Message From the Eocene

by Margaret St. Clair

  It tasted bitter. The results were quicker than they had been with the green capsule.

  There was no sense of the visible world becoming transparent, of another world or worlds beginning to be seen. What happened this time was that his second body began to come out through the bones of his skull.

  His first body gave a groan and collapsed, still tightly bound, on the deck of the little aircraft. Tharg was pulling loose from his first body gradually, but it was a slow process, like trying to get off tight, painful boots. Since what was happening was not a normal process, but one coerced by the ingestion of a drug, it caused him an unnatural amount of distress and badly frightened him.

  Slowly he got his head and one of his arms free. He wanted to get out, and yet he didn't. Tharg lying there on the deck was his house, and he was not yet ready to leave.

  "Untie him," said the tall leader. "This isn't what that drug was supposed to do. It may be that we've interfered with his circulation by having the cords too tight."

  The order was obeyed. Tharg felt the prickling of a thousand invisible needles in his arms as his blood began to move again. But the order had come too late: his second body kept on coming out.

  "He's still unconscious," said the leader. He seemed to ponder, his long eyelids almost closed over his pale eyes. "Try stimulating his inner eye," he said at last.

  By now, only Tharg's feet were still inside the body of Tharg One. He could only look on, in a paralysis of horror, while the subordinate picked up the slender knife, located the point of it accurately above Tharg's nose, and struck.

  Tharg's body gave no cry, but it half rose from the deck, as if it were trying to sit up, and then dropped back limply. Tharg in his second body was not conscious of pain, but his hand had gone involuntarily to his head.

  "I think he's dead," said the subordinate after a minute.

  "It looks like it," the leader answered. "Remind me, when we go back up, to tell the chemists their psylocybate didn't do quite what they said it would." He riffled through the pages of the book, the beautiful book that had been sent to Tharg's people. The book's outer case, the dark-brown ellipsoid in which it had arrived, lay unnoticed beside his narrow sandaled feet.

  "Well," he said finally, "I suppose we know enough now to be positive that this ... thing ... must be destroyed. The descriptions he gave correspond closely enough with the text. It's a pity, in a way, for the book is a handsome thing. But we can't take any chances on this poisonous supernatural nonsense contaminating anybody. Yes, we'll have to destroy it."

  So, Tharg thought, that's why they wanted it. The Vaeaa disapprove of the book—our book—because it's a guidebook to the world of psychic phenomena. The Vaeaa are rigid materialists, and they think there's something indecent in the nonmaterial. They're censors, and like censors they know a good deal about what they disapprove of.

  He felt a certain gratification at having at last fathomed their motives. But his gratification was overpowered by anxiety about the book and about what was going to happen to the body of Tharg One. He was out of that body entirely now, but a long, elastic ropy ligature still bound him to it.

  "What shall I do with the book?" the subordinate asked.

  "Throw it in the ship's matter converter. As for him"—he indicated Tharg One, lying on the deck—"dump him over the side. He's too big for the converter, and I don't want any craft I command cluttered up with carrion."

  The leader handed the book to his subordinate. "Perhaps you'd like to look at it before you destroy it," he said kindly. "There are some interesting passages. If only it weren't such vicious stuff!"

  Tharg had listened with growing rage and despair. The beautiful book would be destroyed, and Tharg himself would be technically dead once his first body was gone. Wasn't there anything he could do to stop them? He'd read a fair amount of the book.

  The subordinate was turning over the pages, smiling a thin-lipped smile like a man reading a funny but disgusting joke. Tharg knew that his second body was powerless to affect material things. But—his first body—

  It would hurt. He didn't know whether it could be done. But he couldn't let them destroy his people's book.

  He began to enter his first body again.

  He had to do it carefully, without any betraying movements, and the pain in his head was agonizing. He must not groan. Woefully, unnaturally, like a child reentering the womb, he forced himself back into the house, the prison, of flesh.

  Now. He had to be quick, while the subordinate was still reading. He gathered his force.

  His head! His head!

  He snatched the book from the long hands of the Vaeaa, dropped it into the ellipsoidal case, and ran across the deck with it.

  It was only a short toss to the mouth of the biggest scoria cone. The impervious case would protect the book, and sometime somebody might get it out of the volcano again. Anyhow, the Vaeaa shouldn't have the satisfaction of destroying it.

  He threw the book into the crater's mouth.

  The subordinate, who had seen a man rise from the dead, was looking at him with an open mouth. Would the Vaeaa be able to fish for the book and dredge it up out of the lava? Tharg didn't think so. Even the Vaeaa had their limits. Anyhow, he'd done the best he could. Now it was time for him to be getting out of his first body, before they punished it.

  Once more he began to extricate himself. His first body was in better shape than he had thought, and the effects of the psylocybate were wearing off. But he wanted to get out, and break the cord between his two bodies, before the torture began. It would be an unheard-of sort of suicide.

  Now. Except for the ligature, he was free. The subordinate and two or three other Vaeaa had grabbed his first body again; somebody was twisting his arm violently. Tharg wrenched at the ligature.

  It was impossible to break it by force. He had no force. If his will ... Only the force of will.

  Violence. He willed his second body's death.

  Abruptly Tharg one slumped down in the cruel circling arms. The link was severed; his first body was dead. Tharg had won.

  But he felt no triumph. What had happened to his second body? It wasn't dead, and yet it wasn't here. The link had been severed the wrong way, unilaterally.

  Tharg knew he wasn't a ghost. But he didn't know what he was.

  -

  Chapter Four

  What kept him bound to earth? He was dead, or at any rate his first body had perished; he ought to have been elsewhere. But Tharg remained, ambient and perceptive, a spectator of earthly events who, lacking the usual privileges of the dead, was anchored somewhere in space unable either to leave Earth or to affect what went on there.

  At first he had felt anguish when the wars grew more fierce. Men he had known fought and suffered, the allied cities turned on each other, Synon was wiped out and then Gwynor. The Vedimi, always opportunists, attacked whichever of the allies might be weaker at the time. Tharg could only look on helplessly at destruction, while the centuries passed like blinking and the wars went on.

  By degrees his emotion grew more remote. Unconcern invaded him. Sunk in a glacial ataraxia, he watched the deaths of men and cities. His people grew fewer, the wars increased in bitterness. At last there was not a man of his stock left alive.

  The Vaeaa followed them into oblivion. Those enigmatic people, who had possessed almost the powers of gods, proved mortal. Tharg was never to know why the Vaeaa had brought his people to Earth or what their link with them had been. Perhaps they had depended in some way on their underlings for psychological sustenance.

  Whatever the cause, their number diminished. Their stock grew tired. The ships that had circled Earth grew fewer and fewer. But while there was still half a handful of their ships left, they undertook a great work.

  Perhaps because they were dying out, their incomprehensible animus against the non-physical had strengthened. It drove them to an endeavor that for a long time Tharg did not understand. It was not until the last of their ships had vanished tha
t he realized the projector they had set up on Pluto was designed to keep another guidebook from space from ever getting through to Earth.

  Tharg did not witness the construction on Pluto directly, of course. His consciousness remained restricted to Earth and its ambient seas of atmosphere. He inferred the nature of the construction from the preparations for it that he saw and the many mental references to it he picked up. In ordinary terms, though not in Tharg's, it took them a long time, almost a hundred Earth years.

  After the projector was built, the Vaeaa decreased rapidly. If Tharg had been capable of astonishment, he would have felt it at seeing how quickly they died out. In no time at all, the last one was gone. Earth was rid of the burden of its alien and anachronistic life.

  With the death of the last Vaeaa, the roaring in Tharg's ears died away. It had been with him constantly since his first body died, a never-ceasing background to all his perceptions. Now it was gone. It had been the roaring of the wind of volitional thought.

  He floated in a perfect silent emptiness. Events on Earth went on occuring but now, since the alien life had perished and no native life had yet arisen, they were purely geologic. Tharg saw mountains crumble into dust and new mountains arise, continents move over the surface as giddily as dancers, and felt the planet's axis of rotation change. The moon receded and its silver surface grew pocked. Like someone who sleeps with open eyes, Tharg beheld the meaningless panorama of change with his perception uninvolved. Ten thousand years to him meant less than a day. It was not that time had no meaning; it was that he had not. Yet he remained bound to Earth.

  Bound, like an embryo in its amniotic bath. But an embryo grows and changes, and Tharg did not. The millennia passed like the pattering of rain, and Tharg was no nearer to birth.

  Sometimes it occurred to him—if one can say "times" about non-experiences that last billions of years—that if he had been able to learn more from the guidebook before the Vaeaa took it away from him, he might have been able to rescue himself. Such thoughts did not distress him; they were as meaningless as he himself was. Though he was alone as nobody, alive or dead, was ever alone, he did not suffer from his isolation. To suffer would have been to admit his own meaning.

  The geologic events on Earth's surface continued, and at last, because in a long enough time the highly improbable becomes the possible, a series of unique events occurred. Neither Tharg nor anybody else anywhere was aware of it then, but life had come into being on Earth.

  How many millions of years before the one-celled became the two-celled? How many more millions before chlorophyll was evolved and the green plants crept out timidly over the land? The atmosphere changed as the plants took up their vital task of releasing free oxygen. Primitive animals evolved. The raw young planet was becoming an abode of life.

  Tharg perceived the qualitative changes without involvement. He felt no impatience at their extreme slowness. After all, he was not waiting for anything.

  An evolutionary plateau was reached: Earth's creatures developed the backbone. Fish thronged the sea, amphibia crawled out on the land. The huge saurians ruled for a day and then vanished. And with astonishing rapidity—the plateau became an inclined plane—the higher mammals began to evolve.

  Herbivora. Carnivora. And some small, unprepossessing eat-anything proto-monkeys. Some of these last took the great step of balancing the soap-bubble skull on the end of an upright spine.

  These were true children of the third planet, shaped by her sun and her seas, her own autochthonous life. They struck stone upon stone for tools, and bellowed signals to each other in the chase. Tharg began to hear in his ears once more, like a freshening breeze, the noise of volitional thought.

  It was weak and confused at first, concerned solely with survival. But it grew from generation to generation, augmenting torrentially. It was a great roaring. And Tharg perceived, almost with resentment, that these tool-making new beings might be the source of help.

  Help? A rescue from prolonged no-meaning? He was no body, nowhere, a consciousness without dimension or vehicle. No ghost was ever so powerless as he. Whether he existed at all was a question for philosophers. Yet the prospect of release filled him with a longing that was almost painful. Was there nothing he could do to help himself?

  For the first time in several billion years, he tried to think.

  Now, if he was still bound to Earth, there must be some link with it. An immaterial link, perhaps, but it was to a material thing. Even if his second body was gone, something held him. He had some real existence, he was something more than a percipient thought.

  And even if he were only a thought, could he not re-think himself?

  Tharg—who was Tharg? He fell into a state of consciousness that was not quite meditation. It was something new for him, utterly unlike the glacial ataraxia that had held him for so long. Speculation on personal identity is a well-known way of attaining the condition that is known as nirvana; some teachers have considered it a valuable mystic experience. Tharg was already in a state outside the experience of any mystic, so the results of his speculating about his identity were different from those a mystic might get.

  He had been right when he had thought, so long ago, that he might have been able to help himself if he could have learned more from the guidebook. Now, though he did not know it, he was working out for himself, under adverse circumstances, what he might have learned from the guidebook. In short, he was discovering the psi function the hard way.

  Who was Tharg? He thought about this point for a long time, by human standards; time had begun again for him, and he was once more conscious of its passage.

  At last, softly, but coming nearer, he heard a voice—the word is inexact, but there is none that fits it better—he heard a voice say, "Tharg has become."

  Who was speaking? Was it he himself? This was not the sound of rational thought, coming from without, but a voice from himself. As to e, he remembered that it was a transcendental, a number that popped up in mathematical statements where one wouldn't have expected it. "Tharg has become e ..." How could that be it?

  Perhaps because he had rejected its information, the voice seemed to withdraw. Tharg realized that he had not let his speculations range wide enough. He must manage to be quite passive, and at the same time deeply concerned. And he must not be afraid.

  This time the voice from himself told him, "The lumniferous ether ... is Tharg."

  No. That wasn't right. He might be a mere percipient consciousness, without dimension or vehicle, but he knew he wasn't the ether, lumniferous or otherwise. He began to realize that what was being communicated to him was not a statement but a process.

  Once more he looked inward. He had risen to a great height; he would drop away in a moment. The ... voice ... said, quite loudly, "Tharg is the square root of minus one."

  That did it. Now he knew. That was enough.

  The square root of minus one is an imaginary quantity, usually represented by a lower case letter I. For all it is conventionally called "imaginary", it can be written down on paper, manipulated, worked with, divided, multiplied.

  It vanishes and reappears in equations. When it is squared, it becomes minus one. When it is cubed, it becomes minus i. When it is raised to the fourth power it becomes, simply, one. When it is raised to the fifth power, it reverts to being bare i. And then the cycle starts over again.

  Tharg knew these elementary mathematical facts. The process had been disclosed to him now: i was "imaginary", but it existed. It could be multiplied.

  It was himself the voice had meant.

  What should he do with his new knowledge? A point of light reflected from a thousand mirrors, so that it is reduplicated a thousand times, is a thousand points of light. A thought a thousand times augmented ...

  If he expected the new inhabitants of Earth to help him, they would first have to know that he existed. He would try to manifest himself.

  -

  Chapter Five

  The jargonelle pear trees
bloomed up to the third story windows. In spring they were tall clouds of white blossom and silvery green leaves. The old thorn tree had masses of red flowers in May, and in the yard there were two big beds of spring flowers, one of purple and blue irises and one of fragrant, velvety auriculas. The young Proctors called these last "recklesses".

  The Proctors were not the first tenants of the house. It had been built about 1800, and when Mary Unthank and her husband—the Unthanks were cousins of the Proctors—had moved into it, the house had already had a faintly unpleasant reputation. But twenty-five years of blameless occupancy had caused the stories concerning it to die away. When the Proctors moved in, late in 1834, they had no apprehensions at all.

  The Proctors were a quiet young Quaker couple, strongly attached to each other, with one young child and the prospect of more to come. Joseph Proctor, like his wife Elizabeth, was a birthright member of the Society of Friends. He was fond of reading: George Fox's Journal was one of his favorite books, and he took in several periodicals. He was active in peace and antislavery societies.

  Elizabeth Proctor was too occupied with her household duties to read as much as her husband, but from the time of Margaret Fell women have played a large part in the Society of Friends. At the end of 1834, however, she was less active than usual, since she was expecting shortly to be confined with her second child.

  The house itself lay in a deep hollow. The spot was a lonely one: there were no houses near, and, except for the mill which was across the lane from the house, no buildings. Willington Mill, as it was called, was owned jointly by Joseph Proctor and his cousin Unthank. It was a large steam flour mill, efficient for its day, and the Proctors owed a certain modest prosperity to it.

  On the other side of the house a large field stretched away upward for a long distance. The river Tyne Was not too far away to be reached on foot, and from its banks one could watch the shipping sailing upriver, or gliding lazily down to the North Sea. The field and yard were fine places for children to play, and in later years the Proctors remembered this part of their residence here with pleasure. They were to feel other emotions about the house.