As we followed him, I kept looking round eagerly, expectantly. Soon perhaps I should see real people. We passed several men, but they were the same type of automaton as those on the ship, and seemed unaware of our presence. They were dressed merely in short kilts that fell from the waist to the knees, and were obviously working men. There were no others.
The place was lit with some phosphorescent stuff, that was smeared on the ground and on the walls, and by globes of phosphorescent light that stood at intervals on the tops of round pillars. If there was anything to see, I should have seen it, but there was nothing but the automaton men and the piles of stuff on the quays and the boats.
Some of the cargo in the boats seemed to be bales of cloth, but mostly it consisted of foodstuff —fish, clumsy-looking beasts like seals, serpents piled on one another, and heaps of different sorts of vegetable growths. Of machinery I could see no sign.
After a few minutes’ walk along the quay to the right, the commander turned from the waterside. There was an opening in the quay wall to the left, and we went through it. I stared around. We were on a path of hard-beaten earth, as broad as one of our big public roads. In front of us, a series of hedges formed enclosures, and the road led to the middle of this, but the place was empty except for three men who were coming along the road, and who, when they came near, I saw were automatons.
By now I had become adapted to my surroundings. The glimmer of phosphorus that gave light would have been confusing to eyes accustomed to the clear, hard light of the sun, but my eyes had grown used to the general dimness, and, indeed, found the roadway well lit after the comparative darkness of the waters.
The hedges were of some sea-weedy tree, and were fairly thick and about six feet high, and I could see that there were lights behind them, as if people lived there, though there was no sound except the padding of feet on the roadway.
As I walked along I tried to keep up my courage, but the silence of this abode of men, the lack of all the ordinary noises of streets and horses and traffic, was depressing me. In spite of all the warnings of my reason, I had been expecting something human, and the lack of it was weighing on me, invading me, with its suggestion of unknown sinister powers. I felt influences pressing in on me, and could not know whether those were coming from the darkness that had subdued this branch of the human breed to such inhuman silence, or from the powers which the darkness had called forth in that race in their efforts to combat it. Whatever cause had stilled all the noisiness and tumult of life that one associates with the groupings of men, it made me afraid.
Although we met several people, they were all men and all automatons.
Apart from them, there was nothing to see but the hedges grouped round big squares or circular spaces of considerable size. We moved in a complete silence. Since there were lights inside the enclosures, it was clear that there must have been something going on inside, but I could not tell what it might be, since there was no sound. I was encompassed by a brooding menace.
CHAPTER NINE
The Sentence
AT THE CORNER of one of the hedges we swung round to the left and then again to the left, through a passage in a side-hedge. We were inside one of the enclosures. The commander had disappeared.
I felt my heart beating against my ribs, like the thumping of an engine. I looked round me. In the middle of the enclosures men were standing in a row, like statues, under globes of phosphorescence. They were dressed in some soft stuff that shimmered in the light. My guides stood at the door of the enclosure and let go my arms. Two of the men came forward. I stared intently at them, then relaxed. Whatever was coming had not come yet—the men who were coming towards me were mere automatons. They stood beside me, but did not move. I stood staring at an opening in front of me that seemed to lead to an inner enclosure. I felt that in that inner space my fate would be decided, my life perhaps ended.
I closed my eyes and tried to pull my forces together. I hadn’t thought that I should meet my fate trembling in this way. I tried to hold my knees firm. The men were now bringing me forward, past the row of men who stood under the globes of light, to the opening into the inner enclosure. We went through.
Inside, there was an empty space with two men standing in the middle—not automatons. I thought that one of them was the commander of the ship, but I could not tell. Both men were very like him, but both ignored me—stared through and past me. It was not to these either that I was being conducted.
We passed them. There was an opening in the farther side of the square, and my guards were leading me to this. At the entrance they halted.
I was on the point of going through, but they held me back.
I stood staring at the opening. At last I was coming to the place. My body was firmer, though my heart was still pounding hard.
I looked around, trying to fix my attention on external things. The place was a sort of yard, with benches and presses round the sides and nothing more in the way of furniture. There was nothing to hold the attention.
A man came out of the enclosure, a man with a face like the commander, and motioned me to pass through the opening. I went forward alone.
My body was rigid, but my mind was clear and ready. Then I relaxed deeply. I was in the presence of a man—not a monstrous being such as I had expected, but a man comparatively young, a man with a face far more human than any I had yet seen.
I almost smiled with relief. The easing of tension was profound; I drew deep breaths. It was not a human face—not really human; it was the face of an eagle—vacuous, all-seeing, hypnotising in its fixity—but there was something else in the face, something beyond mere brute will and driving-power. There was knowledge—whatever sort the knowledge would prove to be—there was knowledge and understanding looking at me—searching, almost sickening knowledge—pitiless, passionless—no sympathy, no more contact in those eyes than in those of the others. But I had expected none, and my heart sprang up at the mere sight of deep knowledge, however inhuman, in the strange eyes that were regarding me so steadfastly.
He was watching me, reading all I thought. Now he was ordering me silently to come nearer.
I went over near him and stood, at some direction of his, in such a place that the light from the globes over his head fell full on my face.
For a long time—or what seemed a long time—he gazed at me. I was not afraid, but paralysed, fascinated, motionless under that fixed stare. Then suddenly I realised that he was not merely reading my thoughts. He was entering my mind. I felt him almost physically entering my mind.
Immediately I took fright and resisted.
When I say that I took fright, I do not mean fear. I know now that, if I had felt fear, he would have got me. My fear was gone. He was entering my mind, but he had not seized my will. It was standing upright, not cowering. My fear was the horror of violation again, and the instinct to resist with all my forces. I flung the whole of my will into it. At once he accepted my resistance and withdrew.
“Be quiet,” his mind said to me. “Be quiet! If you do not wish me to understand you fully, you are unwise, and I cannot understand you fully if I cannot enter into your mind and see for myself what is there. Questions and answers will not be enough, since they are knowledge at second hand. The mind itself must see directly.”
Again my body relaxed, became calm, soft. He was helping me, not attacking. I heard my own voice saying aloud in Latin, but quietly, as if he were directing me:
“I have been trained in such a way, or born in such a way, or both, that I cannot let any man enter my mind. It is not possible for me while I live and am conscious, and, if you try to do it, I must resist. I cannot help it. Even while I am asleep or unconscious, I will resist. I must resist to the last of my strength.”
“Why then did you come to us?” came the question.
“I came to look for my father, who came down here from the surface of the earth some time ago—years as we count time.”
I stopped. I was panting. I must wait
, though words came pouring into my mouth.
He stared at me without reply, then his mind sent me the first mention I had had of my father:
“There was such a man. He is no more. You cannot find him.”
“He is dead?” I cried.
“The man you knew is no more. He came here to us to be reintegrated. His mind was remade. He is absorbed. There is no such man now as the man you call your father.”
“But,” I cried, “he is still here. If you haven’t killed him, he is still here!”
“No,” came the message, “he is not here; there is another here, created from the being that you knew, with all the warring elements left out.”
I stared at him in silence. Then I found my voice.
“Where is he?” I cried. “No matter how mutilated he is, I want to find him.”
“The man who is here now has not the memories of the man you knew. He could not remember you.”
“Even so,” I cried, “I want to see him.”
“You cannot,” came the answer. “No one can see another in this land for any purpose except one arising from his work for the State. You have no work and no purpose that we can understand. If you wish to have purpose or meaning, we shall give it to you, when we know what purpose your powers can best serve.”
“I have purpose and meaning,” I said, “even though you cannot understand them. I have come to find my father. A man could have no greater purpose.”
“That purpose can exist no longer,” came the answer. “There is no such man, no such purpose, now.
“A man came here to give himself to the Roman State. He has given himself. The State has absorbed him. He is happy at last. The People are the better for his coming. You want to find him and take him from the State and from his happiness. It could not be done.
“Even if we were to try to help you, it could not be done. You are lawless, and want to do what you will, not what the State needs nor what the man you speak of wishes.”
“But,” I said, “if I find that he does not wish it, I shall trouble him no more.”
“You are weak of mind,” came the answer. “Therefore you cannot understand that he is all one—a single mind.”
“Then,” I said, “you will not tell me where he is?”
“There would be no purpose served by telling you. There can be no waste, no distraction———”
“Even you,” I cried, “even you do not know where my father is!”
His mind stopped me.
“He is not here. The man who has taken his place is here, and I know where he is, since it is my duty to know all things here below. Such knowledge is necessary for my task. If it were not, I should not know.”
I stared at him in dismay. I felt as if I were being strangled in the meshes of a net. I heard my voice saying:
“I want to know where the man who has taken my father’s place can be found—only that.
“I don’t ask for knowledge that isn’t necessary to me. What I ask for is necessary—essential: it is what I have come for.”
“Your mind is full of confusion,” came his answer. “You do not know the meaning of the words you use or the thoughts you think. The knowledge you seek is not necessary to you. Therefore you will not get it.
“Knowledge that is not necessary is as poisonous as superfluous food. Knowledge cannot be necessary, except when it is needed for work. No other knowledge is knowledge.”
“There is other knowledge,” I cried. “Knowledge that is necessary because one loves—all knowledge that touches life—all knowledge is necessary in the end—all knowledge. There is no knowledge that does not touch life—no knowledge. You have no knowledge if you think otherwise, no joy or knowledge, no meaning——!”
I was trembling with excitement. It seemed to me that I was fighting the battle of the whole human race. His mind stopped me:
“There can be no true meaning attained from knowledge. Only from feeling can man draw meaning and joy. We have joy from feeling; every man has constant joy, here in our State, from feeling——”
I stared at him in amazement:
“From feeling!” I cried. “Joy from feeling! You and your poor automatons have joy from feeling!”
I felt equal to him—not afraid—not trembling now—standing up straight before him.
His mind stopped me, this time with a question:
“How else than from feeling? Our lives have meaning through our emotions for the common good, for which all work, some with Knowledge, others with Will, others with their hands, each according to his capacity——”
“And these automatons,” I interrupted in amazement, “these poor creatures whom you have robbed of their minds—they are happy?”
“They do not need their minds for their work,” came the answer. “Little minds such as theirs could be of no use to them, any more than their little emotions. These could only do them harm. We have taken all the little minds and little emotions and we have pooled these into one deep emotion—a love for the common good of all—so that they have more joy even than I have, who have had to keep my mind.”
I stared at him, unable to answer. His version of life here below was so strange and incredible. My mind was not triumphant now in its defence, as it had been a few moments ago. It felt weak— ignorant. There was a strange power numbing it.
I shook off the confusion that was coming over me.
His message was coming again:
“Yes. It is true. This State is built on a great emotion, such as the men of old, from whom we have sprung, did not know.
“Their books tell us that they loved little things and various things, with little loves—little things that died and left them desolate. They let their minds war with their wills, their feelings war with both. They had lives that were torn apart by meaningless struggles, and they lived and died without faith or hope.
“Before they came here they had lived above. They thought that they could go on living here as they had lived above. They died or went mad—scattered and died.
“Then a Master of Knowledge was born with deep knowledge—the knowledge that, if lives have no meaning, they will perish. Our people accepted that. After a struggle, they accepted his message.
“Otherwise they would have all died here below, where life must have a meaning in itself. If we had remained as you are, we should have died, but wisdom was given to us equal to our need, and, when we accepted it, we discovered powers in man that were great enough to save us from meaninglessness and despair and death.”
His message stopped, but I made no answer. I was too overwhelmed by his statement of the solution those men had found to their dreadful problem.
I looked at the dark, beaten earth, on which no grass had ever grown. I looked round at the darkness that encompassed us on all sides, feebly tempered, in our little bit of space, by the glimmer of a green phosphorescence.
I thought of how these men had never heard a bird sing, nor seen the sun shining on fields of corn, nor the soft green of grass just coming up from the earth, they whose fathers were children of the sun and the wind and brothers of the joyous birds and happy creatures of our upper earth.
How could I talk to men who had suffered such deprivations and yet endured—I who had had to meet only the common lot of humanity?
His mind read mine, for it came to me again.
“You are growing wise—you are beginning to understand. When it has sunk into your mind, you will know that from the greatest misfortune that has befallen men we have reached the greatest happiness to which man has attained.”
“I cannot accept your happiness,” I answered, “if you are happy. I cannot tell whether you are happy or not, or anything about you.
“I have grown wise enough not to give you advice or counsel, or even to deny that you may have reached happiness of a sort. But I am not as you are. Your happiness, if it exists, would be death to me.
“If you will not tell me where my father is, let me at least go out to loo
k for him. You have no right to keep me, who have not come to seek you and cannot accept your happiness. My happiness can come to me henceforward only if I can find my father and have his word that he is happy and will not come back with me——”
His mind stopped me:
“You have already been told that you cannot find the man you seek, since there is no longer such a man: but you cannot grasp it. The sight of our people may perhaps enable you to do so. It may bring you wisdom, if your mind is capable of wisdom, since you may learn by vision what you are not capable of grasping by thought.”
“No matter what I see,” I said, “I shall never accept your system.”
“You think so now,” came his answer, “because your thought is feeble, but wisdom lies deeper than the regions where thought is made. Your deeper regions of mind are overlaid with little thoughts.
“If you would let me into your mind, I could cleanse you of these, but, since you will not do that, we will let you learn by studying our people. When you see the truth, it may dispel your fever of thought and your own wisdom may heal you.”
“And if I keep my thoughts,” I said, “even when I have seen the life of your people, what is to happen to me?”
“We shall decide that when the time comes,” came the answer. “There is no need to decide things that may not arise for decision. It is probable that your wisdom will heal you when it is allowed to work.”
“And if I have no wisdom but the wisdom of my own thoughts?” I asked.
“All human beings have wisdom,” came the answer. “In our children it is also overlaid with thoughts inherited from our ancestors. We clear their minds of these thoughts and their wisdom is free. Then we rearrange their powers. We develop that in which each is best, and suppress the other powers that might conflict with it. Thus each is a unity, with one aim and one desire. There is no more pain in conflict and uncertainty.
Land Under England Page 11