market channels. She watches these advertisements for hours at a time. There are people of all ages offering themselves for every conceivable sort of relationship. Here’s a girl looking for a timid boy to dominate. Here’s an older man who has just lost his father, looking for a substitute to whom he can continue to express his guilt. A woman wants a wild, ungrateful boy to mother. A young woman wants a man to set up house with and have children by. A man wants a friend who will let himself be betrayed and cheated and still come back for more.
A serious-looking young man appears, raises himself from his air couch to a polite reclining position, turns his head this way and that way, smiles, looks wistful, and smiles again, while the voice on the soundtrack says: “Jarlath had genuinely normal relations with his parents in childhood, and has matured through three rich physical relationships, one of them of a rather interestingly homosexual nature. He is now seventeen and feels ready for a brief but fairly intense relationship with a woman who can produce evidence of at least ten years’ thorough experience in this field. He has no problems he needs sympathy with.”
But Uncumber cannot imagine applying for Jarlath, or for any of the others like him. Nor can she seriously imagine advertising herself. What would she say? “Bad-tempered, rebellious girl with no experience of any sort of relationship at all except arguing with her parents, and with her head full of romantic ideas about death and decay, seeks …” What? “… to sink herself without trace in someone; what sort of someone she finds it difficult to say, but she is sure she will recognize him when she sees him….”
How she consoles herself
Of course she is not unhappy all the time. She is capable of losing herself in the manifestations on the bespoke daydream channel, just like everyone else. For all her high-minded melancholy, she finds the spectacle of herself and her romantic adventures deeply consoling. For it’s not just herself, but herself as she feels she trembles on the verge of being—beautiful, calm, radiant with individual identity, charged with some mystic sense of quest. And this fully realized self runs lightly through the cool green forest, finding grievously injured young men whose wounds she tends, who, on recovery, turn out to be princes injured in the chase, with crystal palaces on mountaintops to which they bear her off….
“Such nonsense!” she tells herself scornfully from time to time, but goes on watching, feeling secretly: “In a way, after all, this is the real truth about me. This is how I am underneath….”
A trip to the mountains
Sulpice has found someone, of course, being Sulpice. He advertised and had seventy-four replies, out of whom, after thorough interviewing, he picked a calm, lethargic girl called Nanto-Suleta.
Their relationship is perfect. They turn on their holovision and lie for hours beside each other’s manifestation—perfectly still, but going through great ranges of sexual experience prepared for by careful medication with Libidin and triggered by Orgasmin.
Sulpice tells Uncumber about these experiences sometimes.
“If you’ve never been through it yourself, you really can’t begin to imagine it,” he says grandly, as she lies pretending not to listen, racked with curiosity and jealousy. “You move through whole landscapes, legendary landscapes, full of rich greens and browns, with purple distances. You seem to be going southwards, because all the time the light becomes warmer and more golden. The earth teems with profusion—vineyards and cornfields, and orange groves with standing water about the roots of the trees, catching the sun. There are a great many people moving on the roads—strong, sinewy men with weathered skins, driving donkeys and packhorses and singing as they go. Beyond the fields you catch glimpses of walled cities—honey-coloured stone, with towers and domes beyond. Everywhere you look there are little cities tucked away among the landscape! Armed men stand upon their gates; angels with long blue dresses and trumpets alight upon their battlements. In the still, quiet air you can hear voices within their walls—street-cries, snatches of song, laughter.
“For several weeks the great company of pilgrims—as it now seems—presses on through this rich valley with ever lighter steps. Where are we going? We all know, though we couldn’t say it.
“And then, quite suddenly, we are among the hills. Blue, rolling hills seem to lift from among the corn and fruit all around us. Effortlessly we glide among them. The landscape grows wilder—not vineyards now but wild grapes, not corn but aromatic bushes, filling the air with warm southern smells. The whole company strip prickly pears off the roadside cactuses and gorge themselves on the soft yellow fruit.
“We spend a month or more in these sweet uplands.
“And at the end of that time we realize with astonishment that we have wandered onto higher and higher ground, where the light has become dazzlingly clear and the air is so thin that our hearts race at the slightest exertion and our breath comes quickly. The whole teeming world of green-brown-gold and citied plains is stretched out behind and beneath us. In front of us, enormous ramparts of rose-coloured rock soar into the sky. We tilt our heads back to gaze at them, and slowly, slowly we grow light on our feet—our feet leave the ground! Still singing our pilgrim hymns in thin, bell-like counterpoint, we drift gently upwards, our immense eagle wings spread to catch some imperceptible updraught! The great rock towers come slowly nearer and nearer. The air is so thin and sharp that our voices tremble and shatter. Our eyes are fixed on the crest of the rock, because we know that as soon as we draw level with it we shall come face to face with the rising sun!
“And, Cumby, forty-seven days we float upwards like that! Sometimes the draught seems to halt and hold us immobile over the emptiness beneath. We drift down a little, even! And then, upwards again! All around you can hear the faint cries and sighs of the pilgrims—though I think every sound must come from oneself, because there’s no sign of anyone else around at this great height.
“I can’t tell you much about those extraordinary days when you at last rise above the ridge from the west and come face to face with the sun rising from the east. Except to say that the sun is much, much closer than you could ever have thought, and that you dissolve into its warmth and light with the utmost ease.
“And remain there, suspended in solution….
“Then you’re rushing down from the mountaintop into the valley beyond, running down the sheer rock faces, trailing golden light from your hair and outstretched arms. Down and down you race—and it takes several days, you’ve got so far to go!—into a deep valley filled with the utmost silence. Pine trees line the floor and walls of the valley, absorbing every slightest sound, and among them—a lake, still and impenetrably dark. Then up you go again, soaring through the pines on the far side of the valley, your feet scarcely touching the ground, up onto the next mountain ridge. A period of serene, sunlit contemplation here, and then on down, like the wind, into the valley beyond.
“So up and down you soar, from valley to mountain, from mountain to valley, sometimes planing like the eagle, sometimes bounding like the chamois, sometimes galloping like a herd of mountain ponies. Until
at last the mountains subside into hills again, and you drift down from the last of them into the warm, sunlit sea and float there, calm and still, eyes closed, until evening.”
Sulpice lies back on his air cushion and gazes at the ceiling. Uncumber looks at him irritably.
“You got all those ideas out of books and off the holiday manifestations,” she complains. “How could you possibly know what mountains are really like?”
“That doesn’t make the experience any the less valid,” says Sulpice calmly.
“It’s all just inside your head.”
“Of course! That’s where the world is centred, Cumby, inside your head!”
Uncumber thinks about it for some time, plucking at her lip with nervous crossness.
“Do you both take your dark glasses off?” she asks suddenly.
Sulpice blushes. “Sometimes,” he says.
A picture of the mountaineers
This is how one of these excursions to the mountains appears to Uncumber, when Sulpice and Nanto-Suleta accidentally leave their circuit open one day:
SULPICE: Goldenly!
NANTO-SULETA: Yes!
SULPICE: A snakish goldenliness!
NANTO-SULETA: Exactly!
Then there’s a long silence, in which nothing at all happens except that Sulpice smiles once. Then:
NANTO-SULETA: A snakish goldenliness plus 3.
SULPICE: Or anyway … threeish.
NANTO-SULETA: Say 2.997, 2.998 …
SULPICE: 2.99ak43proto-77liness …
NANTO-SULETA: Exactly!
They lie in silence for some twenty-five minutes, and then Nanto-Suleta begins to shake with quiet laughter.
SULPICE: 2.99ak43proto-77liness?
NANTO-SULETA: Yes! A citrusophical problem, I suppose!
BUT, one day …
But one day Uncumber meets a man. She is trying to dial her private education channel for a session of Archaic Botany, and either she misdials, or else she gets wrongly connected, because a small, wiry, bald-headed man she has never seen before appears on the screen. He looks anxious: his forehead is lined, and there are lines at the corners of his eyes. The most surprising thing about him is that his eyes are as naked as the day he was born. At the sight of Uncumber he smiles—a worried, appealing smile which somehow touches her to the heart and makes his glasseslessness seem entirely natural.
“Tilu torku manassa manassa?” he asks gently.
Uncumber frowns, trying to protect herself against that smile.
“You’re not 977–921–773–480–115, are you?” she asks heavily.
“Med nolo ga—ga skonol—ga purimi panai!” exclaims the man, still smiling.
“I was trying to get 977–921–773–480–115,” says Uncumber, thinking to herself, as rudely as she can, that the man is old enough to be her father, and for a man as old as that to go around with bare eyes …! But she doesn’t switch off. Nor does he.
“Shepi,” he says coaxingly. “Shepi khodkhod.” He turns his head from side to side and then nods at her. Uncumber realizes that he wants her to do the same. She feels herself blushing at the ridiculousness of it. But, awkwardly, first to the left and then to the right, she shows him her profile.
“O!” he says admiringly. “Tavonu! Chona tavonu!”
Uncumber smiles in spite of herself. “Thank you,” she says.
“O, O, O!” says the man, seeing her smile. “Guvi!”
He demonstrates smiling, pushing the corners of his mouth up with his hands. “Guvi!” he says. “Tavonola guvi! Chona tavonola guvi!”
Uncumber can’t stop smiling—it’s ridiculous. She puts her two hands over her mouth to try to conceal it. This makes the man laugh. He raises his two index fingers in front of his face and inclines them both in parallel to the left. “Kuri—u kuri falun.” He sweeps the fingers over to point to the right. “Guvi—u guvi onsun.”
He laughs. Uncumber frowns, smiling.
“Kuri,” says the man, and he makes the gesture of wiping away tears from the corners of his eyes. “Mor guvi.” And he demonstrates his smile once again. “Mec?” he asks.
Uncumber nods. “Yes, I understand,” she says.
The man nods too, with a serious air. He looks at Uncumber and spreads his hands in a gesture of helplessness, perhaps at the impossibility of communication—but perhaps, feels Uncumber, at something altogether more overpowering. He smiles his lacerating smile again. She smiles frankly back, and they look at each other, neither of them making any move to switch off.
Then the man sighs. He puts his hands to his chest and speaks sadly and at length. He makes a curious gesture of taking hold of the lobes of his ears and rocking his head back and forth, pulling a sad face. Uncumber nods intently, her heart melting for the man’s sorrows.
“Mec?” he asks.
“Yes,” she says—and she feels she does understand, in some nonliteral way, in some deeper way.
“Moru huan ao chem chem,” he says sadly, putting a hand to his throat.
“Yes,” says Uncumber.
The man sighs. Then he smiles and makes a gesture of pushing everything to one side. “Chom!” he says, smilingly turning his head away to dismiss what he has pushed aside. “Chom! Chom!”
Uncumber smiles too, touched by his courage.
“Soni,” he says gently, pointing at her as he talks, “tavonu—kheri ao chona lisitisi ento malonuru …!”
She looks down and blushes at these frank compliments, which encourages him to go on. When he stops, she looks up quickly and finds that he is smiling at her.
“You’ve got a kind face,” she says quickly. “I think it’s a beautiful face.”
“Uh?” he says, putting his head slightly on one side and raising his eyebrows. His eyes, Uncumber sees, are brown and gentle. She indicates her own face and then points at his.
“Handsome,” she says.
The man shrugs his shoulders cheerfully and laughs. Uncumber laughs too. Then they both stop laughing.
“Hovi,” says the man suddenly in a gentle, coaxing voice. “Hovi … Hovi …”
And he beckons to her. Uncertainly she gets up from her air couch and moves a little nearer to the reception chamber. He nods encouragingly. “Hovi, hovi,” he says, still beckoning. She moves until she is only a few inches from where he reclines, trapped behind the transparent cylindrical wall. “Ka—hovi, hovi!” he says and puts his lips forward to kiss her. She hesitates a moment, then takes off her dark glasses and put her arms out along the wall of the chamber and her lips up against it surface. But of course, as she and the image move forward to meet, so the image seems to dart past her and vanish; the chamber in which his image appears and the lenses which transmit hers are naturally not in exactly the same place. She finds herself with her lips pressed against inert blank plastic.
They both draw back until they can see each other again, and laugh. She slips her glasses back on.
“Cheshti,” says the man, waving his hands ruefully. “Cheshti holovis!”
“Yes, I hate the holovision too.”
“Sansan holovis!” he says, making gestures of hitting at something. “Modrost holovis! Puta holovis!”
“It’s maddening!”
He smiles at her and shrugs and laughs. She smiles at him and shrugs, and bites her lip, because she feels like crying.
“Tecu solim sinini?” he asks.
She spreads her hands helplessly.
“Sinini … sinini …,” he repeats, pointing at her. “Tecu solim sinini?”
But she can’t understand. The man shakes his finger at her to keep her attention while he thinks how to explain. Then he points at himself and says slowly, “Tecas honim—Noli.”
“Noli,” repeats Uncumber, gazing at him obediently, not understanding.
“Ka! Ka!” cries the man excitedly, nodding his head. “Noli!”
“Oh, you’re called Noli!”
“Noli! Noli! Ka! A—tecu solim sinini?” He points at her questioningly.
“Oh, Uncumber.”
“Uncumber,” he repeats thoughtfully. “Uncumber. Tavonil!”
He nods and nods, and smiles and nods. Then he puts his hand to his forehead, as if in a military salute, and says, “Nessom, Uncumber.”
She understands at once: he is saying good-bye!
“No—wait!” she cries in a panic. “We haven’t said—I mean, how shall we see each other again?”
He puts his head on one side questioningly. She looks wildly about her for a pencil, finds none, and snatches up a stick of skin-paint instead. The only writing surface she can find to hand in her haste is herself. She writes in large, hurried figures across her chest: “977–921–773–206–302.”
“My number,” she explains. “You will call me, won’t you?”
“Ka, ka,” says Noli soothingly.
“Evenings are the best time. Oh, no, any time. It doesn’t matter.”
“Choron, choron …”
“What’s your number, Noli?” She points desperately at the figures she has written on herself, then at him. He looks about him, finds some sort of writing implement, and inscribes among the hair on his forearm, “515–214–442–305–217.”
She copies it down on her leg among a variety of scribbled notes on Archaic Botany and other subjects.
“I mean,” she says, “I won’t call you first. I’ll wait for you to call me. But I might just want to call you first. Something might go wrong …”
A Very Private Life Page 4