The Avatar by Poul Anderson

Author:Poul Anderson [ANDERSON, POUL]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9425-5
Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Published: 2011-09-14T12:00:00+00:00

Yet throughout, the observer part of him sensed that beside hers, his perception was misted and his understanding chained. When she drew him back to the flesh, he screamed.

They sat in the office. Her desk separated them. She had raised the blind on the window at her back and opened it. Shadows hastened across grass, sunlight that followed was bright but somehow as if the air through which it fell had chilled it, the gusts sounded hollow that harried smells of damp soil into the room, odors of oncoming autumn.

She spoke with all her gentleness. “We couldn’t have talked meaningfully before you’d been there yourself, could we have, Eric?”

His glance went to the empty couch. “How meaningful was anything between us, even at first?”

She sighed. “I wanted it to be.” A smile touched her. “I did enjoy.”

“No more than that, enjoy, eh?”

“I don’t know. I do care for you, and for everything you taught me about. But I’ve gone on to, to where I tried to lead you.”

“How far did I get?”

She stared down at her hands, folded on the desk in helplessness, and murmured. “Still less than I feared. It was like showing a blind man a painting. He might get a tiny idea through his fingertips, texture, the dark areas faintly warmer than the light—but oh, how tiny!”

“Whereas you respond to the lot, from quanta to quasars,” he rasped.

She raised her head, challenging their shared unhappiness. “No, I’ve barely begun, and of course I’ll never finish. But don’t you see, that’s half of the wonder. Always more to find. Direct experience, as direct as vision or touch or hunger or sex, experience of the real reality. The whole world humans know is just a passing, accidental consequence of it. Each time I go to it, I know it better and it makes me more its own. How could I stop?”

“I don’t suppose I could learn?”

She knew he cherished no hope. “No. A holothete has to start like me, early, and do hardly anything else, especially in those formative young years.” Her eyes stung. “I’m sorry, darling. You’re good and kind and… how I wish you could follow along. How you deserve it.”

“You don’t wish you could go back, though, to what you were when we met?”

“Would you?”

He could never truly summon up what had happened this day. However—“No,” he said. “In fact, I dare not try again. That could be addictive. For me, nothing but an addiction, and to lunacy. For you—” He shrugged. “Do you know the Rubáiyát?”

“I’ve heard of it,” she said, “but I’ve had no chance to become cultured.”

He recited:

Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,

And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,

Were’t not a Shame—were’t not a Shame for him

In this clay carcase crippled to abide?

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