Across the Zodiac (14 page)

He explained the motives and conduct of his countrymen with such
perfect coolness, such absence of surprise or indignation, that I felt
slightly nettled, and answered sarcastically, "If the slaughter of
strangers whose account of themselves appears improbable be so
completely a matter of course among you, I am at a loss to understand
your own interference, and the treatment I have received from yourself
and your family, so utterly opposite in spirit as well as in form to
that I met from everybody else."

"I do not," he answered, "always act from the motives in vogue among
my fellow-creatures of this planet; but why and how I differ from them
it might not be well to explain. It is for the moment of more
consequence to tell you why you have been kept in some sense a
prisoner here. My neighbours, independently of general laws, are for
certain reasons afraid to do me serious wrong. While in my company or
in my dwelling they could hardly attempt your life without endangering
mine or those of my family. If you were seen alone outside my
premises, another attempt, whether by the asphyxiator or by a
destructive animal, would probably be made, and might this time prove
successful. Till, therefore, the question of your humanity and right
to the protection of our law is decided by those to whom it has been
submitted, I will beg you not to venture alone beyond the bounds that
afford you security; and to believe that in this request, as in
detaining you perforce heretofore, I am acting simply for your own
welfare, and not," he added, smiling, "with a view to secure the first
opportunity of putting your relation to our race to the tests of the
dissecting table and the laboratory."

"But my story explained everything that seemed inexplicable; why was
it not believed? It was assumed that I could not belong to Mars; yet I
was a living creature in the flesh, and must therefore have come from
some other planet, as I could hardly be supposed to be an inhabitant
of space."

"We don't reason on impossibilities," replied my friend. "We have a
maxim that it is more probable that any number of witnesses should
lie, that the senses of any number of persons should be deluded, than
that a miracle should be true; and by a miracle we mean an
interruption or violation of the known laws of nature."

"One eminent terrestrial sceptic," I rejoined, "has said the same
thing, and masters of the science of probabilities have supported his
assertion. But a miracle should be a violation not merely of the known
but of all the laws of nature, and until you know all those laws, how
can you tell what is a miracle? The lifting of iron by a magnet—I
suppose you have iron and loadstones here as we have on Earth—was, to
the first man who witnessed it, just as complete a violation of the
law of gravity as now appears my voyage through space, accomplished by
a force bearing some relation to that which acts through the magnet."

"Our philosophers," he answered, "are probably satisfied that they
know nearly all that is to be known of natural laws and forces; and to
delusion or illusion human sense is undeniably liable."

"If," I said, "you cannot trust your senses, you may as well
disbelieve in your own existence and in everything around you, for you
know nothing save through those senses which are liable to illusion.
But we know practically that there are limits to illusion. At any
rate, your maxim leads directly and practically to the inference that,
since I do not belong to Mars and cannot have come from any other
world, I am not here, and in fact do not exist. Surely it was somewhat
illogical to shoot an illusion and intend to dissect a spectre! Is not
a fact the complete and unanswerable refutation of its impossibility?"

"A good many facts to which I could testify," he replied, "are in this
world confessed impossibilities, and if my neighbours witnessed them
they would pronounce them to be either impostures or illusions."

"Then," said I, somewhat indignantly, "they must prefer inferences
from facts to facts themselves, and the deductions of logic to the
evidence of their senses. Yet, if that evidence be wanting in
certainty, then, since no chain can be stronger than its weakest
point, inferences are doubly uncertain; first, because they are drawn
from facts reported by sense, and, secondly, because a flaw in the
logic is always possible."

"Do not repeat that out of doors," he answered, smiling. "It is not
permitted here to doubt the infallibility of science; and any one who
ventures to affirm persistently a story which science pronounces
impossible (like your voyage through space), if he do not fall at once
a victim to popular piety, would be consigned to the worse than living
death of life-long confinement in a lunatic hospital."

"In that case I fear very much that I have little chance of being put
under the protection of your laws, since, whatever may be the
impression of those who have seen me, every one else must inevitably
pronounce me non-existent; and a nonentity can hardly be the subject
of legal wrong or have a right to legal redress."

"Nor," he replied, "can there be any need or any right to annihilate
that which does not exist. This alternative may occupy our Courts of
Justice, for aught I know, longer than you or I can hope to live. What
I have asked is that, till these have decided between two
contradictory absurdities, you shall be provisionally and without
prejudice considered as a human reality and an object of legal
protection."

"And who," I asked, "has authority
ad interim
to decide this point?"

"It was submitted," he answered, "in the first place, to the Astyntâ
(captain, president) who governs this district; but, as I expected, he
declined to pronounce upon it, and referred it to the Mepta (governor)
of the province. Half-an-hour's argument so bewildered the latter that
he sent the question immediately to the Zamptâ (Regent) of this
dominion, and he, after hearing by telegraph the opening of the case,
at once pronounced that, as affecting the entire planet, it must be
decided by the Camptâ or Suzerain. Now this gentleman is impatient of
the dogmatism of the philosophers, who have tried recently to impose
upon him one or two new theoretical rules which would limit the amount
of what he calls free will that he practically enjoys; and as the
philosophers are all against you, and as, moreover, he has a strong
though secret hankering after curious phenomena—it would not do to
say, after impossibilities—I do not think he will allow you to be
destroyed, at least till he has seen you."

"Is it possible," I said, "that even your monarch cherishes a belief
in the incredible or logically impossible, and yet escapes the lunatic
asylum with which you threaten me?"

"I should not escape grave consequences were I to attribute to him a
heresy so detestable," said my host. "Even the Camptâ would not be
rash enough to let it be said that he doubts the infallibility of
science, or of public opinion as its exponent. But as it is the worst
of offences to suggest the existence of that which is pronounced
impossible or unscientific, the supreme authority can always, in
virtue of the enormity of the guilt, insist on undertaking himself the
executive investigation of all such cases; and generally contrives to
have the impossibility, if a tangible one, brought into the presence
either as evidence or as accomplice."

"Well," I rejoined, after a few minutes' reflection, "I don't know
that I have much right to complain of ideas which, after all, are but
the logical development of those which, are finding constantly more
and more favour among our most enlightened nations. I can quite
believe, from what I have seen of our leading scientists, that in
another century it may be dangerous in my own country for my
descendants to profess that belief in a Creator and a future life
which I am superstitious enough to prefer to all the revelations of
all the material sciences."

"As you value your life and freedom," he replied, "don't speak of such
a belief here, save to the members of my own family, and to those with
whom I may tell you you are safe. Such ideas were held here, almost as
generally as you say they now are on Earth, some twelve thousand years
ago, and twenty thousand years ago their profession was compulsory.
But for the last hundred centuries it has been settled that they are
utterly fatal to the progress of the race, to enlightenment, to
morality, and to the practical devotion of our energies to the
business of life; and they are not merely disavowed and denounced, but
hated with an earnestness proportioned to the scientific enthusiasm of
classes and individuals."

"But," said I, "if so long, so severely, and so universally
discountenanced, how can their expression by one man here or there be
considered perilous?"

"Our philosophers say," he replied, "that the attractiveness of these
ideas to certain minds is such that no reasoning, no demonstration of
their absurdity, will prevent their exercising a mischievous influence
upon weak, and especially upon feminine natures; and perhaps the
suspicion that they are still held in secret may contribute to keep
alive the bitterness with which they are repudiated and repressed. But
if they are so held, if there be any who believe that the order of the
universe was at first established, and that its active forces are
still sustained and governed, by a conscious Intelligence—if there be
those who think that they have proof positive of the continued
existence of human beings after death—their secret has been well
kept. For very many centuries have elapsed since the last victim of
such delusions, as they were solemnly pronounced by public vote in the
reign of the four-hundredth predecessor of the present Camptâ, was
sent as incurable to the dangerous ward of our strictest hospital for
the insane."

A tone of irony, and at the same time an air of guarded reserve,
seemed to pervade all my host's remarks on this subject, and I
perceived that for some reason it was so unpleasant to him that
courtesy obliged me to drop it. I put, therefore, to turn the
conversation, some questions as to the political organisation of which
his words had afforded me a glimpse; and in reply he undertook to give
me a summary of the political history of his planet during the last
few hundred generations.

"If," he said, "in giving you this sketch of the process by which our
present social order has been established, I should mention a class or
party who have stood at certain times distinctly apart from or in
opposition to the majority, I must, in the first place, beg you to ask
no questions about them, and in the next not to repeat incautiously
the little I may tell you, or to show, by asking questions of others,
what you have heard from me."

I gave my promise frankly, of course, and he then gave me the
following sketch of Martial history:—

We date events from the union of all races and nations in a single
State, a union which was formally established 13,218 years ago. At
that time the large majority of the inhabitants of this planet
possessed no other property than their houses, clothes, and tools,
their furniture, and a few other trifles. The land was owned by fewer
than 400,000 proprietors. Those who possessed movable wealth may have
numbered thrice as many. Political and social power was in the hands
of the owners of property, and of those, generally connected with them
by birth or marriage, who were at any rate not dependent on manual
labour for their bread. But among these there were divisions and
factions on various questions more or less trivial, none of them
approaching in importance or interest to the fundamental and
irreconcilable conflict sure one day to arise between those who had
accumulated wealth and those who had not. To gain their ends in one or
another of these frivolous quarrels, each party in turn admitted to
political influence section after section of what you call the
proletariat; till in the year 3278 universal suffrage was granted,
every man and woman over the age of twelve years
[6]
being entitled to
a single and equal vote.

About the same time the change in opinion of which I have spoken had
taken general effect, and the vast majority of the men, at any rate,
had ceased to believe in a future life wherein the inequalities and
iniquities of this might be redressed. It followed that they were
fiercely impatient of hardships and suffering, especially such as they
thought might be redressed by political and social changes. The
leaders of the multitude, for the most part men belonging to the
propertied classes who had either wasted their wealth or never
possessed any, demanded the abolition of private ownership, first of
land, then of movable wealth; a demand which fiercely excited the
passions of those who possessed neither, and as bitterly provoked the
anger and alarm of those who did. The struggle raged for some
generations and ended by an appeal to the sword; in which, since the
force of the State was by law in the hands of the majority, the
intelligent, thrifty, careful owners of property with their adherents
were signally defeated. Universal communism was established in 3412,
none being permitted to own, or even to claim, the exclusive use of
any portion of the planet's surface, or of any other property except
the share of food and clothing allotted to him. One only privilege was
allowed to certain sectaries who still clung to the habits of the
past, to the permanence and privacy of family life. They were
permitted to have houses or portions of houses to themselves, and to
live there on the share of the public produce allotted to the several
members of each household. It had been assumed as matter of course by
the majority that when every one was forced to work there would be
more than enough for all; that public spirit, and if necessary
coercion, would prove as effectual stimulants to exertion and industry
as interest and necessity had done under the system of private
ownership.