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

CHAPTER XIII

THE BEGINNING AND THE END

 

1. BACK TO THE NEBULAE

 

WHILE the awakened galaxies were striving to make full use of the last

phase of their lucid consciousness, while I, the imperfect cosmical

mind, was thus striving, I began to have a strange new experience. I

seemed to be telepathically stumbling upon some being or beings of an

order that was at first quite incomprehensible to me.

 

At first I supposed that I had inadvertently come into touch with

subhuman beings in the primitive age of some natural planet, perhaps

with some very lowly amoeboid microorganisms, floating in a primeval

sea. I was aware only of crude hungers of the body, such as the lust to

assimilate physical energy for the maintenance of life, the lust of

movement and of contact, the lust of light and warmth.

 

Impatiently I tried to dismiss this trivial irrelevance. But it

continued to haunt me, becoming more intrusive and more lucid. Gradually

it took on such an intensity of physical vigor and well-being, and such

a divine confidence, as was manifested by no spirits up and down the

ages since the stars began.

 

I need not tell of the stages by which I learned at last the meaning of

this experience. Gradually I discovered that I had made contact not with

microorganisms, nor yet with worlds or stars or galactic minds, but

with the minds of the great nebulae before their substance had

disintegrated into stars to form the galaxies.

 

Presently I was able to follow their history from the time when they

first wakened, when they first existed as discrete clouds of gas, flying

apart after the explosive act of creation, even to the time when, with

the birth of the stellar hosts out of their substance, they sank into

senility and death.

 

In their earliest phase, when physically they were the most tenuous

clouds, their mentality was no more than a formless craving for action

and a sleepy perception of the infinitely slight congestion of their own

vacuous substance. I watched them condense into close-knit balls with

sharper contours, then into lentoid discs, featured with brighter

streams and darker chasms. As they condensed, each gained more unity,

became more organic in structure. Congestion, though so slight, brought

greater mutual influence to their atoms, which still were no more

closely packed, in relation to their size, than stars in space. Each

nebula was now a single great pool of faint radiation, a single system

of all-pervasive waves, spreading from atom to atom.

 

And now mentally these greatest of all megatheria, these amoeboid

titans, began to waken into a vague unity of experience. By human

standards, and even by the standards of the minded worlds and the stars,

the experience of the nebulae was incredibly slow-moving. For owing to

their prodigious size and the slow passage of the undulations to which

their consciousness was physically related, a thousand years was for

them an imperceptible instant. Periods such as men call geological,

containing the rise and fall of species after species, they experienced

as we experience the hours.

 

Each of the great nebulae was aware of its own lentoid body as a single

volume compact of tingling currents. Each craved fulfilment of its

organic potency, craved easement from the pressure of physical energy

welling softly within it, craved at the same time free expression of all

its powers of movement, craved also something more.

 

For though, both in physique and in mentality, these primordial beings

were strangely like the primeval microorganisms of planetary life, they

were also remarkably different; or at least they manifested a character

which even I, the rudimentary cosmical mind, had overlooked in

microorganisms. This was a will or predilection that I can only by

halting metaphor suggest.

 

Though even at their best these creatures were physically and

intellectually very simple, they were gifted with something which I am

forced to describe as a primitive but intense religious consciousness.

For they were ruled by two longings, both of which were essentially

religious. They desired, or rather they had a blind urge toward, union

with one another, and they had a blind passionate urge to be gathered up

once more into the source whence they had come.

 

The universe that they inhabited was of course a very simple, even a

poverty-stricken universe. It was also to them quite small. For each of

them the cosmos consisted of two things, the nebula’s own almost

featureless body and the bodies of the other nebulae. In this early age

of the cosmos the nebulae were very close to one another, for the volume

of the cosmos was at this time small in relation to its parts, whether

nebulae or electrons. In that age the nebulae, which in man’s day are

like birds at large in the sky, were confined, as it were, within a

narrow aviary. Thus each exercised an appreciable influence on its

fellows. And as each became more organized, more of a coherent physical

unity, it distinguished more readily between its native wave-pattern and

the irregularities which its neighbors’ influence imposed upon that

pattern. And by a native propensity implanted in it at the time of its

emergence from the common ancestral cloud, it interpreted this influence

to mean the presence of other minded nebulae.

 

Thus the nebulae in their prime were vaguely but intensely aware of one

another as distinct beings. They were aware of one another; but their

communication with each other was very meager and very slow. As

prisoners confined in separate cells give one another a sense of

companionship by tapping on their cell walls, and may even in time work

out a crude system of signals, so the nebulae revealed to one another

their kinship by exercising gravitational stress upon one another, and

by long-drawn-out pulsations of their light. Even in the early phase of

their existence, when the nebulae were very close to one another, a

message would take many thousands of years to spell itself out from

beginning to end, and many millions of years to reach its destination.

When the nebulae were at their prime, the whole cosmos reverberated with

their talk.

 

In the earliest phase of all, when these huge creatures were still very

close to one another and also immature, their parleying was concerned

wholly with the effort to reveal themselves to one another. With

childlike glee they laboriously communicated their joy in life, their

hungers and pains, their whims, their idiosyncrasies, their common

passion to be once more united, and to be, as men have sometimes said,

at one in God.

 

But even in early days, when few nebulae were yet mature, and most were

still very unclear in their minds, it became evident to the more

awakened that, far from unity, they were steadily drifting apart. As the

physical influence of one on another diminished, each nebula perceived

its companions shrinking into the distance. Messages took longer and

longer to elicit answers.

 

Had the nebulae been able to communicate telepathically, the “expansion”

of the universe might have been faced without despair. But these beings

were apparently too simple to make direct and lucid mental contact with

one another. Thus they found themselves doomed to separation. And since

their life-tempo was so slow, they seemed to themselves to have scarcely

found one another before they must be parted. Bitterly they regretted

the blindness of their infancy. For as they reached maturity they

conceived, one and all, not merely the passion of mutual delight which

we call love, but also the conviction that through mental union with one

another lay the way to union with the source whence they had come.

 

When it had become clear that separation was inevitable, when indeed

the hard-won community of these naive beings was already failing through

the increased difficulty of communication, and the most remote nebulae

were already receding from one another at high speed, each perforce made

ready to face the mystery of existence in absolute solitude.

 

There followed an aeon, or rather