Edgar Pangborn - A Mirror for Observers

“Why, I’d even lie and say I had a hand in it myself, if that was the only way to get the fact across.”

“Wrong, for several reasons—”

“Oh, Will, the individual isn’t so much as all that—”

“He is, but that’s not the greatest reason. I’ll ask you to look at this one in particular: if you did that, you’d be a scapegoat, nothing more, and haven’t you stopped to wonder why men want a scapegoat? What is it, what was it ever, but a device to help them avoid looking at themselves? This is the kind of world where it’s possible for a Joseph Max to run wild. If there must be blame, then all citizens — you, I, everyone — are responsible for letting it be that kind of world, for not placing ethical development ahead of every other kind. We understand ethical necessities quite well; we’ve been capable of understanding them for several thousand years; but we haven’t been willing to let them rule our actions — it’s that simple. Spend yourself in the long labor, Abraham, not in the passionate gesture or the unheeded sacrifice. On the personal level — because I’ve always seen a special flame in you that burns more dimly in others, and because I’ve always loved you — I forbid you to give yourself to crucifixion for no purpose.”

After a while he said, to me, to himself, to the girl who was so silent but not dying: “Is maturity the acceptance of conflict?”

And I said, silently, to myself only: Mission accomplished.

Early this morning, before dawn, she moved her hands up to her face, and her eyes opened — wide, knowing, full of recognition. “Sharon—”

“I’m all right,” she whispered. “I’m all right, Abe.”

“Yes, you’re out of it. You—”

“Darling, don’t whisper. I want to hear everything you say.”

“Sharon! Sharon—”

“I can’t hear you,” said Sharon Brand. “I can’t hear you.”

The ocean, forever changing and the same, was awake with deep music tonight; I was alone and not alone at all. Not alone, looking down some hours from the moving bow, seeing the flash and lingering subsidence of the noctilucae, those living diamonds of the sea, their light as transient as the sea foam and eternal as life, if life is eternal. Everything goes with me, the cherished faces, the words that endure although no embodied voice is near my body but only the great continuing voice of the sea and of a westerly wind out of the open regions of the world. I am not alone.

As we measure time it is not long, my second father, since I was in Northern City with you: nine years, a moment — it will seem nothing indeed when I am there with you again, in a few weeks or months.

You have my journal. Now that more time has passed, letting some pain recede, some anger die away, I must ask you to destroy that letter which I wrote to accompany the journal. I wrote it only one day after I knew that Sharon was deaf; I should have known better than to write anything at such a time. It was several weeks before I dared entrust the journal to the crippled human transportation system with any hope that it would reach Toronto and be forwarded to you, but in those weeks the anger and despair did not release me, and perhaps I could have written nothing better at the end of them. Now, however, I ask you to destroy that letter. From pride and vanity, and from the thought that my children are almost old enough to study my work, I do not want such a mood to be preserved. Put with the journal this message I am writing you now, and throw away what was written at a time when I was too heartsick to know what I said.

I cannot truly hate human beings for anything they do. If I said I did, that was an aberration of weakness, because I love Sharon more than any Observer should allow himself to love, and because I knew, as well as anyone can, what effort, sacrifice, and devotion it had cost her to make herself so fine an artist, only to have it torn away. “I live with dream stuff,” she said. Yes, she did; and to all who could hear she gave those dreams with a most free sharing. And the world responded — with para, with permanent deafness, not curable, not to be remedied with any device, for the beautiful magic nerves themselves are destroyed: she must live all the rest of her life in total silence. And for a while, as I admit now, I was not myself and I could not endure it.

It was Abraham who saved my reason, and probably Sharon’s. He upheld all three of us, forcing us to understand what richness of life remained in spite of everything. Well, let me tell in a couple of dozen words what Abraham has done since I wrote that wretched letter. He married her in April, as soon as she could be up and about, and took her to a small village in Vermont. Now he’s a clerk there, in a general store: dry goods and fishhooks and a pound of this and a pound of that. Laugh at it, Drozma — he does — and you’ll see that it makes sense. I’ll come back to that presently.

This freighter is an old tramp in no hurry. The air liners are flying again. There are fast boats. The whole huge complex of human transport and commerce and communication has staggered back to maybe forty per cent of normal; by the end of a year I suppose things will seem very much as they did a year ago. Superficially. I chose this old tub because I wanted a month with the ocean, and near it, where I could feel the voice of it, not slipping across it in a vast fission-driven city or soaring above it more swiftly than sound, but down here in the swells, the salt smell, the long whispering, the blue and green and gray. I wanted to watch the humorous pace-setting of the fulmars, whose flying is a kind of singing; the hasty brilliance of the flying fish; the large unhurried fins of danger that sometimes follow; the distant spouting of leviathan. I wanted to see the Pacific sunshine on the water through the hot days, the uncaring splendor of its setting in the evening — and with the sense that I was in that sunset, not overtaking it, not challenging it with my tiny conceptions of duration and motion. I wonder whether, some day, human beings will settle down, relax a little, discover that eternity is a long time.

I’ll talk with you directly from Manila, Drozma, if I can. If there should be difficulty about that, I suppose this may reach you first. I want to arrange matters so that Sharon and Abraham will learn of my “death” in a way that will distress them as little as possible and yet leave no doubt. They know I am going to Manila — “for a sort of vacation and to see some old friends.” I told Abraham once, casually, how I had always hoped that when I died it would be in the ocean, a relinquishment, a slipping downward into calm without a grave. That was not true, to be sure — I want to die in Northern City, after many more years of interesting work. But it was a humanlike notion that Abraham would not find strange in me, and I said it to prepare the way. I want about two months in Manila. Then I’ll take another slow ship for the States. If one of our little exploration subs could meet the ship, say about thirty miles out of Cavite? I could be a “man overboard” with not too much fuss, and Abraham would think that the old man died the way he wanted to. But if this would be too expensive and troublesome to arrange, Drozma, we can work out some other gentle fraud when I get in touch with you.

The worst was over at the end of April. Gradually, grudgingly, the curve on the graph sagged downward. By the end of May the fire was out: no new cases were reported, and the survivors found that there was still civilization, of a sort. How much it may have set back the “progress” that Namir hated so badly, I don’t know; and about ten years from now, I think we might begin to assess what it has done to men’s thinking.