"We called it the Long Dance," replied Karellen. "They never sleep, you know, and this lasted almost a year. Three hundred million of them, moving in a controlled pattern over a whole continent. We've analysed that pattern endlessly, but it means nothing, perhaps because we can see only the physical part of it-the small portion that's here on Earth. Possibly what we have called the Overmind is still training them, moulding them into one unit before it can wholly absorb them into its being."
Excerpt from 'Childhood's End', c. 1953, by Arthur C Clarke
Photo by Júnior Ferreira on Unsplash
by framersqool
When I was a kid I was a total bookworm, going back to when I'd basically taught myself to read by age four; or more accurately, I had taken it upon myself to require my mom, dad, sister and brother to tell me what every word I saw on every cereal box and road sign said, until I'd built enough of a crib to solve the remainder of this code called 'literacy' for myself.
I never have remembered childhood as a happy time for me, far from it.
But once years ago when I was visiting my parents out in California (the leaving behind of which human regional nightmare had become the first and most crucial mission of my early adulthood by any means available), my mom was showing off to me one of her latest projects in homemakering, a lifetime pursuit she prided herself on deeply, and one which had always made our household a total anachronism which I had been too embarrassed to share with anyone from among various friends, whose families actually got out and, you know, had fun together, and tended to leave their homes in much more of a state of easygoing chaos than my mom would have ever tolerated.
Her project had been to go back through all the old photos she had in various boxes, going back to before she and Dad were married in the early fifties, and collate them in chronological order in a series of lovingly composed albums. She was very proud of her results and rightfully so, the presentation she'd organized was truly impressive.
The images in the photos themselves, not so much for me.
I saw, for example, her two brothers, my uncles Alvin and Gary, growing progressively more and more angry and bitter with each passing year, each of them in various posed family shots looking as if their dad had just boxed their ears or cursed them out over nothing, or their mom had once again made some scene of excessively religious fervor in front of their friends (my grandma Addie was quite sure The Lord spoke to her personally each and every day, to tell her what to make for dinner and whatnot, rest her pious soul.)
But what struck me to the core was how, at every age and in every shot where I appeared throughout childhood and even adolescence, I had this big mischievous grin on my face, like I had just made some latest discovery of yet another reason to just go ahead and be happy, because one might as well.
The images entirely omitted what I remember coming to follow each such epiphany on my part, which was four other people under the same roof who'd taken it upon themselves to show me or tell me on each occasion that I had neither reason nor right to be happy, over whatever this latest Ronny-phase must be, and that if I knew what they all knew, being all older and therefore worldwise in a way I could never be because they'd always all be older than me no matter what popped into my silly head, I'd know I would soon grow bored with whatever it was, like I always did.
The memory I have of an unhappy childhood then appeared to me in a whole different light: I'd spent it doing everything I could think of to be happy, and to share that with the four people I loved most, and they'd always each in their own way already known better, that happiness itself was just a foolish delusion indulged in by Other People who would never include us in anything. The worldview of an entire planet peopled by two kinds of folks, Other People Who Do Things, and the miserable five of us, who mostly clung to each other to keep stupid feuds and spats going as long as possible, is something I have had to wrestle with for my entire life, and is the primary reason I can have nothing to do with any of my own people.
Whether immediate or extended family, any time for decades I have found myself in the company of relatives, anywhere and of any generation or grouping, this project of mutually sustained infighting misery had continued to go on full-speed without me, and was all I could see for the few hours or days I could stand to be among them. The feeling that none of them ever had any use for me as kinfolk either, has remained as the permanent impression I have, of what it means to have a family. Loneliness, for me, has always been synonymous with the experience of being among my own kin; otherwise, being lonely, no matter how alone I actually am, hardly ever occurs to me. The very highest points of my mortal existence have been passed while sharing them with exactly no one else, and I'm pretty sure that was how I'd arranged it and for cause each time.
The pictures didn't show anything but an irrepressible and spontaneous young boy, who valued joie de vivre above all else. They didn't show all the constant countermeasures taken against that defining trait of my very essence as a human being, or the sum total of their effect ending up as their all being the last people on earth I'd ever want to be stuck with.
So I read a lot growing up.
Probably the first semi-serious work of long-form fiction I ever tackled was Clarke's novel Childhood's End.
I'd ordered it from one of those catalog-newsletters that used to circulate in English classes to try to encourage kids to read, sometime in the early seventies when we lived in Pennsylvania, probably the miserablest of all those miserable years of trying to coexist with a family of strangers who all adored their misery so much that they saw me as just a disruption to the pursuit of it. Reading was quite literally the only form of inner growth, development or cultivation of joy I could get away with, with the bonus to my loved ones being that it also kept me quiet....
The story opens with a cold-war-typical scenario, of a world on the verge of nuclear apocalypse over some latest misunderstanding between the US and USSR. But this time, just before somebody opens the briefcase and unlocks the launch codes, suddenly fleets of alien spaceships appear in the skies all around the world, and simultaneously all the world's technological systems down to the last light bulb stop working.
(Say, have you heard the one about UFOs being shot down over Alaska?)
The Overlords, as it turns out, had been watching the earth for quite some time, and many other worlds as well. The usual MO was to wait until each one developed one form of mutually-assured destruction or another, and then intervene just before they managed to destroy themselves with it, and bring a rigidly-enforced status of permanent peace there, and with it increasing boredom and loss of purpose, just in time.
But they had other plans for these worlds, and forcing them to live in peace was just the beginning.
The passage above comes near the end, after our hero has stowed away on board one of the Overlords' ships and seen the alien homeworld for himself. They have discovered him and brought him back, but owing to various effects of the bending of light and various other by-products of the physics of interstellar travel, our hero's round trip has been just a matter of weeks for him while centuries have passed back on earth.
Or something; this was written in the fifties, you'll recall....
What he finds is the last of humanity, its final generation of children, since long after all the adults had gone sterile and died off, and they are in a lengthy process of collectively transforming into something post-human. Karellen is the Overlord who had served as the envoy on earth for centuries since the first chapter, and he is explaining what the last human adult to exist is witnessing, upon his return to earth.
The scene of the Long Dance has emerged again and again in my memory, all throughout this twenty-first century.
It was evoked once again, when I stood by and watched my adoptive home town of Texhoma begin to dismantle itself over a sexting affair: young people all falling under the same spell, acting on some other impulse than their own agency or self-interest as distinct individuals, and all driven by an alien technology which had simply appeared out of nowhere and taken over the world.
The news of the youth brawls in both Ukraine and Russia just this week has awakened this literary image for me once again.
I am not making any claim that aliens have taken over the world to steal our last generation of children, but damned if the past twenty-three years haven't made me wonder as much, all the same.
Something is happening to the very essence of what it is to be a human being, and this all-pervasive technology the whole world has become addicted to and reliant on has had something to do with it.
The sci-fi of former generations is only one aspect of how it feels as though all this had been expected, predicted, somehow even engineered long in advance, and by now the human species itself has been recruited to the task of being, even more than ever, the author of its own dismantling.
But that happy kid in those family photos also makes me wonder, if I'm maybe supposed to try and do something about that, while I still can.
Or not. Maybe my own household growing up was right about me all along, that I'm just prone to various fixations and wild suppositions, until I get bored with them.
Or not?
It's just that the idea of my lifetime having me bear witness to some kind of childhood's end for my species keeps being provoked, and to some extent reaffirmed, by events within that lifetime, again and again.
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.