Bush stared at the scene. No awe took him. He felt nothing. For the time
being, he had filed away Wygelia's information that he would marry --
had married Ann; by some trick of mentality, all he could recall now was
little Joan Bush marrying, for obscure reasons, the man who managed what
had once been her father's grocery shop. The image of her, the loving
arm about her father, was close to him, perhaps prompted by this new
revelations of a familial relationship. Something that had no closer
name than longing rose in him; he could scarcely see that her life was
any less important than Earth's.
Turning to Wygelia, interrupting quite unconsciously her conversation
with Ann, he said, "You followed me to many places. You knew the miners'
village and Joan; you saw what happened to Herbert."
She nodded. "You began to find your real self there -- or by my terms
you lost yourself."
"Am I right? By your terms, what happened in Breedale was less of a tragedy
than by mine."
"In what respect?"
"You saw Herbert's end. Things grew more and more impossible for him.
In the end, he could see only to cut his throat and run bleeding to die
in the garden. His wife's end was as wretched. Joan -- I believe she
married for money rather than for love, which would be bound to bring
her nothing but sorrow. That story could be multiplied thousands of
times just in her generation, couldn't it?
"Now, look at it all as it really was, without the occulting lens of the
overmind! Joan would emerge from the loveless marriage and come home one
day to find her father quiet in the weeds, soon to be born. Her mother
would similarly come to life and her miserable pregnancy terminate in time.
The man would arrive and return her little shop to her. They would all grow
younger. The mine would work again, everyone would be employed. Gradually,
the family would grow smaller, burdens lighter, hope greater. Joan,
we presume, would sink into a happy babyhood and finally be taken into
her mother, who would grow young and fair again. There'd be no tragedy
and very much less distress.
"I realize now why that period I spent minding in Breedale was so vital
to me. I saw how most human sin is the result of most human misery;
it was misery and above all the misery of uncertainty that made me do
the base acts in my life. Once rid of the overmind, you -- everyone --
can suffer no uncertainty, because you know the future. What happened
to Joan, a loving creature who in the end denied love, is like a history
of everyone under overmind.
"So tell me, what terrible affliction brought down the overmind on humanity?
What happened on the Himalayas?"
Borrow said quietly, "I don't know what this particular experience of yours
with Joan was, Eddie, but that was the question I was going to ask
Silverstone -- and Wygelia. Why all this, in heaven's name, from the
Stone Age men to us?"
"You deserve an answer, and I will give it to you as simply as possible,
trying to relate it in your terms," Wygelia said. She looked down at
the composed face of Norman Silverstone on his bier before continuing,
as if to gather strength.
"Nothing has yet been said to you of the long past of the human race --
the future as you learned to see it. But you must know that that past
has been extremely long -- a dozen Cryptozoics placed on end, covering
untold epochs. The growth of the overmind was a rapid thing, spread over
only two or three generations.
"The overmind grew from the first serious mental disturbance we had ever
known -- for we never had the history of tragedy and mental suffering
and pain that you did, on your side of the Himalayas. That disturbance
was brought about by the realization that the end of Earth was drawing
near. You cannot imagine the powers or the glories of our race; for
though you are children of ours and we children of yours, and there is
no break in the succession, yet we existed under different natural laws
from you, as Silverstone explained, and created with them -- well, many
things you would find too miraculous to be credible, mind-travel on a
formidable scale being but one of them. We were almost a perfect race --
you would say 'will be.'
"Can you imagine the bitterness such a people would experience to
realize that in their great days the planet they lived on would die,
and the system of which it was a part?
We
were not hardened as you
to numberless sorrows, we did not know sorrow, and a mass-sickness --
a revulsion from time that dragged us to the brink of the catastrophe --
overtook us all.
"We think it was an evolutionary sickness. Our next generation, or in
some cases the next generation but one, was born (died, as you would
say) with the upper part of the mind reversed in temporal polarity,
so that they perceive as you perceive, because they are you.
"And we can see now that this reversal is the greatest mercy, that -- "
"Wait, Wygelia! Bush said. " How can you call it a mercy when you admit
that if we -- if the people at Breedale -- could see their lives right
way round they would be happier? And so back through recorded history,
through all the ancient civilizations!"
She answered him firmly, without hesitation. "I call it merciful because
you have had the distraction of all your smaller pains to hide the larger
pain from you."
"You can't say that! Think of Herbert Bush bursting into the garden with
his throat choking blood! What more pain than that?"
"Why, the pain of being fully aware of your glorious faculties slipping
away one by one, generation by generation. Of seeing the engineers
constructing ever cruder engines; the governments losing their enlightenment
in favor of slavery; the builders pulling down comfortable houses,
building less convenient ones; the chemists degenerating into old men
looking for a metal to transmute into gold; the surgeons abandoning their
elaborate equipment to take up hacksaws; the citizens forgetting their
scruples to run to a public hanging -- this all happens only a pathetic
few generations after you four fade back into your mothers. Could you bear
that? It's the senescence of an entire species! Could you bear to see
the last rudiments of agriculture lost before a grubby nomadism? Could
you bear to see huts exchanged for poor caves? Could you bear to see
the human eye grow dull as intelligence left it?
"And then everything else begins to senesce, even the plants, even the
reptiles and amphibians. With mind-travel, you have been able to see
them climb out onto the land and populate it. However cynical you were,
you must have taken hope and reassurance from it! But suppose you saw
that process through our clear eyes! Would you not love the lumbering
Permian amphibians, however crude, however incomplete, as tokens of the
grandeur that had once been on Earth? And when those amphibians lumbered
backwards into the mud and swamp and dwindled into finny things, would
you not weep? Would you not weep when the last green pseudo-seaweed
slipped back off the rocks into the warm sea for the last time? When
the trilobites vanished? When life died into mud?
"That terrible process, the senescence of Earth, could never be reversed!
Mankind has to go the hard way into the scuttling mindless world of the
jungle, the jungle on the ineluctable tide of time has to shrink back into
seaweeds, and all that was dissolved into the fire and ash we see about
us. No escape -- no hope of escape! But the overmind fell like a vizor and
protected mankind from realizing the full horror of his ultimate decay."
Chapter 9
GOD OF GALAXIES
They buried Silverstone then: or, as they had begun to see it should
be, they received his body from nature -- and this mucilaginous world
of flowing rock was the wildest face of nature any of them would ever
gaze upon.
The force sphere was manipulated by Wygelia. The bier bearing the professor's
body was set down and the sphere then distorted, so that the bier was borne
into a long extension of it; the extension closed in on itself and broke
off, in a manner reminiscent of a bubble of glass being blown. With the body
inside it, this bubble drifted down from the mass of floating rock.
It hovered over the ocean of heaving ash and then touched it. At once,
a great jet, a block of liquid flame, rose high into the heavy air. The
bubble flashed and disappeared. It was all over except for a great line
of light that split across the glutinous waste and disappeared.
In a moved voice, Howes said, "We should have had a bugle. We should have
sounded 'Last Post.'"
"'Reveille,'" Borrow corrected him.
There seemed nothing more to say. They stood gazing out over the fantastic
scene. It was full day now. A strong wind was moving, calling sparks from
the waste; a few more millennia and all would be fire; their island would
melt like a candle in a furnace. The wind was breaking up the cloud,
which had lain across the entire sky like slate strata and seemingly
as solid. The strata tore away in mighty patches more reminiscent of
islands than clouds, and revealed the sun.
The sun blazed; yet it was dark and blotched. It trailed streamers of fire.
It was an augur of the final inferno to come.
"Well, we'll be getting back to 2093 now, Wygelia," Howes said, forcing
a conversational officer's voice. "Just one thing I'd like to ask before
we go. We're going back to trouble. How do I -- er, meet my -- birth?"
"You meet it triumphantly, Captain. Bravely and far from uselessly.
That's all you should know. And you fully understand now?"
"Haven't any option, have I? And I know what I'm going to do when we return,
what my strategy will be. I shall report to my own revolutionary force
first, of course. Then I shall give myself up to the Action party.
They'll take me before Gleason. And I'll tell him -- all this, about
the overmind."
"Will you convert him?" Borrow asked.
"I'll see that I shake him. Or, given the chance, I'll kill him."
"I suppose after all this we'd better get in some action too," Ann said.
"I won't know how to start explaining, though."
"Here's a bit of proof nobody has mentioned so far, Bush said. "Perhaps
I take it from my own life, perhaps from Breedale -- more likely
from everywhere. You and I talked about incest, Ann. That's the point
where the join between overmind and undermind is weakest -- naturally,
because it is the point where life and death, birth and death, become
confused. The ban against incest -- we said no animal allows such a
ban; it was invented to stop us looking back to our parents because the
undermind knew all along that that way was death, not life. In the past,
you don't have any ban against incest, do you, Wygelia?"
She shook her head. "No. Nor do we have incest, since we all return anyway
to our parents."
Howes shook his head. "I think I'll stick to gunpoint for my conversions."
"I'm not a soldier," Borrow said firmly. "But I will certainly be happy to
do what Silverstone charged me with. Give me a chance to collect Ver from
The Amniote Egg and I will begin interpretive montages straight away.
I can explain the situation in arty circles -- they'll soon disseminate it."
"Are you coming with us to 2093?" Bush asked Wygelia.
She shook her dark head, smiling sadly.
"I have done all Central Authority asked of me. My mission is done and
I am not permitted to do more. But I shall see you and Ann again when I
am a child. Before I leave you, the four men here and I will accompany
you in mind-travel to the threshold of 2093."
They were mind-traveling again, drawing back from the end of the world
that they had long regarded as the beginning.
Both Ann and Bush floated a question to Wygelia together.
Bush, a million spirals, mainly mauve rattling: "If -- the long past of
the race -- humanity -- was so great, why remain on this one planet to die?
Why not escape to other worlds?"
Ann, interlocking yellow circles: "Tell us -- give us just a glimpse of
that great past."
Wygeia warned them she would answer both questions at once.
She released a great white castle. It floated at them and through, being
transformed by their minds' touch as it went, and crossed a dizzying
space. It had many rooms. Its walls interlocked and interpenetrated. It
was an elaborate structuring of universe-history, a popularization which
they might vaguely comprehend, formulated by a master-mind. It was also
the supreme art-work. This, Bush and Borrow would spend the rest of their
lives searching for, forgetting, trying to recreate, handing something
of the paradoxical glory of it down to other artists such as Picasso
and Turner.
Some of its meaning they grasped, as they swam like fish through its
elucidations.
Long past, immeasurably long past, the human race had been born into creation
at myriad points at once. It was as diffuse as gas. It was pure intellect.
It was omnipotent.
It was God.
It had been God and it had created the universe. It had then been governed
by its own laws. In the course of untold eons, it entered more fully into
its own creation. It had become planet-bound and occupied many millions of
planets. Gradually, over countless forgotten eons, it had drawn in upon
itself, like a large family returning to the same roof in the afternoon,
when work is done. To grow together had meant the shedding of abilities;
that had not mattered. Other abilities remained. Soon the planets became
drained of human life, whole galaxies were evacuated. But the galaxies
were themselves gathering together, rushing closer.
The long long process. . . . Nothing now left in the race expressed it.
Finally, all that remained of the shining multitude was congregated on
Earth. The great symphony of creation was reached, a conclusion long since
arranged.
"It's a consolation -- we have legends of the truth in our religions,"
Bush thought.
"Memories!" Wygelia corrected. From the tenor of her thoughts they took
consolation for their fallen state.
The great castle had permeated them for longer than they had suspected.
She was guiding them in to surface, she would set them miraculously in
a safe place, close to one of the anti-Action strongholds.
They surfaced. Wygelia had gone, the four pall-bearers had gone. Howes was
already looking alert and ready for action. Ann and Bush turned and looked
at each other, softly, yet challengingly.