Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon [top rated books of all time .TXT] 📗
- Author: Olaf Stapledon
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must come in another way. The planet’s own orbit, fatally contracting,
must bring every world at last so close to its sun that conditions must
pass beyond the limit of life’s adaptability, and age by age all living
things must be parched to death and roasted.
Dismay, terror, horror many a time seized us as we witnessed these huge
disasters. An agony of pity for the last survivors of these worlds was
part of our schooling.
The most developed of the slaughtered worlds did not need our pity,
since their inhabitants seemed capable of meeting the end of all that
they cherished with peace, even a strange unshakable joy which we in
this early stage of our adventure could by no means comprehend. But only
a few, very few, could reach this state. And only a few out of the great
host of worlds could win through even to the social peace and fullness
toward which all were groping. In the more lowly worlds, moreover, few
were the individuals who won any satisfaction of life even within the
narrow bounds of their own imperfect nature. No doubt one or two, here
and there, in almost every world, found not merely happiness but the joy
that passes all understanding. But to us, crushed now by the suffering
and futility of a thousand races, it seemed that this joy itself, this
ecstasy, whether it was supported by scattered individuals or by whole
worlds, must after all be condemned as false, and that those who had
found it must after all have been drugged by their own private and
untypical well-being of spirit. For surely it had made them insensitive
to the horror around them.
The sustaining motive of our pilgrimage had been the hunger which
formerly drove men on Earth in search of God. Yes, we had one and all
left our native planets in order to discover whether, regarding the
cosmos as a whole, the spirit which we all in our hearts obscurely knew
and haltingly prized, the spirit which on Earth we sometimes call
humane, was Lord of the Universe, or outlaw; almighty, or crucified. And
now it was becoming clear to us that if the cosmos had any lord at all,
he was not that spirit but some other, whose purpose in creating the
endless fountain of worlds was not fatherly toward the beings that he
had made, but alien, inhuman, dark.
Yet while we felt dismay, we felt also increasingly the hunger to see
and to face fearlessly whatever spirit was indeed the spirit of this
cosmos. For as we pursued our pilgrimage, passing again and again from
tragedy to farce, from farce to glory, from glory often to final
tragedy, we felt increasingly the sense that some terrible, some holy,
yet at the same time unimaginably outrageous and lethal, secret lay just
beyond our reach. Again and again we were torn between horror and
fascination, between moral rage against the universe (or the Star Maker)
and unreasonable worship.
This same conflict was to be observed in all those worlds that were of
our own mental stature. Observing these worlds and the phases of their
past growth, and groping as best we might toward the next plane of
spiritual development, we came at last to see plainly the first stages
of any world’s pilgrimage. Even in the most primitive ages of every
normal intelligent world there existed in some minds the impulse to seek
and to praise some universal thing. At first this impulse was confused
with the craving for protection by some mighty power. Inevitably the
beings theorized that the admired thing must be Power, and that worship
was mere propitiation. Thus they came to conceive the almighty tyrant of
the universe, with themselves as his favored children. But in time it
became clear to their prophets that mere Power was not what the
praiseful heart adored. Then theory enthroned Wisdom, or Law, or
Righteousness. And after an age of obedience to some phantom lawgiver,
or to divine legality itself, the beings found that these concepts too
were inadequate to describe the indescribable glory that the heart
confronted in all things, and mutely prized in all things.
But now, in every world that we visited, alternative ways opened out
before the worshippers. Some hoped to come face to face with their
shrouded god solely by inward-searching meditation. By purging
themselves of all lesser, all trivial: desires, by striving to see
everything dispassionately and with universal sympathy, they hoped to
identify themselves with the spirit of the cosmos. Often they traveled
far along the way of self-perfecting and awakening. But because of this
inward absorption most of them became insensitive to the suffering of
their less-awakened fellows and careless of the communal enterprise of
their kind. In not a few worlds this way of the spirit was thronged by
all the most vital minds.
And because the best attention of the race was given wholly to the inner
life, material and social advancement was checked. The sciences of
physical nature and of life never developed. Mechanical power remained
unknown, and medical and biological power also. Consequently these
worlds stagnated, and sooner or later succumbed to accidents, which
might well have been prevented.
There was a second way of devotion, open to creatures of a more
practical temperament. These, in all the worlds, gave delighted
attention to the universe around them, and chiefly they found the
worshipped thing in the persons of their fellow-beings, and in the
communal bond of mutual insight and love between persons. In themselves
and in each other they prized above all things love.
And their prophets told them that the thing which they had always
adored, the universal spirit, the Creator, the Almighty, the All-wise,
was also the All-loving. Let them therefore worship in practical love of
one another, and in service or the Love-God. And so for an age, short or
long, they strove feebly to love and to become members one of another.
They spun theories in defense of the theory of the Love-God. They set up
priesthoods and temples in service of Love. And because they hungered
for immortality they were told that to love was the way to attain
eternal life. And so love, which seeks no reward, was misconceived.
In most worlds these practical minds dominated over the meditators.
Sooner or later practical curiosity and economic need produced the
material sciences. Probing every region with these sciences, the beings
found nowhere, neither in the atom nor in the galaxy, nor for that
matter in the heart of “man” either, any signature of the Love-God. And
what with the fever of mechanization, and the exploitation of slaves by
masters, and the passions of intertribal warfare, and the increasing
neglect or coarsening of all the more awakened activities of the spirit,
the little flame of praise in their hearts sank lower than it had ever
been in any earlier age, so low that they could no longer recognize it.
And the flame of love, long fanned by the forced draught of doctrine,
but now suffocated by the general obtuseness of the beings to one
another, was reduced to an occasional smoldering warmth, which was most
often mistaken for mere lust. With bitter laughter and rage the tortured
beings now dethroned the image of the Love-God in their hearts.
And so without love and without worship the unhappy beings faced the
increasingly formidable problems of their mechanized and hate-racked
world.
This was the crisis which we in our own worlds knew so well. Many a
world up and down the galaxy never surmounted it. But in a few, some
miracle, which we could not yet clearly envisage, raised the average
minds of these worlds to a higher plane of mentality. Of this I shall
speak later. Meanwhile I will say only that in the few worlds where this
happened, we noticed invariably, before the minds of that world passed
beyond our reach, a new feeling about the universe, a feeling which it
was very difficult for us to share. Not till we had learned to conjure
in ourselves something of this feeling could we follow the fortunes of
these worlds.
But, as we advanced on our pilgrimage, our own desires began to change.
We came to wonder whether, in demanding lordship of the universe for the
divinely humane spirit that we prized most in ourselves and in our
fellow-mortals in all the worlds, we were perhaps impious. We came less
and less to require that Love should be enthroned behind the stars; more
and more we desired merely to pass on, opening our hearts to accept
fearlessly whatever of the truth might fall within our comprehension.
There was a moment, late in this early phase of our pilgrimage, when,
thinking and feeling in unison, we said to one another, “If the Star
Maker is Love, we know that this must be right. But if he is not, if he
is some other, some inhuman spirit, this must be right. And if he is
nothing, if the stars and all else are not his creatures but
self-subsistent, and if the adored spirit is but an exquisite creature
of our minds, then this must be right, this and no other possibility.
For we cannot know whether the highest place for love is on the throne
or on the cross. We cannot know what spirit rules, for on the throne
sits darkness. We know, we have seen, that in the waste of stars love is
indeed crucified; and rightly, for its own proving, and for the throne’s
glory. Love and all that is humane we cherish in our hearts. Yet also we
salute the throne and the darkness upon the throne. Whether it be Love
or not Love, our hearts praise it, outsoaring reason.”
But before our hearts could be properly attuned to this new, strange
feeling, we had still far to go in the understanding of worlds of human
rank, though diverse. I must now try to give some idea of several kinds
of worlds very different from our own, but not in essentials more
mature.
MORE WORLDS
1. A SYMBOLIC RACE
ON certain large planets, whose climates, owing to the proximity of a
violent sun, were very much hotter than our tropics, we sometimes found
an intelligent fish-like race. It was bewildering to us to discover that
a submarine world could rise to mentality of human rank, and to that
drama of the spirit, which we had now so often encountered.
The very shallow and sun-drenched oceans of these great planets provided
an immense diversity of habitats and a great wealth of living things.
Green vegetation, which could be classified as tropical, subtropical,
temperate and arctic, basked on the bright ocean floors. There were
submarine prairies and forests. In some regions the giant weeds
stretched from the sea-bottom to the waves. In these jungles the blue
and blinding light of the sun was reduced almost to darkness. Immense
coral-like growths, honeycombed with passages and swarming with all
manner of live-things, lifted their spires and turrets to the surface.
Innumerable kinds of fish-like creatures of all sizes from sprat to
whale inhabited the many levels of the waters, some gliding on the
bottom, some daring an occasional leap into the torrid air. In the
deepest and darkest regions hosts of sea-monsters, eyeless or luminous,
browsed on the ceaseless rain of corpses which sank from the upper
levels. Over their deep world lay other worlds of increasing brightness
and color, where gaudy populations basked, browsed, stalked, or hunted
with arrowy flight. Intelligence in these planets was generally achieved
by some unimposing social creature, neither fish nor octopus nor
crustacean, but something of all three. It would be equipped with
manipulatory tentacles, keen eyes and subtle brain. It would make nests
of
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