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Billows and Shadows
or
Rosecove City
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Rosecove City was built of old north of the River Barandiun by the good Logarians that had gone south, making dwellings chiefly beyond the deserts of Aredia, so that central Roria still held much of their beneficial influence. In ancient days it was called Taurlondë, a great haven of the Logathrim, friendly with the Wild Men before the Shadow fell. Long had it lain empty until the son of the Last Emperor of Logaria came there, at the very end of antiquity, to dwell there in exile. His sons were now dispersed, and they married with Men of other race, so that all their bloodlines became mingled and their claim to kingship was lessened. All lines, that is, save one.
The city was shaped like a G in Drake's years, though the shoreline was a straight strip from the southern woods to the northern hills. Miles northward was a bay that from the city's beaches looked like a shepherd's crook. Rosecove is a city that is built on the Western Sea; its tides are its life. The ocean is blue because it is warm, far warmer than any waters outside the subtropics have any right to be. There is an ancient alchemy with Men and the sea. It is said that in ancient times Kyogre sent them messages in secret by stream and flood. But the first Men did not have skill in such matters, and still less they had in those days before they mingled with the gods. Therefore they loved the waters, and their hearts were stirred, but they did not understand why.
Rosecove has two thousand inhabitants. It is not rightly called a city at all, but before the war when its people were more numerous it was considered urban. The greater part of them were of the Rorian kind, but intermixed were men with rich blond hair, which were rare in the south, and also stunted and diminished Hisuians here and there about the country. Rumors came out of the Dark Years saying that sea-lords came from the uttermost west and married some of the women in Roria; but they were not Logathrim, for they were pale and taller than any Southman. Some of the children born and begotten because of these intermingling, for there were many, were fair to see and strong, and most of them had white skin. This was how these Westermen were marked, but to that day when Bronze and Jake came into the city none knew where they had sprung from, only that the rumored name of Galar had been passed down from the age of heroes.
The city beggars no description. It is classical and small, so let its sleeping soul rest today. The real focus is Kyogre's realm. Bronze had expected the war history to be his interest, and though there was some, the concern he had was with the sea. With luck you will carry some fragments of this time off as memory.
There is a lighthouse at the end of the northern cliffs. The hills go west beyond the shore and have tumbled breakers at their dark base. It looked west, (toward the land of Galar, the wise men said) over the sea where so many fools had drowned within. Rosecove is beautiful but the sea it borders is ancient, older than the hills. It was indefinable to the Logathrim, bravest of Men, and a great mystery to the Hisuians, the wisest mortals. Its vastness is so great that in circling around the world a sailor could set out west from Rosecove and take the bent paths, so that he would find that west became east and he would be at Roria once more. There is no limit to it, no trading colony over the sea, no hopes of hidden lands yet unknown, nothing but many millions of tons of salt amid the wide murk.
I had once met a man who was afraid of space travel. He was afraid of the impassable expanse of the heavens. Let me speak a moment about the Second Heaven, which is above the sky and below Deep Heaven.
...
There is no fear in Space to rival the whelming darkness of the sea. Space is imagined as being cold and dark. Have all Men forgotten the sun and stars? The heavens, the heavens that proclaim His glory, the heavens beyond the firmament, the wall of crystal glass. All can be seen and there is no true darkness in space. There are planets of unbelievable majesty, and constellations to be dreamed of: there are celestial sapphires, rubies, emeralds, and pinpricks of burning gold. Look out of your window in the expanse! Far out on the left of your sight hangs a comet, tiny and remote, and between all and behind all, far more emphatic and palpable than it shows on Earth, the undimensioned, enigmatic blackness.
The lights tremble: they seem to grow brighter as you look. Do not disbelieve the old astrology. Let the feelings of "sweet influence" come into your body. All is silence but for the irregular tinkling noises against your ship's hull. Those noises are made by meteorites, small, drifting particles of world-stuff that smite continually against every spaceship's steel armor. Imagine that at any moment you might meet something large enough to make meteorites of ship and all! But when I went through the Expanse I did not fear. The adventure was too high, its circumstance too "solemn", for any emotion, save a severe delight. But the days I spent in space, at the very end of my life on Earth, were some of the best. There is an irresistible attraction to the regions of light; I could not cease to wonder at the noon that always awaited you however early you were to seek it. There, totally immersed in a bath of pure ethereal color and of unrelenting though unwounding brightness, stretched my full length and with eyes half closed in the strange chariot that bore me, faintly quivering, through depth after depth of tranquillity far above the reach of night, I felt my body and mind daily rubbed and scoured and filled with new vitality. I will admit the scientific basis for these sensations: in space the human body is exposed to cosmic rays that never pass to Earth through the airish gases.
My travels in the Heavens do not come into this tale, nor any other, and will not till the end of time. If the annal that takes place after this one is read by the same reader it is easy to guess under what circumstances I experienced Space. But as time wore on, I became aware of another and more spiritual cause for my progressive lightening and exultation of heart. A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off me. I had read of "Space": at the back of my thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. I had not known how much it affected me till my glorious journey; now that the very name "Space" seems a blasphemous libel for that empyrean ocean of radiance in which I swam. I could not call it "dead"; I felt life pouring into me from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? I had thought it barren; I saw then that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the Earth with so many eyes, and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the Heavens, the
"Happy realms that lie,"
Where day never shuts his eye
Up in the broad fields of the sky."
...
When Bronze had looked onto the sea he felt quite like what that man sensed when encountering Space: a perfectly loathsome and abyssal dimension, where all his arithmetic was destroyed and the world passed into the deeps. He felt like the sea was lolling him cradle-like and that it was drawing him in. He knew that the same goodly picture he was devouring with his eyes had been a salty coffin for many an unwary mariner. The sea was a sepulcher for brave men, those with too much fire in their chests and loins, a fire that made them go out into the unmitigated night. There Poseidon entombed them.
He knew that there was darkness. Sight was not a kindness that he would be afforded. Among many divers it is said that under the waves there lies freedom, and more freedom forevermore, in the regions where the sounds are hazy and the light is dim. But Bronze knew that in the sea nothing was arranged for his rational consumption. Beyond the diffuses glows, in the primeval canyons, the ocean bred huge monsters, sea-serpents and nameless things. They were as old as the Dark Lord, hungry things gnawing at the roots of the Earth. Even the gods know them not. Below the deepest delvings of the Logarians live things that I will not bring report of to the light of day. In that despair of the sea, there can be no hope.
Bronze was actually now walking on the sea-strand. The two had passed through the city arch and made their way to the shore. There were few on the beach; the day was cloudy and wet. Out to sea he saw a yacht bobbing, an alien speck in the emptiness, some few hundred yards out. He was aware of a subtle unease, so much stronger than any other time he had encountered the ocean, the abyss that goes no-wither, into which he could be dropped and sink forever and ever. The sea is such an ancient symbol of primality that its effects on his psyche can hardly be analyzed.
"Ho!" said Jake. "What's that?"
Dimly, against the billows and shadows of the waves, the yacht lilted onto its side. Someone, a feeble creature, was splashing as his boat foundered. COuld he not swim to shore? What was going on?
Thrilling fear seized Bronze.
...
A man overboard!
What matters it? The vessel does not halt. The wind blows. That somber ship has a path that it is forced to pursue. It passes on.
The man disappears, then reappears; he plunges, he rises again to the surface; he calls, he stretches out his arms; he is not heard. The vessel, trembling under the hurricane, is wholly absorbed in its own workings; the passengers and sailors do not even see the drowning man; his miserable head is but a speck amid the immensity of the waves. He gives vent to desperate cries from out of the depths. What a specter is that retreating sail! He gazes and gazes at it frantically. It retreats, it grows dim, it diminishes in size. He was there but just now, he was one of the crew, he went and came along the deck with the rest, he had his part of breath and of sunlight, he was a living man. Now, what has taken place? He has slipped, he has fallen; all is at an end.
He is in the tremendous sea. Under foot he has nothing but what flees and crumbles. The billows, torn and lashed by the wind, encompass him hideously; the tossings of the abyss bear him away; all the tongues of water dash over his head; a populace of waves spits upon him; confused openings half devour him; every time that he sinks, he catches glimpses of precipices filled with night; frightful and unknown vegetations seize him, knot about his feet, draw him to them; he is conscious that he is becoming an abyss, that he forms part of the foam; the waves toss him from one to another; he drinks in the bitterness; the cowardly ocean attacks him furiously, to drown him; the enormity plays with his agony. It seems as though all that water were hate.
Nevertheless, he struggles. He tries to defend himself; he tries to sustain himself; he makes an effort; he swims. He, his petty strength all exhausted instantly, combats the inexhaustible.
Where, then, is the ship? Yonder. Barely visible in the pale shadows of the horizon. The wind blows in gusts; all the foam overwhelms him. He raises his eyes and beholds only the lividness of the clouds. He witnesses, amid his death-pangs, the immense madness of the sea. He is tortured by this madness; he hears noises strange to man, which seem to come from beyond the limits of the earth, and from one knows not what frightful region beyond.
There are birds in the clouds, just as there are angels above human distress; but what can they do for him? They sing and fly and float, and he, he rattles in the death agony.
He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky, at one and the same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud. Night descends; he has been swimming for hours; his strength is exhausted; that ship, that distant thing in which there were men, has vanished; he is alone in the formidable twilight gulf; he sinks, he stiffens himself, he twists himself; he feels under him the monstrous billows of the invisible; he shouts.
There are no more men. Where is God?
He shouts. Help! Help! He still shouts on. Nothing on the horizon; nothing in heaven. He implores the expanse, the waves, the seaweed, the reef; they are deaf. He beseeches the tempest; the imperturbable tempest obeys only the infinite.
Around him darkness, fog, solitude, the stormy and nonsentient tumult, the undefined curling of those wild waters. In him horror and fatigue. Beneath him the depths. Not a point of support. He thinks of the gloomy adventures of the corpse in the limitless shadow. The bottomless cold paralyzes him. His hands contract convulsively; they close, and grasp nothingness. Winds, clouds, whirlwinds, gusts, useless stars! What is to be done? The desperate man gives up; he is weary, he chooses the alternative of death; he resists not; he lets himself go; he abandons his grip; and then he tosses forevermore in the lugubrious dreary depths of engulfment.
The soul, going down into this gulf, becomes a corpse. Who shall resuscitate it?
...
What was Bronze doing? He was swimming, clutching the water, pursuing the currents. Above him reared the dizzy eyrie of the lighthouse. He saw the tumbled boat before him not thirty yards away. Jake remembered that Bronze rushed on as if he made no distinction between land and water and plunged in with a great splash. He could see Bronze's head, dark against the blue sea, as he swam. Bronze rejoiced at his chase, for swimming was the only sport in which he had ever approached excellence. As he took the water he lost sight of the drowning man for a moment; then, looking up and shaking the wet hair from his face as he struck out in pursuit (his hair was getting long by now), he saw the man's whole body upright and above the surface as though it were sitting on the sea. A second glance and he realized that the floating quarry had mounted an inflatable ring.
As his speed and strength ebbed Bronze began to despair, but he had forgotten the man-loving nature of sea-Pokemon. He found almost at once that he was in a complete shoal of Whiscash, leaping and frisking to attract his attention. In spite of their good will it was no easy matter to get himself onto the slippery surface of the fine specimen that his grabbing hands first reached: while he was struggling to mount, the distance widened between him and the struggling man as he drifted away. But at last it was done. Settling himself behind the great goggle-eyed head he nudged the Pokemon with his knees, kicked it with his heels, whispered words of praise and encouragement, and in general did all he could to awaken its mettle. It began threshing its way forward.
But looking ahead Bronze could no longer see any sign of the man, but only the long empty ridge of the next wave coming towards him. Doubtless the frail man was beyond the ridge. Then he noticed that he had no cause to be bothered about the direction. The slope of water was dotted all over with the great fish, each marked by a heap of blue foam and some of them spouting as well. They were all forging straight ahead, no more uncertain of their course than homing rooks or bloodhounds on a scent. As Bronze and his Whiscash rose to the top of the tall wave, he found himself looking down on a wide shallow trough shaped much like a valley in the home counties. Far away and now approaching the opposite slope was the little, dark puppet-like silhouette of the adrift man: and between him and Bronze the whole school of fish was spread out in three or four lines. Clearly there was no danger of losing touch.
Bronze was pursuing him with the fish and they would not cease to follow. He laughed aloud. "My hounds are bred out of the Logathrim kind, so flew'd so sanded," he roared.
Now the man was no longer drifting away but moving swiftly toward him. The other was swimming feebly, but drifting further and further out to sea. Mere bigness and loneliness threatened to overwhelm him. "You there!" he said in a broken voice. "For Arceus's sake grab onto me!"
"I won't cold-shoulder you," said Bronze over the sound of the waves. He moved the Whiscash up and grabbed onto the floating ring; it would have to be enough. The man in the ring was old, perhaps sixty, his flesh the tan color of liver and a heavy shirt that clownishly billowed in the waters. Soon he would have grown tired and slipped beneath the waves. This man, in fact, had been only recently cured of arthritis in Silvent City.
Bronze hoped that another Wishcash would come in close enough. His own mount had turned around and was going back to the shore. Electabuzz was swimming beside the man in his inflatable ring, pushing it along to keep up with Bronze. The man calculated that during Bronze's sojourn on the waves, he had swam a hundred yards unaided in a minute. It was immensely improbable. Bronze understood nothing of why he did it; the deed seemed right as anything else.
A small populace of townsmen on the beach were cheering them on. Bronze heard yells like those for a runner who is well within hope of finishing, and also in languages he remembered a little of. "Tsar Kaloyan! Tsar Kaloyan!" The king of the tides! With the sea-foam spraying and the sand glistening Bronze felt like the subject of a painting in the historically romantic style of the artists a hundred years ago. After all these events the two came safely back to firm land. The yacht was drifting out to sea and by now immediate retrieval was a lost cause.
...
"You saved me, boy," said the man. "For that I owe my life. Many good men could have despaired and left me to drown."
"I don't know why I did it," said Bronze, would was drying himself on the shore. "It felt like an obvious thing to do."
"Still I hold your bravery in high regard," said the man. "But if you remember nothing of the 'why' then that is all the better. No man in risking his life for another may need a reason for going off in pursuit." They shook hands then.
"I am Quentin," said the man.
"I am called Bronze."
Now at last a full and prosaic sense of Bronze's position descended upon him. It is a curious flaw in the reason, to judge from Bronze's experience, that when a man comes to a strange land he at first quite forgets its size. That whole world is so small in comparison with his journey to that place that he forgets the distances within it: any two places in Brimber, or in Rosecove, appear to him like places in the same town. But now, as Bronze looked round once more and saw nothing in out toward the sea but sky and tumbling waves, the full absurdity of his previous delusion to swim out into the open was borne in upon him. He might as well have been divided from land by the width of the whole Western Ocean or more. Even if a loose archipelago was to be spread over a thousand square miles, what would that be but a negligible freckling in a landless ocean that rolled forever around the globe of the World of Men?
And now the experiences of the past hour began to make a direct assault upon his faith. The solitude of the seas and, still more, the experiences which had followed his taste of the feeling of helplessness, had insinuated a doubt as to whether this world in any real sense belonged to those who called themselves its Kings and Queens, the Children of Arceus. How could it be made for them when most of it, the seas, in fact, was uninhabitable by them? Was not the very idea naive and anthropomorphic in the highest degree? What did these roarers of waves with the white foam, and these strange Pokemon who lived under them, care whether little human creatures, now away from the sea, trespassed into their dominion?
The parallelism between the existential scenes he had lately witnessed and those recorded in the Hisuian Coda, and which had hitherto given him the feeling of knowing by experience what other men only believe, (the primeval dark, the demonic enemies, the speeches with gods) now began to shrink in importance. Need it prove anything more than that similar irrational taboos had accompanied the dawn of reason in both his own mind and the mind of the ancient peoples? It was all very well to talk of Arceus: but where was Arceus now? If this illimitable ocean said anything, it said something very different. Like all solitudes it was, indeed, haunted: but not by an anthropomorphic Deity, but rather by the wholly inscrutable to which man and his life remained eternally irrelevant.
I have seen that beyond this ocean was space itself. I do try to remember that I have, as I write this, been in "space" and found it Heaven, tingling with a fullness of life for which infinity itself is not one cubic inch too large. All that seems like a dream to the younger Bronze. That opposite mode of thought which he had often mocked and called in mockery The Empirical Bogey, came surging into his mind: the great myth of our century with its gases and galaxies, its light years and evolutions, its nightmare perspectives of simple arithmetic in which everything that can possibly hold significance for the mind becomes the mere by-product of essential disorder. Later he would see the real truth but for now, he was lost.
Always till he looked at that great sea he had belittled it, had treated with a certain disdain its flat superlatives, its bizarre amazement that different things should be of different sizes, its glib munificence of ciphers. Even now, his reason was not quite subdued, though his heart would not listen to his reason. Part of him still knew that the size of a thing is its least important characteristic, that the material universe derived from the comparing and mythopoeic power within him that very majesty before which he was now asked to abase himself, and that mere numbers could not over-awe us unless we lent them, from our own resources, that awfulness which they themselves could no more supply than a banker's ledger. But this knowledge remained an abstraction. The sea makes vagueness. It was good enough for now that he had saved one man from the Stygian midnight below the frothing currents.
...
Preceded by Jake and Quentin, Bronze entered an inn and found himself a moment later seated in an armchair and awaiting the return of Quentin, who had gone to fetch refreshments. The room into which he had been shown revealed a strange mixture of luxury and squalor. The windows were shuttered and curtainless, the floor was uncarpeted and strewn with packing cases, shavings, newspapers and books, and the wallpaper showed the stains left by the pictures and furniture of the previous occupants. On the other hand, the only two armchairs were of the costliest type, and in the litter that covered the tables, cigars, oyster shells and empty champagne bottles jostled with tins of condensed milk and opened sardine tins, cheap crockery, broken bread, coffee mugs a quarter full of coffee and used vapes.
His host seemed to be a long time away, and Bronze fell to thinking of Quentin. He felt for him that sort of distaste we feel for someone whom we have admired in boyhood for a very brief period and then outgrown. Quentin seemed to have learned that type of humor which consists in a perpetual parody of the sentimental or idealistic cliches of one's intellectual elders. For after Bronze had saved him his references to the Dear Old Town and to Remembering The War, and (shockingly) the White Man's Burden had swept everyone, Bronze included, off their feet. But before they had gone into the seaside inn Bronze wondered how anyone so flashy and, as it were, ready-made could be so unoriginal. Bronze had not been especially talkative; scientific racism was now unpopular and Bronze felt that the days of the brown-skinned Logathrim were rising again, though he felt the idea very silly to go by.
"How came you to be in this part of the country?" asked Quentin, placing a tray of malasada on a tray on their table, and addressing himself to opening a wine bottle. "I'm the lighthouse keeper, and I see all sorts of folk pass through. Before I went out fishing today (that's why I was out there, you see) I even met someone from Kalos."
"We're on a League tour," said Bronze. "We slept at Lagoona last night and hoped to challenge the Gym here later today. But I saw that the Leader was out, so I suppose I'll wait before going far north into subtropical Anthien."
"Marvellous!" said Quentin, and now his corkscrew was idle. "You have quite a busy schedule. Do you do it for fame, or just sheer masochism?"
"The thrill, of course," said Bronze, keeping his eye on the still unopened bottle. "I have been pursuing physical excellence on the battlefield and outside of it."
"Can the attraction of the battles be explained to the uninitiated?" asked Quentin.
"I hardly know. To begin with, I like the actual labor. And on these great trips you are mostly detached. You stop where you like and go where you like to go, and there's little to guide you except for the next Gym. As long as it lasts you need not consult anyone but yourself."
"I begin to see the idea," said Quentin, pausing in the very act of drawing the cork. "It wouldn't do if you were in business. You are a lucky young fellow! But can even you just disappear like that? No girlfriend, no younger siblings, no needy but honest parents or anything of that sort?"
"My parents are away," said Bronze. "Jake only has a married sister in Unova and a mother in the care of the Association. Not an inmate or anything, just dependent. And then, you see, I'm a scholar. And a scholar in the middle of long trip is almost a non-existent creature. The colleges neither knows nor cares where he is, and certainly no one else does."
The cork at last came out of the bottle with a heart-cheering noise. "Say when," said Quentin. "If you don't feel old enough to have any, take a sip. But I feel sure there's a catch somewhere. Do you really mean to say that no one knows where you are or when you ought to get back, and no one can get hold of you?"
"Of course they do," said Bronze, and he was not lying. The Association should know where he was; the trouble was concealing his plans from them. "Between ourselves, I am putting a little money into some people with power at their hands. It's all straight stuff: the march of progress and the good of humanity and all that, but it has an industrial side. But who knows where you are, Quentin? Who would grieve at your drowning?"
"One granddaughter," said Quentin. "A fifteen-year-old girl that goes by Tess. About your age, I reckon. The mother and father died in a boating accident. I'll be blunt. Somewhere out in the cape sound is a rock with their bones still clutching the mossy stone, picked clean by the birds or else blown away by the winds. It was an awful time for us, though she was four and I was still middle-aged."
"I am sorry for your loss," said Bronze. "Did you raise her by yourself?" It was the wrong sort of emotion, but for an instant Bronze did not really feel sorry. Any couple of adventurers foolish enough to die in a boating accident, his thought said, if the trip had been for pleasure, were the sort of people incapable of serving society and were only too likely to propagate idiocy. They were the sort of people who in a civilized community would be automatically handed over to a state laboratory for experimental purposes. Then his full conscience returned. These dark thoughts were rendered all the more horrible in the wake of Drake's blessing. He recognized that he knew nothing of the circumstances around the disaster and immediately sought contrition, which he found. His words of apology went from mere protocol into actual sincerity.
"She's been my daughter for all purposes," said Quentin. "That I dare say. But in Roria she is the sort of girl in whom the wrong sort of powerful people might conceivably feel an interest. You might disappear for months and no one would know where you had gone, perhaps. You came nearly alone. Tess would poke her nose into any affair of her own accord."
"Are you concerned for her safety?" said Bronze. This talk has begun to interest him and Groudon's words about meeting a girl in Rosecove had not been forgotten.
"Well, of course," said Quentin. "I don't like her going too abroad, getting into troubles that don't concern her. Right now she's studying in the lighthouse. It'd be bad for her to go off risking her life for some grand cause. Where would my promise to the social services to keep her safe be, then?"
"True enough," said Bronze. "That's your decision. Say, do you know where the Gym Leader might be?"
"Do you know his name?" said Quentin.
"Admittedly no," said Bronze.
"He's right here in front of you," said Quentin.
"Then why did your Pokemon not save you? Surely they should swim."
"You ask how I could drown, then? But do you not understand that those Whiscash were mine? I thought of mounting one and turning the boat upright, but then I saw you swimming. I wanted to test you, boy! Better to float and keep an eye on you, maybe send a Wishcash when you started struggling. The impressive thing was that you tamed one of my Pokemon."
Bronze came down with a sudden headache. He had not expected this. Combined with a general state of lassitude from the swimming, he felt discouraged at first from taking real stock of the revelation. It troubled him that the heroic deed was not empirically necessary for Quentin's safety. It only just occurred to him that this might get him a Gym Badge without a fight, or at least some advantages in an organized match, but he had to be cautious in asking. What formless misgivings he had first held about Quentin were gone. The poor humor and bigotry conceivably could be a test. His very manner of talking might be an act. Who was Bronze to know anything different?
"Let's get going," said Quentin. "I would like like to show you the lighthouse, and then the Gym. You know that there's a deep trench out in the sea, a few miles out?"
"I have heard that Kyogre came there," said Bronze. "After the crisis with the meteor, both Kyogre and Groudon went separate ways, you've likely seen."
"You know about the Lord of the Sea, then?" said Quentin. "I've much to tell you. The day is drawing on and you'll soon be wanting to challenge me. High time we left!"
"Going to the lighthouse seems out of the way," said Jake.
"Not at all," said Bronze. "It was a kind offer. And, if I may put it baldly, I think that God has tasked me with meeting your granddaughter."
.
.
.
Northern Roria, Association Far South Operations Headquarters
.
Yanase did not lose consciousness, though she greatly wished that she might do so on hearing the news. Any change, death or sleep, or, best of all, a waking which should show all this for a dream, would have been inexpressibly welcome. None came. Instead, the lifelong self-control of social man, the virtues which are half hypocrisy or the hypocrisy which is half a virtue, came back to her and soon she found herself answering Cypress in a voice not shamefully tremulous.
"Do you mean that?" she said to Cypress.
"Certainly," said he. "Kyurem is gone. It might be a hundred thousand miles away for all we know."
"You mean Team Eclipse has it," said Yanase. She uttered the words with the difficulty that small children have when mentioning ghosts or frightened men when speaking of cancer.
Cypress nodded. "But I do not only bring bad news. I have established with the Chairman that we know what the Alliance is planning. We know what they are looking for. Several of our men died getting this information, but it has been conclusively decided that Team Eclipse is looking for an artifact called the Prison Bottle."
"Then where is it?" said Yanase. "And why do they want it? What for? You think they kidnapped those two archeologists because of what they found, don't you?"
For a moment Cypress seemed disposed to give no answer; then, as if on a second thought, he sat down on the chair beside Yanase and spoke as follows:
"I suppose it will save trouble if I deal with these questions at once, instead of leaving you to pester me with them every hour for the next month. As to how we know, I suppose there's no good your asking that. Unless you were one of the four or five real men in charge now living you couldn't understand: and if there were any chance of your understanding you certainly wouldn't be told. If it makes you happy to repeat words that don't mean anything, then I will tell you. But aside form that, our current theory of why the Alliance wants it is because of the less observed properties of the bottle, namely some kind of special radiation they can work with to make a power source. That is our leading theory."
"You can't really ask me to believe that," said Yanase. "It's not an everyday affair. Why has no one heard of it? Why has it not been in all the news channels?"
"We are keeping it quiet," said Cypress. "Don't you know how this works? The Chairman is the head of the spear: he makes the laws that fight against Team Eclipse. Already he has prohibited minors from enlisting in special organizations this day; it's to curb their membership. The rest of the Association, the intelligentsia, are supposed to find out what resources they have and how to keep them from doing anything really illegal. We aren't sure yet if Kyurem's capture was their doing, but if we knew, we would use it. The bottle itself is in a storehouse. We are guarding it."
"So it's safe," said Yanase.
"Not at all. The Chairman has been obliged to move it to Anthien City. It would be more secure there. The risk of an attack in transit is appreciable. We won't mention anything of it. Why is all this news, the kidnapping, the taking of Kyurem, everything, not given to the public? Because we are not perfect idiots. Everything the people know the Alliance knows."
"But I hoped I would learn from you what is being done about Bronze Tercano," said Yanase. "You're the one tracking him. Erika said that you ordered her to bring him that Electabuzz. So far both his Pokemon are from you."
"The boy is being preserved, and hopefully groomed for his role," said Cypress. "As it is, I admit that we have had to infringe his rights. My only defense is that small claims must give way to great. As far as we know, we are doing what has never been done in the history of man, perhaps never in the history of the universe. We are defending our race, on this small speck of matter called Earth, against its enemies. We will use Bronze to our liking. You cannot be so small-minded as to think that the rights or the life of an individual or of a million individuals are of the slightest importance in comparison with this."
"I happen to disagree," said Yanase, "and I always have disagreed, even about the Association's vivisection policies. But you haven't answered all my is the news on the archaeologists? Did Team Eclipse really kidnap them? What are they good for?"
"That I don't know," said Cypress. "We are fairly certain that the Alliance was responsible. It is even likely that they are still alive. I would guess that the Alliance knows exactly what they are looking for and also the general area. Damn it all! You know I'm disobeying orders by telling you this."
"Whose?"
There was another pause. Cypress seemed to wonder why he had said that. "Well," said Cypress at last. "There is really no use in continuing this cross-examination. You keep on asking me questions I can't answer: in some cases because I don't know the answers, in others because you wouldn't understand them. It will make things very much more pleasant during this war if you can only resign your mind to your station and stop bothering yourself and us. It would be easier if your philosophy of life were not so insufferably narrow and individualistic. I had thought no one could fail to be inspired by the role you are being asked to play: that even a worm, if it could understand, would rise to the sacrifice. I mean, of course, the sacrifice of time and liberty, and some little risk, in this war. Don't misunderstand me."
"Well," said Yanase, "you and the Chairman hold all the cards, and I must make the best of it. I consider your philosophy of life raving lunacy. I suppose all that stuff about infinity and eternity means that you think you are justified in doing anything, absolutely anything, here and now, on the off chance that we may prolong the time before the end of the human race by disabling this Eclipse Alliance."
"Yes, anything whatever," returned the scientist sternly, "and all educated opinion (for I do not call classics and history and such trash education) is entirely on my side. I am glad you raised the point, and I advise you to remember my answer."
When Yanase asked him what that answer was, he would lapse into satire and make ironical remarks about the intelligent man's burden and the blessings of civilization. For the most part his conversation ran on the things he would do when he retired, as he planned to do after the cold war was over: ocean-going yachts, the most expensive women, and a big place on the sea-shore figured largely in his plans.
But when Yanase was more direct about it he said: "But why haven't you already figured out what that answer would be? Unless someone is fool enough to tell you! Anyway, even if you suspected, do you think a man like me would have the idiocy to tell you who I most identify with? I think you would eat out of my hand at the first sight of my Masters."
"More mumbo-jumbo," said Yanase. "Sometimes I wonder if you are quite insane."
"Quite, quite," he said. "It is understood that I am doing it all from the highest motives. So long as my Master's motives lead to the same results, I am quite welcome in their eyes. No, they're not organic masters."
"So you're a spiritualist?" said Yanase. "I heard you had more materialist leanings."
"If you're so fond of materialist masters as that you'd better stay with them and interbreed," Cypress cackled. "As for spirits, if they have sexes, I don't yet know. Don't you worry," he added ominously. "When the time comes for cleaning the world up we'll save one or two humans for the elites, and we can keep them as pets or vivisect them or sleep with them or all three, whichever way it takes. Yes, I know. Perfectly loathsome. Ha! I was only joking. But I will begin with a frank admission. You may make what capital of it you please. I shall not be deterred. I deliberately say that I was, in some respects, mistaken, seriously mistaken, in my conception of the whole nature of the spiritual world when all this business began."
Partly from the relaxation which followed the apology, and partly from the elaborate air of magnanimity with which the great scientist spoke, Yanase felt very much inclined to laugh. But it occurred to her that this was possibly the first occasion in her whole life in which Cypresshad ever acknowledged himself in the wrong, and that even the false dawn of humility, which is still ninety-nine per cent. of arrogance, ought not to be rebuffed, at least not by her.
"Well, that's very handsome," she said. "What do you mean?"
"The tragedy of my life," he said, "and indeed of the modern intellectual world in general, is the rigid specialization of knowledge entailed by the growing complexity of what is known. It is my own share in that tragedy that an early devotion to physics prevented me from paying any proper attention to Biology until I reached my forties. To do myself justice, I should make it clear that the false humanist ideal of knowledge as an end in itself never appealed to me. I always wanted to know in order to achieve utility. At first, that utility naturally appeared to me in a personal form. I wanted scholarships, an income, and that generally recognized position in the world without which a man has no leverage. When those were attained, I began to look farther: to the utility of the human race!"
He paused as he rounded his period and Yanase nodded to him to proceed.
"The utility of the human race," continued Cypress, "in the long run depends rigidly on the possibility of inter-planetary, and even inter-universal travel. In my research into how this might be cheaply achieved a number of interventions from hostile parties led to a serious breakdown of my health a week ago. During my convalescence I had that leisure for reflection which I had denied myself for many years. In particular I reflected on the objections Bronze Tercano had made to my logical materialism. The traditional and, if I may say so, the humanitarian form in which he advanced those objections had till then concealed from me their true strength. That strength I now began to perceive. I began to see that my own exclusive devotion to human utility was really based on an unconscious dualism."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"I mean that all my life I had been making a wholly unscientific dichotomy or antithesis between Man and Nature, had conceived myself fighting for Man against his non-human environment. During my illness I plunged into Biology, and particularly into what may be called biological philosophy. Hitherto, as a philosopher, I had been content to regard Life as a subject outside my scope. The conflicting views of those who drew a sharp line between the organic and the inorganic and those who held that what we call Life was inherent in matter from the very beginning had not interested me. Now it did. I saw almost at once that I could admit no break, no discontinuity, in the unfolding of the cosmic process. I became a convinced believer in emergent evolution. All is one. The stuff of mind, the unconsciously purposive dynamism, is present from the very beginning."
Here he paused. Yanase had heard this sort of thing pretty often before and wondered when her companion was coming to the point. When Cypress resumed it was with an even deeper solemnity of tone.
"The majestic spectacle of this blind, inarticulate purposiveness thrusting its way upward and ever upward in an endless unity of differentiated achievements towards an ever-increasing complexity of organization, towards spontaneity and spirituality, swept away all my old conception of a duty to Man as such. Man in himself is nothing. The forward movement of Life, the growing spirituality, is everything. I say to you quite freely, Yanase, that I should have been wrong in thinking the world wholly material. To spread spirituality, not to spread the human race, is henceforth my mission. This sets the coping-stone for my career. I worked first for myself; then for science; then for humanity; but now at last for Spirit itself. I might say, borrowing language which will be more familiar to you, the Holy Spirit, or the Third One."
"Now what exactly do you mean by that?" asked Yanase.
"I mean," said Cypress, "that nothing now divides you and me except a few outworn theological technicalities with which organized religion has unhappily allowed itself to get incrusted. But I have penetrated that crust. The Meaning beneath it is as true and living as ever. If you will excuse me for putting it that way, the essential truth of the religious view of life finds a remarkable witness in the fact that it enabled you, on your own, to grasp, in your own mythical and imaginative fashion, a truth that was hidden from me about the nature of the world."
"I don't know much about what people call the religious view of life," said Yanse. "You see, I'm an Arcean, along with the rest of the Hisuians, and what we mean by the Holy Ghost is not a blind, inarticulate purposiveness."
"My dear Yanase," said Cypress, "I understand you perfectly. I have no doubt that my phraseology will seem strange to you, and perhaps even shocking. Early and revered associations may have put it out of your power to recognize in this new form the very same truths that religion has so long preserved and that science is now at last re-discovering. But whether you can see it or not, believe me, we are talking about exactly the same thing."
"I'm not sure at all that we are."
"That, if you will permit me to say so, is one of the real weaknesses of organized religion, that adherence to formula, that failure to recognize one's own friends. Some say Arceus is a Pokemon. You say, I say, that Arceus is a spirit, Yanase. Get hold of that. You're familiar with that already. Stick to it. Arceus is a spirit."
"Well, of course. But what then?"
"What then? Why, spirit, mind, freedom, spontaneity: that's what I'm talking about. That is the goal towards which the whole cosmic process is moving. The final disengagement of that freedom, that spirituality, is the work to which I dedicate my own life and the life of humanity. The goal, Yanase, the goal: think of it! Pure spirit: the final vortex of self-thinking, self-originating activity."
"Final?" said Yanase. "You mean it doesn't yet exist?"
"Ah," said Cypress, "I see what's bothering you. Of course, I know. Religion pictures it as being there from the beginning. But surely that is not a real difference? To make it one, would be to take time too seriously. When it has once been attained, you might then say it had been at the beginning just as well as at the end. Time is one of the things it will transcend."
"By the way," said Yanase, "is it in any sense at all personal; is it alive?"
An indescribable expression passed over Cypress's face. He moved a little nearer to Yanase and began speaking in a lower voice.
"That's what none of them understand," he said. It was such a gangster's or a schoolboy's whisper and so unlike his usual orotund lecturing style that Yanase for a moment felt a sensation almost of disgust.
"Yes," said Cypress, "I couldn't have believed, myself, till recently. Not a person, of course. Anthropomorphism is one of the childish diseases of popular religion" (here he had resumed his public manner), "but the opposite extreme of excessive abstraction has perhaps in the aggregate proved more disastrous. Call it a Force. A great, inscrutable Force, pouring up into us from the dark bases of being. A Force that can choose its instruments. It is only lately, Yanase, that I've learned from actual experience something which you have believed all your life as part of your religion." Here he suddenly subsided again into a whisper, a croaking whisper unlike his usual voice. "Guided," he said. "Chosen. Guided. I've become conscious that I'm a man set apart. Why did I do physics? Why did I discover the Rose-bridges? Why did I go into Otherworld? It, the Force, has pushed me on all the time. I'm being guided. I know now that I am the greatest scientist the world has ever produced. I've been made so for a purpose. It is through me that Spirit itself is at this moment pushing on to its goal."
"Look here," said Yanase, "one wants to be careful about this sort of thing. There are spirits and spirits you know."
"Eh?" said Cypress. "What are you talking about?"
"I mean a thing might be a spirit and not good for you. There is nothing very good about being a spirit. Demons are spirits."
"Now your mentioning the Dark Powers is very interesting," said Cypress, who had by this time quite recovered his normal manner. "It is a most interesting thing in popular religion, this tendency to dissipate, to breed pairs of opposites: heaven and hell, God and Devil. I need hardly say that in my view no real dualism in the universe is admissible; and on that ground I should have been disposed, even a few weeks ago, to reject these pairs of doublets as pure mythology. It would have been a profound error. The cause of this universal religious tendency is to be sought much deeper. The doublets are really portraits of Spirit, of cosmic energy, self-portraits, indeed, for it is the Life-Force itself which has deposited them in our brains."
"What on earth do you mean?" said Yanase. As she spoke she rose to her feet and began pacing to and fro. A quite appalling weariness and malaise had descended upon her.
"Your Devil and your God," said Cypress, "are both pictures of the same Force. Your heaven is a picture of the perfect spirituality ahead; your hell a picture of the urge or push which is driving us on to it from behind. Hence the static peace of the one and the fire and darkness of the other. The next stage of emergent evolution, beckoning us forward, is Arceus; the transcended stage behind, ejecting us, is the Devil. Your own religion, after all, says that the devils are fallen angels."
"And you are saying precisely the opposite, as far as I can make out; that angels are devils who've risen in the world."
"It comes to the same thing," said Cypress.
There was another long pause. "Look here," said Yanase, "it's easy to misunderstand one another on a point like this. What you are saying sounds to me like the most horrible mistake a man could fall into. But that may be because in the effort to accommodate it to my supposed 'religious views,' you're saying a good deal more than you mean. It's only a metaphor, isn't it, all this about spirits and forces? I expect all you really mean is that you feel it your duty to work for the spread of civilization and knowledge and that kind of thing." She had tried to keep out of her voice the involuntary anxiety that she had begun to feel. Next moment she recoiled in horror at the cackling laughter, almost an infantile or senile laughter, with which Cypress replied.
"There you go, there you go," he said. "Like all you religious people. You talk and talk about these things all your life, and the moment you meet the reality you get frightened."
"What proof," said Ransom (who indeed did feel frightened and was beginning to suspect that Cypress might have some kind of venereal disease), "what proof have you that you are being guided or supported by anything except your own individual mind and other people's books?"
"Guidance, you know, guidance," croaked Cypress. His face wore a fixed and even slightly twisted grin. "Guidance. Guidance," he went on. "Things coming into my head. I'm being prepared all the time. Being made a fit receptacle for it."
"That ought to be fairly easy," said Yanase impatiently. "If this Life-Force is something so ambiguous that God and the Devil are equally good portraits of it, I suppose any receptacle is equally fit, and anything you can do is equally an expression of it."
"There's such a thing as the main current," said Cypress. "It's a question of surrendering yourself to that, making yourself the conductor of the live, fiery, central purpose, becoming the very finger with which it reaches forward."
"But I thought that was the Devil aspect of it, a moment ago."
"That is the fundamental paradox. The thing we are reaching forward to is what you would call God. The reaching forward, the dynamism, is what people like you always call the Devil. The people like me, who do the reaching forward, are always martyrs. You revile us, and by us come to your goal."
"Does that mean in plainer language that the things the Force wants you to do are what ordinary people call diabolical?"
"My dear Yanase, I wish you would not keep relapsing on to the popular level. The two things are only moments in the single, unique reality. The world leaps forward through great men and greatness always transcends mere moralism. When the leap has been made our 'diabolism' as you would call it becomes the morality of the next stage; but while we are making it, we are called criminals, heretics, and blasphemers."
"How far does it go? Would you still obey the Life-Force if you found it prompting you to murder me?"
"Yes."
"Or sell Roria to Team Eclipse?"
"Yes."
"Or to print lies as serious research in a scientific journal?"
"Yes."
"Arceus help you!"
"You are still wedded to your conventionalities," said Cypress. "Still dealing in abstractions. Can you not even conceive a total commitment, a commitment to something which utterly overrides all our petty ethical pigeon-holes?"
He grasped in the air like a child for a sweet. His jaw was set most formidable. "That's the point of contact between my religion and yours. I've not only been working for myself. My morality and yours are really the same in the end."
"It sounds like you would like to join the Alliance," said Yanase.
"No, they will fail," said Cypress. "Already their plans are uncovered and will soon be destroyed. But it is interesting to hear what they have to say, and how all of our philosophies are actually pluralistic. Mine is, by any rate, and you have failed to recognize the social conditions that the founders of Arceanism lived with. Of course Arceaism is universalist! I am confident that my faction will eventually prevail. All that sustains me is the conviction that our Realism, our rejection, in the face of all temptations, of all silly nonsense and claptrap, must win out in the end."