“The child died,” said Hamilton.
“We have all failed,” said Herjellsen, turning ashen, falling back to the pillows.
“What is so important,” asked Gunther, “about the child?”
“And how,” asked Hamilton, “could you seriously have expected me to turn the eyes of men to the stars?”
“By the child,” whispered Herjellsen. “By the child!” He looked at her, sadly, through the thick lenses. “Words will not turn men to the stars, though they may open the eyes of men who have eyes with which to see the stars. Words are little, and futile, a bit of noise, briefly heard, swiftly forgotten, and fatuous, and not enough. I did not expect you to argue with hunters, nor to explain physics to them, nor to instill in them dreams.”
“What did you expect me to do?” asked Hamilton.
“Whether a man can see the stars, in his heart as well as in his eyes, like cattle or birds is a little understood factor locked in his genetic codes. It is much like the factor that permits one man to detect the beauty of music and forever precludes another from its raptures; it is like the factor that permits one man to be strong and denies strength to another; it is like the factor that makes it possible for one man to be touched by love, and forever makes this splendor an enigma, a fiction, to one who might otherwise be his brother.”
“The hunters are dead,” said Gunther. “They died, and many thousands of years ago.”
“What did you expect me to do?” asked Hamilton.
“Bear the child,” said Herjellsen. He looked at her. “Civilization totters,” said Herjellsen. “It is dying. It is choking on its own filth. Ever more toxic grows the atmosphere. Ever more abundant grow the multitudes, crowding and pressing, hating and sweating and squirming for room to love, to breathe and live, and dying, denied and crushed, gasping in the jungles and sewers of their own garbage. And looming on the brink of this poisoned tank we note, poised, the ultimate purificatory instrument. Insects will survive, and, it is likely, certain forms of reptiles. Little else. Surely not man.”
“How would the child make such a difference?” asked Hamilton, puzzled.
“It would be, in its way,” said Herjellsen, “not only my ancestor, but my grandson. It would have borne within it my seed, my genetic coding, a part of me, a particle of a protoplasmic, carnal chain which might reach high enough to explode in its fragments of significance among the stars.”
“How can it be before you, and after you?” asked William.
“Time,” said Herjellsen, “is not understood. It is perhaps a condition of our representations, constituting for us a reality, but not in itself the ultimate reality. The concept of time, as we think of it, is filled with conflicts, and it cannot, as we think of it, correspond to a reality. Our minds are perhaps not equipped to understand the true nature of time. What we experience as time may be something in itself quite different, a color we cannot see, a sound we cannot hear, a reality we can know only under our own consecutive forms of perception.”
“Surely, for us,” said William, “time is quite real.”
“Surely,” said Herjellsen. “That is not at issue. What is dubious or problematic is the nature in itself of that which we experience as time. Doubtless time is a real mode in which that reality expresses itself, and in this sense is not unreal, but only is not understood. Color and sound, too, are real, but they are not, surely, identical with vibrations, gross and tenuous, in an atmosphere. Similarly the vibrations themselves may not be ultimate, for in one of their dimensions, they are temporal, and time, as we have suggested, cannot be as we conceive it. Could there be a first moment of time? Or, could there not be a first moment of time? The dilemma, my beloved friends, makes manifest the limitations of our concepts points clearly to their inadequacy, and hints timidly at what must lie beyond, the different, the mystery, the reality.”
“How,” asked Hamilton, “could one child make a difference?”
“It could,” said Herjellsen, “make all the difference in this world, and in others, because of the hundred geometries of biology. The child begets its children, and each of these begets others in turn, and others.” Herjellsen smiled. “All of you,” he said, “you, Gunther, you, William, as well as you, my beloved daughter, may be my children.”
“I look about the world,” said Gunther. “I do not think so. These are not Herjellsen’s children.”
“The child, Herjellsen,” said Hamilton, “died.”
“Consider the world,” said Gunther. “It is not populated with the children of Herjellsen.”
“The hunters are dead,” said William.
It was only the Dirt People who, in the long run, survived, thought Hamilton. Victors in the long course had not been the hunters, so vain, so proud, so arrogant, so vital, so cruel, so strong, but the Dirt People, with their seeds, and their sacrifices and their sticks. Horizons and stars had not been victorious; but barley and beer.
“I am sorry, Father,” said Hamilton.
“Let him rest now,” said William.
Herjellsen laid back against the pillows. He pretended to be Asleep. When they had left, he wept.
34
It was in the neighborhood of ten in the morning, in late June. It was a light, brightly sunny day, cool. The short night preceding had been pleasant even chilly.
Hamilton sipped her coffee, black, sitting at the small table in the open-air restaurant on the Vester Farimagasade.
From the harbor, more than a kilometer away, there was a breeze, carrying over the city. She could smell fish, and salt.
She liked the city. It was clean, as cities went, and the people calm, industrious. She liked the Danes. She liked the sky over the city, the wind.
Hamilton thought of Herjellsen. Herjellsen had been Finnish. He had had something of their appetites, their stubbornness.
“Have you been long in Copenhagen?” asked the man of the couple, sitting near her, in English.
“No,” she responded. She smiled, but she did not want to talk. They returned to their conversation. Hamilton looked again into the small cup of coffee, and then lifted it to her lips and drank. She buttoned the top button on her sweater.
There was no particular reason, as far as she knew, why she had come to Copenhagen. She was now well fixed. Herjellsen, before she had left the compound, had seen to that. William and Gunther, not speaking, had driven her more than two hundred and fifty miles to Salisbury.
“Good-bye,” they had said to her.
“Good-bye,” she had said, and boarded the plane. They had returned to the compound.
Her eyes had been dry, but inside her body there had been only emptiness and ashes. Herjellsen was dying. He had failed, and William and Gunther had failed and she, too, had failed. She had boarded the plane, and fastened her safety belt, and the runway had slipped away beneath her and in a few moments she saw Rhodesia, whitish and dry in the sun, vanish under the metallic wing.
The adventure, the experiment had ended. Tree was gone.
And the child had died.
William and Gunther returned to the compound. William did not wish to leave Herjellsen. Both, in that lonely, fenced compound in the bush, with the blacks, would keep the vigil, waiting for the old man to die.
Then there would be nothing to keep them there.
The compound, deserted, would fall into disrepair and ruin, and the dry wind would blow across a simple grave.
The adventure was ended. The experiment had failed. Herjellsen had lived in vain.
It was then that Hamilton saw them, the young couple. They were entering. They were seeking a table.