The Seeds of Time (17 page)

I think it was during that questioning that I really began to feel that there was something seriously wrong with my dream. They wanted to know my name, where I came from, what I did, when I did it, and a great deal more, and the answers I gave caused them pauses from time to time to confer. It was all very logical and detailed – that was what was wrong. Dreams – my dreams, at any rate – have a more cinematic quality. They do not proceed in smooth sequence, but jump rather suddenly from one scene to another as though a not quite sane director somewhere were ordering ‘Take!' and ‘Cut!' when he felt like it. But this was not at all that way. I was acutely aware of what was going on, both physically and mentally …

Progress was slow on account of Clytassamine's indifferent English, but we made enough of it to produce longer and more involved conferences. At last she said:

‘They – wish – you – learn – language. More – easy – to speak.'

‘That's going to take a long time,' I said, for no word that any of them had yet spoken had the least familiar relation for me.

‘No. Few – thlana.'

I looked blank.

‘Quarter – day,' she explained.

She gave me some food first – a box of things which looked like candies and tasted good, but not sweet.

‘Now – sleep,' said Clytassamine, pointing to a cold, unfriendly looking block.

I got on it, and found that it was neither chill nor hard. I lay wondering if this was the end of it and I would wake up to find
myself back in my own bed with the old pain where my legs ought to be. But I didn't wonder long – maybe there was something in the food.

When I woke up I was still there. Hanging over me was a kind of canopy of rose-coloured metal which had not been there before. It was – but I am going to give up attempting to describe things. Frankly, I could understand about one per cent of what I saw, so what is the use? There was too much basic unfamiliarity. What would an ancient Egyptian know of a telephone by looking at it? What would a Roman or a Greek make of a jet plane, or of radio? Or, coming right down to the simple things, if you saw a slab of chocolate for the first time you might think it was for mending shoes, lighting the fire, or building houses – about the last thing you'd think was that that hard brown rectangle was meant for eating – and when you did find it out, you'd most likely try eating soap, too, because the texture was similar and the colour was more attractive. That's the way it was with me. You grow up with your network of thinking patterns on an acquired foundation. You look at a machine, almost subconsciously you say to yourself ‘Ah, that works by steam, or oil, or electricity' and you go on from there. But nearly all of what I was seeing now was fundamentally foreign to me. I'd no place to start, and, not understanding what might bite me or burn me any minute, I was scared of it – just like a child or a backward aboriginal. Naturally I floundered around with wild guesses, but mostly they had to remain just that. I guessed now, for instance, that the canopy was a part of a hypnotic teaching machine such as I'd heard of people trying to develop. I guessed that because I found I could now understand what the people were saying – some of it – but of the how or the why, I knew nothing. In some way I had acquired an understanding of the language they spoke, but the concepts that were behind it did not necessarily follow … I knew just what I could translate. The word
thlana
that Clytassamine had used I now knew for a measure of time – one hour and twelve minutes, making twenty
thlana
to the day – and
dool
was electricity, but
laythal
meant nothing to me. I had to work it out that it was some form of power unknown to me, so that I had no equivalent to translate it to.

This certainly had the effect of enhancing the dream-like quality. The utter blankness of certain words, which kept on cropping up like the dumb notes on a bar-room piano, began to get me more bewildered than before. After a bit, my distress must have begun to show pretty plainly because they laid off questioning, and told Clytassamine to take me away and look after me. My mind was whirling so much with the attempts to understand that the relief was almost physical as I sat down beside her again, and I sighed in relaxation when the seat floated us back once more into the open air.

Before I understood anything about this world I was immensely impressed by Clytassamine's power of mental adjustment. It seemed to me that it must be a frightening thing to find that one whom you have known intimately has suddenly become a perfect stranger – with, maybe, unpredictable reactions. Yet she showed no alarm, and only occasionally made the slip of calling me Hymorell.

I understood why somebody recovering consciousness usually demands first of all ‘Where am I?' I wanted to know that very much; without some relation to my circumstances I didn't seem to be able to get my thinking started properly. There was no fixed point to begin from. When we were back in the green room again I began to ask questions. She looked at me doubtfully.

‘You should rest. Simply relax and don't worry. We will look after you. If I were to try to explain I would only bewilder you more.'

‘You couldn't,' I told her. ‘Nothing could. I've got to the stage where I can't pretend this is a dream any longer. I've got to get some kind of orientation, or go crazy.'

She looked at me closely again, and then nodded.

‘Very well. But where am I to begin? What is most urgent?'

‘I want to know where I am, who I am, and how it happened.'

‘As
to who you are, you know that. You told me you are Terry Molton.'

‘But this' – I slapped my left thigh – ‘this isn't Terry Molton.'

‘Temporarily it is,' she said. ‘It was Hymorell's body, but now everything that makes it individual – mentality, personality, character – are yours: therefore it is Terry's body.'

‘And Hymorell?' I asked.

‘He has transferred to what was your body.'

‘Then he's made a remarkably bad deal,' I told her. I thought for a moment, then:

‘That doesn't make sense,' I said. ‘Disposition isn't constant. I know that. I'm not the same as I was before I was shot up, for instance. Physical differences make mental differences. Personality largely depends on the equilibrium of the glands. Injuries, and dope, changed mine to some extent – if they'd done it more I'd have quite a different personality.'

‘Who told you that?' she asked.

‘It's a matter of scientific knowledge – and common sense,' I told her.

‘And your scientists postulate no constant? Surely there must be some constant factor to be affected by changes? And if there is that factor, may it not be a cause rather than simply an effect?'

‘As I understand it, it's simply a matter of balance – an affair of forces held in equilibrium.'

‘Then you
don't
understand it,' she told me.

‘Oh,' I said.

I decided to drop that angle for the moment.

‘What is this place?' I asked.

‘The building is called Cathalu,' she said.

‘No. I mean where is it? Is it on Earth? It looks like Earth, all right – but nowhere that I ever heard of.'

‘Of course it's Earth – where else would it be? But it's in a different salany,' she said.

I looked back at her, up against one of those dumb words once more. Salany meant just nothing to me.

‘Do
you mean it's in a different – ?' I began, and then I stopped, baffled. There didn't seem to be a word in her language for ‘time' – at least not in the sense I was wanting it.

‘I told you it would be bewildering,' she said. ‘You think differently. In terms of old thinking – as near as I can understand it – you came from one end of the human race, now you are at the other.'

‘But I don't,' I protested. ‘There were some twenty million years of human evolution before me.'

‘Oh, that!' she said, airily dismissing those twenty million years with a wave of her hand.

‘Well, at least,' I went on, rather desperately, ‘you can tell me how I got here.'

‘Roughly, yes. It is an experiment of Hymorell's. He has been trying for a long time' – (and in this straightforward, day to day, sense, I noticed, there
did
seem to be a word for time) – ‘but now he has made a new approach – a successful one at last. Several times before he has almost done it, but the transfer did not hold. His most successful attempts until now were about three generations ago. He –'

‘I beg your pardon?' I said.

She looked questioningly.

‘I thought you said he tried three generations ago?'

‘So I did,' she agreed.

I got up from the block I'd been sitting on, and looked out of the arched windows. It was a peaceful, sunny, normal-looking day out there.

‘Maybe you were right. I'd better rest,' I said.

‘That's sensible,' she agreed. ‘Don't bother your head about the hows and whys. After all, you won't be here long.'

‘You mean, I'll be going back – to be as I was?'

She nodded.

I could feel my body under the unfamiliar robe. It was a good body, strong, well kept, lithe, whole – and there was no pain in it any place …

‘No,'
I said. ‘I don't know where I am, or what I am now, but one thing I do know – and that is that I'm not going back to the hell where I was.'

She just looked at me a little sadly, and shook her head slowly.

The next day, after we had fed on more of the candies that were not candies, and drunk an elusively flavoured milky stuff, she led the way into the hall, and towards the chairs. I stopped.

‘Can't we walk?' I said. ‘It's a long time since I walked.'

‘Why, yes, of course,' she agreed, and we turned towards the doorway.

Several people spoke to her, and one or two of them to me. There was curiosity in their eyes, but their manners were kindly, as though to set a stranger at ease. It was evident that they knew I was not Hymorell, yet apparently I was not sensational. Outside, we walked across rough grass and found a path leading through a spinney. It was quiet, peaceful, Arcadianly beautiful. To me, now feeling the very ground beneath my feet as something precious, everything had the freshness of spring. The blood livened in my veins in a way that I had forgotten.

‘Wherever it is, it's lovely,' I said.

‘Yes, it is lovely,' she agreed.

We walked on in silence for a while, then my curiosity came back.

‘What did you mean by “the other end of the race”?' I asked her.

‘Just that. We think we are coming to the end, finishing. We are practically sure of it – though there is always chance.'

I looked at her.

‘I have never seen anyone more healthy, or more beautiful,' I said.

She smiled.

‘It's a nice body,' she agreed. ‘My best, I think.'

For the moment I ignored that baffling addition.

‘Then what is happening – is it infertility?' I asked.

‘No. There are not a great many children, but that is more a
result than a cause. It is that something in us is failing to reproduce – the thing that makes us human instead of just animal – we call it malukos.'

The word gave me an impression akin to a spirit or a soul, yet not quite either.

‘Then the children – ?'

‘They nearly all of them lack that. They are – feeble-minded,' she said. ‘If things go on this way they will all be like that one day – and then it will be over.'

I pondered that, feeling that I was back in the dream again.

‘How long has this been happening?' I asked.

‘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: