IMAGINATION, corrected by racial instinct in the assemblies of all, was the seeker for foregleams of what was to be. And a people that had organised its civilisation into a disciplined advance was not likely to leave its scouts and vanguard unorganised. Its destiny was largely in the hands of those who went before it into the night, or who ascended the heights above it, and told of the region to be traversed next, and the best routes through it. There was no service that needed so much the best powers of the race and its best organisation.
Into the pioneering families were gathered their most powerful imaginations. For imagination is the only clairvoyant of the faculties; it can see what lies below the horizon of knowledge; it can forecast the world as it might be and as it is to be; and it can draw the human mind onwards by the splendours of this forecast. This people had early realised the sibylline character of the faculty, and the great part it might play in their devotion to progress. And they resolved to save it from all waste. They refused to have it become the mere slave of luxury or of popular amusement, such as they saw it was in most other civilised nations. Even where it conjured up the past in magnificent literary pictures, what else was it than the pander to tastes and habits that were overworn, the encomiast of deeds that had better be buried in oblivion? It frequented the palaces of kings and licked the dust off their feet, or it played the buffoon to the indolent, sensuous crowd. At rare times it isolated itself, and, heedless of the babbling world that offered it so many prizes, it wrestled with the powers of darkness and ignorance. But what could a poor recluse do against the infinite night? If it were to help the forward march of humanity, it must be disciplined and organised to a definite aim.
All other peoples have left imagination to struggle for itself. This people recognised it as the most unschooled and shiftless of the human faculties, whilst they felt it to be the most divine and fullest of promise. They determined that amongst them it should lose its reeling gait and wandering, aimless eye, and become the pioneer of their march onwards; instead of fixing its eye on the past or on the favours of the great, it should skirmish before the main army into the region of the unknown; it should report on the difficulties and the enemies to be met, and map out the world as it was to be. What would be thought of the shipmaster who let the keenest-eyed of his crew lounge round the ship looking into the pockets of his comrades and making them laugh, or lean over the stern watching the track left behind, if darkness and cloud and a broken sea ever lay on the horizon ahead? What else were the nations doing with their lookout faculty, imagination, but allowing it to waste itself on providing amusement for the luxurious, or on figuring the problem of the past?
It was one of the first duties of the Limanoran elders, after the great series of purgations of the race, to organise and develop the imagination they had in their midst. They had observed that there were two great types and uses of the faculty; one was short of vision, and could see with great distinctness the regions that were hidden in twilight immediately in front of them; the other was far-sighted, and could descry the features of wide regions that lay in darkness under the horizon. There happened to be amongst them two families distinguished from all others by their great imaginativeness, and from each other by pre-eminence in one of these two kinds of imagination. The task therefore was easy. It only needed care in disciplining the members of these to the main purpose of the race, in developing the faculty of each, and in recruiting their numbers from the most imaginative children of other families. The Loomiamo or pioneers of the immediate were recruited chiefly from the scientific and technical families; for their duties lay most of all in supplying hypotheses for experimentation, in suggesting methods of solving difficult problems, and in tracing out paths that invention should take; invention in fact was what they were oftenest engaged in. But there was a subordinate function, that was, however, of equal importance for the forward movements of the race; it was to take the far-reaching conceptions of the other imaginative family, and show how they could be attained by the civilisation and means they already had. They accepted the scientific ideas and apparatus of the time as they were and out of them and their development they engineered a highway through the intervening twilight to the ideal that the Fraloomiamo or pioneers of the distant had pictured and set up ahead of the race.
I had not known of this division of pioneering work when I flew back from the marvellous spectacle in the valley of futuritions. As I thought over it, I became more and more sceptical of the realisability of the scene. It had the inconsecution and absurdity of a dream. I said to Thyriel, where was the possibility of ever substituting artificial for natural propagation of the race? It was completely out of the line of evolution, and could lead to nothing but what was unnatural and evil. They could modify nature to an indefinite extent, I knew; but what was the use of attempting to supersede nature? And suppose it were possible to supersede it in this respect, where would be the advantage? They could already modify and guide nature so as to produce the type of children they desired for the progress of the race; what more was needed?
Thyriel gave no answer, partly because she thought that the elders were more capable of answering, partly because she knew that the publication of the book on human sculpture was by no means finished. Next day my sense of community with the immediate yearning and aim of the Limanorans drew me unconsciously to Loomiefa again; and on my way the streaming wings through the sky showed me that my impulse was not purposeless; there was a general movement towards the same goal. Soon the whole amphitheatre was filled from height to hollow with spectators enriched in colour by the rays of the afternoon sun.
I had scarcely settled in my rest and surveyed the scene when I knew that all eyes were fixed on the hollow of the valley. The platform had again run out with the globular magnifier covering it. But the succession of scenes upon it was almost too swift for my observation, untrained as I still was in my senses, and a certain confusion still rests over the spectacle in my memory. Many of the links in the chain were so amazing as to bewilder me, and yet the general purpose and effect of the scene as a whole rise above the confusion in my mind.
I knew before it was done that it was a complete answer to my questions and scepticism. The Loomiamo were enacting the various stages in the evolution of the race which would connect its actual state with the possibility of artificial human propagation. One scene enacted what they had long been able to do, the production of animal tissue of all kinds; even the most subtle nerve was spun, and under their microscopes they could examine it like a rope. Another showed animal creation at work on the combination of tissue into one of the lower types of animal. One after another in a long series we saw the creative power rise in its ambitions and efforts through the animal creation up to the human. But the most striking scene was to come. It was the application of the newly discovered biometer to the search for the principle of life. We saw the creative artists investigate with the instrument plant after plant and animal after animal, and fail in their attempts to isolate it or produce it. They modified the biometer in innumerable ways. Then we saw them fly though the atmosphere, and set the new life-measuring apparatus afloat in space. After repeated attempts, ever pulling the faleena back empty, they at last showed by the joy on their faces that they had attained the goal of their quest. In the delicate test-tubes of their new biometers was found something that kept agitating their indicators. Soon they had it in their laboratories, and were experimenting with it. Again and again they gathered it from the vacuum above the atmosphere. At last by means of it they were enabled to find it in the plants around them, and in the animals of the surrounding islands. A series of scenes as amazing showed how they came at the discovery of the principle of soul by means of the psychometer. Step by step (and each step, I came afterwards to feel, represented a Limanoran generation) they traced it back to its secret. Most of all were they aided in their researches by investigations outside of the atmosphere; there they captured in the tubes of their psychometers the form of energy that constituted human soul. And in their laboratories they were able to study it at leisure.
For long I felt that these pictures of the future were unlikely to be realised. Yet the steps in the process were so gradual, and the scene representing each so vivid that I came in after years to accept it as well within the range of Limanoran possibilities; for I realised at last how far into the future imagination could pioneer, and what a vast number of ages one of these predictive dramas would cover. My sense of time was crude and weak during my earlier years in the island, and it was difficult for me to appreciate the passage of cosmic periods, such as were often implied in the scenes representing the publication of a book by the Fraloomiamo.
I afterwards listened to the book of Human Sculpture itself, as it uttered itself from a loud-sounding linasan or reproducer of speech. This automaton-reader had the long strip of irelium constituting a Limanoran book fed into it off the cylinder on which the book was kept rolled. It gave the sound and every intonation of the author’s voice, so that there was no difficulty in following his every thought as it found expression. I never came to be able to read those books on the irelium rolls themselves under a microscope, as the Limanorans could, and preferred to use my hearing instead of my eyes. There was no possibility of ambiguity if I listened to the words as they came hot from the thinker’s own lips.
A new and more esoteric kind of book tended to supersede this at a later period. It consisted of an electrogram of the author’s thoughts, as they developed and shaped themselves, flashed on to long moving strips of labramor or electricity-sponge by his active magnetic sense; this placed in an idrosan or electrograph affected the firla of the receiver so that he followed the whole process of thinking. Such a permanent record of creative thought in its process of creating was of measureless value to such a people as this, for every economy of time and intelligence meant a quickening of their march into the nobler future. But for many ages the effort of electrographing the thought was too much except for the most powerful of mature creative minds; and that of receiving the flash of the electrogram through the firla was within the capacity of none but those who had developed their magnetic faculty to great refinement of power.
The book of Human Sculpture was the first of the recent imaginative productions that I became acquainted with. Thyriel and I joined a party of youth who, under the guidance of our proparents, were to listen to it, as it sounded through the linasan in the valley of Loomiefa. Hour after hour we followed the melodious periods, as they echoed up the slopes; at brief intervals on the rocky curtain at the head of the gorge there would flame out for several minutes a moving picture of the scenes we had witnessed the enaction of on the stage; and a still more striking illustration of the text of the book was a magnetic communication to our minds of the originating impulse which moulded each thought and scene in the imagination of the author, and the creative enthusiasm he felt as each idea burst in all its light upon his soul. By the time we had finished the book we knew its whole conception and history, its purpose, and its probable effect upon the civilisation.
It answered all my questions, and rooted out all my scepticism. The whole object of their unending labours was to take command of nature by finding out her secrets and abridging her processes, so as to make them serviceable to their advance. I felt how absurd had been my objections; for where would this people have been, if they had left nature to herself? What else was barbarism but leaving nature to herself, so that the more cruel animal part of her became dominant? Nature included an infinite range of gradations of energy and life from what we call dead matter to the subtle and elevated organisations that fill space and evade the finest perception of our senses. Within our own systems are to be found many of those, from the débris of our bodily tissues and organs to the noblest thought we can conceive; the precept to let nature alone is fraught with inextricable ambiguity; and if we let the myriad natures within us fight it out, it is not difficult to see which would have dominance, for it is easier to level down than to level up. Every interference with the lower nature in order to bring it under the sway of the higher, every new mastery of our systems as a whole by our creative thought, is a step upwards in the scale of existences. Three fourths of the process of human propagation belonged to the sphere of our lower nature, so that civilised men and women were ashamed to speak of it, and tended to become gross and coarse if they did freely speak of it. Every act seemed to drag them back again to the level of the animals, and it took them years of effort to drive the thoughts and traces of it into oblivion. They had as a people painfully fought their way up out of the slough of passion, and mastered the emotions that tended to overbalance them by their excess, and to plunge them back again into it. Guard themselves as they might by all kinds of precautions, and spiritualise the act as they ever tried to do, its necessary recurrence never failed to embrute the nature for a moment, whilst it still kept open a path for retrogression. To shut out this possibility of re-descent into the beast would be one of the greatest services to their race.
As useful for their advance would the command of human propagation be in another direction. The only fear of deterioration that still haunted them arose from atavism. Nature had still a trick of returning on her own footsteps. The child of the noblest pair had at times traces of far-back ancestry resurgent in evil or retrogressive traits; and it wasted the time and the best energy of parents and proparents to obliterate these. In every germ lay dormant the potentialities of its whole ancestral past; and any one of them might assert itself as master during the dim unguided life of gestation. With all their precautions something evil might still lurk in the systems of the young to be developed in full maturity of life. But if they moulded every tissue and organ and faculty for themselves, this retrogressive tendency that nature treasures up in every germ and child would disappear. There would be nothing to watch or obliterate in the immature.
A still greater economy of time and labour would result in the abridgment of the earlier processes of education. Education, it is true, never ceased throughout life. But the education of the mature was self-conducted; the citizen was his own schoolmaster, and his surroundings were his instruments and assistants. That of the earlier stages used up the labour and wisdom of two other personalities for the long period of discipline; they were ever on watch and guard lest the past that lay in the youthful nature should suddenly rise and master it. For all education is a wrestle with the superseded past, which becomes evil as soon as it grows superfluous or obstructs further advance. Every form of vitality that has played its part on the stage of existence leaves it with reluctance; it clings to the new, that it may have a little more of life, and impedes its advance. The obsolete most survives in the tissues of the young and immature; and to educate is to struggle with the obsolete or obsolescent. The labour and thought needed to make the struggle end in the success of the new and progressive have never been understood so well by any as by the elders of the Limanorans. No effort of their civilisation was so exhausting as the educative. To enter on parenthood or proparenthood made them pause, for all acknowledged that the assumption of this duty was the greatest sacrifice a man or woman could make for the progress of the race. They knew that for half a century their individual vigilance could never cease, and that the strain would come on all their faculties, and not on one or two alone, as it would in most of the other duties they owed to the race, even invention or discovery. Whatsoever would commute or abolish this heavy service to the nation was sure to be welcomed. So vast an amount of the best time and wisest ability of the island would be set free that it would be difficult to calculate the acceleration of progress it would effect.
All this and a thousand other considerations passed through my mind, as I listened to the book of Human Sculpture and drank in its inspirations. The doubts that its dramatic publication had left in me were all laid. I now knew that this would be a new sacred book, which would hold up for ages an ideal for Limanora to struggle towards.
This book of Human Sculpture made clear to me the meaning and purpose of another publication that I soon witnessed. It was the book of Asexuality, which showed us dramatically how sex and its results belonged to a lower and more physical stage of personal development. It revealed to us the nature of the beings that flit through sidereal space just outside the ken of our senses, centres of energy less inert and more ethereal than any terrestrial creatures. Into them flows more freely than it flows into us the divine energy that is above all. Out of themselves they give as freely to their fellows as they receive. They need no such inequality and unstable equilibrium as sex to teach them such bounteous benignity. Living in the precincts of the fountain of life as they do, not imprisoned within local and temporal limits, but free to move whither they will and to drink unstintingly of supernal existence, they know how essentially all nobler life consists in free bounty; the more of themselves and their energy they give, the higher the energy they receive in its place. Sex is only the rude beginning of this higher law, the principle of antagonism to stagnation, of giving lavishly in order to have room for receiving from higher sources. It supersedes and antagonises the law of parasitism, which governs the crude beginnings of life on a new world. The lower microscopic creatures that live a famished jejune life in space ready to pounce upon any orb their shoals encounter, propagate by mere self-division; they have nothing to give. A new star cooling down on its surface sufficiently for life to settle on is their great opportunity. There they may parasite and feed to their heart’s content, propagating by the myriad every infinitesimal fraction of time. And, as long as they live in such primeval luxury, they never move one step higher in life. Over-supply of food, indeed all luxury, damns a being to stagnancy. The full-fed parasite is unprogressive, and, though multiplying teemingly, is practically sterile; his generations are on a level with himself; he is immortal by mere fission; the only function of his life is to grab, till his gettings make him too big for his microscopic unity, and he has to break up. In the higher stages of life, even in human life, this infecundity attaches in the same way to luxurious living, whilst the sycophant is sterile of purpose and existence. All take and no give is a monstrosity above the lowest bacterial life. The more of dependence or flattery there is in a people, the lower their natures; a tyranny is the lowest political organism; and of tyrannies the worst is the socialistic; for there, there is no inequality to antagonise and overcome the lethargy of parasitism.
Even when bacteria begin to feel the pinch of scanty nutrition or malnutrition, they start on a new career, and show the first traces of an advance in life. They incline to give as well as receive, and here are the primeval beginnings of sex. Ill-fed bacteria tend to propagate by means of special cells or spores. Instead of steeping themselves in food till they burst, they now begin to nurse within their systems a germ, to which they give of their best till it is able to launch out for itself; they cease to reproduce by fission, and reproduce by spore-formation. This is the first step upwards on the long road to human morality. The beginnings of sex are the beginnings of unlikeness of individuals, and the beginnings of unstable equilibrium and of overflow of energy from one being into another. This is the organisation of the policy of give in a new star, ultimately meant to drive out, after a world-long struggle, the antagonistic policy of mere get. Sex first introduced into our world the eagerness of one being to give of its best for the good of another being. Conjugal love in the human era is the first noble form of sexuality; and parental love is its still nobler offshoot.
The development of parenthood is the knell of sexuality. For it is a new and higher phase of the policy of give, and antiquates the mere mutuality of sexual love. It gives of its all expecting nought in return. And into the place of the energy that has gone out of it flows an energy that is nearer the divine and raises towards the divine. It is at this point that sex becomes a lower stage, seeming almost to mingle with brute life. Out of it must humanity struggle in order to progress. “In the spirit there is no sex.” This I had heard as a meaningless echo from wise lips in the West. Now I saw its significance. The higher, the more spiritual we become, the less we permit sex to dominate, and the less difference there is between the sexes. It was in the world of imagination and intellect that the first idea of equality of the sexes arose. And the more intellectual a people became, the less it insisted on the difference between man and woman. Emphasis on sex in a civilised people was a sure sign of approaching decay.
For the goal towards which the human race is advancing is asexual; not that that will be the main characteristic; but it is the most striking compared with our present phase of being. The more highly organised existences that fill space and hover just outside the range of our grosser senses have reached the stage in which the stimulus of sex or even of parenthood is no longer needed in order to save the benignant instincts from dying out. And the higher a centre of energy climbs in the scale of existence, the more eager does it become to overflow into other centres, to give of its highest and best. What we call life, or the spontaneous rejection of stagnancy, begins on its lowest fringe with a tendency to take all and give none, with appetite. Below this are inert centres of energy, that resist all receiving as well as all giving, that exist only in persisting, in keeping what they have and what they are; this stage is usually called dead matter in contrast to energy, although it consists of nuclei of energy as truly as any living creature. Between the two stages of mere keep and mere take seems to lie a great gulf fixed; but there are minute evidences of transition to be found all through nature. We ourselves, the human race, form the transition from the stage of take all to the stage of give all. And sex is the chief impetus to progress in the earlier history of human evolution. Parenthood takes its place in the upper levels, where the human is rapidly approaching the supersensuous. The very fact of our nature being so heterogeneous and complex reveals that we are making for something higher; and, as our appetites imply a stage behind us, in which our systems were fitted for nothing but taking, so our loves, our benevolences, our self-sacrifices, point forward to a stage in which the whole of existence will consist in giving. I remember, whenever an average man in Europe quoted the phrase, “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” he meant it as a jest, or in a sinister sense; even the priest, when he had to preach the doctrine as one of the foundations of his religion, had incredulity in his heart if not in the smile on his lips, as he spoke the words. Amongst the Limanorans it was a truism that was implied in all conduct and need never be explicitly stated. And the book of Asexuality revealed the inner and scientific significance to me. The highest state of any centre of energy in the cosmos was to be eagerly, lavishly, and perpetually giving out of its best. For thus was it ever kept in unstable equilibrium, towards which flowed higher and higher energies from centres above it; thus it kept its life unstagnant and immortal. That which only received, and was eager only to receive, suffered the maladies of the luxurious, soon reached its utmost capacity, and fell into stagnancy and decay. Above the human rose the hierarchy of sexless, supersensuous beings, who peopled infinite space; but into their ranks rose the human by means of struggle, by means of the effluence of their energy into others, by means of sex, and still more of parenthood. The purpose of sex is to attain to the higher asexuality.
Not that monasticism is good for the human race. It is on the contrary the greatest of evils in the sexual stage of progress. It counts as wicked and harmful that which alone prevents self-absorption and the beginning of decay and death. Sex is the provision of nature for drawing the animal outside of itself so that it may introduce into its generations the seeds of development. It makes it as a centre of energy feel the need of other centres, to which it may give, from which it may receive. It is her chief means of keeping any vital centre from falling back into stagnancy and the desire of stagnancy. And, as long as man is still animal, sex and its resultant parenthood must continue to play the main part in development. To attempt to reach asexuality before the animal is ejected from his system is to balk progress and invite stagnancy and decay.
The book of Asexuality showed how the family must remain the unit and lever of advance till sex should be superseded by individual creation. Then friendship or the bond of contrast in community will take the place of the bond of heredity, or of that bond which is based upon sexual passion. The mutual choice will be completely rational and in the will of the choosers. There will be nothing instinctive or mediate or unconscious about it. It is indeed one of the indignities of this present sexual stage of evolution that we are thrust on in spite of ourselves, that we have little command over the stimulus that is urging us on the road of progress.
The Limanorans had got rid of some of this indignity inasmuch as the elders and wise men took command of the instinct of sex, and bent it in the direction of their own line of advance. In other peoples, and especially in the West, it stumbled blindly on, led sometimes by the love of youthful beauty, sometimes by the love of money, sometimes by the necessities of position and diplomacy, most frequently by ambition and the love of power or social influence, seldom or never by the deliberate intent of producing noble posterity. As a consequence retrogression in health, physique, morality, or intellectual power was seen in all ranks far oftener than progress. Over the whole there might be a slight advance in centuries; but in most families it was one generation forward and the next back. This people had by their purgations become the assistants of nature; and since the era of the exilings they had wisely piloted sex to serve the highest purposes of evolution. The young were still driven half-blindly by the sting of sex, and might by chance accelerate progress; but the elders without revealing their art wisely controlled the instinct, and by the governance of proximity and opportunity, companionship and circumstances, amongst the immature made it the guardian and keeper of past advance and the prompter of still renewed advance. The final step was pictured by this new imaginative book, the supersession of sex and the deliberate creation of posterity. This would relieve the elders of their anxious task of match-making, and put into the hands of the pairs themselves the control of the parental instinct and the power of improving their posterity.
Even as it was, I could see, from the axioms and postulates of this book of Asexuality, and the impression it made on my friends and companions, that the sex-instinct was already to a large extent under the control of those whom it impelled. It had become, like their appetite for food, saturated with intellect and deliberation. It was no mere goad that drove them on in the dark stumbling towards some object that would gratify the passion. They knew its physiological and psychological working, and understood how the destinies of the race waited upon the wisdom or folly of its guidance. Not even the youngest of them would allow it the caprice and perverse whimsicality that was considered its native prerogative in the West. The passionate whim of the moment for “a grey eye or so” was no more to them than toothache or the pangs of indigestion, an aberrancy from healthy nature, to be checked and healed as soon as possible. I found that I was far in the rear of their advance in respect to love. My Western heroics and amorous transports were discounted and yet curiously watched as the antiquated manners of an age long gone by. Nothing gave so keen a shock to my self-approval as the smile that played upon the face of Thyriel when I first broke into the raptures of adoration for her which are the natural expression of passionate love in my native Europe. Romeo-and-Julietism had been consecrated by centuries of the traditions of Christendom as the true attitude and conduct of lovers. And here was I, only fulfilling the instinct and bursting into the appropriate transports of passion, reined in by what I thought at first the cynicism of my Juliet. The smile would have been cynical on the lips of a young European inamorata. In Thyriel it was no more than the amused recognition of manners which she had laughed at in studying the ancient history and literature of the island, as if I had seen a comrade in the commonness of European daily life adopting the language and attitude of Homeric or Ossianic heroes.
I grew ashamed of the amorous ardours of the West, and, when I felt the tendency to erotic idolatry come upon me, I kept it to myself. Even then I knew that I was centuries behind my Limanoran coevals in the rational guidance of the sexual instinct. Nothing brought this so clearly to my mind as the reception of the book of Asexuality. During its dramatic publication I looked round to see the shock of unnatural innovation on the faces of the audience, or the shrinking of modesty, or the sense of outraged religious or traditional instincts. But there was none of these to be found there. The ideal was accepted at once as the proper and possible goal of the race, and the book was treasured amongst the sacred literature of the time.
It soon flashed upon me, too, as I frequented Loomiefa, that their art had all a far higher purpose than I had conjectured from my European experience. It was not meant merely to stir or to satisfy the sense of beauty and harmony, but to implant in the emotions and the imagination the love of the future and the passion for rising in the scale of existence. I grew ashamed to think that I had attributed to this wonderful people the frivolity and even lowness of aim that I had so often seen in European art. Here was a drama that the West had not even a conception of. At its best the stage of Europe professed to educate by representing heroic scenes from the past, by evolving from them lessons for the audience, and by stirring their enthusiasm for great deeds of history or myth. In its commonest mood it reproduced in mimic form some scene or action from contemporary life. At its worst it was but a pander to the survivals of a gross and animal past. What I now thought of as the Limanoran stage was wholly occupied with the future, so far as it was a possible evolution from the present. The noblest ideal that the imagination of the race could shape was brought dramatically before the people that their thoughts and ambitions might be fixed on something beyond themselves.
For this high purpose and not for luxury or personal enjoyment their sculpture and painting and music had been developed, and the newest discoveries and inventions of science had been brought to their aid. There was no objection to what gave pleasure; but to spend the thought and effort of the fully developed human mind on that alone was, they held, a degradation. Strenuous endeavour towards a higher and better future was the note that characterised their pursuits. But, if they could add attractiveness to the prosecution of the aim, the task was all the easier; if they could make the path ahead beautiful and pleasant so as to decoy the reluctant senses onwards, the pace would be all the swifter.
Even with this high aim, I could not understand how this people, who loathed all pretence, could condescend to their dramatic art; for on this stage of Loomiefa were members of their community representing in their persons what they were not and could not be for many ages. And I had heard them often decry the histrionic art as one that encouraged in the actors a habit of delighting in mere semblance and superficial show, a habit that is the basis of hypocrisy and deceit; whilst the love of mimicry and pageantry, I had been led to believe, had vanished from the island at one of the last purgations of the race.
The seeming contradiction was afterwards explained. As one of the necessary steps in my initiation into the privileges and duties of the mature citizen I was led behind the scenes. Through the gorge at the upper end of the valley I passed into a great hall that seemed to me a combination of a museum and workshop. Here were the youth of the Loomiamo and the Fraloomiamo at work upon automata and the elaborate machinery that would guide their motions. Had I kept at a distance from them as they worked, I would have thought that the play of human sculpture was being again enacted, such exact reproductions of the human system were the figures that grew under their hands. In one section stood thousands of what I would have called statues, which had served in the publication of former books. In another the puppets were going through dramatic scenes by way of experimentation, and in many the illusion was complete; I should have said that human beings were talking and acting. In others there was some imperfection, and there one could see that they were all mere fantoccini galvanised into life. In a third section the tissues and parts that were to make mimic men and women were being manufactured; the workers and artists could draw on Rimla for as much force as they needed, whilst the advice of the scientific families was at their command. The machinery of the great workshop was bewildering in its complexity and refinement. The finest tissue or nerve of the human brain could be here imitated so that under a microscope I would have said it was part of a living body.
After all it was only the acting of marionettes that I had seen upon the stage in the valley. But it was greatly aided by another department where the pioneering families cultivated the art and science of illusions. They could imitate the human voice at any point in the valley measured to the fraction of an inch; they could reproduce any scene of history, of contemporary existence, or of futuritive fiction so exactly, making it so full of the lights and shadows of life and of the developments of all advance, that none of the senses unaided by the reasoning and analytic faculties could assert that the men and women were not living, and that their actions and words were not real. Even the electric sense could be deluded by the impulses manufactured by these machinists and illusionists; it would take the magnetic thrills it received for genuine enthusiasm and sympathy from the mind of a man or from a crowd. This department was even more important than the factory of puppets; for it made the play of the marionettes look still more human on the stage. After all it was not the puppets themselves I had watched with such breathless excitement, but a mere illusory picture of their proceedings; the illusion was far more lifelike than the play of the marionettes themselves. So much stress did they lay on stirring the imagination and emotions of the race in favour of the ideals of the future that half the work of these two families consisted in the dramatic publication of their books.
The next sacred book I saw produced in Loomiefa would have of itself persuaded me that this people could have nothing to do with the histrionic art or any art that would encourage the habit of pretence and show in the individual nature. It was called the book of Human Transparency and described the various methods by which the inner working of the human brain could be made patent to Limanoran senses. The tissues could be clarified; the significance of every fibre and nerve could be made familiar to all as an essential part of their education; the eye, the ear, and the firla could be made more subtle and acute in their perceptions, till at last they were able to tell in a moment everything that was proceeding beneath the skull and within the heart. What was done slowly and painfully by the medical elders with the help of their instruments, their hypnotic powers, and the interpretation of dreams, every man would be able to do instantaneously, and without extraneous aid, exceptional wisdom, or occult powers. The general drift of a neighbour’s emotions was known to everyone through his magnetic senses, but not the particular intention or thought; this would be known only after the long course of training and development mapped out in the book of Human Transparency.
One of the chief ethical purposes that had in recent times been fixed in the mind of the community was to eject from the human system all elements and processes that were offensive to the finer feelings and senses, everything in fact that a man or woman might be ashamed of or wish to conceal. The new book of the time aimed at extending this to the operations of thought and emotion. To get clear of the waste products of the mind in a way that would be inoffensive to others was an ideal they had not yet been able to entertain. They had learned with much pain and self-denial the habit of concealing the crude processes of thought that lead to what is worth saying or doing. It was one of the things they were most ashamed of in looking over the history or the memorials of their far past to see the vast amount of the raw digestion of thought and of the refuse of emotion that was made public, and even put into literature meant to be permanent. Most of the orations and magazine articles, and ultimately most of the books that had been produced in past ages were much the same as if the stomach and intestines of the speaker or writer had been anatomised and laid open with all their offensive processes to the gaze of spectators. One of the most beneficent events of their later history had been a conflagration in their valley of memories; for it had wiped out of existence the libraries and art accumulations of many centuries, of which they had come to be ashamed. They could not understand the long-past stage of their civilisation, in which men, and especially young men, had been so proud of displaying the mere débris of their worst and crudest processes of thought; it had actually been the case that most of the literature and art had been produced by youths under fifty years of age, who had not yet begun to appreciate the difference between the processes of thinking and the results of thinking; and one of the most extraordinary features of that period was that the most applauded literary and artistic productions, those that were supposed to be most distinctively the outcome of what they called genius, were the work of boys and girls, mere children under twenty-five years of age. Natures that should still have been in the nursery for many a year were stimulated to address the public and seek applause with work that was merely tentative and disciplinary. The result was that, on the one hand, one half of the most original and promising minds racked themselves to death years before they should have faced life, whilst on the other a juvenile ideal was set before literature and art, and boys and girls became their chief audience and most powerful arbiters. They felt heartily ashamed of that singular stage in their development, and were glad to have accidental fire come to their assistance in huddling its products out of sight.
One of the first instincts they evolved after the series of purgations was the desire to conceal within their minds what was crude or mere process in thinking, and, still more, what was mere waste product and refuse of the mind. Instead of being eager to speak out or publish all that came into the thoughts, bad or good, they grew shy of public exhibition of their projects and schemes till they had been shaped by long years of thinking and experimenting, and criticised and checked by the caution and wisdom of their fully matured nature. Publication became the last resort of the mature and old instead of the first ambition of the young, so afraid were they of exhibiting what might be crude or offensive. Even in the give and take of conversation and social intercourse they preferred long periods of silence to the utterance of truisms and commonplaces. The trivial and conventional in speech, as in life, was what they abhorred, as revealing an intellectual nature on the road back to the infertility and childishness of barbarism, the elaborate mechanism of thought whizzing round without connection with what represents work.
But now the book of Human Transparency proposed as an ideal to eject from the system every process of thought and feeling that they might blush to let others see. If the nature was made transparent then would it become a self-preserving instinct to develop their natures in this direction. Everything crude or false or offensive, that might begin to show itself in their minds, would be at once suppressed before it got headway, instead of having to be slowly reasoned out of existence with the aid of the moral instincts. This accomplished, the race would be able to take another great leap forward. The advance of their processes of thought and feeling to the level of the former results of them would give them a higher point of view from which to look forth into the future.
A mediate book, soon afterward produced by one of the Loomiamo, supplied one of the steps towards the consummation of this ideal. It was the book of Ethereal Nutriment. It took as basis a former discovery, the liquefaction of air, and showed how, by similar methods, the medium that filled interstellar space could be made available in the halls of nutriment and medication, and how it could be manufactured in such a concentrated form as to allow of its being poured along conduits and imbibed by the human organs through the mouth and nostrils, just as air was. For some time the atmosphere had been distilled in liquid form, and supplied to the houses of the citizens absolutely rid of all impurities. Nay, it had been made a fountain of power, transmissible to long distances, and available in a form that was easily carried. Compressed and liquefied, it rapidly returned to the gaseous form as soon as the pressure began to be removed. And the re-equilibrising of the liquid to the expansion of the surrounding air had been made to supply vast quantities of power in the centre of force. The new book proposed to find in the compression and liquefication of the ether an infinite fountain of force that would enable their civilisation to progress at an ever-accelerating pace.
But the most immediate effect proposed by the book was to enable the Limanorans to etherealise their bodies by introducing the liquefied ether into their dietary. The result would be that the tissues would grow more diaphanous. They had already been able to transport some of the universal medium in their anchored vacuum faleenas from the outer margin of the atmosphere to their laboratories, and now they had been able to find it in their manufactured vacuums. With the enormous power they had in Rimla they could easily compress it into forms that would touch the senses, and enter into the blood and the formation of the tissues. As the medium of light and magnetism it was almost certain to make the human body more translucent than it had ever been. All the tissues, even the osseous, had always been pervious to light, but many of them not apparently so to the untrained human eye. Recently their lavolans had shown that by means of certain kinds of luminous rays the human system gave up its most hidden secrets to the human eye. But once they were able to chemicalise and compress the luminiferous ether into palpable form, and to mingle it with the volatile food that could be taken into their bodies as they breathed, there would be no need of lavolans or other apparatus to see the inner movements of the human system.
The sanitary effects of this advance would be no mean result. The medical council would have much of their time set free for their ever-pressing investigations; they would not be needed for the diagnosis of deteriorative symptoms in the tissues; each individual would be able, by the aid of magnifying mirrors to examine for himself what was going on in any part of his system; and every man had sufficient physiological and medical knowledge to understand the beginnings of all the ordinary diseases, and, if he recognised them, to prescribe for himself the hall in Oomalefa that he should frequent in order to check them. Now it would be only the symptoms of obscure or new diseases or deteriorations of the system that the medical elders would have to diagnose. And thus they would have great tracts of their life to devote to new discoveries, and medical science was certain to advance more rapidly.
Another sanitary effect of the new permeability to light would be to render the human body less open to diseases either known or unknown. For it had long been a commonplace of medical science that sunlight reduced the vitality, and therefore the virulence, of all noxious microbes; after nightfall their power increased tenfold. Wherever the sun’s rays could not reach by day, there diseases multiplied and festered. And one of the chief reasons why, in their far past history, incurable maladies were generally internal, was that sunshine could not get to the parts affected except in a feeble and straggling way. The fact that they had fixed themselves deeply in the tissues before they could be observed, and that it was difficult to get at their roots without cutting a passage in to them had been generally accepted as the explanation of their frequency and deadliness. But it had been one of the most important discoveries of the new era after the purgation period, that pure oxygen and pure sunlight were the most medicative of all things, and that the nearer any affected part could get to them the sooner it healed. The new book of Ethereal Nutrition pointed out that one of the results of rendering the human system easily pervious to light would be to rid its internal parts of all trace of immedicability; sunlight, permeating the inner organs and tissues, would make any noxious microbes that might lodge in them innocuous.
The reciprocity of suggestion and discovery was never more saliently exemplified than by one of the less immediate results pointed out by this book as likely to flow from the attainment of its ideal. Volatile ether-food, gradually introduced into the halls of nutrition and gradually increased, would, step by step, bring the human organs to adapt themselves to existence outside of the atmosphere of the earth. For a long time they would be amphibious, with organs adapted to both aërial and ethereal life. Even as it was, the human body revealed in it traces of having already passed through an amphibious stage. There were in the neck glands that were the remains of gills, which must have once belonged to an aquatic habit; besides, there was the last vestige of an eye in the back of the neck still extant in the pineal gland, and this could have been of use only when the ancestor of man was passing through the stage of a water-animal which must watch his enemies from the surface, his body being submerged and out of sight. Step by step he abandoned the water for a littoral, and even at first arboreal, habit; the result was that the gills came to be unused and closed up, and the upward-looking eye was useless in a head that was held upright and could be turned swiftly in all directions; still man retains the memory of the aquatic stage of his ancestry in the ease with which he learns to swim, and in his love of a life on the sea; whilst an occasional birth in more barbarous tribes with the webbed toes of a water-animal still showing reveals his ancestry atavistically.
What was to hinder him, now he had the mastery of himself and his destiny, becoming again amphibious in a new way? Without guidance of his own, driven only by the forces of nature, he had risen out of the waters that once covered the earth, and taken to dry land; for a long period he had been able to live at will in either of two elements, air and water. Where lay the difficulty in making himself again capable of living in two elements, in air and in the luminiferous ether? In prehistoric times nature had worked her evolution in his system by long and slow stages. But in Limanora progress had become lightning-swift, and would again and again increase its pace. For there man had taken command of nature, and made her accommodate her step to his stride. She was his willing servant, nimble as her own electric flash. He could now compress the work of centuries into hours by his concentration of power in Rimla, and by his countless ingenious contrivances. Thought was the lord of time as of space, and thought was now his essence and characteristic. He could, if he wished, contract the process that used to cover geological ages into a generation. There was no reason why he should not become amphibious again in a less grovelling sense than of old within the few centuries of a lifetime. This was the purport of another production of this time, the book of Amphibious Existence.
It was a mediate book, one bridging the gulf between things as they were and the far ideals held out to the race by the Fraloomiamo. It helped to point out the steps towards the realisation of one of the most cherished productions of the age, the Book of Emigration. It had been many years in the maturer minds of the community before I was introduced to Loomiefa and its wonders, and it had recently been much modified by the discoveries of the new outburst of energy that followed Choktroo’s attempt at invasion. Its ideal was to enable the Limanorans of that or some future generation to travel throught space and reach other stars.
Long ago a publication that had prepared for, and demanded this, was the book of the Destiny of the Earth. It had made a profound impression on the people when first produced; for it dramatically painted the horror of death that would settle on this globe. It had been proved by both astronomers and physicists that our orb was gradually losing its heat by the same process which had brought its originally glowing surface to a state that would allow of life settling upon it. First, vegetation and animal life were found at the poles, where the lessened heat of the sun made the terrestrial heat endurable; then they crept their slow way onwards to the equator, till the whole surface of the earth teemed with vitality, at first developing towards vastitude in the warm vapours, in later periods towards concentration of energy in special points of the animal body, and especially in the head. Round the poles at last settled the ice-sheet, advancing at long intervals towards the tropics, now in one hemisphere and again in the other, according as the one or the other was farthest in winter from the sun during an extensive period. The hyperborean powers shepherded the growing life of the earth down into her central belt. But the brumal shepherds of the one side of the world receded as those of the other advanced with their arctic winds and fleecy drifts. Within measurable time this alternation would cease, and the glacial fences would move forward together north and south, and pen the overcrowded human life and energy with all its enemies into the narrow equatorial belt.
It was the drama of these boreal limitations that the book of Terrestrial Destiny pictured. The teeming life weltered over sea and land alike in search of foothold and nutrition. No inch of tropical earth was sacred from brute appetite. Animal and man fought with venomous passion for dear life. Not animalculæ alone but beasts, and even man, became parasitic. Creatures that had loved a free existence in vast prairies or forests learned to nest and hibernate in the folds and hollows of larger animals. Life swarmed over life till for lack of food it began to fail. Man crept with loathsome beasts of prey into caves of the earth, and grew as loathsome in his troglodytic habits. On moved the brumal prison walls. The sun shrivelled in the sky and withdrew his heat. Nothing lived that was not arctic not even amongst the still-free birds of the air. Man finally ceased to have faculty enough to notice the shrinking of the already narrow enclosure that was soon to be his grave. Feebly the last remnants of the race stole forth into the struggling rays of daylight and killed everything of life they could find. Only in the sea still lived their possible prey and food, and thither they dared not go beneath the gloom of the thick ice. The cannibal habit came upon man again and no relationship or love restrained his appetite. The last scene of the drama was the death of the last man, the grave of the remnants of his race; where he fell, there he lay embalmed; and his tomb was the earth’s own winding-sheet. The meagre relics of terrestrial life soon followed him into silence and darkness, and through the sunless night the dead orb wheeled round the extinguished cinder which had for so many geological ages given it light and life.
The publication of the book would have frozen the hearts within them, had not the Limanorans known that that was not the end of all. They saw that the alternations of death and life were not confined to the vegetal and animal species around them. The same pendulum swung through the whole cosmos. The universe which was dead now would live again in blazing rounds of vapour that would solidify and cool till life could settle on the new orbs again. Dead it only seemed. For it never rested but revolved round some centre revolving also, and too distant for man to see or feel. Out of these motions would come resuscitation. After millions of ages, that are but as moments in the history of the cosmos, it would encounter another exhausted universe, and from the collision would a new system of glowing worlds arise, ready for another series of vital colonisations from the limitless life of sidereal space.
It was this knowledge that took the sting out of their sadness over the new book. Yet the fate of man, age by age more closely penned in by the walls of his glacial-coffin, and drawn back by the eddy of time into his primeval savagery, left a loophole for despair and palsy to enter into their lives. Were they to let their descendants fall back again into the beast, whence their ancestors had come? Was this glacial prison and tomb to remain a possibility and a shadow on even the distant horizon of their race? Once before had their ancestry evaded such a fate, penned between the invasive glaciers and the sea; once before had the race committed their fates to an element they feared and hated, lest the encroaching ice-sheet should smother their civilisation and reduce their vitality to the level of barbarism and at last annihilation. Better to let the race die out at its noblest than leave it to go down into such an inferno. Nothing now so made them shudder as the prospect of retrogression, however slight. But to think of their civilisation ebbing away from their posterity before the waning power of the sun and the earth, to think of the lapse of their own intellectual mastery of nature into decrepitude and putrescence, was to turn their hearts to stone.
Under such a prospect they could not sit in intellectual paralysis. For years the imagination of the race worked feverishly towards its rescue from such an appalling destiny, and every new scientific advance brought forth a new book of Emigration. Their one thought of escape was taken from their old migration out of the reach of antarctic glacial advance. To sail out from the earth and commit themselves to the strange conditions and uncertainties of a new element seemed no more hazardous to them now than in their primeval stage of land-civilisation to launch out with their lives in their hands upon the unknown and terrifying ocean. It was urged that there was precedent and basis for their marine adventure in that their ancestry had been amphibious, and that one of the primeval species out of which they had come had been aquatic. The reply was that the case was parallel and not antagonistic. The original vital germs that settled on the cooling surface of the globe must have come out of sidereal space, and must have lived in the element that they would have to cross in emigrating from the glacial orb again; and from these vital germs they, and all living terrestrial things, had evolved. It was only one stage farther back in the history of life; the precedent was the same, though the training and modification of the system would have to be more strenuous and drastic than they had been before the former leap was taken from land to sea. Preparation had already been made; for they had learned aërial navigation far more thoroughly than they had ever known the mastery of the sea. Their airships had ventured right up into the ether, whilst on wings they had themselves coasted the earth’s atmosphere. Nothing was impossible to intellect which had mastered the art of evolution.
Recent discovery had led them far on the difficult ascent towards safe departure from the surface of the world. It only needed ingenuity and development to give them a concentration of aërated sustenance, which would enable them to journey for ages outside of an atmosphere such as they had been accustomed to inhabit; they had the germ of this in the nuts of the alfarene or oxygen-shrub; recently their chemists had been able to reproduce the essence of them, and to compress it into microscopic globules. Not till a later age of discovery did they supersede this by the liquefaction and solidification of air. They were rapidly adapting their own systems to the vacuums they could produce and to the rarefied atmosphere high above the clouds. They were introducing the quintessence of the ether into their halls of sustenance and medication, and thus accustoming their organs and tissues to conditions which they would meet continually on their voyage through sidereal space. The next generation would practically be amphibious, able to live in the luminiferous ether with occasional return to an atmosphere such as surrounds the earth. Every new age would enable them to make longer and longer excursions away from the bosom of mother-earth out towards the influence of other planets. Every new generation would have more elastic and adaptable tissues and organs, which would fit varied pressure and varied mediums of vitality. And with all this the Limanoran body would grow lighter at the same time as it would grow more consolidated, coherent, and indissoluble. But most important of all was the new command of gravitation given them by the discovery of the varying sensitiveness or nonsensitiveness of certain rays to magnetism and gravity according to conditions that were in human hands. There were limitless possibilities in this for sidereal migration. And already out of it had come the lavolamma or gravitation power-machine.
The new book of Emigration brought all these discoveries and thoughts into bearing on its problem and harmonised them, and developed them by means of imaginative suggestion. The drama of its publication drew the bulk of the people to Loomiefa. There we saw a representation of Lilaroma itself, piercing the sky in pure and lonely grandeur. Near its top lay moored a fleet of faleenas of strikingly new form and material; they were as light as foam-bubbles, and as opalescently transparent; within each of them we could see stored quantities of alfarene globules, that seemed enough to serve a people for thousands of years; in each we saw a new anti-gravitation engine, ready to deal with every form of attraction and repulsion in the wide ether and turn it into available power. Men and women in Limanoran form, but as transparent and as imponderable and buoyant as their new ships, floated round the ethereal fleet. Now and again a flash of artificial light would dart across the scene, and along it, as if impelled by it, ran with lightning-swiftness one of the rainbow-flecked faleenas, bearing its full freight. We could see the lavolamma work, and we concluded that there was a new form of it that could take advantage of beams of light to travel with them, as an electric impulse travels along them. Innumerable evolutions with the ethereal fleet took place. The sublimated Limanorans of the future seemed to have complete command of the new ships and of the new power over light and gravitation.
Suddenly came tremors in the framework of the great mountain. It rocked like a buoy in the uneasy surge of a reef. Its snows fell in huge avalanches. Then the conical top was ejected into the sky like a shot from a cannon. The air was thick with dust and stones. But when it cleared and great flames shot forth and licked the face of heaven, we could see far above their reach the rainbow-coloured fleet speeding aloft, filled with their tiny diaphanous sailors.
The scene changed, and we saw universes set in the vault of heaven, and across the space between them we could discern minute specks of light flashing mercurial as thought. Behind them in dim eclipse sped the noctambulant earth, still eddying round the central spot of light; now it broke forth in ragged coruscation, only to sink back into pitchy gloom. Yet a thread of light stretched forth to the luminous atoms that flitted on through the night. Nearer they came and, one by one, grew more distinct and larger. At last we could see that it was the fleet on its way from the top of Lilaroma. Within each ether-ship we could make out the movements of the sailors as they bent its way this side and that. The light from a brilliant star in the new universe made play upon the surface of their faleenas. They had caught in its rays, and were speeding as swift as light towards the now-definite goal. The luminiferous current bore them steadily on, their little engines palpitating with the impulse of the new light and the new gravitation.
Again the scene changed, and we looked upon the surface of a new orb, more advanced in vital development, more highly organised than the earth with which we were familiar. We saw the inhabitants in crowds, face upwards into the night, all eyes upon some distant star. The excitement was rising like a tempest. It seemed as if the object on which they gazed were swiftly approaching them. And in a flash there swept within our sight the fleet of prismatic ether-ships, like rainbows in the light of another sun. They stopped and hovered above the atmosphere. We saw their crews breathe in the elements in which they floated. Lower and lower they came, still sounding the atmosphere and testing its effects upon their organs. The absence of commotion and the steady descent showed that nothing alien to their systems had yet been encountered. Out of their faleenas they gazed as wonderingly down upon the new star as its sea of up-turned faces watched their slow descent.
The scene was brought still nearer to our eyes. Instead of microscopic foam-bells floating in the sky, and microscopic crowds resting on the surface of the other world, we felt present at the meeting of these creatures of different universes. They seemed to feel conscious of this great event in the history of the cosmos. The dwellers of the new world were almost paralysed at first with wonder at these beings so like and yet so unlike themselves; they could recognise, we could see in their friendly faces, the divine community of spirit; their eyes, as soon as they recovered from their waking dream, flashed welcome in magnetic fire; there was no need of community of words for open intercourse; the dwellers of the new star had the same development of electric sense as the Limanorans had; their souls could speak without a sound from the lips.
Step by step their mutual sympathy grew more definite, more cordial, and approximated to the communication of thought and fact. Within a brief period they knew enough of each other’s language to tell out their whence and whither. But in the people of the new star the language was that of feature and not of tongue. Over their faces flashed the signals of thought as well as of emotion, astonishing the newcomers at the rapidity with which expression flitted over their features. Equally astonished were their hosts to hear the countless variety of tone and accent come from the throats of the strangers. They covered their ears as if shielding them from the assault of some thunderous report. Even the voyagers shrank from the voice of their own spokesman. And, tone it down as he would, still was it too loud for any delicate ear to endure. They were in a new atmosphere that bore sound so quickly and clearly as to make a whisper reverberate like thunder. So did it make the eyes of the dwellers in it as keen and far in sight as if armed with the most powerful microscopes and telescopes. The slightest adjustment of them and their lids changed them back and forth from distant observation to near. And the same translucency marked their tissues as made the inner movements of the newcomers’ heart and brain apparent. There was needed no sound to interpret the magnetic messages of the brain along its nerves. Hosts and guests were seen at one, familiar as lifelong friends and thrilling each other with the strange new experiences of their history. The voyagers from earth soon knew why the use of the tongue and throat had been abandoned by their hosts as means of communication; the uncontrollable volume of sound offended their hearing, and drove them to develop the language of eye and feature; the sight grew more powerful and adaptable as voice and ear gave up their share of the energy and sustenance of the system; their tissues, too, had ever been to a large extent transparent because of the rarity and clearness of their atmosphere, and by selection and training they had been able to make them pellucid as they now were.
The gleam of question and answer showed as clearly on the stage of Loomiefa as the movement of the figures themselves. And, when the colloquy had ended, and the strangers had gained all the information they needed for their farther journey through space, we saw them enter their faleenas and rise above the eager, penetrating gaze of their new friends. Across the face of the heaven we followed the ethereal fleet as it faded again into insignificance. Another scene showed us their landing upon another planet of the universe they had entered. The drama thus bore us with delight from system to system throughout the cosmos, and revealed the ease with which stellar voyaging could be accomplished, once the initial difficulties had been overcome.
A mediate book, dramatically published in Loomiefa just before, prepared the way for this. It was the book of Sidereal Intercourse. They had always held that the other universes in the cosmos were as much inhabited by life as theirs was. It had ever seemed to them the absurdest of arrogance for the dwellers on the earth to assume that theirs was the only orb out of the countless myriads on the face of night that had life upon it; that it monopolised the vital energy of infinity, and the attention of its divine intelligence. The wider they had ranged with their sidereal sciences, the more they smiled at the primitive thought of their remote ancestors that they were the cynosure of the cosmos. It had come to be used as the readiest and most striking example of infatuation and conceit. That the poor earthlings were as microscopic in their importance compared with the vastitude of existence, as the bacterial swarms of a wayside pool compared to the denizens of the great ocean, was assumed in every movement and act of their minds.
And, wherever life was, there was the chance that highly developed intelligence existed. They were not so sure that this was yet the case on the farthest of our planets. It might be that the inner and smaller bodies of our universe had passed the stage in which they could support the higher life. The others, they thought, were rapidly evolving a life of their own, most of it still in a low grade; when the earth had passed its climax and begun to decay, they would probably, one after the other, be attaining to a loftier type of life and intelligence. Whilst they were running their course of progress the earth and her inner sister planets would be waiting in their frozen silence the time when the whole of their universe would be exhausted. Nearer and nearer would the whole solar system be approaching some other system that had run its course; and the encounter of the two would evolve a young universe, full of heat and energy enough from the collision to make a new cosmic career.
They had little hope then of stirring reply, if ever they were able to send an embassy of thought to any star of our own system. All their hopes of astral intercommunication were pointed to other stars and other universes; and, as they looked up into the eyes of night, they seemed to feel magnetic answer to the impulses of their souls, not from Mars or Venus, from Saturn or Jupiter, but from the stars that throbbed in far more distant depths. They had ever believed, of course, and they had now scientifically shown, that the centres of light flashing in the nightly sky were not the true sisters of earth but only suns, round which the unseen universes circled. They tried to find the dim worlds which drew their heat and light from these poignant watch-fires of heaven; and their more recent instruments had revealed the dark outlines of many of these twilight wanderers which hung on the radiance of the visible stars. The magnetism that came with the rays from some of those far distant luminous points had shown striking aberration early in its course; and nothing could explain this but the existence of rayless planets revolving round these lambent sources of light. Step by step had they homed these aberrations, till they knew the courses of the dusky satellites of many stars, and they could tell the moment when a circular shadow would cross the face of any one of these suns.
The eyes of the astronomical families had become so accustomed to the times and places of such obscurations that their firlas acted with them and searched for magnetic impulses from the dark sisters of the star they were watching; till at last they could tell by their electric sense the place of many dim planets in the nearer universes.
It was on this that the book of Sidereal Intercourse based its forecast of the immediate future. Since the definite discovery of varied types of life in the spaces beyond the earth’s atmosphere, the last suspicion of mere fancy had vanished from the belief in the existence of high intelligence on the universes of infinity. And now their faces were set towards communication with some of this intelligence on distant worlds. The new book assumed that the electric sense, or something equivalent for the perception of the great cosmic force, had been developed in the inhabitants of some invisible worlds; and it laid down as an axiom that there were vast stores of magnetic material in these orbs, just as there were in the earth and in the sun.
What they must first do was to sweep the range of a universe with an electric impulse on which the whole force of Rimla should be concentrated, and to keep their delicate indicators all set in the same direction. At the publication of the book in Loomiefa we saw gigantic engines slowly moving their long arms this way and that athwart one of the most brilliant stars of night, and scientists eagerly scanning the numerous magnetometers that surrounded the huge electric machine. We could see the air thrill and undulate with the mighty impulse, and the very light of the star seemed to flicker and wink before the penetration of the intrusive force. At last a flash of hope came over the faces of the watchers; the pendent beam of one sarmolan began to quiver. It was a message from the world they sought. Again they turned the whole available power of the island--millions of millions of horse-power--into the electric engine, the arm of which they had at once brought to rest. Fierce lightnings again played through the atmosphere, marking the line of the new despatch. And again the luminous tongue of the magnetometer told of its reception by intelligences like ours. Then came the astronomic families who marked the exact position of the sensitive spot in the sky. And thereafter their sentry stood with sarmolan directed thither, ready to announce the slightest sign of astral impulse or response.
The scene changed, and we saw a new type of electric engine placed in position on the stage. On its long arm was a singularly crooked cage of transparent irelium, flat and sharp like the blade of a sword yet bent into a right angle in the direction of the edge. Within it were placed recording magnetometers. We could see the directors fix them towards their responsive universe. Then Rimla concentrated its tremendous power upon the machine; the arm swung right and left, and finally with a jerk shot the crooked cage like lightning through the air. We followed its luminous track far into the sky, till it seemed nothing but one of the countless stars that silvered the night. Suddenly, like a rocket, it bent back on its course, and as swiftly retraced its flight. I thought to see it shattered into dust as it struck the earth, but there was a deep pool ready to break its force. Its sharp edge cut the water and it vanished, but slowly rose to the surface unhurt, and on the faces of the observers we could see how successful had been the experiment with the limotar, or new boomerang vehicle of electric indications. It had shot far up into space along the true electric impulse that travelled away beyond it towards the sensitive point of sky they had discovered. Before it bent back from its headlong course, the response, speeding more freely and more swiftly through the untrammelled ether, imprinted itself upon the face of the sarmolan. It was this answer, more decided than any they had yet received, that filled the eyes of the observers with joyous light.
There was another change of scene. The gigantic engines had disappeared and in their place we saw the ether-courier families floating on the outskirts of the atmosphere with strata of clouds far below them. On the back of their necks, where the electric sense had its special seat, they bore a singular apparatus, not unlike a small telescope. On their chests they had strapped a small engine of irelium, a miniature of those we had seen in former scenes. The one was a magnifier of electric indications, and the other was an electricity catapult. The couriers could not only draw upon the electric resources of the spaces around them, but upon those of the centre of force. And we could see them converse with distant stars by means of these apparatus. Through unobstructed space they could send with ease their electric impulses to limitless distances, free from the atmospheric retardation which before had demanded immense power to overcome its inertia. And with their new electro-telescopes they could magnify ten-thousand-fold any electric ray for their firlas to receive, although it might have travelled a thousand times the distance between the earth and the sun. They might have to wait days for their answer; but again and again were they rewarded with it. With the dim stars circling round the nearer suns they were able to hold comparatively rapid converse. But they were going farther afield through the cosmos, and they had often to watch and wait for weeks or months or years for any indication of response.
The book awakened little enthusiasm compared with the publication of some of those that I had witnessed. For, though the authors had been rapid in the composition of it, they had been somewhat forestalled by one of the ingenious inventions of the last great age of discovery. This was the modification of the lavolan which brought them records of the life of extra-aërial space. Amongst the luminous impressions that their combination of lavolan and faleena had brought down out of the ether, they had found evidences of highly organised systems which frequented the vacuum outside our atmosphere. They were satisfied with the knowledge of this new-discovered teeming life, and they believed that before many ages they would have developed, first their apparatus, and next their senses, so far as to open intercourse with it. And if they could come to converse with nobler intelligences near the earth, they did not need to go so far afield in the cosmos as the new book suggested. Their own filammus would serve to bring them into close sympathy with the best life that was to be found in space until they should know the conditions of such life and aim at fulfilling them.
It was one of the subsidiary studies and ideals of the book that drew most attention and produced most result. It pictured an apparatus and method for tapping the thoughts of men as they travelled along the nerves, an adaptation of their huge electric engines for sidereal intercommunication. For some ages they had been able to send emotions and impulses through the air, or rather through the medium that interpenetrated the air, and recently they had developed this into the despatch of thoughts through long distances. The combination of great magnetic power and sensitive sarmolans, this book showed, would draw off thought at any point along its line of flight whether in the body or in the air; and underneath an electric magnifier and interpreter the indicator would reveal the meaning of the thoughts. Thus would they be able to find out the intentions of men, however distant. But this was only a minor result of the ideal. They would be able, with the aid of the apparatus, to tap the torrents of thought speeding through the ether, and so drink of the highest intelligence and imagination which approached the earth. Much of it would be too intricate and abstruse for them to follow or understand. But they already knew that most of their greatest inspirations had come from this ocean of tremulous energy, bordering the shores of our world; and development of their faculties and of their sympathy with this extra-terrestrial thought would gradually lead them to the interpretation of its more complex and deeper elements. All their civilisation had been an attempt to know the thoughts that lie in the structure of our universe, in its complicated energy and minute life. By this new means they would feel the throb of the very heart of our system, perchance of the very heart whose beats are the life of the cosmos; at least they would get to know the intelligence that flashes through space around our world, the wisdom and the inspirations passing between the inhabitants of the ether beyond our grosser senses.
Had it not been for this minor issue and ideal, the publication of the book would have been completely overshadowed by that of the book of Immortality. This took as basis the great expansion of life they had been able to produce and their ideals of ethereal nutrition and amphibious life, and pictured the posterity of the Limanorans able to join the inhabitants of the ether without any violent transition or death. We saw a Limanoran on the stage in Loomiefa passing through the new transmutation from mortal to immortal. His transient elements were atom by atom sublimed away in a new hall of medication, where magnetic energy took the place of more material nutrition. His tissues became diaphanous, till only the light and the magnetism he emitted marked the place where he lay. It was what he thought and felt rather than what he was that told us he was still there. His lower and more stagnant centres of energy had vanished; and gravitation seemed to have little or no influence upon him. Whithersoever his thought willed, thither he floated, rather the luminous reflection of a man than the man himself. To our grosser senses he seemed as impalpable and evanescent as a perfume or a mist on the morning hills. Yet there he stood or moved an inexpugnable centre of the highest energy, whither flowed the sympathetic force of other centres, and whither nothing hostile could approach. Storms passed effectless over his head; the deadliest engines shot their darts at him in vain; poisonous fumes, lethal showers, armies of pestilential microbes, swept round him and through him innocuous. All the evanescent centres of energy that had laid him open to the attacks of these, had dissolved and left him fit to be a dweller in the infinite ether. There might be other noxious elements, to whose assaults he was yet vulnerable; but these we could not discover. He was immortal as far as terrestrial enemies were concerned, immortal without the sudden collapse and dissolution of the lower centres which we call death upon our world. By the most natural of processes he lost the substance that awakened our grosser senses and became the mere halo of what he had been, fit only to make himself felt by our centres of thought and imagination. With our firlas we could feel stream from him great currents of magnetic influence, unobstructed by any of those terrene or aërial media that make spiritual intercourse so difficult upon this world.
Such an ideal, when attained, would spread what is now called death over the greater part of our terrestrial lifetime, instead of massing it into a few moments of farewell. It would be difficult to fence off the immortal from the mortal, so many stages would there be of transmutation. The intercourse between the immortalising and the immortal would then be continuous and there would be no sudden break in existence, no great gulf fixed between the spiritual and the material.
With the same corporeal and mental faculties which their ancestry had had in primeval ages, and the bulk of men had in their own day, they would have counted immortality as the gift of a friend. Even with their existing development, noble though it was, they would never think of longing for such a fate; for the lower centres of energy, forming what is called the body, still demanded an amount of attention and sustenance that was burdensome. They had great delight in their life; they energised so purely and continually that they often forgot the corporeal system and its claims. Yet the time came in all men’s lives when they felt their still-mixed constitutions advance too slowly for their spiritual ambitions; and then they longed for change, perhaps rest, such as the dissolution we call death accomplished. If, however, they could get rid of the inferior and clogging elements of their systems and float free of terrene forces and conditions like gravitation, then might immortality be an object of desire.
A publication that delighted them even more than this was one that had a cognate theme, the dimension of time. It seemed to me the most fanciful of all the productions I had witnessed in Loomiefa. Yet it did not seem to strike the Limanorans as beyond the bounds of possibility. It was called the book of Time-focussing. So fantastic and utopian did I think it that I paid little attention when it was dramatically published on the stage. Yet I remember some of the chief features of the new book.
It counselled the development of the imagination on its prospicient side till it should count æons as moments and take easy flight through eternities. It was the real time-faculty, and had already in the productions of Loomiefa forerun the civilisation of the race by long periods. It had become true prophet not merely over months or years, but over centuries. Trained to use the data of the past and the present, it had been able to forecast the evolution of the future with a certainty that made its art almost a science. What was to hinder extending its range of vision beyond the immediate horizon, and taking in at a glance the course of the future as it did the page of history? And as it reached higher and higher points of view, it could paint eternity as it now pictured the past. There was no limit to its previsional powers, as there had been none to its penetration into the prehistoric and primeval darkness. Prescience should be as organised and exact as any science. In fact all their sciences had become presciential, those that were merely retrospective or synchronous having gradually fallen out of notice. And the families that had been devoted to them were one by one absorbed into other services. No study was counted of much value that had not one eye on the future. Their whole intellectual system was thus becoming futuritive, and all the faculties looked up to and centred in the greatest and most predictive of them all--the imagination.
They had already been able in the valley of memories to focus the past into the view of a few moments or days or months. The time stretching behind us into the darkness was underneath one glance of the intellectual eye. Only greater certainty in their imaginative methods was needed for the eternity that stretches in front of us to flash before the soul in a single picture. Only develop the prophet-faculty as rapidly in the next few generations as it had been developed in the past few, and we might move at will from age to age of the future, as we now move from age to age of the past, living at any moment in any period we pleased, or in a thousand periods at once. From past to future would be as easy a leap as from hell to heaven for this great time-and-space-focussing faculty. Eternity would be as focal to imagination as infinity. It was an eye towards which radiated all time and all space. Post-historic pictures would be as vivid to it as prehistoric. Even now interest was fast leaking from mere recorded history before the romance of eternity past and future. What was the history of the race upon earth, compared with the periscope of the cosmos? Then would their posterity be able to stand on a watch-tower in the heights of heaven, and view the whole arena of existence as it stretched through time and space. There is no faculty so close to the divine as imagination.
I felt that this publication was like all their work, singularly self-regardless. It clearly recognised that the realisation of its proposed ideal would mean the doom of its art. Pioneering, all of theirs which we in the West would call literature, would be superseded. Loomiefa would then become an institution of the past, less and less interesting as but a rapidly receding item of history. Self-effacement for the sake of progress was the dominant note of Limanoran civilisation. And in this book it seemed to me to rise to its highest pitch; for it held before the race a goal, which, when attained, would render literature and its publication unnecessary to its advance.
