Two mothers and a father had committed suicide during the long captivity, and a father had died of a stroke. The forty remaining parents had kept up a round-the-clock watch for years, trying to restrain their children: twelve adolescent girls and ten adolescent boys, all awake all the time. The conditions of the experiment prevented the parents from locking any doors; they could not keep the young people from access to one another. The parents’ pleas for locks and contraceptives had been rejected by Dr. Mr. Prof. Uy Tug, who was convinced that the second generation of asomnics would fully vindicate his theory, as expounded in the unpublished manuscript of Asomnia: The Answer Is to Come.
When the compound was opened, four of the girls had had babies, which were being looked after by the grandparents. Three more of the girls were pregnant. One of the mothers had been raped by one of the asomnic boys and was also pregnant. She was permitted to abort the fetus.
There followed an obscure and shameful period in which the government disclaimed any responsibility for the experiment and left its subjects to fend for themselves. Some of the Super-smarts were exploited sexually and for pornographic purposes. One was killed by his mother, allegedly in self-defense; she served a brief term in prison. At last, under the rule of the new Forty-Fourth Supreme Pinnacular, all the surviving asomnics, including their infants, were taken to a reservation on a remote island in the vast Ru Mu River delta, where their descendants have remained ever since, wards of the nation of Hy Brisal.
The second generation failed to vindicate Uy Tug’s theory but proved the skill of the genetic engineers: they bred absolutely true. No descendant of the Supersmarts has been capable of sleep after the age of five.
There are now about fifty-five asomnics on Wake Island. The climate is very warm, and they go naked. Fruit, cheese, bread, and other foods that need no preparation are left on the shore by an army jetboat every second day. Except for these provisions, tossed ashore from the boat, a strict no-contact policy is maintained. No humanitarian or medical aid is permitted. Tourists, including those from other planes, are allowed on a neighboring islet, where they can catch glimpses of the asomnics from a blind through high-power telescopes. Teams of scientific observers are occasionally lowered from helicopters into two observation towers on the island itself. These towers, inaccessible to the asomnics, are equipped with infrared and other highly sophisticated viewing devices; the observers are hidden behind one-way glass. Pickets from the Save the Asomnic Babies Association are permitted to march and keep vigils on the south shore. From time to time these SABA activists make rescue attempts by boat, but the army jetboats and helicopters have always forestalled them.
The asomnics bask, walk, run, climb, swing, wrestle, groom themselves and one another, hold and suckle babies, and have sex. Males fight in sexual rivalry and often beat females who reject intercourse. All fight occasionally over food, and there have been a number of apparently causeless killings. Group rape is common, when males are excited by seeing others copulate. There are some indications of affectional bonding between mother and infant and between siblings. Otherwise there are no social relations. No teaching occurs, and there is no sign of individuals learning skills or customs by imitation.
Most of the females bear a child a year from the age of thirteen or fourteen on. Their maternal skills can only be innate, and the question of whether human beings have any innate skills has not yet been settled; in any case, most of the babies die. The mothers leave dead babies where they lie. After weaning, children fend for themselves; since an excess of food is always provided, a fair number of them survive to puberty.
Adult female death is usually from brutality or complications of childbirth. Female asomnics seldom reach thirty years. Males live longer, if they survive the dangerous late teens and early twenties when fighting is all but constant. The longest-lived inhabitant of Wake Island, FB-204, nicknamed Fibby by the observer team, was a female who lived to seventy-one. Fibby bore one infant at age fourteen and was apparently sterile thereafter. She never rejected a male’s effort to copulate and so was seldom beaten. She was shy and very lazy, rarely appearing on the beach except to pick up food and retreat into the trees with it.
The current patriarch is a grizzled male, MTT-311, fifty-six years old, muscular and well-made. He spends most days basking on the sand beaches, and at night roams endlessly through the forests of the interior. Sometimes he digs holes and ditches with his hands, or piles up rocks to dam a creek, apparently for the physical pleasure of doing so, as the dams serve no purpose and are never made watertight enough to divert the stream. One of the young females spends a part of almost every night building up piles of torn bark and leaves like huge nests, though she never uses them for anything. Several females hunt for ants or grubs in fallen trees and eat them one by one. These are the only observed evidences of purposive behavior beyond the fulfillment of immediate physical needs.
Though they are extremely unclean and the females age quickly, most asomnics are handsome in youth. All observers comment on their expression, described as bland, serene, supernally calm. A recent book about the asomnics was entitled “The Happy People”—with the Orichi equivalent of a question mark.
Orichi thinkers continue to argue about them. Are you happy if you aren’t conscious of being happy? What is consciousness? Is consciousness the great boon we consider it? Which is better off, a lizard basking in the sun or a philosopher? Better off in what way and for what? There have been lizards far longer than there have been philosophers. Lizards do not bathe, do not bury their dead, and do not perform scientific experiments. There have been many more lizards than philosophers. Are lizards, then, a more successful species than philosophers? Does God love lizards better than he loves philosophers?
However one may decide such questions, observation of the asomnics, or of lizards, seems to indicate that consciousness is not necessary to living a contented sentient life. Indeed, when carried to such an extreme as human beings have carried it, consciousness may prevent true contentment: the worm in the apple of happiness. Does consciousness of being interfere with being—pervert, stunt, cripple it? It seems that every mystical practice on every plane seeks precisely to escape from consciousness. If Nirvana is the mind freed of itself, allowed to rejoin the body in the body’s pure oneness with its world or god, have not the asomnics achieved Nirvana?
Certainly consciousness comes at a high cost. The price of it, evidently, is the third of our lives we spend blind, deaf, dumb, helpless, and mindless—asleep. We do, however, dream.
The poem “Wake Island,” by Nu Lap, portrays the asomnics as spending their whole life “in a dream of dreams…” Dreams of waters flowing always by the sandbars, dreams of bodies meeting, opening like deep flowers, dreams of eyes forever open to the sun and stars…
A moving poem, it offers one of the very few positive views of the asomnics. But the scientists of Hy Brisal, though they might like to agree with the poet to ease their collective conscience, assert that asomnics do not and cannot dream.
As on our plane, only certain animals, including birds, dogs, cats, horses, apes, and humans, regularly enter the peculiar and highly specific brain/body condition known as sleep. Once there, and only there, some of them enter the even more peculiar state or activity, characterised by highly specific brainwave types and frequencies, called dreaming.