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

>now, in retrospect, how accidental! True, of course, that as a

long-married couple we fitted rather neatly, like two close trees whose

trunks have grown upwards together as a single shaft, mutually

distorting, but mutually supporting. Coldly I now assessed her as merely

a useful, but often infuriating adjunct to my personal life. We were on

the whole sensible companions. We left one another a certain freedom,

and so we were able to endure our proximity.

 

Such was our relationship. Stated thus it did not seem very significant

for the understanding of the universe. Yet in my heart I knew that it

was so. Even the cold stars, even the whole cosmos with all its inane

immensities could not convince me that this our prized atom of

community, imperfect as it was, short-lived as it must be, was not

significant.

 

But could this indescribable union of ours really have any significance

at all beyond itself? Did it, for instance, prove that the essential

nature of all human beings was to love, rather than to hate and fear?

Was it evidence that all men and women the world over, though

circumstance might prevent them, were at heart capable of supporting a

worldwide, love-knit community? And further, did it, being itself a

product of the cosmos, prove that love was in some way basic to the

cosmos itself? And did it afford, through its own felt intrinsic

excellence, some guarantee that we two, its frail supporters, must in

some sense have eternal life? Did it, in fact, prove that love was God,

and God awaiting us in his heaven?

 

No! Our homely, friendly, exasperating, laughter-making, undecorated

though most prized community of spirit proved none of these things. It

was no certain guarantee of anything but its own imperfect rightness. It

was nothing but a very minute, very bright epitome of one out of the

many potentialities of existence. I remembered the swarms of the

unseeing stars. I remembered the tumult of hate and fear and bitterness

which is man’s world. I remembered, too, our own not infrequent

discordancy. And I reminded myself that we should very soon vanish like

the flurry that a breeze has made on still water.

 

Once more there came to me a perception of the strange contrast of the

stars and us. The incalculable potency of the cosmos mysteriously

enhanced the Tightness of our brief spark of community, and of mankind’s

brief, uncertain venture. And these in turn quickened the cosmos.

 

I sat down on the heather. Overhead obscurity was now in full retreat.

In its rear the freed population of the sky sprang out of hiding, star

by star.

 

On every side the shadowy hills or the guessed, featureless sea extended

beyond sight. But the hawk-flight of imagination followed them as they

curved downward below the horizon. I perceived that I was on a little

round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling

in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the

swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labor and

blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit.

And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its

philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing

hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of

stars.

 

If one could know whether among that glittering host there were here and

there other spirit-inhabited grains of rock and metal, whether man’s

blundering search for wisdom and for love was a sole and insignificant

tremor, or part of a universal movement!

 

1. EARTH AMONG THE STARS

 

Overhead obscurity was gone. From horizon to horizon the sky was an

unbroken spread of stars. Two planets stared, unwinking. The more

obtrusive of the constellations asserted their individuality. Orion’s

four-square shoulders and feet, his belt and sword, the Plough, the

zigzag of Cassiopeia, the intimate Pleiades, all were duly patterned on

the dark. The Milky Way, a vague hoop of light, spanned the sky.

 

Imagination completed what mere sight could not achieve. Looking down, I

seemed to see through a transparent planet, through heather and solid

rock, through the buried graveyards of vanished species, down through

the molten flow of basalt, and on into the Earth’s core of iron; then on

again, still seemingly downwards, through the southern strata to the

southern ocean and lands, past the roots of gum trees and the feet of

the inverted antipodeans, through their blue, sun-pierced awning of day,

and out into the eternal night, where sun and stars are together. For

there, dizzyingly far below me, like fishes in the depth of a lake, lay

the nether constellations. The two domes of the sky were fused into one

hollow sphere, star-peopled, black, even beside the blinding sun. The

young moon was a curve of incandescent wire. The completed hoop of the

Milky Way encircled the universe. In a strange vertigo, I looked for

reassurance at the little glowing windows of our home. There they still

were; and the whole suburb, and the hills. But stars shone through all.

It was as though all terrestrial things were made of glass, or of some

more limpid, more ethereal vitreosity. Faintly the church clock chimed

for midnight. Dimly, receding, it tolled the first stroke.

 

Imagination was now stimulated to a new, strange mode of perception.

Looking from star to star, I saw the heaven no longer as a jeweled

ceiling and floor, but as depth beyond flashing depth of suns. And

though for the most part the great and familiar lights of the sky stood

forth as our near neighbors, some brilliant stars were seen to be in

fact remote and mighty, while some dim lamps were visible only because

they were so near. On every side the middle distance was crowded with

swarms and streams of stars. But even these now seemed near; for the

Milky Way had receded into an incomparably greater distance. And through

gaps in its nearer parts appeared vista beyond vista of luminous mists,

and deep perspectives of stellar populations.

 

The universe in which fate had set me was no spangled chamber, but a

perceived vortex of star-streams. No! It was more. Peering between the

stars into the outer darkness, I saw also, as mere flecks and points of

light, other such vortices, such galaxies, sparsely scattered in the

void, depth beyond depth, so far afield that even the eye of imagination

could find no limits to the cosmical, the all-embracing galaxy of

galaxies. The universe now appeared to me as a void wherein floated rare

flakes of snow, each flake a universe.

 

Gazing at the faintest and remotest of all the swarm of universes, I

seemed, by hypertelescopic imagination, to see it as a population of

suns; and near one of those suns was a planet, and on that planet’s dark

side a hill, and on that hill myself. For our astronomers assure us that

in this boundless finitude which we call the cosmos the straight lines

of light lead not to infinity but to their source. Then I remembered

that, had my vision depended on physical light, and not on the light of

imagination, the rays coming thus to me “round” the cosmos would have

revealed, not myself, but events that had ceased long before the Earth,

or perhaps even the Sun, was formed.

 

But now, once more shunning these immensities, I looked again for the

curtained windows of our home, which, though star-pierced, was still

more real to me than all the galaxies. But our home had vanished, with

the whole suburb, and the hills too, and the sea. The very ground on

which I had been sitting was gone. Instead there lay far below me an

insubstantial gloom. And I myself was seemingly disembodied, for I could

neither see nor touch my own flesh. And when I willed to move my limbs,

nothing happened. I had no limbs. The familiar inner perceptions of my

body, and the headache which had oppressed me since morning, had given

way to a vague lightness and exhilaration.

 

When I realized fully the change that had come over me, I wondered if I

had died, and was entering some wholly unexpected new existence. Such a

banal possibility at first exasperated me. Then with sudden dismay I

understood that if indeed I had died I should not return to my prized,

concrete atom of community. The violence of my distress shocked me. But

soon I comforted myself with the thought that after all I was probably

not dead, but in some sort of trance, from which I might wake at any

minute. I resolved, therefore, not to be unduly alarmed by this

mysterious change. With scientific interest I would observe all that

happened to me.

 

I noticed that the obscurity which had taken the place of the ground was

shrinking and condensing. The nether stars were no longer visible

through it. Soon the earth below me was like a huge circular table-top,

a broad disc of darkness surrounded by stars. I was apparently soaring

away from my native planet at incredible speed. The sun, formerly

visible to imagination in the nether heaven, was once more physically

eclipsed by the Earth. Though by now I must have been hundreds of miles

above the ground, I was not troubled by the absence of oxygen and

atmospheric pressure. I experienced only an increasing exhilaration and

a delightful effervescence of thought. The extraordinary brilliance of

the stars excited me. For, whether through the absence of obscuring air,

or through my own increased sensitivity, or both, the sky had taken on

an unfamiliar aspect. Every star had seemingly flared up into higher

magnitude. The heavens blazed. The major stars were like the headlights

of a distant car. The Milky Way, no longer watered down with darkness,

was an encircling, granular river of light.

 

Presently, along the Planet’s eastern limb, now far below me, there

appeared a faint line of luminosity; which, as I continued to soar,

warmed here and there to orange and red. Evidently I was traveling not

only upwards but eastwards, and swinging round into the day. Soon the

sun leapt into view, devouring the huge crescent of dawn with its

brilliance. But as I sped on, sun and planet were seen to drift apart,

while the thread of dawn thickened into a misty breadth of sunlight.

This increased, like a visibly waxing moon, till half the planet was

illuminated. Between the areas of night and day, a belt of shade,

warm-tinted, broad as a sub-continent, now marked the area of dawn. As I

continued to rise and travel eastwards, I saw the lands swing westward

along with the day, till I was over the Pacific and high noon. The Earth

appeared now as a great bright orb hundreds of times larger than the

full moon. In its center a dazzling patch of light was the sun’s image

reflected in the ocean. The planet’s circumference was an indefinite

breadth of luminous haze, fading into the surrounding blackness of

space. Much of the northern hemisphere, tilted somewhat toward me, was

an expanse of snow and cloud-tops. I could trace parts of the outlines

of Japan and China, their vague browns and greens indenting the vague

blues and grays of the ocean. Toward the equator, where the air was

clearer, the ocean was dark. A little whirl of brilliant cloud was

perhaps the upper surface of a hurricane. The Philippines and New Guinea

were precisely mapped. Australia faded into the hazy southern limb.

 

The spectacle before me was strangely moving. Personal anxiety was

blotted out by wonder and admiration; for the sheer beauty of our planet

surprised me. It was a huge pearl, set in spangled ebony. It was

nacrous, it was an opal. No, it was far more lovely than any jewel.