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

CHAPTER XVI

EPILOGUE: BACK TO EARTH

 

I WOKE on the hill. The street lamps of our suburb outshone the stars.

The reverberation of the clock’s stroke was followed by eleven strokes

more. I singled out our window. A surge of joy, of wild joy, swept me

like a wave. Then peace.

 

The littleness, but the intensity, of earthly events! Gone, abolished in

an instant, was the hypercosmical reality, the wild fountain of

creations, and all the spray of worlds. Vanished, transmuted into

fantasy, and into sublime irrelevance.

 

The littleness, but the intensity, of this whole grain of rock, with its

film of ocean and of air, and its discontinuous, variegated, tremulous

film of life; of the shadowy hills, of the sea, vague, horizonless; of

the pulsating, cepheid, lighthouse; of the clanking railway trucks. My

hand caressed the pleasant harshness of the heather.

 

Vanished, the hypercosmical apparition. Not such as I had dreamed must

the real be, but infinitely more subtle, more dread, more excellent. And

infinitely nearer home.

 

Yet, however false the vision in detail of structure, even perhaps in

its whole form, in temper surely it was relevant; in temper perhaps it

was even true. The real itself, surely, had impelled me to conceive that

image, false in every theme and facet, yet in spirit true.

 

The stars wanly trembled above the street lamps. Great suns? Or feeble

sparks in the night sky? Suns, it was vaguely rumored. Lights at least

to steer by, and to beckon the mind from the terrestrial flurry; but

piercing the heart with their cold spears.

 

Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the

abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent

darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrors

that imagination had mustered. Peering, the mind could see nothing sure,

nothing in all human experience to be grasped as certain, except

uncertainty itself; nothing but obscurity gendered by a thick haze of

theories. Man’s science was a mere mist of numbers; his philosophy but a

fog of words. His very perception of this rocky grain and all its

wonders was but a shifting and a lying apparition. Even oneself, that

seeming-central fact, was a mere phantom, so deceptive, that the most

honest of men must question his own honesty, so insubstantial that he

must even doubt his very existence. And our loyalties! so

self-deceiving, so mis-informed and misconceived. So savagely pursued

and hate-warped I Our very loves, and these in full and generous

intimacy, must be condemned as unseeing, self-regarding, and

self-gratulatory. And yet? I singled out our window. We had been happy

together! We had found, or we had created, our little treasure of

community. This was the one rock in all the welter of experience. This,

not the astronomical and hypercosmical immensity, nor even the planetary

grain, this, this alone, was the solid ground of existence. On every

side was confusion, a rising storm, great waves already drenching our

rock. And all around, in the dark welter, faces and appealing hands,

half-seen and vanishing.

 

And the future? Black with the rising storm of this world’s madness,

though shot through with flashes of a new and violent hope, the hope of

a sane, a reasonable, a happier world. Between our time and that future,

what horror lay in store? Oppressors would not meekly give way. And we

two, accustomed only to security and mildness, were fit only for a

kindly world; wherein, none being tormented, none turns desperate. We

were adapted only to fair weather, for the practice of the friendly but

not too difficult, not heroical virtues, in a society both secure and

just. Instead, we found ourselves in an age of titanic conflict, when

the relentless powers of darkness and the ruthless because desperate

powers of light were coming to grips for a death struggle in the world’s

torn heart, when grave choices must be made in crisis after crisis, and

no simple or familiar principles were adequate.

 

Beyond our estuary a red growth of fire sprang from a foundry. At hand,

the dark forms of the gorse lent mystery to the suburb’s foot-worn moor.

 

In imagination I saw, behind our own hill’s top, the further and unseen

hills. I saw the plains and woods and all the fields, each with its

myriads of particular blades. I saw the whole land curving down from me,

over the planet’s shoulder. The villages were strung together on a mesh

of roads, steel lines, and humming wires. Mist-drops on a cobweb. Here

and there a town displayed itself as an expanse of light, a nebulous

luminosity, sprinkled with stars.

 

Beyond the plains, London, neon-lit, seething, was a microscope-slide

drawn from foul water, and crowded with nosing animalcules. Animalcules!

In the stars’ view, no doubt, these creatures were mere vermin; yet each

to itself, and sometimes one to another, was more real than all the

stars.

 

Gazing beyond London, imagination detected the dim stretch of the

Channel, and then the whole of Europe, a patch-work of tillage and

sleeping industrialism. Beyond poplared Normandy spread Paris, with the

towers of Notre-Dame tipped slightly, by reason of Earth’s curvature.

Further on, the Spanish night was ablaze with the murder of cities. Away

to the left lay Germany, with its forests and factories, its music, its

steel helmets. In cathedral squares I seemed to see the young men ranked

together in thousands, exalted, possessed, saluting the flood-lit

Fuhrer. In Italy too, land of memories and illusions, the mob’s idol

spell-bound the young.

 

Far left-wards again, Russia, an appreciably convex segment of our

globe, snow-pale in the darkness, spread out under thestars and

cloudtracts. Inevitably I saw the spires of the Kremlin, confronting the

Red Square. There Lenin lay, victorious. Far off, at the foot of the

Urals, imagination detected the ruddy plumes and smoke-pall of

Magnetostroy. Beyond the hills there gleamed a hint of dawn; for day, at

my midnight, was already pouring westward across Asia, overtaking with

its advancing front of gold and rose the tiny smoke-caterpillar of the

Trans-Siberian Express. To the north, the iron-hard Arctic oppressed the

exiles in their camps. Far southward lay the rich valleys and plains

that once cradled our species. But there I now saw railway lines ruled

across the snow. In every village Asiatic children were waking to

another schoolday, and to the legend of Lenin. South again the

Himalayas, snow-clad from waist to crest, looked over the rabble of

their foot-hills into crowded India. I saw the dancing cotton plants,

and the wheat, and the sacred river that bore the waters of Kamet past

ricefields and crocodile-shallows, past Calcutta with its shipping and

its offices, down to the sea. From my midnight I looked into China. The

morning sun glanced from the flooded fields and gilded the ancestral

graves. The Yang Tse, a gleaming, crumpled thread, rushed through its

gorge. Beyond the Korean ranges, and across the sea, stood Fujiyama,

extinct and formal. Around it a volcanic population welled and seethed

in that narrow land, like lava in a crater. Already it spilled over Asia

a flood of armies and of trade. Imagination withdrew and turned to

Africa. I saw the man-made thread of water that joins West to East; then

minarets, pyramids, the ever-waiting Sphinx. Ancient Memphis itself now

echoed with the rumor of Magnetostroy. Far southward, black men slept

beside the great lakes. Elephants trampled the crops. Further still,

where Dutch and English profit by the Negro millions, those hosts were

stirred by vague dreams of freedom. Peering beyond the whole bulge of

Africa, beyond cloud-spread Table Mountain, I saw the Southern Ocean,

black with storms, and then the ice-cliffs with their seals and

penguins, and the high snow-fields of the one unpeopled continent.

Imagination faced the midnight sun, crossed the Pole, and passed Erebus,

vomiting hot lava down his ermine. Northward it sped over the summer

sea, past New Zealand, that freer but less conscious Britain, to

Australia, where clear-eyed horsemen collect their flocks.

 

Still peering eastward from my hill, I saw the Pacific, strewn with

islands; and then the Americas, where the descendants of Europe long ago

mastered the descendants of Asia, through priority in the use of guns,

and the arrogance that guns breed. Beside the further ocean, north and

south, lay the old New World; the River Plate and Rio, the New England

cities, radiating center of the old new style of life and thought. New

York, dark against the afternoon sun, was a cluster of tall crystals, a

Stonehenge of modern megaliths. Round these, like fishes nibbling at the

feet of waders, the great liners crowded. Out at sea also I saw them,

and the plunging freighters, forging through the sunset, port holes and

decks aglow. Stokers sweated at furnaces, look-out men in crow’s-nests

shivered, dance music, issuing from opened doors, was drowned by the

wind.

 

The whole planet, the whole rock-grain, with its busy swarms, I now saw

as an arena where two cosmical antagonists, two spirits, were already

preparing for a critical struggle, already assuming terrestrial and

local guise, and coming to grips in our half-awakened minds. In city

upon city, in village after village, and in innumerable lonely

farmsteads, cottages, hovels, shacks, huts, in all the crevices where

human creatures were intent on their little comforts and triumphs and

escapes, the great struggle of our age was brewing.

 

One antagonist appeared as the will to dare for the sake of the new, the

longed for, the reasonable and joyful, world, in which every man and

woman may have scope to live fully, and live in service of mankind. The

other seemed essentially the myopic fear of the unknown; or was it more

sinister? Was it the cunning will for private mastery, which fomented

for its own ends the archaic, reason-hating, and vindictive, passion of

the tribe.

 

It seemed that in the coming storm all the dearest things must be

destroyed. All private happiness, all loving, all creative work in art,

science, and philosophy, all intellectual scrutiny and speculative

imagination, and all creative social building; all, indeed, that man

should normally live for, seemed folly and mockery and mere

self-indulgence in the presence of public calamity. But if we failed to

preserve them, when would they live again?

 

How to face such an age? How to muster courage, being capable only of

homely virtues? How to do this, yet preserve the mind’s integrity, never

to let the struggle destroy in one’s own heart what one tried to serve

in the world, the spirit’s integrity?

 

Two lights for guidance. The first, our little glowing atom of

community, with all that it signifies. The second, the cold light of the

stars, symbol of the hypercosmical reality, with its crystal ecstasy.

Strange that in this light, in which even the dearest love is frostily

assessed, and even the possible defeat of our half-waking world is

contemplated without remission of praise, the human crisis does not lose

but gains significance. Strange that it seems more, not less, urgent to

play some part in this struggle, this brief effort of animalcules

striving to win for their race some increase of lucidity before the

ultimate darkness.

 

THE END