The Seed of Evil

by Barrington J. Bayley

  He stroked his mustachios. He glowered. “Evidently I must be blunt. Unless you cease to prevaricate and arrange for the early transfer of my property, I shall visit upon you a punishment designed to secure your co-operation.”

  Smiling tolerantly, Madders stuffed his paperback in his pocket. The threat mildly amused him, but he was tired of the exchange. He prepared to rise.

  As if in close confidence, Wizard Wazo leaned closer, “I shall send Hathor, the goddess of love, to you.”

  “Love?” laughed Madders. “Go ahead, mate. We could all use some more of that.”

  “Once she was Kesmet, the great lion sent to devour mankind. In her new form she is even more terrible.”

  Madders stood up. “If you’d studied magic properly, old chap, you’d know better than to come out with all that chat about ‘words of power’. You’ve been reading the wrong books.”

  “You can meet me here tomorrow,” Wizard Wazo replied shortly. Angrily, as Madders walked away, he signalled the waitress and ordered a cup of tea.

  When, in the early afternoon of the following day, Arnold Madders next entered the coffee house, he found Wizard Wazo sitting at the same table as if he had not moved since Madders had left him. In front of him stood a cup of Turkish coffee, which he picked up and sipped at from time to time. He glanced up, stroking his mustachios with a forefinger, as the Earthman approached.

  Madders sank into the chair opposite and bowed his head. “Relieve me of this,” he mumbled. “I cannot bear it.”

  “At once, when you discharge your obligation to me.”

  Madders kept his eyes downcast and was studiously avoiding looking at anyone in the restaurant. Not until that morning, when he had left his cramped flat to buy groceries, had he learned what had been done to him.

  Now he knew that up until the present he had been blind, seeing nothing and no one, living an existence made up of himself only. Others had existed, but only as projections of his own needs, shadowy objects on the surface of his consciousness.

  And why was he blind? Because he had not loved!

  No one had, except in flashes that afterwards tormented the heart. And indeed it was needful that they should not. There was nothing worse than to love!

  On coming down from his third-floor flat to the street, a plastic shopping-bag tucked under his arm, he had chanced to spy a young boy, perhaps ten years of age. A sharp-nosed, pinch-faced boy in shabby grey clothes, with narrow eyes and a mean, stupid look, a boy who (Madders had studied physiognomy) was destined for many misdeeds and much unhappiness. An unlikely object to win Madders’s love!

  And yet there it was. Madders loved that boy. Love had been born in him, at first glance, like the striking of a match, bringing searing insights, a burning perception of a unique, if flawed, human being. He had stopped in his tracks, momentarily paralysed. He had thought to go after the boy, to get to know him somehow, to try to help him steer through the tragedies of life that, all too clearly, awaited him.

  But the boy had turned a corner, and before Madders could act a new surprise was upon him.

  How happy mankind was to be bereft of love! For was not love the most powerful of human emotions, and therefore the most destructive? Was it not an agony to be consumed with love, to ache and grieve for another person, to feel, as though they were one’s own, his sufferings, his disappointments, to become aware of the helplessness that secretly surrounds each human life?

  Madders’s punishment now was to love everyone he met or saw, to love unrestrainedly and unreservedly. Seconds after seeing the boy, love had flared in him again, this time for a girl, not very attractive, in an ill-fitting skirt. Then for a hag, stooped and withered, lost in dreams as she carried home scant provisions in a tattered cloth shopping-bag. Next he saw a young man in baggy trousers, vague of manner, who stumbled as he mounted the kerb.

  Madders loved them all, and he could not stop loving them even now! To love one person could be burden enough. But to feel the same intensity for every single person one encountered! For the heartbreak to be continuous, to flame anew a hundred times a day, anew and anew and anew, for love to pile on love!

  No! The human frame could not endure it!

  Within an hour Madders was devastated, and was conscious that before the day was out he would feel obliged to destroy himself. For this was nothing like the generalised love for all mankind he had once believed in, had even imagined he possessed. Now he knew that emotion for the sentimental and self-congratulating lie that it was. No, there was nothing generalised about this. Love could not count past the number one, and was never abstract. It was intimate, a gaze that rested only on living individuals, it was specific to the individual, it was never the same twice, and it blotted out the lover by forcing him never to forget that another was more precious to him than he himself was.

  “Who are you?” Madders demanded in a low, unsteady voice. “Who taught you to do this?”

  “I was trained by the Galactic Observance,” replied Wizard Wazo, as though repeating a self-evident fact. “And I it was who trained the Order of the Secret Star.”

  “Tell me what you want of me.”

  “My words of power. That is all.”

  Madders shook his head. “I have no words of power, as you call them. I didn’t even know there were such things.”

  Wizard Wazo bridled. “I am speaking to the Master of the Order of the Secret Star, am I not?”

  “Yes … I mean, no. I took the name of the order, and some of the ceremonies, that’s all … as much as I could find. It was in a manuscript in the British Museum.” Madders groaned. “You’ve made a mistake, don’t you see?”

  On hearing this, Wizard Wazo committed the indiscretion that, to judge by what Madders had just said, was probably no indiscretion at all. Determined to get at the truth, he entered Madders’ mind.

  And the truth was roughly as stated. Madders had no connection with the group founded by Wizard Wazo at all. He had done no more than commandeer the empty shell of the order, preserved by writings stored in some dusty archive. Of the order itself, nothing remained. It had failed to maintain itself, had perished, Wizard Wazo’s precious words scattered before the winds as its last adepts turned to dust!

  As for Madders himself, he was no magician at all! For all he knew about magic, he might barely have made the grade as a pot-boy in the restaurant here! His knowledge was all cant, useless tittle-tattle picked up here and there, from blathering books, from self-deluding nonentities, from playing-cards, from idle doodles masquerading as cosmic sigils, from the drivellings of, to use a phrase in the current repertoire, senile Jews!!!

  And as for his possessing words of power, he could put no more conscious force into any word whatsoever than was enough to induce the waitress yonder to fetch him a cup of tea, and barely that!!!

  The words lost! Even for this miserable and unadmired planet, such incompetence was beyond belief. Wizard Wazo surged to his feet. His whole body was shaking, and his face had turned purple.

  “WHAT??? Can I trust NO ONE??!! I make the most straightforward of arrangements to preserve my property, and what happens? I return here and am cheated, spurned and insulted, my requirements are completely ignored, and in the end I find that my valuable property has been discarded and lost like dirty old rags!!! WHAT AM I TO MAKE OF IT ALL??!!!”

  He kicked over the table, and Arnold Madders fell back in terror as Wizard Wazo’s displeasure exploded across the restaurant. For an instant Madders received a memory flash: the picture of a dynamic Christ throwing the money-changers out of the temple. Wizard Wazo raged, upturning table after table, scattering customers and chairs like chaff, and mouthing a ceaseless stream of vituperation.

  Before he could reach the door a tall figure clad in dark blue had entered the restaurant to bar his path. Though Wizard Wazo tried to brush this obstacle aside the policeman skilfully detained him, twisting his arm up behind his back.

  “You’ll have to leave, sir.”

  �
��Leave?” Wizard Wazo brayed in the policeman’s grip. “With pleasure! Indeed I will leave!”

  Such abominable treatment as he had received here deserved retribution several times more severe than that he had visited upon Nekferus. He quit Earth; but while pausing to direct himself to distant regions, he also created upon that despicable planet, which he wished never to see again, a world ocean, covering all but the tips of the highest mountains. All across the surface of the Earth the human population abruptly found itself placed under water. On streets, on farms, in rooms, in buildings, in ships, in aircraft and even in submarines, four thousand million people stumbled and threshed, gurgled in bewilderment, were unable to draw another breath of air. In buildings people floundered or swam to doors and windows, only to discover that in the street, too, there was nothing but water. Because of the suddenness of the change, which meant at first that the new ocean’s pressure was uniform from top to bottom, no crushing weight was anywhere felt, and some were thus deluded into supposing that only a few feet separated them from fresh air; they struck vainly upwards, for a surface that was too, too far overhead.

  Most, however, lacked the presence of mind to do anything. Children died first, squirming and kicking, watched by agonised parents who were themselves to live for only tens of seconds longer. In minutes it was all over. Henceforth only marine creatures would swarm in the shells of civilisation, oblivious of harm, picking mammalian bones on the floor of the galaxy’s newest panthalassa.

  The Infinite Searchlight

  “The materialist view,” the radio lecturer said, “is that no entities exist in the universe other than entities as they are understood by the science of physics. The only major obstacle to this view lies in the problem posed by the experience of consciousness. Opponents of materialism are able, with justification, to point to the absence of any convincing physical description of consciousness, and will claim that it is impossible to give consciousness such a description. This objection has never been enough to overthrow the materialist school, however, for the reason that in ascribing consciousness to a non-physical agency the non-materialist then puts himself in the position of having to explain how such an agency interacts with a physical brain. This he has never been able to do.

  “On examination the brain is found to be a physical apparatus, just as a radio receiver, for instance, is a physical apparatus. The comparison is a striking one. An intelligent visitor from another planet, on hearing speech and music bearing all the hallmarks of conscious activity coming from a radio set, might decide to examine the set to discover their source. He would very likely conclude that the set could not, by itself, have been responsible for such a high level of intelligibility. If he were of a materialist persuasion, he would also reject the notion of a non-physical ‘soul’ dwelling within the radio. Instead, he would infer that the apparatus was merely a receiver, amplifying signals transmitted from elsewhere.

  “Should we take a leaf from our imaginary alien’s book? Could the brain be no more than a receiver, tuned, so to speak, to a ‘beam of consciousness’ directed from an external source? If so, where, and what, is the transmitter?

  “This is a concept which, oddly enough, the materialist is better able to handle than the non-materialist, for if the transmission is itself physical in nature, there is only one source we can reasonably look to. The entity that acts as transmitter can only be the brain’s overall environment, radiating diffuse informational signals which our sensory organs—the brain’s ‘antennae’—pick up. The brain amplifies and focuses these signals, concentrating them into a focal point much as a lens or concave mirror will focus diffuse sunlight into an intense spot. This ‘intense spot’ is what we call individual consciousness. …”

  The two beings, far off, who were monitoring the broadcast lecture, as they had monitored much taking place on the Earth planet during the last three thousand million years, turned to regard one another.

  “How close he has come to the truth,” said one, his speech a nanosecond hum. In reply the other emitted a similar nanosecond burst. “Except that the real truth is so much simpler. Ascribing consciousness to the general environment is ingenious, but unnecessary.”

  “He is far too cautious to entertain the idea of an artificial transmitter, of course. Think how long it took us to arrive at the facts in our own case. Four thousand million years.”

  “Do you remember that we once undertook a calculation along the lines of his premise, to determine whether the quality of consciousness, even though it is non-physical, could arise from the collection and collation of environmental data?”

  “Yes, I remember it well. We found that consciousness could arise in that way, but only if the items of data to be processed were infinite in number.”

  “So putting it beyond the bounds of possibility.”

  Those who conversed had the appearance of craggy masses, partly with a dull corrugated sheen, partly twinkling, partly containing patches of electron haze. They hovered in the void, seemingly with the help of dark, curved wings, whose function was not, however, concerned with flight but with collecting sensory data. To human eyes they would not have seemed alive at all, for they had evolved not on a planetary surface but in the interior of a dense dust cloud. They were not even made of CHON, that blend of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen which was the basic substance of the Earth biosystem, but instead were composed of metallic ions.

  Their consciousness was more intense and voluminous than human consciousness. They communicated with one another in a comprehensive, multidimensional talk which recapitulated vast ranges of fact, and which could only be suggested by, rather than rendered into, human speech; and every utterance of which, however great its content, took place in exactly one nanosecond of time.

  The place where they had evolved, and which they now inhabited, was a dark winding cloud where dust trails made endless caves and tortuous canyons. From out of that dust they had been precipitated, provoked into being by an evolutionary impulse immensely more powerful than the corresponding impulse they had imposed on the Earth planet. During the million million years of their existence they had constructed, out of the dust, three pieces of apparatus. One of these floated nearby: the transmitter which provided all Earth brains, animal and human, with consciousness.

  One of the entities emitted another nanosecond hum. “It would be interesting if the lecturer could be transported here and have the consciousness transmitter explained to him. What would be his feelings?”

  “It may be imagined that his first thought would be similar to our own in like circumstances,” the other rejoindered. “He would find it strange to think that he would lose consciousness should he step out of the beam. He would then ask: is the machine a generator, as well as a transmitter, of consciousness?”

  “And we would then answer: no, it is not. The generation of awareness is impossible, whether by artificial or natural means. We would explain that we built the transmitter to test the thesis that our own brains are also receivers, illuminated by a beam of consciousness transmitted from elsewhere.”

  “We would explain that we devised a means to draw off a proportion of the quality of awareness active in our own brains, and to project it to the Earth planet in diffuse form.”

  “It was interesting to watch the chemicals on the planetary surface react even to the weak, diffused beam. Within aeons, only, they formed themselves into brains capable of focusing the irradiation into localised feelings of self.”

  The two metallic beings stayed close together, transmitting interleaved chains of nanosecond bursts to one another, recapitulating familiar facts as was their comforting habit. The quality of their thought was careful and rigorous. They knew that the universe was a physical system, and that physical systems could not give rise to anything nonphysical. The consciousness beam was, indeed, a physical force; but there was an element in it, that very element which was vital to the experience of self-awareness, that could not be described in physical terms. Thi
s was the element they called the infinity factor. It could only be described as non-physical; it was an anomaly, and they knew it could not have originated anywhere in the universe.

  Suddenly one of the metallic beings paused in the exchange, and interjected a new item.

  “Did you suffer a derangement of consciousness just then?”

  “Yes,” answered his companion.

  A short distance away from the consciousness transmitter (known as the Earth machine, in their parlance) floated the two other pieces of apparatus they had constructed during their existence. One was really an adjunct to the Earth machine: it was the monitoring device with which they had watched the progress of the Earth experiment. The other had been constructed much later, a bare two thousand million years ago. It was an instrument for detecting and measuring that much stronger beam they called “the primary beam”, though they did not believe it was in any real sense primary: the consciousness beam for which their own brains were receivers, and which came from such an immense distance that they were unable to locate its source.

  The latter of the two beings to speak drifted towards the primary beam meter. But before he could examine its dials the aberration recurred, and was much stronger.

  Wings wheeling in the void; distorted awareness drawn out into exaggerated forms; bodies arcing, losing control.

  The Earth transmitter continued functioning smoothly, automatically adjusting itself when the kink was relayed to it. When the fit was over, however, the entities paid no attention to the machine. They gathered round the primary beam meter.