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

for the slow-living creatures

themselves a brief spell, in which they sought, by self-mastery of their

own flesh and by spiritual discipline, to find the supreme illumination

which all awakened beings must, in their very nature, seek.

 

But now there appeared a new trouble. Some of the eldest of the nebulae

complained of a strange sickness which greatly hampered their

meditations. The outer fringes of their tenuous flesh began to

concentrate into little knots. These became in time grains of intense,

congested fire. In the void between, there was nothing left but a few

stray atoms. At first the complaint was no more serious than some

trivial rash on a man’s skin; but later it spread into the deeper

tissues of the nebula, and was accompanied by grave mental troubles. In

vain the doomed creatures resolved to turn the plague to an advantage by

treating it as a heavensent test of the spirit. Though for a while they

might master the plague simply by heroic contempt of it, its ravages

eventually broke down their will. It now seemed clear to them that the

cosmos was a place of futility and horror.

 

Presently the younger nebulae observed that their seniors, one by one,

were falling into a state of sluggishness and confusion which ended

invariably in the sleep that men call death. Soon it became evident even

to the most buoyant spirit that this disease was no casual accident but

a fate inherent in the nebular nature.

 

One by one the celestial megatheria were annihilated, giving place to

stars.

 

Looking back on these events from my post in the far future, I, the

rudimentary cosmical mind, tried to make known to the dying nebulae in

the remote past that their death, far from being the end, was but an

early stage in the life of the cosmos. It was my hope that I might give

them consolation by imparting some idea of the vast and intricate

future, and of my own final awakening. But it proved impossible to

communicate with them. Though within the sphere of their ordinary

experience they were capable of a sort of intellection, beyond that

sphere they were almost imbecile. As well might a man seek to comfort

the disintegrating germ-cell from which he himself sprang by telling it

about his own successful career in human society.

 

Since this attempt to comfort was vain, I put aside compassion, and was

content merely to follow to its conclusion the collapse of the nebular

community. Judged by human standards the agony was immensely prolonged.

It began with the disintegration of the eldest nebulae into stars, and

it lasted (or will last) long after the destruction of the final human

race on Neptune. Indeed, the last of the nebulae did not sink into

complete unconsciousness till many of the corpses of its neighbors had

already been transformed into symbiotic societies of stars and minded

worlds. But to the slow-living nebulae themselves the plague seemed a

galloping disease. One after the other, each great religous beast found

itself at grips with the subtle enemy, and fought a gallant losing fight

until stupor overwhelmed it. None ever knew that its crumbling flesh

teemed with the young and swifter lives of stars, or that it was already

sprinkled here and there with the incomparably smaller, incomparably

swifter, and incomparably richer lives of creatures such as men, whose

crowded ages of history were all compressed within the last few

distressful moments of the primeval monsters.

 

2. THE SUPREME MOMENT NEARS

 

The discovery of nebular life deeply moved the incipient cosmical mind

that I had become. Patiently I studied those almost formless megatheria,

absorbing into my own composite being the fervor of their simple but

deep-running nature. For these simple creatures sought their goal with a

single-mindedness and passion eclipsing all the worlds and stars. With

such earnest imagination did I enter into their history that I myself,

the cosmical mind, was in a manner remade by contemplation of these

beings. Considering from the nebular point of view the vast complexity

and subtlety of the living worlds, I began to wonder whether the endless

divagations of the worlds were really due so much to richness of being

as to weakness of spiritual perception, so much to the immensely varied

potentiality of their nature as to sheer lack of any intense controlling

experience. A compass needle that is but feebly magnetized swings again

and again to west and east, and takes long to discover its proper

direction. One that is more sensitive will settle immediately toward the

north. Had the sheer complexity of every world, with its host of minute

yet complex members, merely confused its sense of the proper direction

of all spirit? Had the simplicity and spiritual vigor of the earliest,

hugest beings achieved something of highest value that the complexity

and subtlety of the worlds could never achieve?

 

But no! Excellent as the nebular mentality was, in its own strange way,

the stellar and the planetary mentalities had also their special

virtues. And of all three the planetary must be most prized, since it

could best comprehend all three.

 

I now allowed myself to believe that I, since I did at last include in

my own being an intimate awareness not only of many galaxies but also of

the first phase of cosmical life, might now with some justice regard

myself as the incipient mind of the cosmos as a whole.

 

But the awakened galaxies that supported me were still only a small

minority of the total population of galaxies. By telepathic influence I

continued to help on those many galaxies that were upon the threshold of

mental maturity. If I could include within the cosmical community of

awakened galaxies some hundreds instead of a mere score of members,

perhaps I myself, the communal mind, might be so strengthened as to rise

from my present state of arrested mental infancy to something more like

maturity. It was clear to me that even now, in my embryonic state, I was

ripening for some new elucidation; and that with good fortune I might

yet find myself in the presence of that which, in the human language of

this book, has been called the Star Maker.

 

At this time my longing for that presence had become an overmastering

passion. It seemed to me that the veil which still hid the source and

goal of all nebulae and stars and worlds was already dissolving. That

which had kindled so many myriad beings to worship, yet had clearly

revealed itself to none, that toward which all beings had blindly

striven, representing it to themselves by the images of a myriad

divinities, was now, I felt, on the point of revelation to me, the

marred but still growing spirit of the cosmos.

 

I who had myself been worshipped by hosts of my little members, I whose

achievement reached far beyond their dreams, was now oppressed,

overwhelmed, by the sense of my own littleness and imperfection. For the

veiled presence of the Star Maker already overmastered me with dreadful

power. The further I ascended along the path of the spirit, the loftier

appeared the heights that lay before me. For what I had once thought to

be the summit fully revealed was now seen to be a mere foot-hill. Beyond

lay the real ascent, steep, cragged, glacial, rising into the dark mist.

Never, never should I climb that precipice. And yet I must go forward.

Dread was overcome by irresistible craving.

 

Meanwhile under my influence the immature galaxies one by one attained

that pitch of lucidity which enabled them to join the cosmical community

and enrich me with their special experience. But physically the

enfeeblement of the cosmos continued. By the time that half the total

population of galaxies had reached maturity it became clear that few

more would succeed.

 

Of living stars, very few were left in any galaxy. Of the host of dead

stars, some, subjected to atomic disintegration, were being used as

artificial suns, and were surrounded by many thousands of artificial

planets. But the great majority of the stars were now encrusted, and

themselves peopled. After a while it became necessary to evacuate all

planets, since the artificial suns were too extravagant of energy. The

planet-dwelling races therefore one by one destroyed themselves,

bequeathing the material of their worlds and all their wisdom to the

inhabitants of the extinguished stars. Henceforth the cosmos, once a

swarm of blazing galaxies, each a swarm of stars, was composed wholly of

star-corpses. These dark grains drifted through the dark void, like an

infinitely tenuous smoke rising from an extinguished fire. Upon these

motes, these gigantic worlds, the ultimate populations had created here

and there with their artificial lighting a pale glow, invisible even

from the innermost ring of lifeless planets.

 

By far the commonest type of being in these stellar worlds was the

intelligent swarm of minute worms or insectoids. But there were also

many races of larger creatures of a very curious kind adapted to the

prodigious gravitation of their giant worlds. Each of these creatures

was a sort of living blanket. Its under surface bore a host of tiny legs

that were also mouths. These supported a body that was never more than

an inch thick, though it might be as much as a couple of yards wide and

ten yards long. At the forward end the manipulatory “arms” traveled on

their own battalions of legs. The upper surface of the body contained a

honeycomb of breathing-pores and a great variety of sense organs.

Between the two surfaces spread the organs of metabolism and the vast

area of brain. Compared with the worm-swarms and insect-swarms, these

tripe-like beings had the advantage of more secure mental unity and

greater specialization of organs; but they were more cumbersome, and

less adapted to the subterranean life which was later to be forced on

all populations.

 

The huge dark worlds with their immense weight of atmosphere and their

incredible breadths of ocean, where the waves even in the most furious

storms were never more than ripples such as we know on quicksilver, were

soon congested with the honeycomb civilizations of worms and insectoids

of many species, and the more precarious shelters of the tripe-like

creatures. Life on these worlds was almost like life in a

two-dimensional “flat-land.” Even the most rigid of the artificial

elements was too weak to allow of lofty structures.

 

As time advanced, the internal heat of the encrusted stars was used up,

and it became necessary to support civilization by atomic disintegration

of the star’s rocky core. Thus in time each stellar world became an

increasingly hollow sphere supported by a system of great internal

buttresses. One by one the populations, or rather the new and specially

adapted descendants of the former populations, retired into the

interiors of the burnt-out stars.

 

Each imprisoned in its hollow world, and physically isolated from the

rest of the cosmos, these populations telepathically supported the

cosmical mind. These were my flesh. In the inevitable “expansion” of the

universe, the dark galaxies had already for aeons been flying apart so

rapidly that light itself could not have bridged the gulf between them.

But this prodigious disintegration of the cosmos was of less account to

the ultimate populations than the physical insulation of star from star

through the cessation of all stellar radiation and all interstellar

travel. The many populations, teeming in the galleries of the many

worlds, maintained their telepathic union. Intimately they knew one

another in all their diversity. Together they supported the communal

mind, withall its awareness of the whole vivid, intricate past of the

cosmos, and its tireless effort to achieve its spiritual goal before

increase of entropy should destroy the tissue of civilizations in which

it inhered.

 

Such was the condition of the cosmos when it approached the supreme