Persistence of Vision Read Online Free PDF Page B

It wasn't all hands, as I'd thought.
    Any part of the body in contact with any other was communication, sometimes a very simple and basic sortthink of McLuhan's light bulb as the basic medium of information-perhaps saying no more than "I am here." But talk was talk, and if conversation evolved to the point where you needed to talk to another with your genitals, it was still a part of the conversation. What I wanted to know was what were they saying? I knew, even at that dim moment of realization, that it was much more file:///G|/rah/John%20Varley%20-%20Persistence%20Of%20Vision.txt (10 of 24) [2/17/2004 11:43:30 AM]
    file:///G|/rah/John%20Varley%20-%20Persistence%20Of%20Vision.txt than I could grasp.
    Sure, you're saying. You know about talking to your lover with your body as you make love.
    That's not such a new idea. Of course it isn't, but think how wonderful that talk is even when you're not primarily tactile-oriented. Can you carry the thought from there, or are you doomed to be an earthworm thinking about sunsets?
    While this was happening to me, there was a woman getting acquainted with my body. Her hands were on me, in my lap when I felt myself ejaculating. It was a big surprise to me, but to no one else. -I had been telling everyone around me for many minutes, through signs they could feel with their hands, that it was going to happen. Instantly, hands were all over my body. I could almost understand them as they spelled tender thoughts to me. I got the gist, anyway, if not the words. I was terribly embarrassed for only a moment, then it passed away in the face of the easy acceptance. It was very intense. For a long time I couldn't get my breath.
    The woman who had been the cause of it touched my lips with her fingers. She moved them slowly, but meaningfully I was sure. Then she melted back into the group.
    "What did she say?" I asked Pink.
    She smiled at me. "You know, of course. If you'd only cut loose from your verbalizing.
    But, generally, she meant 'How nice for you.' It also translates as `How nice for me.' And `me,'
    in this sense, means all of us. The organism."
    I knew I had to stay and learn to speak.
    The commune had its ups and downs. They had expected them, in general, but had not known what shape they might take.
    Winter killed many of their fruit trees. They replaced them with hybrid strains. They lost more Page 13

    fertilizer and soil in windstorms because the clover had not had time to anchor it down.
    Their schedule had been thrown off by the court actions, and they didn't really get things settled in a groove for more than a year.
    Their fish all died. They used the bodies for fertilizer and looked into what might have gone wrong. They were using a three-stage ecology of the type pioneered by the New Alchemists in the seventies. It consisted of three domed ponds: one containing fish, another with crushed shells and bacteria in one section and algae in another, and a third full of daphnids. The water containing fish waste from the first pond was pumped through the shells and bacteria, which detoxified it and converted the ammonia it contained into fertilizer for the algae. The algae water was pumped into the second pond to feed the daphnids. Then daphnids and algae were pumped to the fish pond as food and the enriched water was used to fertilize greenhouse plants in all of the domes.
    They tested the water and the soil and found that chemicals were being leached from impurities in the shells and concentrated down the food chain. After a thorough cleanup, they restarted and all went well. But they had lost their first cash crop.
    They never went hungry. Nor were they cold; there was plenty of sunlight year-round to power the pumps and the food cycle and to heat their living quarters. They had built their buildings half-buried with an eye to the heating and cooling powers of convective currents. But they had to spend some of their capital. The first year they showed a loss.
    One of their buildings