IN MEMORIAM

by

Russell E. Spooner

He was Jakarnahaton, but not one person on earth knew him by that name. To humans, he was Jake Marron, a man who liked to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon in the art museum. There was nothing strange about this. Others were similarly attracted to both the traditional and the unusual in man's attempts to make his world hold still for viewing.

But the others had a tendency to talk, in hushed tones, to one another. They socialized. Jake did not. His sole purpose, in the museum as elsewhere, was to acquire knowledge.

Slightly smaller than average in height and build, Jake possessed lean, almost hawk-like features and a beard patterned after one worn by a Civil War general, in a painting which had hung in this museum a few years ago. But it was his blue-gray eyes you would notice most. If eyes were the windows to the soul, Jake Marron's soul was composed of prehistoric ice.

No one knew him well. If any did, they would have understood why there was little passion in Jake, and no sentiment. At least, that was true in the beginning, for he had left the Congress of Outer Galactic Sentients to visit earth as an observer only. His objective was to gather information about humans and a human experience his own kind were unable to know or understand.

His task was to die, in as many ways as he could discover. Jake found that there was but one way. That was to cease living. It was the immediate prelude to that event which possessed such incredible diversity.

His first experience had been with a youth, a short distance from a wilderness trail in what was then called the Northwest Territories of America. The young man lay on a bed of leaves, close in time to the event in question. His body had been pierced in several places by sharpened stones attached to wooden shafts. The back of his skull was shattered. Jake slipped unseen into the youth's battered mind and became one with his faltering stream of consciousness. He felt Jacob Marron's pain as it ended, was confused by sensations he'd never imagined could exist, and briefly did his best to comfort the boy as much as possible. He took the name for his own as he left.

Since then, the minds and bodies he'd inhabited had been as varied as the manner in which they had approached their deaths. Through generations of these often perplexing biological entities, Jake had drifted undetected, touching those he chose, experiencing their emotions as their lives ended. He became skilled in his assessment of the proper time at which to attach himself to a member of this species. He learned much concerning their habits and prejudices.

Always, when he thought of himself as human, he was Jake Marron. In time, he decided a more-or-less permanent human body would be a useful possession. He selected a solitary hunter/fisherman who lived in a crude shack within a grove of trees near the sea. The recluse died after ingesting poisonous shellfish. Jake, who had anticipated the event, was close by. He repaired the damaged liver, restarted the heart and lungs, and left with the recently vacated body as his own. He attached his "Jake Marron" name to it and maintained it in a small apartment near the museum.

The landscape painting he now examined was a strange one. He wondered why anyone had considered it worthy of display. Its composition was unbalanced, its perspective skewed. A grove of conical trees, probably poplars, circled an enclosure at the right. An open place in the circle permitted the viewer to see within to a shaded, grassy depression. This appeared like nothing quite so much as an ancient amphitheater where sacrificial rites might once have been performed. The grass in the center of the amphitheater was a deeper shade of green and more lush than elsewhere. At the left of the grove was a plain, which stretched to hills near the center of the picture. The plain at first appeared to be extensive, with the hills actually great mountains, seen from a distance. But from another angle, it was hardly more than a large field, with the hills merely angular heaps of rocky debris, the kind often left by a retreating glacier.

Jake stepped back and forth, and tried to determine why there would be such a change. As he did so, a horse and girl appeared and vanished. He leaned forward and touched the picture. There was nothing in the texture to indicate the presence of a lenticular screen, or anything else that would cause the effect he witnessed.

He moved to where the horse and girl were again visible. This also foreshortened the plain. The horse faced him with head up, its mane and tail flaring in the wind. It was pure white, a beautiful animal. Jake knew little about horses, but was sure this one was a thoroughbred of some kind.

The girl stood in profile, her right side to Jake. Her dark hair swam in the wind like the horse's mane. A gauzy, layered garment also streamed out, but hugged her tightly on the windward side, concealing little of a body that was all gracious curves. She looked at the horse, and held out her arms to it.

Jake felt bile rise in his throat, and spun on his heel, tight-lipped and angry, to walk away. He had known them, the girl and the horse, in the past.

He bumped into a dark-haired young woman he'd not seen before, either today or in his earlier visits to the museum. "Excuse me," he said, and tried to step around her.

She blocked his path. "Aren't you going to finish examining the picture?" she asked.

Jake stood perfectly still and stared at her, into eyes as empty of emotion as his own had been when he first assumed human form. "You're from the Congress?" he asked.

She nodded. "Marantikanarkin. Mary Hilton in this form."

"What are you doing here?" Jake asked. He knew the answer to this. She'd been sent to spy on him, to monitor his work and report to the Congress if he did anything he wasn't supposed to do. Such as associate with the creatures on a personal level. He'd not done that. Or develop feelings similar to what they possessed, such as sympathy. That, he admitted to himself, had happened to some extent.

"I'm an artist," said Mary Hilton. "I paint some of the pictures you see here."

Jake nodded. "Like the one with the girl and the horse."

"Of course."

"What is it supposed to be, a warning?"

"Exactly," she replied. "You're not here to influence events on this world. You're letting yourself become involved, and from our perspective, that's wrong. It destroys the validity of your observations."

Jake backed a step and slowly turned to the picture again. Yes, he thought, he knew them, the girl and the horse. She was but one of several he'd known who had died cruelly and senselessly in his presence. Few could he place accurately in times remembered, or in times he didn't want to remember. This particular scene reminded him of an occurrence in which he'd been intimately involved. Intimate, he thought, in the sense that he was there and had physically participated. Psychic intimacy - the thing humans called love was a phenomenon whose existence he doubted.

When he'd known the girl, he'd recently joined the consciousness of a rifleman in some forgotten war. Death was clearly imminent. His platoon had advanced too far too rapidly. They'd outrun their supply line and been cut off. There were just nine survivors at the time, every one a walking dead man.

For three days and nights, they wandered about the countryside, avoiding the enemy and searching for food. There had been none to find, until they stumbled upon the field and the horse. The leader of the group was a brute whose authority resided in the fact that no officers, commissioned or non-commissioned, were left. The horse was meat, several days of life. He ordered it shot and butchered, after which they built a fire in a grassy depression within a circle of trees.

They were sitting on the ground with full bellies, pretending they had options for the future, when the girl appeared. She'd apparently come to take the horse home for the night. She must have seen the mangled corpse and followed the blood trail to the campfire. For her, that was a fatal error.

Jake briefly touched the thoughts of each man in the group. He learned that those who are about to die are not inclined to exercise much control over their carnal instincts. They all knew what they were going to do. He tried to stop their intended actions by using the man whose mind he shared. For a short time, the man responded. He argued against it, citing the girl's age, which could not have been much more than sixteen. It was futile. Every one of them had her and, at the end, the brute used his bayonet. After all, she was the enemy, wasn't she?

The real enemy, in superior force, found them soon after that, and Jake shared the violence of the rifleman's death.

But why should he be reminded of all that now, by a landscape poorly done? Was his small effort to alter events at that place such a serious violation of the mandate given him? He was aware that he'd been expressly forbidden to interfere. For the most part, he had scrupulously observed that prohibition. But why was it so wrong to improve, if ever so slightly, the conditions under which he gathered his information?

He turned to Mary Hilton, who now stood beside him. "I didn't change anything there. I may have tried, but nothing came of my effort. What's the point of all this?"

"The point," she said, "is that you should not have even tried. It's not your place, nor is it your assigned duty, to do any more than observe."

"And if I should see some way by which my unseen influence might relieve suffering? Am I forbidden the slight satisfaction of making life more bearable for those unable to help themselves?"

Mary moved closer and faced him. She placed an index finger against Jake's chest. "You've forgotten who you are, or you'd not ask such a question. We do not control events on this world, nor do we wish to. Remember the tale of the shining one, and all the misery he created."

Jake knew the story. One of their fellow beings had absorbed enough energy from a white dwarf star to fluoresce at will. On a world not too different from this one, he had used his ability to temporarily confuse the leaders of an expeditionary force headed toward an enemy village. Their intent was to annihilate it. A superstitious folk, the bright light in the darkest part of the forested approach to the village aroused wild speculation and violent disagreements. They took a wrong turn in the path.

The attack never occurred, and the inhabitants of the village grew in strength and numbers. Their contribution turned the tide of war in favor of their allies.

Open and generous beings under the pressure of adversity, they became brutal tyrants when victorious. The entire world was eventually plunged into a dark age of barbarism. This because a bodiless entity briefly fluoresced in a forest.

Jake went to the exit and left the museum. A backward glance confirmed that Mary stood outside the building and watched him leave. At the apartment he placed Jake Marron on the sofa in a deep sleep. He became Jakarnahaton.

For his next foray, he decided on a village in east Africa, where the daily death toll from starvation presented a multitude of choices. As quickly as he thought about it, he was there. A local militiaman rode the back of an incoming relief truck filled with food. He was about to meet an ambush of armed bandits. There was no chance he would survive, so Jake became one with him.

It happened at the edge of the village. The driver died instantly, but the militiaman escaped the first hail of gunfire. He rolled off the sacks of flour to the ground. He was not an especially brave man, but his family lived here. His only son had already died. His wife's milk had dried up and his infant daughter could not last another day without the foodstuffs he protected on this truck.

He carried a submachinegun, with a spare magazine of ammunition. He raced around the rear of the truck. The gun jumped and chattered as he swept what he guessed was the position of the bandits. It was doubtful he hit any, but they kept their heads down.

People came out of their shacks and ran, walked, or hobbled to the truck. Food was close enough to reach. Some bandits realized they were about to lose much of their prize. With angry shouts, they charged the truck, firing as they came.

The militiaman emptied the magazine and pressed the stud to eject it. He slammed the other in place. He aimed at the nearest bandit. It was a skinny boy, eleven or twelve years old. He wielded not a rifle, but a rusty old sword.

Visions of what his own son might have become burned through the militiaman's mind and reduced it to a welter of confused thoughts.

Jake knew the man's indecision, as other bandits killed and wounded unarmed villagers. Among them was the militiaman's wife. This boy, this sword-swinging juvenile hardly out of his infancy, prevented the man from performing his sworn duty. He could neither save the food entrusted to him nor protect the innocent villagers. Jake urged him to act, to do what was unavoidable, and to do it quickly. The militiaman fired. The sword sailed through the air. The boy fell and clutched his torn, bleeding chest. He died. Other bandits also died, before a half dozen rifles cut down the militiaman.

That was the end of it, as far as Jake was concerned. It had never been his habit to wait and see what took place after he'd shared a death. That was human business, and of little interest to him or his kind.

He returned to the apartment, occupied Jake's physical body once again, and knew he'd committed another error. He'd likely be reminded of it in some future painting. But whether that happened or not, he believed he'd just experienced something worthwhile. With a suddenness that shocked him, the realization came that by far the greatest number of his most interesting sharings had involved military actions.

This brought to mind something he'd learned at an earlier time: a soldier has but one prime duty, which is to die. All his training is in preparation for that event. The only qualifier was expressed in purely economic terms. It should cost the enemy more to kill him than it cost him to kill one of them. Wars were won or lost on that simple premise.

But this explained nothing of the attitude he'd found again and again in those whose death he'd shared. They had the same fears as the coronary patient in a hospital bed, or the dying victim of an automobile accident. But a soldier rose above his fear enough to function, to do whatever was required of him.

It was like a drug, like morphine perhaps. Once, he'd miscalculated the ability of a young soldier to hang onto that last thread of life. The dying had been prolonged. At the field hospital, the only treatment for his splintered limbs and ruptured internal organs was massive doses of morphine. Triage had determined he could not live anyway, and no further effort could be made on his behalf. The time was more urgently needed for those who might survive.

Jake became aware that neither morphine nor any other analgesic medication actually stopped pain. It simply made it possible for the sufferer to disassociate himself from pain, to stand beside it and treat it as a separate entity. Those who knew they were about to die in battle, he thought, did something very similar. They put that impending event, with all its fear and terror, to one side while they performed the role for which they had been trained. This was a curious ability, he decided, and he was unsure whether he should admire it or condemn it.

He returned to the museum on the following Sunday. There was another painting, which reminded him of a past involvement. His interference had been minimal. The scene was a pastoral one of grazing sheep near a thatch-roofed farmhouse. He recalled that he'd diverted artillery fire, which prevented destruction of the house. He'd known that several terror-stricken children huddled inside. It had been a forward observer with whom he had shared, and he simply called back slightly altered map coordinates. Forward observers rarely lived very long, and this one was no exception.

Mary Hilton stood beside him again. "Why?" she asked.

Why indeed, Jake thought. He'd never tried to rationalize his deviant behavior. Nor did he create excuses for it. Regardless of the story about the shining one, he could not believe that his slight prodding with a person about to die could matter.

"All right," he said, "I admit to a few mistakes. I fail to see how they can make any difference. Nothing really changed."

"You did," said Mary. "You changed, and I suspect are now useless to us as an observer. Don't you understand what's happened to you, Jakarnahaton?"

He did understand. He knew, even if he'd never tried to express it with language. Jake had, through this survey and his conscious specialization in military actions, acquired a sense of what humans considered right and wrong. He shouldn't have cared about this. At no time in the long space-faring history of his species had a moral sense ever been found an advantage. He stared glumly at the painting.

"You've been infected," Mary said. "You're contaminated by those very qualities you were sent to analyze in your study subjects."

He nodded. She had spoken the truth and he knew it. Actually, it was worse than she suspected. In circumstances that involved the most hideous aspects of humanity, in those situations which degraded, brutalized, and stripped all dignity from the participants, he had developed a sense of compassion.

The realization startled him. It drove him to a deeper contemplation of not only the role he had played in past events, but in the peripheral knowledge he had unintentionally acquired. He knew, for example, that there were strange paradoxes in the beliefs and behavior of this species. Truth could exist on the cutting edge of the greatest lies. Morality could be found in the darkest cesspools of sin.

"What am I supposed to do now?" he asked Mary.

"Nothing," she replied. "Do nothing until a decision has been reached." She turned and walked away.

Jake left the museum and wandered aimlessly into the town's commercial center. People bustled about, buying what they thought were the necessities and small luxuries of their lives. Not one, as far as Jake could determine, had the slightest clue that their actions were at any time under scrutiny. For he had long ago gone beyond the simple sharing of the death phenomenon with those who surrendered life. He analyzed life in human terms, in an attempt to better understand the losses which terrified so many of them.

He could not, he realized, obey Mary's order. Regardless of the consequences, he could not do nothing. He ate, returned to the apartment, and made Jake Marron comfortable in bed.

Thus began a period of frenzied activity. He bent time itself to his needs, turned future and past into a mosaic of wildly divergent experiences.

He shared death with the boy whose body parts were so scattered by an explosion, he simply became one with the land over which he had fought. He shared with the one buried under so much debris, it would be centuries before any trace of his remains were found. Some were blown to bits in the air, some eaten by sharks in the sea. No one, other than Jake, ever knew what had really happened to them.

He died in London during the Blitz of Word War II. He was trapped underwater in the Arizona at Pearl Harbor. He burned to death in the Dresden firestorm. He went to the gas chambers in Auschwitz and Dachau. His body was vaporized in a blinding instant at Hiroshima.

He died as a rear-guard Turk in the mountains of North Korea. He suffered death by sharpened bamboo stakes and hidden mines in Vietnam. He was crushed by the pressure when his submarine, damaged by depth charges, sank into a near-bottomless abyss. His lungs dissolved to bloody pulp from the effects of chemical weapons. Phosphor shells sent bright burning particles into his body, where they continued to burn. Every horror of warfare became familiar to him.

What he learned, over and over, was that there were qualities about this species he would probably never understand.

Less and less of his gathered impressions were pure reportage, filed away in his subconscious and accessible to the Congress. He retained a greater portion in his conscious mind, until he realized he possessed something that had hitherto been peculiar to humans.

It was not conscience, for he knew this to be based on the social mores of a particular time and culture. People of one age were often appalled at what was considered proper behavior in another. Ethical conduct was founded on ever-changing values.

There was something simpler, something which did not change, which motivated just enough individuals to preserve humanity through its often self-inflicted catastrophes. This was altruism, the willingness of a few to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others. A strange aspect of this quality was that the "others" were not necessarily known to them.

Stranger yet was his irrefutable conclusion that of all the occupations by which humans made their living, the one which added nothing to the wealth of its society, and in fact was a constant drain upon it, had the highest percentage of those willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the whole. This was the military. Part of it was training, he was certain. But another part was in the character of many who elected to serve what they considered a higher purpose, a less selfish good.

He learned that this impulse to patriotism could unfortunately be used by those who had less than honorable goals in mind. Instead of the end justifying the means, noble means could be perverted to serve an ignoble end. Many a bright, unselfish, and compassionate young man in Germany's Wehrmacht died to preserve the insanity of Hitler's extremism.

Jake made his way back to the apartment. He'd been away a long time.

He'd been away too long. Jake Marron's human body had gone beyond sleep to a comatose state. His vital signs were not good. Unless Jakarnahaton took control and once more became the consciousness of this biological entity, it was beyond help. He considered his options for the immediate future and knew they were limited. Use the body again, only to have it taken from him by Mary or another representative of the Congress? Or abandon it and remain in his unseen state, not impossible for them to find, but difficult if he were careful? He chose the latter course. He induced cardiac arrest in the human shell that had been his for many years. There was no remorse in this, for the thing had no mind, no will, no self-awareness without him.

Without lifting the telephone receiver, he initiated, inside the instrument, those electronic pulses which would translate into a 911 call. He gave the address and said he was suffering a heart attack. He left. He thought about the museum and was there. No one else was in the exhibition room. On every wall were paintings which reminded him of his transgressions. Shock at the great number subsided into resentment that he should be so severely censured for behavior he still refused to admit was wrong.

What he could no longer deny, after seeing this display, was that in the aggregate, he'd done enough to alter the course of human history. But for the better, he convinced himself. Always, he had striven to improve conditions, to temper the brutality of circumstances. He sensed another presence in the room. "Marantikanarkin?" he inquired.

"Yes," she replied, although she did not make herself visible as the Mary Hilton entity. "You went too far, you know. We must now abandon our mission here. Henceforth, this world shall be excluded from consideration for membership in the community of sentient beings."

"Because of my actions?" he asked.

"Because you have made it impossible for us to form an unbiased opinion of its inhabitants' suitability. One thing leads to another, Jakarnahaton. Many things lead to irreversible changes. This is no longer the world we set out to examine." He paused. "Then may I return to the Congress? There's nothing else I can accomplish here."

"You mean there's no further damage you can do. Perhaps that's true. But your irresponsible behavior requires punishment of some sort. It has been deemed appropriate that you remain here on this planet until it once more encounters the Congress."

"But that could be thousands of revolutions of the earth around its primary."

"And perhaps in that length of time, you might see the error of your ways and devise counter measures."

Her presence faded, and he was alone. He sent desperate messages to the Congress, begging forgiveness. There were no replies. He wanted to go home, to nothing any human would recognize as such, but to him it was familiarity and comfort. He wanted to join others of his kind, with similar sensitivities and dispositions. He was done with earth and its creatures, and wished to affirm life rather than examine death.

From a distance already far beyond the orbit of any planet in this system came a faint and diminishing call. "Farewell, Jake Marron. Now live with what you have wrought."

Both Jake Marron and Jakarnahaton had been written off. He was a non-entity without purpose on a foreign world. Had he still possessed a functioning biological specimen to inhabit, he might have wept. Abandonment was his lot and despair his companion. For a time uncounted, he wandered the earth, observing, noting, but never joining, never interfering. Nothing changed. Death was an ongoing event, endlessly repeated and predictable. He only wished he might participate in it, manage one final joining and vanish with his subject. He could not. His joining ability had been cancelled, oblivion denied him.

Eventually, his aimless wandering took him to a place near the east coast of North America, to Arlington Cemetery. It was November and a cold mist blew off the Potomac. About this time of year, he recalled, an armistice had ended the agony of World War I. An armistice, he also recalled, was defined as a temporary cessation of hostilities. That's all it had ever been.

There were few people about. He supposed it was too uncomfortable for most potential visitors. He drifted across the Fields of Dead. Row on seemingly endless row of identical markers were a specter of desolation to all that was left of his sentiments and sensitivities.

Although he'd never visited this place before, he knew where he should go. A single thought took him there.

The sentry walked back and forth in rigid, cadenced steps. Pace, stop, turn. Pace, stop, turn. Every hour another took his place.

What did they think they were guarding? he asked himself. There was a body in that tomb, of course. It was the body of some unfortunate youth who had figuratively swung a rusty sword at what he perceived to be the forces of injustice. He had died, as had so many others. His identification lost, no one knew exactly who he was.

No human knew. Jake knew, had known him as a thousand different personalities, each worthy of life, each paid in the coin of death for whatever idealism had guided him. Jake knew, because for a brief time he had been the person in that tomb.

Jake Marron, or Jakarnahaton, or what remained of either, made his final decision on this world. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier should not contain mere dead flesh. It should also possess the spirit of those it represented. He could be that because he had been that.

From that time forward, the sentries who pace out their hour of duty do so with more purpose. Those who visit the Tomb sense a Presence, and leave knowing that there is something there, in the air around it, or in the soil on which it stands, that makes them stop a minute and realize they could not be what they are without the sacrifices this place represents.

The visitor to earth did, after all, make a real difference to life on this world. If he believes he made it better, what reason could we have to dispute that?

(The End)