The World Set Free

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'The key that opens the door,' said Karenin, 'is not the goal of the
journey.'

'But women!' cried Rachel. 'Here we are! What is our future--as women?
Is it only that we have unlocked the doors of the imagination for you
men? Let us speak of this question now. It is a thing constantly in my
thoughts, Karenin. What do you think of us? You who must have thought so
much of these perplexities.'

Karenin seemed to weigh his words. He spoke very deliberately. 'I do not
care a rap about your future--as women. I do not care a rap about the
future of men--as males. I want to destroy these peculiar futures. I
care for your future as intelligences, as parts of and contribution
to the universal mind of the race. Humanity is not only naturally
over-specialised in these matters, but all its institutions, its
customs, everything, exaggerate, intensify this difference. I want to
unspecialise women. No new idea. Plato wanted exactly that. I do not
want to go on as we go now, emphasising this natural difference; I do
not deny it, but I want to reduce it and overcome it.'

'And--we remain women,' said Rachel Borken. 'Need you remain thinking of
yourselves as women?'

'It is forced upon us,' said Edith Haydon.

'I do not think a woman becomes less of a woman because she dresses and
works like a man,' said Edwards. 'You women here, I mean you scientific
women, wear white clothing like the men, twist up your hair in the
simplest fashion, go about your work as though there was only one sex in
the world. You are just as much women, even if you are not so feminine,
as the fine ladies down below there in the plains who dress for
excitement and display, whose only thoughts are of lovers, who
exaggerate every difference.... Indeed we love you more.'

'But we go about our work,' said Edith Haydon.

'So does it matter?' asked Rachel.

'If you go about your work and if the men go about their work then for
Heaven's sake be as much woman as you wish,' said Karenin. 'When I ask
you to unspecialise, I am thinking not of the abolition of sex, but the
abolition of the irksome, restricting, obstructive obsession with sex.
It may be true that sex made society, that the first society was the
sex-cemented family, the first state a confederacy of blood relations,
the first laws sexual taboos. Until a few years ago morality meant
proper sexual behaviour. Up to within a few years of us the chief
interest and motive of an ordinary man was to keep and rule a woman and
her children and the chief concern of a woman was to get a man to do
that. That was the drama, that was life. And the jealousy of these
demands was the master motive in the world. You said, Kahn, a little
while ago that sexual love was the key that let one out from the
solitude of self, but I tell you that so far it has only done so in
order to lock us all up again in a solitude of two.... All that may have
been necessary but it is necessary no longer. All that has changed
and changes still very swiftly. Your future, Rachel, AS WOMEN, is a
diminishing future.'

'Karenin?' asked Rachel, 'do you mean that women are to become men?'

'Men and women have to become human beings.'

'You would abolish women? But, Karenin, listen! There is more than
sex in this. Apart from sex we are different from you. We take up
life differently. Forget we are--females, Karenin, and still we are a
different sort of human being with a different use. In some things we
are amazingly secondary. Here am I in this place because of my trick of
management, and Edith is here because of her patient, subtle hands. That
does not alter the fact that nearly the whole body of science is man
made; that does not alter the fact that men do so predominatingly make
history, that you could nearly write a complete history of the world
without mentioning a woman's name. And on the other hand we have a
gift of devotion, of inspiration, a distinctive power for truly loving
beautiful things, a care for life and a peculiar keen close eye for
behaviour. You know men are blind beside us in these last matters. You
know they are restless--and fitful. We have a steadfastness. We may
never draw the broad outlines nor discover the new paths, but in the
future isn't there a confirming and sustaining and supplying role for
us? As important, perhaps, as yours? Equally important. We hold the
world up, Karenin, though you may have raised it.'

'You know very well, Rachel, that I believe as you believe. I am not
thinking of the abolition of woman. But I do want to abolish--the
heroine, the sexual heroine. I want to abolish the woman whose support
is jealousy and whose gift possession. I want to abolish the woman who
can be won as a prize or locked up as a delicious treasure. And away
down there the heroine flares like a divinity.'

'In America,' said Edwards, 'men are fighting duels over the praises of
women and holding tournaments before Queens of Beauty.'

'I saw a beautiful girl in Lahore,' said Kahn, 'she sat under a golden
canopy like a goddess, and three fine men, armed and dressed like the
ancient paintings, sat on steps below her to show their devotion. And
they wanted only her permission to fight for her.'

'That is the men's doing,' said Edith Haydon.

'I SAID,' cried Edwards, 'that man's imagination was more specialised
for sex than the whole being of woman. What woman would do a thing like
that? Women do but submit to it or take advantage of it.'

'There is no evil between men and women that is not a common evil,' said
Karenin. 'It is you poets, Kahn, with your love songs which turn the
sweet fellowship of comrades into this woman-centred excitement. But
there is something in women, in many women, which responds to these
provocations; they succumb to a peculiarly self-cultivating egotism.
They become the subjects of their own artistry. They develop and
elaborate themselves as scarcely any man would ever do. They LOOK for
golden canopies. And even when they seem to react against that, they may
do it still. I have been reading in the old papers of the movements
to emancipate women that were going on before the discovery of atomic
force. These things which began with a desire to escape from the
limitations and servitude of sex, ended in an inflamed assertion of sex,
and women more heroines than ever. Helen of Holloway was at last as
big a nuisance in her way as Helen of Troy, and so long as you think
of yourselves as women'--he held out a finger at Rachel and smiled
gently--'instead of thinking of yourselves as intelligent beings, you
will be in danger of--Helenism. To think of yourselves as women is
to think of yourselves in relation to men. You can't escape that
consequence. You have to learn to think of yourselves--for our sakes and
your own sakes--in relation to the sun and stars. You have to cease to
be our adventure, Rachel, and come with us upon our adventures. ...' He
waved his hand towards the dark sky above the mountain crests.

Section 8

'These questions are the next questions to which research will bring us
answers,' said Karenin. 'While we sit here and talk idly and inexactly
of what is needed and what may be, there are hundreds of keen-witted
men and women who are working these things out, dispassionately and
certainly, for the love of knowledge. The next sciences to yield
great harvests now will be psychology and neural physiology. These
perplexities of the situation between man and woman and the trouble with
the obstinacy of egotism, these are temporary troubles, the issue of
our own times. Suddenly all these differences that seem so fixed will
dissolve, all these incompatibles will run together, and we shall go on
to mould our bodies and our bodily feelings and personal reactions as
boldly as we begin now to carve mountains and set the seas in their
places and change the currents of the wind.'

'It is the next wave,' said Fowler, who had come out upon the terrace
and seated himself silently behind Karenin's chair.

'Of course, in the old days,' said Edwards, 'men were tied to their city
or their country, tied to the homes they owned or the work they did....'

'I do not see,' said Karenin, 'that there is any final limit to man's
power of self-modification.

'There is none,' said Fowler, walking forward and sitting down upon the
parapet in front of Karenin so that he could see his face. 'There is no
absolute limit to either knowledge or power.... I hope you do not tire
yourself talking.'

'I am interested,' said Karenin. 'I suppose in a little while men will
cease to be tired. I suppose in a little time you will give us something
that will hurry away the fatigue products and restore our jaded tissues
almost at once. This old machine may be made to run without slacking or
cessation.'

'That is possible, Karenin. But there is much to learn.'

'And all the hours we give to digestion and half living; don't you think
there will be some way of saving these?'

Fowler nodded assent.

'And then sleep again. When man with his blazing lights made an end to
night in his towns and houses--it is only a hundred years or so ago
that that was done--then it followed he would presently resent his eight
hours of uselessness. Shan't we presently take a tabloid or lie in some
field of force that will enable us to do with an hour or so of slumber
and rise refreshed again?'

'Frobisher and Ameer Ali have done work in that direction.'

'And then the inconveniences of age and those diseases of the system
that come with years; steadily you drive them back and you lengthen and
lengthen the years that stretch between the passionate tumults of youth
and the contractions of senility. Man who used to weaken and die as
his teeth decayed now looks forward to a continually lengthening,
continually fuller term of years. And all those parts of him that once
gathered evil against him, the vestigial structures and odd, treacherous
corners of his body, you know better and better how to deal with.
You carve his body about and leave it re-modelled and unscarred. The
psychologists are learning how to mould minds, to reduce and remove bad
complexes of thought and motive, to relieve pressures and broaden ideas.
So that we are becoming more and more capable of transmitting what we
have learnt and preserving it for the race. The race, the racial wisdom,
science, gather power continually to subdue the individual man to its
own end. Is that not so?'

Fowler said that it was, and for a time he was telling Karenin of new
work that was in progress in India and Russia. 'And how is it with
heredity?' asked Karenin.

Fowler told them of the mass of inquiry accumulated and arranged by
the genius of Tchen, who was beginning to define clearly the laws of
inheritance and how the sex of children and the complexions and many of
the parental qualities could be determined.

'He can actually DO----?'

'It is still, so to speak, a mere laboratory triumph,' said Fowler, 'but
to-morrow it will be practicable.'

'You see,' cried Karenin, turning a laughing face to Rachel and Edith,
'while we have been theorising about men and women, here is science
getting the power for us to end that old dispute for ever. If woman is
too much for us, we'll reduce her to a minority, and if we do not like
any type of men and women, we'll have no more of it. These old bodies,
these old animal limitations, all this earthly inheritance of gross
inevitabilities falls from the spirit of man like the shrivelled cocoon
from an imago. And for my own part, when I hear of these things I feel
like that--like a wet, crawling new moth that still fears to spread its
wings. Because where do these things take us?'

'Beyond humanity,' said Kahn.

'No,' said Karenin. 'We can still keep our feet upon the earth that made
us. But the air no longer imprisons us, this round planet is no longer
chained to us like the ball of a galley slave....

'In a little while men who will know how to bear the strange
gravitations, the altered pressures, the attenuated, unfamiliar gases
and all the fearful strangenesses of space will be venturing out from
this earth. This ball will be no longer enough for us; our spirit will
reach out.... Cannot you see how that little argosy will go glittering
up into the sky, twinkling and glittering smaller and smaller until the
blue swallows it up. They may succeed out there; they may perish, but
other men will follow them....

'It is as if a great window opened,' said Karenin.

Section 9

As the evening drew on Karenin and those who were about him went up
upon the roof of the buildings, so that they might the better watch
the sunset and the flushing of the mountains and the coming of the
afterglow. They were joined by two of the surgeons from the laboratories
below, and presently by a nurse who brought Karenin refreshment in a
thin glass cup. It was a cloudless, windless evening under the deep blue
sky, and far away to the north glittered two biplanes on the way to the
observatories on Everest, two hundred miles distant over the precipices
to the east. The little group of people watched them pass over the
mountains and vanish into the blue, and then for a time they talked of
the work that the observatory was doing. From that they passed to the
whole process of research about the world, and so Karenin's thoughts
returned again to the mind of the world and the great future that was
opening upon man's imagination. He asked the surgeons many questions
upon the detailed possibilities of their science, and he was keenly
interested and excited by the things they told him. And as they talked
the sun touched the mountains, and became very swiftly a blazing and
indented hemisphere of liquid flame and sank.

Karenin looked blinking at the last quivering rim of incandescence, and
shaded his eyes and became silent.

Presently he gave a little start.

'What?' asked Rachel Borken.

'I had forgotten,' he said.

'What had you forgotten?'

'I had forgotten about the operation to-morrow. I have been so
interested as Man to-day that I have nearly forgotten Marcus Karenin.
Marcus Karenin must go under your knife to-morrow, Fowler, and very
probably Marcus Karenin will die.' He raised his slightly shrivelled
hand. 'It does not matter, Fowler. It scarcely matters even to me. For
indeed is it Karenin who has been sitting here and talking; is it not
rather a common mind, Fowler, that has played about between us? You and
I and all of us have added thought to thought, but the thread is neither
you nor me. What is true we all have; when the individual has altogether
brought himself to the test and winnowing of expression, then the
individual is done. I feel as though I had already been emptied out of
that little vessel, that Marcus Karenin, which in my youth held me so
tightly and completely. Your beauty, dear Edith, and your broad brow,
dear Rachel, and you, Fowler, with your firm and skilful hands, are now
almost as much to me as this hand that beats the arm of my chair. And as
little me. And the spirit that desires to know, the spirit that resolves
to do, that spirit that lives and has talked in us to-day, lived in
Athens, lived in Florence, lives on, I know, for ever....

'And you, old Sun, with your sword of flame searing these poor eyes
of Marcus for the last time of all, beware of me! You think I die--and
indeed I am only taking off one more coat to get at you. I have
threatened you for ten thousand years, and soon I warn you I shall be
coming. When I am altogether stripped and my disguises thrown away. Very
soon now, old Sun, I shall launch myself at you, and I shall reach you
and I shall put my foot on your spotted face and tug you about by your
fiery locks. One step I shall take to the moon, and then I shall leap
at you. I've talked to you before, old Sun, I've talked to you a million
times, and now I am beginning to remember. Yes--long ago, long ago,
before I had stripped off a few thousand generations, dust now
and forgotten, I was a hairy savage and I pointed my hand at you
and--clearly I remember it!--I saw you in a net. Have you forgotten
that, old Sun? . . .

'Old Sun, I gather myself together out of the pools of the individual
that have held me dispersed so long. I gather my billion thoughts into
science and my million wills into a common purpose. Well may you slink
down behind the mountains from me, well may you cower....'

Section 10

Karenin desired that he might dream alone for a little while before he
returned to the cell in which he was to sleep. He was given relief for a
pain that began to trouble him and wrapped warmly about with furs, for
a great coldness was creeping over all things, and so they left him, and
he sat for a long time watching the afterglow give place to the darkness
of night.

It seemed to those who had to watch over him unobtrusively lest he
should be in want of any attention, that he mused very deeply.

The white and purple peaks against the golden sky sank down into cold,
blue remoteness, glowed out again and faded again, and the burning
cressets of the Indian stars, that even the moonrise cannot altogether
quench, began their vigil. The moon rose behind the towering screen of
dark precipices to the east, and long before it emerged above these, its
slanting beams had filled the deep gorges below with luminous mist and
turned the towers and pinnacles of Lio Porgyul to a magic dreamcastle of
radiance and wonder....

Came a great uprush of ghostly light above the black rim of rocks, and
then like a bubble that is blown and detaches itself the moon floated
off clear into the unfathomable dark sky....

And then Karenin stood up. He walked a few paces along the terrace and
remained for a time gazing up at that great silver disc, that silvery
shield that must needs be man's first conquest in outer space....

Presently he turned about and stood with his hands folded behind him,
looking at the northward stars. . . .

At length he went to his own cell. He lay down there and slept
peacefully till the morning. And early in the morning they came to him
and the anaesthetic was given him and the operation performed.

It was altogether successful, but Karenin was weak and he had to lie
very still; and about seven days later a blood clot detached itself from
the healing scar and travelled to his heart, and he died in an instant
in the night.