Limanora the island of progress
imaginative children of other families. The Loomiamo or pioneers of
the immediate were recruited chiefly from the scientific and technical
families; for their duties lay most of all in supplying hypotheses for
experimentation, in suggesting methods of solving difficult problems,
and in tracing out paths that invention should take; invention in fact
was what they were oftenest engaged in. But there was a subordinate
function, that was, however, of equal importance for the forward
movements of the race; it was to take the far-reaching conceptions
of the other imaginative family, and show how they could be attained
by the civilisation and means they already had. They accepted the
scientific ideas and apparatus of the time as they were and out of them
and their development they engineered a highway through the intervening
twilight to the ideal that the Fraloomiamo or pioneers of the distant
had pictured and set up ahead of the race.
I had not known of this division of pioneering work when I flew back
from the marvellous spectacle in the valley of futuritions. As I
thought over it, I became more and more sceptical of the realisability
of the scene. It had the inconsecution and absurdity of a dream. I said
to Thyriel, where was the possibility of ever substituting artificial
for natural propagation of the race? It was completely out of the line
of evolution, and could lead to nothing but what was unnatural and
evil. They could modify nature to an indefinite extent, I knew; but
what was the use of attempting to supersede nature? And suppose it were
possible to supersede it in this respect, where would be the advantage?
They could already modify and guide nature so as to produce the type
of children they desired for the progress of the race; what more was
needed?
Thyriel gave no answer, partly because she thought that the elders
were more capable of answering, partly because she knew that the
publication of the book on human sculpture was by no means finished.
Next day my sense of community with the immediate yearning and aim of
the Limanorans drew me unconsciously to Loomiefa again; and on my way
the streaming wings through the sky showed me that my impulse was not
purposeless; there was a general movement towards the same goal. Soon
the whole amphitheatre was filled from height to hollow with spectators
enriched in colour by the rays of the afternoon sun.
I had scarcely settled in my rest and surveyed the scene when I knew
that all eyes were fixed on the hollow of the valley. The platform
had again run out with the globular magnifier covering it. But the
succession of scenes upon it was almost too swift for my observation,
untrained as I still was in my senses, and a certain confusion still
rests over the spectacle in my memory. Many of the links in the chain
were so amazing as to bewilder me, and yet the general purpose and
effect of the scene as a whole rise above the confusion in my mind.
I knew before it was done that it was a complete answer to my questions
and scepticism. The Loomiamo were enacting the various stages in the
evolution of the race which would connect its actual state with the
possibility of artificial human propagation. One scene enacted what
they had long been able to do, the production of animal tissue of all
kinds; even the most subtle nerve was spun, and under their microscopes
they could examine it like a rope. Another showed animal creation
at work on the combination of tissue into one of the lower types of
animal. One after another in a long series we saw the creative power
rise in its ambitions and efforts through the animal creation up to the
human. But the most striking scene was to come. It was the application
of the newly discovered biometer to the search for the principle of
life. We saw the creative artists investigate with the instrument plant
after plant and animal after animal, and fail in their attempts to
isolate it or produce it. They modified the biometer in innumerable
ways. Then we saw them fly though the atmosphere, and set the new
life-measuring apparatus afloat in space. After repeated attempts, ever
pulling the faleena back empty, they at last showed by the joy on their
faces that they had attained the goal of their quest. In the delicate
test-tubes of their new biometers was found something that kept
agitating their indicators. Soon they had it in their laboratories,
and were experimenting with it. Again and again they gathered it from
the vacuum above the atmosphere. At last by means of it they were
enabled to find it in the plants around them, and in the animals of the
surrounding islands. A series of scenes as amazing showed how they came
at the discovery of the principle of soul by means of the psychometer.
Step by step (and each step, I came afterwards to feel, represented a
Limanoran generation) they traced it back to its secret. Most of all
were they aided in their researches by investigations outside of the
atmosphere; there they captured in the tubes of their psychometers the
form of energy that constituted human soul. And in their laboratories
they were able to study it at leisure.
For long I felt that these pictures of the future were unlikely to be
realised. Yet the steps in the process were so gradual, and the scene
representing each so vivid that I came in after years to accept it as
well within the range of Limanoran possibilities; for I realised at
last how far into the future imagination could pioneer, and what a vast
number of ages one of these predictive dramas would cover. My sense of
time was crude and weak during my earlier years in the island, and it
was difficult for me to appreciate the passage of cosmic periods, such
as were often implied in the scenes representing the publication of a
book by the Fraloomiamo.
I afterwards listened to the book of Human Sculpture itself, as it
uttered itself from a loud-sounding linasan or reproducer of speech.
This automaton-reader had the long strip of irelium constituting a
Limanoran book fed into it off the cylinder on which the book was
kept rolled. It gave the sound and every intonation of the author’s
voice, so that there was no difficulty in following his every thought
as it found expression. I never came to be able to read those books
on the irelium rolls themselves under a microscope, as the Limanorans
could, and preferred to use my hearing instead of my eyes. There was no
possibility of ambiguity if I listened to the words as they came hot
from the thinker’s own lips.
A new and more esoteric kind of book tended to supersede this at a
later period. It consisted of an electrogram of the author’s thoughts,
as they developed and shaped themselves, flashed on to long moving
strips of labramor or electricity-sponge by his active magnetic sense;
this placed in an idrosan or electrograph affected the firla of the
receiver so that he followed the whole process of thinking. Such a
permanent record of creative thought in its process of creating was of
measureless value to such a people as this, for every economy of time
and intelligence meant a quickening of their march into the nobler
future. But for many ages the effort of electrographing the thought was
too much except for the most powerful of mature creative minds; and
that of receiving the flash of the electrogram through the firla was
within the capacity of none but those who had developed their magnetic
faculty to great refinement of power.
The book of Human Sculpture was the first of the recent imaginative
productions that I became acquainted with. Thyriel and I joined a
party of youth who, under the guidance of our proparents, were to
listen to it, as it sounded through the linasan in the valley of
Loomiefa. Hour after hour we followed the melodious periods, as they
echoed up the slopes; at brief intervals on the rocky curtain at the
head of the gorge there would flame out for several minutes a moving
picture of the scenes we had witnessed the enaction of on the stage;
and a still more striking illustration of the text of the book was a
magnetic communication to our minds of the originating impulse which
moulded each thought and scene in the imagination of the author, and
the creative enthusiasm he felt as each idea burst in all its light
upon his soul. By the time we had finished the book we knew its whole
conception and history, its purpose, and its probable effect upon the
civilisation.
It answered all my questions, and rooted out all my scepticism. The
whole object of their unending labours was to take command of nature by
finding out her secrets and abridging her processes, so as to make them
serviceable to their advance. I felt how absurd had been my objections;
for where would this people have been, if they had left nature to
herself? What else was barbarism but leaving nature to herself, so that
the more cruel animal part of her became dominant? Nature included
an infinite range of gradations of energy and life from what we call
dead matter to the subtle and elevated organisations that fill space
and evade the finest perception of our senses. Within our own systems
are to be found many of those, from the débris of our bodily tissues
and organs to the noblest thought we can conceive; the precept to let
nature alone is fraught with inextricable ambiguity; and if we let the
myriad natures within us fight it out, it is not difficult to see which
would have dominance, for it is easier to level down than to level up.
Every interference with the lower nature in order to bring it under the
sway of the higher, every new mastery of our systems as a whole by our
creative thought, is a step upwards in the scale of existences. Three
fourths of the process of human propagation belonged to the sphere of
our lower nature, so that civilised men and women were ashamed to
speak of it, and tended to become gross and coarse if they did freely
speak of it. Every act seemed to drag them back again to the level of
the animals, and it took them years of effort to drive the thoughts
and traces of it into oblivion. They had as a people painfully fought
their way up out of the slough of passion, and mastered the emotions
that tended to overbalance them by their excess, and to plunge them
back again into it. Guard themselves as they might by all kinds of
precautions, and spiritualise the act as they ever tried to do, its
necessary recurrence never failed to embrute the nature for a moment,
whilst it still kept open a path for retrogression. To shut out this
possibility of re-descent into the beast would be one of the greatest
services to their race.
As useful for their advance would the command of human propagation be
in another direction. The only fear of deterioration that still haunted
them arose from atavism. Nature had still a trick of returning on
her own footsteps. The child of the noblest pair had at times traces
of far-back ancestry resurgent in evil or retrogressive traits; and
it wasted the time and the best energy of parents and proparents to
obliterate these. In every germ lay dormant the potentialities of its
whole ancestral past; and any one of them might assert itself as master
during the dim unguided life of gestation. With all their precautions
something evil might still lurk in the systems of the young to be
developed in full maturity of life. But if they moulded every tissue
and organ and faculty for themselves, this retrogressive tendency that
nature treasures up in every germ and child would disappear. There
would be nothing to watch or obliterate in the immature.
A still greater economy of time and labour would result in the
abridgment of the earlier processes of education. Education, it is
true, never ceased throughout life. But the education of the mature