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