The Paradox Men

by Charles L. Harness

  Blood still drained sluggishly from a half-devoured reindeer carcass lying under the old man’s head.

  Some sixth sense warned Eoanthropus of danger. He shook his five hundred pound body and convulsed into a snarling squat over the reindeer, searching through nearsighted eyes for the interlopers. The females and children scurried behind him with mingled fear and curiosity.

  “All men are brothers!” shouted the aging Neandertaler. “We come in peace and we are hungry.”

  He dropped his spear and held up both hands, palms outward.

  Eoanthropus clenched his fists nervously and squinted uncertainly toward his unwelcome guests. He growled a command to his little family, and like shadows they melted up the side of the draw. And after hurling a final imprecation at the invaders, the old male scuttled up the hill himself.

  The hunters watched the group vanish, and then two of them ran toward the reindeer carcass with drawn flint knives. With silent expert strokes they cut away the hind quarters of the animal and then looked up inquiringly at the old leader.

  “Take no more,” he warned. “Reindeer may be scarce here, and they may have to come back or go hungry.” He could not know that the genes of his fathers had been genetically reengineered by an inconceivably titanic intelligence, with the consequence that the colloidal webs in his frontal lobes had been subtly altered. And he could neither anticipate nor visualize the encounter of his own descendants in the distant future with their Cro-Magnon cousins, the tall people who would move up from Africa across the Sicilo-Italian land bridge.

  He had no way of knowing that even as he had spared the animal-like Eoanthropus, so would he, Neandertal, be spared by Cro-Magnon. Nor had he any way of knowing that by offering the open palm instead of the hurled spear he had changed the destiny of all mankind to come. Or that he had dissolved, by preventing the sequence of events that led to its formation, the very intelligence that had wrought this marvelous change in the dawn-mind.

  For the entity sometime known as Muir-Alar had rejoined Keiris in a final eternity, even as the Neandertal’s harsh vocal cords were forming the cry that would herald the eventual spread of Toynbee Twenty-two throughout the universe:

  “All men are brothers!”

  Afterword: The Flight Into Tomorrow

  By Brian W. Aldiss

  AS LONG AS there is no general agreement on what does or does not constitute science fiction, there can be no agreement as to what “pure” science fiction is, although the term is frequently used. But Charles Harness’s The Paradox Men must come close to anybody’s idea of one kind of pure science fiction: the wild and imaginative kind which juggles amusedly with many scientific concepts.

  Before this imaginative play is dismissed as fantasy—or perhaps “fancy,” in S. T. Coleridge’s definition—it is wise to consider how Harness has been moved by the tremendous challenge of Einstein’s theories of Relativity. The American philosopher Henry LeRoy Finch says of Einstein’s imagination that it “reformed our conception of the universe.” The original formulation of the Special Theory of Relativity involved an imaginative feat unparalleled in human thought… When asked many years later how he had come to formulate this theory, Einstein is said to have replied: “By refusing to accept an axiom.” [Henry LeRoy Finch: Introduction to Conversation with Einstein, by Alexander Nosekowski, USA, 1970.]

  The magazine SF writers of the thirties and forties were fired by this defiance of intellectual frontiers. They came, paradoxically, to feel that one was being most true to the spirit of science by upsetting all its established laws which, like stones, might conceal a real truth beneath them. In the same way, another influential thinker of the age, Sigmund Freud, generated disciples who were moved to scrutinize words and actions for their concealed motives, often turning meaning upside down in the process.

  This contemporary preoccupation which “calls all in doubt” extended to questioning some of the basic tenets upon which Western civilization is based. Two such tenets are questioned.

  First, Harness contradicts the conventional idea of civilization as a neat progression. To this end, he employs the theory of Arnold Toynbee, whose multi-volume A Study of History was then highly fashionable, that civilization was not the continual if faltering upward march as depicted by H. G. Wells in his book The Outline of History, and by many other historiographers before and since, but rather cyclic in nature, somewhat as proposed by Oswald Spengler, each civilization containing the seeds of its eventual decline. Harness proposes a spaceship which will act as a bridge between Western civilization and its successor civilization, setting the main action of the novel in the heady days of Western decadence, when Imperatrix Juana-Maria of the House of Chatham-Perez rules over the Western Hemisphere.

  The second basic tenet brought to question is the Aristotelian logic on which our rational thinking has been based since the Renaissance. The Greeks formulated a concise way of handling concepts in which the answer at each stage of an argument was negative or positive (Yes or No); as long as this problem is settled at each stage, the deductive series can continue ever onwards. With the immensely greater information-flow about us today, we require more ways of solving problems (intuition must play its part, for instance); Harness’s non-Aristotelians are simply people who use new deductive processes. Nowadays, we might call them lateral thinkers. The challenge to Aristotelian logic was a popular one in the science fiction magazines when Harness was writing; it helped reinforce the idea, derived from Einstein, that anything was possible in an impossible universe. It is most notably enshrined in A. E. Van Vogt’s two novels and titles, The World of Null-A and The Pawns of Null-A.

  Incorporating all these elements of change, the novel is itself about a world of change, in which eventually all men become brothers.

  Some years ago, I categorized this novel and others like it—such as the Van Vogt titles already mentioned—as Widescreen Baroque. The label remains adequate. Despite the intellectual background sketched above, The Paradox Men is far from being a work of cerebration; indeed, it is a fast-paced pursuit story. Its style is exuberant rather than fine, sometimes dropping into extravagance—which is one definition of baroque. Widescreen Baroque requires at least the whole solar system for its setting, with space- and preferably time-travel as accessories, and a complex plot with mysteries and lost identities and a world to ransom. Perspectives between Possible and Impossible must be foreshortened dramatically; great hopes must mingle with terrible destruction. Ideally, the characters involved should have short names and short lives.

  All these conditions are fulfilled by Harness’s novel. The hero, Alar the Thief, is a secret master, a traveler through many dimensions, a cryptogram in the riddle of his culture, and he dies before the conclusion of the novel.

  Most Widescreen Baroque novels are ultimately frivolous. Under all the swashbuckle, there is a pleasing seriousness about The Paradox Men, a seriousness having nothing to do with the ideas of Toynbee or Einstein, which act in part as window-dressing. For all the surrealist effects—of which the plunge into the raging heart of the sun is the most spectacular—for all the derring-do and costume drama, Harness is saying something about life. Though his statement is never set directly into words, it is far from vague; on the contrary, it is clear and concise. That living is vital is hardly a profound message, yet it was profound and immediate enough to move the great Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. Their feeling for “this sensible warm motion” was most aptly expressed when set against torture and death, and Harness’s lively figures move against that same dark foil: “The Thief knelt without a word and gently gathered Haven’s body into his arms. The body of the older man seemed curiously shriveled and small. Only now did Alar realize what stature the bare fact of being alive contributed to flesh and bone.” (But Alar himself will undergo death and transfiguration.)

  And the woman Keiris, who loves Alar, endures as much suffering as Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, and surely discovers that “death hath ten thousand severa
l doors for men to take their exits.” This is very much a neo-Jacobean novel, right down to the profusion of grand gestures and adjectives.

  Charles Harness was born in Texas in 1915. He is also known for a short mystic novel, The Rose, again on a theme of death and transfiguration, and for a fantastic novel, The Ring of Ritornel, which employs the same theme against a galactic background, with eternity represented as a recurrent cycle of cosmic death and rebirth. Each of Harness’s infrequent but highly individual novels enjoys a coterie reputation. In the case of The Paradox Men, there is every reason to believe that that reputation will continue to grow.

  Author’s Note

  I WAS BORN in 1915 in Colorado City, a little town in West Texas. (It sprang up in 1870 when the railroad came in and the Comanches left.) The area was (and is) dry, bleak, semisavage, wholly beautiful. We lived at “Riverside,” a few miles outside the town, on the Colorado River, surrounded by mesquite, cactus, and sandstorms. Mother tried to grow honeysuckle on an “arbor.” It laughed forlornly and died. (Here in Maryland it’s a victorious weed.) Centipedes were five inches long. Shake out your shoes every morning to make sure thay harbored no “stingin’ lizards” (scorpions). My big brother Billy was an artist; he sketched water moccasins wreathed languidly in the river brambles. My older sister and I bounced rubber balls against the sunny side of the house, trying to hit tarantulas that had crawled up on the warm cinder blocks. These memories have led to stories about spiders: Raq, in The Ring of Ritornel; the aliens in The Araqnid Window; Atropos, in The Venetian Court. Some evenings Dad would stand on the front porch, looking at the western sky, wondering if that ominous black cloud would drop a funnel, or at other times listening to the woman screaming upriver. Except, he explained, it wasn’t a woman, it was a panther, and “you kids had better sleep inside tonight.”

  Alas, all that came to an end. We moved to Fort Worth. During my boyhood there I got interested in chemistry and radio. My pals and I had a chem lab in a backyard shack. Initiation was by exposure to burning sulfur in the closed shack. If you could last five minutes (by guess—nobody had a watch), you were a member. Radio: I built a crystal set, then a one-tube set. We bought no parts. Everything was scrounged, salvaged, borrowed. We didn’t even have earphones. We used an old telephone receiver we found in a vacant house. First reception: Tiptoe through the Tulips. I can still hear it. We broadcast, too, using an old Ford spark coil as oscillator. Morse code only, of course. The best time for this was Saturday afternoons, when the TCU football games were being broadcast. The spark coil covered the entire electromagnetic band, and neighborhood response was terrific. We were exuberant little wretches.

  In high school I coedited the school paper with William Barney, subsequently Texas poet laureate. Also in high school I tried my hand at short stories because (a) my brother Billy wrote short stories in his English class at TCU and (b) to see whether I could (I couldn’t) and (c) because my journalism teacher was giving a course in short story writing. At the end of her course we published our own anthology. A lot of short stories were being published in the “slicks” in those days: The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Liberty… All gone now, except a highly modified Post.

  And so in Fort Worth I finished high school and got my first full-time job (in a paper warehouse—in the red light district). Simultaneously I attended TCU’s night school on a ministerial scholarship. This arrangement stemmed from a mix of factors. Firstly, because we were poor, and it was the only way I could get into college. Also, I had (then) a genuine piety and associated Christian convictions: genetic traits passed down from early Harness ancestors. (My great uncle George, several generations back, had such idealism and trust in his fellow man that he built his cabin on an Iroquois warpath. This was grave doctrinal error.)

  Later I got a job as a fingerprint clerk in the Fort Worth police department, and in that capacity I had the pleasure of keeping in touch with old friends from both district and seminary. I have tried to recapture some of these happy earthy times of serail and jail in Redworld, an SF novel that will probably never be published. (One very nice lady editor had a superlative for it, though: “Most disgusting thing I ever read.”)

  Billy died of inoperable brain tumors when he was twenty-six. He’s a major character in several of my novels: Ruy Jacques in The Rose, Omere in The Ring of Ritornel, and himself in The Catalyst. The last line in The Paradox Men is a salute to Billy.

  But on to Washington, D.C., and ten years with the U.S. Government. There I married Nell White, the prettiest and smartest girl in my high school class and my college sweetheart. In Washington I got a B.S. in chemistry, then an Ll.B. (both from George Washington University), became a patent lawyer, and a father. Nell and I have two grown children and one grandchild. They live nearby and we see them frequently.

  I’ve been fascinated by SF and fantasy ever since the mid-twenties, when Billy started bringing in copies of Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, and Argosy. Later I added Astounding, Unknown, Startling, Thrilling Wonder, Planet, and others. I wrote my first story (charitably bought by Astounding in 1947) because I needed the money. (Red ink is a great stimulant.)

  I worked full time as a patent attorney for thirty-five years, and I’ve written SF sporadically during that time. But now I’ve retired, and maybe it’s time to quit writing. And I will, as soon as I come to a good stopping place.

  Charles L. Harness

  March 1984