by John Wyndham
‘I don’t know. One doesn’t think of the salany arithmetically – though there is the perimetrical approach.’
I let her have best over that.
‘Surely there are records?’ I said.
‘Oh, yes. That is how Hymorell and I learned your language. But there are very big gaps. Fives times at least the race all but destroyed itself. There are thousands of years missing from the records at different salany.’
‘And how long is it going to be before it is all finished?’ I asked.
‘We don’t know that, either. Our task is to prolong it because there is always chance. It may happen that the intelligence factors will become strong again.’
‘How do you mean, “prolong it”? Prolong your own lives?’
‘Yes, we transfer. When a body begins to fail, or when it is fifty years old or so, and getting past its best, we choose one of the feeble-minded, and transfer to that. This,’ she added, holding up her perfect hand, and studying it, ‘is my fourteenth body. It’s a very nice one.’
I agreed. ‘But do you mean you can go on and on transferring?’ I asked.
‘Oh, yes – as long as there are bodies to transfer to.’
‘But – but that’s immortality.’
‘No,’ she said, scornfully, ‘nothing like it. It is just prolongation. Some day, sooner or later, there’ll be an accident – that’s mathematically inevitable. It might have been a hundred years ago, or it might be tomorrow –’
‘Or a thousand years hence?’ I suggested.
‘Exactly, but one day it will come.’
‘Oh,’ I said. That seemed pretty near immortality to me.
I did not for a moment doubt that she was telling me the truth. By this time I was prepared for any fantastic thing. All the same, I revolted against it. I had an instinctive sense of disapproval – prejudice, of course, the same prejudice which made me disapprove of the soft, flowing garments and the soft, easy manner of life: there is a hangover of the old Puritan censor in all of us. I couldn’t help feeling that the process she spoke of was allied to cannibalism – in some symbolic fashion. She must have read my expression, for she said, explaining, not excusing:
‘This body wasn’t any good to the girl who had it. I don’t suppose she was really even conscious of it. It was being wasted. I shall look after it. I shall have children. Some of them may be normal human children, then when they grow old they will be able to transfer. The urge to survival still exists, you see – something may happen, someone may make a discovery to save us even now.’
‘And the girl who had this body? What happened to her?’
‘Well, there wasn’t very much there beyond a few instincts. What there was changed places with me.’
‘Into a body aged fifty? – Losing thirty years of life?’
‘Can you call it loss when she was incapable of using it?’
I did not reply to that, for a thought had struck me like a sudden illumination.
‘So that’s what Hymorell was working on! He was trying to extend this transference – to operate it at, well, long range. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s why I’m here?’
She looked at me steadily.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s been successful at last. It is a real transference this time.’
I thought it over. I was strangely unsurprised. I suppose I had been working up to the realization before it actually came. But there was a lot I wanted to know about the why and how as it affected me. I asked her for more details.
‘Hymorell wanted to get as far as possible,’ she told me. ‘The limit was the point where he could be sure of assembling the parts to make an instrument that would get him back here. If he went too far, certain essential metals would not be known, instruments would be inaccurate, electric power unavailable. In that case it might take him years to build the instrument, if he could do it at all. The knowledge of nuclear fission was the line he decided to draw. Further away than that, he thought, might be dangerous. Then he had to find a contact. It had to be a subject where the integration was not good – where there was a lesion weakening the attachment of the personality to the physical shape. When we perform the operation we can prepare the subject, so it is easy, but he had to find one already in a suitable state. Unfortunately, those he could find were nearly all on the point of death, but he found you at last, and then he had to study the strength of your tie. He was puzzled because it fluctuated a great deal.’
‘That would be the dope?’ I suggested.
‘Possibly. Anyway, he worked out a rhythmic incidence of lesion, and then tried. This is the result.’
‘I see,’ I said, and thought awhile. ‘How long did he reckon it was going to take him to build the instrument for his return?’
‘He couldn’t tell that. It depends on his facilities for assembling materials.’
‘Then it’s going to take him quite a while, I’d say. A legless cripple wasn’t a convenient subject to choose, from that point of view.’
‘But he’ll do it,’ she said.
‘Not if I can help it,’ I told her.
She shook her head. ‘Once you have transferred you never can have the perfect integration you had with your own original body. If at no other time, he will put on more power and get at you when you’re sleeping.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ I said.
Afterwards I saw the instrument that he had used for the transfer. It was not large. In appearance it was little more than a liquid-filled lens mounted upon a box the size of a portable typewriter from which there protruded two polished, metal handles. But within the box there was such an intricacy of wiring, tubes, and strange whizzits as to fill me with great satisfaction. No one, I reckoned, was going to knock a thing like that together in a few days, or even a few weeks.
The days drifted the life by with them. That placidity which was their chief characteristic was, at first, restful; after that there came periods when I wanted to go wild and break up something just for the diversion. Clytassamine took me here and there in the great green building. There were concerts at which I understood not a thing. I sat there, bored and musing to myself, while around me the audience went into an intellectual trance, finding something in the strange scales and queerer harmonies that was utterly beyond my perception. And there was one hall where colours played on a large fluorescent screen. They seemed to be projected from the spectators themselves in some incomprehensible way. Everybody but me enjoyed it, you could feel that, and now and then, for no reason that I could perceive, they would all sigh or laugh together. Nevertheless, I thought some of the effects very pretty, and said so; by the way it was received it was the wrong thing to say. Only in the performances of three-dimensionally projected plays was I occasionally able to follow the action for a while, and when I thought I could, it usually shook me badly. Clytassamine became short with my comments. ‘How can you expect to feel when you measure civilized behaviour by primitive taboos?’ she asked curtly.
She took me to a museum. It was not like any I had thought of, being mostly a collection of instruments projecting sound or images, or both, according to selection. I saw some horrible things. We went back, back, and still further back. I wanted to see or hear something of my own time, but: ‘There’s only sound,’ she said. ‘No images from so far away.’ ‘All right,’ I told her. ‘Some music.’ She worked at the keyboard of the machine. Into that great hall a familiar sound stole softly and mournfully. As I listened to it I had a sense of emptiness and vast desolation. Memories flooded back as if the old world – not, oddly enough, that which I had left, but that in which I was a child – were suddenly round me. A wave of sentimentality, of overwhelming self-pity and nostalgia, for all the hopes and joys and childhood that had vanished, utterly engulfed me, and the tears streamed down my face. I did not go to that museum again. And the music which conjured a whole world up from the aged dust? – No, it was not a Beethoven symphony, nor a Mozart concerto: it was, I confess, ‘The Old Folks at Ho
me’ …
‘Do you never work? Does nobody work?’ I asked Clytassamine.
‘Oh, yes – if he wants to,’ she said.
‘But what about the unpleasant things – the things that must be done?’
‘What things?’ she asked, puzzled.
‘Well, growing food, providing power, disposing of waste, all that kind of thing.’
She looked surprised.
‘Why, naturally, the machines do all that. You wouldn’t expect men to do those things. Good heavens, what have we got brains for?’
‘But who looks after the machines – keeps them in order?’
Themselves, of course. A mechanism that couldn’t maintain itself wouldn’t be a machine, it would be just a form of tool, wouldn’t it?’
‘Oh,’ I said. And I suppose that was so, though the thought was new to me.
‘Do you mean to say,’ I went on, ‘that for your fourteen generations – some four hundred years or so – you’ve done nothing but this?’
‘Well, I’ve had quite a lot of babies – and three of them were quite normal. And I’ve worked on eugenic research from time to time – almost everybody does that when he thinks he’s got a new lead, but it never does lead anywhere.’
‘But how can you stand it – just going on and on?’
‘It is not easy sometimes – and some of us do give up, but that is a crime, because there is always chance. And it’s not quite so monotonous as you think. Each transfer makes a difference. You feel as if the world had become a different place then. The spirit rises in you like sap in spring … And those glands you think so much of are not entirely without effect, because you are never quite the same person with quite the same tastes. Even in one body tastes can change quite a lot in one lifetime, and they inevitably differ slightly between bodies. But you are the same person, you have your memory, yet you are young again, you’re hopeful, the world looks brighter, you think you’ll be wiser this time … And then you fall in love again, just as sweetly and foolishly as before. It’s wonderful – like a re-birth. You can only know just how wonderful if you have been fifty, and then become twenty.’
‘I can guess,’ I said. ‘I was something worse than fifty before this happened. But love! … For four years I haven’t dared to think of love …’
‘You dare now,’ she said. ‘Daren’t you … ?’
There was so much I wanted to know.
‘What happened to my world?’ I asked her. ‘It seemed pretty well headed for disaster, as I saw it. I suppose it nearly wiped itself out in some vast global war?’
‘Oh dear, no. It just died – the same way as all the early civilizations. Nothing spectacular.’
I thought of my world, its intricacies and complexities. The mastery of distance and speed; the progress of science.
‘ “Just died”!’ I repeated. ‘That’s not good enough. It can’t have “just died” like that. There must have been something that broke it up.’
‘Oh, no. It died of Government – paternalism. The passion for order is a manifestation of the deep desire for security. The desire is natural – but the attainment is fatal. There was the means to produce a static world, and a static world was achieved. When the need for a new adaptation arose it found itself enmeshed in order. Unable to adapt, it inertly died of discouragement – it had happened to many primitive peoples before.’
She had no reason to lie, but it was hard to believe.
‘We hoped for so much. Everything was opening before us. We were learning. We were going to reach out to other planets and beyond …’ I said.
‘Ingenious you certainly were – like monkeys. But you neglected your philosophers – to your own ruin. Each new discovery was a toy. You never considered its true worth. You just pushed it into your system – a system already suffering from hardening of the arteries. And you were a greedy people. You took each discovery as if it were a bright new garment, but when you put it on you wore it over your old, verminous rags. You had grave need of disinfectants.’
‘That’s rather hard on us – and sweeping. We had very complex problems.’
‘Mostly concerned with preservation of forms and habits. It never seems to have occurred to you that in Nature life is growth, and preservation is an accident … What is preserved in the rocks or in ice is only the image of life, but you were always regarding local taboos as eternal verities, and attempting to preserve them.’
My mind switched suddenly to my present situation.
‘But suppose I were to go back and tell them what is going to happen. It would alter things. Doesn’t that show I’m not going back?’ I said.
She smiled. ‘You think they would listen to you while they neglect philosophers, Terry?’
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘it doesn’t arise. I don’t intend to go back. I don’t like your world. I think it is decadent, and in many ways immoral, but at least I am a whole human being here.’
She smiled again. ‘So young, Terry. So sure of right and wrong. It’s rather sweet.’
‘It’s not sweet at all,’ I said brusquely. ‘There have to be standards – without standards where are you?’
‘Well, where are you? Where’s a tree, or a flower, or a butterfly?’
‘We’re more than plants or animals.’
‘But not godlike in our judgements. What do you do about opposing standards? – Go gloriously to war?’
I dropped that.
‘Did we get to other planets?’ I asked.
‘No, but the next civilization did. They found Mars too old for us, and Venus too young. You had a dream of men spreading out over the universe; I’m afraid that never happened, though it was tried again later. They bred men specially for it as they bred them for all kinds of things. In fact they produced some very strange men and women, highly specialized. They were even more zealous for order than your people – they would not admit chance, which is a great foolishness. When their end came it was disastrous … None of the specialized types could survive. The population dwindled down to a few hundred thousand who had enough adaptability left to start over again.’
‘So you have come to distrust order – and standards?’
‘We have ceased to think of society as a structural engineering problem, or of individuals as components for assembly into some arbitrary pattern.’
‘And you just sit and wait supinely for the end?’
‘Oh dear, no. We preserve ourselves as materials for chance to work on. Life was an accident in the beginning, survival has often been an accident. Perhaps there’ll be no more accidents – on the other hand, there may be.’
‘That sounds very near defeatism.’
‘In the end, defeat, and the cold, must come. First to the system, then the galaxy, then the universe, and the rest will be silence. Not to admit that is a foolish vanity.’ She paused. ‘Yet one grows flowers because they are lovely – not because one wishes them to live for ever.’
I did not like that world. It was foreign in its very thought-streams. The strain to understand was constant and wearisome – it was also unprofitable. All the comfort and ease I had there were centred in Clytassamine. For her I pulled down the barriers I had so bitterly erected around myself in the last few years, and I fell the more deeply in love on account of them.
Thus there was a second reason not to let things happen tamely as Hymorell had envisaged. Even Clytassamine could not make the place heaven, but I had got out of hell, and intended to stay out. It was on account of that that I spent unnumbered hours poring over the transference machine, learning all I could of it. My progress was slow, but some idea of the way it operated did begin at last to come to me.
But I could not settle. The feeling of transience would not leave me, and the days began to pass in long nagging uncertainty. There was no way of telling whether Hymorell would be successful in getting all the parts he needed. I had a haunting, mind’s eye picture of him in my wheel-chair working away all the time on the contrivance which would conde
mn me to suffering in that broken body again. As the weeks went by the strain began to affect me, and I grew nervy. I began to reach the point where I was afraid to go to sleep lest the next time I woke I should find myself back in that chair.
Clytassamine, too, began to look worried. I wished I could be quite sure what she was worried about. Her emotions must have been confused. She undoubtedly had some affection for me – with a slightly maternal flavour to it, and an air of responsibility. Her genuine sympathy over my distress at the idea of going back was cut across by her feeling for Hymorell who must now be suffering what I had. There was also the point that my mental strain wasn’t doing my temporary mortal tenement any good, either.
And then, when six uneventful months had begun to give me hope, it happened. It did so without sign or warning. I went to sleep in the room of the great green building: I woke back home – with a raging pain in my missing leg.
All was just as it had been – so much so that I reached right away for the dope bottle.
When I grew calmer I found that there was something there which had not been before. It was on the table beside me, looking like a radio-set partially assembled. I certainly had not built it. But for that, the whole thing might have been a dream.
I leaned back in my chair, considering that mass of wiring very carefully. Then I started to examine it closely, touching nothing. It was, of course, crude in construction compared with the transference machine I had studied in the place that Clytassamine had called Cathalu, but I began to see similarities and noticed adaptations. I was still looking at it when I fell asleep. By the hours I slept I reckoned that Hymorell must have been driving my body at considerable pressure.
When I awoke, I began to think hard. My spell of soundness and health had left me with one firm decision – I would not remain as I was now. There were two ways out. The first had always been there for the taking – and still was. But now, there was the transference instrument. I did not understand a lot about it. I doubted whether I could succesfully re-tune it if I tried – and I did not wish to try. For one thing, little as I liked that other world, Clytassamine would be there to help me; for another, what I had learned made me think that I might easily land in circumstances even less desirable. So I left it on Hymorell’s setting.
