The Messenger
By
Byron Edgington
Friday October 12th 2217, somewhere in what they’re calling Arcadia. Imagine my surprise and gratitude when Orshie asked me to share with his group the lessons I’d only alluded to in passing, the astonishment I’d expressed when I first opened the device. The greens so much greener; blue sky to make a robin’s egg look dull; streets pristine, without a hint of grime or the erosion of constant use. No signs. No posters. “We just know.” No street lights. “Not needed.” And no glaring advertisements, billboards, flashing slogans or waving banners. “We know what we want,” he explained. “We don’t have to be told.”
The first time I saw this world I was reminded of the fanciful scenery in Oz, or the Edenic paintings of the old masters of biblical themes, a Brueghel, or Titian, perhaps a Botticelli. Indeed, the vision I first saw of this ‘Arcadia’ brought one word to my mind: perfection. Orshie had wondered why I laughed when I joined him and asked, “is this heaven?” Fully expecting his response to mention Iowa, I was confused when he said, “not heaven. Why?”
I had no way to reply to his question to my question, so I let it be. He motioned for me to join him, and I followed along, marveling at the luminous civilization spread before me. I attempted to blink my eyes more slowly, lest I miss the tiniest part of it. Soaked it in, the rich textures, deep vistas and palpable calm. Walking along with Orshie, a deep sadness welled in me at the certain knowledge that I had so little time here, just one day before I’d reenter the device and return.
When I’d stepped into that realm, Orshie had met me as if I was expected. The hatch on the side of the device swung free to my immediate right, its hinges cringing like rubber bands stretched too tight. My senses jumped to a kind of hyper-mode: the air entering the device tasted sweet; light massaged my eyes in a warm glow; I heard the colors outside and thought, right away, ‘how will I ever explain hearing colors?’ But I did. I had no idea that red sounded so harsh, that green chimed, or orange chittered. Never expected yellow to sound mournful.
Orshie acted like he’d seen others do the same thing before me. “You’ll get used to it,” he said, smiling. “Wait till you see salty.”
“See salty?”
He just grinned again. “You’ll see.” He motioned for me to step fully into his world, and I did.
When I joined the little group, the reaction from Orshie’s people was, at first, a curious mix of glee and hesitation. They weren’t fearful exactly, just reticent, a bit secretive, surely, if that’s what all the side-glances and whispers were about. I sensed their curiosity, and knew that I’d react the same way were someone from a past century to step into my midst. I knew to be careful with them, to make no sudden or erratic moves, and to not revert to emotional extremes like I’d been used to back… back where I’d come from. I left my hands exposed, and my palms open, so they’d relax, like I’d been taught back then, like my dad told me to do with a traffic cop if I ever got pulled over. “Let them see your hands,” he’d said “….and they’ll know you’re not a threat.” It was good advice then; it was better advice now. These were, after all, people who could hear yellow.
After I’d convinced them that I meant no harm, and that I’d truly come from another time zone—indeed, another time altogether—they were like children, eager to hear my tale. I saw their faces turn and lips curl up from down. Saw eyes open a bit wider. I smiled; they smiled back. The atmosphere glowed. I tasted the serenity. Sweet, like whipped honey on oat toast.
Orshie smiled. “So, tell us,” he said. “We’re eager to hear what the messenger has to say.”
Just being asked proved to be a gift all by itself. Before I’d agreed to participate in the time-compression experiment, and found myself two hundred years in the future (imagine my surprise that it had worked!) I’d often yearned for just such a request, a chance to explain what all the confusion and mystery of life back then meant. To explain why all the misery, the depredations, the constant tension between races, religions, genders and cultures. To explain why humans seemed bent on self-destruction, and where our predilection for war and conquest came from, and why certain people devoted their lives to the eradication of all those inequities. More than that: I wished to explain why those courageous and devoted people were often destroyed, their efforts to right the wrongs of life met with hostility and hatred. Perhaps I wanted only to explain those things to myself.
For one reason or another I’d always had a ferocious desire to teach, to share my experiences and to craft strong, indelible images with words. Especially after the war that I was thrown into as a young man, and its subsequent humiliations, the unspoken yet insistent demand to move away from it, to pretend it never happened, I’d wanted an audience. I’d needed an audience. I’d made an honest effort to leave it be. But the war lingered, a clawed beast snagging my gut that screamed to break loose, retreating only after I’d diverted its attention with some kind of learned tactic, some culturally acceptable way to cover it up. Drugs, alcohol, sex, materialistic extravagance. None of that worked, of course. But I used those methods anyway to salve my war-battered soul, and to try to regain the once hopeful, positive man I’d been. The tension and need to explain was always there. It was one of the reasons I chose to participate in the time experiment that my friends and family scoffed at, twirling fingers at their temples and rolling their eyes. ‘time travel, huh?,’ they said. ‘say hello to my great, great-grandkids,’ ‘don’t forget to pack Viagra!’ ‘….hurry back with stock tips!’
I sensed that if it worked it might be a damn fine way to gain an audience. And it appeared I was right. Orshie gave me one. “So, tell us…” he said. And like children, the 200 members of Arcadia who’d greeted me when the machine clunked to a stop smiled again, in their inimitable way and stepped aside, as Orshie and I entered the vaulted hall.
His people filed inside, perhaps a thousand in all, took their seats and crossed arms over laps, waiting. They turned their heads up to me, mouths agape, waiting for whatever the messenger from 2015 had to say.
Imagine if you will the range of emotions that swept over me: Gratitude for the opportunity, of course; anxiety that I might give them incorrect data; fear that I’d run out of time. I had less than twenty-four hours at that point. An old 20th Century poet named John Ciardi once said his biggest fear about releasing a poem was that he’d left part of it in his head. Standing on the stage next to Orshie, I understood what Ciardi meant. What to tell them? What to leave out? Scanning the crowd of smiling Arcadians, I scoured my brain to extract just the right pieces of data and encouraging, useful information. Understanding that they considered us crude, almost uncivilized beings, or so Orshie had warned me ahead of time, their expectations were not high, and not hard to guess. A future Columbus, or Magellan, I brought artifacts into their midst from a time they had only read about. They waited for me to relate the stories of the wars, misery, hatred and bigotry I’d alluded to. They expected to hear about the depredations from my century involving different people, people with various religious quirks and fanaticism, the emotional incitements that caused so much misery to so many people, conflicts over natural resources, power, allocation of land and wealth and the right to populate with our seed and to banish someone else’s—the very uncivilized behaviors that might prove their opinions of how we’d lived two hundred years prior.
I had my work cut out for me. But then I had a lot of material to work with, as well. The task of educating these gentle, yet oddly wary people could be either the hardest I ever encountered, or the easiest. I sniffed the red in the room, and heard the curiosity.
Instead of just laying history bare, pouring forth exacting details and unadorned minutiae about those past times, I decided to confound their images and beliefs about us twentieth-century denizens. Yes, I’d come as a messenger from a time filled with hate, bigotry, ruthless competition and dismissive attitudes. I’d seen negative, harsh, judgmental actions delivered over the internet, (a quaint relic of those times that had long since been replaced by much more efficient and logical technology, according to Orshie). But did they really want to hear how crude we’d been? Should I share the negative, the backward and beastly behaviors that they expected to hear? Learning of the world I’d inhabited, would they continue to believe what Orshie had said about me, that I meant them no harm? Did they belong to a more highly evolved sect, as Orshie explained, a group of people that regarded emotional, purely instinctive responses to crises to be illogical? People who, despite their placement two hundred years ahead of us had learned much more, and much better the value of time and its gift of discernment?
Then a new fear: How immersed had I been in all that negative, mean-spirited action before my journey in the experimental endeavor that put me among them? Could I even successfully relate to these highly-evolved Arcadians of the twenty-third century? Would I be able to dredge up the good, the affirming aspects of life in the twenty-first? Or had my own experience poisoned me as a messenger from that long forgotten past?
I’d soon find out.
I stepped to the voice modulator, smelled its green, welcoming aura and started off by explaining who I was, that I’d stepped into the device back in the year 2015 and stepped out among them nearly two hundred years later. I scanned the curious faces of my audience, tasted the green again and launched into my message.
“I must tell you, that looking at what you’ve done, the wonderful society you’ve built and the gentle reception I was given that I wish I’d been born in your century, not in mine. Back then I looked on in anguish as people killed one another over inconsequential things—fossil fuels, land, money, drugs, women. We fought first and talked later, if anyone was left to do the talking. We established agencies, associations and government bureaus to address these problems: A defense department that soaked up much of our valuable assets, a spy agency to discern what our neighbors were doing, and to intervene first to protect ourselves, a monstrous crime prevention and incarceration edifice that held many thousands of our citizens captive for the smallest of infractions.”
The Arcadians stared at me with a bemused expression, a sea of similar smiles gazing at me like clones. I went on.
“We never seemed to learn from our past, or to take to heart the lessons available to us from our own mythologies. Here’s a question for you.” I swept the audience, wondering if these refined people even knew of these things. “Who can tell me about the myth of Ares and Aphrodite?”
To my astonishment, every hand went up. Blinking in amazement, my jaw slack, I pointed at a fellow in the third row. “Yes? Can you tell me?”
He stood straight and tall, and then looked across at his friends. “Ares was the Greek god of war,” he said. “Everyone knows that. And Aphrodite the Greek goddess of love. Ares and Aphrodite made love, and they had a child. They named that child Harmonia, the god of harmony and peace.” He sat down.
My mouth dry as dust, marveling at the man’s ease with the ancient tale I stared at the fellow, at all of them, as heads nodded across the room. “So what that means is…”
Another hand went up.
“Yes?”
A woman stood near the back, her shoulders rigid, proud. “It means,” she said. “That we always have Ares inside us.” She jabbed at her breast. “And if we accept that, but make love with Aphrodite anyway, that’s the only way we’ll achieve harmony. If we deny our instinct to be human and our urge to lash out at others, suppressing that instinct leads to rage.” She took her seat.
Unable to continue for a moment, I thanked them for their responses and went on to the various inequalities I’d been asked to explain. “And those people who had to fight against the system, the agencies that denied their humanity…” Here I stopped. I looked at the woman who’d shared the Aphrodite story, and decided to take another tack. “I’m going to stop here and take questions from you.” I looked at Orshie. “Is that all right?”
“Perfectly fine,” he said. Then he glanced at his watch. “Not much longer though.”
“You there, in the fifth row.”
“Is it true that your people taught children that only one religion was the real one? And that their beliefs gave them license to kill others?”
“It is true , I’m afraid. In our weak defense, that led eventually to the establishment of government protections for all, so the tendency had another consequence.” The fellow sat. “In the back row?”
“Tell us what kind of people would use their resources to create a weapon that could erase all humanity, thus eliminating that creative instinct?”
“You’re referring to..?”
“Nuclear weapons, yes. They cost you much more than simply supplying others with what they tried to wrest from you might have. It seems, almost mad, pardon me for saying so.”
“It does seem mad. We even used that acronym, MAD, for Mutual Assured Destruction, and the tension kept us safe. But nuclear research also gave us knowledge of atomic structure, and scientific advances unimaginable without it.” The man nodded. “Over there, near the side.”
“Did your people truly believe that money and its pursuit would make you happy?”
“Most of us not only believed that, we made it the center of our lives.”
“Like its own religion, then.” It was not a question. The fellow took his seat.
“Yes, its very own religion. We called it capitalism, I guess you’d say. Over there, by the door.”
“Could you explain why lovers were kept apart? Why your people wrote all that beautiful poetry and those heart-wrenching songs about love, and made all those movies and wrote all those fine books and then denied people the right to love each other? It seems…well, irrational, forgive me.” He sat down.
A woman in the front stood. Then a woman beside her did, too. “Yes, please explain that.” They held hands. “It’s very odd to us that there seemed to be so much dissonance between what your people said and what they did. Didn’t you smell the yellow all the time?” The two women hugged each other, kissed and sat again.
“I’m sorry, I have no answer for you. Or just this as feeble and weak as it is. We believed that the system was established to bring us to a better sense of ourselves. That the inequity and tension were necessary to act as a forge on which our better natures were shaped, where the raw material of our humanity became refined. We believed that people who felt wronged, or impeded, or shunned in some way had an obligation to demand redress. They had to bring their grievances forward and cry out for justice. And we believed that only through that system could we truly wring out the better natures inside of us.”
My audience acted restless for the first time. They shifted in their seats, whispered to each other. As one, they looked at Orshie instead of me.
He stood and walked to the front of the stage. “Have we?”
As one, the inhabitants of Arcadia nodded.
Orshie extended his hand to me. “Thank you for coming. I’ll see you back now.”
“But I still have…” I held my watch up.
“Enough,” he said. “Come with me.” He stepped off the stage, and filed through the auditorium.
I followed behind. “Have I offended..?”
“Oh, no.” He turned quickly and stopped. “Not at all. Please don’t think…”
“It’s just that, well, I was getting started pretty well, and they seemed…”
“We know what we want.”
The device sat right where I’d left it, its hatch gaping on its hinges, its maw wide open ready for me to enter and strap in. I eased through the portal, gathered the wide belts around my shoulders and snapped their silver buckles into their locks. I flipped the switches, fingering off each checklist item, as Professor Bernard had taught me two-hundred years before. I felt the device hum alive, lights blinking, then winking out. Saw the computerized display flash its arcane coded message and its ending command: ‘System nominal—proceed.’
I extended a hand through the open hatch to Orshie. Outside, standing as one, a sea of clone-like people, happy, calm, as serene and at ease as any people I’d ever been among—and why would they not be?—I waved to them. I looked at their Edenic surroundings again, tasted the sugary air, felt the warmth of the green on their groomed, perfect ground. “Thank you,” I said to Orshie, as he swung the hatch into position. “Seeing this gives me hope.”
“I’m glad you feel that way,” he said. Then he bent toward me, and whispered. “Come again?”
“I, I’m…not sure I can… But I’ll certainly try.”
“Please? And next time..?”
“Yes?”
“Bring a much bigger device?” He stepped out of the way.
I waved again. Then I saw the forlorn looks of the anguished Arcadians. Arms linked, eyes like slits, they watched me prepare to return to the world I’d described, a world of chaos, and injustice and fear. A world where humans worship love and war in equal measure. A world where a system demands that we be as human as it is possible to be, even in our inhumanity. I looked at the screen again. ‘System nominal—proceed.’ I closed the hatch. As the device lurched, I heard the red. And I saw the salty.
