I am the King.
Over the years, Rajasinghe—himself the bearer of a royal name, and doubtless host to many regal genes—had often thought of those words. They demonstrated so perfectly the ephemeral nature of power, and the futility of ambition. “I am the King.” Ah, but which king? The monarch who had stood on these granite flagstones—scarcely worn then, eighteen hundred years ago—was probably an able and intelligent man; but he failed to conceive that the time could ever come when he would fade into an anonymity as deep as that of his humblest subjects.
The attribution was now lost beyond trace. At least a dozen kings might have inscribed those haughty lines. Some had reigned for years, some only for weeks, and few indeed had died peacefully in their beds. No one would ever know if the king who felt it needless to give his name was Mahatissa II, or Bhatikabhaya, or Vijayakumara III, or Gajabahukagamani, or Candamukhasiva, or Moggallana I, or Kittisena, or Sirisamghabodhi . . . or some other monarch not even recorded in the long and tangled history of Taprobane.
The attendant operating the little elevator was astonished to see his distinguished visitor, and greeted Rajasinghe deferentially. As the cage slowly ascended the full fifteen meters, the visitor remembered how he would once have spurned it for the spiral stairway, up which Dravindra and Jaya were bounding even now in the thoughtless exuberance of youth.
The elevator clicked to a halt, and he stepped onto the small steel platform built out from the face of the cliff. Below and behind was a hundred meters of empty space, but the strong wire mesh gave ample security. Not even the most determined suicide could escape from the cage, large enough to hold a dozen people, that was clinging to the underside of the eternally breaking wave of stone.
Here in this accidental indentation, where the rock face formed a shallow cave, and so protected them from the elements, were the survivors of King Kalidasa’s heavenly court. Rajasinghe greeted them silently as he sank gratefully into the chair that was offered by the official guide.
“I would like,” he said quietly, “to be left alone for ten minutes. Jaya—Dravindra—see if you can head off the tourists.”
His companions looked at him doubtfully; so did the guide, who was supposed never to leave the frescoes unguarded. But, as usual, Ambassador Rajasinghe had his way, without even raising his voice.
“Ayu bowan,” he greeted the silent figures when he was alone at last. “I’m sorry to have neglected you for so long.”
He waited politely for an answer, but they paid no more attention to him than to all their other admirers for the last twenty centuries. Rajasinghe was not discouraged; he was used to their indifference. Indeed, it added to their charm.
“I have a problem, my dears,” he continued. “You have watched all the invaders of Taprobane come and go, since Kalidasa’s time. You have seen the jungle flow like a tide around Yakkagala, and then retreat before the ax and the plow. But nothing has really changed in all those years. Nature has been kind to little Taprobane, and so has History; it has left her alone. . . .
“Now the centuries of quiet may be drawing to a close. Our land may become the center of the world . . . of many worlds. The great mountain you have watched so long, there in the south, may be the key to the universe. If that is so, the Taprobane we knew and loved will cease to exist.
“Perhaps there is not much that I can do. But I have some power to help, or to hinder. I still have many friends. If I wish, I can delay this dream—or nightmare—at least beyond my lifetime. Should I do so? Or should I give aid to this man, whatever his real motives may be?”
He turned to his favorite, the only one who did not avert her eyes when he gazed upon her. All the other maidens stared into the distance, or examined the flowers in their hands; but the one he had loved since his youth seemed, from a certain angle, to catch his glance.
“Ah, Karuna! It’s not fair to ask such questions. What could you possibly know of the real worlds beyond the sky, or of men’s need to reach them? Even though you were once a goddess, Kalidasa’s heaven was only an illusion.
“Well, whatever strange futures you may see, I shall not share them. We have known each other a long time—by my standards, if not by yours. While I can, I shall watch you from the villa; but I do not think that we will meet again. Farewell—and thank you, beautiful ones, for all the pleasure you have brought me down the years. Give my greetings to those who come after me.”
Yet as he descended the spiral stairs—ignoring the elevator—Rajasinghe did not feel at all in a valedictory mood. On the contrary, it seemed to him that he had shed quite a few of his years (and, after all, seventy-two was not really old). He could tell that Dravindra and Jaya had noticed the spring in his step, by the way their faces lit up.
Perhaps his retirement had been getting a little dull. Perhaps both he and Taprobane needed a breath of fresh air to blow away the cobwebs—just as the monsoon brought renewed life after the months of torpid, heavy skies.
Whether Morgan succeeded or not, his was an enterprise to fire the imagination and stir the soul. Kalidasa would have envied—and approved.
II
The Temple
“While the different religions wrangle with one another as to which of them is in possession of the truth, in our view the truth of religion may be altogether disregarded. . . . If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.”
Sigmund Freud
New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 1932
“Of course man made God in his own image; but what was the alternative? Just as a real understanding of geology was impossible until we were able to study other worlds besides earth, so a valid theology must await contact with extraterrestrial intelligences. There can be no such subject as comparative religion as long as we study only the religions of man.”
El Hadj Mohammed ben Selim
Professor of Comparative Religion
Inaugural Address, Brigham Young University, 1998
“We must await, not without anxiety, the answers to the following questions: (a) what, if any, are the religious concepts of entities with zero, one, two, or more than two ‘parents’; (b) is religious belief found only among organisms that have close contact with their direct progenitors during their formative years?“
If we find that religion occurs exclusively among intelligent analogs of apes, dolphins, elephants, dogs, etc., but not among extraterrestrial computers, termites, fish, turtles, or social amoebae, we may have to draw some painful conclusions. . . . Perhaps both love and religion can arise only among mammals, and for much the same reasons. This is also suggested by a study of their pathologies. Anyone who doubts the connection between religious fanaticism and perversion should take a long, hard look at the Malleus maleficarum or Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun.”
Ibid.
“Dr. Charles Willis’s notorious remark (Hawaii, 1970) that ‘religion is a by-product of malnutrition’ is not, in itself, much more helpful than Gregory Bateson’s somewhat indelicate one-syllable refutation. What Dr. Willis apparently meant was: (1) the hallucinations caused by voluntary or involuntary starvation are readily interpreted as religious visions; (2) hunger in this life encourages belief in a compensatory afterlife, as a, perhaps essential, psychological survival mechanism . . . .
“It is indeed one of the ironies of fate that research into the so-called consciousness-expanding drugs proved that they did exactly the opposite, by leading to the detection of the naturally occurring ‘apothetic’ chemicals in the brain. The discovery that the most devout adherent of any faith could be converted to any other by a judicious dose of 2-4-7 ortho-para-theosamine was, perhaps, the most devastating blow ever received by religion.
“Until, of course, the advent of Starglider. . . .”
R. Gabor
The Pharmacological Basis of Religion
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Miskatonic University Press, 2069
12
Starglider
Something of the sort had been expected for a hundred years, and there had been many false alarms. Yet when it finally happened, mankind was taken by surprise.
The radio signal from the direction of Alpha Centauri was so powerful that it was first detected as interference on normal commercial circuits. This was highly embarrassing to all the radio astronomers, who for so many decades had been seeking intelligent messages from space, especially because they had long ago dismissed the triple system of Alpha, Beta, and Proxima Centauri from serious consideration.
At once, every radio telescope that could scan the Southern Hemisphere was focused upon Centaurus. Within hours, a still more sensational discovery was made. The signal was not coming from the Centaurus system at all—but from a point half a degree away. And it was moving.
That was the first hint of the truth. When it was confirmed, all the normal business of mankind came to a halt.
The power of the signal was no longer surprising. Its source was already well inside the solar system, and moving sunward at six hundred kilometers a second. The long-awaited, long-feared visitors from space had arrived at last. . . .
Yet for thirty days the intruder did nothing, as it fell past the outer planets, broadcasting an unvarying series of pulses that merely announced “Here I am!” It made no attempt to answer the signals beamed at it, nor did it make any adjustments to its natural, cometlike orbit. Unless it had slowed down from some much higher speed, its voyage from Centaurus must have lasted two thousand years. Some found this reassuring, since it suggested that the visitor was a robot space probe; others were disappointed, feeling that the absence of real, live extraterrestrials would be an anticlimax.
The whole spectrum of possibilities was argued, ad nauseam, in all the media of communications, all the parliaments of man. Every plot that had ever been used in science fiction, from the arrival of benevolent gods to an invasion of bloodsucking vampires, was disinterred and solemnly analyzed. Lloyds of London collected substantial premiums from people insuring against every possible future—including some in which there would have been little chance of collecting a penny.
Then, as the alien passed the orbit of Jupiter, man’s instruments began to learn something about it. The first discovery created a short-lived panic. The object was five hundred kilometers in diameter—the size of a small moon. Perhaps, after all, it was a mobile world, carrying an invading army. . . .
This fear vanished when more precise observations showed that the solid body of the intruder was only a few meters across. The five-hundred-kilometer halo around it was something familiar—a flimsy, slowly revolving parabolic reflector, the exact equivalent of the astronomers’ orbiting radio telescopes. Presumably this was the antenna through which the visitor kept in touch with its distant base. And through which, even now, it was doubtless beaming back its discoveries as it scanned the solar system and eavesdropped upon the radio, television, and data broadcasts of mankind.
Then came yet another surprise. That asteroid-sized antenna was not pointed in the direction of Alpha Centauri, but toward a totally different part of the sky. It began to look as if the Centaurus system was merely the vehicle’s last port of call, not its origin.
The astronomers were still brooding over this when they had a remarkable stroke of luck. A solar weather probe on routine patrol beyond Mars became suddenly dumb, but recovered its radio voice a minute later. When the records were examined, it was found that the instruments had been momentarily paralyzed by intense radiation. The probe had cut right across the visitor’s beam—and it was then a simple matter to calculate precisely where it was aimed.
There was nothing in that direction for fifty-two light-years, except a very faint—and presumably very old—red dwarf star, one of those abstemious little suns that would still be shining peacefully billions of years after the galaxy’s splendid giants had burned themselves out. No radio telescope had ever examined it closely; now all those that could be spared from the approaching visitor were focused upon its suspected origin.
And there it was, beaming a sharply tuned signal in the one-centimeter band. The makers were still in contact with the vehicle they had launched, thousands of years ago; but the messages it must be receiving now were from only half a century in the past.
As it came within the orbit of Mars, the visitor showed its first awareness of mankind, in the most dramatic and unmistakable way that could be imagined. It started transmitting standard 3075-line television pictures, interleaved with video text in fluent though stilted English and Mandarin. The first cosmic conversation had begun—and not, as had always been imagined, with a delay of decades, but only minutes.
13
Shadow at Dawn
Morgan had left his hotel in Ranapura at 4:00 A.M. on a clear, moonless night. He was not too happy about the choice of time, but Professor Sarath, who had made all the arrangements, had promised him that it would be well worth while. “You won’t understand anything about Sri Kanda,” he had said, “unless you have watched the dawn from the summit. And Buddy—er, the Maha Thero—won’t receive visitors at any other time. He says it’s a splendid way of discouraging the merely curious.” So Morgan had acquiesced with as much good grace as possible.
To make matters worse, the Taprobanean driver had persisted in carrying on a brisk, though rather one-sided, conversation, apparently designed to establish a complete profile of his passenger’s personality. This was all done with such ingenuous good nature that it was impossible to take offense, but Morgan would have preferred silence.
He also wished, sometimes devoutly, that his driver would pay rather more attention to the countless hairpin bends around which they zipped in the near-darkness. Perhaps it was just as well that he could not see all the cliffs and chasms they were negotiating as the car climbed up through the foothills. This road was a triumph of nineteenth-century military engineering—the work of the last colonial power, built in the final campaign against the proud mountain folk of the interior. But it had never been converted to automatic operation, and there were times when Morgan wondered if he would survive the journey.
And then, suddenly, he forgot his fears and his annoyance at the loss of sleep.
“There it is!” said the driver proudly as the car rounded the flank of a hill.
Sri Kanda itself was completely invisible in a darkness that as yet bore no hint of the approaching dawn. Its presence was revealed by a thin ribbon of light, zigzagging back and forth under the stars, hanging as if by magic in the sky. Morgan knew that he was merely seeing the lamps set two hundred years ago to guide pilgrims as they ascended the longest stairway in the world, but in its defiance of logic and gravity it appeared almost a prevision of his own dream. Ages before he was born, inspired by philosophies he could barely imagine, men had begun the work he hoped to finish. They had, quite literally, built the first crude steps on a road to the stars.
No longer feeling drowsy, Morgan watched as the band of light drew closer and resolved itself into a necklace of innumerable twinkling beads. Now the mountain was becoming visible, as a black triangle eclipsing half the sky. There was something sinister about its silent, brooding presence. Morgan could almost imagine that it was indeed the abode of gods who knew of his mission, and were gathering their strength against him.
These ominous thoughts were entirely forgotten when they arrived at the cable-car terminus and Morgan discovered to his surprise—it was only 5:00 A.M.—that at least a hundred people were milling around in the little waiting room. He ordered welcome hot coffee for himself and his garrulous driver, who, rather to his relief, showed no interest in making the ascent. “I’ve done it at least twenty times,” he said with perhaps exaggerated boredom. “I’m going to sleep in the car until you come down.”
Morgan purchased his ticket, did a quick calculation, and estimated that he would be in the third or fourth load of pas
sengers. He was glad that he had taken Sarath’s advice and slipped a thermocoat in his pocket. At a mere two-kilometer altitude, it was quite cold. At the summit, three kilometers higher, it must be freezing.
As he slowly shuffled forward in the rather subdued and sleepy line of visitors, Morgan noted with amusement that he was the only one not carrying a camera. Where were the genuine pilgrims? he wondered. Then he remembered; they would not be here. There was no easy way to heaven, or nirvana, or whatever it was that the faithful sought. Merit was acquired solely by one’s own efforts, not with the aid of machines. An interesting doctrine, and one containing much truth; but there were also times when only machines could do the job.
At last, he got a seat in the car, and with a considerable creaking of cables they were on their way. Once again, Morgan felt that eerie sense of anticipation. The elevator he was planning would hoist loads more than ten thousand times as high as this primitive system, which probably dated right back to the twentieth century. And yet, when all was said, its basic principles would be much the same.
Outside the swaying car was total darkness, except when a section of illuminated stairway came into view. It was completely deserted, as if the countless millions who had toiled up the mountain during the last three thousand years had left no successor. But then Morgan realized that those making the ascent on foot would already be far above on their appointment with the dawn; they would have left the lower slopes of the mountain hours ago.
At the four-kilometer level the passengers had to change cars and walk a short distance to another cable station, but the transfer involved little delay. Now Morgan was glad of his coat, and wrapped its metalized fabric closely around his body. There was frost underfoot, and already he was breathing deeply in the thin air. He was not at all surprised to see racks of oxygen cylinders in the small terminus, with instructions for their use prominently displayed.