The Seeds of Time

When I woke up I was still there. Hanging over me was a kind of canopy of rose-coloured metal which had not been there before. It was-but I am going to give up attempting to describe things. Frankly, I could understand about one per cent of what I saw, so what is the use? There was too much basic unfamiliarity. What would an ancient Egyptian know of a telephone by looking at it? What would a Roman or a Greek make of a jet plane, or of radio? Or, coming right down to the simple things, if you saw a slab of chocolate for the first time you might think it was for mending shoes, lighting the fire, or building houses-about the last thing you’d think was that that hard brown rectangle was meant for eating-and when you did find it out, you’d most likely try eating soap, too, because the texture was similar and the colour was more attractive. That’s the way it was with me.

You grow up with your network of thinking patterns on an acquired foundation. You look at a machine, almost subconsciously you say to yourself ‘Ah, that works by steam, or oil, or electricity’ and you go on from there. But nearly all of what I was seeing now was fundamentally foreign to me. I’d no place to start, and, not understanding what might bite me or burn me any minute, I was scared of it-just like a child or a backward aboriginal. Naturally I floundered around with wild guesses, but mostly they had to remain just that. I guessed now, for instance, that the canopy was a part of a hypnotic teaching machine such as I’d heard of people trying to develop. I guessed that because I found I could now understand what the people were saying-some of it-but of the how or the why, I knew nothing. In some way I had acquired an understanding of the language they spoke, but the concepts that were behind it did not necessarily follow….

I knew just what I could translate. The word thlana that Clytassamine had used I now knew for a measure of time-one hour and twelve minutes, making twenty thlana to the day-and dool was electricity, but laythal meant nothing to me. I had to work it out that it was some form of power unknown to me, so that I had no equivalent to translate it to.

This certainly had the effect of enhancing the dream-like quality. The utter blankness of certain words, which kept on cropping up like the dumb notes on a bar-room piano, began to get me more bewildered than before. After a bit, my distress must have begun to show pretty plainly because they laid off questioning, and told Clytassamine to take me away and look after me. My mind was whirling so much with the attempts to understand that the relief was almost physical as I sat down beside her again, and I sighed in relaxation when the seat floated us back once more into the open air.

Before I understood anything about this world I was immensely impressed by Clytassamine’s power of mental adjustment. It seemed to me that it must be a frightening thing to find that one whom you have known intimately has suddenly become a perfect stranger-with, maybe, unpredictable reactions. Yet she showed no alarm, and only occasionally made the slip of calling me Hymorell.

I understood why somebody recovering consciousness usually demands first of all ‘Where am I?’ I wanted to know that very much; without some relation to my circumstances I didn’t seem to be able to get my thinking started properly. There was no fixed point to begin from. When we were back in the green room again I began to ask questions. She looked at me doubtfully.

‘You should rest. Simply relax and don’t worry. We will look after you. If I were to try to explain I would only bewilder you more.’

‘You couldn’t.’ I told her. ‘Nothing could. I’ve got to the stage where I can’t pretend this is a dream any longer. I’ve got to get some kind of orientation, or go crazy.’

She looked at me closely again, and then nodded.

‘Very well. But where am I to begin? What is most urgent?’

‘I want to know where I am, who I am, and how it happened.’

‘As to who you are, you know that. You told me you are Terry Molton.’

‘But this-‘ I slapped my left thigh ‘-this isn’t Terry Molton.’

‘Temporarily it is,’ she said. ‘It was Hymorell’s body, but now everything that makes it individual-mentality, personality, character-are yours: therefore it is Terry’s body.’

‘And Hymorell?’ I asked.

‘He has transferred to what was your body.’

‘Then he’s made a remarkably bad deal,’ I told her. I thought for a moment, then:

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ I said. ‘Disposition isn’t constant. I know that. I’m not the same as I was before I was shot up, for instance. Physical differences make mental differences. Personality largely depends on the equilibrium of the glands. Injuries, and dope, changed mine to some extent-if they’d done it more I’d have quite a different personality.’

‘Who told you that?’ she asked.

‘It’s a matter of scientific knowledge-and common sense,’ I told her.

‘And your scientists postulate no constant? Surely there must be some constant factor to be affected by changes? And if there is that factor, may it not be a cause rather than simply an effect?’