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

CHAPTER X

A VISION OF THE GALAXY

 

IT seemed to us now that the troubles of the many worlds of this galaxy

were at last over, that the will to support the galactic Utopia was now

universal, and that the future must bring glory after glory. We felt

assured of the same progress in other galaxies. In our simplicity we

looked forward to the speedy, the complete and final, triumph of the

striving spirit throughout the cosmos. We even conceived that the Star

Maker rejoiced in the perfection of his work. Using such symbols as we

could to express the inexpressible, we imagined that, before the

beginning, the Star Maker was alone, and that for love and for community

he resolved to make a perfect creature, to be his mate. We imagined that

he made her of his hunger for beauty and his will for love; but that he

also scourged her in the making, and tormented her, so that she might at

last triumph over all adversity, and thereby achieve such perfection as

he in his almightiness could never attain. The cosmos we conceived to be

that creature. And it seemed to us in our simplicity that we had already

witnessed the greater part of cosmical growth, and that there remained

only the climax of that growth, the telepathic union of all the galaxies

to become the single, fully awakened spirit of the cosmos, perfect, fit

to be eternally contemplated and enjoyed by the Star Maker.

 

All this seemed to us majestically right. Yet we ourselves bad no joy in

it. We had been sated with the spectacle of continuous and triumphant

progress in the latter age of our galaxy, and we were no longer curious

about the host of the other galaxies. Almost certainly they were much

like our own. We were, in fact, overwhelmingly fatigued and

disillusioned. During so many aeons we had followed the fortunes of the

many worlds. So often we had lived out their passions, novel to them,

but to us for the most part repetitive. We had shared all kinds of

sufferings, all kinds of glories and shames. And now that the cosmical

ideal, the full awakening of the spirit, seemed on the point of

attainment, we found ourselves a little tired of it. What matter whether

the whole huge drama of existence should be intricately known and

relished by the perfected spirit or not? What matter whether we

ourselves should complete our pilgrimage or not?

 

During so many aeons our company, distributed throughout the galaxy, had

with difficulty maintained its single communal mentality. At all times

“we,” in spite of our severally, were in fact “I,” the single observer

of the many worlds; but the maintaining of this identity was itself

becoming a toil. “I” was overpowered with sleepiness; “we,” severally,

longed for our little native worlds, our homes, our lairs; and for the

animal obtuseness that had walled us in from all the immensities. In

particular, I, the Englishman, longed to be sleeping safely in that room

where she and I had slept together, the day’s urgencies all blotted out,

and nothing left but sleep and the shadowy, the peaceful awareness in

each of the other.

 

But though I was fatigued beyond endurance, sleep would not come. I

remained perforce with my colleagues, and with the many triumphant

worlds. Slowly we were roused from our dowsiness by a discovery. It

gradually appeared to us that the prevailing mood of these countless

Utopian systems of worlds was at heart very different from that of

triumph. In every world we found a deep conviction of the littleness and

impotence of all finite beings, no matter how exalted. In a certain

world there was a kind of poet. When we told him our conception of the

cosmical goal, he said, “When the cosmos wakes, if ever she does, she

will find herself not the single beloved of her maker, but merely a

little bubble adrift on the boundless and bottomless ocean of being.”

 

What had seemed to us at first the irresistible march of godlike

world-spirits, with all the resources of the universe in their hands and

all eternity before them, was now gradually revealed in very different

guise. The great advance in mental caliber, and the attainment of

communal mentality throughout the cosmos, had brought a change in the

experience of time. The temporal reach of the mind had been very greatly

extended. The awakened worlds experienced an aeon as a mere crowded day.

They were aware of time’s passage as a man in a canoe might have

cognizance of a river which in its upper reaches is sluggish but

subsequently breaks into rapids and becomes swifter and swifter, till,

at no great distance ahead, it must plunge in a final cataract down to

the sea, namely to the eternal end of life, the extinction of the stars.

Comparing the little respite that remained with the great work which

they passionately desired to accomplish, namely the full awakening of

the cosmical spirit, they saw that at best there was no time to spare,

and that, more probably, it was already too late to accomplish the task.

They had a strange foreboding that unforeseen disaster lay in store for

them. It was sometimes said, “We know not what the stars, even, have in

store for us, still less what the Star Maker.” And it was sometimes

said, “We should not for a moment consider even our best-established

knowledge of existence as true. It is awareness only of the colors that

our own vision paints on the film of one bubble in one strand of foam on

the ocean of being.” The sense of the fated incompleteness of all

creatures and of all their achievements gave to the Galactic Society of

Worlds a charm, a sanctity, as of some short-lived and delicate flower.

And it was with an increasing sense of precarious beauty that we

ourselves were now learning to regard the far-flung Utopia. In this mood

we had a remarkable experience.

 

We had embarked upon a sort of holiday from exploration, seeking the

refreshment of disembodied flight in space. Gathering our whole company

together out of all the worlds, we centered ourselves into a single

mobile viewpoint; and then, as one being, we glided and circled among

the stars and nebulae. Presently the whim took us to plunge into outer

space. We hastened till the forward stars turned violet, the hinder red;

till both forward and hinder vanished; till all visible features were

extinguished by the wild speed of our flight. In absolute darkness we

brooded on the origin and the destiny of the galaxies, and on the

appalling contrast between the cosmos and our minute home-lives to which

we longed to return.

 

Presently we came to rest. In doing so we discovered that our situation

was not such as we expected. The galaxy whence we had emerged did indeed

lie far behind us, no bigger than a great cloud; but it was not the

featured spiral that it should have been. After some confusion of mind

we realized that we were looking at the galaxy in an early stage of its

existence, in fact at a time before it was really a galaxy at all. For

the cloud was no cloud of stars, but a continuous mist of light. At its

heart was a vague brilliance, which faded softly into the dim outer

regions and merged without perceptible boundary into the black sky. Even

the sky itself was quite unfamiliar. Though empty of stars, it was

densely peopled with a great number of pale clouds. All seemingly were

farther from us than that from which we had come, but several bulked as

largely as Orion in the Earth’s sky. So congested was the heaven that

many of the great objects were continuous with one another in their

filmy extremities, and many were separated only by mere channels of

emptiness, through which loomed vistas of more remote nebulae, some of

them so distant as to be mere spots of light.

 

It was clear that we had traveled back through time to a date when the

great nebulae were still near neighbors to one another, before the

explosive nature of the cosmos had done more than separate them out from

the continuous and congested primal substance.

 

As we watched, it became obvious that events were unfolding before us

with fantastic speed. Each cloud visibly shrank, withdrawing into the

distance. It also changed its shape. Each vague orb flattened somewhat,

and became more definite. Receding and therefore diminishing, the

nebulae now appeared as lens-shaped mists, tilted at all angles. But,

even as we watched, they withdrew themselves so far into the depth of

space that it became difficult to observe their changes. Only our own

native nebula remained beside us, a huge oval stretching across half the

sky. On this we now concentrated our attention.

 

Differences began to appear within it, regions of brighter and of less

bright mist, faint streaks and swirls, like the foam on the sea’s waves.

These shadowy features slowly moved, as wisps of cloud move on the

hills. Presently it was clear that the internal currents of the nebula

were on the whole set in a common pattern. The great world of gas was in

fact slowly rotating, almost as a tornado. As it rotated it continued to

flatten. It was now like some blurred image of a streaked and flattish

pebble, handy for “ducks and drakes,” held too near the eye to be

focused. Presently we noticed, with our novel and miraculous vision,

that microscopic points of intenser light were appearing here and there

throughout the cloud, but mainly in its outer regions. As we watched,

their number grew, and the spaces between them grew dark. Thus were the

stars born.

 

The great cloud still span and flattened. It was soon a disc of whirling

star-streams and strands of uncondensed gas, the last disintegrating

tissues of the primal nebula. These continued to move within the whole

by their own semi-independent activity, changing their shapes, creeping

like living things, extending pseudopodia, and