They demanded much of us, and the number of hours we worked was unimaginable for anyone outside the Union. I said I had a talent for learning, but the standards of those on the outside were irrelevant to us, since our brains could master such an enormous body of material only thanks to daily doses of substances whose chemical composition I myself do not know. Under the influence of those substances, a kind of splitting occurred: one part of us remained astounded by the rapid operations of our own minds, and the fact that we were able to remember so much. All this strenuous work, including the work on ourselves, took us farther and farther away from ordinary people every day. Alcohol was banned, and we were forbidden under pain of the harshest penalties from trying the M37 current. Strict sexual asceticism was also enforced as long as we were in the unit.
I fully identified myself with the Union: I was the Union, and the Union was me. I studied its history in detail, and I regarded the boundary drawn between us and the rest of humanity as right and just in the light of its achievements. I also regarded our privileges as right and just, if only because we had paid for them with a commitment that others had renounced. Besides, one of the privileges was ours simply because it could not be extended to others. Of course, I speak of a certain right that would have led to general catastrophe if it had not been reserved for us alone: the right to the prolongation of life. They couldn’t even handle the short lives they had been given, often resorting to suicide, so what would they have done with hundreds of years, not to mention the problem of the overpopulation of the planet? We, on the other hand, were ready to sacrifice ourselves if necessary, conscious that we would be sacrificing more than they, with their short-lived bodies.
I cannot describe how much I changed as a result of our training, which lasted a very long time—for years. Each of us was both passive and swift in the pursuit of our common aim, like an arrow in flight. We were the representatives of the species on earth and in the galaxy, and we had been imbued with patriotism and a sense of responsibility for the whole species. And it was by no means the case that we ignored the problem of appealing to the rest of them. On the contrary, we constantly discussed it as we studied the history of the Union. Yet there had already been so many failed attempts. What was the point of putting people on the rack and stretching them out to make them taller? When they didn’t want it, and so all they could do was suffer. Once long ago, it had been foretold that a new man would be created, and that every cook would be capable of running the state. The state! And this at a time when even the smallest factory had been divided between those who gave orders and others who carried them out, cursing, stealing, and drinking in their spare time. The choice faced by our predecessors was inevitable. Yes, this meant propaganda. It wasn’t possible to abandon appeals to hope, somehow trying to encourage them to take pride in their involvement, all the while writing off almost all this propaganda as a loss, as pure static or white noise that would never reach their ears. To light the fire of enthusiasm among them? How? Only if they felt shared responsibility. But they had no responsibility; nothing depended on them.
So our separateness—and even loneliness—appeared to us as a necessary consequence of our whole development, and of circumstances in which the species was a hair’s breadth away from final extermination. It was our burden, rather than a reason for pride, with the appropriate margin left over for error and chance, almost like a game of Russian roulette. Because when they sent settlers out to Lakania nobody questioned the principle that only men and women with a solid preparation in the Union were suitable, as this was supposedly the only way to avoid the risk of infecting the new settlement with the disorder of ordinary people. Yet it was clear that all this was an experiment—yet another experiment—and that at least one experiment had not worked out very well, since if everything had gone according to plan they wouldn’t have had to shut down Arguria. We didn’t know what had happened there. In general, I should point out that the Union is very different from what people imagine on the outside. Since neither its internal organization nor what goes on inside it are made public, a monolithic image has arisen. In fact, everything depends on where you find yourself in the Union—in which section and on which floor. The structure is strictly hierarchical, and there is no communication between the branches and departments, only vertical communication of each department with the one above it.
Even before the expedition to Sardion, I pondered a great deal over our whole cause, though not with any real doubt. If I didn’t share my thoughts with anybody, it was not because they seemed incompatible with my convictions, for they weren’t. It was just that I hadn’t been taught any language in which they could be expressed, so that they weren’t so much thoughts as quarter-thoughts. Perhaps now I am distorting, ascribing greater insight to myself than I really had at the time. I guess I would describe it as follows: I was disquieted by the pressure of humanity on us, since we were supposed to be separate, but in reality we weren’t entirely. Reason—which had scrutinized and created for millennia, from the first tools or the invention of fire—was incarnate in us, and we were its sole carriers, as we had not discovered any other rational beings in the galaxy. We vaunted not only our learning, but, above all, the rule of our reason over the passions and animal instinct, whether egoism or fear. And yet, when the struggle for survival abated, subsiding in the species thanks to universal protection from hunger, it seemed to shift over to us—to the Union. For the people on the outside were mistaken when they swallowed the intentionally disseminated legends about the filling of positions according to the verdicts of dispassionate computers. In reality, the whole Union was the scene of a struggle that was all the more fierce for being hidden under a multitude of pretenses, and the prize was power. That power, for its own sake—since nothing threatened us from below—obsessed us all, and I almost began to suspect that the inhabitants of Earth had been allowed to run wild and do as they pleased not simply because it would have been difficult to educate them. A passion had taken hold of our closed circle, preoccupying its members too completely for them to spare any energy for anything more than negative control of the crowds of others on the outside.
When they nominated me for a journey, I took it as an honorable distinction. Here, once again, the power of language endures, as certain words have preserved the tone they held for our most distant ancestors, even as we have become accustomed to giving them different meanings. For instance, despite all our knowledge, we still associate the word “journey” with separation and speed. You set off, and after however many hours you’re somewhere else, as in the days when people journeyed by stagecoach or train, with traveling companions and shifting landscapes outside the window. Or when rockets lifted off from Earth, missiles launched by explosions. So against my will I connected travel with ideas like separation, moving away, and drawing near, while theoretically being prepared for the lack of anything of the kind. We should have abandoned the word “journey” the moment we broke through 90 percent of the speed of light; and yet we still use it, just as we still use the word “speed.” Our ship perhaps most resembled those old sailing vessels surrounded by the monotony of the ocean, becoming for their crews a kind of substitute earth, though admittedly we never had the sailing out from port, the waving of handkerchiefs, or the thunder of cannon in farewell, for the planet just vanished as if it had been blown away. Or perhaps the ship resembled a new country, from which there would be no return to the homeland, and instead of traveling companions we would have companions for life. Sardion is two and a bit light years away, and we would reach 99.5 percent of the speed of light, spending five of our own years away from Earth. Considering that the time difference jumps sharply at 99.5 percent, this meant that we wouldn’t be returning to the same home planet. Five years on board our ship would amount to fifty years on Earth. This was the terrifying alienation of the Union from the mass of mortals. Upon our return, we could expect to meet some of our long-lived colleagues and friends, but otherwise we would find towering tre
es instead of saplings, children grown into old people, and nothing but memories of those who had once passed us by on city streets.
They do not send people on such expeditions without partners. And the Union takes great pains over their selection. Tolerance almost always verges upon contemptuous acquiescence, and in this way, too, the Union has isolated itself, looking indulgently upon polygamous habits among the masses, but demanding strict monogamy of its own. My wife, Ilen, went through the same training as I. In general, none of us ever dreamed of going near a woman outside the Union. We would have had too little in common. Between Ilen and myself there was complete understanding: we were bound by a common faith in the goal, and we could count on each other down to the similarity of all our instincts. And thus we were permitted to get married. They don’t always give permission, only after long observation and favorable genetic calculations. So Ilen and I set off together with the other couples of our crew for a time far removed from that of our planet, and we were supposed to return even closer to each other for our alienation from the earthly prisoners of another time that was no longer ours.
In truth, I don’t wish to go into the daily routine of those years. Duty, study, playing chess, exercise, duty, study, and so on, over and over. It wasn’t very different from the routine in the unit. Yet something is formed between people trapped on board a ship, not just camaraderie or friendship, mutual dislike or hatred, but a kaleidoscopic system in constant creation and transformation. Only there, on the ship, did I sharply experience the opposition between us, people, and it, the indifferent universe. The shifting system between us grew enormous, while the worlds we passed grew small, as they were without speech. Yet the more I clung to this whirling of ourselves like planets spinning around one another, the more I noticed my desire for something greater than what we were giving. What did I desire? I didn’t know. It was as if the absence of speech in the interplanetary void triggered a reinforcement or concentration of our existence as warm-blooded and thinking beings opposed to that void. I began to suspect that the rumors about the reasons for the closure of Arguria might have been true. Supposedly there had been a revival of magic on the planet, and a new hierarchy had arisen among the settlers, turning the Union’s order on its head, as they gave their loyalty to self-appointed leaders of collective shamanic rituals. It wasn’t good news that people with such talents had appeared, but, assuming the rumors were not pure invention, I could more or less understand where these temptations had come from. We had been trained to admire the greatness of man. We—the vanguard of the human race, sent farther than any before us—looked to one another for warmth and comfort, and yet the system we had created was based on a constant shuffling of petty ambitions, complexes, and the impulse to dominate others. In short, the barriers between “I” and “I” did not disappear, but rather they grew, and I had the feeling that I was touching a smooth surface, and that either something was hidden behind it or nothing at all—that perhaps human greatness was the cube root of nothing.
The specialized nature of our education didn’t leave much room for many subjects beyond the history of technology. Still, I was conversant in the old imaginings about the planets, and especially about the Sun, the symbol of the greatest life-giving power: everything as a gift from the Sun; everything straining toward the Sun. We examined in some detail the views of a certain eighteenth-century European geologist, because he was a brilliant scientist, notwithstanding his religious doctrine, a sort of proto-Einstein, and because some of his scientific ideas turned out to be true. In treatises written in Latin, this strange eccentric wrote detailed accounts of journeys through heaven and hell, developing a comprehensive anthropocentric and heliocentric doctrine. In his works, there was nothing in the universe but God and man; even angels were redeemed human souls, while devils were the souls of the damned. And the whole of reality was twofold, existing both for itself and as a symbol of another, spiritual reality. The Sun was the highest symbol, representing God, and redeemed souls were to ascend ceaselessly from the lower sphere, which he called the lunar sphere, to the higher, solar sphere—ceaselessly, because the spiritual Sun was impenetrable and unfathomable, so that heaven was constant ascending movement. I must confess that as I recalled all this on the ship I envied those who still lived in their own solar system, with the Sun as their reference point. At our ship’s speed, the Sun was eight minutes from Earth, and yet it was not the earthly Sun but other suns in other systems that the settlers would soon behold, and so I wondered whether man had strayed outside the circle inscribed by the very nature of his mind, whether he had lost his symbols, nourished in the earth and fed by the sun, moon, plants, and animals, so that our imagination didn’t turn there, toward the trillions of heavenly bodies, but here, toward the other members of the crew, spinning around one another along our own individual orbits.
Our sojourn on Sardion. It’s true that we were the first to take possession of the planet. Yet Sardion is just as the instruments sent there long ago showed it to be, and just as it appears on the screens. It deserves its name. During the months when we were building the station, I thought of the generations who would grow up there deprived of two colors, green and blue, surrounded only by the red of the rocks and the sky. Yellowy red, rusty red, purple red, grayish red, and a blackness somehow saturated with red. I won’t recite the well-known facts about life-forms that undergo not evolution but involution. Certainly, what our eyes absorbed during that journey was astonishing, but we are adaptable. Long ago, the buildings of the great cities had astounded newcomers from the jungle, but they adapted rapidly, and soon learned even to drive cars. And I must say that nothing that happened during the journey could compare with the shock I experienced when I found myself back on Earth.
Now, as promised, it’s time to return to my early youth, in a country so similar to this one that perhaps it’s no coincidence that something drew me here. The same high mountains, forests, and lakes. My relatives, Wincenty and Felisa, lived all year round high up in a region that belonged at the time to the Botanists’ Union. He was a biologist, specializing in fish. A very old house on a lake, out of which a river flowed—just like here. Except that the older houses there were built from cut stone. In winter—snow and skiers. In summer—a holiday paradise, with stables not far from the house, so that people could hire horses for mountain excursions. The whole thing took off to such an extent that every summer the horses had to be managed by Hauki, a young man who spent the winter off somewhere else on his studies—in other words, doing nothing. He would arrive as soon as the snows melted; he had his own room in the house, and he would stay until the fall.
I had barely emerged from childhood back then: I was at an awkward age. It seemed to me that I would never be like the others. I found various imagined deficiencies in my build, though in reality I was deficient in nothing. I would have been astonished if I had heard that anybody there regarded me as a handsome boy. My timidity and these various inhibitions were such that my physical talents remained dormant and uncoordinated. I adored Hauki, who for me was the inaccessible paragon of masculine harmony and nonchalant charm; whatever he touched was an effortless success, bowing before the ease with which he achieved it. In my opinion, nobody could compare with him. A muscular torso, long neck, small head, a face seemingly illuminated by big gray eyes, a straight, somewhat broad nose, high forehead, slightly frizzy chestnut hair—the ancient sculptors must have chosen such youths as their models for the gods. He went about naked to the waist, and I would gaze, completely enchanted, at the blue veins running down from his biceps to his wrists, which were wide and heavy. My adoration or even love was clearly not insignificant, since much later, on the ship, I was tormented by a single image, which seemed to contain the whole beauty of Earth: Hauki, as I had seen him for the first time, spurring his horse into a gallop, the most perfectly harmonious rhythm of steed and rider, the horse’s nostrils and mane, the ripple of muscles, the contrast between the frozen human figure straining for
ward and the rush of the animal. Hauki regarded me with indulgent superiority; he barely noticed me, though sometimes, as he would correct my imperfect swimming style or explain my mistakes at horseback riding, I found a skeptically curious look in his eyes. In fact, we spent little time together, so I admired him mostly from afar. He was always busy, and always surrounded by his girls, who rightly belonged to him, and who rightly—as I humbly accepted—ignored me.
Wincenty was heavyset and good-hearted; he was learning to play the violin. Felisa mainly distinguished herself by the fact that she slaved away from morning till night, since the house and garden, and even partly the stables, rested on her shoulders. She dressed herself any old how, usually in black, in threadbare and ragged dresses, tying up her hair with a brightly colored kerchief. Those flowery green and yellow kerchiefs were the only proof that she might ever have used a mirror. She smothered Wincenty with tender care, but her general attitude to people was ironic—indeed, not just to people, but to life—her smirks and shrugs suggesting that one could expect nothing extraordinary from living, and that the only thing worth doing was to perform one’s daily duties. As for me, she tried to replace my mother, taking care that I ate and changed my shirt, trying from time to time to draw me into conversation and somehow remedy my depression, because I was often sad and miserable. I clung to her, since I had nobody but them, and I sorely needed a little bit of warmth.
The Mountains of Parnassus Page 6