Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon [top rated books of all time .TXT] 📗
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official part, would lose contact with the communal mind, and become
mere isolated individuals; but individuals at heart more sane than the
lofty communal mind from which they had fallen. The orthodox majority,
horrified at this mental disintegration, would then apply the familiar
ruthless methods that had been used so successfully in the uncivilized
outposts of empire. The dissentients would be arrested, and either
destroyed outright or concentrated upon the most inhospitable planet, in
the hope that their torture might prove an effective warning to others.
This policy failed. The strange mental disease spread more and more
rapidly, till the “lunatics” outnumbered the “sane.” There followed
civil wars, mass-martyrdom of devoted pacifists, dissension among the
imperialists, a steady increase of “lunacy” in every world of the
empire. The whole imperial organization fell to pieces; and since the
aristocratic worlds that formed the backbone of empire were as impotent
as soldier-ants to maintain themselves without the service and tribute
of the subject worlds, the loss of empire doomed them to death. When
almost the whole population of such a world had gone sane, great efforts
would be made to reorganize its life for self-sufficiency and peace. It
might have been expected that this task, though difficult, would not
have defeated a population of beings whose sheer intelligence and social
loyalty were incomparably greater than anything known on earth. But
there were unexpected difficulties, not economic but psychological.
These beings had been fashioned for war, tyranny and empire. Though
telepathic stimulation from superior minds could touch into life the
slumbering germ of the spirit in them, and help them to realize the
triviality of their world’s whole purpose, telepathic influence could
not refashion their nature to such an extent that they could henceforth
actually live for the spirit and renounce the old life. In spite of
heroic self-discipline, they tended to sink into inertia, like wild
beasts domesticated; or to run amok, and exercise against one another
those impulses of domination which hitherto had been directed upon
subject worlds. And all this they did with profound consciousness of
guilt.
For us it was heartrending to watch the agony of these worlds. Never did
the newly enlightened beings lose their vision of true community and of
the spiritual life; but though the vision haunted them, the power to
realize it in the detail of action was lost. Moreover, there were times
when the change of heart that they had suffered seemed to them actually
a change for the worse. Formerly all individuals had been perfectly
disciplined to the common will, and perfectly happy in executing that
will without the heart-searchings of individual responsibility. But now
individuals were mere individuals; and all were tormented by mutual
suspicion and by violent propensities for self-seeking.
The issue of this appalling struggle in the minds of these former
imperialists depended on the extent to which specialization for empire
had affected them. In a few young worlds, in which specialization had
not gone deep, a period of chaos was followed by a period of
reorientation and world-planning, and in due season by sane Utopia. But
in most of these worlds no such escape was possible. Either chaos
persisted till racial decline set in, and the world sank to the human,
the subhuman, the merely animal states; or else, in a few cases only,
the discrepancy between the ideal and the actual was so distressing that
the whole race committed suicide.
We could not long endure the spectacle of scores of worlds falling into
psychological ruin. Yet the Sub-Galactics who had caused these strange
events, and continued to use their power to clarify and so destroy these
minds, watched their handiwork unflinchingly. Pity they felt, pity such
as we feel for a child that has broken its toy; but no indignation
against fate.
Within a few thousand years every one of the imperial worlds had either
transformed itself or fallen into barbarism or committed suicide.
6. A GALACTIC UTOPIA
The events that I have been describing took place, or from the human
point of view will take place, at a date as far future to us as we are
from the condensation of the earliest stars. The next period of galactic
history covers the period from the fall of the mad empires to the
achievement of Utopia in the whole galactic community of worlds. This
transitional period was in itself in a manner Utopian; for it was an age
of triumphant progress carried out by beings whose nature was rich and
harmonious, whose nurture was entirely favorable, and their
ever-widening galactic community a wholly satisfying object of loyalty.
It was only not Utopian in the sense that the galactic society was still
expanding and constantly changing its structure to meet new needs,
economic and spiritual. At the close of this phase there came a period
of full Utopia in which the attention of the perfected galactic
community was directed mainly beyond itself toward other galaxies. Of
this I shall tell in due course; and of the unforeseen and stormy events
which shattered this beatitude.
Meanwhile we must glance at the age of expansion. The worlds of the
Sub-Galaxy, recognizing that no further great advance in culture was
possible unless the population of awakened worlds was immensely
increased and diversified, now began to play an active part in the work
of reorganizing the whole galactic continent. By telepathic
communication they gave to all awakened worlds throughout the galaxy
knowledge of the triumphant society which they themselves had created;
and they called upon all to join them in the founding of the galactic
Utopia. Every world throughout the galaxy, they said, must be an
intensely conscious individual; and each must contribute its personal
idiosyncrasy and all the wealth of its experience to the pooled
experience of all. When at last the community was completed, they said,
it must go on to fulfil its function in the far greater community of all
galaxies, there to participate in spiritual activities as yet but dimly
guessed.
In their earlier age of meditation the Sub-Galactic worlds, or rather
the single intermittently awakening mind of the Sub-Galaxy, had
evidently made discoveries which had very precise bearing on the
founding of the galactic society; for they now put forward the demand
that the number of minded worlds in the Galaxy must be increased to at
least ten thousand times its present extent. In order that all the
potentialities of the spirit should be fulfilled, they said there must
be a far greater diversity of world-types, and thousands of worlds of
each type. They themselves, in their small Sub-Galactic community, had
learned enough to realize that only a very much greater community could
explore all the regions of being, some few of which they themselves had
glimpsed, but only from afar.
The natural worlds of the galactic continent were bewildered and alarmed
by the magnitude of this scheme. They were content with the extant scale
of life. The spirit, they affirmed, had no concern for magnitude and
multiplicity. To this the reply was made that such a protest came ill
from worlds whose own achievement depended on the splendid diversity of
their members. Diversity and multiplicity of worlds was as necessary on
the galactic plane as diversity and multiplicity of individuals on the
world plane and diversity and multiplicity of nerve-cells on the
individual plane. In the upshot the natural worlds of the “continent”
played a decreasing part in the advancing life of the galaxy. Some
merely remained at the level of their own unaided achievement. Some
joined in the great cooperative work, but without fervor and without
genius. A few joined heartily and usefully in the enterprise. One,
indeed, was able to contribute greatly. This was a symbiotic race, but
of a very different kind from that which had founded the community of
the Sub-Galaxy. The symbiosis consisted of two races which had
originally inhabited separate planets of the same system. An intelligent
avian species, driven to desperation by the desiccation of its native
planet, had contrived to invade a neighboring world inhabited by a
manlike species. Here I must not tell how, after ages of alternating
strife and cooperation, a thorough economic and psychological symbiosis
was established.
The building of the galactic community of worlds lies far beyond the
comprehension of the writer of this book. I cannot now remember at all
clearly what I experienced of these obscure matters in the state of
heightened lucidity which came to me through participation in the
communal mind of the explorers. And even in that state I was bewildered
by the effort to comprehend the aims of that close-knit community of
worlds.
If my memory is to be trusted at all, three kinds of activity occupied
the minded worlds in tills phase of galactic history. The main practical
work was to enrich and harmonize the life of the galaxy itself, to
increase the number and diversity and mental unity of the fully awakened
worlds up to the point which, it was believed, was demanded for the
emergence of a mode of experience more awakened than any hitherto
attained. The second kind of activity was that which sought to make
closer contact with the other galaxies by physical and telepathic study.
The third was the spiritual exercise appropriate to beings of the rank
of the world-minds. This last seems to have been concerned (or will be
concerned) at once with the deepening of the self-awareness of each
individual world-spirit and the detachment of its will from merely
private fulfilment. But this was not all. For on this relatively high
level of the spirit’s ascent, as on our own lowliest of all spiritual
planes, there had also to be a more radical detachment from the whole
adventure of life and mind in the cosmos. For, as the spirit wakens, it
craves more and more to regard all existence not merely with a
creature’s eyes, but in the universal view, as though through the eyes
of the creator.
At first the task of establishing the galactic Utopia occupied almost
the whole energy of the awakened worlds. More and more of the stars were
encircled with concentric hoops of pearls, perfect though artificial.
And each pearl was a unique world, occupied by a unique race. Henceforth
the highest level of persistent individuality was not a world but a
system of scores of hundreds of worlds. And between the systems there
was as easy and delightful converse as between human individuals.
In these conditions, to be a conscious individual was to enjoy
immediately the united sensory impressions of all the races inhabiting a
system of worlds. And as the sense-organs of the worlds apprehended not
only “nakedly” but also through artificial instruments of great range
and subtlety, the conscious individual perceived not only the structure
of hundreds of planets, but also the configuration of the whole system
of planets clustered about its sun. Other systems also it perceived, as
men perceive one another; for in the distance the glittering bodies of
other “multi-mundane” persons like itself gyrated and drifted.
Between the minded planetary systems occurred infinite variations of
personal intercourse. As between human individuals, there were loves
and hates, temperamental sympathies and antipathies, joyful and
distressful intimacies, cooperations and thwartings in personal ventures
and in the great common venture of building the galactic Utopia.
Between individual systems of the worlds, as between symbiotic partners,
there sometimes occurred relationships with an almost sexual flavor,
though actual sex played no part in them. Neighboring systems would
project traveling woridlets, or greater worlds, or trains of worlds,
across the ocean of space to take up orbits round each other’s suns and
play intimate parts in symbiotic, or rather “sympsychic” relationships
in one another’s private life. Occasionally a whole system would migrate
to another system, and settle its worlds in rings between the rings of
the
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