Peculiar Lives Read online

  At this boundary between the types of building tissue, Sanfeil halted. He made no outward sign, but must have conveyed an instruction telepathically to the materials around them, for at once the walls closed in upon them like a womb, and bore them up into the body of the edifice. Abruptly Lechasseur’s already onerous weight was doubled, and his legs failed him, pitching him ignominiously to the spongy floor. For the next minutes his whole concentration was occupied with the effort of breathing, and he was only peripherally conscious of their conveyance coming to a giddying stop, and its muscular walls retracting into the floor of a much larger chamber. With one huge hand beneath each of Lechasseur’s arms, Sanfeil helped the American to stand. The Negro recoiled instinctively from the squirming of the green man’s tentacular appendage.

  The atrium to which the building’s internal workings had directed them was vast, shaped very like a chamber of the human heart, and illuminated by patches of purple phosphorescence. This light was lurid to Lechasseur’s eyes, but the spectrum perceived by the optical organs of those future men is not like that apprehended by our sight. Lechasseur and his guide stood in one of those giant omnicompendious libraries of the Coming Men, although our term ‘library’ scarcely begins to comprehend the multiple social and cultural functions of these sites: to us it might have seemed market-place, church, lecture-theatre and laboratory rolled into one.

  It might remind us also, as it did Lechasseur, of a botanical or zoological gardens, for the knowledge of the Coming Men is kept, not in the short lived medium of cloth and paper, but in the lineages of living creatures, their germ-plasm artfully manipulated so that they live lives both long and fertile. The more animal-like of these living ‘books’ secrete bodily fluids which are ingested by the scholars of the Coming Men (and all of the latter who are allowed to live beyond infancy become scholars at one time or another in their vastly extended lives); those which more closely resemble plants produce leaves or spores which may be eaten. Thus the knowledge which we would gain from scanning a book’s pages is encoded within the bio-chemical composition of these foods, and the tongue of each ‘reader’, which is a perceptual tool as incisive and penetrating as our own eyes, translates this information into words, images or memories.

  Naturally, none of this was known to Lechasseur, who merely observed that he was being led past what seemed to him a monstrous menagerie let loose in an ornamental garden, the total making up a wild profusion of colours, scents and textures. The chamber’s fleshy walls were composed of cubby-holes, their function analogous to that of library carrels. Many of these were occupied by members of Sanfeil’s race who sat or stood or knelt about their diverse tasks, the greater number of which were entirely incomprehensible to Lechasseur.

  As I have said, these halls are endowed with functions which would seem to us very diverse; although to the understanding of the Coming Men they are all of a piece, and it is only to our ignorant minds that they appear muddled. Lechasseur was startled to see a knot of five or six persons, surely juvenile members of the species, who were engaged in some form of group sexual act beneath the vegetable creatures’ broad flesh-leaves. The American was startled by the sight of one boy’s intricate sexual apparatus as it blossomed forth from his abdomen. He gritted his teeth and followed his giant guide, until shortly they arrived at one particular nook, in which Percival was seated.

  Lechasseur thought at first that the young man was attacking him once again; for the supernormal youth launched himself toward the American quite as precipitately as he had done on the previous occasion when they had met. To Lechasseur’s surprise and discomfiture, however, Percival embraced him, clinging to his clothes and sobbing like a child. Confused, the Negro found himself looking to Sanfeil for guidance, and thought for a moment that he detected in that inscrutable countenance something akin to grim amusement. Supporting most of Percival’s exaggerated weight, Lechasseur struggled over to a bench, a cartilaginous excrescence which protruded from the wall, whereon the boy had earlier been seated, and helped him to sit down once more. Sanfeil crouched opposite them, his powerful limbs splayed like those of a gigantic ape. Again he gave no outward signal, but at once a circle of muscular tissue drew inward around the entrance, so as to isolate their small nook from the greater chamber outside.

  Lechasseur realised that Percival was trying to communicate with him: the young man’s sobs had become words, coughed out like air from a bellows. ‘Said I was – obsolete,’ Percival was gasping, ‘primitive. No better – than animals. No better – than you. A fossil – curiosity – a missing – link.’

  Like Emily, Lechasseur had been ignorant of the presence of Homo peculiar among the populace of his own time. Before Emily’s meeting with Violet, the species had not overtly appeared on the lengthy roster of queer phenomena with which the two investigators had come into contact. Since the American’s mental balance had returned to him, however, he had been mentally comparing the anatomies of the men of this distant future with those aberrations of appearance which his erstwhile assailant had displayed. Percival’s words seemed to confirm his earlier conclusions, and he thought that he understood (which is not to say that he felt any inclination to sympathise with) the boy’s conspicuous distress at being placed in the same category with himself.

  Sanfeil spoke, this time in the articulate voice of his body and in calm, accentless English. He said, ‘We thought that we could help him to adjust, to live among us in our time instead of being sent back to your own to die; but we were wrong. He feels all of your alienation, Honoré, but in his case it is immeasurably magnified by the sensibility of the common ground between him and ourselves. He cannot live with our honest opinion of his worth, and we cannot, will not perjure our understandings for his sake. He must go back: you, Honoré, must show him how to take you back.’

  Lechasseur’s temporal perceptions had been quiescent since his abrupt departure from London, and he had almost given up hope of their returning. On seeing Percival, however, it was as if they had been instantly re-calibrated. The young man’s ‘flesh-worm’ presented itself to him, stretching a few days back into the past, before becoming attenuated and vanishing into the immense abyss of history. The present body of the supernormal youth was still, to Lechasseur’s perceptions, interwoven with those threads of red, binding him to what was now their present like an insect in a web. Sanfeil’s life was also perceptible, sturdy and ponderous as an oak, with roots and branches spreading into past and future. Even the edifice surrounding them had its own temporal presence, long-lived and no less alive than the others.

  Lechasseur took Percival’s hand, and tried to concentrate upon the depths from which their own time-traces had emerged and into which one single root of Sanfeil’s time-tree plunged, but the young man pulled away from him. With an effort that was evident in every lineament of his face, Percival composed himself sufficiently to ask, ‘Why must I die?’ Sanfeil returned his belligerent glare indifferently, and Percival elaborated: ‘You said I must be sent home to die, Sanfeil. Why?’

  Sanfeil shrugged, a perfectly human gesture. ‘All men die, Percival,’ he said. ‘Even your people die. Even my own.’

  ‘That isn’t it, though,’ the boy persisted. ‘You know something about me. About my... not my future I suppose. About what was waiting for me, back then in the past.’

  Sanfeil seemed to consider this, although he might as easily have been rapt in the contemplation of the mysteries of the cosmos, or observing that very event in the distant past of which the young man spoke. At length, he bowed his head and opened his mind; and once again a torrent of images and experience was flooding into Lechasseur’s bruised awareness.

  A Distant View Of History

  Honoré Lechasseur does not know, and I had no opportunity to enquire, in what form Percival perceived the voluminous quantity of information which Sanfeil then imparted to them both. I am aware (for this Lechasseur himself explained, falteringly and at length, to E
mily and myself as we drove back to London together) that the American experienced it as a direct impression upon his time-senses, so powerful as to overwhelm his other perceptions and to induce a kind of trance. In it he apprehended the complex of events which Sanfeil showed him as what is called a gestalt image, a whole impression made up from innumerable parts. It was, he said, like looking at a tapestry whose overall design one grasps at once although its details would take meticulous inspection to tease out.

  It was not precisely like a tapestry, for it was solid. Indeed, it was more than solid, for it extended not only into those three spatial dimensions which are familiar to us all, but also into the fourth axis of temporal duration which only Lechasseur and his like are able to perceive. It did resemble a tapestry in being woven, although its constituents were not silk threads, but the threads of men’s lives, the trails which Lechasseur refers to as the ‘flesh-worms’. It was a static picture, for that which it represented was immutable, the unchanging shape of history itself; but its constituents appeared as if they were a seething mass of worm-bodies, frozen in a writhing frenzy.

  These lives numbered, in total, many millions, and they intertwined in an intricate web which contrived to embody the whole condition of their little human society. From certain qualities of the tapestry’s background (which underlay it as the cloth beneath the weft, and which he was, unfortunately, unable to describe in verbal terms), Lechasseur realised that he was being shown an image of his accustomed time and place, of Europe during the first half of the current century.

  This much he understood immediately: examining this vision in greater detail, however, brought only perplexity, and numb awe at the overwhelming intricacy of each individual life, and all the more so at their myriad interwovennesses. The more closely he attempted to inspect the picture, the more complexity he found opening up before him: it was as if he were to view a forest, first from an aeroplane, then from a tall tower, then from the ground; and then to begin examining each tree-trunk through magnifying-glass and microscope. There was simply too great a proliferation of data for the human mind to absorb, and so Lechasseur’s latched instead onto its broader, cruder trends. For had the image been a tapestry, he says, its pattern seen from a distance would have been clear and unambiguous.

  Certain of the lives appeared to stand out from the others, thanks to a quality which Lechasseur would later describe in terms of pigment, for he ‘saw’ them as ‘red’, just as he had the traces of futurity which ran through Percival. The great majority of the flesh-worms were grey and undistinguished, but those of these few men glowed with a ruddy light like heated metal. The glowing lines proceeded unremarkably through the early part of the tapestry, until they were apparently altered by a particular event. Evidently this was of cataclysmic proportions, for like another, later band of darkness, its stain seeped through the whole cloth. Across its width, a band of time which corresponded to perhaps four or five years, countless of the un-luminous grey lives were cut off whole, their flesh-worms sliced apart in their millions, each terminating in a bloody, mangled form in one of Europe’s innumerable muddy fields.

  Beyond this catastrophe the life-shapes of the glowing men began to meet, in something like a complex mating-dance. Together they formed knots, connecting and corresponding and contriving, twisting apart and together like the vermiform feelers of a Coming Man’s manipulating-hand. From their most concentrated ravellings emerged (usually at some remove) new lives, which glowed more brightly and more variously than they. These particoloured snake-threads of humanity spiralled gloriously through the world, culminating at last in a handful of multiply shining braids, which twisted suddenly into nothingness.

  Allowing for its very different mode of expression, this information corresponded closely with what Emily and I had learned about the Hampdenshire Programme. The glowing flesh-worms were those of Gideon Beech’s internationalists who had participated in the project and its analogues, while the polychromatic flesh-serpents were the shapes made by the lives of the supernormal children.

  This tapestry of Lechasseur’s, however, came with the benefit of Sanfeil’s very deep historical perspective, and thus it also portrayed aspects of the future, as well as details from the past which were unknown to Beech. Lechasseur saw, for instance, that in the weaving of the supernormals’ life-skeins the glowing men had drawn in, from all directions spatial and temporal, innumerable finer filaments of many ‘colours’. These he supposed to represent ideas or objects rather than separate lives, suggesting that the ruddy men had incorporated material and techniques of diverse origins into their creations.

  Then, too, when (having passed hastily across the second, darker apocalyptic region, which he had no desire to visit) he inspected that tangle of grey strands wherein the peculiar lives of the supernormals met their end, he saw that in its knot were also snagged two of the luminous ropes of the glowing men. These two emerged unharmed from the event which curtailed the existences of the supernormals (and whose spatial-temporal location Lechasseur now understands to have corresponded to the Retreat in June of 1950): he followed them to their own ends, which happened in succession some short while later.

  He had at first surmised that the ruby glow of these life-worms had been an artificial marking, imposed upon the image by Sanfeil to demonstrate the significance of certain individuals to the overall scheme; but where these ruddy lives were cut off he now saw that they were made from two separate entities, the one containing the other as the insulation around an electric cable. In fact the outer, visible life was as grey and mundane as its neighbours; it was the inner life that glowed with the molten redness of futurity. These pallid flesh-worms had bloody parasites living within them; and these latter forms stretched away beyond those of their hosts, into the very dark and very distant future.

  Each member of the Hampdenshire Programme, and certain others (as the three of us would realise later, when together we attempted to interpret this vision of Lechasseur’s), had been under the influence of an observer from Sanfeil’s own time.

  Lechasseur found suddenly that his attention was being drawn against his will along one of those fiery trails, and once again he found himself precipitately hurled into the future, fetching up within the cavity where Percival, Sanfeil and he himself were sitting, long aeons after his accustomed era. Lechasseur’s mind was reeling, and his bodily sensations told him that some time had passed: his stomach was empty, and his limbs were cramped. He flexed his muscles carefully.

  Percival was coming round as well, and looked as stunned as Lechasseur himself; as well he might, after having had his question answered in such exhaustive detail. The young man made as if to speak, but there was a question which Lechasseur was impelled to put to Sanfeil first. ‘Is that how you people see time?’ he asked. ‘The whole of history, laid out like that in front of you?’

  ‘We do not,’ Sanfeil said. ‘Others have: men like yourself. There have been times in the grand history of man, Honoré, when entire cultures have shared your faculty of recognising time. It was their method of explication which I used.’

  Percival could contain himself no longer, however. ‘But how could they have understood – seeing it all like that, in so much detail? Surely they must have gone mad! There was so much of it, and so mixed-up, so confused. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, Sanfeil.’

  Sanfeil’s voice was as flat as ever. ‘Honoré? What did you understand?’

  Lechasseur looked from Sanfeil to Percival. ‘I think,’ he told the giant, ‘that your people made his people. You bred them, back in the present, using people from our time as your... well, “puppets” isn’t quite right. I don’t think you made anyone do it. You took something that was already there, and had it serve your purpose – whatever that is.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Percival almost snarled. ‘From all that marvellous, convoluted intricacy, you derive something so... banal? Does all we saw just now amount in yo
ur mind to no more than that?

  ‘Mind you...’ – the boy was suddenly more thoughtful – ‘... I suppose that that would make for an interpretation, on the crudest level. Is it true, Sanfeil? Did you make my friends and me? Were you trying for people who could jump through time – am I one of your successes?’

  ‘You are all successes, Percival,’ Sanfeil said. ‘The whole experiment has been a glorious success, and now it is at an end.’

  ‘But if what Honoré says is right,’ Percival said, ‘then that would have to mean that my friends are going to die! Those soldiers will kill every one of us. How can we stop that from happening?’

  Sanfeil seemed obscurely disappointed. ‘Did you truly understand so little? I have said to you that all men die.’

  ‘But you made us!’ the young man insisted. ‘Why would you abandon us to our deaths?’

  Sanfeil explained: ‘The experiment’s purpose was to demonstrate that we in the future could retrospectively participate in our own origins, by influencing the development of our ancestors. This we have done, though not without impediments. Others have attempted to direct man’s progress also, whether sojourners from another world or the distant descendants of my own generation, to whom my race of man is in its infancy. Such an influence we could not counteract. Yet still in you, Percival, and in the other specimens of your race, we saw the spirit of the cosmos express herself more vividly and fully than ever before on Earth. Your spirits burned more brightly than any before you.’