The pan of the clock began to tremble. “Soon we may know the truth,” Marcus said with a smile.
“Or I shall lose a friend,” I replied.
Just then the balance tipped and the water-clock chimed the hour of midnight. We both rose.
I accompanied Marcus to the inner sanctum. As we went down the short corridor, flanked by two pillars, which leads to the door of the adytum, the possibility that I might be seeing him alive for the last time suddenly weighed heavily on me, but I tried to show no emotion. I opened the heavy oak door, whose edges are trimmed with lambswool so as to shut out extraneous noises, and we entered.
I looked around to ensure that everything was in place and the surroundings harmonious. For us, the inner sanctum serves the same function in our activities as the preliminary ritual of donning ceremonial garb: to help calm the mind and divert it from trivial thought. Hence everything is arranged to invoke the feeling of departure from the mundane. The room is oval in shape and painted in restful hues. On the walls are mandalas and one or two specially selected paintings. Earlier I had placed a vase of peonies on the small table of polished walnut.
The nostrum had already been left in a crucible over the brazier. While Marcus reclined himself on the couch I moved the brazier closer, so he would gain the direct benefit of the vapours, and lit the oil-soaked charcoal with a taper. Quickly the brazier began to blaze and the nostrum to bubble.
With no further glance at Marcus, I left.
The Temple of Mysteries subscribes to none of the traditional doctrines, since all of these are in varying degrees erroneous or at best blur the distinction between what is truly known and what is merely deduced or speculated upon. Our approach, once we have formulated an area of ignorance, is to try to gain the truth first-hand.
On the subject of what follows death, there are many proffered answers. The most pragmatic, of course, is that death is simply extinction. But most schools of thought claim some kind of survival, either in a different condition—in a spiritual realm or else by way of rebirth into another body—or actually in the same condition. The latter version, the bleakest of theories of this kind, represents time as a circle and says that following death we are born again into the same life as before, to repeat everything that has happened. Then again there is the doctrine that death means the end of individual consciousness, but that the mind is absorbed into a universal consciousness.
While sitting by myself in the changing room I reviewed these ideas as a means of taking my mind off Marcus. Close to an hour had passed, for the pan of the water-clock was again almost full, when I heard a hoarse shout from the inner sanctum, followed by the thud of falling furniture.
In seconds I had gained the corridor. As I did so the oak door flew open and Marcus staggered forth, his face grey. I rushed to assist him; he all but collapsed against me. His eyes, I noticed, were stricken and not glazed, as though he had seen something that horrified him.
Through the door, I saw that both the couch and the walnut table had been overturned. The brazier still glowed; but only a black stain on the crucible recorded the presence of the nostrum, whose fragrance yet drifted on the air.
I helped Marcus to the changing room and sat him down. He begged for wine. Though apprehensive of what its effect might be on top of so many drugs, I took a flask from the cupboard, uncorked it and poured him a goblet. He gulped it greedily, at which a little colour came to his cheeks.
“I shall be all right,” he said in answer to my solicitations. “Just give me a minute or so to recover.”
I stood by while he slumped in the chair, breathing heavily. At length I could forbear no longer. What, I enquired, had been the outcome of the experiment? Had it been successful? He groaned, and in sombre tones told me that it had; indeed (his voice fell to a mutter) the whole secret of death had been revealed to him. “Do not ask me to reveal this secret,” he said. “Better not to know.”
Astonished, I reminded him of the rule of our order forbidding any member to withhold from his brothers anything he has learned as a result of his work in the Temple, and again I eagerly pressed him to relate his new knowledge. He nodded resignedly and asked for more wine. Then, uttering a deep sigh, he related what is essentially the following.
Death (he said) is reversal. Reversal of consciousness, and reversal of time.
What do I mean by this? I will take consciousness first, for that is the first thing to be reversed. As we are now, our consciousness is within our bodies. I perceive you through my eyes, and within my brain I derive, through my senses, a picture of the outside world. Of myself I have no direct perception. I know myself only indirectly, through my relations with others, or through beholding myself in a mirror.
After death all this changes. Consciousness remains; but it is consciousness external to one’s body. It becomes an objective consciousness, similar to experiences of ecstasy we have had accounts of, where one sees oneself from outside. One watches while one’s body is laid out. One is present when it is placed on a bier and, accompanied by one’s friends and relatives, carried to the grave.
Then one seems to be present in the grave, watching the cast-off body decay for several months. From this there is no escape, for one’s consciousness is always where one’s body is. This, you might think, is a harrowing experience. But wait.
The reason why one becomes conscious of one’s dead body is that consciousness has momentum and, for a spell, coasts forward through time. But after a while the second reversal takes place. Time reverses.
(Emptying his goblet, Marcus reached for the flask, ignoring my anxious glance in that direction.) Time reverses. Do you understand me? Time runs backwards. Death truly is the end of life, but only in the sense that a road ends in a particular place. After that one turns round and retraces one’s steps. One finds oneself watching as one’s corpse slowly mends, is taken up from the ground, is carried home, and comes to life. So one’s life resumes, from death to birth. Reversed time. Reversed consciousness.
Eventually birth must come again. The shock of this is like the shock of death, and indeed it is, for this reversed life, the same as death. And again one’s consciousness coasts past it, but made internal now, living as a shrinking foetus until time again reverses itself and the foetus expands again, and one is born, a new babe, seeing the world through the senses as before.
This, then, Clinias, is the manner of our lives. The soul oscillates eternally between the poles of birth and death, though we know it not, and not one whit of what has happened can be changed. Therein, in our ignorance, lies our happiness for the present. But wait. You will not be happy. Wait until you stand outside yourself and must see yourself. …
Marcus’s voice trailed off. “So the doctrine of an eternally repeating life comes closest to the truth,” I ventured.
“Yes. We have lived this life many, many times before.”
“But why so gloomy, Marcus? It is immortality after a fashion.”
Marcus looked up at me with a startled look on his face. “Have you not understood, Clinias? Do you not see? This is the worst of all possibilities! Each of us is doomed to see himself as he appears to the external world, and in that stance to live again through every detail of his existence! Every unworthy act, every self-deception, every last piece of shame we hide even from ourselves—all is presented to our gaze, and for a lifetime! How can one endure it? There is no one who lives with such dignity that this could be bearable!”
Slowly the horror of Marcus’s revelation began to dawn on me. Unsteadily he rose to his feet and placed his hand on my shoulder. For long moments the silence of the Temple seemed to descend on us, while I pondered on what I had heard and stood there with my friend.
“That nothing can be changed is the worst aspect of it,” Marcus said wearily. “How one longs and aches to be able to change what one sees!”
“We are in a trap,” I observed.
He nodded. “Normally the traumas of birth and death wipe memory clean. For
our temerity the gods have allowed me to glimpse the truth, and to remember it. That is our reward, and our punishment. But I can speak no more tonight. Let us go home. We have done enough.”
Suddenly Marcus was violently sick. I cleaned him up, conducted him to his house, and saw to it that he was put to bed, leaving him only after he had fallen soundly asleep.
Although the secret of death has been imparted to the full membership of the Temple, not all have understood its import. Several members, driven by curiosity, have repeated Marcus’s experiment, with results that more or less confirm his findings, but to most it is interesting merely; they do not grasp its terror. To live a life which, because lacking external awareness of itself, is contemptible and mean, and then to be given that awareness which alone could have improved it—and be condemned at the same time to do no more than watch the wretched and loathsome spectacle! The gods do indeed chuckle when they look down on the human condition.
A change of outlook has been forced on we senior members of the Arcanum who do understand the meaning of Marcus’s discovery. Suicide, which once seemed an honourable escape from undignified circumstance, is now realised to be no escape at all. And yet from this trap of life there should be, if the world is just, some escape.
Marcus has sickened, but fears to die. We all of us fear to die, knowing what awaits us. Men, who take refuge in never seeing themselves as they really are, invariably will shun such a vision.
Our work now is in how to end the eternal oscillation, whether to gain oblivion or a new life does not matter. But how may it be done? On that we have not a single idea. The gods may know. The gods, whom we have spurned as confusers and defilers of the minds of men, perhaps in the end we must turn to the gods.
Farewell, Dear Brother
Strangers are a nuisance. Few people have anything new to say to a man once he’s settled down in life.
But occasionally someone turns up whose chance words stir up vivid memories, and set me thinking again.
A man like that turned up at a small party my wife and I gave. He was small, agile, about forty, and he may have been intoxicated. With his type, it’s hard to tell. Some friends of ours had brought him along, and he clearly didn’t know whose house it was he had come to.
He was one of those people who can’t stop talking. I steer clear of talkers usually, but he managed to corner me and so I let him chatter volubly on for a few minutes.
Then I discovered that this one was different, from my point of view. He had just returned from an expedition to Celenthenis, the Planet of Cold.
I became more alive to him. “Oh, yes,” I said, “I had heard there was a second expedition. What did you think of the place?”
“Well, the cold’s pretty drastic.”
“Too much for you, eh?”
“Yes.” He nodded emphatically, as if he could read my mind. “It’s too cold for description. There’s practically no temperature to the place at all. Goddammit, it’s right at the dead end of creation.”
I pondered over his words. The dead end of creation. …
He hadn’t much of a gift for word-pictures, but my imagination and memory made up for it. He was right. There’s a minimal amount of energy on Celenthenis—some physicists say none at all. There’s argument about that. At any rate, every atom and molecule of the whole planet is frozen immobile. No chemical changes. No energy exchanges. Nothing. It’s a world without time.
What it must be like to live there, looking over its dark surface through a televisor from inside an alloy dome—any ordinary material simply crumbles away—and know that nothing happens there, ever.
It led to strange possibilities, as a matter of fact. The material of the planet is super-conducting, but nothing ever happened to cause a current. Electricity had no place there—until the explorers came. As an experiment, Professor Juker discharged a million volts into the ground. It flashed right round the planet and is still going. The whole planet is alive with that circling million volts which never decreases.
“You can’t have actually felt cold,” I said.
“No, but you can see it. Goddammit, you can feel it. But not with your senses. With your emotions. Get me?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“If only there was some starlight, or something like that. But just darkness. We could only see by the reflection of our own beams. I’d have liked to set off some hydrogen bombs, just to show the place some action.”
“It wouldn’t have made much difference.”
“No, I guess not.” He laughed. “Say, you’re a good listener, aren’t you?”
“Oh, I know all about Celenthenis. My brother and I were on the ship that discovered it.”
He looked at me with new interest. “Say … you must be—”
“Robert Stemming.” I held out my hand.
He shook it vigorously. “I never realised who I was talking to.”
“As a matter of fact,” I continued, “my brother is upstairs. Perhaps you would like to meet him.”
He looked alarmed. “No! I mean, I’ve promised to have a word with somebody in the other room. …” He backed away.
This time it was my turn to laugh.
I hid myself for the rest of the evening and left the guests to my expert and sociable wife. Crowds don’t interest me. In recent years I’ve developed a liking for a peaceful, solitary life.
At about two o’clock in the morning I heard the sounds of the party diminish. The few people left were talking quietly in the lounge, and they would probably stay for another hour.
I decided to go upstairs and look at my brother.
Not many people care to meet Jack, and I can’t say I blame them. There’s something decidedly eerie about it all.
But I’m not afraid of him. I mounted the wooden stairs to the top of the house. Towards the attic, where we keep Jack, it gets musty. Janet never comes up here, so neither the steps nor the attic get cleaned. Cobwebs brushed me frequently. Outside the door of the attic I could hear the low hum of the apparatus on the other side.
I opened the door and went in. The attic is illuminated by a dim yellow electric light bulb which is always on because I forgot to install a switch. To the right of the door a thick power cable comes snaking through the wall and across to the other side of the room. The cable’s a thick one. We need a lot of power to keep the temperature down.
And on the dirty table opposite was a silicon container, two foot on the side, surrounded by Professor Juker’s refrigerators.
Closing the door, I walked across. “How are you today, Jack?” I said.
There was a definite pause, before the small speaker attached to the canister spoke in a weary voice.
“Can’t complain, Robert,” it said disconsolately.
Brother Jack, it is a hard life I have lived with you!
Ever since the day of our birth, Jack and I have been together. I arrived first, and Jack came pushing and shoving his way awkwardly right after. Or so I like to think.
Perhaps I even gave him a hand. Because I’ve been looking back over my shoulder and hauling him over his troubles ever since.
You could never avoid trouble, could you, Jack? It’s in your nature to steep yourself in it. Show you a doubtful situation, a compromising situation, a sneaky situation, and you plunge right in without regard for anyone. That’s why you have a hundred enemies on every inhabited planet.
I don’t say you intend it. You just revel in temptation; you can’t resist an opportunity to cheat. But why, Jack, why have you such a knack of doing it when a blind donkey could see you’ll be found out?
I’m not exempt from Jack’s ways, in fact I’ve borne the life-long brunt of them. Even when we were youngsters he would borrow my cycle for an hour and sell it on the other side of town for a few pounds. Then he would stall for days on end before I found out. He would always stall. And several times he stole my girl from behind my back.
That would make me really mad. But even then, Jack always seemed
to get away with it. Somehow he would crawl from under like an indestructible insect. His technique was quite simple. Stall. Stay out of the way. Sooner or later, you lost the heart to hit back at him.
When we grew up we set up in business together as go-getters.
Go-getters are a kind of glorified galactic scrap merchant. All you need is backing, and a ship, and somewhere unexplored to go. Or you can take a shot in the dark, but that’s pretty desperate. You arrive, look the place over, and when you come back you trade in whatever you’ve discovered there. There’s a high premium on information in modern civilisation. If you’re lucky you might sell a concession on raw materials. More often you make money on selling scientific data, so a go-getter prefers weird places. At the very least the government pays a tithe for having assayed another planet.
Let me make it clear now in regard to my complaints about my brother Jack, that we’re nothing particularly fine as human beings go. The galaxy is wide and unknown, and there are thousands of freelance go-getting teams. Usually they have a vast amount of technical knowledge haphazardly acquired, but no qualifications of any kind. Usually professional men despise them. In a nutshell, they live in a way qualified men disdain, and Jack and I were fairly representative, trading in second-hand plant and equipment when we didn’t have a job.
Our relationship was what you would expect of two brothers, but looking back I can only see its unpleasant tinge.
You never played straight with me, did you, Jack? It was in little things. The small deals. After not seeing you for a week or two, I would get a letter like this:
Dear Bob, the time has come I think to let you know the truth about the cheque. All that I’ve been telling you about it not arriving and then not cashing it is a load of ruthless lies, what really happened is that I was desperate for money and had the audacity to spend the bloody lot. Please don’t think too badly of me, I know the sob-story stuff isn’t much use to you, and all I can do now is try to pay it back somehow. …
The Seed of Evil Page 15
