“That’s what I wanted to remind you of. Your own concilium of social death so far consists of only one man!”
Mven Mass took Evda’s hand and raised it to his lips and she permitted him this gesture of great and intimate friendship. She was, at the moment, the only friend of a strong man oppressed by moral responsibility. The only one? And if Chara had been in her place? No… to receive Chara now the African would need great spiritual uplift and he still had not found strength enough for that. Let everything go its own way until Renn Bose recovered and the Astronautical Council held its meeting.
“Do you know what the third operation is that Renn has to undergo?” asked Evda, to change the subject. Mven Mass thought for a moment and then recalled a conversation he had had with Ahf Noot.
“Noot wants to take advantage of Renn’s being opened up to cleanse his organs of accumulations of entropy. It is usually done by physiochemotherapy and takes a long time, but it can be done in conjunction with such extensive surgery much more quickly and thoroughly.”
Evda Nahl thought over everything she knew of the basis of longevity, the cleansing of the organism of entropy. Man’s fish, saurian and arboreal ancestors have left contradictory vestiges of ancient physiological structures in his organism each of which has its own specific way of forming entropic remnants of their activity. Thousands of years of study of these ancient centres of entropy accumulation, formerly the cause of senility and sickness, have resulted in the elaboration of cleansing by chemical and ray treatment and of methods of stimulating the aging organism with wave baths.
In nature living beings are freed of accumulated entropy through being born of different individuals coming from different places and possessing different lines of heredity. This juggling with heredity in the struggle against entropy and the absorption of fresh strength from the surrounding world is one of the most difficult riddles of science that biologists, physicists, palaeontologists and mathematicians have been battling with for thousands of years. But the struggle has been worth it, expectation of life is now almost two hundred years and, more important still, that exhausting period of decay in old age has been eliminated.
Mven Mass guessed the psychiatrist’s thoughts.
“I have been thinking of the new and great contradiction of our lives,” said the African. “I mean the power of biological medicine that fills the body with new strength and the constantly increasing creative labour of the brain that burns a man up so quickly. How complicated everything is in the laws of our world.”
“That’s true and explains why we are lagging behind with the development of man’s third system of signals[26],” agreed Evda Nahl. “Thought-reading greatly facilitates communication between individuals but requires a great expenditure of energy and weakens the inhibitory nerve centres. This latter effect is the most dangerous.”
“And still the majority of the people, the real workers, live only half the possible number of years owing to their tremendous nervous tension. As far as I can understand, medicine cannot combat this except by forbidding people to work. But, then, who will give up his work for the sake of a few extra years of life?”
“Nobody, naturally, because people only fear death and try to hang on to life when their lives have been passed in isolation and in sorrowful expectation of joys never experienced,” said Evda Nahl pensively; despite herself she could not help remembering that people live longer on the Island of Oblivion than anywhere else.
Mven Mass once again understood her unspoken thoughts and grimly suggested that they return to the observatory to rest. Evda consented.
Two months later Evda Nahl found Chara Nandi in the upper hall of the Palace of Information, whose tall columns gave it the appearance of a Gothic cathedral. The rays of the sun, slanting down from high windows, crossed at half the height of the hall creating a warm glow above and soft twilight below.
The girl stood leaning against a column, her hands folded behind and her legs crossed. Evda Nahl, as usual, could not help admiring her simple attire — a short grey dress trimmed with blue and with a very low-cut bodice.
Chara glanced over her shoulder as Evda approached and her sorrowful eyes lit up.
“What are you doing here, Chara? I thought you were practising a new dance to surprise us with.”
“Dances are a thing of the past,” said Chara, seriously. “I’m choosing a job in a field I’m acquainted with. There is a vacancy at a factory growing artificial leather somewhere in the South Seas near Celebes and another at the station developing perennial plants in the old Atakama Desert. I was happy working in the Atlantic Ocean, everything was so clear and bright and joyful there from the power of the sea and an unthinking contact with it… I enjoyed skilful play in competition with the waves, the big waves that are always there waiting for you and, as soon as you’ve finished work….”
“I, too, have only to give way to melancholy to recall my first work in the psychological sanatorium in New Zealand where I was just an ordinary nurse. And Renn Bose, today even, after his terrible accident, says that he was happiest when he was working on helicopter traffic control. But, Chara, surely you know that’s just weakness! It’s only fatigue from the tremendous strain that was necessary for you to keep at the high artistic level you have achieved. It is going to be worse later on when your body ceases to be so splendidly charged with vital energy. But as long as it remains what it is, please give us the pleasure of admiring your skill and your beauty.”
“You don’t know how it is with me, Evda. Every new dance I prepare is a matter of joyful search. I realize that I shall once more be giving people something good, something that brings them joy and reaches to the very depths of their emotions and that is what I live by. The moment comes when my plan is put into effect and I give myself up entirely to one burst of passion, to furious, flaming voluptuousness. I suppose this is transmitted to the audience and accounts for the enthusiasm with which the dance is received. I give all of myself to you all!”
“And then what next? A sudden anticlimax?”
“Yes! I’m just like a song that has flown away and vanished into thin air, I’m an exile from a vanished world that nobody wants and to whom nothing is left but the admiration of naive youth. I do not create anything that is registered by the intellect!”
“You do more than that, you leave something in the hearts of people!”
“That’s all very immaterial and transient — I was thinking of myself!”
“Have you ever been in love, Chara?”
The girl lowered her eyelashes and her chin stuck out.
“Would that be like me?” she answered with another question.
Evda Nahl shook her head.
“I mean that tremendous big emotion that you, but not everybody, are capable of.”
“I know what you mean, the poverty of my intellectual life leaves me a richness of emotion….”
“That’s the right idea in essence but I would explain it differently; you are so gifted emotionally that the other side docs not necessarily have to be poor, although, of course, it will naturally be weaker by the law of contradictions. We’re talking too much in the abstract and I have an urgent matter to talk to you about, something that directly concerns our conversation. Mven Mass….”
The girl flinched and Evda Nahl felt that she was inwardly putting up barriers against her. She took Chara under the arm and led her to a side gallery of the hall where the dark wooden panelling harmonized beautifully with the blue-gold of the stained glass in the arched windows.