Certain critics, including the noted Christian apologist Prof John Cleavis, claim to have found a degree of sympathy between Beech’s philosophy and my own, amounting to something like a unified dogma. In fact this perception could not be further from the truth. While I see the universe, and the life within it, as incidentally a part of the creator, abstracted and detached as a prelude to being shaped objectively by that deity’s conscious mind, Beech sees his deity as actively present in Life itself, engaged in a half-witted, animal struggle towards her own betterment. In my work I have endeavoured to show that Man, however noble in his own right, is ultimately all but irrelevant to the cosmical scheme, whereas Beech ignores the very likely possibility of life outside our solar system, and makes Man in his current incarnation, as the highest present achievement of the life-force, central to the whole plan of creation.
In this, Beech’s supposedly scientific faith duplicates that very anthropocentrism which has been a cardinal mistake of those older creeds which he intends for it to overthrow. More disastrously still, in seeing life and spirit as the ultimate good and their negation as the ultimate wrong, he recapitulates their moral dualism. I have struggled in my own thought with this very beguiling error; but I always return to the conclusion that our human categories of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are meaningless when applied to the deity: that our Creator combines in His nature both absolute good and what is in our terms absolute evil, and that our purpose as His creatures, whatever our feelings might be in the matter, is as much to suffer as to thrive.
‘Oh, to be sure,’ Beech said in answer to my objection, beaming. ‘Created by the Will of Life to be sure, but indirectly. Their mundane creators are rather closer to home. The Will shall always find a way to express herself, and in the present instance she has chosen to speak through the medium of human folly. These children represent Man’s tragic pride given form, for it is Man – the old, obsolete model – who inadvertently and foolishly has made them.’
His imparting of this news both astonished and unsettled me. Violet and the others received it with apparent calm, but I was sensitive to certain subtle clues of expression and posture which would have eluded one less familiar with the supernormals’ company. Beech’s declaration, whether it were truth or (as I could not help but suspect) a fiction devised in order to allow him to remain the centre of attention, was to them wholly new information.
Jelena, who seemed to have appointed herself as Beech’s guardian, gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘Out with it, please, Giddy,’ she said. ‘Stop being so mysterious, and tell us all you know.’
What it was that Gideon Beech knew, or claimed that he knew, I will now tell. Out of a basic consideration for my fellow-author I will try as best I may to represent the playwright’s words verbatim; out of respect for my readers, however, I shall strip away the greater portion of Beech’s tediously self-aggrandising commentary on his own part in affairs.
I must state now, though, that while his narrative made me profoundly uncomfortable, and while I felt extremely dubious about the philosophical gloss he placed upon it, I did not continue for long to doubt the specifics of his testimony.
The ‘Hampdenshire Programme’
‘The ways are legion,’ Beech said, ‘in which Life progresses and betters herself, and her resources are boundless. Sometimes, though, the methods which she uses are thought too slow by her impatient children.
‘You are not the first of your kind, naturally. Your friend Pedro has shown you that, and – well, modesty forbids. Life does as she pleases, and it has pleased her that sports such as yourselves should appear at intervals throughout mankind’s history. Socrates was such a one, as was Gautama. Even that dabbler Jesus of Nazareth may have been of a similar type to some degree. But you, my children, represent the first time in the evolutional experience when a whole crop (and such a fine crop it is, too) of Homo peculiar has sprung up at the same historic instant (and such a critical instant!)
‘You are all of you too young to remember the Great War which came before the last one, and which was meant to end all possibility of future war; except for Mr Clevedon, who perhaps like many among his generation remembers it too well. Millions of young men died in that conflict, torn to shreds by bombs, bullets or barbed wire; and many more returned to their homes convinced that killing a man was no very great thing, and that the problems of mankind might perhaps be solved by killing a great many men all in one go.
‘It was an evil time for those of us who serve the cause of Life, and who value the spiritual unity of mankind over and above the petty claims of our temporal and temporary nation-states.
‘Different kinds of men took away different lessons from that war. Those of us in all the nation-states who considered that our loyalties transcended whatever limited sense of place our tribal leaders might have tried to instil in us, made attempts to come together as citizens of the globe, and to co-operate towards ensuring that an atrocity such as the war could not easily occur again. Some of us felt that this could only be accomplished by establishing an international scientific elite, to guide the world’s less educated classes; others looked forward to a unification of the religions of mankind; while others still held out hopes for the revolution of the proletariat.
‘All of us understood that some form of comprehensive social planning, benevolent in its aims but ruthless when necessary in its execution, would be indispensable for the bringing-about of any such state of affairs. A few of us had the intellectual wherewithal to realise that such an ambitious end could be achieved by no less lofty a means than the remaking of human nature itself.
‘The men who were in charge of the nation-states, by contrast, had come to a very different set of conclusions. Their belief – for in this regard the beliefs of those at the apex of power in every civilised country, thus-called, were identical – was that, if such a war were ever to recur, their own tribe must at all costs be the one that should prevail. To this end, these men set about strengthening their nation-tribes. They did this surreptitiously, knowing that if such a project were to succeed, it must be done in secret, away from the gaze both of their own war-weary populations and of the spies of other nations.
‘Those programmes which they undertook revolved for the most part around acquiring new weapons, whether by discovery or invention. Naturally this required the aid of experts in all the applied sciences, the newest and most dynamic of these being the biological. The war itself had seen some hopeful innovations in the killing of men in large numbers by the application of the science of Life and, with a view to building upon such undoubted progress, the tribal governments each assembled, in deadly secret, the best of their biological experimenters.
‘There was a surprising and felicitous correspondence between the ambitions of the nation-states and those of the aspiring internationalists. For one of the plans dreamed up severally but identically by the leaders of every nation was that of breeding improved fighting-men: soldiers who would fight with all the strength, cunning and valour of the heroes and demi-gods of old, whether the local avatars taken by these paragons were called Artorius, Siegfried or Paul Bunyan.
‘There had indeed been some efforts in this direction both during the war and earlier, but they had not been successes, and their embarrassing products had usually been tidied neatly away out of sight. However, with the recent discovery of such sciences as that of eugenics, the authorities were hopeful that more satisfactory results might be obtained. To this end, the biologists were ordered to discover means of making supermen, although of course the tribal leaders thought that they were asking for super-Germans, super-Americans or super-Englishmen.
‘Naturally a good number of these biological experimenters were members of that fledgling international confederacy which the scientists of all the nations had been working to establish. Some of them were members also of that more rarefied association to which I had myself the honour of belonging, which perceived the
future hopes of mankind as lying wholly in the physical and mental betterment of the race.
‘The scheme to breed the super-Englishman was known as “The Hampdenshire Programme”, after one case of infantile prodigiousness so notorious as to have penetrated even the notoriously impregnable imagination of the mandarins of Whitehall. Many of the primary movers in this patriotic branch of the great global endeavour were known to me. I myself have not, alas, been taught biology formally, although my knowledge of the science is extensive. Even had I, however, I doubt that His Majesty’s Government would have been keen on entrusting the future of our nation’s fighting-men to one of my well-known radical sympathies. Nevertheless, on behalf of the more progressive of the international superhumanists, I acted as an extremely unofficial advisor to some of the individuals involved.
‘For the members of that loose global federation, the plan of campaign could not have been clearer. The biological experts of every nation, co-ordinated clandestinely by individuals such as myself, would work together in a secrecy so absolute that not even the spy-services of the individual nation-tribes would be able to observe it. The specimens whom they would generate would be just as their paymasters requested, stronger, more cunning and braver than the best of humanity: and it would be these very qualities which would prevent them from falling under the spell of any lesser cause than that of Life herself.
‘Thus they would become a single race of supermen: for surely a solitary superman, in the service of a single nation-state, fighting for one tribe’s way of life against that of another, was an unthinkable absurdity.
‘It sometimes happened that, for what were considered to be ethical reasons (for unhappily some of the subjects died or were permanently mutilated during the course of the experiments), particular operations were confined to isolated groups of natives in the colonies. Often, though, the subjects of the Hampdenshire experiments were British residents living in out-of-the-way places, who remained quite unaware of the higher plan in which they were participating. As I have said, the internationalists were obliged to be ruthless, and of course the rulers of the English nation-tribe did not have very many moral qualms about harming some of its members in order to make others function better.
‘By the criteria of all the interested parties, however, the experiments were a dismal failure. Beyond a slight increase in muscle capacity which might have been down to exercise, and a minor advance in understanding which could easily have been achieved by attending evening classes, the young men and women experimented upon remained resolutely normal. By the late 1920s, not only the Hampdenshire Programme, but as I learned from my international contacts its sister projects in almost all the tribal nations, had been dismantled by those nations’ governments.
‘There, so we all believed, the matter rested: until, that is, our specimens began to breed.
‘I see from your expressions that I am anticipated. Well, so be it. Each one of you (saving your presences, Clevedon, Miss Blandish) has one parent, or in rare cases two, who had been an experimental subject in the Hampdenshire Programme, or in one of the other identical projects which took place elsewhere.
‘In a prosaic sense, you are the children of the Programme, and the creatures of the governments of mankind. The Great War showed us all that man’s capacity to act as the guardian of this planet was tragically limited. You are the nation-tribes’ fumbling and inept response to this revelation. And yet, through you, the Will of Life has chosen to speak far more eloquently. You represent the highest type to which that Will has yet aspired; and you will supersede humanity as readily as man the mastodon.
‘The last two wars have seen the tribal states of Homo sapiens exterminating one another in unprecedented numbers. The next war will, I am certain, take that process to its natural conclusion: the final extinction, at your own infinitely versatile hands, of Homo sapiens himself.
‘The leaders of the tribes know this, of course. They have been shocked to see their citizens give birth to gifted little monsters, and they have watched in horror as those monsters have grown into the supermen those leaders once thought themselves in need of, and whom now they fear above all else.
‘These soldiers they have sent to harry you, my children, and your brethren elsewhere, are the arms and hands of the nation-tribes, making their last feeble effort to fight away the merciful surcease which you offer them. You must knock aside these failing limbs of theirs, not without compassion, and push the lethal needle home into their moribund flesh.
‘Only then will your decrepit old parent, Homo sapiens, have that rest from his labours which he has so faithfully earned.’
An American In Futurity
Impressions Of The Future
Honoré Lechasseur’s memories of his sojourn in futurity are nebulous and partial, even now. He was dazed by his arduous journey through the ages, his mind inchoate and fragmented, and he had great difficulty in translating the images and sensations which he received into impressions which he was capable of understanding. In all likelihood, any man of our century, whatever his origins, would have experienced similar difficulties in adapting to that strange and distant epoch. There was too little commonality, too little which was shared, between the two worlds.
The reader may recall Mr HG Wells’ time-traveller, and his frustration at his own failure to comprehend the future in which he found himself:
Conceive the tale of London which a Negro, fresh from Central Africa, would take back to his tribe! What would he know of railway companies, of social movements, of telephone and telegraph wires, of the Parcels Delivery Company, and postal orders and the like?
Lechasseur was a Negro of the modern age, a native not of the African jungle but of a proud city of a highly developed nation. He had been already a passing visitor to other times both past and future, though rarely to any epoch greater than a century from our present. In this regard, he was indeed rather better prepared to interpret the phenomena of this remote futurity than you or I had been, or Mr Wells. Faced with the reality of it, however, his apprehension was quite as helpless as, I am nearly certain, would have been each of ours.
He believes that the time during which he remained there might have been counted in days, not in hours or weeks; but in that place the stars neither rose nor set, and the sky remained veiled in that obsidian twilight. As his body became accustomed to that world’s crushing gravity, he found that he was able, first to stand and then to walk or at least shamble, although the process was an arduous one and he required frequent rest. His time-sensitive faculty was still deaf and blind, and he wondered if it had burnt itself out altogether.
There was no trace that he could see of Percival, nor of the pine-hued giant who had, so Lechasseur assumed, led the young man away. The plain on which he found himself continued for as far as he could spy in all directions, flat and spiked with the unwelcoming blades of ‘grass’. The purple-black cliff which he had observed turned out to be the nearest side of a vast tapering tower, one of several which dotted the plain irregularly, the nature and purpose of which entirely eluded him. Sometimes he thought that these must be dwellings, at other times geological formations, or animal constructions like a termite mound. Their texture appeared something between chalk and candle-wax, and he even entertained the thought that they might be colossal plant growths. They were abuzz with swarms of birds, or perhaps large insects, depending on the structures’ size.
All over the ground low cairns of earth and stones were scattered, towards a horizon which, he says, ‘somehow seemed like it was too flat.’ There were no trees, but instead stands of shrubs, coloured much like the grass, their leaves so closely-packed as to resemble a cauliflower. Lechasseur was famished, and he tried breaking off a part of one of these to eat. It was revolting, but he crammed it down.
Awkwardly, he stumbled across that unforgiving ground in the direction of the nearest of the giant edifices. He was in a feverish daze, and it
dawned on him only gradually that he had been walking already for the best part of an hour. The construction, or creature, or whatever it might be, was scarcely larger than it had appeared from the place where he and Percival had made their landfall. The skies were cloudless, and without a background to the object Lechasseur had dramatically misjudged its scale: the outcrop was as big as or bigger than the Earth’s highest mountains. The myriad specks that played about it must be gigantic flying things, the size of men or larger.
At this point there is a hiatus in his recollection of events.
The next experience that he is able clearly to remember is this: he was sitting in an area ringed with cairns, which was occupied by a small party of the otherworldly human beings. These were going about some incomprehensible business of their own, and ignoring Lechasseur’s presence altogether. They had some items with them of around the size of wardrobes, which might have been plants or artefacts, or possibly the bony shells of living creatures. Each of these was somehow emitting coldness, as if it were an oven radiating heat. Lechasseur, who found the climate of this world oppressive (it was, perhaps, not greatly warmer than his native New Orleans, but after his years in London it came as a shock to his system), gratefully crouched down next to one of these and basked in its chill.
After a while, one of the human creatures took from a nearby cairn some chalky hemispheres, about the size of Lechasseur’s two clenched fists. This man (if he was indeed a man, for as I will explain Lechasseur entertained some doubts as to his sex), opened up a tap or orifice in one of the cold objects, and filled these bowls in turn with the viscous, milky fluid which was thence secreted. (Lechasseur noticed that the individual used his anemonoid appendage to manipulate the delicate mechanism, and his more humanlike left hand to hold the grosser hemispheres: this, he would later discover, marked the general distinction in usage between the two organs.) The man then handed round the bowls to his fellows: indifferently and without any other acknowledgement of the black man’s presence, he included Lechasseur in his rounds. The American said, ‘Thanks – thank you very much,’ but the company ignored him altogether. They were, between themselves, quite silent, either in no need of conversation, or carrying out their communication by ethereal means quite inaccessible to their guest.
Peculiar Lives Page 7
