Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon [top rated books of all time .TXT] 📗

experiences merely in order to afford my host’s body time to

recuperate. Bvalitu, for his part, at least in the early days of our

partnership, was inclined to resent my power of watching his dreams. For

though, while awake, he could withdraw his thoughts from my observation,

asleep he was helpless. Naturally I very soon learned to refrain from

exercising this power; and he, on his side, as our intimacy developed

into mutual respect, no longer cherished this privacy so strictly. In

time each of us came to feel that to taste the flavor of life in

isolation from the other was to miss half its richness and subtlety.

Neither could entirely trust his own judgment or his own motives unless

the other were present to offer relentless though friendly criticism.

 

We hit upon a plan for satisfying at once our friendship, his interest

in my world, and my own longing for home. Why should we not somehow

contrive to visit my planet together? I had traveled thence; why should

we not both travel thither? After a spell on my planet, we could proceed

upon the larger venture, again together.

 

For this end we had to attack two very different tasks. The technique of

interstellar travel, which I had achieved only by accident and in a very

haphazard manner, must now be thoroughly mastered. Also we must somehow

locate my native planetary system in the astronomical maps of the Other

Men.

 

This geographical, or rather cosmographical, problem proved insoluble.

Do what I would, I could provide no data for the orientation. The

attempt, however, led us to an amazing, and for me a terrifying

discovery. I had traveled not only through space but through time

itself. In the first place, it appeared that, in the very advanced

astronomy of the Other Men, stars as mature as the Other Sun and as my

own Sun were rare. Yet in terrestrial astronomy this type of star was

known to be the commonest of all throughout the galaxy. How could this

be? Then I made another perplexing discovery. The galaxy as known to the

Other Astronomers proved to be strikingly different from my recollection

of the galaxy as known to our own astronomers. According to the Other

Men the great star-system was much less flattened than we observe it to

be. Our astronomers tell us that it is like a circular biscuit five

times as wide as it is thick. In their view it was more like a bun. I

myself had often been struck by the width and indefiniteness of the

Milky Way in the sky of the Other Earth. I had been surprised, too, that

the Other Astronomers believed the galaxy to contain much gaseous matter

not yet condensed into stars. To our astronomers it seemed to be almost

wholly stellar.

 

Had I then traveled unwittingly much further than I had supposed, and

actually entered some other and younger galaxy? Perhaps in my period of

darkness, when the rubies and amethysts and diamonds of the sky had all

vanished, I had actually sped across intergalactic space. This seemed at

first the only explanation, but certain facts forced us to discard it in

favor of one even stranger.

 

Comparison of the astronomy of the Other Men with my fragmentary

recollection of our own astronomy convinced me that the whole cosmos of

galaxies known to them differed from the whole cosmos of galaxies known

to us. The average form of the galaxies was much more rotund and much

more gaseous, in fact much more primitive, for them than for us.

 

Moreover, in the sky of the Other Earth several galaxies were so near as

to be prominent smudges of light even for the naked eye. And astronomers

had shown that many of these so-called “universes” were much closer to

the home “universe” than the nearest known in our astronomy.

 

The truth that now flashed on Bvalltu and me was indeed bewildering.

Everything pointed to the fact that I had somehow traveled up the river

of time and landed myself at a date in the remote past, when the great

majority of the stars were still young. The startling nearness of so

many galaxies in the astronomy of the Other Men could be explained on

the theory of the “expanding universe.” Well I knew that this dramatic

theory was but tentative and very far from satisfactory; but at least

here was one more striking bit of evidence to suggest that it must be in

some sense true. In early epochs the galaxies would of course be

congested together. There could be no doubt that I had been transported

to a world which had reached the human stage very long before my native

planet had been plucked from the sun’s womb.

 

The full realization of my temporal remoteness from my home reminded me

of a fact, or at least a probability, which, oddly enough, I had long

ago forgotten. Presumably I was dead. I now desperately craved to be

home again. Home was all the while so vivid, so near. Even though its

distance was to be counted in parsecs and in aeons, it was always at

hand. Surely, if I could only wake, I should find myself there on our

hilltop again. But there was no waking. Through Bvalltu’s eyes I was

studying star-maps and pages of outlandish script. When he looked up, I

saw standing opposite us a caricature of a human being, with a frog-like

face that was scarcely a face at all, and with the thorax of a

pouter-pigeon, naked save for a greenish down. Red silk knickers crowned

the spindle shanks that were enclosed in green silk stockings. This

creature, which, to the terrestrial eye, was simply a monster, passed on

the Other Earth as a young and beautiful woman. And I myself, observing

her through Bvalltu’s benevolent eyes, recognized her as indeed

beautiful. To a mind habituated to the Other Earth her features and her

every gesture spoke of intelligence and wit. Clearly, if I could admire

such a woman, I myself must have changed.

 

It would be tedious to tell of the experiments by which we acquired and

perfected the art of controlled flight through interstellar space.

Suffice it that, after many adventures, we learned to soar up from the

planet whenever we wished, and to direct our course, by mere acts of

volition, hither and thither among the stars. We seemed to have much

greater facility and accuracy when we worked together than when either

ventured into space by himself. Our community of mind seemed to

strengthen us even for spatial locomotion.

 

It was a very strange experience to find oneself in the depth of space,

surrounded only by darkness and the stars, yet to be all the while in

close personal contact with an unseen companion. As the dazzling lamps

of heaven flashed past us, we would think to one another about our

experiences, or debate our plans, or share our memories of our native

worlds. Sometimes we used my language, sometimes his. Sometimes we

needed no words at all, but merely shared the-flow of imagery in our two

minds.

 

The sport of disembodied flight among the stars must surely be the most

exhilarating of all athletic exercises. It was not without danger; but

its danger, as we soon discovered, was psychological, not physical. In

our bodiless state, collision with celestial objects mattered little.

Sometimes, in the early stages of our adventure, we plunged by accident

headlong into a star. Its interior would, of course, be inconceivably

hot, but we experienced merely brilliance.

 

The psychological dangers of the sport were grave. We soon discovered

that disheartenment, mental fatigue, fear, all tended to reduce our

powers of movement. More than once we found ourselves immobile in space,

like a derelict ship on the ocean; and such was the fear roused by this

plight that there was no possibility of moving till, having experienced

the whole gamut of despair, we passed through indifference and on into

philosophic calm.

 

A still graver danger, but one which trapped us only once, was mental

conflict. A serious discord of purpose over our future plans reduced us

not only to immobility but to terrifying mental disorder. Our

perceptions became confused. Hallucinations tricked us. The power of

coherent thought vanished. After a spell of delirium, filled with an

overwhelming sense of impending annihilation, we found ourselves back on

the Other Earth; Bvalltu in his own body, lying in bed as he had left

it, I once more a disembodied viewpoint floating somewhere over the

planet’s surface. Both were in a state of insane terror, from which we

took long to recover. Months passed before we renewed our partnership

and our adventure.

 

Long afterwards we learned the explanation of this painful incident.

Seemingly we had attained such a deep mental accord that, when conflict

arose, it was more like dissociation within a single mind than discord

between two separate individuals. Hence its serious consequences.

 

As our skill in disembodied flight increased, we found intense pleasure

in sweeping hither and thither among the stars. We tasted the delights

at once of skating and of flight. Time after time, for sheer joy, we

traced huge figures-of-eight in and out around the two partners of a

“double star.” Sometimes we stayed motionless for long periods to watch

at close quarters the waxing and waning of a variable. Often we plunged

into a congested cluster, and slid amonest its suns like a car gliding

among the lights of a city. Often we skimmed over billowy and palely

luminous surfaces of gas, or among feathery shreds and prominences; or

plunged into mist, to find ourselves in a world of featureless dawn

light. Sometimes, without warning, dark continents of dust engulfed us,

blotting out the universe. Once, as we were traversing a populous region

of the heaven, a star suddenly blazed into exaggerated splendor,

becoming a “nova.” As it was apparently surrounded by a cloud of

non-luminous gas, we actually saw the expanding sphere of light which

was radiated by the star’s explosion. Traveling outward at light’s

speed, it was visible by reflection from the surrounding gas, so that it

appeared like a swelling balloon of light, fading as it spread.

 

These were but a few of the stellar spectacles that delighted us while

we easefully skated, as on swallow wings, hither and thither among the

neighbors of the Other Sun. This was during our period of apprenticeship

to the craft of interstellar flight. When we had become proficient we

passed further afield, and learned to travel so fast that, as on my own

earlier and involuntary flight, the forward and the hinder stars took

color, and presently all was dark. Not only so, but we reached to that

more spiritual vision, also experienced on my earlier voyage, in which

these vagaries of physical light are overcome.

 

On one occasion our flight took us outwards toward the limits of the

galaxy, and into the emptiness beyond. For some time the near stars had

become fewer and fewer. The hinder hemisphere of sky was now crowded

with faint lights, while in front of us lay starless blackness,

unrelieved save by a few isolated patches of scintillation, a few

detached fragments of the galaxy, or planetary “sub-galaxies.” Apart

from these the dark was featureless, save for half a dozen of the vague

flecks which we knew to be the nearest of the alien galaxies.

 

Awed by this spectacle, we stayed long motionless in the void. It was

indeed a stirring experience to see spread out before us a whole

“universe,” containing a billion stars and perhaps thousands of

inhabited worlds; and to know that each tiny fleck in the black sky was

itself another such “universe,” and that millions more of them were

invisible only because of their extreme remoteness.

 

What was the