Cryptozoic! (23 page)

Howes made a wide angry gesture of hopelessness. "Okay -- then if it
happens the way you and Silverstone say,
why don't we see it that way?
"
Sighing, the professor said, "We have explained that. Our perceptions
have been strained through a distorting lens of mind, so that we saw
things backwards, just as the lens of the eye actually sees everything
upside-down." He turned to Borrow, who was gnawing some beef twigs Ann
had passed round. "Are
you
grasping all this, my friend?"
"I find this shooting business easier to grasp than the idea of the universe
closing in on us. Suppose you divide the shooting up into a series of
scenes like a comic strip, and number them. The first shows a dead body,
horizontal; the second, body half off ground; third, body almost upright,
ray coming from it; fourth, ray going back into gun; fifth, gun button
being pressed; sixth, resolution forming in gun-owner's mind. Those six
scenes all exist in space-time -- and with our experience of mind-travel,
we know they always exist, can be revisited over and over like any other
event in history. Okay; they lie there like six pictures of a strip on
a page. They can be read from one to six or from six to one, although
only one way is the right way. Just happens we always read them the
wrong way. Am I right, Professor?"
"Yes, yes, a good analogy. We experienced them the wrong way, since our
very memories were distorted. Do you see it more clearly now, Captain?"
Howes scratched the back of his neck and shrugged. "Give me another cup
of coffee, will you, Ann?"
They had reached some sort of a pause. Silverstone and Bush looked rather
hopelessly at each other. Perhaps because of tiredness, Bush's first spurt
of intellectual excitement had worn thin. He had hardly touched his food.
He stared grimly at the massed ranks of shadowy people about them, many of
them, in the illusions of mind-travel, seeming to stand half in the
ambiguously shaped rocks.
"Ann -- I'd like another cup of coffee!" Howes repeated sharply.
She was sitting with her knees drawn up, her rations lying beside her,
staring into the grey rock ahead of her, a totally blank expression on
her face. In alarm, Bush leaned over and shook her shoulder gently.
"Are you all right, Ann?"
By dragging degrees, her head came round and she stared at him.
"Are you going to point your gun at me again, Eddie, and demonstrate
the new system? I think you're all in a dream -- this awful place has
hypnotized you. Can't you realize that what you are saying is just tearing
human life up by the roots and -- and laughing at it? Well, I don't want
to hear a word more! I've heard enough, and I want to go back -- back to
the Jurassic or
anywhere
, rather than hear you men talk this frightening
stuff in this frightening dump! It's like a terrible dream! I'm going
back -- or forward -- or wherever the hell you think it is!"
"No!" Silverstone jumped up. He could see she was on the verge of hysterics.
Anxiously, he took her hands.
"Ann, I can't let you leave! I need -- we all need a woman's common sense
on this. Don't you see? We're -- sort of disciples, a band of disciples.
We must go back to 2093 when we've got things clear and
explain
to other
people -- "
"Well, you won't catch me explaining, Norman! I'm not your kind and you
know it -- I'm just an ordinary person."
"We are all ordinary persons, and all ordinary persons are going to have
to face the truth."
"Why? I've passed thirty-two years happy enough with a lie!"
"Happy, Ann? Really happy? Not frightened at heart, aware as several
generations ahead to the twentieth century have been that some immense
and awful revelation was about to burst? People have to know the truth!"
"Leave her to me, Professor," Bush said. He put his arm round her.
"Please stay and listen, Ann! We do need you here. You'll be okay. I know
how tough you are. You can take all this."
She almost managed to smile at him. "I'm tough, am I? You men are all
the same, whichever way round things are! You so love something new,
theories, all that stuff! Look, all this that you were saying about
bolts going back into guns, all explained in six scenes -- "
"Roger made that pretty clear."
"God, clear!" She laughed scornfully. "Do you realize what you were
talking about? You were talking about the dead coming to life again --
lying bleeding on the ground, perhaps, and the blood sucking back into
the veins, and then the chap getting up and walking away as if nothing
had happened!"
"Christ!" Bush and Borrow said together.
The girl jumped up. "Okay, then -- take Christ! You're talking about
him hanging on the cross, getting the spear through his side, coming to
life, having the Romans pulling -- hammering -- the nails from his hands,
getting him down, letting him go back to his disciples. . . . Aren't you?"
Silverstone clapped his hands.
"She's got it! She's got it first! I was going to postpone the new concept
of animal and human existence until later but -- "
"To hell with that!" she said. She stood there with her back to the grey
rocks, defying them all. "To hell with new concepts! You were talking about
dead men coming alive and you didn't even realize it, you were so wrapped
up in theories! I tell you, you're mad!"
"In that sense, perhaps we are," Silverstone admitted, pulling his
self-mocking-bird face. "Ann, I apologize. We have tried to remain
detached. It's a man's way of going about things: The shooting was just
an example Captain Howes gave us. Let's deal with human life now and I
promise you it will not be too terrible when you understand fully."
"The dead walk!" She folded her arms and stared at him as if she had never
seen a man before. "Okay, Professor Norman Silverstone, go ahead and
scare me!"
"As Ann realizes -- as I realize -- with the collapse of the overmind,
the naked and true undermind's view of life is somewhat startling,
even horrifying, at first sight," Silverstone said.
"The sun rises in the west and sets in the east. It acts like the governor
of all organic and mortal life that, with their circadian rhythms, come
under its sway. Shortly after the beginning of the year, the dead leaves
stir, turn gold, rise from the ground in shoals, and coat the beech trees;
the beeches then turn them green and by the eighth month suck them back
into themselves in the form of buds; all this time, the trees have been
pouring out nourishment into the soil; now they stand bare throughout
March, February, January, and December, until their next ingestion ot
leaves gives them strength to grow smaller again. As with the beech,
so of course with the other trees. Acorns from giant oak trees grow.
"And as with the trees, so with animals and humankind. Some of the major
religions of the world -- which after all obtain their power from the
undermind -- must have guessed the true way of things; their claim that
we shall all rise again from the grave is nothing less than the literal
truth. At the same time, the medieval notion of spontaneous generation is
also fulfilled. In the moldering bones of the grave, organization stirs;
worms put flesh onto bones; something more and more like a human is built;
the coffin is filled, needing only the mourners to come and haul it from
the ground, take it home, absorb the moisture from their handkerchiefs,
and clutch each other just before the first breath enters the body. Or, if
the body was cremated, then flames will reconstitute the ashes into flesh.
"Human life bursts in upon the world in countless ways! Bodies rise again
from the sea bed during storms and are washed back onto ships that also
emerge from the waves. Before road accidents, you will see ambulances
rush backwards with broken limbs that are strewn over the road to join
themselves into a living being, jerking into a car that deconcertinas
away from another car. Wreckage that has possibly rusted for years on a
remote mountainside will grow gleaming, lurch abruptly into form, and
roar flaming backwards into the sky, its passengers suddenly snapping
into frenzied life; they will suffer apprehensions, but all will be well,
for the fire will die out and the plane take itself back to a civilized
airfield.
"In these and many other ways, population increases. But the special
ceremony whereby human life is increased is war. From wrecked buildings,
from bomb craters, from splintered forests, from gutted tanks and sunken
subs and muddy batflefields, the dead rise up and live and their wounds
heal, and they grow younger. War is the great harvester of birth over
the planet.
"So much for birth. What of death? We know the future, that the human race
is dwindling towards its union with animal kind, that the end of the Earth
is so near, geologically speaking, that everything is tending towards the
less and the mindless. So marvelously is everything planned, that humanity
follows that same pattern, in the general and in the individual. Every
human being -- and of course this applies to the animals as well -- grows
younger and smaller, with most of his faculties reaching maturity just
before he loses the abilities of puberty. He then grows through boyhood,
probably attending school to forget the knowledge he will no longer
need. The decline into helplessness is comparatively swift and merciful;
it is possible that at the age called twelve -- twelve years to the womb,
that is -- the human is probably as mentally alert as he will ever be:
and he needs all his alertness, for there is the complicated business of
unlearning the language to go through. For most, this is a happy period to
which they gladly surrender at the end of their life. They can lie back in
their mothers' arms and babble without care. They hardly know it when the
time comes for them to return to the womb, that grave of the human race.
"Perhaps I should add here -- you'll forgive me, Ann -- that the mother
often experiences first pain and then discomfort over this process;
it is a month or two before the child's struggles die away completely
and he merges fully with the life of her body. But things do improve
for her, and when the child has dwindled to a speck, her husband or
lover penetrates her and syphons off the residual matter. The process
is complete and they often fall in love before parting forever.
"Any questions?"
Bush, Howes, and Borrow all looked at Ann. She was still standing against
one of the monstrous grey Cryptozoic boulders, staring at Silverstone.
They had taken the retrograde progression of the universe with some aplomb;
the backward flow of human life had knocked them cold.
"You dress it up to sound almost pretty," she said. "You steered away
from the nasty side, didn't you. What about being sick, and eating --
and all that?"
"You can think through the process for yourself," Silverstone said steadily.
"Eating and elimination are merely the reverse of what the overmind has
assured us was the case. It may seem revolting, but that is because it
is new -- "
"Yes, but -- you're saying the food comes out of our mouths onto our
plates, and is eventually decooked and sent back to the butcher and the
slaughterer to be made into animals -- aren't you?"
"I am. And I'm also saying that when you have lived with the idea for
a year or two, as I have, you will find it no more objectionable than
the idea of chopping up animals and cooking and eating them."
Gesturing impatiently, as if she found his argument mere sophistry,
she turned to Bush, who was standing next to her. He noted how their
every movement was followed by the shadowy throng round about them,
and hated the audience heartily.
"You can take all this, Eddie, can't you?"
"Yes. Yes, I can take it -- perhaps because I'm partly anesthetized
by the beauty of the strange effects: waterfalls shooting uphill,
milkers squirting milk into a cow's udders, a cup of cold coffee
heating itself to boiling. It's like being a child again, when a cup
of milk working its way from boiling to cold, and the skin forming,
held the same fascination. Which way is a waterfall more magical, or
more subject to natural law -- with its waters flowing up or down? What
I don't understand -- you can tell us, Professor -- is when we can sheer
off our overminds and see things for ourselves with time flowing in the
opposite direction -- see instead of talking."
Silverstone shook his head. "I don't think that moment will come. Not for
us, the Himalayan generation. I hoped it would come to me but it hasn't.
Our brains are too loaded with what we must call the inhibitions of the
future. But the next generation, your sons, will be free of the overmind,
if we put over the message to everyone clearly and soon enough."
For a long while, Howes had been standing moodily apart from them, almost
as if he were not listening. Now he turned and said, "You explain well,
Silverstone, but you have not given us one concrete shred of proof for
all this."
"On the contrary, I have quoted proof from the arts and sciences. When we
have overturned our enemies, and astronomers can resume their studies,
they will soon give you proof that the Doppler effect is in fact evidence
for a shrinking universe. Proofs will soon surround you. Proof
does
surround you, but you will not take these dreary rocks for evidence that
the end of the world is at hand."
Howes shook his head. "I don't want to believe! Supposing I manage to
confront Gleason and kill him? He then lives again?"
"Think it out, man! We hope you
have
reached Gleason and killed him!
Now, in 2093, he has his moment of power -- but we know he will be out
of power, the economic disorders will vanish, and soon nobody will have
heard of him -- he will be an insignificant major soldiering in Mongolia.
And if you mind back to, say, the year 2000, not one whisper of his name
would remain."
"If I have killed him, why don't I remember doing so?"
"Think it out for yourself, Captain! Until now, you believed you had a
good memory but next to no precognitive faculty. Now you see the reverse
is true, and there seems a logical reason for it. Beyond the Himalayan
divide we have spoken of, human life wifl be organized towards forgetting;
a bad memory will be a positive asset; while I think you will agree an
ability to see clearly into the future would be useful at any time."