The space trilogy, p.27
The Space Trilogy, page 27
“The tragedy of my life,” he said, “and indeed of the modern intellectual world in general, is the rigid specialization of knowledge entailed by the growing complexity of what is known. It is my own share in that tragedy that an early devotion to physics has prevented me from paying any proper attention to Biology until I reached the fifties. To do myself justice, I should make it clear that the false humanist ideal of knowledge as an end in itself never appealed to me. I always wanted to know in order to achieve utility. At first, that utility naturally appeared to me in a personal form—I wanted scholarships, an income, and that generally recognized position in the world without which a man has no leverage. When those were attained, I began to look farther: to the utility of the human race!”
He paused as he rounded his period and Ransom nodded to him to proceed.
“The utility of the human race,” continued Weston, “in the long run depends rigidly on the possibility of interplanetary, and even intersidereal, travel. That problem I solved. The key of human destiny was placed in my hands. It would be unnecessary—and painful to us both—to remind you how it was wrenched from me in Malacandra by a member of a hostile intelligent species whose existence, I admit, I had not anticipated.”
“Not hostile exactly,” said Ransom, “but go on.”
“The rigors of our return journey from Malacandra led to a serious breakdown in my health—”
“Mine too,” said Ransom.
Weston looked somewhat taken aback at the interruption and went on. “During my convalescence I had that leisure for reflection which I had denied myself for many years. In particular I reflected on the objections you had felt to that liquidation of the nonhuman inhabitants of Malacandra which was, of course, the necessary preliminary to its occupation by our own species. The traditional and, if I may say so, the humanitarian form in which you advanced those objections had till then concealed from me their true strength. That strength I now began to perceive. I began to see that my own exclusive devotion to human utility was really based on an unconscious dualism.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that all my life I had been making a wholly unscientific dichotomy or antithesis between Man and Nature—had conceived myself fighting for Man against his nonhuman environment. During my illness I plunged into Biology, and particularly into what may be called biological philosophy. Hitherto, as a physicist, I had been content to regard Life as a subject outside my scope. The conflicting views of those who drew a sharp line between the organic and the inorganic and those who held that what we call Life was inherent in matter from the very beginning had not interested me. Now it did. I saw almost at once that I could admit no break, no discontinuity, in the unfolding of the cosmic process. I became a convinced believer in emergent evolution. All is one. The stuff of mind, the unconsciously purposive dynamism, is present from the very beginning.”
Here he paused. Ransom had heard this sort of thing pretty often before and wondered when his companion was coming to the point. When Weston resumed it was with an even deeper solemnity of tone.
“The majestic spectacle of this blind, inarticulate purposiveness thrusting its way upward and ever upward in an endless unity of differentiated achievements towards an ever-increasing complexity of organization, towards spontaneity and spirituality, swept away all my old conception of a duty to Man as such. Man in himself is nothing. The forward movements of Life—the growing spirituality—is everything. I say to you quite freely, Ransom, that I should have been wrong in liquidating the Malacandrians. It was a mere prejudice that made me prefer our own race to theirs. To spread spirituality, not to spread the human race, is henceforth my mission. This sets the copingstone on my career. I worked first for myself; then for science; then for humanity; but now at last for Spirit itself I might say, borrowing language which will be more familiar to you, the Holy Spirit.”
“Now what exactly do you mean by that?” asked Ransom. “I mean,” said Weston, “that nothing now divides you and me except a few outworn theological technicalities with which organized religion has unhappily allowed itself to get incrusted. But I have penetrated that crust. The Meaning beneath it is as true and living as ever. If you will excuse me for putting it that way, the essential truth of the religious view of life finds a remarkable witness in the fact that it enabled you, on Malacandra, to grasp, in your own mythical and imaginative fashion, a truth which was hidden from me.”
“I don’t know much about what people call the religious view of life,” said Ransom, wrinkling his brow. “You see, I’m a Christian. And what we mean by the Holy Ghost is not a blind, inarticulate purposiveness.”
“My dear Ransom,” said Weston, “I understand you perfectly. I have no doubt that my phraseology will seem strange to you, and perhaps even shocking. Early and revered associations may have put it out of your power to recognize in this new form the very same truths which religion has so long preserved and which science is now at last re-discovering. But whether you can see it or not, believe me, we are talking about exactly the same thing.”
“I’m not at all sure that we are.”
“That, if you will permit me to say so, is one of the real weaknesses of organized religion—that adherence to formulae, that failure to recognize one’s own friends. God is a spirit, Ransom. Get hold of that. You’re familiar with that already. Stick to it. God is a spirit.”
“Well, of course. But what then?”
“What then? Why, spirit—mind—freedom—spontaneity—that’s what I’m talking about. That is the goal towards which the whole cosmic process is moving. The final disengagement of that freedom, that spirituality, is the work to which I dedicate my own life and the life of humanity. The goal, Ransom, the goal: think of it! Pure spirit: the final vortex of self-thinking, self-originating activity.”
“Final?” said Ransom. “You mean it doesn’t yet exist?”
“Ah,” said Weston, “I see what’s bothering you. Of course I know. Religion pictures it as being there from the beginning. But surely that is not a real difference? To make it one, would be to take time too seriously. When it has once been attained, you might then say it had been at the beginning just as well as at the end. Time is one of the things it will transcend.”
“By the way,” said Ransom, “is it in any sense at all personal—is it alive?”
An indescribable expression passed over Weston’s face. He moved a little nearer to Ransom and began speaking in a lower voice.
“That’s what none of them understand,” he said. It was such a gangster’s or a schoolboy’s whisper and so unlike his usual orotund lecturing style that Ransom for a moment felt a sensation almost of disgust.
“Yes,” said Weston, “I couldn’t have believed, myself, till recently. Not a person, of course. Anthropomorphism is one of the childish diseases of popular religion” (here he had resumed his public manner), “but the opposite extreme of excessive abstraction has perhaps in the aggregate proved more disastrous. Call it a Force. A great, inscrutable Force, pouring up into us from the dark bases of being. A Force that can choose its instruments. It is only lately, Ransom, that I’ve learned from actual experience something which you have believed all your life as part of your religion.” Here he suddenly subsided again into a whisper—a croaking whisper unlike his usual voice. “Guided,” he said. “Chosen. Guided. I’ve become conscious that I’m a man set apart. Why did I do physics? Why did I discover the Weston rays? Why did I go to Malacandra? It—the Force—has pushed me on all the time. I’m being guided. I know now that I am the greatest scientist the world has yet produced. I’ve been made so for a purpose. It is through me that Spirit itself is at this moment pushing on to its goal.”
“Look here,” said Ransom, “one wants to be careful about this sort of thing. There are spirits and spirits, you know.”
“Eh?” said Weston. “What are you talking about?”
“I mean a thing might be a spirit and not good for you.”
“But I thought you agreed that Spirit was the good—the end of the whole process? I thought you religious people were all out for spirituality? What is the point of asceticism—fasts and celibacy and all that? Didn’t we agree that God is a spirit? Don’t you worship Him because He is pure spirit?”
“Good heavens, no! We worship Him because He is wise and good. There’s nothing specially fine about simply being a spirit. The Devil is a spirit.”
“Now your mentioning the Devil is very interesting,” said Weston, who had by this time quite recovered his normal manner. “It is a most interesting thing in popular religion, this tendency to fissiparate, to breed pairs of opposites: heaven and hell, God and Devil. I need hardly say that in my view no real dualism in the universe is admissible; and on that ground I should have been disposed, even a few weeks ago, to reject these pairs of doublets as pure mythology. It would have been a profound error. The cause of this universal religious tendency is to be sought much deeper. The doublets are really portraits of Spirit, of cosmic energy—self-portraits, indeed, for it is the Life Force itself which has deposited them in our brains.”
“What on earth do you mean?” said Ransom. As he spoke he rose to his feet and began pacing to and fro. A quite appalling weariness and malaise had descended upon him.
“Your Devil and your God,” said Weston, “are both pictures of the same Force. Your heaven is a picture of the perfect spirituality ahead; your hell a picture of the urge or nisus which is driving us on to it from behind. Hence the static peace of the one and the fire and darkness of the other. The next stage of emergent evolution, beckoning us forward, is God; the transcended stage behind, ejecting us, is the Devil. Your own religion, after all, says that the devils are fallen angels.”
“And you are saying precisely the opposite, as far as I can make out—that angels are devils who’ve risen in the world.”
“It comes to the same thing,” said Weston.
There was another long pause. “Look here,” said Ransom, “it’s easy to misunderstand one another on a point like this. What you are saying sounds to me like the most horrible mistake a man could fall into. But that may be because in the effort to accommodate it to my supposed ‘religious views,’ you’re saying a good deal more than you mean. It’s only a metaphor, isn’t it, all this about spirits and forces? I expect all you really mean is that you feel it your duty to work for the spread of civilisation and knowledge and that kind of thing.” He had tried to keep out of his voice the involuntary anxiety which he had begun to feel. Next moment he recoiled in horror at the cackling laughter, almost an infantile or senile laughter, with which Weston replied.
“There you go, there you go,” he said. “Like all you religious people. You talk and talk about these things all your life, and the moment you meet the reality you get frightened.”
“What proof,” said Ransom (who indeed did feel frightened), “what proof have you that you are being guided or supported by anything except your own individual mind and other people’s books?”
“You didn’t notice, dear Ransom,” said Weston, “that I’d improved a bit since we last met in my knowledge of extra terrestrial language. You are a philologist, they tell me.”
Ransom started. “How did you do it?” he blurted out.
“Guidance, you know, guidance,” croaked Weston. He was squatting at the roots of his tree with his knees drawn up, and his face, now the color of putty, wore a fixed and even slightly twisted grin. “Guidance. Guidance,” he went on. “Things coming into my head. I’m being prepared all the time. Being made a fit receptacle for it.”
“That ought to be fairly easy,” said Ransom impatiently. “If this Life Force is something so ambiguous that God and the Devil are equally good portraits of it, I suppose any receptacle is equally fit, and anything you can do is equally an expression of it.”
“There’s such a thing as the main current,” said Weston. “It’s a question of surrendering yourself to that—making yourself the conductor of the live, fiery, central purpose—becoming the very finger with which it reaches forward.”
“But I thought that was the Devil aspect of it, a moment ago.”
“That is the fundamental paradox. The thing we are reaching forward to is what you would call God. The reaching forward, the dynamism, is what people like you always call the Devil. The people like me, who do the reaching forward, are always martyrs. You revile us, and by us come to your goal.”
“Does that mean in plainer language that the things the Force wants you to do are what ordinary people call diabolical?”
“My dear Ransom, I wish you would not keep relapsing on to the popular level. The two things are only moments in the single, unique reality. The world leaps forward through great men and greatness always transcends mere moralism. When the leap has been made our ‘diabolism’ as you would call it becomes the morality of the next stage; but while we are making it, we are called criminals, heretics, blasphemers. . . .”
“How far does it go? Would you still obey the Life Force if you found it prompting you to murder me?”
“Yes.”
“Or to sell England to the Germans?”
“Yes.”
“Or to print lies as serious research in a scientific periodical?”
“Yes.”
“God help you!” said Ransom.
“You are still wedded to your conventionalities,” said Weston. “Still dealing in abstractions. Can you not even conceive a total commitment—a commitment to something which utterly overrides all our petty ethical pigeonholes?”
Ransom grasped at the straw. “Wait, Weston,” he said abruptly. “That may be a point of contact. You say it’s a total commitment. That is, you’re giving up yourself. You’re not out for your own advantage. No, wait half a second. This is the point of contact between your morality and mine. We both acknowledge—”
“Idiot,” said Weston. His voice was almost a howl and he had risen to his feet. “Idiot,” he repeated. “Can you understand nothing? Will you always try to press everything back into the miserable framework of your old jargon about self and self-sacrifice? That is the old accursed dualism in another form. There is no possible distinction in concrete thought between me and the universe. In so far as I am the conductor of the central forward pressure of the universe, I am it. Do you see, you timid, scruple-mongering fool? I am the Universe. I, Weston, am your God and your Devil. I call that Force into me completely. . . .”
Then horrible things began happening. A spasm like that preceding a deadly vomit twisted Weston’s face out of recognition. As it passed, for one second something like the old Weston reappeared—the old Weston, staring with eyes of horror and howling, “Ransom, Ransom! For Christ’s sake don’t let them—” and instantly his whole body spun round as if he had been hit by a revolver bullet and he fell to the earth, and was there rolling at Ransom’s feet, slavering and chattering and tearing up the moss by handfuls. Gradually the convulsions decreased. He lay still, breathing heavily, his eyes open but without expression. Ransom was kneeling beside him now. It was obvious that the body was alive, and Ransom wondered whether this were a stroke or an epileptic fit, for he had never seen either. He rummaged among the packages and found a bottle of brandy which he uncorked and applied to the patient’s mouth. To his consternation the teeth opened, closed on the neck of the bottle and bit it through. No glass was spat out. “O God, I’ve killed him,” said Ransom. But beyond a spurt of blood at the lips there was no change in his appearance. The face suggested that either he was in no pain or in a pain beyond all human comprehension. Ransom rose at last, but before doing so he plucked the revolver from Weston’s belt, then, walking down to the beach, he threw it as far as he could into the sea.
He stood for some moments gazing out upon the bay and undecided what to do. Presently he turned and climbed up the turfy ridge that bordered the little valley on his left hand. He found himself on a fairly level upland with a good view of the sea, now running high and teased out of its level gold into a continually changing pattern of lights and shadows. For a second or two he could catch no sight of the islands. Then suddenly their treetops appeared, hanging high up against the sky, and widely separated. The weather, apparently, was already driving them apart—and even as he thought this they vanished once more into some unseen valley of the waves. What was his chance, he wondered, of ever finding them again? A sense of loneliness smote him, and then a feeling of angry frustration. If Weston were dying, or even if Weston were to live, imprisoned here with him on an island they could not leave, what had been the danger he was sent to avert from Perelandra? And so, having begun to think of himself, he realized that he was hungry. He had seen neither fruit nor gourd on the Fixed Land. Perhaps it was a death trap. He smiled bitterly at the folly which had made him so glad, that morning, to exchange those floating paradises, where every grove dropped sweetness, for this barren rock. But perhaps it was not barren after all. Determined, despite the weariness which was every moment descending upon him, to make a search for food, he was just turning inland when the swift changes of color that announce the evening of that world overtook him. Uselessly he quickened his pace. Before he had got down into the valley, the grove where he had left Weston was a mere cloud of darkness. Before he had reached it he was in seamless, undimensioned night. An effort or two to grope his way to the place where Weston’s stores had been deposited only served to abolish his sense of direction altogether. He sat down perforce. He called Weston’s name aloud once or twice but, as he expected, received no answer. “I’m glad I removed his gun, all the same,” thought Ransom; and then, “Well, qui dort dine and I suppose I must make the best of it till the morning.” When he lay down he discovered that the solid earth and moss of the Fixed Land was very much less comfortable than the surfaces to which he had lately been accustomed. That, and the thought of the other human being lying, no doubt, close at hand with open eyes and teeth clenched on splintered glass, and the sullen recurring pound of breakers on the beach, all made the night comfortless. “If I lived on Perelandra,” he muttered, “Maleldil wouldn’t need to forbid this island. I wish I’d never set eyes on it.”
