A Lonely and Curious Country (29 page)

I trembled and thrashed violently – or rather I attempted too, because my hosts had shown some foresight in restraining me with some silky elastic cords. I could move – somewhat – but I could not raise myself and I could not reach out beyond the slab on which I lay. This was for the best, considering the harm I might have done myself, but it did not bode well. Was I to be straitjacketed permanently? That may well be the case, because how else could I explain my circumstances except with a diagnosis of insanity? I was at once vividly aware that I was a
beetle
and yet I remembered too my life as a man. There is an old parable told by Chuang Tzu of a man who awoke under a tree and remembered that he had dreamed of being a butterfly, but then wondered if that he was in fact a butterfly now dreaming that it was a man. It is an interesting conundrum, but one I would rather have saved for discussion in the common-room than had as first-hand experience.

Am I then a man or am I a beetle? Be that as it may, I see things before me and they affect me and I must deal with them and thereby control the affect that they have on me. Let me then describe what I see and what I make of it and you may judge for yourself. This is the rule I imposed upon myself in order to maintain my grip upon reason, and as I demonstrated personal restraint, I needed no external restraint and the cords were released and eventually I was even permitted to wander with guidance throughout the domain of these creatures, learning as I went.

My discoveries since my first awakening have not been particularly cheering. I surmise that the time is very late in the history of the world. The sun is nothing like the warm and dazzling orb you know. It is instead as swollen as a tumor and colored the red of embers. It squats on the horizon beyond an oily sea, lethargic and unmoving while a cold wind blows eternally. Limp black vegetation of a kind like seaweed and like tough leather in texture drapes itself in layered heaps of gray dunes that undulate down to the shore where feeble waves roll in with tubercular gurgles and mutterings. Now and again I see things like gigantic white crabs roaming the littoral zone. Perhaps they are distant, degenerate cousins of my hosts.

I would say that this earth that was ours is at the brink of its ending, but it seems to me that there will be nothing so dignified as an end. Instead, its dreary senescence will be forever, pointlessly attenuated.

My hosts have made their redoubt here by this beach. As befits their insectile appearance, they are as busy as bees. Unlike bees however, they do not store honey, but knowledge. Their civilization transcends is dubious and meager environment and is, I must say, a grand and noble thing – all the more so because of the hopeless conditions outside. They are industrious and ingenious, filling their vaulted basalt halls with extravagant machines as visually delightful as the innards of a pocket watch, all composed of glittering crystals and concentrically oscillating movements that quivered and sang like crickets on a spring evening.
Contra
the sound of the lassitudinous surf, it is quite reassuring.

These beings – we – have a name of course.
1
We
who call
ourselves
the Great Race of
Yith
– the name is the sound of a scraped claw and an indrawn breath – have an interest in those who are themselves interested. According then to their interest they have devised a technique by which they are able to open “windows” into time. As the recent demonstrations of Hertzian waves in our own time have shown that information can be propagated across space without physical contact, the Great Race have earned their sobriquet by collecting information propagated across
time.
In particular the information that they are able to collect is
thought
. To further my analogy with this wireless telegraphy, as a transmitter-receiver of Hertzian waves may be turned in various directions and it may be tuned to send or receive at different frequencies, so too do their transmitter-receivers of thought may be directed to different eras, and by exquisitely fine tuning, establish a link with an individual mind to passively listen to it, or to actively influence it. It is by this means that my thoughts have been drawn from my brain at the end of the Nineteenth Century have been drawn out and projected into the brain of this beetle-like creature at the end of the earth’s time.

I am by no means unique. The Great Race are nothing if not systematic and there are many more like me, all organized and put to task quite logically. The people and beings they have dredged up from the past to relate their own histories all by and large people whose vocations it has been to do so. It is an efficient approach, I must say, though they make appropriate boogie-men for scholars: “Do not study too well,” one could warn, “or the
Yith
will snatch you out of your own head and reveal to you the logical end of all scholarship. Instead have a drink, blur your senses and forget what you have read today.” Perhaps that is why so many scholars are drunkards.

1
If I ever find myself back in the age of the bright sun and in a university, I swear that I will devote myself to the study of pronouns and tenses in all the world’s languages and perhaps I will be able to write a more consistent account of my experiences, but to avoid ridiculously compounded clauses, I use “us” to denote both humanity and the beings of the future and now to denote whatever time I may be writing of and leave it to the reader to deduce from context which I am describing.

The scholarship of the Great Race is very sober, and not cruel. I was eventually led from my place of awakening to my place of education or assimilation and their attitude was quite solicitous. They do not treat me as a prisoner or patient, I who am so strange here, but more as a kind of prophet, a madman touched with holy visions such as the Russians call a
yurodivy
. I soon learned, as I have mentioned, that I was far from being the only one such; rather there are many of us, all with our own particular mania and we were all indulged avidly. I prided myself on my fluency in languages when I was… human, but my grasp of the language and scripts of these beetles came to me too fast even for someone such as me to have acquired by learning. Instead, it seemed as if the knowledge had always been latent within me and its resurgence merely required the triggering effect of what passed for pen and parchment. This seemed common to us all and accordingly, we are each given a booth in what I shall call a scriptorium, furnished more or less comfortably or at least of shape and form that is convenient to my body (I do not imagine that any man of the Nineteenth Century who was not a professional contortionist would agree however!).

My acquiescence to apparent confinement and labor may seem odd, especially to the self-styled humorists among the scholarly community (of which there are too many), but industriousness is the cardinal virtue of these creatures and they find work to be its own comfort. I was not therefore unhappy, instead I experienced the constant pleasure familiar to any writer in being able to give coherent form to my otherwise chaotic thoughts. It may seem trivial to write of the minutiae of mundane human life, but to an intelligent beetle, the most ordinary to us is the most enchanting and I could indeed, as William Blake wrote, see infinity in a grain of sand – or in my case, the items on the menu at the Café Royale, the results of horse races printed in
The Times
and remembered chatter over whether mauve or yellow was this year’s most fashionable color. Imagine if you will a child given a jigsaw puzzle with an infinite number of pieces; rather than being daunted with the prospect of a seemingly futile task, the child is overjoyed with the assurance that they will never run out of pieces to connect. It is not so much the pieces that matters as the sense of “eureka” in perceiving their assembly into a pattern that gives pleasure. Such it is in the scriptorium.

My mania or my task is the late Nineteenth Century, but of course I am not alone and my many companions each have their own niches. To one side of me there is an individual whose speciality is Byzantine mosaics – which is surely an appropriate metaphor for our general creation – while on the other side there is an astronomer and fifteen places down there is a being who claims to be transcribing his conversations with Machiavelli. If this is an asylum and we are all mad, then it is not without its pleasures. For instance, many supposedly established historical facts are undermined or even contradicted by these chronicles. Is it because of the wandering capriciousness of my imagination, or because the witnesses who were present at these historic events have knowledge beyond what has been officially recorded. History as we read it has been written for the convenience of the victors after all and one wit of our time – the time I imagine as such, I mean – has described the official register of the peerage as the greatest work of fiction that the English have ever produced. Then too there are many, many portraits of Renaissance popes and cardinals with their “nephews” standing in the background which anyone can guess to be their bastards. In these latter-day texts, such guesses are confirmed. Time travel, I realized with some
schadenfreude
, would be an excellent tool for blackmail.

There are also the accounts of the “past” that are to me actually the future, and reading those, the pendulum of my emotion swung far away from anything like amusement; if the past is scandalous, your future is terrible. There are revelations of such depths of human depravity I could never have imagined in my worst nightmares that have filled me with utter despair of humanity itself. I can write the word “Auschwitz”, but while I could warn you of it, I am so overcome with sickness that words fail me. It is knowledge such as this that makes me wish that I am indeed mad, because sanity would be still more awful knowing what I know. Better one man be mad than an entire world! If the latter were the case, then oblivion and the wasteland outside is all we deserve!

These secrets that I have seen – trivial, enlightening, amusing and awful – imply collectively an insidious dread. There is declared in the fact that what I had once thought to be the future is written as
fait accompli.
It is but one immense mechanism, a clock made of gears grinding upon gears, regular but inflexible and lubricated with a slurry of the blood and ashes of men and none of us can ever be anything more than tiniest complicit wheels within it… and having become the past, that awful machine has seized itself to hold in complete unalterable stasis all of the atrocities committed by man and nature. As the thousands of beetles scribble ceaselessly in their booths, I imagine that for each of them there is another life fixed within that machine, a tiny figure stretched and broken upon a tiny cogwheel.

Fleeing the thought of the bloody rigid clock, now and again I wander in that wrack of a world under the red sun and I become glad of my protection. Strange as I am, strange as my companions are, we have a purpose and this damp twilit shore has none. I do not spend long outside before scurrying back under cover to write and write some more in the stone hall filled with singing machines and busy scribes. Do you see then why I found my strange embodiment ultimately reassuring and comfortable?

This then is the peculiar entwinement of horror and hope that I have found at the end of earth’s time. I found a strange wonder and nobility in the task of the Great Race, which I shall now describe to you. Observing one scribe, I was shocked to discover that it was working on what I could describe as an historical kaleidoscope. As it scratched away at its plaque, I leant over to read and found to my shock that this creature was
chronicling the work of another scribe.
Tremendously intrigued by this I rushed to another and then another in the same row. All of them were writing of the experiences of scribes stationed far in the past relating events still further in the past, leading further and further back into time to the distant prehistory of earth when the Great Race occupied other bodies. According to their descriptions they were even stranger than the coleopterous things that toiled here: they were roughly conical creatures that looked like a bouquet of lilies and clawed fronds mounted in a long pleated skirt that moved it about by a kind of rippling or sweeping motion – at least that description is the best I could make sense of their words and sketches. In any case, as I peeled back one strange mask to reveal another, that mask too lifted to reveal still more weirdness. Those creatures were themselves recording the events of a time and place that could not have occurred at any time on earth and could only have happened upon a planet of another star still further back in time.

The project of the Great Race not one of idle curiosity. They would not employ their great resources to reach through time if it were of passing interest. It is, I have come to realize, their creed, the eternal mission to record. This great litany upon which they collectively toil is the very essence of their being and purpose. Unable to achieve immortality in any material form, they leap across the aeons in mind, and at each stop, they establish what we could call a civilization and which they think of merely as a base camp or reference tableau. They have, I realize, created a great encyclopedia in time and space, its chapters scattered across the eternal cosmos. At any point, on any world and at any era they can open a page on another and read it as it is being freshly written!

These
Yith
know of course the horror both explicit and implicit of which I have written because they write of it too in the manifold recursions of their encyclopedia. It is their technique for crossing time and space extra-corporeally that is their liberation from determinism – provided that they keep moving and never linger in one era or place. Now, they sense that their time here has ended and more and more often their compound eyes swivel away from the dark, vermillion-lit sands of this terminal beach and towards the stars twinkling distantly in the sky above. They are ready to flee once more across the reaches of space and time, these cosmic nomads. Already they have selected their recipients and measuring them to fit. They will take with them the sum of the earth’s history as they have trawled it up from the past, and the history of all their previous abodes too. When they can carry no matter, of course memories are the most precious things to them and they are nothing if not thrifty. Perhaps they are even honorable in doing so, ensuring that mankind, a brief player in the theatre of life before collapsing into decadence and oblivion will be remembered in still more distant aeons. The fact will remain thought that we are but a medallion, a bauble in the forever-reaching hands and they have far brighter prizes.