His Master's Voice (24 page)

Integration on the scale of a planet could become "frozen" at a stage along the way if the discovery of nucleonics arose prematurely. Only in that case would the weaker side become equal to the stronger—inasmuch as each of them, wielding atomic weapons, could wipe out the entire species. Certainly social integration always occurred on a foundation of technology and science, but the discovery of atomic energy would ordinarily take place in the post-unification period—and then it would have no dire consequences. The self-imperilment of the species, or its tendency to commit involuntary suicide, was no doubt a function of the number of primitive societies that possessed the "ultimate weapon."

If on some globe there were a thousand hostile governments, and each had a thousand nuclear warheads, the chance of a purely local conflict's snowballing into an apocalypse would be many times greater than if there existed only a few antagonists. Therefore, the relation between the two calendars—one calendar showing the sequence of scientific discoveries, and the other recording the progress of the amalgamation of the separate societies—determined the fate, in the Galaxy, of each individual Psychozoic. We on Earth definitely had bad luck: our passage from preatomic civilization to atomic took place atypically, too early, and it was this that had caused the "freezing" of the
status quo
, until the advent of the neutrino emission. For a planet united, the cracking of the letter would be something positive, a step toward entering the "club of cosmic civilizations." But for us, in our situation, it was a knell.

"Maybe," I said, "if Galileo and Newton had died of whooping cough in childhood, physics would have been delayed enough so that the splitting of the atom would not have come about until the twenty-first century. That whooping cough that never was might have saved us."

Rappaport accused me of falling into journalism: physics was ergodic in its development, and the death of one or two people could not have influenced its course.

"All right," I said, "then we might have been saved by the emergence, in the West, of some other dominant religion than Christianity—or, millions of years earlier, by a different formation of man's sexual nature."

Challenged, I took up the defense of this thesis. It was no accident that physics had arisen in the West as the "queen of empiricism." Western culture was, thanks to Christianity, a culture of sin. The Fall—and the first one had been sexual!—engaged the whole personality of man in melioristic pursuits, which provided various types of sublimation, with the acquiring of knowledge at the head.

In this sense Christianity favored empiricism, though, of course, unwittingly: it opened the possibility for it and gave it the chance to grow. Characteristic of the East and its cultures, on the other hand, was the category of shame—quite central—because a man's inappropriate action there was not "sinful" in any Christian sense, but at most disgraceful, and mainly in the external sense: having to do with the forms of behavior. Therefore, the category of shame transferred man, as it were, "outside" the soul, into the realm of ceremonial practices. For empiricism, then, there was simply no place; the chance for it disappeared with the deprecation of substantive action, and instead of the sublimation of drives, their "ceremonialization" was provided for. Vice, no longer the "fall of man," became detached from the personality and was, so to speak, legally channeled into a separate repertoire of forms. Sin and grace were replaced by shame and the tactics of avoiding it. There was no penetration into the depths of the psyche: the sense of "what is proper," "what ought to be," took the place of the conscience, and the finest minds were directed toward the renunciation of the senses. A good Christian could be a good physicist, but one could not become a physicist if one was a good Buddhist, Confucianist, or follower of the Zen doctrine, because then one would be occupying oneself with the very thing those faiths deprecated
in toto
. With this as a point of departure, social selection gathered the entire "intellectual cream" of the population and allowed it to spend itself only in mystical exercises—yoga, for instance. Such a culture acted like a centrifuge; it cast the talented away from the places in society where they could initiate empiricism, and stoppered their minds with an etiquette that excluded instrumental pursuits as "lower" and "less worthy." But the potential of egalitarianism inherent in Christianity—though it came into conflict with class structures, though for periods it yielded to them—never altogether disappeared, and indirectly from it sprang physics, with all its consequences.

"Physics—a kind of asceticism?"

"Oh, it is not that simple. Christianity was a mutation of Judaism, which was a 'closed' religion in that it was intended only for the chosen. Thus Judaism was, as a discovery, something like Euclidean geometry; one had only to reflect on the initial axioms to arrive, by extrapolation, at a more general doctrine, one that under the heading 'chosen' would put all people."

"Christianity corresponds to a generalized geometry?"

"Yes, in a sense, on a purely formal level—through the changing of signs in a system that is the same with regard to values and meanings. The operation led, among other things, to the acceptance of the validity of a theology of Reason. This was an attempt not to renounce any of the qualities of man; since man was a creature of Reason, he had the right to exercise that faculty—and this finally produced, after a due amount of hybridization and transformation, physics. I am, of course, oversimplifying enormously.

"Christianity is a generalized mutation of Judaism, an adaption of a systematic structure to all possible human existences. This was a property of Judaism, purely structural to begin with. One could not carry out an analogous operation on Buddhism or Brahmanism, let alone the teachings of Confucius. So, then, the sentence was passed back when Judaism arose—several thousand years ago. And there is another possibility. The main problem of this world which every religion must confront is sex. It is possible to worship it—that is, to make it positive and central to the doctrine; it is possible to cut it off, to shut it out—neutrally; but it is also possible to see it as the Enemy. This last solution is the most uncompromising, and it is the one Christianity chose.

"Now, if sex had been a phenomenon of less importance biologically, if it had remained a periodic, cyclic thing only, as it is with some mammals, it could not have possessed central significance, being a transient, rhythmic occurrence. But all this was determined some one and a half million years ago. From then on, sex became the
punctum saliens
of really every culture, because it could not simply be denied. It had to be made 'civilized.' The man of the West always felt it an injury to his self-esteem that
inter faeces et urinam nascimur …
a reflection that, by the laws of Mystery, put Original Sin in Genesis. That is how it was. Another kind of sexual periodicity, or—again—another kind of religion, might have set us on a different road."

"To stagnation?"

"No—just to a delay in the development of physics."

Rappaport accused me of "unconscious Freudianism." Having been brought up in a puritanical family, he said, I was projecting onto the world my own prejudices. I had not freed myself, in fact, from the vision of everything in the colors of Damnation and Salvation. Since I considered Earthlings to be damned root and branch, I transferred Salvation to the Galaxy. My curse cast mankind into Hell—but did not touch the Senders, who remained completely good and without blemish. That was my mistake. In thinking of them, one first had to introduce the notion of a "fellowship threshold." All intelligence moved in the direction of more and more universal generalization, which was only proper, because the Universe itself approved that course. He who generalized correctly could control phenomena of increasing scope.

An evolutionary awareness—understanding that mind was the result of a homeostatic "mountain climbing" against the current of entropy—made one embrace, in fellowship, the evolutionary tree that gave rise to sentient beings. But one could not encompass with fellowship the entire tree of evolution, because ultimately a "higher" being was obliged to feed on "lower" ones. The line of fellowship had to be drawn somewhere. On Earth, no one had ever placed that line below the fork where the plants parted company with the animals. And in practice, in the technological world, one could not include, for example, the insects. If we learned that for some reason exchanging signals with the Cosmos required the annihilation of Earth's ants, we would certainly think that it was "worth" sacrificing the ants. Now, we, on our rung of development, may be—to Someone—ants. The level of fellowship may not necessarily extend, from the standpoint of those beings, to such planetary vermin as ourselves. Or perhaps they had rationalizations for this. Perhaps they knew that according to the galactic statistics, the Earth type of psychozoic was doomed to techno-evolutionary failure, so that it would not be so horrendous to add to the threat hanging over us, since in any case "we most likely would not amount to anything."

I present here the gist of that vigil on the eve of the experiment, not a chronological record of the conversation, which I do not recall that precisely. I do not know when Rappaport told me of his European experience—the one I described earlier. It was, I think, when we had finished with the generals but had not begun to seek the cause of the impending denouement. Now I said to him more or less the following:

"Dr. Rappaport, you are even worse than me. You have made of the Senders a 'higher race' that identifies only with the 'higher forms' of the Galaxy. Why, then, do they endeavor to spread biogenesis? Why should they sow life if they are able to carry out a policy of expansion and colonization? Neither of us can go, in our reasoning, beyond the concepts accessible to us. You may be right that I localize to Earth the reasons for our defeat because of the way I was raised as a child. Except that instead of 'human sin' I see a stochastic process that has driven us into a dead end. You, a refugee from a country of victims, have always felt too strongly your own innocence in the face of extermination, and therefore you situate the source of the catastrophe someplace else: in the domain of the Senders. We did not choose this ourselves—they did it for us. Thus concludes every attempt at transcendence. We need time, but we will not have time now.

"I have always said that if only there were a government wise enough to want to pull all humanity out of that hole and not just its own, we might eventually climb out. But funding from the federal budget has been readily available only to the seeker of 'new weapons.' When I told the politicians that we ought to launch a crash program in anthropology, build machines for the simulation of socio-evolutionary processes, using the kind of money they put into their missile and antimissile research, they smiled at me and shrugged. No one took it seriously, and at least now I have the bitter satisfaction of being right. We should have studied man first—that was our proper ordering of priorities. But we did not, and now what we know of man is not enough. Let us finally admit that this is the case.
Ignoramus et ignorabimus
, because now we do not have the time."

The good-hearted Rappaport did not try to argue with me. He led me—I was drunk—to my room.

Before we parted, he said, "Don't take it so much to heart, Mr. Hogarth. Without you things would have turned out just as badly."

DONALD WOULD PLAN
the experiments as much as a week in advance, four runs a day. This was the maximum of which the improvised apparatus was capable. After each experiment it would suffer partial destruction, and repairs would be necessary. The repairs went slowly, because the work had to be done in protective suits—on material radioactively contaminated. We got under way after the "wake"—or, rather, he did; I was only a spectator. We knew now that the people from His Master's Ghost or the Alter-Project were coming in eight days. Donald originally intended to start first thing in the morning, because he wanted his people, still engaged in the bogus research that he had assigned them, to cover with their cannonade the unavoidable roar of the explosions, but, having everything ready late the evening before (in other words, while I was working out endless variations of global Armageddon at the computer center), he did not wait.

Actually, by now it did not matter
when
Nye—and, after him, our mighty protectors—found out. Fallen into a troubled sleep after Rappaport left me, I awoke several times and jumped up with the impression that I had heard the boom of a detonation, but it was a dream. The concrete of the buildings had been designed, way back when, for more than such explosions. At four in the morning, feeling like Lazarus, I dragged my aching bones out of bed and decided—since I was unable to stay in my room any longer—to dispense with the rest of our "conspiratorial" cautions and go to the laboratory. We had not planned it this way, but I simply could not believe that Donald Prothero, having everything ready, would quietly turn in for the night. And I was not mistaken: his nerves, too, had their limit.

I washed my face in cold water and went out. As I passed Nye's door at the end of the corridor, I noticed that his light was on, and involuntarily softened my footsteps. Conscious of the absurdity of this action, I smiled a crooked smile, which stretched the skin of my face—making it feel stiff and leathery, as if not my own—and ran down the stairs instead of summoning the elevator.

Never before had I left the hotel at that hour. The lobby was dark; I bumped into chairs set about; there was a full moon, but the concrete block at the entrance shut out its light. The street, on the other hand, looked uncanny, but perhaps it only seemed so to me. On the administration building shone the ruby lights that warned airplanes; other than that, there were only a few lamps at the intersections. The physics building was dark and appeared deserted, but, going the way I knew by heart through the half-open door, I made it to the main hall. Immediately I knew that the thing was over, because the signals that flashed red while the inverters were in operation were all dark. In the dimness of the hall the giant ring of the inverter made the place seem like the, engine room of a factory or ship; the tiny indicator lights at the consoles were still blinking on and off, but I found no one by the chamber. I knew where Donald would be; the narrow passageway between the coils of the multi-ton electromagnets led to a small interior area in which there was a kind of cubicle, where Donald kept all his records, films, notebooks. And, in fact, I saw a light on. He jumped up when he saw me. McHill was with him. Without a word of explanation he handed me the scrawled sheets of paper.