TOTAL ECLIPSE

by John Brunner

  “If I could tell you, I would,” he answered soberly. “And in a little while, I expect I shall be able to. Already I can draw analogies.”

  “For example…?”

  He hesitated, then gave an unexpected chuckle. “I don’t know whether what I have in mind works for women as well as men—and doesn’t it make my project seem ludicrous, when I’m setting out to think like a Draconian and I don’t even know something quite commonplace about the other sex of my own species?”

  “Stop beating about the bush, will you?” She pinched his arm.

  “Would you believe that pinch feels solid, but magnetically permeable, and about eighty kilograms in mass ten centimetres away?”

  She whistled softly. “Ay-ay-ay! You mean that literally? That’s the way it really feels to you?”

  “Yes, even without being put into trance.”

  She hesitated awhile, and eventually said, “I was talking about you to Karen the other day. Is it true that when you first met her you said your brain was like a haunted house?”

  “Yes. Not in any frightening way,” he hastened to add. “More… more it’s that I sense overtones. Echoes. Implications.” He waved vaguely to embrace a world of possibilities. “But I never dreamed I’d make so many cross-associations from one sense to another as I can with the mock Draconian.”

  “I believe you,” she muttered. “What was the thing you said you don’t know about women?”

  “Oh!” He laughed aloud this time. “Well, when you have to wait a long time before relieving yourself, do you get a sort of upside-down pain when you finally let go?”

  “Yes!” She started upright on the bed. “I know just what you mean! ‘Upside-down pain’—I never thought of expressing it like that, but it’s exact! Know something?”

  “Mm-hm?”

  “If you can capture a sensation that vividly in a neat new phrase…” She lay down again, seeming thoughtful. “I guess I don’t have to be worried about what’s been bothering me. Maybe it’s doing you an injustice—in fact, now I’m sure it is—but I have been wondering how you’d explain to the rest of us what came of your experiment if you honestly did start to think in Draconian patterns. I see how, now you’ve given me an example. I’m glad. It’s taken a weight off my mind.”

  “That kind of ‘upside-down pain,’” Ian said, “indicates a tremendous mass with very low magnetism all around, like a big building. I had it very intensely in the refectory… Hell, what am I doing rambling on at such length? I ought to be doing something entirely different that I may not have the chance to do again for months!”

  He rolled over towards her. Some time later she said, close to his ear, “At least I can be sure of one thing. No matter how efficient the simulacrum is, you’re not going to leave me for some dowager Draconian, are you? Still, you might see if they could have offered humans any hints!”

  XVI

  He woke into a different universe.

  For a while he waited, digesting the impact of his surroundings at the site named Ash—

  It doesn’t have that name. It has no name. Moreover I am not called Ian Macauley. I am “I,” but in a sense less than that. Others flow and interact even though they are not here.

  He wrenched his mind away from contemplation of things that related to being human (though a Draconian had no knowledge of other intelligence a priori, so would think a concept meaning human, of my own kind) and spent many minutes exploring his surroundings without moving. It was almost dark in this place; nonetheless, he knew exactly what there was here. With sudden surprise he realised that the walls and floor tingled, though the ceiling/roof did not.

  Hmm! Why…? Ah: iron traces in the material used to build it.

  He carefully avoided thinking: that they built it with. The whole goal and purpose of this test was to strip away every element of his thinking that related to a species which would not visit this planet for another thousand centuries.

  When he was satisfied that, despite the low light level, he knew to within a centimetre or so where the walls and the entrance were, he shut his eyes and found his way to the latter by nontouch, by the little tickles and light sensations of pressure which were fed into his skin and thence to his nerves by the miniaturised transducers in his… body.

  His practice at the base stood him in good stead. He was overlarge compared to the vanished inhabitants of this city, but he steered a precise course through the doorway, then along a passage, and then into the open air, where he halted to conduct another review of his surroundings. He did not bump or scrape the walls, even with eyes closed.

  This was his talent, the thing he could do better, perhaps, than any living man: learn another mode of thought. But until now those other modes had always been, at bottom, human and consequently not very far removed from his ordinary processes of mentation. They might swarm with godlings and evil spirits and mistaken notions of the nature of the air and the land and the oceans, but they could be reached by merely peeling away modern sophistication and substituting artificial naïveté. Hands remained, eyes, belly, gonads.

  Now it was necessary for those to be shed, too, and in their place would have to come alien senses, alien likes and dislikes, alien imaginings. Perhaps it was impossible.

  Still, it was starting well.

  He had emerged from a small building, purpose unknown, at the western side of a large open space: a market, perhaps, because charred vegetable remains had been found under the layer of volcanic debris. One could hazard a guess at some kind of display table, fixed or mobile, on which were arrayed plants… for sale?

  Good question. What did these people do to organise their trade? Did they trade? It seems very probable. Here in the centre of a great city, with its pavements of grit-in-glue, there would have had to be food. They ate vegetables. No plants in quantities large enough to provide nourishment for a million-strong population could be grown within kilometres of here—

  He checked that thought, too. A kilometre was a meaningless measure now. Strike that and replace it with “as long a distance as I could walk in a quarter of a day” or something of the sort.

  His eyes were still shut, but he could discern the change from interior to exterior very clearly. Overhead, a vast nothing; underfoot, another tingling surface, but different in character from what he had awoken to. (Yes, the Draconians would have slept; he’d made sure about that, confirming that contemporary animals did so. Lucas had lectured him exhaustively on the inevitable incidence of sleep among creatures with highly organised nervous systems… Stop! No such person as Lucas!)

  Close at his back, the wall of the building he had left with the doorway gap in it; to right, left, and in front, other walls, also with gaps where streets/alleys ran (and he consciously imposed awareness of four walking limbs, not two, on that metaphorical “ran”), casting back at him a sort of radar echo… except it was not a pulse-emitted-echo-received sensation, it was a there-it-is sensation, perfectly continuous.

  He thought in delight: Oh, they’ve done a fantastic job for me!

  And cancelled that along with every subsequent recollection of humanity.

  Next, then, a fleeting problem.

  Whom do I thank for having been created as myself?

  Too early to start investigating the subtlest, least conscious aspects. Too early to wonder about parental-filial relationships. Sufficient for the moment to try to picture in imagination the busy-ness of this(?) market.

  People. Instead of a clear signal of that distant wall, a multiple hum of pressure (as it were) moving and intertwining… good, yes, must have been a bit like that. (A flicker in his mind, based on the tingling of his skin, making a pattern that hinted at comprehensibility.) Some reference to hunger, perhaps? If food stuffs were(?) sold here, did I come out to break my night’s fast?

  File that as entirely possible but unconfirmed!

  Now, having completed his imaginary picture, he opened his eyes and saw the present reality: a greyish-white expanse of ha
rd ground, blank to the new daylight.

  Vacancy.

  Yet not still, not inactive. Hereabouts, at this season, the weather was clement: humidity high, conductivity excellent. No electrical tension in the low overcast. In a word—fine.

  He began to move, and at random made for a southerly exit from the open space. In a little while he realised he was going downhill, towards a level where excavation had revealed the bed of a former river. The Draconians had liked to have a river running through their cities. Unsurprisingly. As he went, he pictured(?) modified plants in wall niches, signalling to him: directions? News? Knowledge of some sort, very likely.

  But now the river was dry. Its course had been remade by the volcano’s lava—stop! Not for centuries yet! It is a river for me, it’s water, I’m getting the right impulses because I’m sure, absolutely sure, I’d head for a damp area if I had no obligation to do otherwise.

  Following which, a question which later grew to be crucial:

  When would I have no obligation to do otherwise…?

  That too, though, was excessively subtle to be considered this early in the project.

  The days passed, and by gradual stages his conception of life as a Draconian rounded out, took on detail, became colourful. He grew able to discard words from his thinking and replace them with “equates-to-tingle-pattern”… but he was mostly unaware that that was happening, except during the one hour each evening when, under posthypnotic compulsion, he returned to his “home” and ate human food and used a human-built device to report that he was well and happy.

  He did not talk, even then. He simply pressed a button that activated remote sensors in his body, and a cross section of their impulses was flashed to a satellite and thence to the main base.

  The chief question after the first ten days or so was a simple but incredibly difficult one: What do I do?

  Initially he was quite content to accept that Draconians thought, reflected, considered, invented, more than (suppress this) human beings. Would perhaps take a long while over a private plan, then implement it and see it succeed first time.

  But additional insights conglomerated into a whole, and new ideas were spawned…

  Spawned?

  In all the places where, obviously, there had been great activity (market?, laboratory?, library?, ******?), he kept recalling that there was active-male, passive-female, and…

  (Now he was losing words more and more; the transition to symbols that weren’t symbols, but called up to consciousness real-time physical sensations, was gathering momentum, and the experience was giddying but vastly exciting.)

  And I’m going to make the change myself.

  Friends? Yes, of course—that is, persons whose patterns strike a chord of recognition. Fifteen days, nearly twenty (but I count, most likely, to a base two, I suspect), and I never spoke to anybody, never interacted!

  A night of dreams of horrible, fearful, unspeakable loneliness—

  Click.

  I know who I am. Suddenly I’m quite sure who I am. I’m neuter. No wonder my friends won’t talk to me right now.

  I’ve lived the active part of my life. What I was able to do, with complete mobility, is done. I am growing slower and more awkward in my movements (I feel I move awkwardly, there are deep aches, deep as my bones, penetrating me like blades) in spite of…

  Did I try to stave it off? Yes, I think so. There is advanced modern medicine, practised solely by my friends the active males. In olden times it was taken for granted, the changeover; now, nothing is taken for granted at all—we fly, we shoot to the moon, we work miracles, thought out beforehand.

  Yet and still, there is an eventual limit. With what to be looked forward to?

  He puzzled that, pondered it, grew so frustrated he wanted to weep… except that that wasn’t right. Tears-eyes: of secondary importance. Instead, a discernible change in the body field. Causing others to shy away! Yes, yes! Anger!

  But, again: what to look forward to? Surely something, some compensation, some consolation (what was that? Compensation…? Like an itch in the brain, can’t be scratched but one desperately wants to!).

  It had turned out that the use of the pronoun “one” instead of “I” was infinitely more apt.

  As though resigned already to completing his life in a stiff sessile mode, he spent long hours at the side of the dry empty river, among no-longer-existent plants that clung to its muddy banks, feeling the soothing caress of the current by force of will, groping, creeping, striving towards acceptance of senility… but not that yet. Between now and then some climax, some repayment for the sacrifice of activity, some reward, some—something.

  He often felt giddy, disoriented, at a loss. Until it was treated, he had suffered migraine during childhood, and knew the obsessive-compulsive repetition of a single random phrase which typically associated to the onset of his aura. Now he was being infuriated by concepts revolving around a centre: reward for, compensation for, reimbursement for, just fee for, look back on and feel satisfied (in a crazy confusion, a garbled blend of apprehension and assurance)—

  Insurance?

  Frustrated not because of the change of life which is the fate of us all, but because somehow I didn’t—make provision properly?

  ?

  It eluded him, like a darting fish, like the rainbow’s end (pot of gold but makes no sense, I know what a pot is but gold is for use, it’s a superb conductor and I don’t care that it’s yellow because more importantly I feel its nature) or like those ballonet-borne treetop-sleeping creatures that soar landwards on the morning breeze, seawards again after sunset.

  Frustration stretched out over days and days turned easily to thoughts of: competition, being done down, being outmanoeuvred… but just a second, we don’t do that, do we?

  Do we?

  Once again, painfully and slowly from the top: We begin as babies, we grow to functional active males, we undergo a neuter transition lasting about a year, we spend a much shorter time as fertile females, we lapse into ultimate senility and—

  GOT IT!

  But there were strange hideous creatures before him, and he cowered in terror. Things like plants, moving: vertical things, horrible, with too few limbs, impossibly balanced on stalks that planted and rooted and planted and brought them swiftly towards him even though he tried to flee. They caught up, they surrounded him, they uttered some kind of atmospheric vibration that meant nothing and—

  It was the infirmary at the base, and Cathy was there at the side of this—this bed he was stretched out in, and by the door (how odd to block an entrance like that, with a solid object!) Lucas Wong, and also present, Rorschach.

  “He’s waking up!” Cathy exclaimed.

  And before the others had a chance to do more than react, he cried out, “Why did you stop me? I was so close—I was so close!”

  “What you were close to,” Lucas said, “was death.”

  “But I— What?” The word struck through the artificial garb in which he had dressed his mind.

  “You nearly died,” Lucas emphasised. “You caught a local disease, one of the rare ones that can infect human tissue. When we came to rescue you, you were running four degrees of fever and you hadn’t eaten more than a mouthful in three days. You were delirious. You’ve been lying here unconscious for nearly a week.”

  “But I was so close!” Ian repeated piteously. “It was all starting to come clear. You’ve got to let me go back, right away.”

  “No,” Rorschach said, taking a pace towards the bed. “And that’s final. It’s too dangerous, Ian. What good would it be if you went the same way as the natives?”

  “But it wasn’t disease!” he exclaimed. “It was… It was…”

  And found he could no more remember the truth he’d stumbled on than a vague and shadowy dream.

  XVII

  It was very quiet in the base’s medical-inspection room. Elsewhere on the planet there were creatures that buzzed and crawled and stridulated after the fashion
of earthly insects, but on the high desert plateau there were none to speak of.

  Sunlight slanted stark through the big windows, gleaming on sterile metal shelves and furniture, but the chair where Ian sat was in shadow. Before him Lucas Wong, on a high stool, leaned intently forward, while a short distance away in another chair Valentine Rorschach waited impatiently for the result of this experiment.

  “If it’s true”—so Lucas had argued—“that Ian really was on the verge of a breakthrough when we had to rescue him, then it must have been something he figured out while he was under hypnosis. Among the tricks you can play with that technique is artificial enhancement of the memory. When Ian is better, we’ll simply put him back in trance and interrogate him.”

  And today was the day to try it out.

  Rorschach watched with curiosity as Lucas passed his hand once, twice, a third time over Ian’s open eyes, fixed on a bright reflection from a mirror angled to beam at the opposite wall. When this was being done in preparation for Ian’s month at the Ash site, he himself had been too busy tying together the complicated strands of the simulacrum-building project to come and watch. But right now everything was, if not at a standstill, then at any rate proceeding with a sort of leisurely slackness, as though over the months since Ian’s arrival people had grown overused to leaning on him as a source of bright new suggestions, and were marking time in the expectation that he would indeed reveal the answer to the mystery of the natives.

  He was worried.

  “Your eyelids are growing heavy,” Lucas murmured. “You feel sleepy, so-o-o sleepy… When I count to three, you will relax completely, you will close your eyes, you will drift away, you will hear nothing but my voice…”