An Island Called Moreau

by Brian W Aldiss

  “So we train ’em and keep ’em happy at the same time. Break down that narrow gap between human and animal.” He launched a kick at Bernie, who was slinking close to me. “Get out, you brute! There’s no food here!”

  “Leave him alone! Why should you treat him like that? Bernie, here, come on, good man, stay with me if you want!”

  Whimpering, Bernie came back toward me and crept fearfully behind my back, where he remained to make quiet growling curses at the Netherlander.

  Maastricht’s face had gone brick-red. He clutched the butt of his riot gun without unslinging it. “Let me warn you, hero! You are just new here! Keep at my good side. That’s what I say—keep at my good side! You are already enough in peril. You do not know the Beast People like I. Why you think Dart turns you out? Because he hopes they tear you apart, so he then don’t got any problem with you, right?”

  “You degrade these people by brutality, but they don’t look dangerous.”

  His anger left him abruptly, and he turned away to avoid my eyes. “Only after nightfall do things get dangerous on Moreau Island, hero. If he want you back and locked in by then, it is not for your sake, don’t worry! It is so that these friends of yours don’t go amok with taste of blood, savvy! Ask Bernie!”

  He climbed back into his crane and began to eat his lunch.

  The singing continued raucously, echoing across island and ocean.

  Go ape now, Baby, have yourself a ball—

  Get with the loving, forget the Shape,

  Groove it on in a laughing fall,

  Wolf, leopard, jackal, with man, bull, and ape!

  I went over to the crane and asked Maastricht, “Why give them this muck? Why not Haydn?”

  He spluttered with laughter over his bottle. He was tapping one boot to the rhythm.

  “Jesus, but you are an idealist! I forgive you, hero—I was an idealist once. I even went to Church. Haydn? Papa Haydn? Why vex them with things they don’t understand? You got to dress up smart for Haydn, right, hero! This is a utopia, not a prison camp.” He bellowed with laughter and then repeated what was possibly a favorite line. “This is a utopia, not a prison camp.”

  There was no sense in arguing with him. I folded my arms and leaned against the machine, looking up at the sky where fulmars sailed.

  Maastricht passed me down a coconut still encased in its green husk and said, more reasonably, “You understand the Master is content as long as nobody make trouble. His interest is in the similarity of human and animal. Form and attitude determine behavior—he will tell you if you ask him.”

  “Moreau practiced vivisection in Wells’ novel.” As I spoke, I was watching three seals, or at any rate seal-like creatures, come swimming into the lagoon from the open sea. “He tortured human shapes out of leopards and other animals—a peculiarly nineteenth-century occupation, it seemed, until the process was virtually reversed in the concentration camps of the last world war. Dart says he duplicated Moreau’s experiments. Research is too kind a name for it. He is using a scalpel simply as an instrument of torture.”

  “You God-freaks are all the same! You condemn without bothering to find out facts. Pfhah! The Master’s not Moreau. Give him his damned due. Time has moved on since that crude stuff.”

  “Nobody who behaves—”

  “I show you something, hero! Watch this!” He pointed toward the three seal creatures and then leaned out of the cab, calling to them. Bernie, excited, dashed to the edge of the water, inserted fingers in both cheeks and whistled. The seals turned in our direction.

  Maastricht flung a piece of food into the water to hasten their progress, but they moved slowly. As they neared, I saw that their faces were surprisingly human, though obscured by long flowing black hair. Finally, they rested against the rocks, shaking water out of their eyes, and calling, “Hello, Hans!”—while at the same time looking warily at me.

  Bernie was hopping up and down, trying to communicate with them. “Speak only with speech, come out from water, yes. New Four Limbs Long, good, good man. No Bearded One, two, three, five …”

  They gave him good-natured glances, but were dismissive, too, as if they accepted that Maastricht’s companions were not to their taste. Their faces were rounded and not unlike seals; their noses were flattened, their skins very dark, and their eyes had an epicanthic fold which made them resemble Japanese. Their bodies were shaped like human bodies, except that they had four flipper-like appendages instead of arms and legs.

  “Get a close look, hero! What do you think they are?” Hans shouted.

  “I am looking …” I could see that the appendages differed on the three creatures; one of them had a vestigial leg. They playfully splashed water at Bernie, then dived and began clumsily to swim across to the village, evidently more hopeful of finding food there.

  Maastricht took a large swig on his bottle, choked, and said, not precisely looking at me, “Those are humans, hero. They are humans, and no scalpel has been near them. And that’s what happened to the Master, just the same thing. That’s what the Master really looks like.”

  He drank again, letting liquid run down his chin into his beard. He shook his head.

  I sat down in the dusty shade of the crane. Bernie came and sat comfortingly close to me on one side. Maastricht jumped clumsily down from the footplate and squatted on my other side.

  “The Master’s got reason for cutting up nasty now and again, hasn’t he? That’s what your bloody God did to him, see?”

  There were many replies to that. Instead, I pointed to the three creatures still wallowing their way across the lagoon and said, “And what did your bloody Master do to them?”

  “Whatever he did, hero, he had a license from Above, didn’t he?” He laughed stupidly and pointed up where fulmars wheeled above us. He seemed to pull himself back from the edge of drunkenness and said, with cold sense, “You make me drink more than usual, hero, you savvy that? I guess it means I feel guilty. I’m not such a bastard.… Look, let me tell you. See, the Master’s interested in the plasticity of flesh—human and animal, and shapes unthought of …” His voice tailed off. After a while, he said, “There’s two hours’ siesta. Let’s take a swim, then a sit in the shade, and talk. Okay?”

  We stripped naked and dived into the lagoon. The water felt as beautiful as it looked. I had gone in to humor him, and now rejoiced in the element I had so recently hated. Maastricht never ventured far from the rocks, on which he had left his riot gun close to the water’s edge for easy access, but I was impelled to swim out to the middle and thence to the mouth of the lagoon. There I floated, treading water, staring across the ocean which had so recently attempted to swallow me up. A sort of anguish rose in me; I thought that ever afterward I would have a fear of wide expanses of water, as I had never had a fear of limitless space.

  While I floated there, the three Seal Men came splashing up to me. They seemed playful, but were unsmiling and wary, and I disliked being surrounded by them so much at first that I caught myself looking round for Hans and his gun.

  I saw that one of the three Seal People was a woman. She was the most sportive, leaping up so that I could see her delicate breasts, diving to reveal the cleft and scut of hair between her flipper-feet.

  “Where do you live?” I asked her.

  “Oh, live, yes—you Four Limbs Long, good, good man.” She said something laughingly to her companions, who swam about rather soberly. She had strong white teeth. She counted up to ten. “Many times, what you like. Green, yellow—speak always with speech. You live with Master.”

  “Yes, I live with Master. Where do you live? Where do you three live?”

  “One, two, three, live, yes, where I live. It’s not a funfair. They two men, me girl. Pretty girl.”

  I was amused that she had picked up Dart’s English expression about life not being a fun-fair.

  The two men began to beat about in the water. Although the amplifiers were still booming a jingle across the water to us, one of the Seal Men b
egan to sing, clearly and in a good accent:

  I’ve a wife and a lover in fair London Town

  And tonight she a widow will be, will be, will be.…

  The girl brushed against me and caught me by my hair with the fingers that sprouted from her shoulder. Her face pressed into mine. I put an arm about her, feeling her naked and rubbery little body against me. She pushed, and the others were there pushing. I went under the water, kicking out to escape, but the Seal Girl came with me. Her eyes were open, and her mouth. She was excited. We came plunging up, blowing water, she giggling heartily. She dived again, and I knew I was being examined underwater.

  One of the men jerked a shoulder and pointed with a look toward the palm-crowned rock I had observed earlier, standing a kilometer away from the end of Moreau Island.

  “Home,” he said. “Is good fun, home. Catch fish, dive. We go, no trouble, one, two, three, four. Yes, hero?”

  “You live on that rock?”

  “Live, yes, live rock. No trouble. One, two, three, girl. ‘Get with the loving, forget the Shape …’”

  We were moving forward in the warm water together. It was like talking to dolphins. The girl was laughing in my face; her bright dark eyes, her white teeth, the touch of her body, had an intense impact on me. Suddenly, I felt a colder area in the water. Looking down, I saw that we were moving away from the lip of the lagoon, entering the ocean proper. The water hue changed abruptly from green to a deep blue. We were coming over steep gradients, where the neck of the island tumbled down sheer into the unplumbed abyss.

  “No, no farther!” I was afraid. The understanding came that I had been ill and was still not fully in command of myself.

  I broke away from the girl and swam back toward the crane, trying not to hear their jeering calls and whistles. The episode had shaken me; in more than one sense, I had been on the brink of something unfathomable.

  The island closed round me. I swam to the shore, trod water, pulled myself up by where my clothes lay. Bernie was guarding them; he held out his hand, but I pushed him off and lay down to let the sun dry me, shaking.

  A few paces away, also prone, Maastricht said, “Jesus, I thought you were off then, hero! That might be the one route for escape.”

  “It’s difficult to tell how intelligent these people are. Their mastery of the language doesn’t amount to much.” I tried to stop my voice trembling.

  “Those Seal People are smart cookies, you understand. They are the only ones who have escaped the Master, apart from—no, the only ones. He has all of their defects. He don’t got arms and legs. One shoulder blade is missed. That’s the thalidomide drug. I knew a Chinese man in Jakarta who had lost both his legs as a child, and he—”

  Maastricht launched himself into a complicated anecdote. I had no desire to listen. The understanding that had burst upon me—that I had suffered more than I knew from my long exposure in the ocean, followed by the unnatural shocks of this island—took possession of me with all the force of novelty. I needed to think about it. Still trembling in every limb, I got dressed as quickly as I could.

  In his maundering way, Maastricht had reverted to the topic of Dart.

  “See, hero, he had a struggle to manhood, too. But he was lucky. He won by legal suit—no, by lawsuit, he won many compensations from the pharmaceutical company who make the drug. So he could come here and start work. He does not do that old scalpel business like you think. Only drugs, to change the fetus in the womb, savvy? There were all kinds of animals here, left over from Moreau’s time. Also some Japanese fisherman families. Your three swimming friends, they’re triplets born to a Jap girl who took the drug in her second and third month pregnant.”

  I got up and walked away. I did not want to talk.

  “It gives something to think about, don’t it, hero?” Maastricht called.

  I made no answer.

  “Don’t think about it, Cal,” he called. Without looking back, I could imagine him upending the bottle in his fleshy mouth.

  5

  A Chance to Think Things Over

  In my troubled state of mind, I had to keep walking—walking away from Maastricht and his unhappy preoccupations. I needed somewhere where I could think straight, in peace. I headed eastward, which soon entailed going uphill. Bernie scampered by my side, making consoling noises. Birds hopped before us into the pale undergrowth.

  When I came to consider it, I realized that I knew few details about the administration of the Pacific; the subject lay outside my department; but I felt convinced that the setting up of the United Oceans Consortium in the eighties to conserve and control the world hydrosphere precluded anyone from establishing his own private hell as Dart had done. Was the island never visited by UOC patrols? Had the U.S. Navy never investigated?

  On a deeper level, I contemplated the political realities that hid behind fancy labels like the United Oceans Consortium. For the UOC had been established by the United States, China, and Japan, together with several satellite states such as Singapore, to contain spreading Soviet domination of Pacific waters. The Soviets, with their reluctant but vital allies in the Middle East, now controlled the Mediterranean (traditional base of sea power), the North Sea, and the Atlantic. The war was being fought to a great extent over the last free ocean. That both Chinese and Japanese companies were extracting vital oil from coastal oil fields only accentuated the bitterness of the struggle.

  Moreau Island, without U.S. or UOC protection, could provide an ideal supply base for the giant Soviet nuke subs, situated as it was within strike distance of Australia and not all that far from the important base of Singapore.

  As soon as I returned to Washington, I would see that the matter of Moreau Island was thoroughly investigated. And that, I perceived, was precisely what Dart expected me to do. Would he then send my radio message? Or would he attempt to detain me here, either keeping me as a kind of prisoner, or seeing that something far more permanent happened to me, as Maastricht had suggested?

  The answer to such questions depended on the extent of Dart’s ruthlessness, and on the extent to which his experiments went beyond the bounds of normal human conduct. My state of health had been more enfeebled than I had realized until now; it had led me to pretend that very little was the matter—that for instance the wretched “village” was an ordinary village in which facilities for cabling, rooms to let, and so on were available. No one had attempted to mislead me in these matters; I had unknowingly misled myself.

  The account I have so far given of myself shows me, I realize, in a poor light. Normally, I can rely on myself to behave with perception, command, and decision. Since I had been dragged half dead into Maastricht’s boat, my actions had been feeble in every way. In particular, I had managed to ignore the dreadful realities round me.

  I sat on a boulder in the speckled shade and Bernie settled beside me, gazing up at my face. After a moment, he put a hand on my knee and uttered some of his propitiatory nonsense. I stared down at his stunted limb in pity and horror, forcing myself, now that I was back to my senses, to experience the full realization of what Bernie was. He was a welding of animal and human, the grotesque result of laboratory experiment. Similar specimens inhabited the island, and I walked among them. An intense shaking took my limbs, a belated reaction to the truth. I forced myself to jump up and walk again.

  Of course, the island might be something more than a private torture chamber. If Dart were brought to trial (that was how my mind worked), he could possibly provide some rationale for his “work.” Not that any rationale could serve as moral justification for the misery he was inflicting. But it was important to establish just what he was doing, and what were those “three stages” of research of which he had spoken with some pride.

  It was not hard to understand how an intelligent man afflicted by his disabilities might be obsessed with the function of those disabilities and their cause. I knew how erroneous was the popular view of scientists as being “detached,” of science as being “pure�
�; scientists, like artists, were often obsessionals, and the most outstanding work came from obsessionals. Dart would have as strong a drive as any man to comprehend the mysteries of genetic structure and programming. If that was what he was working on.

  So I arrived at the point where I decided that what he was doing might possibly be of value to the world, and that he must immediately be prevented from doing it. Was there a contradiction there? All knowledge was valuable; only in the wrong hands was it destructive, and Dart’s were decidedly wrong hands.

  If my reasoning was correct, then I had to return and face Dart with greater resolution than I had shown. And more than reason would be required there …

  So deep in thought was I that I stumbled over a branch half hidden in the grass and fell full length.

  Bernie virtually jumped on to me and began patting my hand.

  “My Master, good man, good boy. No trouble, no trouble. Take care! You go down, boy, hero, okay!”

  “I’m okay,” I said, sitting up. “I’m glad of your company, Bernie. Just don’t touch me.”

  The glade we were in was littered with rock and the great white shells of dead tortoises. The sun, high overhead, beat down among the straggling eucalyptus and bamboo. I sat and rubbed my knee, weary again. The swim had been too much. Whatever terrific events may inform our lives, it always comes to that in the end; we just want to lie down.

  Leaning back, I shaded my eyes from the sun and watched Bernie cast himself down beside me. The garish distant music came to my ears, together with the continuous sound of the ocean, which one could never escape. I dozed, half comfortable.

  A scuffling near at hand brought me back to present realities. Bernie was already peering alertly across my chest at a point to the right.

  Only three meters from us, with ponderous tread, a giant tortoise was crossing the clearing. Its head craned on its rough neck, tendons stretching with effort as it pulled at a small plant growing there. It stood for a while, munching the green thing until even the stalk was gone, giving us an abstracted look from its dark liquid eyes. Then it marched past, edging aside the relic of a former comrade as it went. Bernie whined but did not pursue.