Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon [top rated books of all time .TXT] 📗
- Author: Olaf Stapledon
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Since we were now free of space, we ranged with equal ease over the
nearer and the remoter tracts of this galaxy. That we did not till much
later make contact with minds in other galaxies was not due to any
limitations imposed by space, but seemingly to our own inveterate
parochialism, to a strange limitation of our own interest, which for
long rendered us inhospitable to the influence of worlds lying beyond
the confines of the Milky Way. I shall say more of this curious
restriction when I come to describe how we did at last outgrow it.
Along with freedom of space we had freedom of time. Some of the worlds
that we explored in this early phase of our adventure ceased to exist
long before my native planet was formed; others were its contemporaries;
others were not born till the old age of our galaxy, when the Earth had
been destroyed, and a large number of the stars had already been
extinguished.
As we searched up and down time and space, discovering more and more of
the rare grains called planets, as we watched race after race struggle
to a certain degree of lucid consciousness, only to succumb to some
external accident or, more often, to some flaw in its own nature, we
were increasingly oppressed by a sense of the futility, the planlessness
of the cosmos. A few worlds did indeed wake to such lucidity that they
passed beyond our ken. But several of the most brilliant of these
occurred in the earliest epoch of the galactic story; and nothing that
we could as yet discover in the later phases of the cosmos suggested
that any galaxies, still less the cosmos as a whole, had at last come
(or will at last come) more under the sway of the awakened spirit than
they were during the epoch of those early brilliant worlds. Not till a
much later stage of our inquiry were we fitted to discover the glorious
but ironical and heartrending climax for which this vast proliferation
of worlds was but a prologue.
In the first phase of our adventure, when, as I have said, our powers of
telepathic exploration were incomplete, every world that we entered
turned out to be in the throes of the same spiritual crisis as that
which we knew so well on our native planets. This crisis I came to
regard as having two aspects. It was at once a moment in the spirit’s
struggle to become capable of true community on a worldwide scale; and
it was a stage in the age-long task of achieving the right, the finally
appropriate, the spiritual attitude toward the universe.
In every one of these “chrysalis” worlds thousands of millions of
persons were flashing into existence, one after the other, to drift
gropingly about for a few instants of cosmical time before they were
extinguished. Most were capable, at least in some humble degree, of the
intimate kind of community which is personal affection; but for nearly
all of them a stranger was ever a thing to fear and hate. And even their
intimate loving was inconstant and lacking in insight. Nearly always
they were intent merely on seeking for themselves respite from fatigue
or boredom, fear or hunger. Like my own race, they never fully awoke
from the primeval sleep of the subman. Only a few here and there, now
and then, were solaced, goaded, or tortured by moments of true
wakefulness. Still fewer attained a clear and constant vision, even of
some partial aspect of truth; and their half-truths they nearly always
took to be absolute. Propagating their little partial truths, they
bewildered and misdirected their fellow mortals as much as they helped
them.
Each individual spirit, in nearly all these worlds, attained at some
point in life some lowly climax of awareness and of spiritual integrity,
only to sink slowly or catastrophically back into nothingness. Or so it
seemed. As in my own world, so in all these others, lives were spent in
pursuit of shadowy ends that remained ever just round the comer. There
were vast tracts of boredom and frustration, with here and there some
rare bright joy. These were ecstasies of personal triumph, of mutual
intercourse and love, of intellectual insight, of aesthetic creation.
There were also religious ecstasies; but these, like all else in these
worlds, were obscured by false interpretations. There were crazy
ecstasies of hate and cruelty, felt against individuals and against
groups. Sometimes during this early phase of our adventure we were so
distressed by the incredible bulk of suffering and of cruelty up and
down the worlds that our courage failed, our telepathic powers were
disordered, and we slipped toward madness.
Yet most of these worlds were really no worse than our own. Like us,
they had reached that stage when the spirit, half awakened from
brutishness and very far from maturity, can suffer most desperately and
behave most cruelly. And like us, these tragic but vital worlds, visited
in our early adventures, were agonized by the inability of their minds
to keep pace with changing circumstance. They were always behindhand,
always applying old concepts and old ideals inappropriately to novel
situations. Like us, they were constantly tortured by their hunger for a
degree of community which their condition demanded but their poor,
cowardly, selfish spirits could by no means attain. Only in couples and
in little circles of companions could they support true community, the
communion of mutual insight and respect and love. But in their tribes
and nations they conceived all too easily the sham community of the
pack, baying in unison of fear and hate.
Particularly in one respect these races were recognizably our kin. Each
had risen by a strange mixture of violence and gentleness. The apostles
of violence and the apostles of gentleness swayed them this way and
that. At the time of our visit many of these worlds were in the throes
of a crisis of this conflict. In the recent past, loud lip-service had
been paid to gentleness and tolerance and freedom; but the policy had
failed, because there was no sincere purpose in it, no conviction of the
spirit, no true experience of respect for individual personality. All
kinds of self-seeking and vindictiveness had nourished, secretly at
first, then openly as shameless individualism. Then at last, in rage,
the peoples turned away from individualism and plunged into the cult of
the herd. At the same time, in disgust with the failure of gentleness,
they began openly to praise violence, and the ruthlessness of the
godsent hero and of the armed tribe. Those who thought they believed in
gentleness built up armaments for their tribes against those foreign
tribes whom they accused of believing in violence. The highly developed
technique of violence threatened to destroy civilization; year by year
gentleness lost ground. Pew could understand that their world must be
saved, not by violence in the short run, but by gentleness in the long
run. And still fewer could see that, to be effective, gentleness must be
a religion; and that lasting peace can never come till the many have
wakened to the lucidity of consciousness which, in all these worlds,
only the few could as yet attain.
If I were to describe in detail every world that we explored, this book
would develop into a world of libraries. I can give only a few pages to
the many types of worlds encountered in this early stage of our
adventure, up and down the whole breadth and length and the whole
duration of our galaxy. Some of these types had apparently very few
instances; other occurred in scores or hundreds.
The most numerous of all classes of intelligent worlds is that which
includes the planet familiar to readers of this book. Homo sapiens has
recently flattered and frightened himself by conceiving that, though
perhaps he is not the sole intelligence in the cosmos, he is at least
unique, and that worlds suited to intelligent life of any kind must be
extremely rare. This view proves ludicrously false. In comparison with
the unimaginable number of stars intelligent worlds are indeed very
rare; but we discovered some thousands of worlds much like the Earth and
possessed by beings of essentially human kind, though superficially they
were often unlike the type that we call human. The Other Men were
amongst the most obviously human. But in a later stage of our adventure,
when our research was no longer restricted to worlds that had reached
the familiar spiritual crisis, we stumbled on a few planets inhabited by
races almost identical with Homo sapiens, or rather with the creature
that Homo sapiens was in the earliest phase of his existence. These most
human worlds we had not encountered earlier because, by one accident or
another, they were destroyed before reaching the stage of our own
mentality.
Long after we had succeeded in extending our research from our peers
among the worlds to our inferiors in mental rank we remained unable to
make any sort of contact with beings who had passed wholly beyond the
attainment of Homo sapiens. Consequently, though we traced the history
of many worlds through many epochs, and saw many reach a catastrophic
end, or sink into stagnation and inevitable decline, there were a few
with which, do what we would, we lost touch just at that moment when
they seemed ripe for a leap forward into some more developed mentality.
Not till a much later stage of our adventure, when our corporate being
had itself been enriched by the influx of many superior spirits, were we
able to pick up once more the threads of these most exalted
world-biographies.
2. STRANGE MANKINDS
Though all the worlds which we entered in the first phase of our
adventure were in the throes of the crisis known so well in our own
world, some were occupied by races biologically similar to man, others
by very different types. The more obviously human races inhabited
planets of much the same size and nature as the Earth and the Other
Earth. All, whatever the vagaries of their biological history, had
finally been molded by circumstance to the erect form which is evidently
most suited to such worlds. Nearly always the two nether limbs were used
for locomotion, the two upper limbs for manipulation. Generally there
was some sort of head, containing the brain and the organs of remote
perception, and perhaps the orifices for eating and breathing. In size
these quasi-human types were seldom larger than our largest gorillas,
seldom much smaller than monkeys; but we could not estimate their size
with any accuracy, as we had no familiar standards of measurements.
Within this approximately human class there was great variety. We came
upon feathered, penguin-like men, descended from true fliers, and on
some small planets we found bird-men who retained the power of flight,
yet were able to carry an adequate human brain. Even on some large
planets, with exceptionally buoyant atmosphere, men flew with their own
wings. Then there were men that had developed from a slug-like ancestor
along a line which was not vertebrate, still less mammalian. Men of this
type attained the necessary rigidity and flexibility of limb by means of
a delicate internal “basket-work” of wiry bones.
On one very small but earthlike planet we discovered a quasi-human race
which was probably unique. Here, though life had evolved much as on
earth, all the higher animals differed remarkably from the familiar type
in one obvious respect. They were without that far-reaching duplication
of organs which characterizes all our vertebrates. Thus a man in this
world was rather like half a terrestrial man. He hopped on one sturdy,
splay-footed leg, balancing himself with a kangaroo tail. A single arm
protruded from his chest, but branched
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