Galaxies Like Grains of Sand

  The foetus was all Farro’s universe; it filled the mask, filled him. He suffered with it, for it obviously suffered. Pressures racked it, the irremediable pressures of time and biochemistry, the pain of which it strove to lessen by changing shape. It writhed from wormhood to slughood, it grew gills and a tail. Fishlike, and then no longer fishlike, it toiled up the steep slope of evolution, mouselike, piglike, apelike, babylike.

  “This is the truth the wisest man forgets — that he has done all this.”

  Now the environment changed. The foetus, exerting itself, had become a baby, and the baby could only become a man by the proddings of a thousand new stimuli. And all these stimuli — animal, vegetable, or mineral — lived too, in their different way. They competed. They inflicted constant challenges on the man creature; some of them, semisentient, invaded his flesh and bred there, creating their own life cycles; others, nonsentient, were like waves that passed unceasingly through his mind and his body. He seemed hardly an entity, merely a focal point of forces, constantly threatened with dissolution.

  So complete was the identification between the image and the receiver that Farro felt he was the man. He recognized that everything happening to the man happened to him; he sweated and writhed like the foetus, conscious of the salt water in his blood, the unstoppable rays in the marrow of his bones. Yet the mind was freer than it had been in the foetus stage; during the wrenching moment of fear when environments had changed, the eye of consciousness had opened its lids.

  “And now the man changes environments again, to venture away from his own planet,” the Galactic Minister said.

  But space was not space as Farro had reckoned it. It struck his eyes like slate: not a simple nothingness, but an unfathomable web of forces, a creeping blend of stresses and fields in which stars and planets hung like dew amid spiders’ webs. No life was here, only the same interaction of planes and pressures that had attended the man all along, and of which even the man himself was composed. Nonetheless, his perceptions reached a new stage, the light of consciousness burned more steadily.

  Again he was reaching out, swimming toward the confines of his Galaxy. About him, proportions changed, slid, dwindled. In the beginning, the womb had been everywhere, equipped with all the menace and coercion of a full-scale universe; now the galaxy was revealed as smaller than the womb — a pint-sized goldfish bowl in which a tiddler swam, unaware of the difference between air and water. For there was no spanning the gulfs between galaxies: there lay nothing, the nothing of an unremitting Outside. And the man had never met nothing before. Freedom was not a condition he knew, because it did not exist in his interpenetrated existence.

  As he swam up to the surface, something stirred beyond the yellow rim of the Galaxy. The something could hardly be seen; but it was there on the Outside, wakeful and clawed, a creature with senses, though insensate. It registered half as sight, half as noise: a smouldering and delayed series of pops, like the sound of bursting arteries. It was big. Farro screamed into the blackness of his mask at its bigness and its anger.

  The creature was waiting for the man. Stretching, it stretched right around the Galaxy, around the goldfish bowl, its supernatant bat’s wings groping for purchase.

  Farro screamed again.

  “I’m sorry,” he said weakly, as he felt the Minister removing his mask for him. “I’m sorry.”

  The Minister patted his shoulder. Shuddering, Farro buried his face in his hands, trying to erase the now loathsome contact of the mask. That thing beyond the Galaxy — it seemed to have entered and found a permanent place in his mind.

  At last, gathering himself together, he stood up. Weakness floated in every layer of him. Moistening his lips, he spoke.

  “So you inveigle us into the Federation to face that!”

  Jandanagger took his arm.

  “Come back to my room. There is a point I can now make clear to you which I could not before. Earth has not been inveigled into the Federation. With your Earthbound eyes, I know how you see the situation. You fancy that despite the evidence before your eyes of Galactic superiority, there must be some vital point on which Earth can offer something unbeatable. You fancy there must be some factor for which we need terrestrial help — a factor it does not yet suit us to reveal — isn’t that so?”

  Farro avoided the other’s narrow eyes as they ascended in an elevator to the top of the building.

  “There are other things beside the material ones,” he said evasively. “Think for instance of the great heritage of literature in the world; to a truly civilized race, that might appear invaluable.”

  “That depends upon what you mean by civilized. The senior races of the Galaxy, having lost any taste for the spectacle of mental suffering, would be unlikely to find much attraction in your literatures.”

  This gently administered rebuke silenced Farro. After a pause, the Galactic Minister continued. “No, you have no secret virtues, alas, for which we are gulling you into the Federation. The boot is on the other foot. We are taking you in as a duty, because you need looking after. I apologize for putting the matter so bluntly; but such may be the best way.”

  Stopping gently, the elevator released them into the boomerang-shaped room. In a minute, they were speeding back to the building Farro had first entered, with the crowded Horby Clive sector below them. Farro closed his eyes, still sick and shattered. The implications of what Jandanagger had said were momentarily beyond his comprehension.

  “I understand nothing,” he said. “I don’t understand why it should be your duty to look after Earth.”

  “Then already you do begin to understand,” Jandanagger said, and for the first time personal warmth tempered his voice. “For not only are our sciences beyond yours, so are our philosophies and thought disciplines. All our mental abilities have been keyed semantically into the language in which you have learned to converse with me — Galingua.”

  The flying room was reabsorbed; they became again merely one leaf tip of a giant building growing toward the grey clouds.

  “Your language is certainly comprehensive and complex,” Farro said, “but perhaps my knowledge of it is too elementary for me to recognize the extra significance of which you speak.”

  “That is only because you have still to be shown how Galingua is more than a language, how it is a way of life, our means of space travel itself! Concentrate on what I am telling you, Mr Westerby.”

  Confusedly, Farro shook his head as the other spoke; blood seemed to be congested at the base of his skull. The odd idea came to him that he was losing his character, his identity. Wisps of meaning, hints of a greater comprehension, blew through his brain like streamers in the draught of a fan. As he tried to settle them, keep them steady, his own language became less like the bedrock of his being; his knowledge of Galingua, coupled with the experiences of the last hour, gradually assumed a dominant tone. With Jandanagger’s grave eyes upon him, he began to think in the tongue of the Galaxy.

  For Jandanagger was talking, and with increasing rapidity. Although his meanings seemed clear, it felt to Farro as if they were being comprehended only by a level below his conscious one. It was like partial drunkenness, when the grand simplicities of the world are revealed in wine and the mind skates over the thin ice of experience.

  For Jandanagger was talking of many things at once, shifting things that could not be spoken of in terrestrial tongues, dissolving mental disciplines never formulated through terrestrial voices. Yet all these things balanced together in one sentence like jugglers’ balls, enhancing each other.

  For Jandanagger was talking of only one thing: the thrust of creation. He spoke of what the synthesizer had demonstrated: that man was never a separate entity, merely a solid within a solid — or, better still, a flux within a flux. That he had only a subjective identity. That the wheeling matter of the Galaxy was one with him.

  And he spoke in the same breath of Galingua, which was merely a vocal representation of that flux, and whose cadences followed th
e great spiral of life within the flux. As he spoke, he unlocked the inner secret of it to Farro, so that what before had been a formal study became an orchestration, with every cell another note.

  With a wild exultation, Farro was able to answer now, merging with the spiral of talk. The new language was like a great immaterial stupa, its base broad, rooted in the ground of the ego, its spire high, whirling up into the sky. And by it, Farro gradually ascended with Jandanagger; or, rather, the proportions and perspectives about him changed, slid, dwindled, as they had done in the synthesizer. With no sense of alarm, he found himself high above the gaping crowds, shooting upward on an etheric spiral.

  Within him was a new understanding of the stresses permeating all space. He rode upward through the planes of the universe, Jandanagger close by, sharing the revelation.

  Now it was clear why the Galactics needed few space ships. Their big, polygonal vessels carried only material; man himself had found a safer way of travelling in the goldfish bowl of the Galaxy.

  Looking outward, Farro saw where the stars thinned. Out there was the thing with claws, popping silently like bursting blood vessels. Fear came to him again.

  “The thing in the synthesizer...” he said to Jandanagger, through the new-found medium of communication. “The thing that surrounds the Galaxy — if man can never get out, cannot it get in at us?”

  For a long minute Jandanagger was silent, searching for the key phrases of explanation.

  “You have learned as much as you have very rapidly,” he said. “By not-understanding and then by well-understanding, you have made yourself one of the true citizens of the Galaxy. But you have only taken leap X; now you must take leap X10. Prepare yourself.”

  “I am prepared.”

  “All that you have learned is true. Yet there is a far greater truth, a truer truth. Nothing exists in the ultimate sense: all is illusion, a two-dimensional shadow play on the mist of space-time. Yinnisfar itself means ‘illusion’.”

  “But the clawed thing...”

  “The clawed thing is why we fare ever farther ahead into the illusion of space. It is real. Only the Galaxy as you previously misinterpreted it is unreal, being but a configuration of mental forces. That monster, that thing you sensed, is the residue of the slime of the evolutionary past still lingering — not outside you, but in your own mind. It is from that we must escape. We must grow from it.”

  More explanation followed, but it was beyond Farro. In a flash, he saw that Jandanagger, with an eagerness to experiment, had driven him too far and too fast. He could not make the last leap; he was falling back, toppling into not-being. Somewhere within him, the pop-thud-pop sound of bursting arteries began. Others would succeed where he had failed, but, meanwhile, the angry claws were reaching from the heavens for him — to sunder, not to rescue.

  And now the lemmings were scattered over a considerable area of sea. Few of the original column were left; the remaining swimmers, isolated from each other, were growing tired. Yet they pressed forward as doggedly as ever toward the unseen goal.

  Nothing was ahead of them. They had launched themselves into a vast — but not infinite — world without landmarks. The cruel incentive urged them always on. And if an invisible spectator had asked himself the agonized Why to it all, an answer might have occurred to him: that these creatures were not heading for some special promise in their future, but merely fleeing from some terrible fear in their past.

  The Mutant Millennia

  To see the universe, and see it whole... Nothing in it was man’s, yet at that time it could only appear that he had inherited it. For Earth itself — or Yinnisfar, as it was henceforth called — nothing but buoyant optimism suited the day. Terrestrials, having been granted federation, now possessed Galingua, which looked like the ultimate key to everything.

  They sped out into a Galaxy peculiarly vulnerable to new forces. As has been observed, galactic civilization had reached a point of stasis; though its resources were inexhaustible, its initiative was not. The patterns of the Self-perpetuating War wove unceasing artistries of circumstance capable of carrying whole societies along in a mirage of meaningful existence. The Yinnisfarians did not burst, therefore, into a dynamic system but into a glorified Land of Nod.

  The results might have been predicted. Over the next six hundred generations, Yinnisfarians amassed more and more power to themselves. By peaceful means, or by means little better than piracy, they worked their way into the highest galactic positions, succeeding less through their own intrinsic superiority than through the indifference of their rivals. This was a halcyon age, the age of the fulfilment of Yinnisfar.

  As the years passed, and Yinnisfar conquered by commerce, its attitudes insensibly underwent a modification. Then came the blow that forced man to alter his attitude toward himself. His metaphysical view of being had of course been continually subject to change; but now the terrible moment arrived when he was revealed to himself in an entirely new light, as an alien, in a hostile environment.

  It is useful that this next fragment reminds us incidentally that if the universe appeared to rest in human hands, humanity was never alone or unregarded. There were always things that could see though they had no faces and understand though they had no brains.

  It was one of those unlikely accidents that are likely to occur anywhere. The undersea trawler Bartlemeo was approaching the subport of Capverde at four hundred and ninety fathoms when it developed engine trouble. I am not a technical man, so that I cannot exactly describe the fault; apparently uranium slugs move slowly through the piles of these ships, and the dispensing mechanism which shoots the used slugs into the separators became jammed. Instead of using manual remote control to tackle the fault, the chief engineer, a man called Je Regard, went in himself to clear the slugway. As he climbed through the inspection hatches, Regard snagged his protective suit on a latch without noticing it. He was able to repair the congestion in the slugway without trouble, but collapsed as he emerged again, having collected a near-lethal dose of radiation in his kidneys.

  The Bartlemeo carried no doctor. A general call for one was sent out immediately.

  I have said I am no technician; neither am I a philosopher. Yet I can see in this trivial episode which began so many centuries of trouble the pattern of all great things which start as something fairly insignificant.

  In the midst of the shifting and immemorial sands of the Sara Desert crouches the Ahaggari plateau, breasting the dunes like a liner in a sullen sea. On the edge of the plateau stands Barbe Barber, the Institute of Medical Meditation, an elaborate and ancient building in the grand fifty-first epoch manner, as fugal as Angkor Wat, as uncompromising as the Lunar Enterventual. Set about with palms, which lend shade to its wide, paved walks, Barbe Barber thrusts its towers and upper stories above the trees to scan the mighty continent on which it stands — just as its occupants, the doctors, scan the interior of the body, the inner continent of man.

  Gerund Gyres, neckcloth perpetually mopping his brow, stood before the main steps of the institute, waiting. His aircar, which had brought him, stood some distance off in the park. He waited humbly in the rocking heat, although he was a proud man; no layman was ever allowed in Barbe Barber.

  At length the figure Gerund expected to see appeared at the top of the wide steps. It was his wife, Cyro. She turned back, as if to bid someone behind her farewell, and then commenced to descend the steps. As always when Gerund met her here, he was conscious of how Cyro, as she came down those steps, had to force her mind out from the cloister of Barbe Barber back into the external world. While he watched with anxiety and love, the curve of her back straightened, her head came up, her pace increased. By the time she reached Gerund, her eyes held that familiar expression of detached amusement with which she faced both life and her husband.

  “It feels like weeks since I saw you,” Cyro said, kissing Gerund on the mouth and putting her arms around him.

  “It is weeks,” he protested.

  “Is
it really?” she said playfully. “It doesn’t seem as long!”

  Gerund took her hand and led her around to the massive triangle that was their aircar. The month of meditation which Cyro, as a doctor, was compelled to undergo every year was undoubtedly beneficial for her; based on high-ega systems, the disciplines of Barbe Barber were courses of refreshment for brains and bodies of the medical fraternities of the world. Cyro looked younger and more vital than ever; Gerund told himself that, after six years of marriage, he was less a source of vitality in his wife’s life than was high-ega; but it was irrational to hope for any change in that respect.

  Walking together they reached the aircar. Jeffy, their bonded servant, was leaning against the metal hull, awaiting them, arms patiently folded.

  “It’s nice to see you again, Doctor Cyro,” he said, opening the door for them and standing back.

  “And you, Jeffy. You’re looking brown.”

  “Baked right through,” he said, smiling broadly. His homeland was a bleak Northern island lying under frost most of the year; equatorial tour suited him well. Though it was thirty years since he had been brought from that distant land, Jeffy still spoke its simple patois, Ingulesh; he had been unable to acquire the Galingua in which Gerund, Cyro, and most civilized people of the day thought and conversed.

  They climbed into their seats, Jeffy taking the pilot’s throne. He was a great, slow man who moved purposefully. His sluggish mentality had left him fit for nothing but the role of a bonded servant, yet he handled the heavy flier with delicacy.

  Jeffy now brought them over to one of the semicircular takeoff collars which would absorb their exhaust gases. The orange signal came through on the collar beacon and they burst immediately into vertical flight. At once the trees and the white-and-grey walls of Barbe Barber dwindled away below them, as inconsiderable as a child’s charade between the limitless sandwich of sky and sand. The plane headed due west, on a course that would bring them eventually to the Gyreses’ home in the Puterska Islands — or would have brought them there but for the sick man a thousand meters under the bland surface of the Lanic Sea, a sick man of whose very existence they were as yet unaware.