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.The girl jumped up.“Okay, then – take Christ! You’re talking about him hanging on the cross, getting the spear through his side, coming to life, having the Romans pulling – hammering – the nails from his hands, getting him down, letting him go back to his disciples….Aren’t you?”Silverstone clapped his hands.“She’s got it! She’s got it first! I was going to postpone the new concept of animal and human existence until later but – ““To hell with that!” she said.She stood there with her back to the grey rocks, defying them all.“To hell with new concepts! You were talking about dead men coming alive and you didn’t even realize it, you were so wrapped up in theories! I tell you, you’re mad!”“In that sense, perhaps we are,” Silverstone admitted, pulling his self-mocking-bird face.“Ann, I apologize.We have tried to remain detached.It’s a man’s way of going about things: The shooting was just an example Captain Howes gave us.Let’s deal with human life now and I promise you it will not be too terrible when you understand fully.”“The dead walk!” She folded her arms and stared at him as if she had never seen a man before.“Okay, Professor Norman Silverstone, go ahead and scare me!”“As Ann realizes – as I realize – with the collapse of the overmind, the naked and true undermind’s view of life is somewhat startling, even horrifying, at first sight,” Silverstone said.“The sun rises in the west and sets in the east.It acts like the governor of all organic and mortal life that, with their circadian rhythms, come under its sway.Shortly after the beginning of the year, the dead leaves stir, turn gold, rise from the ground in shoals, and coat the beech trees; the beeches then turn them green and by the eighth month suck them back into themselves in the form of buds; all this time, the trees have been pouring out nourishment into the soil; now they stand bare throughout March, February, January, and December, until their next ingestion ot leaves gives them strength to grow smaller again.As with the beech, so of course with the other trees.Acorns from giant oak trees grow.“And as with the trees, so with animals and humankind.Some of the major religions of the world – which after all obtain their power from the undermind – must have guessed the true way of things; their claim that we shall all rise again from the grave is nothing less than the literal truth.At the same time, the medieval notion of spontaneous generation is also fulfilled.In the moldering bones of the grave, organization stirs; worms put flesh onto bones; something more and more like a human is built; the coffin is filled, needing only the mourners to come and haul it from the ground, take it home, absorb the moisture from their handkerchiefs, and clutch each other just before the first breath enters the body.Or, if the body was cremated, then flames will reconstitute the ashes into flesh.“Human life bursts in upon the world in countless ways! Bodies rise again from the sea bed during storms and are washed back onto ships that also emerge from the waves.Before road accidents, you will see ambulances rush backwards with broken limbs that are strewn over the road to join themselves into a living being, jerking into a car that deconcertinas away from another car.Wreckage that has possibly rusted for years on a remote mountainside will grow gleaming, lurch abruptly into form, and roar flaming backwards into the sky, its passengers suddenly snapping into frenzied life; they will suffer apprehensions, but all will be well, for the fire will die out and the plane take itself back to a civilized airfield.“In these and many other ways, population increases.But the special ceremony whereby human life is increased is war.From wrecked buildings, from bomb craters, from splintered forests, from gutted tanks and sunken subs and muddy batflefields, the dead rise up and live and their wounds heal, and they grow younger.War is the great harvester of birth over the planet.“So much for birth.What of death? We know the future, that the human race is dwindling towards its union with animal kind, that the end of the Earth is so near, geologically speaking, that everything is tending towards the less and the mindless.So marvelously is everything planned, that humanity follows that same pattern, in the general and in the individual.Every human being – and of course this applies to the animals as well – grows younger and smaller, with most of his faculties reaching maturity just before he loses the abilities of puberty.He then grows through boyhood, probably attending school to forget the knowledge he will no longer need.The decline into helplessness is comparatively swift and merciful; it is possible that at the age called twelve – twelve years to the womb, that is – the human is probably as mentally alert as he will ever be: and he needs all his alertness, for there is the complicated business of unlearning the language to go through.For most, this is a happy period to which they gladly surrender at the end of their life.They can lie back in their mothers’ arms and babble without care.They hardly know it when the time comes for them to return to the womb, that grave of the human race.“Perhaps I should add here – you’ll forgive me, Ann – that the mother often experiences first pain and then discomfort over this process; it is a month or two before the child’s struggles die away completely and he merges fully with the life of her body.But things do improve for her, and when the child has dwindled to a speck, her husband or lover penetrates her and syphons off the residual matter.The process is complete and they often fall in love before parting forever.“Any questions?”Bush, Howes, and Borrow all looked at Ann.She was still standing against one of the monstrous grey Cryptozoic boulders, staring at Silverstone.They had taken the retrograde progression of the universe with some aplomb; the backward flow of human life had knocked them cold.“You dress it up to sound almost pretty,” she said.“You steered away from the nasty side, didn’t you.What about being sick, and eating – and all that?”“You can think through the process for yourself,” Silverstone said steadily.“Eating and elimination are merely the reverse of what the overmind has assured us was the case.It may seem revolting, but that is because it is new – ““Yes, but – you’re saying the food comes out of our mouths onto our plates, and is eventually decooked and sent back to the butcher and the slaughterer to be made into animals – aren’t you?”“I am.And I’m also saying that when you have lived with the idea for a year or two, as I have, you will find it no more objectionable than the idea of chopping up animals and cooking and eating them.”Gesturing impatiently, as if she found his argument mere sophistry, she turned to Bush, who was standing next to her.He noted how their every movement was followed by the shadowy throng round about them, and hated the audience heartily.“You can take all this, Eddie, can’t you?”“Yes.Yes, I can take it – perhaps because I’m partly anesthetized by the beauty of the strange effects: waterfalls shooting uphill, milkers squirting milk into a cow’s udders, a cup of cold coffee heating itself to boiling.It’s like being a child again, when a cup of milk working its way from boiling to cold, and the skin forming, held the same fascination.Which way is a waterfall more magical, or more subject to natural law – with its waters flowing up or down? What I don’t understand – you can tell us, Professor – is when we can sheer off our overminds and see things for ourselves with time flowing in the opposite direction – see instead of talking.”Silverstone shook his head.“I don’t think that moment will come.Not for us, the Himalayan generation [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]