Every storyy has many pivotal moments for the main characters, especially the protagonist. These moments drive the plot, creating peaks of intensity for the reader. Characters are developed as they face difficult problems and decisions. Often the theme of the novel is revealed in these pivotal moments ( talk about when When the alien discovered emotions) Identify a pivotal moment in the story I had pasted Explore how one or more of the characters deal with it. By using the text I paste only, when answering give examples from text. "I know that some of you reading this are convinced humans are a myth, but I am here to state that they do actually exist. For those that don't know, a human is a real bipedal lifeform of mid-range intelligence, living a largely deluded existence on a small water-logged planet in a very lonely corner of the universe. For the rest of you, and those who sent me, humans are in many respects exactly as strange as you would expect them to be. Certainly it is true that on a first sighting you would be appalled by their physical appearance. Their faces alone contain all manner of hideous curiosities. A protuberant central nose, thin-skinned lips, primitive external auditory organs known as 'ears', tiny eyes and unfathomably pointless eyebrows. All of which take a long time to mentally absorb and accept. The manners and social customs too are a baffling enigma at first. Their conversation topics are very rarely the things they want to be talking about, and I could write ninety-seven books on body shame and clothing etiquette before you would get even close to understanding them. Oh, and let's not forget The Things They Do To Make Themselves Happy That Actually Make Them Miserable. This is an infinite list. It includes - shopping, watching TV, taking the better job, getting the bigger house, writing a semi-autobiographical novel, educating their young, making their skin look mildly less old, and harbouring a vague desire to believe there might be a meaning to it all. Yes, it is all very amusing, in a painful kind of way. But I have discovered human poetry while on Earth. One of these poets, the very best one (her name was Emily Dickinson), said this: 'I dwell in possibility.' So let us humour ourselves and do the same. Let us open our minds entirely, for what you are about to read will need every prejudice you may have to stand aside in the name of understanding. of understanding. And let us consider this: what if there actually is a meaning to human life? And what if - humour me - life on Earth is something not just to fear and ridicule but also cherish? What then? Some of you may know what I have done by now, but none of you know the reason. This document, this guide, this account - call it what you will - will make everything clear. I plead with you to read this book with an open mind, and to work out for yourself the true value of human life. Let there be peace. PART I I took my power in my hand The man I was not So, what is this? You ready? Okay. Inhale. I will tell you. This book, this actual book, is set right here, on Earth. It is about the meaning of life and nothing at all. It is about what it takes to kill somebody, and save them. It is about love and dead poets and wholenut peanut butter. It's about matter and antimatter, everything and nothing, hope and hate. It's about a forty- one-year-old female historian called Isobel and her fifteen-year-old son called Gulliver and the cleverest mathematician in the world. It is, in short, about how to become a human. But let me state the obvious. I was not one. That first night, in the cold and the dark and the wind, I was nowhere near. Before I read Cosmopolitan, in the garage, I had never even seen this written language. I realise that this could be your first time too. To give you an idea of the way people here consume stories, I have put this book together as a human would. The words I use are human words, typed in a human font, laid out consecutively in the human style. With your almost instantaneous ability to translate even the most exotic and primitive linguistic forms, I trust comprehension should not be a problem. Now, to reiterate, I was not Professor Andrew Martin. I was like you. Professor Andrew Martin was merely a role. A disguise. Someone I needed to be in order to complete a task. A task that had begun with his abduction, and death. (I am conscious this is setting a grim tone, so I will resolve not to mention death again for at least the rest of this page.) The point is that I was not a forty-three-year-old mathematician - husband, father - who taught at Cambridge University and who had devoted the last eight years of his life to solving a mathematical problem that had so far proved unsolvable. Prior to arriving on Earth I did not have mid-brown hair that fell in a natural side-parting. Equally, I did not have an opinion on The Planets by Holtz or Talking Heads' second album, as I did not agree with the concept of music. Or I shouldn't have, anyway. And how could I believe that Australian wine was automatically inferior to wine sourced from other regions on the planet when I had never drunk anything but liquid nitrogen? Belonging as I did to a post-marital species, it goes without saying that I hadn't been a neglectful husband with an eye for one of my students any more than I had been a man who walked his English Springer Spaniel - a category of hairy domestic deity otherwise known as a 'dog' - as an excuse to leave the house. Nor had I written books on mathematics, or insisted that my publishers use an author photograph that was now nearing its fifteenth anniversary. No, I wasn't that man. I had no feeling for that man whatsoever. And yet he had been real, as real as you and I, a real mammalian life form, a diploid, eukaryotic primate who, five minutes before midnight, had been sitting at his desk, staring at his computer screen and drinking black coffee (don't worry, I shall explain coffee and my misadventures with it a little later). A life form who may or may not have jumped out of his chair as the breakthrough came, as his mind arrived at a place no human mind had ever reached before, the very edge of knowledge. And at some point shortly after his breakthrough he had been taken by the hosts. My employers. I had even met him, for the very briefest of moments. Enough for the - wholly incomplete - reading to be made. It was complete physically, just not mentally. You see, you can clone human brains but not what is stored inside them, not much of it anyway, so I had to learn a lot of things for myself. I was a forty-three-year-old newborn on planet Earth. It would become annoying to me, later on, that I had never met him properly, as meeting him properly would have been extremely useful. He could have told me about Maggie, for one thing. (Oh, how I wish he had told me about Maggie!) However, any knowledge I gained was not going to alter the simple fact that I had to halt progress. That is what I was there for. To destroy evidence of the breakthrough Professor Andrew Martin had made. Evidence that lived not only in computers but in living human beings. Now, where should we start? I suppose there is only one place. We should start with when I was hit by the car. Detached nouns and other early trials for the language- learner Yes, like I said, we should start with when I was hit by the car. We have to, really. Because for quite a while before that there was nothing. There was nothing and nothing and nothing and-- Something. Me, standing there, on the 'road'. Once there, I had several immediate reactions. First, what was with the weather? I was not really used to weather you had to think about. But this was England, a part of Earth where thinking about the weather was the chief human activity. And for good reason. Second, where was the computer? There was meant to be a computer. Not that I actually knew what Professor Martin's computer would look like. Maybe it looked like a road. Third, what was that noise? A kind of muted roaring. And fourth: it was night. Being something of a homebird, I was not really accustomed to night. And even if I had been, this wasn't just any night. It was the kind of night I had never known. This was night to the power of night to the power of night. This was night cubed. A sky full of uncompromising darkness, with no stars and no moon. Where were the suns? Were there even suns? The cold suggested there might not have been. The cold was a shock. The cold hurt my lungs, and the harsh wind beating against my skin caused me to shake. I wondered if humans ever went outside. They must have been insane if they did. Inhaling was difficult, at first. And this was a concern. After all, inhaling really was one of the most important requirements of being a human. But I eventually got the knack. And then another worry. I was not where I was meant to be, that was increasingly clear. I was meant to be where he had been. I was meant to be in an office, but this wasn't an office. I knew that, even then. Not unless it was an office that contained an entire sky, complete with those dark, congregating clouds and that unseen moon. clouds and that unseen moon. It took a while - too long - to understand the situation. I did not know at that time what a road was, but I can now tell you that a road is something that connects points of departure with points of arrival. This is important. On Earth, you see, you can't just move from one place to another place instantaneously. The technology isn't there yet. It is nowhere near there yet. No. On Earth you have to spend a lot of time travelling in between places, be it on roads or on rail- tracks or in careers or relationships. This particular type of road was a motorway. A motorway is the most advanced type of road there is, which as with most forms of human advancement essentially meant accidental death was considerably more probable. My naked feet were standing on something called tarmac, feeling its strange and brutal texture. I looked at my left hand. It seemed so crude and unfamiliar, and yet my laughter halted when I realised this fingered freakish thing was a part of me. I was a stranger to myself. Oh, and by the way, the muted roaring was still there, minus the muted part. It was then I noticed what was approaching me at considerable speed. The lights. White, wide and low, they may as well have been the bright eyes of a fast- moving plain-sweeper, silver-backed, and now screaming. It was trying to slow, and swerve. There was no time for me to move out of the way. There had been, but not now. I had waited too long. And so it hit me with great, uncompromising force. A force which hurled me off the ground and sent me flying. Only not real flying, because humans can't fly, no matter how much they flap their limbs. The only real option was pain, which I felt right until I landed, after which I returned to nothing again. Nothing and nothing and - Something. A man wearing clothes stood over me. The proximity of his face troubled me. No. A few degrees more than troubled. I was repulsed, terrified. I had never seen anything like this man. The face seemed so alien, full of unfathomable openings and protrusions. The nose, in particular, bothered me. It seemed to my innocent eyes like there was something else inside him, pushing through. I looked lower. Noticed his clothes. He was wearing what I would later realise were a shirt and a tie, trousers and shoes. The exact clothes he should have been wearing and yet they seemed so exotic I didn't know whether to laugh or scream. He was looking at my injuries. Or rather: for them. I checked my left hand. It hadn't been touched. The car had collided with my I checked my left hand. It hadn't been touched. The car had collided with my legs, then my torso, but my hand was fine. 'It's a miracle,' he said quietly, as though it was a secret. But the words were meaningless. He stared into my face and raised his voice, to compete with the sound of cars. 'What are you doing out here?' Again, nothing. It was just a mouth moving, making noise. I could tell it was a simple language, but I needed to hear at least a hundred words of a new language before I could piece the whole grammatical jigsaw together. Don't judge me on this. I know some of you need only ten or so, or just a single adjectival clause somewhere. But languages were never my thing. Part of my aversion to travel, I suppose. I must reiterate this. I did not want to be sent here. It was a job that someone had to do and - following my blasphemous talk at the Museum of Quadratic Equations, my so-called crime against mathematical purity - the hosts believed it to be a suitable punishment. They knew it was a job no one in their right mind would choose to do and, though my task was important, they knew I (like you) belonged to the most advanced race in the known universe and so would be up to the job. 'I know you from somewhere. I recognise your face. Who are you?' I felt tired. That was the trouble with teleportation and matter shifting and bio- setting. It really took it out of you. And even though it put it back in to you, energy was always the price. I slipped into darkness and enjoyed dreams tinged with violet and indigo and home. I dreamed of cracked eggs and prime numbers and ever-shifting skylines. And then I awoke. I was inside a strange vehicle, strapped to primitive heart-reading equipment. Two humans, male and female (the female's appearance confirmed my worst fears. Within this species, ugliness does not discriminate between genders), dressed in green. They seemed to be asking me something in quite an agitated fashion. Maybe it was because I was using my new upper limbs to rip off the crudely designed electrocardiographic equipment. They tried to restrain me, but they apparently had very little understanding of the mathematics involved, and so with relative ease I managed to leave the two green-clothed humans on the floor, writhing around in pain. I rose to my feet, noticing just how much gravity there was on this planet as the driver turned to ask me an even more urgent question. The vehicle was moving fast, and the undulating sound waves of the siren were an undeniable distraction, but I opened the door and leapt towards the soft vegetation at the side of the road. My body rolled. I hid. And then, once it was safe to appear, I got to my feet. Compared to a human hand, a foot is relatively untroubling, toes aside. aside. I stood there for a while, just staring at all those odd cars, confined to the ground, evidently reliant on fossil fuel and each making more noise than it took to power a polygon generator. And the even odder sight of the humans - all clothed inside, holding on to circular steer-control equipment and, sometimes, extra-biological telecommunications devices. I have come to a planet where the most intelligent life form still has to drive its own cars . . . Never before had I so appreciated the simple splendours you and I have grown up with. The eternal light. The smooth, floating traffic. The advanced plant life. The sweetened air. The non-weather. Oh, gentle readers, you really have no idea. Cars blared high-frequency horns as they passed me. Wide-eyed, gape- mouthed faces stared out of windows. I didn't understand it, I looked as ugly as any of them. Why wasn't I blending in? What was I doing wrong? Maybe it was because I wasn't in a car. Maybe that's how humans lived, permanently contained in cars. Or maybe it was because I wasn't wearing any clothes. It was a cold night, but could it really have been something so trivial as a lack of artificial body-covering? No, it couldn't be as simple as that. I looked up at the sky. There was evidence of the moon now, veiled by thin cloud. It too seemed to be gawping down at me with the same sense of shock. But the stars were still blanketed, out of sight. I wanted to see them. I wanted to feel their comfort. On top of all this, rain was a distinct possibility. I hated rain. To me, as to most of you dome-dwellers, rain was a terror of almost mythological proportions. I needed to find what I was looking for before the clouds opened. There was a rectangular aluminium sign ahead of me. Nouns minus context are always tricky for the language learner, but the arrow was pointing only one way so I followed it. Humans kept on lowering their windows and shouting things at me, above the sound of their engines. Sometimes this seemed good-humoured, as they were spitting oral fluid, in my direction, orminurk-style. So I spat back in a friendly fashion, trying to hit their fast-moving faces. This seemed to encourage more shouting, but I tried not to mind. Soon, I told myself, I would understand what the heavily articulated greeting 'get off the fucking road you fucking wanker' actually meant. In the meantime I kept walking, got past the sign, and saw an illuminated but disconcertingly unmoving building by the side of the road. I will go to it, I told myself. I will go to it and find some answers. Texaco The building was called 'Texaco'. It stood there shining in the night with a terrible stillness, like it was waiting to come alive. As I walked towards it, I noticed it was some kind of refill station. Cars were parked there, under a horizontal canopy and stationed next to simple-looking fuel-delivery systems. It was confirmed: the cars did absolutely nothing for themselves. They were practically brain dead, if they even had brains. The humans who were refuelling their vehicles stared at me as they went inside. Trying to be as polite as possible, given my verbal limitations, I spat an ample amount of saliva towards them. I entered the building. There was a clothed human behind the counter. Instead of his hair being on the top of his head it covered the bottom half of his face. His body was more spherical than other humans' so he was marginally better looking. From the scent of hexanoic acid and androsterone I could tell personal hygiene wasn't one of his top priorities. He stared at my (admittedly distressing) genitalia and then pressed something behind the counter. I spat, but the greeting was unreciprocated. Maybe I had got it wrong about the spitting. All this salivatory offloading was making me thirsty, so I went over to a humming refrigerated unit full of brightly coloured cylindrical objects. I picked one of them up, and opened it. A can of liquid called 'Diet Coke'. It tasted extremely sweet, with a trace of phosphoric acid. It was disgusting. It burst out of my mouth almost the moment it entered. Then I consumed something else. A foodstuff wrapped in synthetic packaging. This was, I would later realise, a planet of things wrapped inside things. Food inside wrappers. Bodies inside clothes. Contempt inside smiles. Everything was hidden away. The foodstuff was called Mars. That got a little bit further down my throat, but only far enough to discover I had a gag reflex. I closed the door and saw a container with the words 'Pringles' and 'Barbecue' on it. I opened it up and started to eat. They tasted okay - a bit like sorp-cake - and I crammed as many as I could into my mouth. I wondered when I had last actually fed myself, with no assistance. I seriously couldn't remember. Not since infancy, that was for sure. seriously couldn't remember. Not since infancy, that was for sure. 'You can't do that. You can't just eat stuff. You've got to pay for it.' The man behind the counter was talking to me. I still had little idea of what he was saying, but from the volume and frequency I sensed it wasn't good. Also, I observed that his skin - in the places on his face where it was visible - was changing colour. I noticed the lighting above my head, and I blinked. I placed my hand over my mouth and made a noise. Then I held it at arm's length and made the same noise, noting the difference. It was comforting to know that even in the most remote corner of the universe the laws of sound and light obeyed themselves, although it has to be said they seemed a little more lacklustre here. There were shelves full of what I would shortly know as 'magazines', nearly all of which had faces with near-identical smiles on the front of them. Twenty- six noses. Fifty-two eyes. It was an intimidating sight. I picked up one of these magazines as the man picked up the phone. On Earth, the media is still locked in a pre-capsule age and most of it has to be read via an electronic device or via a printed medium made of a thin, chemically pulped tree-derivative known as paper. Magazines are very popular, despite no human ever feeling better for having read them. Indeed, their chief purpose is to generate a sense of inferiority in the reader that consequently leads to them needing to buy something, which they do, and then feel even worse, and so need to buy another magazine to see what they can buy next. It is an eternal and unhappy spiral that goes by the name of capitalism and it is really quite popular. The particular publication I was holding was called Cosmopolitan, and I realised that if nothing else it would help me grasp the language. It didn't take long. Written human languages are preposterously simple, as they are made up almost entirely of words. I had interpolated the entire written language by the end of the first article, in addition to the touch that can boost your mood - as well as your relationship. Also: orgasms, I realised, were an incredibly big deal. It seemed orgasms were the central tenet of life here. Maybe this was the only meaning they had on this planet. Their purpose was simply to pursue the enlightenment of orgasm. A few seconds of relief from the surrounding dark. But reading wasn't speaking and my new vocal equipment was still sitting there, in my mouth and throat, like yet more food I didn't know how to swallow. I placed the magazine back on the shelf. There was a thin vertical piece of reflective metal beside the stand, allowing me a partial glimpse of myself. I too had a protruding nose. And lips. Hair. Ears. So much externality. It was a very inside-out kind of look. Plus a large lump in the centre of my neck. Very thick eyebrows. A piece of information came to me, something I remembered from what the hosts had told me. Professor Andrew Martin. My heart raced. A surge of panic. This was what I was now. This was who I had become. I tried to comfort myself by remembering it was just temporary. At the bottom of the magazine stand were some newspapers. There were photographs of more smiling faces, and some of dead bodies too, lying beside demolished buildings. Next to the newspapers was a small collection of maps. A Road Map of the British Isles was among them. Perhaps I was on the British Isles. I picked up the map and tried to leave the building. The man hung up the phone. The door was locked. Information arrived, unprompted: Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University. 'You're not bloody leaving,' said the man, in words I was beginning to comprehend. 'The police are on their way. I've locked the door.' To his bafflement, I then proceeded to open the door. I stepped out and heard a distant siren. I listened, and realised the noise was only three hundred metres away and getting rapidly closer. I began to move, running as fast as I could away from the road and up a grass embankment towards another flat area. There were lots of stationary haulage vehicles, parked in an ordered geometric fashion. This was such a strange world. Of course, when viewed afresh there were only strange worlds but this one must have been strangest of all. I tried to see the similarity. I told myself that here all things were still made of atoms, and that those atoms would work precisely as atoms always do. They would move towards each other if there was distance between them. If there was no distance between them, they would repel each other. That was the most basic law of the universe, and it applied to all things, even here. There was comfort in that. The knowledge that wherever you were in the universe, the small things were always exactly the same. Attracting and repelling. It was only by not looking closely enough that you saw difference. But still, right then, difference was all I saw. The car with the siren was now pulling into the fuelling station, flashing blue light, so I hid among the parked lorries for a few minutes. I was freezing, and crouched into myself, my whole body shaking and my testicles shrinking. (A male human's testicles were the most attractive thing about him, I realised, and vastly unappreciated by humans themselves, who would very often rather look at anything else, including smiling faces.) Before the police car left I heard a voice behind me. Not a police officer but the driver of the vehicle I was crouched behind me. Not a police officer but the driver of the vehicle I was crouched behind. 'Hey, what are you doing? Fuck off away from my lorry.' I ran away, my bare feet hitting hard ground scattered with random pieces of grit. And then I was on grass, running across a field, and I kept on in the same direction until I reached another road. This one was much narrower and had no traffic at all. I opened the map, found the line which matched the curve of this other road and saw that word: 'Cambridge'. I headed there. As I walked and breathed in that nitrogen-rich air the idea of myself was forming. Professor Andrew Martin. With the name, came facts sent across space by those who had sent me. I was to be a married man. I was forty-three years old, the exact mid-point in a human life. I had a son. I was the professor who had just solved the most significant mathematic puzzle the humans had ever faced. I had, only three short hours ago, advanced the human race beyond anyone's imagining. The facts made me queasy but I kept on heading in the direction of Cambridge, to see what else these humans had in store for me. Corpus Christi I was not told to provide this document of human life. That was not in my brief. Yet I feel obliged to do so to explain some remarkable features of human existence. I hope you will thereby understand why I chose to do what, by now, some of you must know I did. Anyhow, I had always known Earth was a real place. I knew that, of course I did. I had consumed, in capsule form, the famous travelogue The Fighting Idiots: My Time with the Humans of Water Planet 7,081. I knew Earth was a real event in a dull and distant solar system, where not a great deal happened and where travel options for the locals were severely limited. I'd also heard that humans were a life form of, at best, middling intelligence and one prone to violence, deep sexual embarrassment, bad poetry and walking around in circles. But I was starting to realise no preparation could have been enough. By morning I was in this Cambridge place. It was horrendously fascinating. The buildings were what I noticed first, and it was quite startling to realise that the garage hadn't been a one-off. All such structures - whether built for consumerist, habitative or other purposes - were static and stuck to the ground. Of course, this was meant to be my town. This was where 'I' had lived, on and off, for over twenty years. And I would have to act like that was true, even though it was the most alien place I had ever seen in my life. The lack of geometric imagination was startling. There was not so much as a decagon in sight. Though I did notice that some of the buildings were larger and - relatively speaking - more ornately designed than others. Temples to the orgasm, I imagined. Shops were beginning to open. In human towns, I would soon learn, everywhere is a shop. Shops are to Earth-dwellers what equation booths are to Vonnadorians. In one such shop I saw lots of books in the window. I was reminded that humans have to read books. They actually need to sit down and look at each word consecutively. And that takes time. Lots of time. A human can't just swallow every book going, can't chew different tomes simultaneously, or gulp down near-infinite knowledge in a matter of seconds. They can't just pop a word-capsule in their mouth like we can. Imagine! Being not only mortal but also forced to take some of that precious and limited time and read. No wonder they were a species of primitives. By the time they had read enough books to actually reach a state of knowledge where they can do anything with it they are dead. Understandably, a human needs to know what kind of book they are about to read. They need to know if it is a love story. Or a murder story. Or a story about aliens. There are other questions, too, that humans have in bookstores. Such as, is it one of those books they read to feel clever, or one of those they will pretend never to have read in order to stay looking clever? Will it make them laugh, or cry? Or will it simply force them to stare out of the window watching the tracks of raindrops? Is it a true story? Or is it a false one? Is it the kind of story that will work on their brain or one which aims for lower organs? Is it one of those books that ends up acquiring religious followers or getting burned by them? Is it a book about mathematics or - like everything else in the universe - simply because of it? Yes, there are lots of questions. And even more books. So, so many. Humans in their typical human way have written far too many to get through. Reading is added to that great pile of things - work, love, sexual prowess, the words they didn't say when they really needed to say them - that they are bound to feel a bit dissatisfied about. So, humans need to know about a book. Just as they need to know, when they apply for a job, if it will cause them to lose their mind at the age of fifty-nine and lead them to jump out of the office window. Or if, when they go on a first date, the person who is now making witticisms about his year in Cambodia will one day leave her for a younger woman called Francesca who runs her own public relations firm and says Kafkaesque without having ever read Kafka. Anyway, there I was walking into this bookshop and having a look at some of the books out on the tables. I noticed two of the females who worked there were laughing and pointing towards my mid-section. Again, I was confused. Weren't men meant to go in bookshops? Was there some kind of war of ridicule going on between the genders? Did booksellers spend all their time mocking their customers? Or was it that I wasn't wearing any clothes? Who knew? Anyway, it was a little distracting, especially as the only laughter I had ever heard had been the fur-muffled chuckle of an Ipsoid. I tried to focus on the books themselves, and decided to look at those stacked on the shelves. and decided to look at those stacked on the shelves. I soon noticed that the system they were using was alphabetical and related to the initial letter in the last name of each author. As the human alphabet only has 26 letters it was an incredibly simple system, and I soon found the Ms. One of these M books was called The Dark Ages and it was by Isobel Martin. I pulled it off the shelf. It had a little sign on it saying 'Local Author'. There was only one of them in stock, which was considerably fewer than the number of books by Andrew Martin. For example, there were thirteen copies of an Andrew Martin book called The Square Circle and eleven of another one called American Pi. They were both about mathematics. I picked up these books and realised they both said 'PS8.99' on the back. The interpolation of the entire language I had done with the aid of Cosmopolitan meant I knew this was the price of the books, but I did not have any money. So I waited until no one was looking (a long time) and then I ran very fast out of the shop. I eventually settled into a walk, as running without clothes is not entirely compatible with external testicles, and then I started to read. I searched both books for the Riemann hypothesis, but I couldn't find anything except unrelated references to the long-dead German mathematician Bernhard Riemann himself. I let the books drop to the ground. People were really beginning to stop and stare. All around me were things I didn't quite yet comprehend: litter, advertisements, bicycles. Uniquely human things. I passed a large man with a long coat and a hairy face who, judging from his asymmetrical gait, seemed to be injured. Of course, we may know brief pain, but this did not seem of that type. It reminded me that this was a place of death. Things deteriorated, degenerated, and died here. The life of a human was surrounded on all sides by darkness. How on Earth did they cope? Idiocy, from slow reading. It could only be idiocy. This man, though, didn't seem to be coping. His eyes were full of sorrow and suffering. 'Jesus,' the man mumbled. I think he was mistaking me for someone. 'I've seen it all now.' He smelt of bacterial infection and several other repugnant things I couldn't identify. I thought about asking him for directions, as the map was rendered in only two dimensions and a little vague, but I wasn't up to it yet. I might have been able to say the words but I didn't have the confidence to direct them towards such a close face, with its bulbous nose and sad pink eyes. (How did I know his such a close face, with its bulbous nose and sad pink eyes. (How did I know his eyes were sad? That is an interesting question, especially as we Vonnadorians never really feel sadness. The answer is I don't know. It was a feeling I had. A ghost inside me, maybe the ghost of the human I had become. I didn't have all his memories, but did I have other things. Was empathy part-biological? All I know is it unsettled me, more than the sight of pain. Sadness seemed to me like a disease, and I worried it was contagious.) So I walked past him and, for the first time in as long as I could remember, I tried to find my own way to somewhere. Now, I knew Professor Martin worked at the university but I had no idea what a university looked like. I guessed they wouldn't be zirconium-clad space stations hovering just beyond the atmosphere, but other than that I didn't really know. The ability to view two different buildings and say, oh this was that type of building, and that was this, well, that was simply lost on me. So I kept walking, ignoring the gasps and the laughter, and feeling whichever brick or glass facade I was passing by, as though touch held more answers than sight. And then the very worst possible thing happened. (Brace yourselves, Vonnadorians.) It began to rain. The sensation of it on my skin and my hair was horrific, and I needed it to end. I felt so exposed. I began to jog, looking for an entry into somewhere. Anywhere. I passed a vast building with a large gate and sign outside. The sign said 'The College of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary'. Having read Cosmopolitan I knew what 'virgin' meant in full detail but I had a problem with some of the other words. Corpus and Christi seemed to inhabit a space just beyond the language. Corpus was something to do with body, so maybe Corpus Christi was a tantric full body orgasm. In truth, I didn't know. There were smaller words too, and a different sign. These words said 'Cambridge University'. I used my left hand to open the gate and walked through, on to grass, heading towards the building that still had lights on. Signs of life and warmth. The grass was wet. The soft dampness of it repulsed me and I seriously considered screaming. It was very neatly trimmed, this grass. I was later to realise that a neatly trimmed lawn was a powerful signifier, and should have commanded in me a slight sense of fear and respect, especially in conjunction (as this was) with 'grand' architecture. But right then, I was oblivious to both the significance of tidy grass and architectural grandeur and so I kept walking, towards the main building. A car stopped somewhere behind me. Again, there were blue lights flashing, sliding across the stone facade of Corpus Christi. sliding across the stone facade of Corpus Christi. (Flashing blue lights on Earth = trouble.) A man ran towards me. There was a whole crowd of other humans behind him. Where had they come from? They all seemed so sinister, in a pack, with their odd-looking clothed forms. They were aliens to me. That was the obvious part. What was less obvious was the way I seemed like an alien to them. After all, I looked like them. Maybe this was another human trait. Their ability to turn on themselves, to ostracise their own kind. If that was the case, it added weight to my mission. It made me understand it better. Anyway, there I was, on the wet grass, with the man running towards me and the crowd further away. I could have run, or fought, but there were too many of them - some with archaic-looking recording equipment. The man grabbed me. 'Come with me, sir.' I thought of my purpose. But right then I had to comply. Indeed, I just wanted to get out of the rain. 'I am Professor Andrew Martin,' I said, having complete confidence that I knew how to say this phrase. And that is when I discovered the truly terrifying power of other people's laughter. 'I have a wife and a son,' I said, and I gave their names. 'I need to see them. Can you take me to see them?' 'No. Not right now. No, we can't.' He held my arm tightly. I wanted, more than anything, for his hideous hand to let go. To be touched by one of them, let alone gripped, was too much. And yet I did not attempt to resist as he led me towards a vehicle. I was supposed to draw as little attention to myself as possible while doing my task. In that, I was failing already. You must strive to be normal. Yes. You must try to be like them. I know. Do not escape prematurely. I won't. But I don't want to be here. I want to go home. You know you can't do that. Not yet. But I will run out of time. I must get to the professor's office, and to his home. You are right. You must. But first you need to stay calm, and do what they tell you. Go where they want you to go. Do what they want you to do. They must never know who sent you. Do not panic. Professor Andrew Martin is not among them now. You are. There will be time. They die, and so they have impatience. Their lives are short. Yours is not. Do not become like them. Use your gifts wisely. I will. But I am scared. You have every right to be. You are among the humans. Human clothes They made me put on clothes. What humans didn't know about architecture or non-radioactive isotopic helium-based fuels, they more than made up for with their knowledge of clothes. They were geniuses in the area, and knew all the subtleties. And there were, I promise you, thousands of them. The way clothes worked was this: there was an under layer and an outer layer. The under layer consisted of 'pants' and 'socks' which covered the heavily scented regions of the genitals, bottom and feet. There was also the option of a 'vest' which covered the marginally less shameful chest area. This area included the sensitive skin protrusions known as 'nipples'. I had no idea what purpose nipples served, though I did notice a pleasurable sensation when I tenderly stroked my fingers over them. The outer layer of clothing seemed even more important than the under layer. This layer covered ninety-five per cent of the body, leaving only the face, head- hair and hands on show. This outer layer of clothing seemed to be the key to the power structures on this planet. For instance, the two men who took me away in the car with the blue flashing lights were both wearing identical outer layers, consisting of black shoes over their socks, black trousers over their pants, and then, over their upper bodies, there was a white 'shirt' and a dark, deep-space blue 'jumper'. On this jumper, directly over the region of their left nipple, was a rectangular badge made of a slightly finer fabric which had the words 'Cambridgeshire POLICE' written on it. Their jackets were the same colour and had the same badge. These were clearly the clothes to wear. However, I soon realised what the word 'police' meant. It meant police. I couldn't believe it. I had broken the law simply by not wearing clothes. I was pretty sure that most humans must have known what a naked human looked like. It wasn't as though I had done something wrong while not wearing clothes. At least, not yet. They placed me inside a small room that was, in perfect accord with all human rooms, a shrine to the rectangle. The funny thing was that although this room looked precisely no better or worse than anything else in that police station, or indeed that planet, the officers seemed to think it was a particular punishment to be placed in this place - a 'cell' - more than any other room. They are in a body that dies, I chuckled to myself, and they worry more about being locked in a room! This was where they told me to get dressed. To 'cover myself up'. So I picked up those clothes and did my best and then, once I had worked out which limb went through which opening, they said I had to wait for an hour. Which I did. Of course, I could have escaped. But I realised it was more likely that I would find what I needed by staying there, with the police and their computers. Plus, I remembered what I had been told. Use your gifts wisely. You must try and be like them. You must strive to be normal. Then the door opened. Questions There were two men. These were different men. These men weren't wearing the same clothes, but they did have pretty much the same face. Not just the eyes, protruding nose and mouth but also a shared look of complacent misery. In the stark light I felt not a little afraid. They took me to another room for questioning. This was interesting knowledge: you could only ask questions in certain rooms. There were rooms for sitting and thinking, and rooms for inquisition. They sat down. Anxiety prickled my skin. The kind of anxiety you could only feel on this planet. The anxiety that came from the fact that the only beings who knew who I was were a long way away. They were as far away as it was possible to be. 'Professor Andrew Martin,' said one of the men, leaning back in his chair. 'We've done a bit of research. We googled you. You're quite a big fish in academic circles.' The man stuck out his bottom lip, and displayed the palms of his hands. He wanted me to say something. What would they plan on doing to me if I didn't? What could they have done? I had little idea what 'googling' me meant, but whatever it was I couldn't say I had felt it. I didn't really understand what being a 'big fish in academic circles' meant either though I must say it was a kind of relief - given the dimensions of the room - to realise they knew what a circle was. I nodded my head, still a little uneasy about speaking. It involved too much concentration and co-ordination. Then the other one spoke. I switched my gaze to his face. The key difference between them, I suppose, was in the lines of hair above their eyes. This one kept his eyebrows permanently raised, causing the skin of his forehead to wrinkle. 'What have you got to tell us?' I thought long and hard. It was time to speak. 'I am the most intelligent human on the planet. I am a mathematical genius. I have made important contributions to many branches of mathematics, such as group theory, number theory and to many branches of mathematics, such as group theory, number theory and geometry. My name is Professor Andrew Martin.' They gave each other a look, and released a brief air chuckle out of their noses. 'Are you thinking this is funny?' the first one said, aggressively. 'Committing a public order offence? Does that amuse you? Yeah?' 'No. I was just telling you who I am.' 'We've established that,' the officer said, who kept his eyebrows low and close, like doona-birds in mating season. 'The last bit anyway. What we haven't established is: what were you doing walking around without your clothes on at half past eight in the morning?' 'I am a professor at Cambridge University. I am married to Isobel Martin. I have a son, Gulliver. I would very much like to see them, please. Just let me see them.' They looked at their papers. 'Yes,' the first one said. 'We see you are a teaching fellow at Fitzwilliam College. But that doesn't explain why you were walking naked around the grounds of Corpus Christi College. You are either off your head or a danger to society, or both.' 'I do not like wearing clothes,' I said, with quite delicate precision. 'They chafe. They are uncomfortable around my genitals.' And then, remembering all I had learnt from Cosmopolitan magazine I leant in towards them and added what I thought would be the clincher. 'They may seriously hinder my chances of achieving tantric full-body orgasm.' It was then they made a decision, and the decision was to submit me to a psychiatric test. This essentially meant going to another rectilinear room to have to face looking at another human with another protruding nose. This human was female. She was called Priti, which was pronounced 'pretty' and means pretty. Unfortunate, given that she was human and, by her very nature, vomit- provoking. 'Now,' she said, 'I would like to start by asking you something very simple. I'm wondering if you've been under any pressure recently?' I was confused. What kind of pressure was she talking about? Atmospheric? Gravitational? 'Yes,' I said. 'A lot. Everywhere, there is some kind of pressure.' It seemed like the right answer. Coffee She told me she had been talking to the university. This, alone, made little sense. How, for instance, was that done? But then she told me this: 'They tell me you've been working long hours, even by the standards of your peers. They seem very upset about the whole thing. But they are worried about you. As is your wife.' 'My wife?' I knew I had one, and I knew her name, but I didn't really understand what it actually meant to have a wife. Marriage was a truly alien concept. There probably weren't enough magazines on the planet for me to ever understand it. She explained. I was even more confused. Marriage was a 'loving union' which meant two people who loved each other stayed together for ever. But that seemed to suggest that love was quite a weak force and needed marriage to bolster it. Also, the union could be broken with something called 'divorce', which meant there was - as far as I could see - very little point to it, in logical terms. But then, I had no real idea what 'love' was, even though it had been one of the most frequently used words in the magazine I'd read. It remained a mystery. And so I asked her to explain that too, and by this point I was bewildered, overdosing on all this bad logic. It sounded like delusion. 'Do you want a coffee?' 'Yes,' I said. So the coffee came and I tasted it - a hot, foul, acidic, dual-carbon compound liquid - and I spat it out all over her. A major breach of human etiquette - apparently, I was meant to swallow it. 'What the--' She stood up and patted herself dry, showing intense concern for her shirt. After that there were more questions. Impossible stuff like, what was my address? What did I do in my spare time, to relax? Of course, I could have fooled her. Her mind was so soft and malleable and its neutral oscillations were so obviously weak that even with my as then still limited command of the language I could have told her I was perfectly fine, and that it was none of her business, and could she please leave me alone. I had that it was none of her business, and could she please leave me alone. I had already worked out the rhythm and the optimal frequency I would have needed. But I didn't. Do not escape prematurely. Do not panic. There will be time. The truth is, I was quite terrified. My heart had begun racing for no obvious reason. My palms were sweating. Something about the room, and its proportions, coupled with so much contact with this irrational species, was setting me off. Everything here was a test. If you failed one test, there was a test to see why. I suppose they loved tests so much because they believed in free will. Ha! Humans, I was discovering, believed they were in control of their own lives, and so they were in awe of questions and tests, as these made them feel like they had a certain mastery over other people, who had failed in their choices, and who had not worked hard enough on the right answers. And by the end of the last failed test many were sat, as I was soon sat, in a mental hospital, swallowing a mind-blanking pill called diazepam, and placed in another empty room full of right angles. Only this time, I was also inhaling the distressing scent of the hydrogen chloride they used to annihilate bacteria. My task was going to be easy, I decided, in that room. The meat of it, I mean. And the reason it was going to be easy was that I had the same sense of indifference towards them as they had towards single-celled organisms. I could wipe a few of them out, no problem, and for a greater cause than hygiene. But what I didn't realise was that when it came to that sneaking, camouflaged, untouchable giant known as the Future, I was as vulnerable as anyone. Mad people Humans, as a rule, don't like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead. But the definition of mad, on Earth, seems to be very unclear and inconsistent. What is perfectly sane in one era turns out to be insane in another. The earliest humans walked around naked with no problem. Certain humans, in humid rainforests mainly, still do so. So, we must conclude that madness is sometimes a question of time, and sometimes of postcode. Basically, the key rule is, if you want to appear sane on Earth you have to be in the right place, wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, and only stepping on the right kind of grass. The cubic root of 912,673