Mim

For a brief time in the year 2350, I was engaged in a passionate affair with a novelist from the planet Mim by the name of Tejj K.

One night, lying in bed after making love, the zoom zoom of drones over Soho and the high chimes of the hookers' holo ads playing a contrapuntal bass and soprano to the tenor and alto of our post-coital panting, I was struck with a sudden fear. Shuffling onto my side, I met his chatoyant Mimmian eyes. "Would you ever lie to me?" I asked.

***

K was a singular being, in more ways than one. A novelist of rare talent and insight, his books were (at the time at least) read and admired by the literati of both the Inner and Outer worlds, his fame spreading as far as Re and Lum. He was also, by my reckoning, the only Mimmian in London, which for that great melting pot of a city, flocked to by beings from all across the Commonwealth, was quite something to be noted. Indeed, even today, the only contact most Inner Worlders have with Mimmians is through the pejorative phrase "as honest as a Mimmian," the implication being that all Mimmians are liars. The truth of the matter, as I learned from K, was far more complex, and in fact, on Mim itself, quite the opposite.

The people of Mim, despite being as cerebrally well developed as any other sentient species in the Commonwealth, display, nonetheless, one notable difference—an extreme hyperactivity in the part of their brains responsible for error detection. The intense cognitive dissonance that results when a Mimmian attempts to formulate a false thought, let alone a false statement, is so intense that it makes the act nigh on impossible.

"It's as if your brain is boiling," K told me when I asked how it felt for a Mimmian to lie. "For example," he said, running his fingers down my shoulder and smiling wryly, "if I were to even begin to consider that I found your body hideous, your scent repulsive, your voice grating, it would feel as though my brain were about to leak out of my ears!"

I laughed like a teenager, my breast and stomach suddenly aflutter. Our encounters, what had started as purely sexual, sweaty rendezvous in seedy love hotels, were now something that I yearned for even when my more primal urges had been satisfied.

A result of this neurological quirk, of course, is that Mimmian society is one of absolutely radical honesty. One can expect no false compliments, no false praise, though neither does one find the tedious drawing out of loveless relationships or the putting up with of incompetencies for the sake of politeness that so plagues the rest of the inhabited worlds. This lack of deception means that Mimmians, along with their radical honesty, have also developed a form of radical acceptance: On Mim, one can never harbour any delusions, as these are shattered as soon as one asks of another, "What do you think of my cooking?" "Am I prettier than her?" "Can I carry a tune?"

This inability to lie has naturally made Mimmians wholly and unconditionally trusting. Consequently, upon their entry into the Commonwealth—lest some power-hungry individual exploit this infallible credulity and set themselves up as a deity—the Interplanetary Authority instituted a law requiring all visitors to be fitted with a specialized cranial attachment—one that, by stimulating their own brain's error-detection region, would totally disable the wearer's capacity to utter falsehoods.

Most visitors to Mim, then, are solo travellers, as to visit with a partner or spouse inevitably results in all sorts of undesirable complications. (One might think that those about to marry would make a visit to Mim a priority before their wedding, proof that they have laid their souls bare before the one to whom they have pledged eternal love; however, it may come as no surprise that unfettered honesty is something desired by neither party, and such trips are seldom suggested.) In the case of one couple of my acquaintance, the female party, believing her husband to be having an affair, surprised him one evening with an anniversary trip to Mim, ostensibly to enjoy the fabulous aurora caused by Mim's volcanically active moon, Meo.

Once the devices had been fitted, however, the true purpose of her invitation was made clear, and what followed was an intense scrutiny under the glittering silver lights—the result of which was that, no, her husband had not been having an affair. However, upon subsequent interrogation by her husband, it was revealed that she herself was none so innocent, having once, in a drunken fit of passion, committed adultery with an Eshan gentleman she'd met while on a hen night in Tokyokohama. They returned home on separate starliners, and for the next several years spoke only through divorce lawyers.

When Mimmians travel off-world, they are, in turn, given the option of being fitted with a device of their own, one that suppresses the activity of their overactive cerebral area and allows them to tell untruths.

The ability is so novel to them that to meet a Mimmian off world is to invariably meet someone who is lying constantly, hence that somewhat incongruous saying, "as honest as a Mimmian." According to K, a Mimmian speaking his first lies is much like a fledgling attempting its first flight. "One begins with small things," he said. "Small, innocuous statements: this tea is cold; this table is made of wood," followed always by rapturous laughter as the enormity of the possibilities opens up before them, an entire medium of thought that was hitherto denied; the fledgling, having now flapped its wings, views anew the sky.

Unfortunately, this new ability is often so overwhelmingly novel that after only a few hours of being fitted with a device, a Mimmian is spinning falsehoods the size of megaliths at a frequency bordering on the sociopathic—an overindulgence that quickly becomes trying for anyone he might interact with. Mimmians when met off-world are, as a rule then, most often met with extreme hostility and mistrust, the assumption being that because he can lie, he will. (Of course, no such standard is placed on anyone not from Mim, whom we afford the basic assumption of honesty until proven otherwise.)

For K, however, the benefits, nay, necessity of having the ability to lie outweighed by far the prejudice and unpleasantness he experienced because of it. For without it, he could no longer write. On Mim, without the capacity for lies, no fiction is possible, and indeed, K's works are to this day banned on his own planet, the only work being allowed there being strictly documentary in nature.

I asked him, having lived with the ability to lie for so long, did he think he could ever go back to being otherwise?

"I tried, once, to write without the device," he said, shaking his head and fixing me with those chatoyant eyes, "and although what I wrote was absolutely truthful, I could find no truth in it."
I thought of the couple who had broken up due to their visit to Mim. Could they perhaps have been happy had they maintained the lie of their relationship? Even if it were a lie, could it have held a kind of beautiful truth?

I asked my acquaintance if he wished the truth of his wife's infidelity had never come to light. Yes, he said. When he thought how happy he had once been, how happy they had once been—for they had, you see, been happy, all told—he would have preferred that life, that happy illusion, than the miserable reality he now wallowed in. The truth was that he had loved his wife, but that truth could not stand up to the reality of her betrayal.

***

"Never," answered K, "I would never lie to you, my love."

And despite every ache and wish in my body, I believed him.

That night, I broke off our affair. I never saw K again.