An aspirant must spend fifty years, not including the period of
infantile education, merely getting ready to begin, and the acquisition
of factual knowledge, while not understressed, takes only a small
proportion of those fifty years. Then, if he's good enough, he can
take a small part in the elementary instruction of a few babies, and
if he does well on that basis for another thirty or forty years, he is
considered a fair beginner....
Once upon a time I myself lurched around stuffy classrooms, trying
to insert a few predigested facts--I wonder how many of them _were_
facts--into the minds of bored and preoccupied adolescents, some of
whom may have liked me moderately well. I was even able to shake hands
and be nice while their terribly well-meaning parents explained to me
how they ought to be educated. So much of our human effort goes down
the drain of futility, I sometimes wonder how we ever got as far as the
Bronze Age. Somehow we did, though, and a short way beyond.
After that preliminary stage of an angel's education is finished, the
baby is transferred to more ordinary surroundings, and his bodily
growth completes itself in a very short time. Wings grow abruptly,
as I have seen, and he reaches a maximum height of six inches by our
measure. Only then does he enter on that lifetime of two hundred and
fifty years, for not until then does his body begin to age. My angel
has been a living personality for many years, but will not celebrate
her first birthday for almost a year. I like to think of that.
At about the same time that they learned the principles of
interplanetary travel, approximately twelve million years ago, these
people also learned how growth could be rearrested at any point short
of full maturity. At first the knowledge served no purpose except in
the control of illnesses which still occasionally struck them at that
time. But when the long periods of time required for space travel were
considered, the advantages became obvious.
* * * * *
So it happens that my angel was born ten light years away. She was
trained by her father and many others in the wisdom of seventy million
years--that, she tells me, is the approximate sum of their _recorded_
history--and then she was safely sealed and cherished in what my
superamebic brain regarded as a blue egg. Education did not proceed at
that time; her mind went to sleep with the rest of her. When Camilla's
warmth made her wake and grow again, she remembered what to do with
the little horny bumps provided for her elbows. And came out into this
planet, God help her.
I wondered why her father should have chosen any combination so
unreliable as an old hen and a human being. Surely he must have had
plenty of excellent ways to bring the shell to the right temperature.
Her answer should have satisfied me immensely, but I am still compelled
to wonder about it.
"Camilla was a nice hen, and my father studied your mind while you were
asleep. It was a bad landing, and much was broken--no such landing was
ever made before after so long a journey. Only four other grown-ups
could come with my father. Three of them died en route and he is very
ill. And there were nine other children to care for."
Yes, I knew she'd said that an angel thought I was good enough to be
trusted with his daughter. If it upsets me, all I need do is look at
her and then in the mirror. As for the explanation, I can only conclude
there must be more which I am not ready to understand. I was worried
about those nine others, but she assured me they were all well, and I
sensed that I ought not to ask more about them at present.
* * * * *
Their planet, she says, is closely similar to this, a trifle larger,
moving in a somewhat longer orbit around a sun like ours. Two
gleaming moons, smaller than ours--their orbits are such that
two-moon nights come rarely; they are "magic," and she will ask her
father to show me one, if he can. Because of a slower rotation, their
day has twenty-six of our hours. Their atmosphere is mainly nitrogen
and oxygen in the proportion familiar to us; slightly richer in some
of the rare gases. The climate is now what we should call tropical
and subtropical, but they have known glacial rigors like those in our
world's past. There are only two great continental land masses, and
many thousands of large islands.
Their total population is only five billion.
It seems my angel wants to become a student of animal life here on
Earth. I, her teacher! But bless her for the notion anyhow. We sat and
traded animals for a couple of hours last night; I found it restful,
after the mental struggle to grasp more difficult matters. Judy was
something new to her. They have several luscious monsters on that
planet, but, in her view, so have we.
She told me of a blue sea-snake fifty feet long, relatively harmless,
that bellows cowlike and comes into the tidal marshes to lay black
eggs; so I gave her a whale. She offered a bat-winged, day-flying ball
of mammalian fluff as big as my head and weighing under an ounce; I
matched her with a marmoset. She tried me with a small-size pink
brontosaur, very rare, but I was ready with the duck-billed platypus,
and that caused us to exchange some pretty funny remarks about
mammalian eggs. All trivial in a way; also the happiest evening in my
fifty-three tangled years of life.
She was a trifle hesitant to explain those kangaroolike people, until
she was sure I really wanted to know. It seems they are about the
nearest parallel to human life on that planet; not a near parallel, of
course, as she was careful to explain. Agreeable and always friendly
souls, though they weren't always so, I'm sure, and of a somewhat more
alert intelligence than we possess. Manual workers mainly, because they
prefer it nowadays, but some of them are excellent mathematicians.
The first practical spaceship was built by a group of them, with
assistance, of course.
Names offer a difficulty. Because of the nature of the angelic
language, they have scant use for them except for the purpose of
written record, and writing naturally plays little part in their daily
life--no occasion to write a letter when distance is no obstacle to the
speech of your mind. An angel's formal name is about as important to
him, as, say, my Social Security number is to me.
* * * * *
She has not told me hers, because my mind can't grasp the phonetics on
which their written language is based. As we would speak a friend's
name, an angel will project the friend's image to his friend's
receiving mind. More pleasant and more intimate, I think, although it
was a shock to me at first to glimpse my own ugly mug in my mind's eye.
Stories are occasionally written, if there is something in them that
should be preserved precisely as it was in the first telling. But in
their world the true story-teller has a more important place than the
printer. He offers one of the best of their quieter pleasures; a good
one can hold his audience for a week and never tire them.
"What is this 'angel' in your mind when you think of me?" she asked
once.
"A being men have imagined for centuries, when they thought of
themselves as they might like to be, and not as they are."
I did not try too painfully hard to learn much about the principles
of space travel. The most my brain could take in of her explanation
was something like: "Rocket, then phototropism." Now that makes scant
sense. So far as I know, phototropism--movement toward light--is an
_organic_ phenomenon. One thinks of it as a response of protoplasm, in
some plants and animal organisms, most of them simple, to the stimulus
of light; certainly not as a force capable of moving inorganic matter.
I think that whatever may be the principle she was describing, this
word phototropism was merely the nearest thing to it in my reservoir
of language. If I did know the physical principles which brought them
here, and could write them in terms accessible to technicians, I would
not do it.
Here is a thing I am afraid no hypothetical reader of this journal
would believe:
These people, as I have written, learned their method of space travel
some twelve million years ago, yet this is the first time they have
ever used it to convey them to another planet. The heavens are rich
in worlds, she tells me; on many of them there is life, often on very
primitive levels. No external force prevented her people from going
forth, colonizing, conquering, as far as they pleased. They could have
populated a whole Galaxy. They did not, because they believed they were
not ready. More precisely--
_Not good enough!_
* * * * *
Only fifty million years ago, by her account, did they learn, as we
may learn eventually, that intelligence without goodness is worse than
high explosive in the hands of a baboon. For beings advanced beyond the
level of Pithecanthropus, intelligence is a cheap commodity--not too
hard to develop, hellishly easy to use for unconsidered ends. Whereas
goodness is not to be achieved without unending effort of the hardest
kind, within the self, whether the self be man or angel.
It is clear even to me that the conquest of evil is only one step, not
the most important. Goodness, she tried to tell me, is an altogether
positive quality; the part of living nature that swarms with such
monstrosities as cruelty, meanness, bitterness, greed is not to be
filled by a vacuum when these horrors are eliminated.
Kindness, for only one example. Anybody who defines kindness only as
the absence of cruelty doesn't understand the nature of either.
* * * * *
They do not aim at perfection, these angels, only at the attainable.
They passed through many millenia while advances in technology merely
worsened their condition and increased the peril of self-annihilation.
They came through that, in time. War was at length so far outgrown that
its recurrence was impossible, and the development of wholly rational
beings could begin. Then they were ready to start growing up, through
more millenia of self-searching, self-discipline, seeking to earn the
simple out of the complex, discovering how to use knowledge and not be
used by it. Even then, of course, they slipped back often enough. There
were what she refers to as eras of fatigue. In their dimmer past, they
had had many dark ages, lost civilizations, hopeful beginnings ending
in dust. Earlier still they had come out of the slime, as we did.
But their period of deepest uncertainty and sternest self-appraisal
did not come until twelve million years ago, when they knew a Universe
could be theirs for the taking, and knew they were not yet good enough.
They are in no more hurry than the stars. She tried to convey
something, tentatively, at this point, which was really beyond both of
us. It had to do with time (not as I understand time) being perhaps the
most essential attribute of God (not as I was ever able to understand
that word). Seeing my mental exhaustion, she gave up the effort, and
later told me that the conception was extremely difficult for her,
too--not only, I gathered, because of her youth and relative ignorance.
There was also a hint that her father might not have wished her to
bring my brain up to a hurdle like that one....
Of course they explored. Their little spaceships were roaming the ether
before there was anything like man on Earth--roaming and listening,
observing, recording; never entering nor taking part in the life of any
home but their own. For five million years they even forbade themselves
to go beyond their own solar system, though it would have been easy to
do so. And in the following seven million years, although they traveled
to incredible distances, the same stern restraint was held in force.
It was altogether unrelated to what we should call fear. That, I think,
is as extinct in them as hate. There was so much to do at home! I wish
I could imagine it. They mapped the heavens, and played in their own
sunlight.
Naturally I cannot tell you what goodness is. I know only, moderately
well, what it seems to mean to us human beings. It appears that the
best of us can, often with enormous difficulty, however, achieve a
manner of life in which goodness somewhat overbalances our aggressive,
hostile tendencies for the greater part of the time. We are, in other
words, a fraction alive; the rest is in the dark. Dante was a bitter
masochist; Beethoven a frantic and miserable snob, Shakespeare wrote
potboilers. And Christ said: "My Father, if it be possible, let this
cup pass from me."
But give us fifty million years--I am no pessimist. After all, I've
watched one-celled organisms on the slide, and listened to Brahms'
Fourth. Night before last I said to the angel: "In spite of everything,
you and I are kindred."
She granted me agreement.
* * * * *