Gissa Bokcitatet

‘Surely,’ said Mark, ‘one requires a pretty large population for the full exploitation of Nature, if for nothing else? And surely war is disgenic and reduces efficiency? Even if population needs thinning, is not war the worst possible method of thinning it?’
‘That idea is a survival from conditions which are rapidly being altered. A few centuries ago, war did not operate in the way you describe. A large agricultural population was essential; and war destroyed types which were then still useful. But every advance in industry and agriculture reduces the number of work-people who are required. A large, unintelligent population is now becoming a deadweight. The real importance of scientific war is that scientists have to be reserved. It was not the great technocrats of Koenigsberg or Moscow who supplied the casualties in the siege of Stalingrad: It was superstitious Bavarian peasants and low-grade Russian agricultural workers. The effect of modern war is to eliminate retrogressive types, while sparing the technocracy and increasing its hold upon public affairs. In the new age, what has hitherto been merely the intellectual nucleus of the race is to become, by gradual stages, the race itself. You are to conceive the species as an animal which has discovered how to simplify nutrition and locomotion to such a point that the old complex organs and the large body which contained them are no longer necessary. That large body is therefore to disappear. Only a tenth part of it will now be needed to support the brain. The individual is to become all head. The human race is to become all Technocracy’
‘I see,’ said Mark. ‘I had thought rather vaguely – that the intelligent nucleus would be extended by education.’
‘That is pure chimera. The great majority of the human race can be educated only in the sense of being given knowledge: they cannot be trained into the total objectivity of mind which is now necessary. They will always remain animals, looking at the world through the haze of their subjective reactions. Even if they could, the day for a large population has passed. It has served its function by acting as a kind of cocoon for Technocratic and Objective Man. Now, the macrobes, and the selected humans who can co-operate with them, have no further use for it.’
‘The two last wars, then, were not disasters in your view?’
‘On the contrary, they were simply the beginning of the programme – the first two of the sixteen major wars which are schuduled to take place in this century.’

But of course the hours spent alone with the Un-man were like hours in a back area. The real business of life was the interminable conversation between the Tempter and the [Lady]. Taken hour by hour the progress was hard to estimate; but as the days passed [R] could not resist the conviction that the general development was in the enemy’s favour. There were, of course, ups and downs. Often the Un-man was unexpectedly repulsed by some simplicity which it seemed not to have anticipated. Often, too, [R]’s own contributions to the terrible debate were for the moment successful. There were times when he thought, ‘Thank God! We’ve won at last.’ But the enemy was never tired, and [R] grew more weary all the time; and presently he thought he could see signs that the Lady was becoming tired too. In the end he taxed her with it and begged her to send them both away. But she rebuked him, and her rebuke revealed how dangerous the situation had already become. ‘Shall I go and rest and play, she asked, ‘while all this lies on our hands? Not till I am certain that there is no great deed to be done by me for the King a and for the children of our children.’
It was on those lines that the enemy now worked almost exclusively. Though the Lady had no word for Duty he had made it appear to her in the light of a Duty that she should continue to fondle the idea of disobedience, and convinced her that it would be a cowardice if she repulsed him. The idea of the Great Deed, of the Great Risk, of a kind of martyrdom, were presented to her every day, varied in a thousand forms. The notion of waiting to ask the King before a decision was made had been unobtrusively shuffled aside. Any such ‘cowardice’ was not to be thought of. The whole point of her action — the whole grandeur — would lie in taking it without the King’s knowledge, in leaving him utterly free to repudiate it, so that all the benefits should be his, and all the risks hers; and with the risk, of course, all the magnanimity, the pathos, the tragedy, and the originality. And also, the Tempter hinted, it would be no use asking the King, for he would certainly not approve the action: men were like that. The King must be forced to be free. Now, while she was on her own – now or never — the noble thing must be achieved; and with that ‘Now or never’ he began to play on a fear which the Lady apparently shared with the women of earth – the fear that life might be wasted, some great opportunity let slip. ‘How if I were as a tree that could have borne gourds and yet bore none,’ she said. [R] tried to convince her that children were fruit enough. But the Un-man asked whether this elaborate division of the human race into two sexes could possibly be meant for no other purpose than offspring? — a matter which might have been more simply provided for, as it was in many of the plants. A moment later it was explaining that men like [R] in his own world – men of that intensely male and backward-looking type who always shrank away from the new good — had continuously laboured to keep woman down to mere child-bearing and to ignore the high destiny for which Maleldil had actually created her.

After about an hour, suddenly rounding a little clump of bubble trees he found himself face to face with the Un-man. ‘Is it wounded already?’ he thought as the first vision of a blood-stained chest broke on him. Then he saw that of course it was not its own blood. A bird, already half plucked and with beak wide open in the soundless yell of strangulation, was feebly struggling in its long clever hands. [R] found himself acting before he knew what he had done. Some memory of boxing at his preparatory school must have awaked, for he found he had delivered a straight left with all his might on the Un-man’s jaw. But he had forgotten that he was not fighting with gloves; what recalled him to himself was the pain as his fist crashed against the jaw-bone – it seemed almost to have broken his knuckles – and the sickening jar all up his arm. He stood still for a second under the shock of it and this gave the Un-man time to fall back about six paces. It too had not liked the first taste of the encounter. It had apparently bitten its tongue, for blood came bubbling out of the mouth when it tried to speak. It was still holding the bird.
‘So you mean to try strength, it said i in English, speaking thick.
"Put down that bird, said [R].
‘But this is very foolish, said the Un-man. ‘Do you not know who I am?’
‘I know what you are,’ said [R]. Which of them doesn’t matter.’
‘And you think, little one,’ it answered, ‘that you can fight with me? You think He will help you, perhaps? Many thought that. I’ve known Him longer than you, little one. They all think He’s going to help them – till they come to their senses screaming recantations too late in the middle of the fire, mouldering in concentration camps, writhing under saws, jibbering in mad-houses, or nailed on to crosses. Could He help Himself?’ – and the creature suddenly threw back its head and cried in a voice so loud that it seemed the golden sky-roof must break, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.’
And the moment it had done so, [R] felt certain that the sounds it had made were perfect Aramaic of the First Century. The Un-man was not quoting; it was remembering.

‘But let us begin our journey. You shall sit on my shoulder.’ The proposal was unexpected and alarming, but seeing that the sorn had already crouched down, [R] felt obliged to climb on to the plume-like surface of its shoulder, to seat himself beside the long, pale face, casting his right arm as far as it would go round the huge neck, and to compose himself as well as he could for this precarious mode of travel. The giant rose cautiously to a standing position and he found himself looking down on the landscape from a height of about eighteen feet.
‘Is all well, Small One?’ it asked.
‘Very well’ [R] answered, and the journey began.
Its gait was perhaps the least human thing about it. It lifted its feet very high and set them down very gently. [R] was reminded alternately of a cat stalking, a strutting barn-door fowl, and a high-stepping carriage horse; but the movement was not really like that of any terrestrial animal. For the passenger it was surprisingly comfortable. In a few minutes he had lost all sense of what was dizzying or unnatural in his position. Instead, ludicrous and even tender associations came crowding into his mind. It was like riding an elephant at the zoo in boyhood – like riding on his father’s back at a still earlier age. It was fun. They seemed to be doing between six and seven miles an hour. The cold, though severe, was endurable; and thanks to the oxygen he had little difficulty with his breathing.
[…]
The shadow of the sorn, with [R]’s shadow on its shoulder, moved over the uneven rock unnaturally distinct like the shadow of a tree before the headlights of a car; and the rock beyond the shadow hurt his eyes. The remote horizon seemed but an arm’s length away. The fissures and moulding of distant slopes were clear as the background of a primitive picture made before men learned perspective. […]
Only towards afternoon, as they were about to descend into a dip of the road, they met three sorns together coming towards them down the opposite slope. They seemed to [R] to be rather skating than walking. The lightness of their world and the perfect poise of their bodies allowed them to lean forward at right angles to the slope, and they came swiftly down like full-rigged ships before a fair wind. The grace of their movement, their lofty stature, and the softened glancing of the sunlight on their feathery sides, effected a final transformation in [R]’s feelings towards their race. ‘Ogres’ he had called them when they first met his eyes […]; ‘Titans’ or ‘Angels’ he now thought would have been a better word. Even the faces, it seemed to him, he had not then seen aright. He had thought them spectral when they were only august, and his first human reaction to their lengthened severity of line and profound stillness of expression now appeared to him not so much cowardly as vulgar. So might Parmenides or Confucius look to the eyes of a Cockney schoolboy! The great white creatures sailed towards [R] and Augray and dipped like trees and passed.

Lop oh oh kop, Eftas was saying, yoppo you boploppo oh dopyop foppo ohlop, ee voppeenop top hoppo you gop hop mopyop boppeye roptop hop moppeye yop hoppeye voppee poproppee coppee doppeedop roppo you ropsop bopyop oh noplopyop foppo roptop yoppo noppee soppee coppo nopdop sop, top hoppay top eyesop sopyou fopfop eye coppeye eenoptop toppo Aesop top aybop loppeye sop hop moppee aysop ee lopdoppee rop boproppo top hoppeerop, aynopdop roppeye gop hoptop fopyou loppy ay roplop.

Naraguts tarago yaragou, baragag-haraguead, answered Gore: twaraguins aragare twaraguins aragand naraguetharaguer haragas praraguiaragoraraguitaraguy. Faragurtharaguermaragore araguit's caragommaragon knaragowlaraguedge tharagat yaragou paragayed Faragatharaguer Daraguldaragoon, wharago daraguelaraguivaraguered paragoor Maragummy, tharaguë praraguice aragof faraguive haragundraguëd plaraguenaragararaguy araguindaragulgearaguencearaguës tarago saragupparagort yaragour claragaim aragof baraguëaraguing faraguirstbaragorn. - Crapper, a glass of port for our guest.

Roppo toptop eenop coproppay popyoulop oh you sop you nopbop roppo top hoppee roplopyop loppeye Aesop!

Narago! Aragand wharagat's maragore, Gore added, aragaccaragordaraguing tarago yaradou-knaragow-wharago tharaguere araguis narago daragoubt tharagat Aragui sharagould haragave baragueen maragade Araguearl aragof Maragar, aragand tharagat araguin faragace Aragui aragam tharaguë Aragearl.

Eyemop top hoppee Araguearl aragof Maragar.

Aragui'm tharaguë E ayroplop op fop Moppayrop!

After three glasses of this jargon I took my leave.

On the morning of the twenty-seventh day, the white-sooty wings brush Williaus's face. He thinks, The foolish noddy, unafraid of man. The bird rises a little in the air only to cover his face again with its wings. He is snowblind.

Williaus does not at first understand what has happened to him, He walks through universal whiteness until he falls. After that he crawls for a while.

The noddy has not left him, but hovers in his unblinded mind. The bird darkens, the curious whiteness of its wings gathers to a ball in its beak, a quartzlike globe. An amethyst pupil completes the eye, which regards Williaus inquiringly but without much emotion. Then it begins to sing. (Williaus can tell it's the eye singing by the listening aspect of the bird. It sings such lines as:


At the end of each song the noddy flies out of sight for a moment, bearing the eye, but soon comes back.

After a while Williaus asks if the eye could not sing an old song, The eye, with a look of surprise, consents to render Come away, come sweet love. But it insists on preceding each return to the old music with several popular songs.

By the end of the twenty-eighth day Williaus has given himself over to death. The lustrous voice fades. At a certain moment he becomes aware of a being close to him. He calls out, but hears only a rubbery clatter. Pulling the glove from his right hand, he stretches it toward the sound: a cold softness fills his palm. He leans farther: bones and silky whiskers, and a sweet whine. A new soft clatter, and the being's body moves against him. The seal puts its head on Williaus's lap, he strokes it tenderly.

FIRST: I direct that all my just debts and funeral expenses be paid by my executrix as soon as possible after my decease, provided that the following be adhered to:

(I) That the organist of St. James's Church, Madison Avenue and 71st Street, Manhattan, choose a suitable musical composition to accompany the departure of my remains to their place of burial; that the score of this composition (notes, rests, clefs, key and time signatures, and all indications of speed, phrasing and dynamics) be be reproduced at fifteen times its printed size in the form of pancakes, and that these cakes be obligatorily eaten by any and all persons who attend the reading of this my Last Will and Testament, excepting those specifically invited thereto. In the event of non-compliance with this provision, I have instructed my faithful servant Miss Gabrielle Dryrein, of 1980 Valentine Avenue, the Bronx, to give to the press all information kept in my private files concerning liable parties.)

(II) That I be buried with my ninety-nine-year custom-built Fil Pathétique fob watch, this watch to be set at Greenwich time and placed in my left waistcoat pocket immediately prior to the funeral service.

(III) That my coffin be taken from St. James's Church at eleven o'clock of the Monday morning following my death, on an open cart drawn by two gray donkeys, and that the itinerary of the procession be as follows: Madison Avenue from 71st until 59th Street; Fifth Avenue from 59th until 50th Street; Park Avenue from 50th until 34th Street; and thence to my residence where my remains are to be buried. (...)