An Island Called Moreau

by Brian W Aldiss

  To this account, Dart listened intently, head on one side. I felt that he was struggling to decide whether or not to believe my story. What I said was convincing, and near enough to the truth.

  “You’ve been adventurous. Managed to move round the world, despite all the travel restrictions, East–West, North–South, all that red tape.… Your years have been active, according to you, up to the hilt. Real value for money, if you’re not making it up.” He sighed. “Just for the record, how old are you, Mr. Roberts?”

  I took care not to let my growing impatience show.

  “I’m thirty-five, getting a bit long in the tooth. Born 24th May, 1961. Married four times, divorced four times. No offspring. Anything else you want to know? I don’t need a passport for Moreau Island, I guess?”

  He made another circuit of the room, the machine taking a wide sweep, and bringing him back before me with an abrupt halt. Dart’s face was grim, his brow wrinkled with a scowl.

  “We are the same age, Mr. Roberts. Born on the same day of the same month. Is that a coincidence, a bad joke, or a frameup of some kind? While you’ve lived your life to the full—cities, women, that stuff—I’ve had to drag myself through existence on crutches, or in this cart, or worse. Same day. Glory for you, humiliation for me …”

  “Glory …”

  “You don’t know the half of it, you four-limbed bastard.” The words were spoken almost without emphasis; it was just something he habitually thought when confronted by ordinary people. He looked me in the eye as he said it. I dropped my gaze. Dart’s face, under its puffiness, was striking. He had a heavy formidable skull with plenty of jaw and nose, and a pair of deep-set malignant eyes with which to look out at the world. His hair was dark and carelessly but rather elegantly tumbled about his forehead. Maybe he was going to run to fat.

  “As you must have anticipated, I feel uncomfortable, Mr. Dart. So our lives have been very different. Don’t imagine mine has not had its problems. Everyone’s has. You don’t need me to explain how mysterious are the ways of God, who communicates through suffering very often.”

  “God!” he echoed, and made a blasphemous remark. Although not only weak men swear, I consider the trait a sign of weakness. “That’s your mother’s Presbyterian upbringing, I suppose …”

  It was time to change the subject. The orchestra had embarked on the last movement of Haydn’s symphony, and Bella almost surreptitiously wheeled the food trolley away.

  I said to Dart, “I consider myself conversant with most islands in the Pacific. Moreau Island I have not heard of. How come? Who gave it its name?”

  He countered with another question.

  “Does the name Moreau ring any familiar bells with you?”

  I rubbed my chin.

  “So happens, yes. I used to be a great admirer of the scientific romances of H. G. Wells, who wrote First Men in the Moon and The Time Machine. Wells also wrote a novel about a Pacific island, nameless as I recall, on which a Dr. Moreau practiced some unpleasant experiments on animals of various kinds. Any connection?”

  “You are on Dr. Moreau’s island. This is that same island.”

  I laughed—a little uneasily, I have to admit.

  “Come on, Dart. Moreau’s is a purely fictitious island. Wells was writing an allegory. I can distinguish between reality and imagination, thanks.”

  “An ignorant boast, Mr. Roberts. Wells may have been writing an allegory, but his island was firmly based on a real one—just like the island on which Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked was based on a real one. You know, Robinson Crusoe? Just like there was a real-life equivalent of Crusoe, so there was of Moreau. The real Moreau was a gentleman of some distinction at the Edinburgh Academy of Surgery, by name Mr. Angus McMoreau. He was a pupil of Thomas Huxley—Wells met him. His life is well documented. Wells did very little to camouflage the real situation, beyond some overdramatizing. In fact, McMoreau brought a lawsuit.”

  “All of which must have been over a century ago.” Dart evidently harbored some dangerous illusions. I disbelieved all he said, but thought it best to conceal my skepticism.

  “Right, it was over a century ago, right,” said Dart, laughing sourly. “What difference does that make? McMoreau’s experiments are still of relevance to research today. He was probing the borderland between human and animal nature, where the springs of modern man’s behavior lie. Territorial imperatives, to name but one example I expect you’re au fait with. Questions the scientific world tries to answer today by resort to piddling disciplines like paleontology and archeology, McMoreau tried to resolve through surgery. His methods were primitive but his ideas were valid.… He was a cute old nut case and no mistake.

  “After Moreau’s death, an assistant not mentioned in Wells’ novel carried on his work for a number of years. Then he passed on as well, and the inhabitants of the island were left on their own to survive as best they could. It can’t have been much of a picnic. As you know, they were hybrid stock, but some offspring were born, and they form the basis of the population as you see it today. They can trace their ancestry right back to McMoreau’s times.”

  The symphony finished. The orchestra bowed. Dart sat in his chair, staring out toward the lagoon as he finished speaking.

  “In the Second World War, Japanese forces invaded most of the Pacific, including this island. No permanent detachment was based here. Then, after the Japanese surrender, knowledge of the island came into American hands. Its native name is Narorana, by the way. Which means private. A scientific detachment was sent to investigate and—”

  He paused. Something in the courtyard outside had caught his eye. He bowled over to the window. I also went to look, so impressed was I by the look of absolute fury on his face.

  Bella alone was to be seen. She stood against the palisade. For a moment I thought she was talking to herself; then it became apparent that she must be speaking to someone on the other side of the fortification.

  “How many times have I told her—”

  Dart was moving again, charging through the door and along the corridor. “Da Silva! Da Silva!” he called. His chair had a turn of speed to match his anger. He appeared outside, closely followed by a slender, dark-complexioned man in a lab coat who I guessed was the hastily summoned Da Silva. I saw Dart reach for a whip clamped to the outside of his chair. Then I started running.

  When I got outside, it was to see him striking the wretched Bella repeatedly across her shoulders. She cowered under the lash but made no attempt to run away until I shouted, whereupon she showed a good turn of speed and slipped inside by a farther door.

  The man in the white coat grasped my arm without a great deal of conviction and I easily brushed him aside. I seized Dart’s whip and flung it to the far end of the compound.

  “You dare interfere—This is my island—” Dart’s face turned a patchy yellow.

  “They aren’t your people to do what you like with—”

  “They are my people—”

  “You do not own their souls—”

  “They have no souls, they’re animals—”

  “Animals deserve better than that. You and I are going to quarrel, Dart, unless you keep your temper in check. I can see you feel you have reason to hate the world, and I’m sorry, but I will not stand by and see you—”

  “You fool, I’ll throw you out of here if you speak to me like that! You dare attack me?”

  He was far from subdued by my action. His face was a study in malice. Moreover, I had by no means disarmed him by wrenching his whip away. He seemed to be literally well armed. Whatever disaster had struck him, I saw now that he had had his arms as well as his legs replaced, though the loose-fitting garment he wore made this hard to discern. Three pairs of arms were clamped on both sides of his chair, making him look somewhat like a plastic-and-metal spider. Some of these six interchangeable appendages ended in very odd hands indeed; at least two of them looked like lethal weapons.

  But he mastered his wrath and sa
id, “Just be warned. Come back inside; I wish to finish speaking to you. Da Silva, back to the labs.”

  His chair bore him speedily back into the room we had left, and I followed.

  Dart flipped off the vision on his huge screen. Only music flowed through the room—a quartet by Shostakovich.

  “These people have to be kept under stern control—as you will understand when you have been here a little longer.” He spoke without looking at me.

  I was still angry and would not reply. When Dart spoke again, it was in a vein of explanation, although the tone of his voice gave no hint of apology.

  “The truth is, Roberts, that I’m vexed to be interrupted in my work by you or anyone else. My work here has gone through three stages. The first stage was merely to duplicate Moreau’s original experiments, the second—well, never mind that. Suffice it to say, cutting the cackle, that I’m now into the culminating third stage. All the early crudities of approach have been set aside, junked—finished. I’m beyond all that. I’m discovering … I’m discovering the relativity of flesh …

  “The phrase means nothing to you, Roberts. But believe me, all these years of pain—and pained thought—suffering is nothing unless you learn from it—I am the Einstein of a revolutionary biology …”

  He flashed a look at me.

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  He laughed. I saw again that dark and troubled thing in him. “I know you’re listening, man. Mr. Roberts, I want you on my side and don’t know how to get you there. I’m not another Moreau. You’ve decided already you hate me, haven’t you?”

  “I couldn’t take the way you treated Bella.”

  “Listen, I’m not another Moreau. He was a monster in many ways, a tyrant. I’m a victim. Try and dig that concept. A victim. Look!”

  With a quick movement of his chin, he struck at a button on his right shoulder. So far as I had noticed it, I regarded it as a button securing his loose-flowing tunic. It was more than that. There was a sharp snap, a whirr of servomechanisms, and Dart’s right arm slid off and clamped itself against the side of the chair.

  Another brusque chin movement, and he pushed the tunic from his shoulder so that it fell away.

  I saw his real arm.

  It was not an arm. It was scarcely a hand. Four flexible digits like fingers sprouted from the shoulder joint. He swerved the chair so that I could see the detail, and the puckering of flesh where a shape almost like a hand had formed under the smooth nub of shoulder.

  “On the other side, it’s a bit more grotesque. And my phalanges and metatarsal bones grow out of deformed femurs—that’s what I’ve got for legs. And I have a penile deformity.”

  His voice as he spoke was throaty and the eyes of this Einstein of a revolutionary biology were bright with moisture.

  Although I regarded him stolidly, my face unmoving, I had to fight an unexpected urge to apologize. Why the healthy body should apologize to the defective, I do not know. That’s not part of my philosophy.

  “Why are you so anxious to gain my pity?”

  He leaned sideways. The little fingers pressed a button inside the artificial arm. It moved back into place again, snapping when it was correctly positioned. The tiny sound provoked him to nod to himself almost complacently.

  He was in control of himself, as his voice showed when he spoke again. “Back in all those crummy years when I was a kid, I used to go on reading jags, Mr. Roberts. All sorts of crap I read. Not old H. G. Wells, I don’t mean. Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and a lot more, as well as technical books. A French writer called Gide compares Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. He finds them very alike, and do you know what he puts on about them? He says that Nietzsche was jealous of Jesus Christ, envied him to the point of madness, whereas Dostoevsky was struck with humility and regarded Jesus as a superman. You know what? As those two writers regarded Jesus Christ, so I regarded ordinary human beings—holding both attitudes at the same time. Because I was born monstrous and deformed, Mr. Roberts. I was a thalidomide kid. Remember thalidomide?”

  I remembered the thalidomide scandal well. The drug had been manufactured as a tranquilizer by a German company and licensed by chemical firms all over the world. The side effects of the drug had not been properly researched; its teratogenicity had only become apparent when babies were born deformed. When the drug was administered to women in the early stages of pregnancy, it had the power of passing through the placental barrier and malforming the growth of the fetus. From eight to ten thousand children were born defective in various parts of the globe.

  What made me recall the case so clearly was that, over twenty years ago, when there was a court case in Canada regarding the amount of compensation to be paid one of the thalidomide children, my mother had said to me, “Cal, you were born at the time when thalidomide was available all round the world. We are just lucky that the States has sane laws about testing drugs—so that when I went to Doc Harris for a tranquilizer during pregnancy, he prescribed something safe. Otherwise you might have been born without your proper limbs, like other babies your age in England and elsewhere.”

  I said to Dart, “That whole case was a piece of criminal negligence.” I could but stare at him, ashamed to move my eyes away.

  “My mother was prescribed Distaval, as thalidomide was called in England, and used it for a week only. One week! That week covered the forty-first to the forty-eighth day of her pregnancy. When I was born, I had these severe abnormalities on which you now gaze with such pleasure.

  “If the doctors had had any sense, they would never have let me live.”

  “But you’ve survived …”

  “I’ll leave you to think about what survival means in the circumstances. Life’s not been much of a fun-fair, Mr. Roberts.”

  He was gone, skidding away on two wheels. I stood where I was in the center of the room. I put my hands in my pockets. My brain was refusing to think.

  Shostakovich was bringing his affairs to an enigmatic close.

  It was not until the next morning that Mortimer Dart appeared again.

  By that time, my strength had returned to me and I had gone through a good deal of anxious heart-searching. I had also met Heather Landis.

  Dart’s last remark had moved me; he had invited me to look into his life, that life of the same duration as mine (or so he claimed) but made so very different by physical accident. I had one way of understanding the sort of existence—I mean the sort of mental existence—he had led, by considering the uses to which he had put the island. Those uses (though I had only a sketchy notion of them so far) constituted a fairly broad indication of the sort of man with whom I was dealing.

  I found myself virtually a prisoner. Although the house contained several doors, they were mostly locked. The only rooms to which I had access were my room with its attendant bathroom and the main room I have described. I could get into the compound, but that was of little avail since it did not lead to the rest of the house and the outer doors leading to the village were kept locked.

  Beyond my captivity, the ocean and the daylight fulfilled their predestined functions without touching me. I felt myself as firmly imprisoned by the Master as if I were held captive in his mind.

  Confinement was no new thing to me. Although I considered myself a well-traveled man, I was one of the late twentieth-century version of that species; I had been all round the world and to the Moon in my official capacity, yet most of that travel had been done behind metal plating, and most of the destinations had been security-shrouded rooms. Although I had plenty of muscle, my real strength lay in my nerve. I was a good negotiator when called upon—and negotiation calls upon use of the backside.

  When dark came down over Moreau Island, extraordinary cries and whoops sounded from the direction of the village. I went into the compound to see what I could see, but the walls were too high for me to observe much more than the chilly blue-white eyes of lights burning above the deserted quayside. As I turned to go inside again, a figure crossed the shado
wy room I had just left.

  “Hey!” I called, and ran in after it. It had been a girl—not Bella.

  There was only a desk lamp burning by an instrument panel.

  By its light, dimly across the other side of the room, I saw a small deformed girl.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Hi there,” she said. She turned and switched more lights on.

  “Who are you?” I asked in a different tone. The girl was small, certainly, but perfectly formed. Her hair was long, dark, and curly, and hung about her shoulders; tricks that the shadows played on it had led me to believe for a moment that she was a hunchback. Now I saw that was not so. She was of slender build, and wore a plain loose saffron-colored tunic and a pair of dark nylon trousers, with sandals on her bare feet. Her most remarkable feature was a pair of enormous dark eyes which regarded me with the surprised gaze of some nocturnal animal, a tarsier or a loris.

  “I’m Heather,” she said. “I work for the Master.”

  I moved closer to her. She backed away.

  “I’d prefer if you’d keep a little distance between the two of us, Mr. Calvert Roberts.” Although wary, her tone was also slightly flirtatious.

  “You American? You’re not one of the natives?”

  “You have a great way of handing out a compliment!”

  “It was your accent—look, I don’t want to offend Dart—after all, his boys pulled me out of the drink—but the sooner I can get a radio message to San Diego, the better. Can you help?”