Limanora

CHAPTER II
AN ACCIDENT

BUT so vast an expansion of science and the unveiling of so many outlooks into the future left no room for the thought of death. The pace of life quickened perceptibly, and the energy of every dweller on the island was strained to its utmost to meet the requirements of the new additions to the force of the country and of all the new inventions. It was impossible to think of anything but the tasks in hand. None had an idle thought, none a leisure moment to waste on mere introspection or dreams.

In fact it became quite clear that the old dream-factory might be closed for a time at least. For several generations it had been the custom of the Limanorans to stimulate invention and discovery by the use of magnetism. When anyone felt his problem insoluble, or an insuperable obstacle in the way of his advance towards some practical goal, he had his dream-consciousness awakened and quickened as he slept. A member of the medical families would attend by his bedside, and apply a magnetic current to the particular point of his brain that controlled the powers concerned in his pursuit, and especially to the parts which were the physical expression of the imaginative faculties. And by day he would instruct the thinker as to what nutritive or medicated chambers he should enter in order to draw the main strength of his system towards the faculties he needed. Day after day the patient nurtured the parts of the brain and of the nervous system that would help him to the solution; night after night he dreamt out the terms of the problem. At last either in day-dream or night-fancy the curtain would be raised, and he would see the path to take; light flashed in on him as if from another world. What in my buried life used to be called inspiration was cultivated, moulded, and directed with as deliberate foresight and care as any feature of the body or the character. Nor were these dream-stimulants ever abused; when the purpose had been served, the goal reached, at once the other faculties and physical parts had equal attention; the strain was unbent, and the symmetry and balance of the whole system restored. Never was the stimulation of dream-consciousness permitted for a mere pleasure or whim; the importance of the aim to the progress of the race had to be proved before it was granted; nay it was only problems the solution of which would lead to extraordinary advances, that were dealt with by narolla or dream-consciousness stimulants. Now the narolla were entirely abandoned; for imagination was preternaturally excited, and discovery and invention seemed to come to investigators almost without effort.

It was indeed a period of accelerated progress, if not of precipitance, in the work of all families. The darkness around existence lifted over the whole horizon, and demanded redoubled exertion, in order that the new regions should be mapped before it fell. The tissues and nerves of every Limanoran felt the stimulus; each worked with a will. Still the necessities of the situation almost ran ahead of their powers. One thing became clear, that they must have more workers; the new generation would have to be more numerous than the last. For the young had to be drawn upon for active nerve- and head-work before their usual time; and these would need more leisure in the next stage of their life to compensate for the loss of it in the period of growth.

It grew evident that parents who had been exceptionally successful in the two children they had brought forth, reared, and launched full-fledged on the career of life should be permitted and stimulated to resume parentage. It was considered one of the highest privileges and honours to be selected as parents again by the magnetic consciousness of the nation. There was needed no formal agreement or resolution; the mind of the race was known without consulting it openly; and every pair felt in a moment that they were selected for reparentage; they required no stimulation, no permission to enter on the patriotic duty. And all considered it a duty of the loftiest kind. Passion in the race burned low; no longer was it a sting or goad that had to be mastered; it was in short no more a passion, such as the use of imagination, the love of the race, or the yearning after advance had become. The animal element in it had grown insignificant, and left it at the bidding of intellect and will. These tried parents had thus no sensuous pleasure to seek in the new task assigned to them. They took it upon them as a duty, and their chief pleasure lay in the honour they had been paid, and in the service they were doing to the race and to the progress of their humanity.

A second necessity of the new position was earlier marriage on the part of the men and women of the community. As soon as bare maturity had been reached, pairing now began. First it had to be scientifically ascertained that all the merely primitive stages of mankind had been passed through, not only the prehistoric, but the historical. It would be one of the greatest of evils to allow the privilege of parenting for the community to any who might have yet to go through a stage of individual life that represented centuries of the past of mankind. Little better would this be than stocking their island with children from their exiles. It was a question of testing every individual; for some passed more rapidly through the life of their ancestry than others; and these were not always the best as parents or even as citizens. Every tissue and faculty had to be tested, after careful study of the records of the childhood and youth. No possible prospect or chance of atavistic taint was overlooked.

The next duty was to review the needs of the race. The tasks and abilities of every family were measured, and the possible expansions of these were estimated; then new sciences, or new divisions of sciences, or new duties that would need the services of a family or families specially selected and moulded for the purpose, were taken into the account. From this elaborate review of the resources and needs of the population conclusions were carefully drawn as to the number and quality of the children that were required. The problem was easy enough as far as mere extensions of the existing families were concerned. But the creation of new types was a question that tasked the abilities of the wisest to the utmost. The special faculties needed for the new science or art or duty had to be discussed and decided; and especially how far existing faculties would have to be modified or newly combined. Then out of the various families those two had to be chosen, a cross which would produce the required modification or combination. But, as this was still largely of the nature of experiment, more than one effort was made towards each new type, in order that, if one child failed, the others might be available. But the wise creators of new types were rapidly getting surer of their ground; their experiments were growing less of experiments; they could almost foretell to a faculty or tissue the result of the crossing of any two families. And where any quality was unequal to the new duty, first creative surgery was called in to modify or add to the tissue of that part of the brain which was the physical equivalent of the faculty, and afterwards education with its various magnetic and dietary aids was brought to bear on its development. Yet there might be some chance of their new type falling short of its purpose and, to guard against this, several individuals of it were brought forth and trained. It was generally found that all of them were needed to carry out the duties of the new position.

After everything had been settled in the programme of the next generation, the task of matching began. Time after time the two who were to be the parents of the new type were thrown together as if by accident in circumstances and surroundings which would touch their imaginations and rouse their enthusiasm for each other. They were put into difficult positions together, so that one might help to extricate the other from them. Alternate debt and service wove mutual bonds around them, till at last neither desired to issue from the network of obligation and love in which they were caught. The magnetism of one was complementary to that of the other; and when separated they longed to see each other. With none in the community was the filammu of either in such communion as with the loved mate. Thus partly wise choice, and partly spontaneity, produced the match. The lifelong bond could never become enslaving for either; for the material of it had been selected not by mere youthful caprice, but by the maturest wisdom of the race, whilst it was spun by the impulse and will of the two friends themselves. Neither the state nor either of the partners could possibly regret the friendship, or wish it dissolved. It passed as naturally into marriage as flower into fruit.

But, whilst the future was thus being safeguarded, the new duties or expanded duties had to be looked after. Seventy-five years of work had to be provided for before the new citizens could be made fit for their duties. Part of this was covered by drawing earlier on the powers of the new generation; the youth must come out of their seclusion a few years sooner than usual. But that was not sufficient. What way was there out of the difficulty? It was a tacit rule of the community that none were to overstrain their energies; overwork was considered as great a vice as indolence; for it cheated the race of some of its advance by demoralising the faculties and tissues, and bringing on the nausea of life earlier than it should come by nature. The biometer was carefully applied to every citizen in order to test how far he could go in work without wasting his energies. And after all had been assigned additional work to their utmost limit, there was still so much unassigned. The only chance of meeting it was the extension of life. The elders must live longer. Happily every condition was now present for managing this. They had new foods and agents for revitalising the tissues; they had new apparatus for discovering internal defects in the human system, and new methods of remedying them; the far vistas opened up into the future gave a new purpose to the life even of the most aged; they longed to see what would come of all the expanded invention and discovery; the enthusiasm of the new age fired the imagination of the oldest. Limanoran life had another century added to it.

In the midst of the bustle of these preparations for the future (if anything the Limanorans did could be called bustle), there occurred an accident that smote them almost with dismay, and brought them as near as I had ever seen them approach to melancholy. The additions to the sources of the energy available in Rimla had entailed more muscular work as well as more superintendence, and it was necessary to assign more physical toil to the now-earlier mature than had been customary. Two scions of the meteorological families, who had been selected for marriage and parentage, were sent to manage a large pirakno, which had been constructed for drawing the magnetism from the air and the spaces just beyond the atmosphere. The great machine had been placed on an isolated spur of Lilaroma, so that if ever through the sudden sweeping of the earth into a supermagnetised area it should become dangerous, it could easily be detached from Rimla and insulated. And there were never less than two beside it to help in its management.

The younger men and women took the night watches in all the physical labour that had to be undertaken. And Tamarna and Omirlo, as one of the youngest and least experienced of the pairs that had to manage this huge pirakno, kept the last watch of the night, the watch that included sunrise and was followed by that of two of the most mature workers. It was thought that, as every Limanoran would be awake and on the alert at dawn, help in any emergency could easily be procured. As it was well known that during that period there was a great increase of magnetism in the atmosphere, provision was made in the machine itself for so regular a change; it was so arranged that, when the sun’s rays first touched it, it should automatically increase its capacity for magnetism. But so recent had been the development of cosmic magnetography that the times and seasons of the irregular increase of magnetism had not been tabulated and classified. Had the observations been made for a long enough time to allow of inferring a uniformity or law, then it would have been seen that these supermagnetised spaces, though they may have been entered by the earth during the night, have little effect upon her atmosphere till day dawns; the excess of magnetism seems to lie dormant in the dark; the first rays of the sun act like a fuse to a mine and complete the circuit between extra-terrene space and the surface of the earth. Sunrise, in fact, as they came afterwards to see, was the most critical time for such a machine as the pirakno.

It happened, too, that on this particular night the sarmolan or cosmic barometer had been getting out of order; but its watchers did not think it called for immediate attention; the morning would be time enough to put it right. Its indicator thus lay tongue-tied and misleading, when it should have been violently agitated. Tamarna and Omirlo had no warning of the approaching magnetic tornado. The hour before dawn the pirakno moved as regularly and quietly as at that point of the night when the magnetic tide is at its lowest ebb, the point when sleep is deepest and death is most frequent. They had just seen that every part was moving without friction and fully coping with its work; and Omirlo felt that he could leave his mate for a brief space and consult the sarmolan-watchers. He had been gone but a few minutes when he heard a loud crash behind him, and at the same moment he noticed that the first beams of the sun had struck across the levels of the sea. He turned and saw a flash from the place where, he thought, the pirakno stood. Flying back in trepidation, he found the machine as he had left it, but it had stopped. At first he could not see Tamarna; but on searching he saw her form lying on the ground close to the pirakno, hidden by one of its cranks. He touched her temples and left side, and saw that life had fled. The crank had come upon her as she lay, and bruised her body; the sight of this completed his despair; he felt that the last hope of her recall had vanished.

Yet he knew how much the medical elders could do, and there arose in his mind a flicker of hope. He wasted no time on lamentation, for there moved in him the carefully trained consciousness that all such abandonment to emotion was an offence against the progress of the race. They considered that every occurrence of life demanded as much concentration of energy and thought as a shipwreck, or the incidents of a battle, or anything that we in the West would call an alarming emergency. As grief or despair or fear used up the power that should be spent on action, emotion was strictly reined in at such a moment; the instinct was to call the whole resources of the nature to action.

Omirlo braced himself to the emergency, and sent the whole of the magnetism he was capable of into his will-telegraph. After a few minutes’ exercise of it, it seemed to relax, and he knew that he had roused his parents to the danger. Recalling his energies to Tamarna, he followed the few simple rules that he had been taught for the recovery of the seeming dead. He made her lungs and heart imitate the play of life; he switched the magnetism of his own system on to hers. But after all his efforts she lay still inert when his parents arrived. They decided to carry her at once to the medical elders, for they saw that something exceptional had occurred; it was not a swoon, or even death from the bruise dealt by the pirakno. So they took her wings, and making them by means of soft leafage into a couch for her, they bore her through the air swiftly, but just as she had lain when found. Tamarna’s own parents met them on the way, and helped them to accelerate their pace with her; and within less than ten minutes after the accident she was in the hands of the sages in the mountain hospital.

The general medical house was Oomalefa. But there were two houses of cure which approached more nearly to what our hospitals are. One was far up the slopes of Lilaroma, not much beneath the winter-line of snow. The other was aërial and movable, and was, whenever it was needed, floated upwards to the margin of our atmosphere, where parasitic and microscopic life was reduced to unaggressive feebleness. In it were all the necessities of life at hand; the temperature was kept close to summer heat; and there were lines of communication, so thin as to be almost invisible in the air, connecting it with the halls of sustenance and medication. This hospital was meant for the invalid who was strong enough to be moved up from solid earth; and, as soon as one had been brought back far enough from the grasp of death to bear the rarity of the upper air where it merged into the ether, he was taken up in it. But Tamarna was first borne to the mountain hospital, where the instruments of investigation and cure were ready. When she should have had all the ruptures of her bones and organs and tissues set for mending, and all the tissues that were crushed beyond mending replaced by freshly manufactured tissues, and when she was seen to hold on to life with a tenacious grasp again, then would she be borne into the hospital of accelerative healing high above the clouds.

The biometer recorded the faint presence of life; the spirit had not yet escaped, and before long it grew manifest to ordinary eyes. They had apparatus for stirring any organ of the body into activity; and with the lavolan they soon saw which of Tamarna’s functions had been deranged and had suffered syncope. It was her heart that had ceased action; the inrush of magnetism from space drawn by the pirakno, without provision for storing it or letting it pass harmless, had paralysed some of the more important cardiac tissues and the circulation was in many places clogged, whilst a large proportion of the superficial blood-vessels had been ruptured by the fall of the crank upon the body. A European medical council would have abandoned the bruised and discoloured corpse as fit only to be “food for worms.” But no member of the community could be spared in such a period of enthusiasm and expansion. The newly discovered agents and methods were brought to bear. Delicate instruments made the heart first mimic and then produce the true cardiac action. Currents of magnetism swept the veins, and cleared the routes for the circulation of the blood, at the same time stimulating the life-fluid. The livid hue gradually disappeared from the face. Another instrument gave action to the lungs, first in mimic and then in vital way. Concentrated sustenance was injected into the veins and soon the breathing grew regular. Yet it needed hours of this recreative work to bring the spirit to consciousness of itself. Out of the depths the soul seemed to be dragged by slow steps back into the reluctant body again. The psychometer was far more slow to give signs than the biometer. But, as soon as it revealed the approach of the soul, the friends of Tamarna were brought near her, all who had magnetic affinities with her, and especially her betrothed Omirlo. From that point the recovery was astonishingly rapid. The magnetism of friendship seemed to draw back the spirit from its desire to escape. The eyes opened, and a look of intelligence and love shone through their vitreous dulness like dawn in a misty sky; recognition quickly irradiated her whole being, then faded out, then came again, till at last the curtain which hid the soul rose, and the very body seemed to become diaphanous to the light of reason. The spirit dwelt again in its old habitation.

The rest was a matter of the commonest medical science. Every tissue was restored to its previous healthy state. Every fracture and bruise and scar was obliterated. Every item of her system which had suffered beyond the possibility of repair was remade and grafted into her body again. Nursing and medicated atmospheres under the wisest medical guidance restored Tamarna to her duties and to Omirlo as efficient and graceful and healthy as before the accident.

In spite of this triumphant success of their medical science, I could see that depression prevailed in the community. Not even what appeared to me to be the almost supernatural power of drawing the life back seemed to console them. For they had often seen still more wonderful displays of medical skill. Men who had been for months to all appearance dead were restored to full vital power, even when the microscopic transformers of dead matter had begun to batten on their tissues. No body that still retained the human form was beyond their skill; the soul could be enticed back after it had accomplished its flight from earth, for it still kept its affinities to its terrene companions, though cosmic distances should separate them. That was the most difficult task, not the recrudescence of life, but the re-enticement of the spirit that had grown happy in its release.

When I observed that the meteorological families were the nearest of all to dejection, even though they had recovered their loved member, I came to the right conclusion. It was the accident that had unmanned them. That they should be taken unawares in a sphere they had mastered preyed on their minds. For one of the immediate objects of their science was to take command of their future, to eliminate the unexpected from life. What was the value of their progress, if they did not see more clearly and farther into the sphere of darkness that bounded life like a horizon? True, the cosmic was still infinite in its night for them, and in the cosmic lay ambushed countless alarms. But they had driven their outposts far into the twilight. The age they were in had seen such an expansion of science that the veil seemed lifted from the face of boundless night. Their sarmolan pioneered before them into space, and foretold them the dire catastrophes that might lie in wait for them. And yet they were at the mercy of accident. What was the use of such an influx of suggestion from the unknown? What was their power over nature, if thus they allowed the fortuitous to drift in upon them? They had not suffered such discomfiture for ages. They abhorred the thought that they should again be the slaves of mere hazard.

But they rebelled against even the appearance of impotence, and would not allow any mood approaching despair to settle on their spirits. At once the Piramo set about the repair of their defences against accident. The pirakno was found to be fused into one mass of metal by the force of magnetism which had gathered into it from the space around. Another, larger and more effective, was produced and in it there was a new arrangement by which the storage was automatically governed; any increase in the magnetism it received was at once provided for; and if at any time the inflow should surpass the capacity for storage, there was a governor which automatically switched the surplusage into the sea, or back again into the air.

A sarmolan too was invented which had greater strength, and at the same time greater nicety of adjustment. It could be left in the space beyond the atmosphere, untended for nights together; for it was self-recording, and as long as its parts were kept clear of extraneous matter or force, it was incapable of derangement. Not that it was to be left to itself for a moment; even though it now regularly telegraphed all its changes to Rimla and to the locality of the pirakno, meteorological observers were near it night and day to watch and interpret its signals. To guard against any possible assault of accident, other sarmolans were ballooned into space whose indications were mutually corrective; where one went astray, the others would be right.

When Tamarna was completely restored to health and it was made certain by the medical tests that every organ and tissue of her system was fit for its task, her marriage with Omirlo was accorded; and the two entered on their career of parentage. Their duties were made lighter, in order that their energy might pass unimpaired into posterity. They still had their round of work, that their tissues might not grow flaccid, or their life tend to excessive solitude. But Omirlo did for both all that needed great exertion of mental or physical faculty.