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Tags: Science-Fiction, reincarnation fiction, Journalists - Fiction, Human-Alien Encounters—Fiction, Feminist Science Fiction, Tiptree Award winner

“telepathic” communication Johnny reported. But how much did that mean? Maybe nothing at all.
     said Agnes.
    (‘inside’ and ‘outside’; sic; Johnny’s notes.)

    Not a word of this for Braemar, only an impression of unshakeable youthful earnestness.
    “What is this ‘Self’?” asked Johnny.
    The alien spoke, plain English: one stiff intense phrase.
    “The self is God.”
    She briefly covered her face: Braemar read, obviously, reverence.
    Oh, it was for all the world like a serge-wrapped sweating missionary, communing with a wondering savage. Johnny’s wonder, the alien’s amused calm. Is the laughter, laughter? Is evasion, evasion? Is reverence, reverence? Is sexual attraction, attraction? Johnny was still uneasy about the telepathy business (and who could blame him). He approached the subject cautiously.
    “Agnès, can you explain to me how do we understand each other? How do you make me understand you? Have you learned my language or am I—uh—doing my own translation somehow?”
    Oh, now that worried her. Again, not seriously but socially. The missionary becomes a tourist, a tourist briefly afraid that this attractive bit of local talent is wanting in his wits.
    Agnès was puzzled (reported Johnny). Puzzled tone.
    On Braemar’s screen the alien suddenly dismissed her doubts and became radiant. (a break in transmission, said Johnny’s notes).

    Agnès made no noises, no throat-clearing: none of that mechanical, casual humming and hawing the Deaf have to suppress in social intercourse with the hearing. They are naturally silent, Braemar noted; and thought of animal comparisons.
    There was a vertigo that could strike Braemar: a kind of horror, when looking at Agnès made her feel herself on the brink of some ultimate dissolution. She was attempting to find meaning, where no meaning of hers could exist. At moments she could taste Johnny’s initial terror, bile in the mouth. When this fugue came she would leave the interview tapes and think of glory: how the outcast eejay and the obsolete housewife were going to astonish the world with their noseless tourist.
    They even had an alien artifact. Agnès refused to take Johnny back to the ship with the same firmness as she refused to remove her clothes; but she’d given him a present. It was a piece of rag-paper, grainy and rough, torn from the kind of child’s jotter that you could buy in any street corner supermarket in Fo. An abstract pattern of color covered it. The coloring medium might be ordinary wax crayon, for all Braemar could tell, but in the alien sweeps and dashes she discerned (was this imaginary?), talent and skill. The alien is an artist. The eye attached to the word-filled mind finds it extremely difficult to come to any image “empty”: simply to see. The farther a human artist strays from representation, the more literary a picture becomes, not less. Agnès did not struggle with the paradox. She called this a poem.
    The coralin “maker disc,” which held the original record of Braemar’s whole working life (and plenty of room for another few working lifetimes), was actually a cassette of incredibly fine tape, laid with