Last night when I stopped writing I did go to bed, but I was restless,
refusing sleep. At some time in the small hours--there was light from a
single moon--she flew over to me. The tensions dissolved away like an
illness and my mind was able to respond with a certain calm.
I made plain that I would never willingly part company with her,
which I am sure she already knew, and she gave me to understand that
there are two alternatives for the remainder of my life. The choice,
she says, is altogether mine, and I must take time to be sure of my
decision.
I can live out my natural span, whatever it proves to be, and she will
not leave me for long at any time. She will be there to advise, teach,
help me in anything good I care to undertake. She says she would enjoy
this; for some reason she is, as we'd say in our language, fond of me.
Lord, the books I could write! I fumble for words now, in the usual
human way. Whatever I put on paper is a miserable fraction, of the
potential; the words themselves are rarely the right ones. But under
her guidance--
I could take a fair part in shaking the world. With words alone. I
could preach to my own people. Before long, I would be heard.
I could study and explore. What small nibblings we have made at the sum
of available knowledge! Suppose I brought in one leaf from outdoors, or
one common little bug--in a few hours of studying it with her, I'd know
more of my own specialty than a flood of the best textbooks could tell
me.
She has also let me know that when she and those who came with her
have learned a little more about humanity, it should be possible to
improve my health greatly, and probably my life expectancy. I don't
imagine my back could ever straighten, but she thinks the pain might be
cleared away, entirely without drugs. I could have a clearer mind, in a
body that would neither fail nor torment me.
Then there is the other alternative.
It seems they have developed a technique by means of which any
unresisting living subject, whose brain is capable of memory at all,
can experience _total recall_. It is a by-product, I understand, of
their silent speech, and a very recent one. They have practiced it
for only a few thousand years, and since their own understanding
of the phenomenon is very incomplete, they classify it among their
experimental techniques.
In a general way, it may somewhat resemble that reliving of the past
which psychoanalysis can sometimes bring about in a limited way
for therapeutic purposes. But you must imagine that sort of thing
tremendously magnified and clarified, capable of including every detail
which has ever registered on the subject's brain.
* * * * *
The purpose is not therapeutic, as we would understand it; quite the
opposite. The end result is--death.
Whatever is recalled, by this process is transmitted to the receiving
mind, which can retain it, and record any or all of it, if such a
record is desired; but to the subject who recalls, it is a flowing
away, without return. Thus it is not a true "remembering," but a
giving. The mind is swept clear, naked of all its past, and, along with
memory, life withdraws also. Very quietly.
At the end, I suppose it must be like standing without resistance in
the engulfment of a flood tide, until finally the waters close over.
That, it seems, is how Camilla's life was "saved." When I finally
grasped that, I laughed, and the angel of course caught the reason. I
was thinking about my neighbor Steele, who boarded Camilla for me in
his henhouse for a couple of winters.
Somewhere safe in the angelic records there must be a hen's-eye image
of the patch in the seat of Steele's pants. And naturally Camilla's
view of me too; not too unkind, I hope. She couldn't help the
expression on her rigid little face, and I don't believe it ever meant
anything.
At the other end of the scale is the saved life of my angel's father.
Recall can be a long process, she says, depending on the intricacy
and richness of the mind recalling; and in all but the last stages it
can be halted at will. Her father's recall was begun when they were
still far out in space and he knew that he could not long survive the
journey.
When that journey ended, the recall had progressed so far that very
little actual memory remained to him of his life on that other planet.
He had what must be called a deductive memory--from the material of the
years not yet given away, he could reconstruct what must have been, and
I assume the other adult who survived the passage must have been able
to shelter him from errors that loss of memory might involve. This, I
infer, is why he could not show me a two-moon night.
I forgot to ask her whether the images he did send me were from actual
or deductive memory. Deductive, I think, for there was a certain
dimness about them not present when my angel gives me a picture of
something seen with her own eyes.
Jade-green eyes, by the way. Were you wondering?
In the same fashion, my own life could be saved. Every aspect of
existence that I ever touched, that ever touched me, could be
transmitted to some perfect record--the nature of the written record
is beyond me, but I have no doubt of its relative perfection. Nothing
important, good or bad, would be lost. And they need a knowledge of
humanity, if they are to carry out whatever it is they have in mind.
It would be difficult, she tells me, and sometimes painful. Most of
the effort would be hers, but some of it would have to be mine. In her
period of infantile education, she elected what we should call zoology
as her life work; for that reason she was given intensive theoretical
training in this technique. Right now I guess she knows more than
anyone else on this planet not only about what makes a hen tick, but
how it feels to be a hen.
Though a beginner, she is in all essentials already an expert. She can
help me, she thinks, if I choose this alternative. At any rate, she
could ease me over the toughest spots, keep my courage from flagging.
For it seems that this process of recall is painful to an advanced
intellect--without condescension, she calls us very advanced--because,
while all pretense and self-delusion are stripped away, there remains
conscience, still functioning by whatever standards of good and bad the
individual has developed in his lifetime. Our present knowledge of our
own motives is such a pathetically small beginning! Hardly stronger
than an infant's first effort to focus his eyes.
* * * * *
I am merely wondering how much of my life, if I choose this way, will
seem to me altogether hideous. Certainly plenty of the "good deeds"
which I still cherish in memory like so many well-behaved cherubs will
turn up with the leering aspect of greed or petty vanity or worse.
Not that I am a bad man, in any reasonable sense of the term. I respect
myself; no occasion to grovel and beat my chest. I'm not ashamed to
stand comparison with any other fair sample of the species. But there
you are: I _am_ human, and under the aspect of eternity so far, plus
this afternoon's newspaper, that is a rather serious thing.
Without real knowledge, I think of this total recall as something like
a passage down a corridor of a myriad images, now dark, now brilliant,
now pleasant, now horrible--guided by no certainty except an awareness
of the open blind door at the end of it. It could have its pleasing
moments and its consolations. I don't see how it could ever approximate
the delight and satisfaction of living a few more years in this world
with the angel lighting on my shoulder when she wishes, and talking to
me.
I had to ask her how great a value such a record would be to them.
Obvious enough--they can be of little use to us, by their standards,
until they understand us, and they came here to be of use to us as
well as to themselves. And understanding us, to them, means knowing us
inside out with a completeness such as our most dedicated and laborious
scholars could never imagine. I remember, about those twelve million
years: they will not touch us until they are certain no harm will come
of it.
On our tortured planet, however, there is a time factor. They know
that well enough, of course....
Recall cannot begin unless the subject is willing or unresisting; to
them, that has to mean willing, for any being with intellect enough to
make a considered choice. Now, I wonder how many they could find who
would be honestly willing to make that uneasy journey into death, for
no reward except an assurance that they were serving their own kind and
the angels.
More to the point, I wonder if I would be able to achieve such
willingness myself, even with her help.
When this had been explained to me, she urged me again to make no hasty
decision. And she pointed out to me what my thoughts were already
groping at--why not both alternatives, within a reasonable limit of
time? Why couldn't I have ten or fifteen years or more with her, and
then undertake the total recall, perhaps not until my physical powers
had started toward senility? I thought that over.
This morning I had almost decided to choose that most welcome and
comfortable solution. Then my daily paper was delivered. Not that I
needed any such reminder.
* * * * *
In the afternoon I asked her if she knew whether, in the present state
of human technology, it would be possible for our folly to actually
destroy this planet. She did not know, for certain. Three of the other
children have gone away to different parts of the world, to learn
what they can about that. But she had to tell me that such a thing
has happened before, elsewhere in the Universe. I guess I won't write
a letter to the papers advancing an explanation for the occasional
appearance of a nova among the stars. Doubtless others have hit on the
same hypothesis without the aid of angels.
And that is not all I must consider. I could die by accident or sudden
disease before I had begun to give my life.
Only now, at this very late moment, rubbing my sweaty forehead and
gazing into the lights of that wonderful ring, have I been able to put
together some obvious facts in the required synthesis.
I don't know, of course, what forms their assistance to us will take.
I suspect human beings won't see or hear much of the angels for a long
time to come. Now and then disastrous decisions may be altered, and
those who believe themselves wholly responsible won't realize why their
minds worked that way. Here and there, maybe an influential mind will
be rather strangely nudged into a better course. Something like that.
There may be new discoveries and inventions of kinds that will tend to
neutralize the menace of our nastiest playthings.
But whatever the angels decide to do, the record and analysis of my
fairly typical life will be an aid. It could even be the small weight
deciding the balance between triumph and failure. That is Fact One.
Two: my angel and her brothers and sisters, for all their amazing
level of advancement, are also of perishable protoplasm. Therefore, if
this ball of mud becomes a ball of flame, they also will be destroyed.
Even if they have the means to use their spaceship again or to build
another, it might easily happen that they would not learn their danger
in time to escape. And for all I know, this could be tomorrow. Or
tonight.
So there can no longer be any doubt as to my choice, and I will tell
her when she wakes.
* * * * *