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

>We supposed at first that the mental unity of these little avians was

telepathic, but in fact it was not. It was based on the unity of a

complex electromagnetic field, in fact on “radio” waves permeating the

whole group. Radio, transmitted and received by every individual

organism, corresponded to the chemical nerve current which maintains the

unity of the human nervous system. Each brain reverberated with the

ethereal rhythms of its environment; and each contributed its own

peculiar theme to the complex pattern of the whole. So long as the flock

was within a volume of about a cubic mile, the individuals were mentally

unified, each serving as a specialized center in the common “brain.” But

if some were separated from the flock, as sometimes happened in stormy

weather, they lost mental contact and became separate minds of very low

order. In fact each degenerated for the time being into a very simple

instinctive animal or a system of reflexes, set wholly for the task of

restoring contact with the flock.

 

It may easily be imagined that the mental life of these composite beings

was very different from anything which we had yet encountered. Different

and yet the same. Like a man, the bird-cloud was capable of anger and

fear, hunger and sexual hunger, personal love and all the passions of

the herd; but the medium of these experiences was so different from

anything known to us that we found great difficulty in recognizing them.

 

Sex, for instance, was very perplexing. Each cloud was bisexual, having

some hundreds of specialized male and female avian units, indifferent to

one another, but very responsive to the presence of other bird-clouds.

We found that in these strange multiple beings the delight and shame of

bodily contact were obtained not only through actual sexual union of the

specialized sexual members but, with the most exqui site subtlety, in

the aerial interfusion of two flying clouds during the performance of

courtship gymnastics in the air.

 

More important for us than this superficial likeness to ourselves was an

underlying parity of mental rank. Indeed, we should not have gained

access to them at all had it not been for the essential similarity of

their evolutionary stage with that which we knew so well in our own

worlds. For each one of these mobile-minded clouds of little birds was

in fact an individual approximately of our own spiritual order, indeed a

very human thing, torn between the beast and the angel, capable of

ecstasies of love and hate toward other such bird-clouds, capable of

wisdom and folly, and the whole gamut of human passions from swinishness

to ecstatic contemplation.

 

Probing as best we could beyond the formal similarity of spirit which

gave us access to the bird-clouds, we discovered painfully how to see

with a million eyes at once, how to feel the texture of the atmosphere

with a million wings. We learned to interpret the composite percepts of

mud-flats and marshes and great agricultural regions, irrigated twice

daily by the tide. We admired the great tide-driven turbines and the

system of electric transport of freight. We discovered that the forests

of high concrete poles or minarets, and platforms on stilts, which stood

in the shallowest of the tidal areas, were nurseries where the young

were tended till they could fly.

 

Little by little we learned to understand something of the alien thought

of these strange beings, which was in its detailed texture so different

from our own, yet in general pattern and significance so similar. Time

presses, and I must not try even to sketch the immense complexity of the

most developed of these worlds. So much else has still to be told. I

will say only that, since the individuality of these bird-clouds was

more precarious than human individuality, it was apt to be better

understood and more justly valued. The constant danger of the

bird-clouds was physical and mental disintegration. Consequently the

ideal of the coherent self was very prominent in all their cultures. On

the other hand, the danger that the self of the bird-cloud would be

psychically invaded and violated by its neighbors, much as one radio

station may interfere with another, forced these beings to guard more

carefully than ourselves against the temptations of the herd, against

drowning the individual cloud’s self in the mob of clouds. But again,

just because this danger was effectively guarded against, the ideal of

the worldwide community developed without any life-and-death struggle

with mystical tribalism, such as we know too well. Instead the struggle

was simply between individualism and the twin ideals of the

world-community and the world-mind.

 

At the time of our visit worldwide conflict was already breaking out

between the two parties in every region of the planet. The

individualists were stronger in one hemisphere, and were slaughtering

all adherents of the world-mind ideal, and mustering their forces for

attack on the other hemisphere. Here the party of the world-mind

dominated, not by weapons but by sheer radio-bombardment, so to speak.

The pattern of ethereal undulations issuing from the party imposed

itself by sheer force on all recalcitrants. All rebels were either

mentally disintegrated by radio-bombardment or were absorbed intact into

the communal radio system. The war which ensued was to us astounding.

The individualists used artillery and poison gas. The party of the

world-mind used these weapons far less than the radio, which they, but

not their enemies, could operate with irresistible effect. So greatly

was the radio system strengthened, and so adapted to the physiological

receptivity of the avian units, that before the individualists had done

serious harm, they found themselves engulfed, so to speak, in an

overwhelming torrent of radio stimulation. Their individuality crumbled

away. The avian units that made up their composite bodies were either

destroyed (if they were specialized for war), or reorganized into new

clouds, loyal to the world-mind.

 

Shortly after the defeat of the individualists we lost touch with this

race. The experience and the social problems of the young world-mind

were incomprehensible to us. Not till a much later stage of our

adventure did we regain contact with it.

 

Others of the worlds inhabited by races of bird-clouds were less

fortunate. Most, through one cause or another, came to grief. In many of

them the stresses of industrialism or of social unrest brought about a

plague of insanity, or disintegration of the individual into a swarm of

mere reflex animals. These miserable little creatures, which had not the

power of independent intelligent behavior, were slaughtered in myriads

by natural forces and beasts of prey. Presently the stage was clear for

some worm or amoeba to reinaugurate the great adventure of biological

evolution toward the human plane.

 

In the course of our exploration we came upon other types of composite

individuals. For instance, we found that very large dry planets were

sometimes inhabited by populations of insect-like creatures each of

whose swarms of nests was the multiple body of a single mind. These

planets were so large that no mobile organism could be bigger than a

beetle, no flying organism bigger than an ant. In the intelligent swarms

that fulfilled the part of men in these worlds, the microscopic brains

of the insect-like units were specialized for miscroscopic functions

within the group, much as the members of an ant’s nest are specialized

for working, fighting, reproduction, and so on. All were mobile, but

each class of the units fulfilled special “neurological” functions in

the life of the whole. In fact they acted as though they were special

types of cells in a nervous system.

 

In these worlds, as in the worlds of the bird-clouds, we had to accustom

ourselves to the unified awareness of a huge swarm of units. With

innumerable hurrying feet we crept along Lilliputian concrete passages,

with innumerable manipulatory antennae we took part in obscure

industrial or agricultural operations, or in the navigation of toy ships

on the canals and lakes of these flat worlds. Through innumerable

many-faceted eyes we surveyed the plains of moss-like vegetation or

studied the stars with minute telescopes and spectroscopes.

 

So perfectly organized was the life of the minded swarm that all routine

activities of industry and agriculture had become, from the point of

view of the swarm’s mind, unconscious, like the digestive processes of a

human being. The little insectoid units themselves carried on these

operations consciously, though without understanding their significance;

but the mind of the swarm had lost the power of attending to them. Its

concern was almost wholly with such activities as called for unified

conscious control, in fact with practical and theoretical invention of

all kinds and with physical and mental exploration.

 

At the time of our visit to the most striking of these insectoid worlds

the world-population consisted of many great nations of swarms. Each

individual swarm had its own nest, its Lilliputian city, an area of

about an acre, in which the ground was honeycombed to a depth of two

feet with chambers and passages. The surrounding district was devoted to

the cultivation of the moss-like food-plants. As the swarm increased in

size, colonies might be founded beyond the range of the physiological

radio system of the parent swarm. Thus arose new group-individuals. But

neither in this race, nor in the race of bird-clouds, was there anything

corresponding to our successive generations of individual minds. Within

the minded group, the insectoid units were ever dying off and giving

place to fresh units, but the mind of the group was potentially

immortal. The units succeeded one another; the group-self persisted. Its

memory reached back past countless generations of units, fading as it

receded, and finally losing itself in that archaic time when the “human”

was emerging from the “subhuman.” Thus the civilized swarms had vague

and fragmentary memories of every historical period.

 

Civilization had turned the old disorderly warrens into carefully

planned subterranean cities; had turned the old irrigation channels into

a widespread mesh of waterways for the transport of freight from

district to district; had introduced mechanical power, based on the

combustion of vegetable, matter; had smelted metals from outcrops and

alluvial de-posits; had produced the extraordinary tissue of minute,

almost microscopic machinery which had so greatly improved the comfort

and health of the more advanced regions; had produced also myriads of

tiny vehicles, corresponding to our tractors, trains, ships; had created

class distinctions between those group-individuals that remained

primarily agricultural, those that were mainly industrial, and those

that specialized in intelligent coordination of their country’s

activities. These last became in time the bureaucratic tyrants of the

country, Owing to the great size of the planet and the extreme

difficulty of longdistance travel by creatures so small as the

insectoid units, civilizations had developed independently in a score of

insulated regions; and when at last they came in contact, many of them

were already highly industrialized, and equipped with the most “modern”

weapons. The reader may easily imagine what happened when races that

were in most cases biologically of different species, and anyhow were I

completely alien in customs, thought, and ideals, suddenly found

themselves in contact and in conflict. It would be wearisome to describe

the insane warfare which ensued. But it is of interest to note that we,

the telepathic visitors from regions remote in time and space, could

communicate with these warring hosts more easily than one host could

communicate with another. And through this power we were actually able

to play an important part in the history of this world. Indeed, it was

probably through our mediation that these races were saved from mutual

destruction. Taking up positions in “key” minds on each side of the

conflict, we patiently induced in our hosts some insight into the

mentality of the enemy. And since each of these races had already passed

far beyond the level of sociality known on the Earth, since in relation