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

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One of these parties was convinced that the pretensions of the minded

planets must be false, that beings whose history was compact of sin and

strife and slaughter must be essentially diabolic, and that to parley

with them was to court disaster. This party, at first in a majority,

urged that the war should be continued till every planet had been

destroyed.

 

The minority party clamored for peace. The planets, they affirmed, were

seeking in their own way the very same goal as the stars. It was even

suggested that these minute beings, with their more varied experience

and their long acquaintance with evil, might have certain kinds of

insight which the stars, those fallen angels, lacked. Might not the two

sorts of being create together a glorious symbiotic society, and achieve

together the end that was most dear to both, namely the full awakening

of the spirit? It was a long while before the majority would listen to

this counsel. Destruction continued. The precious energies of the galaxy

were squandered. System after system of worlds was destroyed. Star after

star sank into exhaustion and stupor. Meanwhile the Society of Worlds

maintained a pacific attitude. No more stellar energy was tapped. No

more stellar orbits were altered. No stars were artificially exploded.

 

Stellar opinion began to change. The crusade of extermination relaxed,

and was abandoned. There followed a period of “isolationism” in which

the stars, intent on repairing their shattered society, left their

former enemies alone. Gradually a fumbling attempt at fraternizing began

between the planets and their suns. The two kinds of beings, though so

alien that they could not at all comprehend each other’s idiosyncrasies,

were too lucid for mere tribal passions. They resolved to overcome all

obstacles and enter into some kind of community. Soon it was the desire

of every star to be girdled with artificial planets and enter into some

sort of “sympsychic” partnership with its encircling companions. For it

was by now clear to the stars that the “vermin” had much to give them.

The experience of the two orders of beings was in many ways

complementary. The stars retained still the tenor of the angelic wisdom

of their golden age. The planets excelled in the analytic, the

microscopic, and in that charity which was bred in them by knowledge of

their own weak and suffering forbears. To the stars, moreover, it was

perplexing that their minute companions could accept not merely with

resignation but with joy a cosmos which evidently was seamed with evil.

 

In due season a symbiotic society of stars and planetary systems

embraced the whole galaxy. But it was at first a wounded society, and

ever after an impoverished galaxy. Few only of its million million stars

were still in their prime. Every possible sun was now girdled with

planets. Many dead stars were stimulated to disintegrate their atoms so

as to provide artificial suns. Others were used in a more economical

manner. Special races of intelligent organisms were bred or synthetized

to inhabit the surfaces of these great worlds. Very soon, upon a

thousand stars that once had blazed, teeming populations of innumerable

types maintained an austere civilization. These subsisted on the

volcanic energies of their huge worlds. Minute, artificially contrived

worm-like creatures, they crept laboriously over the plains where

oppressive gravitation allowed not so much as a stone to project above

the general level. So violent, indeed, was gravitation, that even the

little bodies of these worms might be shattered by a fall of half an

inch. Save for artificial lighting, the inhabitants of the stellar

worlds lived in eternal darkness, mitigated only by the starlight, the

glow of volcanic eruption, and the phosphorescence of their own bodies.

Their subterranean borings led down to the vast photosynthesis stations

which converted the star’s imprisoned energy for the uses of life and of

mind. Intelligence in these gigantic worlds was of course a function not

of the separate individual but of the minded swarm. Like the insectoids,

these little creatures, when isolated from the swarm, were mere

instinctive animals, actuated wholly by the gregarious craving to return

to the swarm.

 

The need to people the dead stars would not have arisen had not the war

reduced the number of minded planets and the number of suns available

for new planetary systems dangerously near the minimum required to

maintain the communal life in full diversity. The Society of Worlds had

been a delicately organized unity in which each element had a special

function. It was therefore necessary, since the lost members could not

be repeated, to produce new worlds to function in their places at least

approximately.

 

Gradually the symbiotic society overcame the immense difficulties of

reorganization, and began to turn its attention to the pursuit of that

purpose which is the ultimate purpose of all awakened minds, the aim

which they inevitably and gladly espouse because it is involved in their

deepest nature. Henceforth the symbiotic society gave all its best

attention to the further awakening of the spirit.

 

But this purpose, which formerly the angelic company of the stars and

the ambitious Society of Worlds had each hoped to accomplish in relation

not merely to the galaxy but to the cosmos, was now regarded more

humbly. Both stars and worlds recognized that not merely the home galaxy

but the cosmical swarm of galaxies was nearing its end. Physical energy,

once a seemingly inexhaustible fund, was becoming less and less

available for the maintenance of life. It was spreading itself more and

more evenly over the whole cosmos. Only here and there and with

difficulty could the minded organisms intercept it in its collapse from

high to low potential. Very soon the universe would be physically

senile. All ambitious plans had therefore to be abandoned. Nolonger was

there any question of physical travel between the galaxies. Such

enterprises would use up too many of the pence out of the few pounds of

wealth that survived after the extravagance of former aeons. No longer

was there any unnecessary coming and going, even within the galaxy

itself. The worlds clung to their suns. The suns steadily cooled. And as

they cooled, the encircling worlds contracted their orbits for warmth’s

sake.

 

But though the galaxy was physically impoverished, it was in many ways

Utopian. The symbiotic society of stars and worlds was perfectly

harmonious. Strife between the two kinds was a memory of the remote

past. Both were wholly loyal to the common purpose. They lived their

personal lives in zestful cooperation, friendly conflict, and mutual

interest. Each took part according to its capacity in the common task of

cosmical exploration and appreciation. The stars were now dying off more

rapidly than before, for the great host of the mature had become a great

host of aged white dwarfs. As they died, they bequeathed their bodies to

the service of the society, to be used either as reservoirs of

subatomic energy, or as artificial suns, or as worlds to be peopled by

intelligent populations of worms. Many a planetary system was now

centered around an artificial sun. Physically the substitution was

tolerable; but beings that had become mentally dependent on partnership

with a living star regarded a mere furnace with despondency. Foreseeing

the inevitable dissolution of the symbiosis throughout the galaxy, the

planets were now doing all in their power to absorb the angelic wisdom

of the stars. But after very few aeons the planets themselves had to

begin reducing their number. The myriad worlds could no longer all crowd

closely enough around their cooling suns. Soon the mental power of the

galaxy, which had hitherto been with difficulty maintained at its

highest pitch, must inevitably begin to wane.

 

Yet the temper of the galaxy was not sad but joyful. The symbiosis had

greatly improved the art of telepathic communion; and now at last the

many kinds of spirit which composed the galactic society were bound so

closely in mutual insight that there had emerged out of their harmonious

diversity a true galactic mind, whose mental reach surpassed that of the

stars and the worlds as far as these surpassed their own individuals.

 

The galactic mind, which was but the mind of each individual star and

world and minute organism in the worlds, enriched by all its fellows and

awakened to finer percipience, saw that it had but a short time to live.

Looking back through the ages of galactic history, down temporal vistas

crowded with teeming and diversified populations, the mind of our galaxy

saw that itself was the issue of untold strife and grief and hope

frustrated. It confronted all the tortured spirits of the past not with

pity or regret but with smiling content, such as a man may feel toward

his own childhood’s tribulations. And it said, within the mind of each

one of all its members, “Their suffering, which to them seemed barren

evil, was the little price to be paid for my future coming. Right and

sweet and beautiful is the whole in which these things happen. For I, I

am the heaven in which all my myriad progenitors find recompense,

finding their heart’s desire. For in the little time that is left me I

shall press on, with all my peers throughout the cosmos, to crown the

cosmos with perfect and joyful insight, and to salute the Maker of

Galaxies and Stars and Worlds with fitting praise.”