Briefing for a Descent Into Hell - Doris May Lessing [54]
The penultimate stage showed by Forecast (Detail) was more violent than the last stage. Earth rocked and hissed, and heaved, showered locally by falling rock, flame, boiling liquids, and convulsed by quakes. Men fought and struggled. There were mass movements of lower forms of animal and insect, locusts, rats, mice. There were sudden epidemics. Whole nations of people died in these epidemics, and as poisoned air and water reached their patches of the planet. So much of animal and human life died it was as if the globe quietened, stilled. An awful emptiness distinguished the final stage. It seemed as if no life remained. But even while this cauldron of poison bubbled, it was possible to see the beginnings of another pattern—some of the humans busied themselves in a different way. Even as the Earth’s convulsions began to subside, the planetary Emergency over, they were again rebuilding, re-creating—and, as was obvious from their increasingly meaningful activity, the crisis on the planet had bred a new race. It was a mutation. While not much different in appearance from the previous human, the new human being had increased powers of perception, a different mental structure. This remnant of an old, or the beginnings of a new race, had as heritage all the accumulated experience of the human race, plus, this time, the mental equipment to use it.
Forecast (Detail) ended, and the delegates left. When no one remained but the Descent Team and Minna Erve, the hundred or so of them waited politely for the Sun to leave, if He so wished, but the pervasive golden glow remained steady. Some thought It even brightened a little, and they took courage from this, thinking it to be a message of hope, and of belief in their powers to accomplish what they had all volunteered to do.
Now Minna Erve was joined on the platform by Merk Ury.
Minna said: “Merk will brief you. But I must remind you all that Time is running out.”
Merk said: “Thanks, Minna. I had in fact already decided to limit this to the main points, particularly of course as you have already so ably done the groundwork.
“The first point is this—and the second and the third—you should not underrate the difficulties. Every one of you in this room has of course travelled extensively inside the System—some of you perhaps outside of it—and you won’t need to be told that to hear a place described is not the same as experiencing it. Which is another reason to keep these few remarks short.
“Now, you will probably all know that at first there was a doubt whether life could exist on Earth at all, after the previous Crisis which altered the atmosphere. But Nature is infinitely resourceful, making virtues from deficiencies. We had thought that nothing could live in that tempestuous, erupting, unstable, accident-prone planet, but in fact the life forms did adapt, but most are only able to live in certain dry areas of the Earth and where the temperature is more or less equable. Most parts of the planet are too cold, too hot, wet, frozen, mountainous or dry. But you are all familiar with the dominant creature that has evolved, its most striking physical feature being its pumping system for air and liquid. In other words, it is distinguished by the organs it has evolved for living in a particularly difficult and poisonous air. But it is as yet an inefficient adaptation and the creature’s mental processes are defective.
“Now, the Permanent Staff on Earth has always had one main task, which is to keep alive, in any way possible, the knowledge that humanity, with its fellow creatures, the animals and plants, make up a whole, are a unity, have a function in the whole system as an organ or organism. Our Permanent Staff’s task is always extremely difficult, the main feature of these human beings as at present constituted being their inability to feel, or understand themselves, in any other way except through their own drives or functions. They have not yet evolved