TOLERANCE TOO SOON

By: Roger W. Cain

"What kind of machine did he have in there?"

"Well…"

"Well?"

"Ok… We think it's a time machine, only it doesn't have any controls we can find. Right there among the Neanderthal artifacts, we found it sitting in the hall of cave paintings."

"So the U. Mass professors are excavating the floor of the cave on Tuesday; and Wednesday this guy walks out of the cave and goes ape-shit when he see their tents."

"Right. They thought he was some demented protestor going to mess up their dig."

"So when did they call us?"

"Right after they found the machine."

"You still have the place cordoned off?"

"The French have got a battalion around the place - historic site and all - and they're pissed we won't let them see their "cave man.'"

"Does he talk?"

"No, but he's not stupid and he's no cave man. His clothes all fit and they're made of something synthetic. Shoes too. Size 24! He wasn't afraid of the plane we took him in and the lab guys are up to calculus, teaching him our symbols for math. We can't figure out his writing yet, but he's learning to write our words a hundred a day."

"Let me see those pictures again." General Breen considered the biometrics. Bony hairline brow ridges, massive face and nose, eyes where a forehead should have been and a receding chin stuck on a five foot frame at two hundred and fifty pounds. Hell of a horse-faced linebacker, with a brainpan just like mine.

"I heard you gave him a computer."

"Right. He's typing something on the word processor right now."

"If he's so smart, why can't he talk?"

"We've got a theory about that."

"Ok…"

"We think he may use telepathy instead of speech."

"What?"

"Only we can't hear him think and he can't hear us think. Sometimes he sings to himself. It seems like some kind of meditation - maybe worship. He just doesn't use mouth sounds for… communication."

"Jesus!"

#

Reighel sat in his human prison cell engrossed in a sparkling vision of snow-capped mountain grandeur above a placid azure lake, imbued with teeming life unseen. It was his meditative tome. In the telepathic language of his species it comprised a single word that calmed him to undertake his investigative duty.

The syntax-bound communication of human utterance offended him. He strained to think in the plodding, constipated, serial barks of what they used for language.

Is this a parallel dimension? Did the machine slip outside of time and strand me where humans survived and we did not? Did I jump too far into the future where all my kind have left earth for the stars and monkeys have evolved into men?

Or did a flawed machine go backwards to a time before men blew themselves back to sticks and stones - before my species even arose?

Reighel lapsed into the language of his people and viewed by a single thought the unbroken procession of his species' history, from the first mind-touch in the stone-age cave.

I only did what worked so many times before: a trip into the past to convey a future understanding. Emissaries so commissioned always returned to their future of origin to witness and to report the salutary effects of accelerating our advancement.

Reighel thrilled with the most magnificent word in his mental constellation - a vision of universal peace and unity that propelled his people to the stars. The concept itself was brought from the far future and delivered with the time machine to prevent a catastrophic war.

Tolerance. Reighel cringed at the pitiful limitation of the best human grunt he had found for the concept. A vision of holocaust assaulted his imagination as the intuition of his holographic brain calculated the answer to his investigation. He howled in incoherent anguish and punished himself by speaking the human words in his mind:

All I did was the most wonderful thing that had ever been done for us. I took tolerance to our earliest progenitors as our progeny had brought it back from our future!

Weeping, Reighel returned to the keyboard toy that the humans had given him.

#

Greetings, skinny monkeys that call yourselves "human." You have not changed in twenty-five thousand years. You still talk with your mouths instead of your minds, and for all your science you still kill each other. Long ago, my species killed as you do, wasting centuries warring in clans and tribes. We were stronger, better adapted to the ice ages we thought killed you all. Finally we learned tolerance and built a world with one mind and heart. We traveled to the stars and made every world a paradise.

I am the fool, who sought to advance our civilization by teaching blessed tolerance to my ancestors, before they would learn it on their own.

I traveled back through time to mind-teach a new beginning and push my own time toward the future. Alas, we never knew you skinny monkeys would survive if we didn't kill you. Now you have killed us instead.

I came out of the ancestral caves, back in my own time, expecting centuries of advancement. Instead I found you skinny monkeys, still earthbound and desecrating graves.

Sing a lesson from the ages.

Hear me lest it spell your doom.

Silence teachers; stifle sages.

Don't learn tolerance too soon.

Copyright 2003.