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

no roofed weatherproof enclosures; for there was no

weather. But the plateaux and terraces of the rock were crowded with all

manner of artifacts unintelligible to us.

 

The typical plant-man was an erect organism, like ourselves. On his head

he bore a vast crest of green plumes, which could be either folded

together in the form of a huge, tight, cos lettuce, or spread out to

catch the light. Three many-faceted eyes looked out from under the

crest. Beneath these were three arm-like manipulatory limbs, green and

serpentine, branching at their extremities. The slender trunk, pliable,

encased in hard rings which slid into one another as the body bowed, was

divided into three legs for locomotion. Two of the three feet were also

mouths, which could either draw sap from the root or devour foreign

matter. The third was an organ of excretion. The precious excrement was

never wasted, but passed through a special junction between the third

foot and the root. The feet contained taste-organs, and also ears. Since

there was no air, sound was not propagated above ground.

 

By day the life of these strange beings was mainly vegetable, by night

animal. Every morning, after the long and frigid night, the whole

population swarmed to its rooty dormitories. Each individual sought out

his own root, fixed himself to it, and stood throughout the torrid day,

with leaves outspread. Till sunset he slept, not in a dreamless sleep,

but in a sort of trance, the meditative and mystical quality of which

was to prove in future ages a well of peace for many worlds. While he

slept, the currents of sap hastened up and down his trunk, carrying

chemicals between roots and leaves, flooding him with a concentrated

supply of oxygen, removing the products of past katabolism. When the sun

had disappeared once more behind the crags, displaying for a moment a

wisp of fiery prominences, he would wake, fold up his leaves, close the

passages to his roots, detach himself, and go about the business of

civilized life. Night in this world was brighter than moonlight with us,

for the stars were unobscured, and several great clusters hung in the

night sky. Artificial light, however, was used for delicate operations.

Its chief disadvantage was that it tended to send the worker to sleep.

 

I must not try even to sketch the rich and alien social life of these

beings. I will only say that here as elsewhere we found all the cultural

themes known on earth, but that in this world of mobile plants all was

transposed into a strange key, a perplexing mode. Here as elsewhere we

found a population of individuals deeply concerned with the task of

keeping themselves and their society in being. Here we found

self-regard, hate, love, the passions of the mob, intellectual

curiosity, and so on. And here, as in all the other worlds that we had

thus far visited, we found a race in the throes of the great spiritual

crisis which was the crisis familiar to us in our own worlds, and formed

the channel by which we had telepathic access to other worlds. But here

the crisis had assumed a style different from any that we had yet

encountered. We had, in fact, begun to extend our powers of imaginative

exploration.

 

Leaving all else unnoticed, I must try to describe this crisis, for it

is significant for the understanding of matters which reached far beyond

this little world.

 

We did not begin to have insight into the drama of this race till we had

learned to appreciate the mental aspect of its dual, animal-vegetable

nature. Briefly, the mentality of the plant-men in every age was an

expression of the varying tension between the two sides of their nature,

between the active, assertive, objectively inquisitive, and morally

positive animal nature and the passive, subjectively contemplative, and

devoutly acquiescent vegetable nature. It was of course through animal

prowess and practical human intelligence that the species had long ago

come to dominate its world. But at all times this practical will had

been tempered and enriched by a kind of experience which among men is

very rare. Every day, throughout the ages, these beings had surrendered

their feverish animal nature not merely to unconscious or dream-racked

sleep, such as animals know, but to the special kind of awareness which

(we learned) belongs to plants. Spreading their leaves, they had

absorbed directly the essential elixir of life which animals receive

only at second hand in the mangled flesh of their prey. Thus they

seemingly maintained immediate physical contact with the source of all

cosmical being. And this state, though physical, was also in some sense

spiritual. It had a far-reaching effect on all their conduct. If

theological language were acceptable, it might well be called a

spiritual contact with God. During the busy night-time they went about

their affairs as insulated individuals, having no present immediate

experience of their underlying unity; but normally they were always

preserved from the worst excesses of individualism by memory of their

daytime life.

 

It took us long to understand that their peculiar daytime state did not

consist simply in being united as a group mind, whether of tribe or

race. Theirs was not the condition of the avian units in the bird-cloud,

nor yet of the telepathically constituted world-minds which, as we were

later to discover, had a very great part to play in galactic history.

The plant-man did not in his daytime life come into possession of the

precepts and thoughts of his fellow plant-men, and thereby waken into a

more comprehensive and discriminate awareness of the environment and of

the multiple body of the race. On the contrary, he became completely

unresponsive to all objective conditions save the flood of sunlight

drenching his spread leaves. And this experience afforded him an

enduring ecstasy whose quality was almost sexual, an ecstasy in which

subject and object seemed to become identical, an ecstasy of subjective

union with the obscure source of all finite being. In this state the

plant-man could meditate upon his active, night-time life, and could

become aware, far more clearly than by night, of the intricacies of his

own motives. In this daytime mode he passed no moral judgments on

himself or others. He mentally reviewed every kind of human conduct with

detached contemplative joy, as a factor in the universe. But when night

came again, bringing the active nocturnal mood, the calm, daytime

insight into himself and others was lit with a fire of moral praise and

censure.

 

Now throughout the career of this race there had been a certain tension

between the two basic impulses of its nature. All its finest cultural

achievements had been made in times when both had been vigorous and

neither predominant. But, as in so many other worlds, the development of

natural science and the production of mechanical power from tropical

sunlight caused grave mental confusion. The manufacture of innumerable

aids to comfort and luxury, the spread of electric railways over the

whole world, the development of radio communication, the study of

astronomy and mechanistic biochemistry, the urgent demands of war and

social revolution, all these influences strengthened the active

mentality and weakened the contemplative. The climax came when it was

found possible to do away with the daytime sleep altogether. The

products of artificial photosynthesis could be rapidly injected into the

living body every morning, so that the plant-man could spend practically

the whole day in active work. Very soon the roots of the peoples were

being dug up and used as raw material in manufacture. They were no

longer needed for their natural purpose.

 

I must not spend tune in describing the hideous plight into which this

world now fell. Seemingly, artificial photosynthesis, though it could

keep the body vigorous, failed to produce some essential vitamin of the

spirit. A disease of robotism, of purely mechanical living, spread

throughout the population. There was of course a fever of industrial

activity. The plant-men careered round their planet in all kinds of

mechanically propelled vehicles, decorated themselves with the latest

synthetic products, tapped the central volcanic heat for power, expended

great ingenuity in destroying one another, and in a thousand other

feverish pursuits pushed on in search of a bliss which ever eluded them.

 

After untold distresses they began to realize that their whole way of

life was alien to their essential plant nature. Leaders and prophets

dared to inveigh against mechanization and against the prevalent

intellectualistic scientific culture, and against artificial

photosynthesis. By now nearly all the roots of the race had been

destroyed; but presently biological science was turned to the task of

generating, from the few remaining specimens, new roots for all. Little

by little the whole population was able to return to natural

photosynthesis. The industrial life of the world vanished like frost in

sunlight. In returning to the old alternating life of animal and

vegetable, the plant-men, jaded and deranged by the long fever of

industrialism, found in their calm daytime experience an overwhelming

joy. The misery of their recent life intensified by contrast the ecstasy

of the vegetal experience. The intellectual acuity that their brightest

minds had acquired in scientific analysis combined with the special

quality of their revived plant life to give their whole experience a new

lucidity. For a brief period they reached a plane of spiritual lucidity

which was to be an example and a treasure for the future aeons of the

galaxy.

 

But even the most spiritual life has its temptations. The extravagant

fever of industrialism and intellectualism had so subtly poisoned the

plant-men that when at last they rebelled against it they swung too far,

falling into the snare of a vegetal life as one-sided as the old animal

life had been. Little by little they gave less and less energy and time

to “animal” pursuits, until at last their nights as well as their days

were spent wholly as trees, and the active, exploring, manipulating,

animal intelligence died in them forever.

 

For a while the race lived on in an increasingly vague and confused

ecstacy of passive union with the universal source of being. So well

established and automatic was the age-old biological mechanism for

preserving the planet’s vital gases in solution that it continued long

to function without attention. But industrialism had increased the world

population beyond the limits within which the small supply of water and

gases could easily fulfil its function. The circulation of material was

dangerously rapid. In time the mechanism was overstrained. Leakages

began to appear, and no one repaired them. Little by little the precious

water and other volatile substances escaped from the planet. Little by

little the reservoirs ran dry, the spongy roots were parched, the leaves

withered. One by one the blissful and no longer human inhabitants of

that world passed from ecstasy to sickness, despondency, uncomprehending

bewilderment, and on to death.

 

But, as I shall tell, their achievement was not without effect on the

life of our galaxy. “Vegetable humanities,” if I may so call them,

proved to be rather uncommon occurrences. Some of them inhabited worlds

of a very curious kind which I have not yet mentioned. As is well known,

a small planet close to its sun tends, through the sun’s tidal action

upon it, to lose its rotation. Its days become longer and longer, till

at last it presents one face constantly toward its luminary. Not a few

planets of this type, up and down the galaxy, were inhabited; and

several of them by “vegetable humanities.”

 

All these “non-diurnal” worlds were very inhospitable to life, for one

hemisphere was always extravagantly hot, the other extravagantly cold.

The illuminated face might reach the temperature of molten lead; on the

dark face, however, no substances could retain the liquid state, for the

temperature would remain but a degree or two above absolute