The feeding of a stranger, which would have been instantly recognisable as a gesture of hospitality had it taken place at the hands of a previously undiscovered tribe in Borneo or Guinea, in this instance reminded Lechasseur of nothing so much as the putting down of food for a stray animal toward which one felt a humane duty, but which one hoped would not disrupt one’s household by staying for too long. He felt intense gratitude nonetheless, for his body had rejected the piece of bush which he had eaten. He gulped hungrily at the draught.
His indifferent hosts were between eight and ten in number. In the stocky humanness of their shape they were broadly consistent, and most, though not all, possessed one of the specialised manipulating organs; otherwise, though, they were very diverse in appearance. Either the features which Lechasseur had previously observed were not universal to this race, or else this world’s inhabitants were of many different species.
In height the party ranged from seven feet to ten or twelve, though whether its smaller members might be children or colossal pygmies, he could not say. Their facial features were extremely heterogeneous, although they were in similar degrees human and bestial, with an abstraction in their expressions which reminded Lechasseur of the funerary angels which ornament the cemeteries of his home city. Most had more than two eyes, the arrangements and dispositions of which varied. Most, too, had ears and noses which seemed more like those of animals than of men, although the creatures which they recalled to his mind were as dissimilar as horses, bats and sea-lions. Their skin tones and textures were similarly divergent, no two alike: some of the group were bald, others velvety or shaggy; some sported vestigial scales, or were wrinkled like tree-bark; and the hues of their skin ranged from chryselephantine to a marbled blueish-black quite unlike Lechasseur’s own complexion.
In sexual characteristics, too, they seemed wildly assorted, more so than might be explained by our familiar Earthly sexes. All of them had frames which seemed in general delineation clearly male or female; yet some of the apparent men had breasts like those of women, and some of the apparent women lacked them. While every one of them was naked, none had visible sex organs. (Lechasseur would discover later that, while these existed, and in multiple forms, they were stored inside the pudendal cleft when not in use, becoming apparent only when engorged.) He somehow gained the impression that these variations represented those of many sub-sexes, and that the simple ‘he’s and ‘she’s which the English language bestows upon her subjects would suffice to convey but the crudest impression of these people’s sexualities.
All of this Lechasseur pondered as he drank his milky broth. The liquid was both creamy and salty, and very rich: and despite his appetite, he found that he was able to finish barely half of the meal. It soon became apparent also that it possessed a strong intoxicating element. He shortly became very sleepy, and despite his fears as to the intentions these men and women of the future might have for him, he found himself entirely unable to remain awake. When he came to himself, minutes or hours later, the people were gone, along with all their equipment.
Lechasseur’s remembrance of what, insofar as he could measure time at all, he judges to have been the next few days, is a confusion of unrelated impressions and incidents.
He remembers examining an artefact, large as a house and shaped like a conch-shell, but with a satiny surface which would quiver disquietingly when touched. He heard what sounded like voices coming from deep within, although he knew that the people he had seen had not spoken aloud amongst themselves. He was unable to find any means of ingress, and his pocket-knife could make no impression upon the resilient flesh.
At one point he came upon a group of men and women who had taken root in the soil of that treeless plain, and whose heads had sprouted profusions of leaf-like blades which they angled towards the brightest of the pale stars. They seemed deeply asleep, their many eyes so sunken into their skin-bark as to resemble the knots of a tree-trunk. Lechasseur felt that they were enrapt in serene contemplation: indeed, he gained from them a sense of placidity so overwhelming that he fell onto his knees, longing to sink his own fingers and toes into that loam, and to soak its moisture up into himself.
He spent some time within that grove of tree-men in a reverie, resting at last from his recent exertions. Soon, though, he found himself unnerved by their tranquillity, into which he felt himself drawn ever deeper. He sensed that, through the influence of the tree-men, he was approaching an absorption of his soul into a thing vaster than itself, the placid vegetative consciousness of the plants; and through them perhaps something more, a union with the cosmic source of life itself. In terror, he tore himself from the ground (where he had not, indeed, taken root, but which he found more difficulty in leaving than might be accounted for by the heavy gravity alone) and took flight, stumbling in headlong panic from that place.
Eventually there came the incident which returned to Lechasseur the strength with which to gather the scattered embers of his mind, and stoke them into flame. He was resting in the lee of a kind of megalithic stone, although the chalky surface was ambiguously bone-like in texture. He was becalmed in those sweltering doldrums of half-waking consciousness which had over the past days become his habitual mental state, and he did not register the purposeful approach of some heavy footsteps, until a deep, familiar voice spoke his name. Scrambling to his feet, Lechasseur turned to see the giant man, green-skinned and woman-breasted with a crown of blinking eyes, whom he had met on his arrival.
The Negro’s first, wild instinct was to flee. This creature terrified him, not because it was alien to him, but because it was more fully human than any human being he had known. The fear which Lechasseur experienced was at once instinctive and profound: it was the trepidation of an unwieldy island animal, long established in its comfortable habitat, beholding for the first time the predator introduced by mankind to its isolated paradise. It was the lower organism’s fear of the higher, the weaker for the stronger. Just so must the Neanderthal man have felt, when the first warriors of the Cro-Magnon tribes strode onto his land and raised their spears in territorial challenge.
‘Honoré,’ the man said again, and held out his five-fingered hand.
I have stated that Lechasseur was an exceptional specimen, and so he proved now. Not only was he able to subsume that very fear which had threatened to master him, but he was capable of examining it coolly enough to recognise its biological origins. Still more impressively, he realised at once that there could be one course alone which might allow for his survival in this world, surrounded by these proud supplanters of his own kin. It was the same strategy as had been employed millennia before by the ancestors of the dogs and cats, in adapting to the ever-broadening encroachments of humankind.
Obediently, he took the giant’s hand. The green man turned his gaze upon the standing stone, and with a sound like shredding silk it split asunder, to reveal a bony funnel leading darkly downward. Together, he and Lechasseur stepped into the inside of the world.
The Story Of Sanfeil
I suppose that I must now address an issue which, during the foregoing, will have impressed itself forcefully upon those of you who are familiar with my previous writings. For this future which I have been depicting, the future which was described to me by Lechasseur, shares many of its most singular ingredients (the gravity; the towers; the heterogeneity and the paradoxically statuesque frames of its predicted humanity) with that outlined in certain of my novels, where it is supposed to be perceived in his mystical visions by my fictitious narrator.
I am sure that some impatient minds among you have already ascribed this to a final cataclysmic failure of imagination on my part. Others, willing to accept The Peculiar (a tale set in the present and describing mostly familiar characters and situations) as having had a basis in reality, are doubtless aggrieved to find yourselves the victims of an obvious hoax, now that I have revealed my altogether more incredible contention that my fantasies of fut
ure history, with all their weird and outlandish detail, have similar grounds in veracity.
In fact, as I shall shortly explain, the reason that my reflections of this distant future have turned out to be so improbably accurate is because they were vouchsafed to me, unconsciously as far as I myself was concerned, by a source familiar at first hand with that very future. Although I myself have been convinced that my Coming Men were a fiction, quite as certainly as I knew Percival and his friends to be a reality, nevertheless in making such a distinction I was altogether mistaken.
The name of Lechasseur’s new companion, as nearly as it can be rendered by our vocal apparatus, was Sanfeil, and he was a student of his people’s very distant past. He had scrutinised the dark years of our long-expired century for a span equivalent to many of our generations. It was, however, but one subdivision of his proper field of study, which was the whole history of the genus Homo.
He had been alive for tens of millennia, and in his time he had been such as we might ignorantly call philosopher, scientist and priest. He had five wives, most of whom he saw only a few times in a decade, and one of whom had suckled at his breast when an infant. He had taken many shapes: had spent some hundred years as a flying man, soaring across the skies of that world, and beyond, into the abyss between the planets; had taken his turn, when a callow and idealistic youth of a scant few centuries, among the tree-men as they contemplated the mysteries of the stars; had swum with fish-men in the nutritious oceans of that world, and crept with worm-men deep beneath its soil.
He used his own life-energy as you or I would use a tool, bending it to his will as effortlessly as we might switch on or off an electric light. By use of it he could reshape his body or his environment, and through it he had brought his innately rebellious spirit into harmony with his fellow men and with the group-mind of his world. In spirit he had embarked on lengthy journeys into space, consorted across its immense distances with alien humanities, and addressed as his equals the proud and fiery spirits of the stars. He worshipped, as did all his people, the Creator of the Universe, whom they envisaged as an artist, working with the limitlessly graduated shades of good and evil for His palette, and as a scientist, dispassionately refining His creation through generation after generation of experiments.
He was but one, and not among the most distinguished, of a race of men some hundred thousand million of whom populated that great globe as sparsely as oases in a desert.
All this Sanfeil conveyed to Lechasseur as they walked together through that chalky tunnel, towards what destination the American could not guess, although the other gave him to understand that he had come particularly in order to fetch the Negro thither.
Although Lechasseur is insistent that Sanfeil spoke aloud when he first said Lechasseur’s name, as he had earlier addressed Percival, he maintains that the majority of this conversation took place without the necessity of speech. While Sanfeil could certainly make himself understood perfectly in our country’s and century’s vernacular (he would do so later), he was also able to imprint ideas directly onto the other man’s mind. Some of these ideas took the form of words. Sometimes Sanfeil’s thoughts appeared to him as images, or as experiences interpolated between his own memories. The Negro found himself, as he said later, ‘drowning in his mind. He was pouring so much of himself into my head, it was as if what there was of me in there was being flooded out.’
Speaking to Sanfeil in his soft accented English, Lechasseur attempted to deflect this torrent of information, diverting its flow with questions of his own. Sanfeil was patient enough, although Lechasseur formed the impression that it took much effort for him to respond within a range of thinking which the American might understand. Lechasseur asked about the history of that world, and what its connection was with that of his own sphere: hoping, though without any great degree of confidence, that his surmise that they were in the remote future would turn out to have been mistaken.
Sanfeil answered, certainly, but whether by design or no the details of the stories he told – of mankind making for himself new tyrannies, new soviets and sodalities; of man’s manifold reinventions of his species, of his growth and evolution; of the eventual destruction of the planet of his birth, and his migration to that artificial globe, constructed from the raw material of the solar system’s outer worlds, on which he had at last perfected a utopia of total unity, and on whose leaden surface Lechasseur now stood – would vanish from the black man’s recollection the instant the latter returned to his native time, leaving him with but the image of an ancient tapestry, all save the vividest of its rich colours long since faded to a dim and dusty grey.
Sanfeil told him other things, however, and these Lechasseur was able to retain. The giant explained the techniques used by his kind to mine the past for information, the chief of which was to observe events directly, through the minds of those who had experienced them. Historians like himself used the long-vanished consciousnesses of others as windows upon their sundered worlds and times. Sanfeil informed Lechasseur that I was myself one of his favourite subjects, and that he had already monitored my life from birth to death, experiencing through me the quality of life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of the Christian era. It was, as Lechasseur and Percival before him had surmised, Sanfeil’s time-line which the two of them had perceived underlying my own, on that June night long aeons previously, and by which they had been towed into his far-flung present.
A portion of Sanfeil’s consciousness, as he now explained to Lechasseur, resided inside my person even while the two of them conversed. As they traversed those subterranean tunnels, a shoot or scion of Sanfeil’s mind was still beholding through my self the events of those June days of 1950: my flight with Violet and Emily, my arrival at the Retreat and my introductions to Mary and Freia; my encounter with Gideon Beech and his story of the Hampdenshire Programme.
Through me, long since, Sanfeil had observed Percival’s adolescence; and through me he had done his best to foster the young man’s exceptional potential, somewhat superior as it might be considered to that of those dull man-apes, myself included, who surrounded him. For in history Sanfeil was no mere impotent observer. He might, even at such a remove in time and space, exert an influence upon my thoughts and actions. He had spent his time not solely in detached study, but also in industriously working beneath the threshold of my own awareness, to effect such results as he and his fellows considered desirable. These aims included (so, at least, I must conclude) the writing of my novels The Coming Times and Men of the Times.
In producing these books of mine (as in certain other actions of my life including, I can only assume, committing this final tale to paper now), I have been obeying the impenetrable will of a being who, though he shall be our inaccessibly remote descendant, will have motives and goals of his own: motives quite at odds with those which we now honour, and goals opposed to those which we hold sacred.
I fear that I do not find this a thought by which I may be greatly comforted.
Sanfeil And Percival
It is for these reasons that I consider myself justified in employing my knowledge of that epoch, remote and mediated though it is, in presenting to my contemporaries the intimate experience of it which Honoré Lechasseur has recounted to me. In doing this I am aware of a substantial risk that I will end up misinterpreting my Negro friend’s testimony.
Although the future which I have described in my novels (but for which it appears that I may no longer take the least imaginative credit) is as consistent and comprehensible a world as the domain presented in a fiction must perforce be, I believe that my far-future observer and controller will have had no choice but to simplify his understanding of that world, in order to render it consistent with our limited habits of twentieth-century, Homo sapiens thought. It may well be that every word I have written in The Coming Times and Men of the Times is, literally, false: however, I can only assume that these words in their
totality must give, not indeed an accurate description of that future, but rather a faithful impression of it.
Faced with these alternatives, of remaining true on the one hand to the mystified perplexity which characterises Lechasseur’s own account, or on the other of imparting the remainder of his experiences as if they had taken place within that child’s painting of the future which is as much as our under-developed minds have been considered ready for, I have opted, not without reservations, for the latter course.
The artefact which Lechasseur and his guide had entered was the outlying root-system of one of those massive structures which protrude above the plains in that epoch like the ribs of the world. These colossal buildings of the Coming Men are grown from super-strengthened materials which are indeed of distantly animal, even human, origin, but which have had such liberties taken with their germ-plasm that they retain few recognisable characteristics of our Earthly fauna. After a long period of walking under the ground, the two men arrived at a region where the bony substance of the channel gave way to fibrous walls of more resilient material.
Throughout their journey, the physical relationship between the two of them had impressed uncomfortably upon Lechasseur a comparison with the ratio of sizes we observe between a parent and her child; although Sanfeil could only have been an immensely distant progeny of the American’s contemporaries, and not even his own descendant, Lechasseur himself being childless. He found that being led by the hand by the giant aroused in him certain deep childhood associations, so that his natural terror coexisted most unsettlingly with a strange feeling of comfort.
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