The Seed of Evil

Marcus looked up at me with a startled look on his face. “Have you not understood, Clinias? Do you not see? This is the worst of all possibilities! Each of us is doomed to see himself as he appears to the external world, and in that stance to live again through every detail of his existence! Every unworthy act, every self-deception, every last piece of shame we hide even from ourselves—all is presented to our gaze, and for a lifetime! How can one endure it? There is no one who lives with such dignity that this could be bearable!”

Slowly the horror of Marcus’s revelation began to dawn on me. Unsteadily he rose to his feet and placed his hand on my shoulder. For long moments the silence of the Temple seemed to descend on us, while I pondered on what I had heard and stood there with my friend.

“That nothing can be changed is the worst aspect of it,” Marcus said wearily. “How one longs and aches to be able to change what one sees!”

“We are in a trap,” I observed.

He nodded. “Normally the traumas of birth and death wipe memory clean. For our temerity the gods have allowed me to glimpse the truth, and to remember it. That is our reward, and our punishment. But I can speak no more tonight. Let us go home. We have done enough.”

Suddenly Marcus was violently sick. I cleaned him up, conducted him to his house, and saw to it that he was put to bed, leaving him only after he had fallen soundly asleep.

Although the secret of death has been imparted to the full membership of the Temple, not all have understood its import. Several members, driven by curiosity, have repeated Marcus’s experiment, with results that more or less confirm his findings, but to most it is interesting merely; they do not grasp its terror. To live a life which, because lacking external awareness of itself, is contemptible and mean, and then to be given that awareness which alone could have improved it—and be condemned at the same time to do no more than watch the wretched and loathsome spectacle! The gods do indeed chuckle when they look down on the human condition.

A change of outlook has been forced on we senior members of the Arcanum who do understand the meaning of Marcus’s discovery. Suicide, which once seemed an honourable escape from undignified circumstance, is now realised to be no escape at all. And yet from this trap of life there should be, if the world is just, some escape.

Marcus has sickened, but fears to die. We all of us fear to die, knowing what awaits us. Men, who take refuge in never seeing themselves as they really are, invariably will shun such a vision.

Our work now is in how to end the eternal oscillation, whether to gain oblivion or a new life does not matter. But how may it be done? On that we have not a single idea. The gods may know. The gods, whom we have spurned as confusers and defilers of the minds of men, perhaps in the end we must turn to the gods.

Farewell, Dear Brother

Strangers are a nuisance. Few people have anything new to say to a man once he’s settled down in life.

But occasionally someone turns up whose chance words stir up vivid memories, and set me thinking again.

A man like that turned up at a small party my wife and I gave. He was small, agile, about forty, and he may have been intoxicated. With his type, it’s hard to tell. Some friends of ours had brought him along, and he clearly didn’t know whose house it was he had come to.

He was one of those people who can’t stop talking. I steer clear of talkers usually, but he managed to corner me and so I let him chatter volubly on for a few minutes.

Then I discovered that this one was different, from my point of view. He had just returned from an expedition to Celenthenis, the Planet of Cold.

I became more alive to him. “Oh, yes,” I said, “I had heard there was a second expedition. What did you think of the place?”

“Well, the cold’s pretty drastic.”

“Too much for you, eh?”

“Yes.” He nodded emphatically, as if he could read my mind. “It’s too cold for description. There’s practically no temperature to the place at all. Goddammit, it’s right at the dead end of creation.”

I pondered over his words. The dead end of creation. …

He hadn’t much of a gift for word-pictures, but my imagination and memory made up for it. He was right. There’s a minimal amount of energy on Celenthenis—some physicists say none at all. There’s argument about that. At any rate, every atom and molecule of the whole planet is frozen immobile. No chemical changes. No energy exchanges. Nothing. It’s a world without time.

What it must be like to live there, looking over its dark surface through a televisor from inside an alloy dome—any ordinary material simply crumbles away—and know that nothing happens there, ever.