The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 392
"To you the reason for leaving this place must seem obvious," he went on, dividing his attention between Patricia and Devlin. "This is a rotten, violent and overcrowded place and no sane person with a choice would want to live in it. The not so obvious reason is that you and all the rest of us are being acted on by steadily increasing sociological, cultural, moral and economic pressures—you name it and I can tell you exactly how you are being squeezed. It is therefore probable that you are leaving because you have no choice!"
His voice had risen steadily in volume and his eyes, Devlin thought, seemed to reflect a mixture of anger and confusion. The Brother had never looked or sounded as wild as this before and Devlin reminded himself that not all of the city's madmen were Maxers or teenage citizens.
"Let us go back to your analogy of the fruit-bearing planet," Brother Howard continued in a quieter voice. "The analogy is not perfect, as you know, because this planet-sized rotten fruit has nowhere to fall in order to germinate and restart the growth cycle. Instead it is being compressed on one side by rapidly diminishing resources and an exploding population on the other. The result will be that the seed contained within it will be expelled like a stone from a rotten plum—and the purpose of this project is to direct the seed toward fallow ground."
He took a deep breath, then went on quietly, "Naturally we are making a big effort to ensure the success of our project. But we can never be sure of whether the effort and sacrifices are necessary or whether, if our particular group of talented people had stayed at home and enjoyed the various pleasures of our society, the project would have been launched by a completely different set of people using entirely different methods. However, I am fully convinced that if something is destined to happen, then happen it will. Seeding must occur, and soon—I have special knowledge, you see, which makes me absolutely sure of this. I am also convinced, as are most of the others connected with the project, that God or Fate or the evolutionary process helps those who help themselves.
"Our main worry," he added, and the worry was evident in his voice as well as in his expression, "is that we cannot know for sure whether we are helping or hindering."
Devlin looked at Patricia, but all of her attention was on the Brother and there was no way of telling what she thought about this peculiar confession.
"I wouldn't dream of confusing and frightening you like this," he continued, "if you were intended to remember this interview. However, there is no need to be afraid for your physical well-being. The danger, the real suffering and confusion, will be mental rather than physical, and there is little we have been able to do to prepare you for it.
"But before I go into the details of what we have done, and why, I shall try to dispel some of your present confusion by telling you how I became involved."
According to the Brother the project had its real beginning about a century and a half earlier when mankind, having slammed the door into space some forty years previously, was beginning to open it again and look outside. Scientific advances in the interim had provided methods of space travel that were much more economical than those of the first space age, as well as opening up the possibility of interstellar flight through the development of hibernation anesthesia techniques.
One of the projects initiated at that time was aimed at sending a low-impulse drive ship containing a volunteer astronaut in cold sleep on a cometary orbit that would return it to the vicinity of Earth in one hundred and three years.
But once again the public lost interest in space flight and in hibernation anesthesia, because even then the future promised to be an unpleasantly crowded and polluted and vicious place. Sensible people preferred to live out their lives in the present rather than transferring a large portion of them into this rather frightening future. But the volunteer astronaut, like most people who volunteered, was not very sensible and did not really think about the kind of Earth he would be returning to. Nor did he realize that, while his physical condition upon resuscitation would be perfect, his mind would never be the same again.
"... A lot of time and effort and money had gone into the project, however," Brother Howard went on cynically, "and one of the project psychologists, Doctor Martin, was so interested that he undertook a longevity treatment in order to be around to see the end result. The treatment, although still experimental, was effective in that it conferred long life but not eternal youth.
"Because Doctor Martin was not a normal person," the Brother continued, "and because he was brilliant, dedicated and incredibly patient, he did not give up on the only cold sleeper to return after an extended period in space and gradually he coaxed him back to sanity. It required many, many years of constant attention because the returned astronaut, by the generally accepted standards of the day, was hopelessly insane. In the long process of effecting a cure Doctor Martin discovered what exactly had been going on in the man's mind while all of his bodily processes—except those of mentation, obviously—had been halted, and together with his patient they formulated theories to explain it.
"But my return to sanity was not one hundred per cent complete," the Brother added dryly. "As a result of those cold sleep experiences I became convinced that I had had my nose rubbed very firmly in a form of afterlife, and I'm afraid that I caught a severe dose of religion."
He looked from Patricia to Devlin, studying their expressions. Then he said, "Relax, I'm still not trying to convert you. But I must give you some idea of what to expect, so listen carefully ..."
The Brother's experience in cold sleep had been frightening, painful, stimulating and confusing, with confusion predominating. He had been assured that nothing at all would happen during cold sleep and that he would be awakened without any apparent passage of time. Neither he nor the project medics had expected him to dream, continuously and vividly, throughout his century-long voyage.
Even the pleasant dreams had been frightening because of the confusion and disorientation caused by their apparently running backward. Incidents were experienced normally, but when he dreamed a person's lifetime the incidents were not in chronological order. He would dream a person's entire life-history, complete in every thought and detail and feeling and then, without warning, find himself the same person's infant father an instant after the aged son had died.
He kept dreaming farther and farther back in time, of people and places about which he could not possibly have had knowledge. The dream lives became shorter and more violent. Some of them did not even involve human beings. And when he was resuscitated his mind was filled with the pains, pleasures and confusion of countless lifetimes and he was incapable of forgetting any of them.
All of the lives and, more important, all of the deaths were there as fresh in his memory as if they had happened only a few minutes earlier.
It was a miracle that old Dr. Martin, who had been young Dr. Martin when Howard had been cooled for the trip, had been able to return him to any semblance of sanity. But the psychologist had managed it, in part, by providing an explanation for what had happened to him.
Martin had suggested that when a man—or men and/or women—were removed from their home planet for extended periods of time while being subjected to reduced temperatures a process occurred which had the effect of making them seeds—or potential seeds of their race. The process was psycho-philosophical rather than physical.
Like certain plant seeds and bacteria which were capable of surviving for extended periods in Arctic conditions and then of reproducing themselves, the human equivalents were perfectly preserved in cold sleep, with none of their functions impaired. A major difference was that the human seedlings possessed minds and these, apparently, were even more important and deserving of preservation. But it was not simply the minds of the individuals concerned that were preserved, the process triggered off by time and reduced temperature had the effect of stimulating what amounted to the racial memory.
The cold sleepers became the seeds of humanity—all of its knowledge, experience and achievements since its earliest beginnings.
"In effect," the Brother went on, unable to hide the wonder and excitement he was feeling, "each man and woman has available to himself/herself the memories—that is the total knowledge and experience—of every ancestor of the same sex, and this would include experiences these ancestors shared with contemporaries with whom they came into contact as far back as prehistoric times. Such memories could not be passed from male parent to male offspring, or female to female as the case might be. The dream material made available during cold sleep comprises complete lifetimes. If racial memories were inherited from the parents they would begin at conception but no memory belonging to a parent would become similarly available to descendants after the birth of the final offspring.
"Obviously there is a sex link—otherwise why couldn't males experience female dreams and vice versa? But according to the doctor there is another and much more important process at work. This is the release of information recorded and stored in the large unused portion of the human brain, which is the mental component of the human seedling. Since the brain is the only organ in the human body that grows without regenerating itself, this explains why complete lifetimes can be remembered.
"The reason for dreaming about people who could not possibly be ancestors is more difficult to explain, but Dr. Martin has covered even that ..."
One of the psychologist's pet theories as a young man had dealt with ghosts and similar nonmaterial sound-sight-touch manifestations. He had become convinced that ghosts did not exist, but he did believe that when an event involved considerable amounts of human pain, pleasure, fear or any other strong emotion, the associated mental radiation was absorbed by material in the area—which would later become the scene of the so-called hauntings—and would be made available to anyone who visited the place later and who was sufficiently sensitive to be a receiver for the playback.
When the Brother had reported on his dream lives experienced during a century of cold sleep, Dr. Martin had extended and modified his theory.
According to the psychologist, mental radiation was absorbed and recorded by all forms of organic life and the recording equipment increased its sensitivity and efficiency as the organic life in question developed intelligence. No thought or sensory impression, no matter how faint or distant in time was ever completely lost. It was stored, not in the crude, electro-chemical fashion used by the conscious mind, but on a sub-molecular level which enabled it to accommodate the vast quantity of material necessary for the retention of a racial memory.
Martin held that any given person was composed of atoms or molecules—the organic building blocks—which in the recent or distant past had belonged to the structure of another person or had been briefly in contact with another person's organic material through ingestion or assimilation into the tissues. The transfer of information to the hyper-sensitive recorder in the brain might even have occurred through inhalation of impurities while sharing public transport, possibly even through communal proximity.
Martin had been unable to establish either the degree of sensitivity or the range of the racial memory recording units in Brother Howard's brain, but he had concluded it was not limitless.
"To express it as simply as possible," the Brother concluded, "no single person is carrying all of mankind's history in his after-brain. But the ship will contain two hundred long-term cold-sleepers and the doctor is convinced that half that number, considering the present-day mixing of racial types, would among them take away a record of every thought, emotion or sensation ever experienced by thinking creatures on this planet."
A long, uneasy silence fell after the Brother finished speaking. Devlin felt excited and impressed by the scope of the psychologist's concept, but he still thought it incredible. Patricia must have been thinking along the same lines.
"I can't believe—all that," she said apologetically but firmly.
"Not now, naturally," said the Brother. His voice held a tinge of compassion. "After your third or fourth awakening you will believe, except that our conditioning will keep you from remembering this particular session. By now you are realizing that if you were allowed to remember this you, and all the other colonists, would resign from the project."
Devlin laughed politely. He said, "In a project as important as this, one with so many philosophical implications, I still don't know how you can be sure that you're picking the right seeds for your pod."
"The simple answer," replied the Brother, "is that we are not sure."
"Oh," said Devlin.
Brother Howard shook his head. "We are caterpillars trying to think like butterflies. The process of seeding may be as natural an event as the sun's coming up, but in this case it is still an event that requires the combined knowledge of all the hard and soft sciences. Doctor Martin and myself are responsible for selecting the seed. A lot of time and effort has gone into the design and construction of your ship and we know it will work—but the business of seed selection is scaring us sick.
"A seed should be capable of survival," he went on. "Fine. But do we select our most aggressive, adaptable seedlings who will establish a bridgehead and hold it against all comers? Or will we export our philosopher and artist seeds who between them may be incapable of growing a potato? Or a mixture of both which might result in the seeds destroying each other? All this is an over-simplification, you realize, but you can appreciate our dilemma. Finally we decided to take the easy—and perhaps cowardly—way out. We felt that if the seeding were truly to become an event as natural as childbearing the seeds themselves should be aware of the process. So we began to look around for personality types who were trying to expel themselves or who wanted to be expelled. We found that the strong-minded, aggressive, highly intelligent and resourceful men and women, the kind who to our minds would have made the best colonists, had adapted to present-day society and, under deep probing, were not really interested in going.
"The group who really hated Earth and who desperately wanted to escape comprised more than ninety per cent of the world's population," he concluded. "That's right—the sheep! We didn't even have to go outside the city to find enough candidates."
After a moment's silence Patricia said quietly, "That sounds like the right choice. Ordinary, average, peace-loving people are in the majority. They always have been."
"Yes," replied the Brother. "The highly intelligent and aggressive types are responsible for much progress, but it has been progress without stability. The sheep will move ahead more slowly and evenly—as long as they don't land among wolves."
"I see," said Devlin, then added: "Don't worry. I, too, think you made the right choice."
"Kind of you to say so," said the Brother dryly. "Another worry has been how you people as individuals will react to becoming the repositories of this store of racial experience. From first-hand knowledge I can assure you that the process is anything but pleasant, and we have tried to devise ways of cushioning the psychic shock involved.
"Perhaps," he said, going off on a tangent, "a voyage on a generation-ship, with the original personnel and their descendants living out their lives naturally during the trip and sleeping normally instead of going cold, would be easier on all concerned. Maybe that is the way seeding is supposed to happen. But we can't be sure—and anyway, we haven't technical ability or the psychological control capability to produce that kind of seed pod. All we can do is to try and make the cold dreams a little easier for you to take.
"During the training sessions that you will be allowed to remember we have told you lies, half-truths and generally planted impressions that are nothing but red herrings. Four periodic awakenings to reinforce and exercise the mind and body, for instance, are a case in point—remembering will never be a problem where you are concerned. Hints dropped about the necessity of dreaming, when you will not be able to stop doing it are another—as are oblique references to the use of new psycho-drugs that will make you suspect that the whole business is simply an elaborate simulation. All this lying and misdirection has been to enable you to assimilate the sharp and intense and extremely confusing race memory data without its driving you insane."
Devlin nodded. He no longer thought the Brother a religious fanatic, but neither did he feel particularly reassured. He said, "Surely there are drugs available that would cushion these shocks. They could be injected immediately preceding the awakening and they would dull the initial sensations so that—"
"No!" said the Brother sharply. "The seed pod is a product of the race's technological achievements—but the seeds themselves we are afraid to touch in case we adversely affect them. Drugs might deteriorate over such a lengthy period or have a damaging effect on the recall process. So you are going out untouched, medically speaking. The conditioning process, which we will begin shortly, is psychological and aimed at controlling your dream recall by non-material means. It is being done so that you will remember, or dream, the earliest episodes first and so that the racial memory material will be presented more slowly and in chronological order. We hope that the conditioning will prevent all of your racial memories' being made available during your first cooldown—and that it will enable you to retain your sanity after the later awakenings. But we can't, of course, be sure of anything."
Another long silence was again broken by Patricia, who said, "We both knew that there would be risks."
"Yes," said Devlin, wishing that he could feel as calm as she sounded. "You had us worried for a while—we thought we'd fallen among religious fanatics. I realize now that while this thing has all sorts of philosophical implications it has nothing to do with religion or the afterlife."
"No?"
"Not for me—not now," replied Devlin. "Of course, I may not have thought deeply enough about it."
"You haven't," said the Brother, "and I'll admit that in the objective sense I may not have undergone a religious experience. Much depends on your point of view and on how your parents brought you up to regard such things. I found that my after-brain recorder had been switched on and its return to Earth gravity and temperature did not seem to be switching it off. I kept assimilating impressions from everyone around me. So I became very understanding.
