Immortal Curiosity

The Green Brain is a timely piece reflecting on the results of mankind’s attempts to halt and suppress the growth of nature and her denizens. Published in 1966, Herbert’s words still ring true– though the form and aspect of the threat has transformed into something different than he might have imagined. The external issues are writ large through rather extreme creations befitting the genre, providing a fitting reminder of the internal turmoil of the main characters. Thus I found it subtly pensive; not brooding thanks to its brevity, but introspective nonetheless.

Below are some of my favorite sections and quotations. I noticed in reviewing them once collected that they are strikingly similar to a collection I made while reading Destination: Void, another Herbert work. I’ll have to dig those out soon as well. And, of course, I recommend reading this book.

Pg 121:

That fact should have been part of the original report, the Brain thought. The messengers must be taught not to intervene, but report all details complete with weight-by-source. But how can this be done? They’re creatures of firm reflex and tied to a self-limiting system.

Obviously new messengers would have to be designed and bred.

With this thought, the Brain moved even further from its creators. It understood then how an action-of-mimicry, a pure reflex, gave birth to itself, but the Brain, the thing-produced-by-reflex, was having an inevitable feedback effect, changing the original reflexes which had created it.

Pg 139:

Joao stared at his hands.

He’d never before been trapped in a situation where both fear and idleness forced him to look inward. The experience terrified and fascinated him.

Fear is the penalty of consciousness forced to stare at itself. Joao thought. I should be busy with something. With what? Sleep, then.

But he feared sleep because he sensed dreams poised there.

Emptiness… what a prize that would be: emptiness, he thought.

He felt that somewhere in his past he had reached a glowing summit devoid of before-and-after complications, a place of no doubts. Action…play…reflex motion– that had been the life. Now, it all lay there, open to introspection, open to study and re-examination.

But he sensed there might be a tip-over point with introspection, that somewhere within him lurked memories which could engulf him.

Pg 140:

This is the time of the timid and the terrible, Chen-Lhu thought. The night is my time– and I am not timid.

And he smiled at the way the two shadows in the front seats had become one shadow.

The animal with two backs, he thought. It was such an amusing thought that he put a hand to his mouth to suppress laughter.

Pg 154:

Atheism, the Brain thought, as chemical serenity returned. They spoke of atheism and heaven (religion-subtended). These matters puzzled the Brain. The conversation, reportedly, had come out of an argument and pertained somehow to the human mating pattern… at least among the humans in the vehicle.

Pg 177:

But Joao had heard the crying-out in their voices and he remembered Vierho, the Padre, so solemn, saying, “A person cries out against life because it’s lonely, and because life’s broken off from whatever created it. But no matter how much you hate life, you love it, too. It’s like a cauldron boiling with everything you have to have– but very painful to the lips.”

Pg 180:

She disengaged herself, sat back in her corner, stared out the window. The sweeping passage of shoreline caught her eyes hypnotically: fused movement. It was like time– the immediate past never quite discarded, no fixed starting point for the future– all one, all melted into one gliding, stretched-out forever…

Pg 183:

Chen-Lhu felt fluid heat ripple through his veins, anger like a series of velvet explosions. Still, the unknown remained out there, a place of ravenous tranquility, full of furiously remembered brilliance even in this blackness.

Fear strips away all pretense, Chen-Lhu thought. I’ve been dishonest with myself.

It was as though the thought thrust him suddenly around a corner, there to confront himself like a reflection in a mirror. And he was both substance and reflection. The abruptly awakening clarity sent memories streaking through his mind until he felt his entire past dancing and weaving like fabric rolling off a loom– reality and illusion in the same cloth.

The sensation passed, leaving him feverish with an inner trembling and a sense of terrible loss.

Pg 184:

‘You God-fearing fools”, he snarled. “All of you chanting: ‘Thou hast being, God!’ There couldn’t be a god without man! A god wouldn’t know he existed if it weren’t for man! If there ever was a god… this universe is his mistake!”

Chen-Lhu fell silent, surprised to find himself panting as though after great exertion.

A burst of rain hammered against the canopy as though in some celestial answer, then faded into wet muttering.

“Well… would you listen to the atheist,” Rhin said.

Pg 194:

Chen-Lhu felt the sound like a direct contact on his nerves magnified almost beyond endurance. It grated through him in an unchecked rhythm, dominated his world: a deafening cymbal dissonance gone wild in counterpoint, a rasping, crunching, maelstrom grating. He felt that he had become a seeing-hearing-feeling receptor without any other function.

Rhin pressed her face against Joao. Everything was the hot smell of Joao’s boy and insane motion. She felt the pod lift….lift….lift and slam down, twisting, turning. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down. It was like some crazy kind of sex. A staccato punching motion shook her as the pod shot down a washboard of rapids.

Joao felt all his consciousness concentrated into the terrible intensity of sight. He saw directly out an opening in the cabin side where no opening should be– a millrace chute, a black cavity of water, solid spray, damp green shade along a scarred cliff. He looked directly down into a frothed spiral of current as the pod tipped.

Pg 206:

“Tell me”, the Brains said, “how you define slave.”

“I’m a slave now,” Joao whispered. “I’m in bondage to you. I must obey you or you can kill me.”

“But you tried to kill yourself,” the Brain said.

The thought unfolded and unfolded in Joao’s awareness.

“A slave is one who must produce wealth for another,” the Brain said. “There is only one true wealth in all the universe. I have given you some of it. I have given your father and your mate some of it.” And your friends. This wealth is living time. Time. Are we slaves because we have given you some more time to live?”

[…]

The giant face turned to look out at the cavemouth, where dawn was beginning to touch the world with gray. “That out there, that, too, is a greenhouse.” Again, it peered down at Joao, the giant eyes glittering. “To sustain life, a greenhouse must be maintained in a deliberate state of balance by the life within it– enough of this chemical, enough of that one, another substance available when required. That which is poison one day can be the sweetest food the next day.”

Pg 208:

“But you’ll be our masters,” Joao said. And he thought: Rhin… Rhin, where are you?

“We’ll merely achieve a new balance,” the Brain said. “It will be interesting to see. But there will be time to discuss this later. You are quite free to move… and capable of it. Just do not come too close to me: my nurses will not permit that. But for now, feel free to join your mate outside. There is sunshine this morning. Let the sun work on your skin and on the chlorophyll in your blood. And when you come back here, tell me if the sun is your slave.”