“Hello Pratt traffic, Swift 2304 Bravo's entering forty-five to a left downwind Runway Three Five Pratt.” Faint on the radio, the airplane was miles away.
What suggestions? For the first time in his life, in the high noisy silence of the cockpit, he opened his eyes to see.
He flew back through time; time with himself and with others, through marriage and business, through the years in the military, through high school, grammar school, through home as a child, life as an infant. How do we become part of any culture, any form of life, save by accepting its suggestions to be our truth?
Suggestions by the thousands, millions, there's seas of suggestions; accepted, worshipped, reasonable and un, declined ignored . . . all of them pouring unseen through me, through every human being, every animal, every life-form on Earth: got to eat and sleep, feel hot and cold, pain and pleasure, got to have a heartbeat, breathe air, learn all physical laws and obey, accept suggestions that this is the only life there is or ever was or ever will be. Dee Hartridge had only been hinting.
Any statement, he thought, with which we can agree or disagree, on any level—that's a suggestion.
He blinked at that, airplane forgotten. Any statement? That's nearly every word he had seen spoken heard thought and dreamed, non-stop day and night continuously, for more than half a century, not counting the non-verbal suggestions to be conservative ten thousand times more.
Every split instant we perceive a wall, we reaffirm solid-can't-go-through-that. How many nano-instants during one day do our senses include walls? Doors? Floors? Ceilings? Windows? For how many milliseconds do we accept limits-limits-limits without even knowing we're doing it?
How many micro-instants in a day, he wondered— a trillion? That many suggestions each day in the category of architecture alone, before we move on to something simultaneously flooding suggestions about its own limits, let's say perception, biology, physiology, chemistry, aeronautics, hydrodynamics, laser physics, please insert here the list of every discipline ever conceived by humankind.
That's why infants are helpless as long as they are, even learning quicker than lightning every second. They need to accept a foundation, a critical mass of suggestions, acclimate from spirit to our customs of space and time.
Infancy is basic training for mortality. Such a savage bursting dam-break of suggestions on the poor little guys, no wonder it takes years for them to swim to the first still water, talk ideas on their own. Amazing their first word isn't “Help!” Probably is, that cry.
One hour ten minutes after takeoff, engine instruments in the green, groundspeed 150 knots in the headwind, sky clear, air smooth, ETA Arkansas an hour plus.
In the midst of all that, we mortals have to learn to be afraid, he thought. When we're mortal, danger's necessary, destruction has to be possible, if we're going to play the game.
Got to play, got to dive down deep, deep, deeper in that ocean of suggestions that we're mortal, limited, vulnerable, blind to all but the chaff-storm of what our senses tell us; turn lies to unshakable belief, no questions asked and while we're doing this avoid dying so long as possible and while we're dodging death figure out why we came here in the first place and what possible reason we might ever have had to call this game entertainment.
Oh, and all the real answers are hidden. The game is to find 'em on our own in the midst of clouds of fake answers that other players say are fine for them but which somehow don't seem to work for us at all.
Don't laugh, infant. Mortals find the game fascinating, and you will too when you accept the belief that you're one of them.
As a flying cadet, Jamie Forbes had been to classes about altitude sickness, supposed to happen when you fly high. Is there such a thing as altitude awareness, he wondered now; you understand some things, having flown some secret number of years, that you never would have known on the ground?
If you don't follow rules, you're not allowed to play.
Life in Spacetime Rule One is obvious: You've got to believe in spacetime.
After just a few billion suggestions about the limits of four dimensions, that is, around the time we turn two days old, confirmation comes quick. We're lost in the I Am A Helpless Human Baby trance, but we're players.
What about the ones who change their minds, who decide to withdraw their consent to this planet's sandstorm of suggestion? The ones who say, “I am spirit! I am not limited by the beliefs of this hallucinated world and I won't pretend I am!”
What happens to them is, “Poor thing: stillborn. Little tyke lived less than an hour ain't that a shame. Wasn't sick, it just didn't make it. Who said life's fair?”
The ones who go along, give their consent to be hypnotized, thought Jamie Forbes, cruising level at seven thousand five, that's us. That's me.
Groundspeed down to 135. He reset the GPS, changed his destination from Arkansas to Ponca City, Oklahoma. Never been there, he thought; will be soon.
CHAPTER NINE
“Where do you keep your books on aviation?”
The used-book store near the airport in Ponca City was promising because i
t had musted up in the same spot, it looked, for eighty years or so.
“What we'd have on Aviation,” said the clerk, “would be, go down that way to where it says Travel and turn left. It's at the end of the aisle, right side.”
“Thank you.”
What they had was not a whole lot, the pilot found; nothing on his current flame, seaplane history. Three fine books, though, right together: the rare old Brimm and Bogess two-volume Aircraft and Engine Maintenance, way underpriced, marked three dollars each for two forty-dollar books, and Nevil Shute's Slide Rule, about the author's life as an aircraft engineer.