A Longer Journey

Fan

I went home as early as I could from work and spent the rest of that day and night writing to Fan Murphy and tearing up each letter as I went. Delirious though I still was with delight, as soon as my pen touched paper I started panicking too. How could we be sure we would like one another? What if we hated one another? What if one of us had to reject the friendship of the other at some point? The tone of his letter to me was hopeful but cautious; what did I want to communicate back to him?

The content, of course, was a given: Yes, I want to meet; but my first draft, my second, third, fourth and all attendant scribbles, were incoherent. I felt that our putative friendship deserved the best possible start. This letter would almost certainly be kept, and so had to be for the record as well as answering to the present purpose. In future times, after we knew one another well enough for ribbing, I wanted equal ribbing rights.

I was over-thinking this, I decided, and after a last spate of scribbling and rewriting, I finally copied the following:

“Dear Mr Murphy,

“I am delighted to receive your unexpected letter, and most anxious to make your acquaintance. I do indeed remember a curious meeting many years ago, before I was seven years of age, and have long wished to understand exactly what happened that day and afterwards. I am eager to know whatever your experience has been. We have a great deal to talk about.

“Yours faithfully, Methusaleh.”

I added the phone number by which I could usually be reached, and the most likely times I would be there. According to my best knowledge I calculated five days before he could receive my letter, and by the fourth day I stopped my walks and worked extra hours so as to be near the phone in case Fan rang. I was supposed to see Aunt Emily at the weekend, but that, of course, I cancelled.

Fan phoned me after ten days.

“Methusaleh Johnson,” he pronounced badly but with unmistakeable glee.

“Fan Murphy!”

“How do you do?”

“Never better. And you? Fan, call me Thulie. Or whatever you like. Tell me everything.”

“Thoo, my friend, how I did hope you would say that. I am a Sherlock, not? You were the needle in the haystack.”

“Were you looking for me?” The time delay on the long-distance phone line was nearly a second each way, which lent a slightly unearthly feel to our conversation, but we could get used to that. You just had to make it clear by your intonation when you had said your turn, like saying “Over” on a radio message.

These were the days when an international phone call was a serious expense, but from now on we called every week. I must summarise a couple of hundred phone conversations, and some dozens of letters too:

Fan had been two years old when the aliens had approached his mother, offering to cure him of his ailment (Down syndrome, same as mine). She had agreed immediately, and Fan (rather to my envy) had no memory of the event or of the subsequent alterations in himself. By the time he was school-aged, he was able to integrate fully, but was obliged to leave school early in his teens to support his mother (then in her sixties). He had done everything from farm work to factory overseeing, and after his mother's death he had eventually saved money to study law part-time. He was going to specialise in industrial law.

The “tall people”, as Fan's mother had always called them, had told her there would be others like him, but they knew another family with a Down's child and nothing unusual happened to her. We worked out our best estimates of the dates, and it seemed that he had been visited the first of us two, by a space of some months. He was very interested in my six fingers, and he tried repeatedly to make me remember the other four names, but to no avail. I reminded him that with modern technology—photographs, film, advances in all forms of communication—the chances of tracing the rest of our tribe were only getting better. In a matter of a few decades, I promised him, self-propelled robots could be sent around the whole world, programmed to recognise and record all unusual faces and gaits.

“What if they're in some unheard-of hunter-gatherer group in the deepest Amazonian jungle?” he asked gloomily once. “What if they get killed for witches or something? What if they got killed in the war?”

“We can't think like that.”

“Thoo, they're our people. We have to find them. Why couldn't the tall chaps do it to six of the same town, or country at least? This whole—experiment—fails if we never meet.” He meant breed, of course, and the same thought had crossed my mind; but I changed the subject, speculating further on which technologies were most likely to aid our search.

To reassure ourselves as much as anything, we collaborated on a list of what we knew or could guess:

1. We think there are six of us, visited between or around the months of November 1927 and April 1928.

2. If our visitors were from outer space, and based on their talk about flying, we can surmise that they attempted to create a group of humans capable of interplanetary travel.

3. We do not know on what basis our particular six were chosen, but we can expect both medical and strategic reasons.

4. So far, we are from very separate parts of the world, so genetic diversity was probably an important consideration.

5. The two of us so far discovered do at least share a common language. Depending on the depth of planning that went into this project, the other four are likely to come from English-speaking families of whatever nation, as this would aid our eventual relationship.

6. Neither of us two has siblings or continuing close family. Strategically, this may indicate that they wanted people independent from family ties.

7. It is reasonable to assume that the aliens would choose children likely to survive and thrive, therefore favouring relatively wealthy or educated families.

8. The aliens' intention must either involve our all finding one another, or else some sort of re-intervention to bring us together. We should assume that we have to find one another, but this is a long-term effort and we must be strategic.

9. Two is better than one; at least we have that.

Fan made two copies of this; he kept one in a bank vault and the other he scribbled on and added to over the years. I lost my copy, but the gist of it was often present in my thoughts. The final point—”two are better than one”—had been mine, and I felt forever grateful to Fan for searching me out on the basis of a vague photo in a paper. I wondered, though, at my own reluctance to talk about females with Fan. Maybe in our species, pairing would turn out to be a more private matter than with normal humans. Or simpler. Or more complicated. On the one hand Time's winged chariot wasn't exactly at hurrying near. But there would be cultural differences to contend with, and distances to travel, presumably. And, whatever the aliens had planned, even numbers were not guaranteed. Even if all six of us found one another, the limited choices for pairing amounted practically to arranged marriage. Secretly, I hoped that I might meet all three ladies before Fan did, so that there need be no direct competition between the two of us.

What would the females of the species look like? I am fairly poor at nontechnical drawing, and my attempts at drawing from imagination just looked like dolls or cartoon characters. The new “teenage” fashion dolls began to annoy me slightly. Why would normal humans give their children icons of beauty that didn't even look like their own species? Years ago I had noticed one antique doll that had looked as though it ought to belong to my kind, but now suddenly every modern doll I saw had the big eyes, small bright mouth, slightly triangular head combined with a rounded face, the long neck and legs. All they lacked was large ears and a little more heaviness of physique.

I wondered if I had discovered a lead here, and I set out to research who was designing these dolls. Fan said he was travelling to Japan for work and would start researching cartoon artists. We both drew a blank: no designer or model bore any resemblance whatsoever to their creations, and nobody we talked to could give us any help. Fan, to his mixed amusement and frustration, was offered a contract as a film superhero.

“Why on earth did you refuse it?” I asked.

There was a silence on the line, longer than the second's pause to which we had become accustomed. Then we both spoke at once, but he stopped and let me finish.

“If your face became famous enough,” I explained, “the others have a better chance of seeing it. And contacting us.”

“I know that. But—“

“And you'd be a film star,” I added—“Manga Man or something. I'll buy a pinup and tell everyone I know you.”

“Listen to me, Thoo chap. I am very serious. I think this is something we don't do. No fame, no film stars. No Olympic Games. Because you know where that would lead.”

“No? You've thought this through; I haven't.”

“We can do useful things in the world. We do not use the world, make it our pedestal. We must be symbiots and not parasites or predators. Or we will be prey.”

Fan is either talking nonsense or he is miles ahead of me in his concept of ethics, I considered.

“And anyway, Thoo chap,” Fan pursued, “Would you wish your face, so close to your soul, to be used—say for a doll? And see yourself everywhere? And forget who you are outside of the toyshop?”

“Oh, well, maybe not,” I said, but I didn't agree with his take on psychology either: if you followed it through, you would have to suppose that all celebrities must be psychological sellouts who knew themselves only in terms of other people's adulation. At the same time I did not care about fame in the way that you do when there are three billion of you. If you are already more profoundly unique than anyone would wish to be, notoriety for its own sake is just not the point.

Maybe Fan is afraid, I mused. Afraid of loneliness, afraid of failing to find the rest of us, afraid of how far the small changes of course may lead you when life is long. Too long? My spirit shall not always strive with man... His days shall be threescore and ten. Neither Fan nor I knew what our life expectancy should be, but Fan thought that the “long life” promised by the aliens had to be significantly beyond the normal maximum of, say, a hundred. Two hundred seemed to both of us a safe guess.

If Fan were afraid, I could inwardly admit my own fears. Fan had had better information than I, and had consequently never felt himself quite so alone—but I could easily visualise how much worse things might be even if the aliens had chosen families and situations carefully. The world changes, and there had been a world war, other wars, civil unrest, natural disasters, crime, accidents, disease, even suicide.... I was afraid for the others, and for the two of us if we had to suffer their loss. For it was entirely possible that all four others were lost. I meant dead.

Fan had confided in me, once, that he had bad dreams—nightmares in which he and I, maybe some friends or maybe not, moved along surrounded by the dead as though walking a battlefield at the end of the day. At his persuasion I told him one of my own.

It started off as a sort of daydream. As I sometimes did when over-tired and luxuriating in the approach of sleepiness, I held myself inside the semi-conscious stage, the point where you move away from your five senses and disconnect from voluntary movement; you half-sense a sort of faraway fullness of movement or emotion like a large but badly-tuned TV set.

On the untuned screen, or all around me, or inside my mouth and ears—wherever the sensation migh locate—I faced a lady with five or six very small babies. They lay in warm sunshine. She might have been asleep—peacefully asleep—but I thought the babies were laughing. Or else asleep. Behind me, above or around me, was someone to whom I belonged—in a limited sort of way—if I chose to acknowledge it. It wasn't Fan. It could have been my father. He was also standing beside me.

There was a feeling that I had been expected, as though by appointment, but I found I wasn't there yet; I felt myself swinging, dizzily, like a weight clinging to the end of a very long rope, to and for, wildly, and I had no idea how to get off.

I should have woken up then, but I had lost the thread leading back to consciousness and was fully asleep. The rest of the night was crowded with nightmares that I cannot remember. In my story, Genesis, Abraham falls asleep and gets good and bad news in a vision. An horror of great darkness.... You do have some control over where you go in your dreams: I promised myself I would never go there again.

Fan gave far more attention to my dream than I gave to his. He insisted I should go to a dream interpreter.

“Whatever you believe or you don't believe,” he argued, “you should get help to understand. In the very least, it will tell you what you have hidden inside your own mind.”

So I went to a psychologist, and this is what I got:

The lady was the earth, and the babies were in some way my future: friends, relationships maybe. My father represented my past, from which I had not fully released myself. The babies were all well and happy, so I should not worry about my future, but explore my own issues and find release from my own inhibitions.

Fan seemed to find this comforting, but I could not make myself happy with it.

It was too tidy. It didn't help with the bad dreams afterwards that I couldn't remember. It was too automatically in line with current psychiatric theory. It didn't resonate with the stories I had heard of dreams. For instance, in Genesis again, Pharaoh also has a dream of good and bad news; Joseph tells him what it means; Pharaoh reacts with recognition and (if my father read the tone correctly) relief. I felt neither recognition nor relief.