of his own heart? Let it be decreed that he who declines the high gesture of human suicide, by which mankind will reject the life which it has not asked, and has found to be no more than the gift of a jesting god, may revert to such barbarisms as a baser nature may prefer.”
There was so near an approach, as he said this, to outdated passion in words and tone, and the proposition itself was so amazing—for it had been the fundamental principle of the proposed event that should extinguish human life with an entire finality—that it would have produced a clamour of bewildered protest in an assembly of a more volatile kind. As it was it was followed by a universal silence, in which the first stupefactions of surprise gave way to understanding and then consent.
For, even though this Colpeck of alien ego should elect (fantastic thought!) to remain in solitary discord when the whole procession of his fellow-men should have passed through the gates of death, it would still appear a fantasy beyond serious consideration that he should find a companion of kindred mood. Solitary as he would be—with no possibility of procreation remaining—he might plumb such depths of barbarism as his soul desired, might prolong his absurdity of existence to its latest hour, and he would be no more than a final mockery in his Creator’s eyes, an apotheosis of the futility of the race He made. The proposition would have been agreed without further words, but that it was desirable that the five millions of inferior listening intellects should understand the decision, and the conclusion from which it came.
The resolution, as first proposed, was adopted with one dissentient, and on the chairman’s ruling that this was sufficient to fulfil the condition of unanimity on which the proposition was based, Wyndham understood, from the knowledge of their procedure his brain supplied, that it was an assumption beyond the necessity of words that all must accept the fate for which their own votes had been freely cast. The authority of the assembly would be forthwith used for the prompt and painless end of themselves and their fellow-men. It was that for which they had not the will and sanction alone, but the ample power, and from which only such as he would have further freedom of choice, from the moment the resolution had been proclaimed.
CHAPTER FOUR
When Wyndham Smith, ranking fourth among the intellects of the world by the right of his Colpeck brain, had listened to the monotonous assents of the ninety-six voices that had preceded his own, his eyes had followed the repeated question down the farther side of the table, looking without curiosity at faces he knew before, of men and women whose lives were as empty, their characters as colourless, as was his own in this alien personality that he had so strangely acquired.
It was not likely that he should regard with particularity a girl of no more than twenty-three years at the far end of the table, who was placed as ranking fifty-seventh among this intellectual aristocracy to which she belonged.
Yet his eyes had lingered a moment, his emotion stirred to admiration at a hint of vivacity, a difference of animation which lit the cold, sad beauty of her face, and subtly separated it from the equally regular profiles of other women who sat above or below her. The moment of interest, of admiration—it was no longer than that—was of the ego of Wyndham Smith, and was countered by the protest of the Colpeck brain, which had been taught to view her with a faint disfavour, being the strongest emotion it was accustomed to experience, and which also knew the vague suspicion, and the definite taboo, which divided her from the expected destiny of the women of her generation.
The Colpeck brain, had it concentrated upon her sufficiently, hearing the toneless assent she gave to the verdict of common death might have thought that there were few among the five millions of mankind—to be exact, no more than forty-four others—who would be so certain to cast their votes in the same scale.
For at the time of her birth the settled peace of the world had been stirred and shocked by the discovery of a monstrous crime. A woman who could not have been very far from her fiftieth year, and who had borne in her youth the three children allowed by law, had actually contributed three further children to the nurseries of the race.
It was a monstrosity against which no precautions were taken, since at this period any initiative of criminality had long left the world. It was discovered only by, unlikely accident, shortly after the birth of the third—being, actually, the woman’s sixth—child. It stirred the emotions of men at once to horror and fear, as it would have seemed unlikely that they would ever be moved again, like the last ripple of a tide that was settling to eternal quiet. The woman’s death was quickly agreed, as a warning, however needless, to other lawless impulses which might linger among mankind.
The deaths of three children were decreed with a more urgent necessity, for ancient wisdom had taught that it is among the later children whom a woman bears that there will be found the firebrands who scorch their kind. Indeed, it was only after the establishment of the custom of limiting children that the world could be observed to approach steadily to the placid harbour in which it was anchored now.
But here a difficulty arose. The fourth and fifth children, having been registered and branded in the usual routine of the common nursery, were identified and eliminated without difficulty. But the mother had unfortunately had some hours of warning before the discovery of her criminality had been finally demonstrated, during which she had contrived to change her just-born child with some other, so that, after the most exhaustive investigation, there had still remained forty-five girl-children of whom it was impossible to say with certainty that any one might not be the sixth offspring of the woman’s most lawless blood. Faced with this position, the wisdom of the race, putting passion aside, had preferred the lesser evil, and had offered her pardon if she would identify the issue of her iniquity. But this, with an unrepentant obstinacy, she had declined to do; and when every resort of ingenuity had been exhausted in the endeavour to discover the secret which she concealed (or which, indeed, it is a more probable supposition was no longer hers, owing to the method she had employed for mixing the children), she was reluctantly executed.
After the first sound and natural impulse to destroy the forty-five infants among whom the one unfit for life had been inextricably mingled had been debated, it was weakly resolved, and may be regarded as indicative of the decadence of a failing world, to let them live, under some disabilities of education and other experiences, with the condition that they should not be allowed, on reaching the age of maturity, to contribute to the usual quota of babies, so that the disturbing element might not take evil root in the generation to come.
But, in spite—unless it were because?—of the disabilities they had experienced, when, on the commencement of their twentieth year, they had been intellectually graded by the usual perfect and impartial method, it was found that they were of a most unusual average intelligence, so that though the one already mentioned was actually ranked among the first hundred of the five millions of mankind, the suspicion which this circumstance must have fixed upon her was mitigated by the fact that several others, all of whom could not be of abnormal ancestry, were almost equally eminent.
To the first proposal of universal euthanasia there were few who had responded with a more ready affirmative than had Vinetta (a name which, individual and with no following numerals, proclaimed her, in spite of the recognition of her intellectual status, as outcast among her kind), which is not surprising in consideration of the life of watchful repression which had been hers since, as a child of three, she had overheard the remark of a female keeper: “That’s the one, if you ask me; the little misborn girl.”
From that hour she had moved and spoken in cautious dread lest some development of character, even some trick of gesture, might betray her, as having been that of the mother whom, with a growing confidence, she believed to have been her own. For who could say that the doom which had been suspended before might not still fall upon her, if her development should appear to supply sufficient evidence of the parent from whom she came? Her own destruction, and the release of her companions from disabilities which were not justly theirs, might have been considered measures of an equal and obvious equity.
