A Longer Journey

Not Alone

In our different ways, in our different languages, we all build our own Towers of Babel. Let us make a name for ourselves, we solemnly vow. We can reach the heavens; we are convinced that nothing we have imagined can be restrained from us.

Designing and programming computers may be slow and repetitive, but month after month and year on year I was conscious of building something that had not been built before. It hardly mattered to me who filed the patents or picked up the credit, for I was creating. Powerful computation was of course an absolute necessity for space travel, with all the complexity of physical forces involved, and I was always ready to talk about the possibilities in that direction... but there were things more complex than physics. Artificial intelligence had already appeared in fiction. Computers would surely one day compute human behaviour, interact with people—and with me.

Of course that was decades away at least. Laypeople always expect too much from science—or fear too much. Someone Aunt Emily knew was circulating tracts that ranted against the advance of technology as a force of evil that would end in the destruction of all civilization. Aunt Emily dropped the whole bundle into her fire.

“This is very wrong,” she declared rather tremulously. “It is written too angrily. This railing tone, this excess of capital lettering, this harshness of mind. Mossman? Please call Mossman.... Mossman, kindly inform Mr and Mrs Dennis that I shall receive no more of these booklets.”

However, later that day she said suddenly, “Your computing inventions, Methusaleh. They do not have anything to do with these chemicals and atom bombs, I hope?”

“No,” I said, surprised.

“And yet they will be used for all purposes.”

I told her, hurriedly, that the aim of my work was to aid human endeavour, to advance the scope of scientific knowledge—of outer space for instance.

She sighed. “There is more than enough to do on the earth,” she said in her mildly querulous tone, and I felt again the familiar irritation. I would not argue with old age and declining health, but there seemed a sort of unfairness, too, in my having to listen to her when she had never listened to me. Especially as she was becoming more talkative in her old age.

Should knowing more about her make me more understanding, and is that what she was trying for? She had suffered polio as a young person, she one day reminisced mournfully; and then the influenza that had carried off her dear husband. The doctors say you have fully recovered, she sighed, but the weariness, the feeling of cold and heaviness, is lowering to the spirits. She hoped she had fulfilled every duty towards me. It had been most unsettling, noisy, distressful, having a child in the house. My screaming, in those early days, had proved quite agonising to the sensibilities. There had been only one way to calm me, and that had been to play poor Jacob's phonograph for me. The same record, over and over. It was a miracle, she gently complained, that the thing hadn't worn out in the first weeks I lived in her house.

I actually jumped to my feet. “So he was here!”

I imagine Aunt Emily stared at me, saying, “Dear me, Methusaleh,” or some such reproof, but I was laughing too hard to notice her. I don't know what it was. Mostly, I think, a sense of relief that my memory was suddenly reconciled with reality. Those vague but insistent memories of my father living here with me, the way the early Bible stories sat in my mind like the soundtrack of a film, in King James' English but my father's own voice. I was not religious, but if the Bible takes its place as a part of our literature, the unfinished Book of Genesis had weirdly taken its place as a part of my own head.

“Who was here?” Aunt Emily was asking me.

“Jacob!” I laughed. “I wasn't crazy. I thought I was crazy. You thought I was crazy. His voice was here beside me all the time and I'm not crazy. Where is it now? Have we still got it?”

When she finally understood that I wanted the phonograph recording of my father reading the Bible, she recollected that most of my childhood effects had been disposed of, that she had bought one of the new tape recorders and had turned out the phonograph with all its trappings.

I went to Sue Mossman, who confirmed that the rag-and-bone man had lifted everything—with my agreement, she thought, because my aunt had written to tell me when she ordered the spring-cleaning.

“But you were there,” I moaned; “you knew I needed it when I was little. Are you sure you didn't just leave out that one little thing for me? No copies made? Nothing?” She was in tears by now, and promised to “turn the house out”; she set about it straight away, but with no effect.

My aunt objected to the unnecessary disruption. If I needed a memento of her brother, she had his photograph for me, his papers, his family Bible... but one angry stare on my part convinced her where the path of duty lay, and she even decided to advertise in the local press, offering a reward large enough to generate at least two forgeries.

Aunt Emily was beginning to find all her correspondence wearing, and this incident gave her some pretext for turning it over to me. From now on, I was to open her regular letters when I visited home, and hand her only what was purely personal or social. Any urgent business letters could be forwarded by the young Mr Hurst to my Manchester address.

As I picked up the threads of it, I felt that my aunt, while not grandly wealthy, was richer than her needs or tastes required. Without deliberately calculating to diminish her estate, I began to answer the odd begging letter or miscellaneous charity plea with a cheque. In a year or so I must have aided perhaps two worthy causes and a string of fakes and cons, and the letters asking for money were now flooding in so fast that young Mr Hurst ventured to correct me.

“Could do more harm than good sir,” he said in his permanently hurried manner. “Sometimes best to support a single charity possibly one that's to your own advantage refuse all other applications.”

“I don't know,” I said, deliberately slowing my voice to cue him to slow his own. Aunt Emily paid generously for his time, and there was no need for him to cut corners in giving it. I paused thoughtfully, wondering if he found me an annoying client. “I really wouldn't know which good cause to select.”

“Good idea to hold on to your money until such time sir much better to bin all such unopened always do myself sir.” He hadn't responded one iota to my cues. I reflected that maybe his time really was shorter than mine. I was in my mid 30s at this point, and not a day over eighteen in health, as far as I could tell. I didn't at this point know my own lifespan, but you have a sense of where you are in age.

If you live hurriedly because you feel the limits of your time, you can only shorten it further. I felt suddenly sorry, and agreed to dispose of all begging letters and most especially kinship pretences without so much as a second glance. As young Mr Hurst reminded me, we had no relatives close enough to rightfully claim a place in Aunt Emily's will, and I promised not to acquire any.

And that is how I very nearly destroyed the one letter in my life that was most deeply interesting to me. It was from Hong Kong, but I could not read the return address from the outside; it came from a complete stranger; it was short, typewritten; it included a photograph; it was addressed to me in Manchester.

“Dear Mr Methusaleh Johnson,

“I give you my warmest greetings. I do not know what is the best way to introduce myself, and fear that without an intermediary I may appear to claim a too tenuous connection with you. Forgive any seeming intrusion, but I think that, in some way, we are related to one another. I believe that nearly 30 years ago we both received a visit from the same people, and that you might remember them. If this is so, we should try to become acquainted. I am aged 32 and I am a student of law. I hear you are near the same age, I know that you work at computers, and I have seen your photograph in a technology periodical. Enclosed is my photograph to you. I intend to visit your country one day, and meet you, if you are willing.

“Yours sincerely, Fan Murphy.”

I had seen more skilfully-composed cons, I thought. The name was strange. If it was made up, it was oddly put together, and unlikely to convince either me or my aunt that the bearer belonged to our family. Murphy was Irish, and Fan sounded Oriental, though I had never heard it before. Had I?

I held up my left hand, open, and my right hand, closed except for the thumb. My right thumb had been called Thulie, long ago in a wooded area beyond a garden gate, after I had stumbled down out of an alien vehicle.

Fan was my left thumb.

Was Fan really like me? I searched frantically for the photo, and found it on the floor. Yes, Fan looked Oriental, but he also looked like me in the ways that I looked unlike everyone else.

I was not the only one.

I had a brother—if that could be true. In fact, Fan and I were genetically no closer than we had been at birth, but having the same chromosomal arrangement meant that we were far more similar to one another than to the whole of the rest of the world.

Even if I never produced a working, thinking automaton, it didn't matter. I didn't need to copy myself. I already had a copy—a real live person—maybe more than one.

I held my hands up again, laughing wildly. Six fingers raised. Six of me. Six of us. Thulie, Fan, four others. I tried to compose myself, to remember the other four names, but I could not. I had gone from one single lone solitary creature to a pack, group, tribe, pod, gaggle or whatever we six should decide to call ourselves. And the notion that we could call ourselves whatever we chose, was suddenly too much for me. In my new band/string/swarm, I thought, there will be no rule prohibiting an adult male from crying like a baby.