The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (80 page)

As the humans close relentlessly in on them, Jommy’s mother sends her son running in a desperate but successful try for life that has him clinging with super-strength to the rear bumper of a speeding “sixty electro Studebaker.”
⁶⁵¹
But before she is cut down, she gives Jommy a final mental admonition to kill the man behind the anti-slan campaign, the dictator of Earth, Kier Gray. She thinks:

“Don’t forget what I’ve told you. You live for one thing only: To make it possible for slans to live normal lives. I think you’ll have to kill our great enemy, Kier Gray, even if it means going to the grand palace after him.”
⁶⁵²

When he is 15, Jommy follows a hypnotic command from his long-dead scientist father. He enters the catacombs underneath the city to recover his father’s great discovery, the secret of controlled atomic power, from the place where it has been hidden. However, he is caught in the act, and in order to escape he must use an atomic weapon to kill three guards. This is something that causes him continuing remorse, and which he becomes determined not to repeat.

In his own right as a teenage super-scientist, Jommy develops “ten-point steel,”
⁶⁵³
a metal that approaches the theoretical ultimate in hardness. And he invents “hypnotism crystals,”
⁶⁵⁴
which enable him to control the thinking of ordinary human beings.

Jommy also roams the world looking for other slans with golden tendrils in their hair—but he is never able to find any. Where can they be?

However, again and again he stumbles across a widespread network of “tendrilless slans,”
⁶⁵⁵
who are also products of Samuel Lann’s mutation machines but lack telepathic ability. They have mastered anti-gravity and built spaceships, and established settlements on Mars that are completely unknown to ordinary Earthbound humanity.

But these half-slans look on Jommy as an enemy, too. It seems that when the tendrilled slans were in ascendancy, they persecuted the slans without tendrils, and the tendrilless slans have neither forgiven nor forgotten. They call Jommy “ ‘a damned snake’ ” and strive even more diligently than the simple humans to kill him.

Jommy steals a spaceship from them, and has the opportunity to kill a tendrilless slan, Joanna Hillory. But he forbears in spite of the enmity she shows him. Instead, he assures her of his good will:

“Madam, in all modesty I can say that, of all the slans in the world today, there is none more important than the son of Peter Cross. Wherever I go, my words and my will shall rule. The day that I find the true slans, the war against your people shall end forever.”
⁶⁵⁶

And he sets Joanna Hillory free.

Then, at last, when he is 19, Jommy finds another slan like himself, a girl, Kathleen Layton, seeking refuge in a long-abandoned slan hideout, an underground machine city. Kathleen has been kept for observation by Kier Gray ever since she was a child, but now, with her life in imminent danger from the slan-hating secret police chief, John Petty, she has fled the palace.

The meeting of Jommy and Kathleen is a wonderful moment of mutual recognition:

“And she was a slan!

“And he was a slan!

“Simultaneous discovery!”
⁶⁵⁷

But almost in the moment in which they find each other and fall in love, John Petty invades the cave hideout and surprises Kathleen there alone. He shows her no mercy at all, but straightaway puts a bullet into her brain.

Jommy arrives on the scene with Kathleen’s dying telepathic goodbye to him still ringing in his mind. He might pay John Petty back in kind by blasting him into nothingness with his atomic weapon, but he stays his hand. He leaves the crucial button unpressed, and withdraws under heavy fire in his car made of ten-point steel.

Then, when Jommy is 26—still not fully mature by slan standards—the tendrilless slans launch an all-out attack upon his secret laboratory and his spaceship, hidden under a mountain twenty miles away. But Jommy signals his spaceship, and it tunnels its way to him, and he escapes.

He travels to Mars to spy upon the tendrilless slans. Posing as one of them, he confirms his speculation that they soon intend to make a general attack upon the Earth.

But no sooner is he certain of this than he is suspected of being himself. He is taken to the office of Joanna Hillory, now the tendrilless slan military commissioner who has the job of tracking him down. She has written no less than four books on the subject of Jommy Cross.

While he waits, he is allowed the opportunity to consult what we today would think of as a computer:

Inside the fine, long, low building, a few men and women moved in and out among row on row of great, thick, shiny, metallic plates. This, Cross knew, was the Bureau of Statistics; and these plates were the electric filing cabinets that yielded their information at the touch of a button, the spelling out of a name, a number, a key word.
⁶⁵⁸

Jommy asks these electric filing cabinets to tell him about Samuel Lann—and in no time he is reading Samuel Lann’s diary for 1971, and then further random entries from 1973 and 1990, and from them is discovering that there never was a mutation machine at all. From the very outset, the tendrilled slans were and always have been a purely natural mutation.

Then, when he is called into the office of Joanna Hillory, he finds that his idealism as a 15-year-old was so convincing to her that she has spent the years since maneuvering herself into a position to help him in just such a moment as this. She aids him to escape and to return to Earth with the knowledge of a secret entrance to the slan-built palace of Kier Gray.

Van Vogt has said, “From a fairly early time, towards the end of my stories . . . I would launch my subconscious into free associations, and, within the frame of what I was writing—roughly—would just let it rattle on.”
⁶⁵⁹
This kind of creative process would seem to underlie what happens next in
Slan.

In a very strange scene, Jommy hurls himself down a hole in the palace garden, and when he reaches the bottom he is two miles beneath the surface. There he encounters signs which presume him to be a slan and tell him where he is and what his circumstances are. Then walls close together around him, and in a kind of prison-elevator he is raised high up into the palace to the most private inner sanctum of Kier Gray.

And once again, as in the Greek plays that van Vogt had read, a scene of recognition takes place. Jommy looks on the ruthless and powerful, but noble, face of Kier Gray and knows him for what he really is:

“Kier Gray, leader of men, was—

“ 
‘A true slan!’
exclaimed Cross.”
⁶⁶⁰

At first, Gray’s manner is cold and hard. He even threatens to amputate Jommy’s tendrils. But then Jommy demonstrates his own power by effortlessly freeing himself from his bonds, and the recognition becomes mutual. Kier Gray knows that this must be the son of Peter Cross, the master of atomic energy, and immediately his manner completely alters:

“Man, man,
you’ve done it!
In spite of our being unable to give you the slightest help! Atomic energy—at last.”

His voice rang out then, clear and triumphant: “John Thomas Cross, I welcome you and your father’s great discovery. Come in here and sit down. . . . We can talk here in this very private den of mine.”
⁶⁶¹

And Gray then proceeds to tell Jommy all.

Slans, he says, really rule the world from behind the scenes—something like those Scotsmen running the British Empire: “ ‘What is more natural than that we should insinuate our way to control of the human government? Are we not the most intelligent beings on the face of the Earth?’ ”
⁶⁶²

Slans are “ ‘the mutation-after-man.’ ”
⁶⁶³
Despite the fact that ordinary humanity hates and fears them, the slans are watching out for poor feckless old-style man, who is now growing sterile and beginning to pass from the scene. And if the slans in the past gave the tendrilless slans something of a hard time, well, that was all for their own good, to keep them tough.

The fact of the matter is that all unknown to themselves the tendrilless slans
are
the true slans. Their special characteristics—tendrils, double hearts, more efficient nervous systems, and so on—have been temporarily genetically suppressed to keep them safe from the wrath of humanity. But one by one the slan characteristics have been re-emerging. And in another forty or fifty years, the tendrils and telepathic power will start coming back, too.

The problem for the slans-behind-the-scenes is to make the transition from man to slan a smooth one. They would like to keep the humans from launching one last desperate anti-slan witch-hunt. And they would also like to keep the tendrilless slans from exterminating ordinary man before he passes naturally from the scene.

Now, however, it appears that both problems can be solved. With the aid of Jommy’s atomics, the tendrilless slan attack from Mars can be turned away. Those slans who are in the know will “ ‘make a big noise with a small force’ ”
⁶⁶⁴
that should send the invaders back to Mars until the tendrils of their children grow in. Then, with the hypnotism crystals that Jommy has developed, it will be possible to soothe the hysteria, jealousy and fear of man-as-he-has-been, and make his passing painless and happy.

With this solution worked out,
Slan
concludes with a dramatic entrance, and a final recognition scene. A young woman comes into Gray’s private study—and it is Kathleen. Kathleen resurrected! Kier Gray then introduces her to Jommy. . . .

“It was at that moment that Kier Gray’s voice cut across the silence with the rich tone of one who had secretly relished this instant for years:

“ ‘Jommy Cross, I want you to meet Kathleen Layton—my daughter!’ ”
⁶⁶⁵

And so the story ends, leaving us all aglow. But also with a thousand rational questions that we might ask if we were of a mind to:

If Kathleen Layton really is Kier Gray’s daughter, why should he have endangered both her and himself by keeping her near him as she grows up? And if Gray is such a sentimentalist that he must have her close by, why is it that when Kathleen first meets Jommy, she doesn’t yet have the slightest suspicion that Kier Gray might really be a slan, let alone her own father?

It only takes Jommy a matter of moments to find out from the tendrilless slans’ electric filing cabinets that there never was a mutation machine. Why is it that the tendrilless slans don’t know this fundamental fact? And if the tendrilless slans suspect him of being their most feared adversary, Jommy Cross, why do they so casually allow him free access to their data banks without anyone even bothering to take a peek over his shoulder just to see what he might be up to?

And, in its own way, perhaps the greatest oddity of all: What in the world is a Studebaker car with a protruding rear bumper in the style of the 1930s doing on the streets six hundred and thirty, or eight hundred, or fifteen hundred years in the future? (The figures for how much time has passed between now and then keep shifting, like so much else in this story.)

Of the thousand questions that might be asked about the novel, van Vogt himself would attempt to address perhaps fifty or a hundred in the revised second hardcover edition of
Slan
—but with mixed results. Some matters for doubt, like that anomalous Studebaker, could be tidied up easily enough with the help of an eraser. But the effect of some of the other changes that van Vogt made would just be to swap one question for another.

The truth is that the essence of
Slan
did not lie in logic and reason, and no amount of tidying could ever be enough to make this story add up neatly and consistently. It might even be argued that the unintended result of those 1951 revisions aiming to make
Slan
more reasonable was actually to diminish some of the irrational power of the original serial novel.

In either version, however, the fundamental non-rationality of this story can’t be emphasized strongly enough. In fact, if there is any obvious defect in our brief account of
Slan,
it is that by the very act of compressing and summarizing the story line, we have necessarily made the novel appear a good deal more transparent and coherent than the unsuspecting reader is likely to find it.

In
Slan,
things operate according to the dictates of dream logic. Characters gifted with unaccountable knowledge, and equally unaccountable ignorance, suddenly loom into view, only to disappear again just as abruptly. Anything that seems fixed—like a date, or an attitude, or an identity—may alter without warning and become something other than it was before. In this story, coincidences, unlikelihoods and radical transitions abound—but as within a dream, this just seems the way that things naturally ought to happen.

Far more even than we’ve managed to indicate, van Vogt’s future world is filled with secret passageways, underground hideouts, caves, catacombs and tunnels. Here it seems perfectly normal for a spaceship to be parked within a building or underneath a flowing river, or for someone to leap down a rabbit hole two miles deep, and then rise again. The world of tomorrow and the labyrinths of the mind become one and the same place in
Slan.

The Golden Age
Astounding
had plenty of writers who were prepared to be rational, plausible and responsible in what they imagined. But it had only one A.E. van Vogt, a writer convinced that he could be most true to the real underlying actualities of existence if he gave control of what he wrote to his non-rational mind and allowed it to go wherever it wished to go and say whatever it pleased to say.

In placing his unconscious in charge of his storytelling this way, van Vogt took the risk that it might blurt out something outrageous or paranoid or sexual or stupid. And, indeed, his stories were capable of being any or all of these things. However, there was one great redeeming virtue to his method, and this was that again and again van Vogt was able to evoke vistas of transcendent possibility and human becoming in his stories such as no other SF writer of his era could begin to equal.