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By Root 1347 0

childhood. His questions were always direct, sometimes probing, but without exception gentle. She began to understand why lovers talk baby talk to one another. There was no other socially acceptable circumstance in which the children inside her were permitted to come out. If the one-year-old, the five-year- old, the twelve-year-old, and the twenty-year-old all find compatible personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep all of these sub-personas happy. Love ends their long loneliness. Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship. With her previous partners, it seemed, at most one of these selves was able to find a compatible opposite number; the other personas were grumpy hangers-on.

* * *

The weekend before the scheduled meeting with Joss, they were lying in bed as the late-afternoon sunlight, admitted between the slats of the venetian blinds, played patterns on their intertwined forms.

"In ordinary conversation," she was saying, "I can talk about my father without feeling more than… a slight pang of loss. But if I allow myself to really remember him-his sense of humor, say, or that… passionate fairness-then the facade crumbles, and I want to weep because he's gone."

"No question; language can free us of feeling, or almost," der Heer replied, stroking her shoulder. "Maybe that's one of its functions-so we can understand the world without becoming entirely overwhelmed by it."

"If so, then the invention of language isn't only a blessing. You know, Ken, I'd give anything-I really mean anything I have-if I could spend a few minutes with my dad."

She imagined a heaven with all those nice moms and dads floating about or flapping over to a nearby cloud. It would have to be a commodious place to accommodate all the tens of billions of people who had lived and died since the emergence of the human species. It might be very crowded, she was thinking, unless the religious heaven was built on a scale something like the astronomical heaven. Then there'd be room to spare.

"There must be some number," Ellie said, "that measures the total population of intelligent beings in the Milky Way. How many do you suppose it is? If there's a million civilizations, each with about a billion individuals, that's, um, ten to the fifteenth power intelligent beings. But if most of them are more advanced than we are, maybe the idea of individuals becomes inappropriate; maybe that's just another Earth chauvinism."

"Sure. And then you can calculate the galactic production rate of Gauloises and Twinkies and Volga sedans and Sony pocket communicators. Then we could calculate the Gross Galactic Product. Once we have that in hand, we could work on the Gross Comic…"

"You're making fun of me," she said with a soft smile, not at all displeased. "But think about such numbers. I mean really think about them. All those planets with all those beings, more advanced than we are. Don't you get a kind of tingle thinking about it?"

She could tell what he was thinking, but rushed on. "Here, look at this. I've been reading up for the meeting with Joss."

She reached toward the bedside table for Volume 16 of an old Encyclopaedia Britannica Macropaedia, titled "Rubens to Somalia," and opened to a page where a scrap of computer printout had been inserted as a bookmark. She pointed to an article called "Sacred or Holy."

"The theologians seem to have recognized a special, nonrational-I wouldn't call it irrational- aspect of the feeling of sacred or holy. They call it `numinous.' The term was first used by… let's see… somebody named Rudolph Otto in a 1923 book, The Idea of the Holy. He believed that humans were predisposed to detect and revere the numinous. He called it the misterium tremendum. Even my Latin is good enough for that.

"In the presence of the misterium tremendum, people feel utterly insignificant but, if I read this right, not personally alienated. He thought of the numinous as a thing `wholly other,' and the human response to it as `absolute astonishment.'