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

CHAPTER 2

INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL

 

WHILE I was thus contemplating my native planet, I continued to soar

through space. The Earth was visibly shrinking into the distance, and as

I raced eastwards, it seemed to be rotating beneath me. All its features

swung westwards, till presently sunset and the Mid-Atlantic appeared

upon its eastern limb, and then the night. Within a few minutes, as it

seemed to me, the planet had become an immense half-moon. Soon it was a

misty, dwindling crescent, beside the sharp and minute crescent of its

satellite.

 

With amazement I realized that I must be traveling at a fantastic, a

quite impossible rate. So rapid was my progress that I seemed to be

passing through a constant hail of meteors. They were invisible till

they were almost abreast of me; for they shone only by reflected

sunlight, appearing for an instant only, as streaks of light, like lamps

seen from an express train. Many of them I met in head-on collision, but

they made no impression on me. One huge irregular bulk of rock, the size

of a house, thoroughly terrified me. The illuminated mass swelled before

my gaze, displayed for a fraction of a second a rough and lumpy surface,

and then engulfed me. Or rather, I infer that it must have engulfed me;

but so swift was my passage that I had no sooner seen it in the middle

distance than I found myself already leaving it behind.

 

Very soon the Earth was a mere star. I say soon, but my sense of the

passage of time was now very confused. Minutes and hours, and perhaps

even days, even weeks, were now indistinguishable.

 

While I was still trying to collect myself, I found that I was already

beyond the orbit of Mars, and rushing across the thoroughfare of the

asteroids. Some of these tiny planets were now so near that they

appeared as great stars streaming across the constellations. One or two

revealed gibbous, then crescent forms before they faded behind me.

 

Already Jupiter, far ahead of me, grew increasingly bright and shifted

its position among the fixed stars. The great globe now appeared as a

disc, which soon was larger than the shrinking sun. Its four major

satellites were little pearls floating beside it. The planet’s surface

now appeared like streaky bacon, by reason of its cloud-zones. Clouds

fogged its whole circumference. Now I drew abreast of it and passed it.

Owing to the immense depth of its atmosphere, night and day merged into

one another without assignable boundary. I noted here and there on its

eastern and unilluminated hemisphere vague areas of ruddy light, which

were perhaps the glow cast upwards through dense clouds by volcanic

upheavals.

 

In a few minutes, or perhaps years, Jupiter had become once more a star,

and then was lost in the splendor of the diminished but still blazing

sun. No other of the outer planets lay near my course, but I soon

realized that I must be far beyond the limits of even Pluto’s orbit. The

sun was now merely the brightest of the stars, fading behind me.

 

At last I had time for distress. Nothing now was visible but the starry

sky. The Plough, Cassiopeia, Orion, the Pleiades, mocked me with their

familiarity and their remoteness. The sun was now but one among the

other bright stars. Nothing changed. Was I doomed to hang thus for ever

out in space, a bodiless viewpoint? Had I died? Was this my punishment

for a singularly ineffectual life? Was this the penalty of an inveterate

will to remain detached from human affairs and passions and prejudices?

 

In imagination I struggled back to my suburban hilltop. I saw our home.

The door opened. A figure came out into the garden, lit by the hall

light. She stood for a moment looking up and down the road, then went

back into the house. But all this was imagination only. In actuality,

there was nothing but the stars.

 

After a while I noticed that the sun and all the stars in his

neighborhood were ruddy. Those at the opposite pole of the heaven were

of an icy blue. The explanation of this strange phenomenon flashed upon

me. I was still traveling, and traveling so fast that light itself was

not wholly indifferent to my passage. The overtaking undulations took

long to catch me. They therefore affected me as slower pulsations than

they normally were, and I saw them therefore as red. Those that met me

on my headlong flight were congested and shortened, and were seen as

blue.

 

Very soon the heavens presented an extraordinary appearance, for all the

stars directly behind me were now deep red, while those directly ahead

were violet. Rubies lay behind me, amethysts ahead of me. Surrounding

the ruby constellations there spread an area of topaz stars, and round

the amethyst constellations an area of sapphires. Beside my course, on

every side, the colors faded into the normal white of the sky’s familiar

diamonds. Since I was traveling almost in the plane of the galaxy, the

hoop of the Milky Way, white on either hand, was violet ahead of me, red

behind. Presently the stars immediately before and behind grew dim, then

vanished, leaving two starless holes in the heaven, each hole surrounded

by a zone of colored stars. Evidently I was still gathering speed. Light

from the forward and the hinder stars now reached me in forms beyond the

range of my human vision.

 

As my speed increased, the two starless patches, before and behind, each

with its colored fringe, continued to encroach upon the intervening zone

of normal stars which lay abreast of me on every side. Amongst these I

now detected movement. Through the effect of my own passage the nearer

stars appeared to drift across the background of the stars at greater

distance. This drifting accelerated, till, for an instant, the whole

visible sky was streaked with flying stars. Then everything vanished.

Presumably my speed was so great in relation to the stars that light

from none of them could take normal effect on me.

 

Though I was now perhaps traveling faster than light itself, I seemed to

be floating at the bottom of a deep and stagnant well. The featureless

darkness, the complete lack of all sensation, terrified me, if I may

call “terror” the repugnance and foreboding which I now experienced

without any of the bodily accompaniments of terror, without any

sensation of trembling, sweating, gasping or palpitation. Forlornly, and

with self-pity, I longed for home, longed to see once more the face that

I knew best. With the mind’s eye I could see her now, sitting by the

fire sewing, a little furrow of anxiety between her brows. Was my body,

I wondered, lying dead on the heather? Would they find it there in the

morning? How would she confront this great change in her life? Certainly

with a brave face; but she would suffer.

 

But even while I was desperately rebelling against the dissolution of

our treasured atom of community, I was aware that something within me,

the essential spirit within me, willed very emphatically not to retreat

but to press on with this amazing voyage. Not that my longing for the

familiar human world could for’.a moment be counterbalanced by the mere

craving for adventure. I was of too home-keeping a kind to seek serious

danger and discomfort for their own sake. But timidity was overcome by a

sense of the opportunity that fate was giving me, not only to explore

the depths of the physical universe, but to discover what part life and

mind were actually playing among the stars. A keen hunger now took

possession of me, a hunger not for adventure but for insight into the

significance of man, or of any manlike beings in the cosmos. This homely

treasure of ours, this frank and spring-making daisy beside the arid

track of modern life, impelled me to accept gladly my strange adventure;

for might I not discover that the whole universe was no mere place of

dust and ashes with here and there a stunted life, but actually beyond

the parched terrestrial waste land, a world of flowers?

 

Was man indeed, as he sometimes desired to be, the growing point of the

cosmical spirit, in its temporal aspect at least? Or was he one of many

million growing points? Or was mankind of no more importance in the

universal view than rats in a cathedral? And again, was man’s true

function power, or wisdom, or love, or worship, or all of all these? Or

was the idea of function, of purpose, meaningless in relation to the

cosmos? These grave questions I would answer. Also I must learn to see a

little more clearly and confront a little more rightly (so I put it to

myself) that which, when we glimpse it at all, compels our worship.

 

I now seemed to my self-important self to be no isolated individual,

craving aggrandizement, but rather an emissary of mankind, no, an organ

of exploration, a feeler, ‘projected by the living human world to make

contact with its fellows in space. At all cost I must go forward, even

if my trivial earthly life must come to an untimely end, and my wife and

children be left without me. I must go forward; and somehow, some day,

even if after centuries of interstellar travel, I must return.

 

When I look back on that phase of exaltation, now that I have indeed

returned to earth after the most bewildering adventures, I am dismayed

at the contrast between the spiritual treasure which I aspired to hand

over to my fellow men and the paucity of my actual tribute. This failure

was perhaps due to the fact that, though I did indeed accept the

challenge of the adventure, I accepted it only with secret reservations.

Fear and the longing for comfort, I now recognize, dimmed the brightness

of my will. My resolution, so boldly formed, proved after all frail. My

unsteady courage often gave place to yearnings for my native planet.

Over and over again in the course of my travels I had a sense that,

owing to my timid and pedestrian nature, I missed the most significant

aspects of events.

 

Of all that I experienced on my travels, only a fraction was clearly

intelligible to me even at the time; and then, as I shall tell, my

native powers were aided by beings of superhuman development. Now that I

am once more on my native planet, and this aid is no longer available, I

cannot recapture even so much of the deeper insight as I formerly

attained. And so my record, which tells of the most far-reaching of all

human explorations, turns out to be after all no more reliable than the

rigmarole of any mind unhinged by the impact of experience