The Best New Horror 7

by Stephen Jones

  “The satyrs and the centaurs passed into oblivion without eventual issue; the descendants of my own kind never found an upward path of progress to follow for a second time. Homo sapiens will die, and will be gone for ever; ours is a broken strand upon the loom of destiny, but it does not matter. Our kings and queens, our capitalists and merchants, our servants and factory-hands, will give no children to this vast unpatterned confusion, but all that we are and represent – our every thought, our every property – is there. In this great scheme, the overmen are our brothers and not our conquerors; they are our heirs, our ambassadors to the universe. In this vast overarching scheme, all species are our brothers, our other selves. We are life, and life is everywhere, the image of God in which we are made is neither a face nor a form nor even a soul, but a movement, an impulse, a will to exist, to grow and to change, to be and to become . . .

  “I have seen the worlds which the overmen have come to know, and I have seen that I belong there no less than they. Is it an illusion? Is it simply an effect of my infection by the tiny machines which they left to tutor me? How can I know? How can I know whether any of it is more than mere illusion, or some feverish effect of this infection which I have unleashed upon myself with my seer’s potion, my subtle poison, my loquacious oracle?

  “While I lay on that hillside I was dreaming. It was all a dream, and a dream inside a dream at that . . . but within the dream within the dream there were further dreams, worlds within worlds. Like a spark of light, and as fleet, I soared among the stars. I saw the sidereal system from without, and from its light-filled heart. I saw stars born from dark dust, and I saw stars die, in vast explosions which left behind mere shrinking embers, which collapsed until nothing was left of them but the purest form of nothing, the ultimate blackness, the shadow of eternity. I saw, outside the sidereal system, other such systems, each one surrounded by a cage of darkness so huge and so dense as to beggar the imagination, and I saw these systems extending to unimaginable distances, millions upon millions of them, all flying apart as if they were the debris of an explosion which was the universe itself . . .

  “It is oddly easy, now, to believe that the universe itself is not something still, settled, made and left for dead, but rather something happening, and happening violently, something growing and changing, and that time itself is a headlong rush. We think of ourselves and our world as calm things, nearly tranquil, almost still, but we are not. We are universes ourselves, filled with tiny creatures, fevered by their intangible attentions. There is so much darkness in the world without, and in our inner being too, that we think of existence as a faint and flickering thing in a great illimitable void, but it is not. The darkness of the void without and the void within reflect the limitations of our senses, and not the absence of process. Within and without, we and the world are far more alive than we know, and it does not matter, in the end, that each and every one of us will die, that the race of men will die, that the race of overmen will die, that the universal explosion itself will leave behind nothing in the end but the purest form of nothing, the ultimate blackness – because everything is a part of everything . . .

  “That is the one and only truth, the one and only destiny.

  “Did I truly dream all that, or did I simply come to know it? Is it a conclusion reached by my own effort, or something the machines fed into me, already whole, roiling rhetoric and all? Does it matter, given that it is there inside me, woven into the fabric of my soul, capable of flowing from pen to page? How shall I tell others what I have seen? Above all, slowly and gently, one step at a time. Were they to read this without adequate preparation they would simply think me mad. Perhaps I am mad. Perhaps the function of the machines which invaded me was to derange me, to make certain that my glimpses of the future could not change the past. But that would probably be unnecessary. Is there any hope at all of alerting men to the presence in their midst of those whose decendants will be the overmen? If they could be alerted, could they do anything to alter their fate? Could they become less warlike, less self-destructive, less blind to their destiny? It is a conundrum I cannot hope to solve alone; I must have help.

  “I saw . . . how can I possibly record all that I saw? How can I even remember it? It is fading already in my consciousness, dying like a dream which the waking mind tries with all its might to trap and hold, but loses in the end . . . and after all, what I did was to lie upon the grass, staring up into the darkening sky, watching the stars come out. All else was but an illusion, a disease of the brain, a disturbance in my soul . . . except, of course, that it was all real: preserved, synthesised, packaged, projected into the theatre of my mind by some infinitesimal fantasmagoria or kinematograph, but quite real. I have walked upon the surface of the planet Mars, today and tomorrow. I have seen the planet dead and I have seen it brought to life. I have seen tomorrow’s creators labouring in their laboratories to make and reshape life. I have seen the hustle and bustle of Creation: not the work of a mock-fatherly God overfond of prohibitions and petty acts of vengeance, but the work of men who are able to manipulate germ-plasm, who have mastery of the mysteries of the flesh. I have not seen the maker of stars crying fiat lux into the darkness, but I have seen the makers of overmen and the remakers of worlds, busy in the crucible from which all the Golden Ages of the future will be born. I have come face to face with the black eyes of the infinite, and met their terrifying stare – not bravely enough, I admit, but not so steeped in terror as to be struck blind . . . or dumb . . . or dead.

  “It was not all seeing and hearing, of course. The things which infected my brain, to bring the news of infinity and eternity directly to my synapses were masters of all the senses, and all the emotions. I felt the texture of the future, the rhythm of the spheres, in the secret chambers of my heart . . .

  “What nonsense! Am I not a man of science, a man of precision? What respect will anyone have for me if I descend to such fatuous nonsense? And yet . . . the machines which undertook the task of my education did try to make me feel what no human could ever feel for himself; they did try to communicate to me what the existence of an overman is like, from the standpoint of an overman’s self-regard. What little did I salvage from that, and how can I possibly describe it? I have looked at the world with an overman’s eyes. I have responded as he would respond. I have stood in the shoes of an overman of my own day, of my own present, and have looked at my fellow men with his eyes, with his fearful and resentful heart, with his hunger.

  “I have felt the hunger of vampires . . . the hunger and ecstasy of vampires. I am the prey, privileged to have felt the anticipatory surge of the predator’s blood; I am the unwary, privileged to have felt the uncalm consciousness of the hidden; I am the human, privileged to have felt the triumph of the superhuman. I have tasted and understood the hunger and ecstasy of vampires. I have seen the altar on which mankind is to be sacrificed – and I have worshipped at that altar. I have stood in the shoes of an overman of the far future, too. I have known what it is to have tamed hunger and ecstasy, to have brought them to heel, to have made them docile.

  “They wanted me to stay! That which possessed me begged me to stay and not return, begged me to consent . . . but I could not. I could not do it. I dared not do it. My sense of duty was stronger, in the end, than their temptation. Perhaps I am mad. I have known the peace of the ultimate overmen, and would not accept it as a gift. I have been in Heaven, and threw myself out, like a sinful angel, to fall through all eternity into the blackness of the pit. Yes, I am mad; but I have known ataraxia, the perfect peace of mind – which comes not from the strangulation of emotion, not from the transcendence of the passions, not from mechanization or denial or anaesthesia but from discipline, from control . . . and I have understood what it was in men that had to die, lest mankind itself should die . . . and, of course, did die . . . to be replaced by something gentler, kinder, wiser, better . . . something which emerged from the dark edges of nightmares, from the anxious recesses of myth, to be – when s
een in its own light – something merely different, and not so very different at that: a blurred mirror-image, but recognizably akin. A brother. A blood-brother.

  “If only we could recognize what we truly are, we would surely be less afraid of what we are not. If only we could see the monster which we are making of ourselves, we might be able to see that which is less than monstrous in the images of fear and hate which our minds conjure up so vividly and so prolifically . . .

  “I might have stayed, but I did not. I chose to return, to my poor poisoned self. If only . . .

  “I am ill, but not because I have carried back any vestige of that glorious delirium with which the machines of the far future infected me so carefully. They are gone; I cannot doubt it. I am ill because of what I have done to myself. W***** was right about the dangers. I am poisoned. In seeking to gain intelligence of the future I have cut myself adrift from the present. Did the seers of old understand that there was a price to pay for overmuch success? Did the sybils who served the ancients fully understand their self-sacrifice? Why did I not stay? Why did I not accept the gift that was offered? God how my arm aches! What a rack my grip upon the pen has become!

  “I ought to write all day and all night, until I have wrung from my inarticulate heart every last vestige of the knowledge by which I have been possessed, but I cannot. If I am to tell my story at all I must tell it verbally, all of it – tell it in a single night, if I can, to men that I can trust. If only I knew a hundred who might understand. If only I knew ten.

  “If only . . .”

  XIV

  The doctor looked up from the manuscript. “I fear,” he said, “that Copplestone had reached the limit of his endurance, and the limit of his legibility. He did try to continue, but there are only a few more words I can decipher. He tried to make a list of some kind . . . perhaps topics to be added to a later draft. To the best of my estimation, the list is as follows: Hist Reconst. Great War. Wire and Gas. Vs don’t kill. Hide in Comfort. Atom Bomb. Birth Pills. Silicon Chips. Vs love flying. Thrive in cities: art light. Land on moor. Great Plague War. Oceans die, then rise. Ozone shield. Shapeshifters immune to rad poison. Proofs: Cathode rays. Transistors. There are half a dozen other items of which I can make no sense at all. At the foot of the last page, separate from the rest of the text, four names have been scribbled: Crookes; Wilde; Shiel; Stoker.”

  My overloaded train of thought was jolted very slightly by that name, but there was too much to wonder at.

  What a reward I have reaped by following my instinct! I thought. What a wise providence it was that led me to steal the elixir and the secret of its making! Everything is clear now. All my wicked, wretched, wilful life has been naught but an enigmatic prologue, a prelude to this moment. How can I doubt it? All my life I have been groping towards the kindly light, not knowing how blind I was. Now, at last, it is clear.

  Even Wilde, I knew, could not possibly complain about a lack of imaginative excess in the peculiar diatribe which we had just heard . . . but even a man like Wilde might struggle in vain to penetrate the meaning of it. Infectious machines! A universe of teeming vermin! Existence as explosion! The ultimate nothing! Was even Wilde, I wondered, capable of seeing it as something more than a mere fever-dream, not far removed from gibberish? For myself, I had no doubts. If Copplestone had not seen the future, he had certainly seen something: something that no man of this or any earlier time had ever seen before.

  Let it be the future! I said to myself, silently. Great Father of us All, let it be the future of destiny!

  “We have heard the story,” H***** said, impatiently. “Each of us will doubtless make of it what he will. There are more important matters which now require consideration.”

  “On the contrary,” Wilde said. “We are here at Copplestone’s invitation, for a purpose which he defined. Our first duty is to do what he required of us: to exchange views as to the precise implications of what he had seen. We have accepted the man’s hospitality, and we owe him that.”

  The detective threw up his hands. “Oh, very well!” he said. “Justice is rarely swift, but it is inexorable.” He looked at me as he pronounced this blatant lie. I looked calmly back.

  “Perhaps,” said Wilde, effortlessly usurping the doctor’s role as chairman, “Mr Wells would like to begin, as he has been enthusiastic to point out certain similarities between Copplestone’s vision of the future and his own.”

  “I freely admit,” Wells said, slowly, “that the similarities are, in the end, less striking than the differences. Nevertheless, the similarities are still a matter of some interest to me. I will accept that no conscious imitation can have been involved, but the possibility remains that someone who read the first version of my story in the Science Schools Journal might in the course of the last few years have communicated its contents to Professor Copplestone in such a manner that he built a fantasy of his own upon their foundation. I regret, however, that I cannot seriously entertain Sir William’s hypothesis that I am a true seer who has caught a confused glimpse of the same future which Copplestone has seen in more detail. I favour the less dramatic but more likely hypothesis that Copplestone and I are both products of our milieu and our moment. We shared the same present day for some thirty years, and probably acquired much the same understanding of it. Although he was older than I and born into a different class he must have undergone broadly similar educative experiences. He found Darwin’s theory of evolution, as I did, and realized with a shock as profound as any religious enlightenment what it implies about the precariousness of man’s tenure upon the earth. He came to appreciate, as I have, that the rapid advancement of technology will very soon equip our armies with weapons so powerful that we might easily destroy civilization before learning to curb our primitive impulses. If he and I have visited the Delphic Oracle of the modern imagination and come back with similar prophesies, it is because the Age of Reason has now reached the stage at which secure rational foresight is possible.

  “There is, of course, much in Copplestone’s vision which is merely idiosyncratic. He knew this, and freely admitted the probability that his vision would be polluted, in the way that all our dreams are polluted, by random imps of perversity. In each and every one of us there is a constant battle being fought between a higher, rational part and a lower, animal part. Copplestone’s vision is clearly haunted by a strange darkness which persists in populating his imagined future with phantoms – the phantoms which he calls vampires. I do not think that we should take Copplestone’s vampires any more literally than we take Polidori’s Vampyre, or Christina Rossetti’s goblins. They are, I think, symbols: symbols of something which lies within us, but which we feel, in concert with the prudery of our times, that we ought to exorcise or deny.

  “I believe that Copplestone protests far too much when he insists that his overmen are not men at all, but some other species which has lived since the dawn of time among men, mimicking them in order to prey upon them. We must look for the source of Copplestone’s imaginary vampires in the blood which is supposedly their nourishment: the blood which carries the chemical messengers which are the bases of our feelings, our desires and our passions. It is clear, I think, from the tenor of the professor’s narrative – especially in the final part, which is surely the product of a purely subjective delirium – that he could not quite escape the essential truth. Despite all his attempts to distance himself, he ended up identifying with the vampires, seeing as they saw and feeling as they felt. What he saw in that final vision is far more closely related to his private mental life than to any meaningful picture of what the future could or will be like. The heavy emphasis on the idea of infection proves that, to my mind, beyond the shadow of a doubt.

  “In brief, I think that there may be a little truth in the earlier phases of Copplestone’s story, but I cannot believe that it arrived there by any occult means, and I do not think that the story has any real relevance to the question of whether the future which will come to be is already destine
d, or merely contingent on decisions and discoveries we might or might not make.”

  It was an impressive speech, in its way, and I was glad to hear it. I suspected that it would set a sober and sententious tone for what would follow, and might well draw the entire discussion into a blind alley. I had not the slightest objection to such a deflection.

  “Thank you,” said the doctor. “Mr Shiel, would you like to comment on what your friend has said?”

  The curly-haired man hesitated before replying. His experience, I think, had been a little closer to mine than to his friend’s. He had felt the same shock, the same thrill . . . but he was young, and confused. He did not know how as yet how far to trust the wisdom of his soul.

  “It might easily take half a lifetime,” he said, eventually, “fully to digest the implications of what we have heard these last two nights. In broad terms, Wells is probably right. We cannot doubt that Copplestone really experienced these things, and we must be prepared to consider, if only as an hypothesis, that there is some truth in his vision. It does seem probable that the vampires of his dream are not what Copplestone took them to be . . . but I wonder whether it might not be the case that the final vision was the most rather than the least truthful: the one least confused by the impish froth of pure dream. I wonder whether that incredibly hectic and vivid vision might not have been the grasping of the very essence of evolutionary process and universal destiny . . .”

  He was warming to his task now. “If there is a lesson to be learned from this dream,” he went on, “it is a lesson in the politics of evolution, and the irresistibility of progress. If there is a revelation in it – and I am prepared to entertain the notion that the mind of God is occasionally reflected in the tinier thoughts of man – it is a revelation which speaks to us of the way in which life is forever destined to climb towards dizzy heights of enlightenment. The arrogance which informed men that they were at the centre of creation, that the earth and the universe entire had been made for them, is something which must now be put away with other childish things; we must realize and understand that there will indeed be overmen whose task it will be to take up the torch of progress when our imperfections lead us to exhaustion. We should not see this supersession as a terrible thing, but as a confirmation of the fact that our sojourn upon this earth has not been in vain, and that the gift of our blood – which is surely symbolic of the heritage which we shall pass on to our successors – is well worth the giving. The fact that our species is, indeed, doomed to disappear should delight us rather than disappointing us, once we understand that we are to give way to another which is better and bolder, which will build so magnificently on foundations that we have laid as to become godlike in ambition and achievement.