20
“THIS Shakespeare of yours,” said Elayne, “seems to have been a philosopher, but a rather shaky one. Not at all well grounded.”
“He was a lonely and an ill and frightened man,” said Horton. “He wrote whatever came into his head, without examining the logic or the fitness of it. He was writing for himself. Never for a moment did he think anyone else would ever read what he was scribbling. If he had thought so, he probably would have been more circumspect in what he wrote.”
“At least he was honest about it,” she said. “Listen to this: Time has a certain smell. This may be no more than a conceit of mine, but I am sure it has. Old time would be sour and musty and new time, at the beginning of creation, must have been sweet and heady and exuberant. I wonder if, as events proceed toward their unknowable end, we may not become polluted with the acrid scent of ancient time, in the same manner and to the same end as olden Earth was polluted by the spew of factory chimneys and the foulness of toxic gases. Does the death of the universe lie in time pollution, in the thickening of old time smell until no life can exist upon any of the bodies that make up the cosmos, perhaps eroding the very matter of the universe itself into a foul corruption? Will this corruption so clog the physical processes operative in the universe that they will cease to function and chaos will result? And if this should be the case, what would chaos bring? Not necessarily the end of the universe since chaos in itself is a negation of all physics and all chemistry, perhaps allowing for new and unimaginable combina-tions which would violate all previous conceptions, giving rise to a disorderliness and an imprecision which would make possible certain events that science now tells us are unthinkable.
“And he goes on:”
This may have been the situation—I was first inclined to say a time and that would have been a contradiction in terms—when, before the universe came into being, there was neither time nor space and, as well, no referrents for that great mass of somethingness waiting to explode so our universe could come into existence; It is impossible, of course, for the human mind to imagine a situation where there’d have been neither time or space except as each potentially existed in that cosmic egg, itself a mystery that is impossible for one to visualize. And yet, intellectually, one does know a situation such as this did exist if our scientific thinking is correct. Still, the thought occurs—if there were neither time nor space, in what sort of medium did the cosmic egg exist?
51
“Provocative,” said Nicodemus, “but still it gives us no information, nothing that we need to know. The man writes as if he were living in a vacuum. He could write that sort of drivel anywhere at all. Only occasionally does he mention this planet, with parenthetical dirty digs at the Carnivore.”
“He was trying to forget this planet,” said Horton, “trying to retire within himself so that he could disregard it. He was, in effect, attempting to create a pseudo-world that would give him something other than this planet.”
“For some reason,” said Elayne, “he was concerned about pollution. Here is something else he wrote about it:
The emergence of intelligence, I am convinced, tends to unbalance the ecology. In other words, intelligence is the great polluter. It is not until a creature begins to manage its environment that nature is thrown into disorder. Until that occurs, there is a system of checks and balances operating in a logical and understandable manner. Intelligence destroys and modifies the checks and balances even as it tries very diligently to leave them as they were. There is no such thing as an intelligence living in harmony with the biosphere. It may think and boast it is doing so, but its mentality gives it an advantage, and the compulsion is always there to employ this advantage to its selfish benefit. Thus, while intelligence may be an outstanding survival factor, the factor is short-term, and intelligence turns out instead to be the great destroyer.
She flipped the pages, eyeing the entries briefly. “It’s so much fun reading the elder tongue,” she said. “I was not sure I could.”
“Shakespeare’s penmanship was not of the best,” said Horton.
“Still good enough to read,” she said, “once you get the hang of it. Here’s something strange. He’s writing about the god-hour. That’s a strange expression.”
“It’s real enough,” said Horton. “At least here it’s real. I should have told you of it. It is something that reaches out and grabs you and lays you absolutely open. Except for Nicodemus. Nicodemus barely reacts to it. It seems to originate elsewhere than this planet. Carnivore said that Shakespeare thought it came from some point far in space. What does he say about it?”
“Apparently he was writing about it after a long experience with it,” she said. “Here is what be writes:”
I feel that I may finally have come to terms with this phenomenon that I have termed, for lack of a better description, the god-hour. Carnivore, poor soul, still resents and fears it, and I suppose I fear it, too, although by this time, having lived with it for many years and learning that there is no way one may hide from it or insulate oneself from it, I have reached some acceptance of it as something from which there is no escape, but likewise as something that can, for a time, take a man outside himself and expose him to the universe, although, truth to tell, if it were optional, one would hesitate to thus have himself exposed too often.
The trouble is, of course, that one sees and experiences too much, most of which—nay, all of which—he does not understand and is left, after the event, holding onto only the ragged edge of it, with the horrifying wonderment as to whether a human mentality is equipped and capable of understanding more than a modicum of that to which he has been exposed. I have wondered at times if it could be a deliberate teaching mechanism, but if it is, it is an over-education, a throwing of massive scholarly texts at a stupid student who has not been grounded in the basic funda-mentals of what he is being taught and thus incapable of even feebly grasping at the principles which are necessary for even a shadowy understanding.
I have wondered, I say, but wonder is about as far as this particular thought has ever gotten. As time went on, I became more and more of the opinion that in the god-hour I was experiencing something that was not intended for me at all, nor for any human—that the god-hour, whatever it may be, emanates from some sort of entity that is entirely unaware that such a thing as a human may exist, which might be caught up in cosmic laughter were it to learn that such a thing as I am did exist. I am, I had become convinced, simply caught up in the shotgun effect of it, sprayed by 52
some stray pellets that were aimed at bigger game.
But no sooner had I become convinced of this than I was made acutely aware that the source of the god-hour somehow had at least marginally became aware of me and had somehow managed to dig deep into my memory or my psyche, for at times, instead of being laid open to the cosmos, I was laid open to myself, laid open to the past, and for a period of unknown duration lived over again, with certain distortions, events of the past which almost invariably were distasteful in the extreme, moments snatched out of the muck of my mind, where they had lain deeply buried, where in shame and regret I would have wished to keep them buried, but now dug up and spread out before me while I squirm in embarrassment and indignity at the sight of them, forced to live again certain parts of my life that I had hid away, not only from the ken of others, but of myself as well. And even worse than that, certain fantasies that in unguarded moments I had dreamed in my secret soul and been horrified when I found what I had been dreaming. And these, too, are dragged squealing from my subconscious and paraded in an unpitying light before me. I don’t know which is worse, the opening to the universe, or the unlocking of the secrets of myself.
So I became aware that somehow the god-hour had become aware of me—perhaps not actually of me as a person, but as some fleck of obscene and disgusting matter and had flicked at me in irritation that such a thing as I should be there, not taking the time to really do me any harm, not squashing me as I might squash an insect, but simply brushing me, or trying to brush me, to one side. And I took some courage, strangely, from this, for if the god-hour is only marginally aware of me, then I told myself I stand in no actual danger from it. And if it pays so slight attention to me, then surely it must be seeking bigger game than I and the terrifying part of this is that it seemed to me that this bigger game must be here, upon this planet. Not on this planet only, but on this particular segment of the planet—it must be very near to us.
I have wracked my brains in an effort to imagine what it might be and if it still is here. Was the god-hour intended for the people who inhabited the now-deserted city, and if this should be the case, how is it that the agency which is responsible for the god-hour does not know that they are gone? The more I think of it, the more convinced I become that the people of the city did not supply the target, that the god-hour still is aimed at something that is still here. I look for what it may be, and I have no idea. I am haunted by the feeling that I look upon the target day after day and do not recognize it. It is a frustrating and an eerie sensation to be thinking this. One feels out of touch and stupid and, at times, more than a little frightened. If a man can be so out of touch with reality, so blind to actuality, so insensitive to his surroundings, then the human race, in all truth, is more unfit and feeble than we have sometimes thought.
As she came to the end of what Shakespeare had written, Elayne raised her head from the page and looked at Horton. “Do you agree?” she asked. “Did you have some of the same reactions?”
“I’ve gone through it only twice,” Horton told her. “The sum total of my reactions so far is a vast bewilderment.”
“Shakespeare says it is inescapable. He says there is no way to hide from it.”
“Carnivore hides from it,” said Nicodemus. “He gets under cover. He says it’s not so bad when you are under cover.”
“You’ll know in a few hours more,” said Horton.” I have a hunch it’s easier if you don’t try to fight it. There is no way it can be described. You must experience it to know.” Elayne laughed, a little nervously. “I can hardly wait,” she said.