Across the Zodiac (17 page)

The Regent of that dominion, the only Martialist outside my host's
family with whom I had yet been able to converse, awaited us in the
hall or entrance chamber. I bowed low to him, and then remained
standing. My host, also saluting his visitor, at once took his seat.
The Regent, returning the salute and seating himself, proceeded to
address us; very little ceremony on either side being observed between
this autocratic deputy of an absolute Sovereign and his subjects.

"Esmo
dent Ecasfen
" said the Regent, "will you point out the person
you declare yourself to have rescued from assault and received into
your house on the 431st day of this year?"

"That is the person, Regent," said my host, pointing to me.

The visitor then asked my name, which I gave, and addressing me
thereby, he continued—

"The Camptâ has requested me to ascertain the truth regarding your
alleged size, so far exceeding anything hitherto known among us. You
will permit me, therefore, to measure your height and girth."

I bowed, and he proceeded to ascertain that I was about a foot taller
and some ten inches larger round the waist than himself. Of these
facts he took note, and then proceeded—

"The signs you made to those who first encountered you were understood
to mean that you descended from the sky, in a vessel which is now left
on the summit of yonder mountain, Asnyca."

"I did not descend from the sky," I replied, "for the sky is, as we
both know, no actual vault or boundary of the atmospheric depths. I
ascended from a world nearer to the Sun, and after travelling for
forty days through space, landed upon this planet in the vessel you
mention."

"I am directed," he answered, "to see this vessel, to inspect your
machinery and instruments, and to report thereon to the Suzerain. You
will doubtless be ready to accompany me thither to-morrow two hours
after sunrise. You may be accompanied, if you please, by your host or
any members of his family; I shall be attended by one or more of my
officers. In the meantime I am to inform you that, until my report has
been received and considered, you are under the protection of the law,
and need not apprehend any molestation of the kind you incurred at
first. You will not, however, repeat to any one but myself the
explanation you have offered of your appearance—which, I understand,
has been given in fuller detail to Esmo—until the decision of the
Camptâ shall have been communicated to you."

I simply bowed my assent; and after this brief but sufficient
fulfilment of the purpose for which he had called, the Regent took his
leave.

"What," I asked, when we re-entered my chamber, "is the meaning of the
title by which the Regent addressed you?"

"In speaking to officials," he replied, "of rank so high as his, it is
customary to address them simply by their titles, unless more than one
of the same rank be present, in which case we call them, as we do
inferior officials, by their name with the title appended. For
instance, in the Court of the Sovereign our Regent would be called
Endo Zamptâ. Men of a certain age and social position, but having no
office, are addressed by their name and that of their residence; and,
asfe
meaning a town or dwelling, usage gives me the name of Esmo, in
or of the town of Eca.

"I am sorry," he went on, "that neither my son nor myself can
accompany you to-morrow. All the elder members of my family are
engaged to attend at some distance hence before the hour at which you
can return. But I should not like you to be alone with strangers; and,
independently of this consideration, I should perhaps have asked of
you a somewhat unusual favour. My daughter Eveena, who, like most of
our
women" (he laid a special emphasis on the pronoun) "has received
a better education than is now given in the public academies, has been
from the first greatly interested in your narrative and in all you
have told us of the world from which you come. She is anxious to see
your vessel, and I had hoped to take her when I meant to visit it in
your company. But after to-morrow I cannot tell when you may be
summoned to visit the Camptâ, or whether after that visit you are
likely to return hither. I will ask you, therefore, if you do not
object to what I confess is an unusual proceeding, to take Eveena
under your charge to-morrow."

"Is it," I inquired, "permissible for a young lady to accompany a
stranger on such an excursion?"

"It is very unusual," returned my host; "but you must observe that
here family ties are, as a rule, unknown. It cannot be usual for a
maiden to be attended by father or brother, since she knows neither.
It is only by a husband that a girl can, as a rule, be attended
abroad. Our usages render such attendance exceedingly close, and, on
the other hand, forbid strangers to interrupt or take notice thereof.
In Eveena's presence the Regent will find it difficult to draw you
into conversation which might be inconvenient or dangerous; and
especially cannot attempt to gratify, by questioning you, any
curiosity as to myself or my family."

"But," I said, "from what you say, it seems that the Regent and any
one who might accompany him would draw inferences which might not be
agreeable to you or to the young lady."

"I hardly understand you," he replied. "The only conjecture they could
make, which they will certainly make, is that you are, or are about to
be, married to her; and as they will never see her again, and, if they
did, could not recognise her—as they will not to-morrow know anything
save that she belongs to my household, and certainly will not speak to
her—I do not see how their inference can affect her. When I part with
her, it will be to some one of my own customs and opinions; and to us
this close confinement of girls appears to transcend reasonable
restraint, as it contradicts the theoretical freedom and equality
granted by law to the sex, but utterly withheld by the social usages
which have grown out of that law."

"I can only thank you for giving me a companion more agreeable than
the official who is to report upon my reality," I said.

"I do not desire," he continued, "to bind you to any reserve in
replying to questions, beyond what I am sure you will do without a
pledge—namely, to avoid betraying more than you can help of that
which is not known outside my own household. But on this subject I may
be able to speak more fully after to-morrow. Now, if you will come
into the peristyle, we shall be in time for the evening meal."

Eveena's curiosity had in nowise overcome her silent shyness. She
might possibly have completed her tenth year, which epoch in the life
of Mars is about equivalent to the seventeenth birthday of a damsel
nurtured in North-Western Europe. I hardly think that I had addressed
her directly half-a-dozen times, or had received from her a dozen
words in return. I had been attracted, nevertheless, not only by her
grace and beauty, but by the peculiar sweetness of her voice and the
gentleness of her manner and bearing when engaged in pacifying dispute
or difficulty among the children, and particularly in dealing with the
half-deformed spoilt infant of which I have spoken. This evening that
little brat was more than usually exasperating, and having exhausted
the patience or repelled the company of all the rest, found itself
alone, and set up a fretful, continuous scream, disagreeable even to
me, and torturing to Martial ears, which, adapted to hear in that thin
air, are painfully alive to strident, harsh, or even loud sounds.
Instantly obeying a sign from her mother, Eveena rose in the middle of
a conversation to which she had listened with evident interest, and
devoted herself for half-an-hour to please and pacify this
uncomfortable child. The character and appearance of this infant, so
utterly unlike all its companions, had already excited my curiosity,
but I had found no opportunity of asking a question without risking an
impertinence. On this occasion, however, I ventured to make some
remark on the extreme gentleness and forbearance with which not only
Eveena but the children treated their peevish and exacting brother.

"He is no brother of theirs," said Zulve, the mistress of the house.
"You would hardly find in any family like ours a child with so
irritable a temper or a disposition so selfish, and nowhere a creature
so hardly treated by Nature in body as well as mind."

"Indeed," I said, hardly understanding her answer.

"No," said my host. "It is the rule to deprive of life, promptly and
painlessly, children to whom, from physical deformity or defect, life
is thought unlikely to be pleasant, and whose descendants might be a
burden to the public and a cause of physical deterioration to the
race. It is, however, one of the exceptional tenets to which I have
been obliged to allude, that man should not seek to be wiser than
Nature; and that life should neither be cut short, except as a
punishment for great crimes, nor prolonged artificially contrary to
the manifest intention, or, as our philosophers would say, the common
course of Nature. Those who think with me, therefore, always
endeavour, when we hear in time of their approaching fate, to preserve
children so doomed. Precautions against undue haste or readiness to
destroy lives that might, after all, grow up to health and vigour are
provided by law. No single physician or physiologist can sign a
death-warrant; and I, though no longer a physician by craft, am among
the arbiters, one or more of whom must be called in to approve or
suspend the decision. On these occasions I have rescued from
extinction several children of whose unfitness to live, according to
the standard of the State Nurseries, there was no question, and placed
them in families, mostly childless, that were willing to receive them.
Of this one it was our turn to take charge; and certainly his chance
is better for being brought up among other children, and under the
influence of their gentler dispositions and less exacting
temperaments."

"And is such ill-temper and selfishness," I asked, "generally found
among the deformed?"

"I don't think," replied Esmo, "that this child is much worse than
most of my neighbours' children, except that physical discomfort makes
him fretful. What you call selfishness in him is only the natural
inheritance derived from an ancestry who for some hundred generations
have certainly never cared for anything or any one but themselves. I
thought I had explained to you by what train of circumstances and of
reasoning family affection, such as it is reputed to have been
thousands of years ago, has become extinct in this planet; and, family
affection extinguished, all weaker sentiments of regard for others
were very quickly withered up."

"You told me something of the kind," I said; "but the idea of a life
so utterly swallowed up in self that no one even thinks it necessary
to affect regard for and interest in others, was to me so
unintelligible and inconceivable that I did not realise the full
meaning of your account. Nor even now do I understand how a society
formed of such members can be held together. On Earth we should expect
them either to tear one another to pieces, or to relapse into
isolation and barbarism lower than that of the lowest tribe which
preserves social instincts and social organisation. A society composed
of men resembling that child, but with the intelligence, force, and
consistent purpose of manhood, would, I should have thought, be little
better than a congregation of beasts of prey."

"We have such beasts," said Esmo, "in the wild lands, and they are
certainly unsociable and solitary. But men, at least civilised men,
are governed not only by instinct but by interest, and the interest of
each individual in the preservation of social co-operation and social
order is very evident and very powerful. Experience and school
discipline cure children of the habit of indulging mere temper and
spite before they come to be men, and they are taught by practice as
well as by precept the absolute necessity of co-operation. Egotism,
therefore, has no tendency to dissolve society as a mere organisation,
though it has utterly destroyed society as a source of pleasure."

"Does your law," I asked, "confine the principle of euthanasia to
infants, or do you put out of the world adults whose life is supposed,
for one reason or another, to be useless and joyless?"

"Only," he answered, "in the case of the insane. When the doctors are
satisfied that a lunatic cannot be cured, an inquest is held; and if
the medical verdict be approved, he is quietly and painlessly
dismissed from existence. Logically, of course, the same principle
should be applied to all incurable disease; and I suspect—indeed I
know—that it is applied when the household have become weary, and the
patient is utterly unable to protect himself or appeal to the law. But
the general application of the principle has been successfully
resisted, on the ground that the terror it would cause, the constant
anxiety and alarm in which men would live if the right of judging when
life had become worthless to them were left to others, would far
outweigh any benefit which might be derived from the legalised
extinction of existences which had become a prolonged misery; and such
cases, as I have told you, are very rare among us. A case of hopeless
bodily suffering, not terminating very speedily in death, does not
occur thrice a year among the whole population of the planet, except
through accident. We have means of curing at the outset almost all of
those diseases which the observance for hundreds of generations of
sound physical conditions of life has not extirpated; and in the worst
instances our anæsthetics seldom fail to extinguish the sense of pain
without impairing intellect. Of course, any one who is tired of his
life is at liberty to put an end to it, and any one else may assist
him. But, though the clinging to existence is perhaps the most
irrational of all those purely animal instincts on emancipation from
which we pride ourselves, it is the strongest and the most lasting.
The life of most of my countrymen would be to me intolerable
weariness, if only from the utter want, after wealth is attained, of
all warmer and less isolated interest than some one pet scientific
pursuit can afford; and yet more from the total absence of affection,
family duties, and the various mental occupations which interest in
others affords. But though the question whether life is worth living
has long ago been settled among us in the negative, suicide, the
logical outcome of that conviction, is the rarest of all the methods
by which life is terminated."