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`I was dreaming,' he said. `I was just six years old and in the city of
Tours. In France, where we were living then. My tutor, John Gilchrist, took
me and my brother Edward to see the execution of a woman who had
poisoned her family. It was a treat, Gilchrist said. I was excited, and I
peeked through my fingers when he told us not to watch the final seconds,
when the blade of the guillotine came down. But I did; I had to. I remember
getting a little sick at my stomach but that was the only effect the gruesome
scene had on me. I seemed to have dislocated myself while I was watching
it; it was as if I saw the whole thing through a thick glass, as if it were
unreal. Or I was unreal so I wasn't really horrified.'
Monat had lit another marihuana. Its fight was enough so that
Burton could see him shaking his head. `Flow savage! You mean that you
not only killed your criminals, you cut their heads off! In public! And you
allowed children to see it!'
`They were a little more humane in England,' Burton said. `'They
hung the criminals!'
`At least the French permitted the people to be fully aware that they
were spilling the blood of their criminals,' Monat said. `The blood was on
their hands. But apparently this aspect did not occur to anyone. Not
consciously, anyway. So now, after how many years sixty-three? you
smoke some marihuana and you relive an incident which you had always
believed did not harm you. But, this time, you recoil with horror. You
screamed like a frightened child. You reacted as you should have reacted
when you were a child. I would say that the marihuana dug away some
deep layers of repression and uncovered the horror that had been buried
there for sixty-three years.'
`Perhaps,' Burton said. He stopped. There was thunder and
lightning in the distance. A minute later, a rushing sound came, and then
the patter of drops on the roof. It had rained about this time last night,
about three in the morning, he would guess. And this second night, it was
raining about the same time. The downpour became heavy, but the roof
had been packed tightly, and no water dripped down through it. Some
water did, however, come under the lick wall, which was uphill. It spread
out over the floor but did not wet them, since the grass and leaves under
them formed a mat about ten inches thick. Burton talked with Monat until
the rain ceased approximately half an hour later. Monat fell asleep; Kazz
had never awakened. Burton tried to get back to sleep but could not. He
had never felt so alone, and he was afraid that he might slip back into the
nightmare. After a while, he left the but and walked to the one which
Wilfreda had chosen. He smelled the tobacco before he got to the
doorway. The tip of her cigarette glowed in the dark. She was a dim figure
sitting upright in the pile of grass and leaves.
`Hello,' she said. `I was hoping you would come.'
`It's the instinct to own property,' Burton said.
`I doubt that it's an instinct in man' Frigate said. Some people in the
'60's 1960's, that is tried to demonstrate that man had an instinct which
they called the territorial imperative But..'
`I like that phrase: It has a fine ring to it,' Burton said.
`I knew you'd like it,' Frigate said. `But Ardrey and others tried to
prove that man not only had an instinct to claim a certain area of land as
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his own, he also was descended from a killer ape. And the instinct to kill
was still strong in his heritage from the killer ape. Which explained national
boundaries, patriotism both national and local, capitalism, war, murder,
crime, and so forth. But the other school of thought, or of the
temperamental inclination, maintained that all these are the results of
culture, of the cultural continuity of societies dedicated from earliest times
to tribal hostilities, to war, to murder, to crime, and so forth. Change the
culture, and the killer ape is missing. Missing because he was never there,
like the little man on the stairs. The killer was the society, and society bred
the new killers out of every batch of babies. But there were some societies;
composed of preliterates, it is true, but still societies, that did not breed
killers. And they were proof that man was not descended from a killer ape.
Or I should say, he was perhaps descended from the ape but he did not
carry the killing genes any longer, any more than he carried the genes for a
heavy supraorbital ridge of hairy skin or thick bones or a skull with only 650
cubic centimeters capacity.'
`That is all very interesting,' Burton said. `We'll go into the theory
more deeply at another time. Let me point out to you, however, that almost
every member of resurrected humanity comes from a culture which
encouraged war and murder and crime and rape and robbery and
madness. It is these people among whom we are living and with whom we
have to deal. There may be a new generation some day. I don't know. It's
too early to say, since we've only been here for seven days. But, like it or
not, we are in a world populated by beings who quite oft act as if they were
killer apes.'
`In the meantime, let's get back to our model.' They were sitting on
bamboo stools before Burton's hut. On a little bamboo table in front of them
was a model of a boat made from pine and bamboo. It had a double hull
across the top of which was a platform with a low railing is the center. It
had a single mast, very tall, with a fore-and-aft rig, a balloon jib sail, and a
slightly raised bridge with a wheel. Burton and Frigate had used chert
knives and the edge of the scissors to carve the model of the catamaran.
Burton had decided to name the boat, when it was built, The Hadji.
It would be going on a pilgrimage, though its goal was not Mecca. He
intended to sail it up The River as far as it would go. (By now, the river had
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