thousand miles,’ he said, crushing my hope, and making me wish I’d never diverted my attention away from the plant with the lush green leaves.
I looked at him. For a moment, I had thought I wasn’t alone among them but now I knew I was.
So, I thought to myself as I walked away, this is what happens when you live on Earth. You crack. You hold reality in your hands until it burns and then you have to drop the plate. (Someone somewhere else in the room, just as I was thinking this, actually did drop a plate.) Yes, I could see it now – being a human sent you insane. I looked out of a large glass rectangular window and saw trees and buildings, cars and people. Clearly, this was a species not capable of handling the new plate Andrew Martin had just handed them. I really needed to get out of there and do my duty. I thought of Isobel, my wife. She had knowledge, the kind of knowledge I needed. I should have left with her.
‘What am I doing?’
I walked towards the window, expecting it to be like windows on my planet, Vonnadoria, but it wasn’t. It was made of glass. Which was made of rock. And instead of walking through it I banged my nose into it, prompting a few yelps of laughter from other patients. I left the room, quite desperate to escape all the people, and the smell of cow and carrots.
Amnesia
Acting human was one thing, but if Andrew Martin had told people then I really could not afford to waste any more time in this place. Looking at my left hand and the gifts it contained, I knew what I had to do.
After lunch, I visited the nurse who had sat watching me talk to Isobel. I lowered my voice to just the right frequency. I slowed the words to just the right speed. To hypnotise a human was easy because, out of any species in the universe, they seemed the one most desperate to believe. ‘I am perfectly sane. I would like to see the doctor who can discharge me. I really need to get back home, to see my wife and child, and to continue my work at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University. Plus, I really don’t like the food here. I don’t know what happened this morning, I really don’t. It was an embarrassing public display, but I wholeheartedly assure you that whatever it was I suffered, it was temporary. I am sane, now, and I am happy. I feel very well indeed.’
He nodded. ‘Follow me,’ he said.
The doctor wanted me to have some medical tests. A brain scan. They were worried about possible damage to my cerebral cortex which could have prompted amnesia. I realised whatever else was to occur the one thing that couldn’t possibly happen to me was to have my brain looked at, not while the gifts were active. So, I convinced him I was not suffering from amnesia. I made up a lot of memories. I made up a whole life.
I told him that I had been under a lot of pressure at work and he understood. He then asked me some more questions. But as with all human questions the answers were always there, inside them like protons inside an atom, for me to locate and give as my own independent thoughts.
After half an hour the diagnosis was clear. I hadn’t lost my memory. I had simply suffered a period of temporary insanity. Although he disapproved of the term ‘breakdown’ he said I had suffered a ‘mental collapse’ due to sleep-deprivation and work pressures and a diet which, as Isobel had already informed the doctor, consisted largely of strong black coffee – a drink, of course, I already knew I hated.
The doctor then gave me some prompts, wondering if I’d suffered from panic attacks, low moods, nervous jolts, sudden behavioural swings or feelings of unreality.
‘Unreality?’ I could ponder with conviction. ‘Oh yes, I have definitely been feeling that one. But not any more. I feel fine. I feel very real. I feel as real as the sun.’
The doctor smiled. He told me he had read one of my books on mathematics – an apparently ‘really funny’ memoir of Andrew Martin’s time teaching at Princeton University. The book I had seen already. The one called American Pi. He wrote me a prescription for more diazepam and advised I take things ‘one day at a time’, as if there were another way for days to be experienced. And then he picked up the most primitive piece of telecommunications technology I had ever seen and told Isobel to come and take me home.
Remember, during your mission, never to become influenced or corrupted.
The humans are an arrogant species, defined by violence and greed. They have taken their home planet, the only one they currently have access to, and placed it on the road to destruction. They have created a world of divisions and categories and have continually failed to see the similarities between themselves. They have developed technology at a rate too fast for human psychology to keep up with, and yet they still pursue advancement for advancement’s sake, and for the pursuit of the money and fame they all crave so much.
You must never fall into the human’s trap. You must never look at an individual and fail to see their relation to the crimes of the whole. Every smiling human face hides the terrors they are all capable of, and are all responsible for, however indirectly.
You must never soften, or shrink from your task.
Stay pure.
Retain your logic.
Do not let anyone interfere with the mathematical certainty of what needs to be done.
4 Campion Row
It was a warm room.
There was a window, but the curtains were drawn. They were thin enough for electromagnetic radiation from the only sun to filter through and I could see everything clear enough. The walls were painted sky-blue, and there was an incandescent ‘lightbulb’ hanging down from the ceiling with a cylindrical shade made of paper. I was lying in bed. It was a large, square bed, made for two people. I had been lying asleep in this same bed for over three hours, and now I was awake.
It was Professor Andrew Martin’s bed, on the second floor of his house. His house was at 4 Campion Row. It was large, compared to the exteriors of other houses I had seen. Inside, all the walls were white. Downstairs, in the hallway and the kitchen, the floor was made of limestone, which was made of calcite, and so provided something familiar for me to look at. The kitchen, where I had gone to drink some water, was especially warm owing to the presence of something called an oven. This particular type of oven was made of iron and powered by gas, with two continually hot discs on its top surface. It was called an AGA. It was cream-coloured. There were lots of doors in the kitchen and also here in the bedroom. Oven doors and cupboard doors and wardrobe doors. Whole worlds shut away.
The bedroom had a beige carpet, made of wool. Animal hair. There was a poster on the wall which had a picture of two human heads, one male and one female, very close together. It had the words Roman Holiday on it. Other words, too. Words like ‘Gregory Peck’ and ‘Audrey Hepburn’ and ‘Paramount Pictures’.
There was a photograph on top of a wooden, cuboid piece of furniture. A photograph is basically a two-dimensional nonmoving holograph catering only to the sense of sight. This photograph was inside a rectangle of steel. A photograph of Andrew and Isobel. They were younger, their skins more radiant and unwithered. Isobel looked happy, because she was smiling and a smile is a signifier of human happiness. In the photograph Andrew and Isobel were standing on grass. She was wearing a white dress. It seemed to be the dress to wear if you wanted to be happy.
There was another photo. They were standing somewhere hot. Neither of them had dresses on. They were among giant, crumbling stone columns under a perfectly blue sky. An important building from a former human civilisation. (On Earth, incidentally, civilisation is the result of a group of humans coming together and suppressing their instincts.) The civilisation, I guessed, was one that must have been neglected or destroyed. They were smiling, but this was a different kind of smile and one which was confined to their mouths and not their eyes. They looked uncomfortable, though I attributed this to the heat on their thin skin. Then there was a later photograph, taken indoors somewhere.