The world below
communication from her while she remain upon any part of
that territory or within it, nor with the Primitive who was
her companion.
Article 9. This treaty is made in honour, verity, and
goodwill, without guile and without duress, each nation
contracting freely, and on its own territory, that which is
past being forgotten as though it had not been; by the six
acting Leaders of the Amphibians, and, on behalf of the
Dwellers, by the High Council of Five, and by the device of
the Aged Ones, all equally, severally, and unanimously
assenting thereto, in the Audience of Space, and in the
Light of the Perpetual Stars.
Had I been alone I might have delighted the source of this information
by requiring its repetition several times, for it contained much which
required exactness of memory for its consideration, and it suffered from
the defect of all treaties since the world began, that the effort to
avoid possibilities of ambiguity or evasion results in an added
obscurity, so that they are much more vulnerable to misconstruction, as
they are more difficult to readily comprehend, than are simpler and more
straightforward documents. But my companion intimated at once that she
could recall it as required, and she proposed that we should retire into
the comparative security of the darkness while we considered it
together.
This we did, and I opened my mind to her at once in this manner, “There
is much in what we have heard which must be clearer to you than it is to
me, but it is evident that some larger issue of impending warfare has
assisted your nation to adjust their differences with the Dwellers, and
that you have no further need for concealment, or cause to continue our
enterprise. On the contrary, your safety lies in a prompt and open
return to your own people.
“But my position is different. Your people have abandoned me to the
Dwellers, and it appears that, if I fall into their hands, I shall lose
my liberty at the least, and be exposed to death, or even torture, or
the foulest outrage, as caprice, or self-interest, or curiosity may
suggest.
“For though you appear to regard the Dwellers as of superior mentality
to myself, they do not demonstrate this by brutalities, such as it
appears may have been fatal to my friends already, and which can only
regard a being whom they know to have reached them from an earlier age,
as something to be killed and eaten. In some parts of my own world there
are savages so degraded in type that they will eat the decrepit members
of their own race, or strangers who wander into their territory, but
they are regarded as the lowest specimens of their kind.
“In the experience of my own time it is not usual to find exceptional
brutality such as this to be allied with any high level of intelligence,
and it occurs to my mind that the Dwellers have not shown any
conspicuous ability in discovering our movements, and that when I was
actually captured by one of them, I escaped very easily.
“So far am I from deciding to place myself in their power that I am
resolved to outwit them. I suppose from what we have heard that one of
my friends has already become a victim of their cruelty. The other I am
resolved to rescue, if he be still living. After that, I hope to find
some means of concealment and sustenance on the surface, to which I
shall return, until the time come when I shall be able to rejoin the
civilisation that you deride, but which offers a peace and security
which I am never likely to find among the barbarous cruelties which you
esteem so lightly.”
My companion closed her mind from me when I had finished, but only for a
short time, and then answered quietly. “I think I understand something
of the feeling from which your thoughts had their origin, and at the
injustice to myself and to my nation which you have implied I am not
angered at all, but I think that our minds have never been so far apart
since first I met you.
“There was not a single thought which you showed me which was not either
false or foolish, and it is easy to believe that you come of a species
which devour each other, though there are few created things so base as
to do this, in all the seas that I have known until I came in contact
with you.”
I was startled by the unexpectedness of this rebuke, the justice of
which I did not easily realise, but my mind was cooled by contact with
one which declined to rise to its temperature, and I replied in a
somewhat different mood, “I should be sorry to be unfair to your nation,
and especially to yourself, from whom I have had nothing but a loyal
comradeship which I have done little to merit. I know that my mind was
troubled and indignant, though it still seems to me that I had cause for
such feelings. But if you think differently, can you not show me in what
I have deserved your censure?”
“Yes,” she replied, “I think I can do that very easily, but it is the
more interesting to me to observe how entirely the use of your reason
ceases when you are moved by anger or fear, or, perhaps, by other
feelings, for I can see that the thought that we were about to part was
among the disturbances that suspended your capacity to think to any
useful purpose.
“First, it is by no means clear that I can return in safety, or at all.
How do you know that I have not invaded the Sacred Places, or even that
we are not now within them? I think we may be.
“Second, there would, in any case, be no occasion for us to part
immediately, should we remain undiscovered. The third sunset is still
distant.
“Third, my people have done nothing to cause you to fall into the hands
of the Dwellers, which you are still free to avoid if you are able. They
have been careful to make a treaty which gives you a measure of
protection which you could not otherwise have secured should you be
captured. We have explained already that you could not come with us,
being physically unfit to endure existence in the only territory we
control, or in the waters to which we are native, were we willing to
have you, and were we able to remove you from the place that you have
chosen to enter.
“Fourth, you are unjust to the Dwellers, and forgetful of things which
you have told me of your own kind.
“You have told me that your own race will destroy other creatures
without shame, not only for their own food, or safety (in which you
would not yourself say that they are wrong) but merely for the pleasure
which they derive from inflicting misery upon those who have done them
no injury, or for the gratification of curiosity, or in the hope of some
material advantage resulting to themselves or their fellows.
“More than this, with an unnatural baseness, they will even accept
service from, or make such professions of friendship as will gain the
confidence of, other creatures, which they will not then hesitate to
betray and murder, as caprice or self-interest may incline them. You
have told me that you habitually destroy creatures whose affection and
loyalty you have gained, when they become old and infirm, or are injured
by accident, readily persuading yourselves that you do these things out
of kindness, although you do not desire that you should be dealt with in
a similar manner when your own body shall show evidence that its vigour
is decreasing.
“You have shown me that you justify these things in your own minds by
arguing that you are of such superior nature that the welfare, or
existence of all other creatures is of comparative triviality.
“But even though such conduct could be condoned by a demonstration of
superiority, or would be consistent therewith, it is difficult to
understand by what arguments this asserted superiority could be
maintained.
“Is it by your power to cause the deaths of others? Then a disease-germ
(as you have yourself admitted) may be greater than you.
“Is it by conduct? But you have shown me that you work violence, fraud,
and cruelty among yourselves, and against the creatures around you.
“Is it wisdom? Have you discovered a way of life which is more safe,
more leisured, more healthy, more in harmony with your surrounding
conditions, than that of the creatures which you despise and destroy?
Are their conditions more abject than are those of the disordered and
disastrous lives of which you have told me, where you crowd together in
disease and dirt, inexplicably separated from the land which supplies
you with the food which your bodies need so continually?
“As are the vermin which you trap and kill without mercy, so, and less
than so, and rightly less than so, must you be to the Dwellers.
“You are not of their world. You came unasked. You may bring strange
disease. You may produce discord in a thousand ways. Your mind is
indignant and hostile, merely at the assurance that they will deal with
you in patient justice, after inquiry has been held,--or, it may be, at
the worst, with that expediency which is the basis of the civilisation
from which you come.”
I answered quickly, for my mind responded to hers with more thoughts
than I could easily control for transference, “I see that you have
judged more reasonably than I was able to do. My mind was moved by fear,
under which influence its reactions are instinctive rather than
rational. There is much in your thoughts which is true, as it reflects
upon my own kind, and there is much also that might be urged in defence
or extenuation of conduct which appears to you so monstrous. But there
are questions of practical urgency also which must be faced, and the
occasion is scarcely one for explanation or argument concerning abstract
or distant things.
“Yet one thing I should like to show you. You may reflect adversely upon
our treatment of living creatures of other kinds than our own, and your
thought may not be far from mine, but were you one of ourselves, you
would be faced by issues which are not simple to decide, and by
conditions which are not easy to alter.
“It is true, for the most part, of the domestic animals that we eat,
that we work for them all their lives in a willing servitude, which is
the price we pay for the right to kill them at last. We build their
houses; we prepare their food; we heal their diseases: we wait upon them
in the most menial ways. They are fed with regularity, and without their
own exertion: they are protected from inclement weather. We may even
risk our own lives to guard them from the murderous attacks of other
beasts of prey. Finally, they probably die with less pain, and with far
less of fear and foreboding, than will be the lot of those who minister
to, and then destroy them.
“It is true that we do these things for our own ends, and they owe us no
gratitude, but it is also true that, apart from these things, they would
not exist at all, nor is it true that we are regardless of their
well-being nor indifferent to their suffering. Some may be, but many are
not.
“I am not sure but that the heavier indictment against us may be, not
that we give them death at last, which comes to all, but that we deny
them life while living. It is an inevitable result of their protected
lives, that they have degenerated in intelligence and character, and
compare very poorly with those of their kind that have retained their
freedom in remoter places.
“Further, it appears evident that, with rare and doubtful exceptions,
they have no understanding or premonition of death, and are in this
respect happier than ourselves.
“You have asked why we should consider that we are greater than the
other creatures around us. I agree that a superior capacity for
successful violence is a poor argument in support of such a claim, nor
should I urge it. Nor should I urge that our conduct of life is
superior, for there is a barrier dividing their mentalities from ours