Grimus by Salman Rushdie Page A

for a moment Flapping Eagle’s eyes had sparked—he had almost pulled his mind away from itself. But he hadn’t been strong enough; and now there was only one thing to do.
    Virgil Jones had to go in there, into the dimensions of another man’s mind, more dangerous even than one’s own, and guide him out. The alternative was a foregone conclusion. Flapping Eagle’s mind would overheat and in the end it would burn out, perhaps beyond all saving. As Virgil Jones’ mind had nearly destroyed itself. The worm biting its own tail would finally swallow itself.
    Because the worlds that Calf Mountain and its Effect unleashed inside the head were not phantoms. They were solid. They could hit and hurt.
    Virgil Jones had sat for an age, running his thoughts over the agonies of his past, when he had travelled the Dimensions, before the Effect had become too huge for him to handle, trying to clutch at the knowledge he needed. He knew that he had known it; that somewhere on his travels he had met—who?—someone—that knew the technique for locking on to the mind of another living being.
    Virgil Jones had not told Flapping Eagle about his own travels. In his day he had rejoiced in those interdimensional trips. There had been the voyages to the real, physical, alternative space-time continua. So close, yet such an eternity away. And there had been his own annihilating journey into the Inner Dimensions, like the internal inferno which now clutched Flapping Eagle, which had left him hollow and impotent and lucky to be alive. And there was the third kind.
    The bridge between the first two kinds.
    With sufficient imagination, Virgil Jones had found, one could create worlds, physical, external worlds, neither aspects of oneself nor a palimpsest-universe.
    Fictions where a man could live.
    In those days, Mr Jones had been a highly imaginative man.
    He fought his way past the unbearable memory of his breakdown, when the power became a monster which turned upon him and seared his mind, and came to the good times. He smiled. What worlds he had visited! What things he had learned! He recalled with admiration the sexual techniques of the Ydjac, the instinct-logic of the plant-geniuses of Poli XI, the tonal sculpture of the Aurelions. The pain was gone now; he was past the block, excavating his own history with the pleasure of the genuine archaeologist. And so he came, eventually, to the time he visited the Spiral Dancers.
    Certain kinds of science aspire to the condition of poetry; and on the planet of the Spiral Dancers, a long tradition of scientist-poets had elevated a branch of physics until it became a high symbolist religion. They had probed matter, dividing it into ever-smaller units, until they found at its very roots the pure, beautiful dance of life. This was a harmony of the infinitesimal, where energy and matter moved like fluids. Energy forces came gracefully together to create at their point of union a pinch which was matter. The pinches came together into larger pinches; or else fell away again into pure energy, according to the rules of a highly formal, spiral rhythm. When they came together, they were dancing the Strong-dance. When they fell back into the Primal, they were dancing the Weakdance.
    From this discovery came the religion of Spiral Unity. If everything was energy, everything was the same. A thinking being and a table were only aspects of the same force. It had been proven scientifically.
    The main ritual of the religion, which was only established after generations of poet-scientists worked on applications of the Theory, was the Spiral Dance. It was a physical exercise based on the primal rhythms, and its purpose was to enable every humble, imperfect living thing to aspire to that fundamental perfection. Dance the Dance, and you would commune with the Oneness surrounding you on all sides.
    Virgil Jones stood up.
    He removed his old dark jacket. And his old dark trousers. And his old dark waistcoat with the watchless