Moreau’s Other Island. Brian Aldiss
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on animals of various kinds. Any connection?’
‘You are on Dr Moreau’s island. This is that same island.’
I laughed – a little uneasily, I have to admit.
‘Come on, Dart. Moreau’s is a purely fictitious island. Wells was writing an allegory. I can distinguish between reality and imagination, thanks.’
‘An ignorant boast, Mr Roberts. Wells may have been writing an allegory, but his island was firmly based on a real one – just as the island on which Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked was based on a real one. You know Robinson Crusoe? Just as there was a real-life equivalent of Crusoe so there was a Moreau. The real Moreau was a gentleman of some distinction at the Edinburgh Academy of Surgery, by name Mr Angus McMoreau. He was a pupil of Thomas Huxley – Wells met him. His life is well documented. Wells did very little to camouflage the real situation, beyond some over-dramatizing. In fact McMoreau brought a lawsuit.’
‘All of which must have been over a century ago.’ Dart evidently harboured some dangerous illusions. I disbelieved all he said, but thought it best to conceal my scepticism.
‘Right, it was over a century ago, right,’ said Dart, laughing sourly. ‘What difference does that make? McMoreau’s experiments are still of relevance to research today. He was probing the borderland between human and animal nature, where the springs of modern man’s behaviour lie. Territorial imperatives, to name but one example I expect you’re au fait with. Questions the scientific world tries to answer today by resort to piddling disciplines like palaeontology and archaeology, McMoreau tried to resolve through surgery. His methods were primitive but his ideas were valid … He was a cute old nut-case and no mistake.
‘After McMoreau’s death, an assistant not mentioned in Wells’s novel carried on his work for several years. Then he passed on as well, and the inhabitants of the island were left on their own to survive as best they could. It can’t have been much of a picnic. As you know they were hybrid stock, but some offspring were born, and they form the basis of the population as you see it today. They can trace their ancestry right back to McMoreau’s times.’
The symphony finished. The orchestra bowed. Dart sat in his chair, staring out towards the lagoon as he finished speaking.
‘In the Second World War, Japanese forces invaded most of the Pacific, including this island. No permanent detachment was based here. Then, after the Japanese surrender, knowledge of the island came into American hands. Its native name is Narorana, by the way. Which means private. A scientific detachment was sent to investigate and—’
He paused. Something in the courtyard outside had caught his eye. He bowled over to the window. I also went to look, so impressed was I by the expression of absolute fury on his face.
Bella alone was to be seen. She stood against the palisade. For a moment I thought she was talking to herself; then it became apparent that she must be speaking to someone on the other side of the fortification.
‘How many times have I told her—’
Dart was moving again, charging through the door and along the corridor. ‘Da Silva! Da Silva!’ he called. His chair had a turn of speed to match his anger. He appeared outside, closely followed by a slender, dark-complexioned man in a lab coat who I guessed was the hastily summoned Da Silva. I saw Dart reach for a whip clamped to the outside of his chair. Then I started running myself.
When I got outside, it was to see him striking the wretched Bella repeatedly across her shoulders. She cowered under the lash but made no attempt to run away until I shouted, whereupon she showed a good turn of speed and ran inside by a farther door.
The man in the white coat grasped my arm without a great deal of conviction and I easily brushed him aside. I grabbed Dart’s whip and flung it to the far end of the compound.
‘You dare interfere – this is my island—’ Dart’s face turned a patchy yellow.
‘They aren’t your people to do what you like with—’
‘They are my people—’
‘You don’t own their souls—’
‘They have no souls, they’re animals—’
‘Animals deserve better than that. You and I are going to quarrel, Dart, unless you keep your temper in check. I can see you feel you have reason to hate the world, and I’m sorry, but I will not stand by and see you—’
‘You fool, I’ll throw you out of here if you speak to me like that! You dare attack me!’
He was far from subdued by my action. His face was a study in malice. Moreover, I had by no means disarmed him by wrenching his whip away. He seemed to be literally well armed. Whatever disaster had struck him, I saw now that he had his arms as well as his legs replaced, though the loose-fitting garment he wore made this hard to discern. Three pairs of arms were clamped on both sides of his chair, making him look somewhat like a plastic-and-metal spider. Some of these six interchangeable appendages ended in very odd hands indeed; at least two of them looked like lethal weapons.
But he mastered his wrath and said, ‘Just be warned. Come back inside; I wish to finish speaking to you. Da Silva, back to the labs.’
His chair bore him speedily back into the room we had left, and I followed.
Dart flipped off the vision on his huge screen. Only music flowed through the room – a quartet by Shostakovich.
‘These people have to be kept under stern control – as you will understand when you have been here a little longer.’ He spoke without looking at me.
I was still angry and would not reply. When Dart spoke again, it was again in a vein of explanation, although the tone of his voice gave no hint of apology.
‘The truth is, Roberts, that I’m vexed to be interrupted in my work by you or anyone else. My researches have gone through three stages. The first stage was merely to duplicate McMoreau’s original experiments, the second – well, never mind that. Suffice it to say, cutting the cackle, that I’m now into the culminating third stage. All the early crudities of approach have been set aside, junked – finished. I’m beyond all that. I’m discovering … I’m discovering the relativity of flesh …
‘The phrase means nothing to you, Roberts. But, believe me, all these years of pain – and pained thought – suffering is nothing unless you learn from it – I am the Einstein of a revolutionary biology …’
He darted a look at me.
‘I’m listening,’ I said.
He laughed. I saw again that dark and troubled thing in him. ‘I know you’re listening, man. Mr Roberts, I want you on my side and don’t know how to get you there. I’m not another Moreau. Not by a long chunk of chalk. You’ve decided already you hate me, haven’t you?’
‘I didn’t take to the way you treated Bella.’
‘Listen, I’m not another Moreau. He was a monster in many ways, a tyrant. I’m a victim. Try and dig that concept. A victim. Look!’
With a quick movement of his chin, he struck at a button on his right shoulder. So far as I had noticed it, I regarded it as a button securing his loose-flowing tunic. It was more than that. There was a sharp snap, a whir of servo-mechanisms, and Dart’s right arm slid off and clamped itself against the side of the chair.
Another brusque chin movement, and he pushed the tunic from his shoulder so that it fell away.
I saw his real arm.
It was not an arm. It was scarcely a hand. Four flexible digits like fingers sprouted from the shoulder joint. He swerved the chair so that I could see the detail, and the puckering of flesh where a shape almost like a hand had formed under the smooth nub of shoulder.
‘On the other side it’s a bit more grotesque. And my phalanges and metatarsal bones grow out of deformed femurs – that’s what I’ve got for legs. And