The Star Millennia

 

How many times the whole history of a world is altered by one small-seeming event is, of course, beyond computation. Fortune has a myriad hidden faces. Dael — and, through Dael, Earth — was fortunate. He found men who believed as he did, who also thought Ishrail should have another hearing. By their united pressures, Ishrail was made free. He was treated — though not by all — as a sane man, and his story believed. The account of his life, as he had delivered it, became one of the world’s most precious documents, and the five fat volumes a new gospel of hope.

So wandering man returned to Earth. Ishrail, although he did not know it, was a remote descendant of those few explorers who had braved the journeys to the stars, long, long ago, in the time of the Robot Millennia.

This is no place for the story of man’s gradual expansion into the Galaxy; we must confine ourselves to brief and occasional glimpses of Earth. Something must nevertheless be said of that expansion, if only to render the following fragment more readily understandable.

Of the original interstellar ships, vast arklike vessels, an experimental one was launched in the twenty-third century; christened Big Dog, it set out for Procyon; its story was tragic. After that, no more such ships were launched until the eightieth century. These journeys were in some degree successful.

On the new-found planets, themselves widely dispersed, the colonists established colonies and battled with environments they had never been intended to face. Inevitably, it was a stimulus. The colonies began to flourish; centuries passed; they in their turn put forth little tentacles into the unknown. World after world pullulated with vigorous bipeds.

Consider the case of these worlds. Consider the case of Galcondar. Galcondar was colonized from Koramandel two thousand years after Koramandel’s first colonization from Luggate III. The Galcondaran colonists attempted to establish themselves on the strange planet along a pleasant stretch of coastline in a savanna belt, but failed because of the activities of a rapid-flying fish.

This species of fish, the coastal assatassi, is equipped with a sharp, dartlike snout quite capable of piercing a man to the heart when the fish is in full flight. For most of the Galcondaran year, the coastal assatassi behaves like an ordinary flying fish, using its wings merely for evasive action from marine predators. Toward the breeding season, a change in its habits becomes noticeable. The assatassi is hermaphrodite, capable of fertilizing its own eggs; from the eggs hatch small worms that move into the intestine of the parent fish. Goaded by the irritation of this process, the assatassi assemble some five miles out to sea — the distance depending on the depth of the water — and execute the curious contortions known as “fettling,” both above and below the water. Such brood-maddened shoals may cover several acres of sea and contain several hundred thousandfish. Their antics attract various species of gull and cormorant, which wheel over the shoal, filling their bellies at leisure.

When the density of the shoal reaches its peak, fettling ceases. Taking flight in their thousands, the assatassi wing their way shoreward, flying low over the water and achieving estimated velocities of over 1,850 yards per minute. At this speed, they hit the land and are killed.

Far from being a morbid instinct, this behaviour is another example of nature’s versatility in perpetuating species. The piscicolous assatassi progeny can feed only on carrion. Embedded safely in the parental intestine, this worm stage survives the impact which kills its carrier to feed upon the parental corpse as it decays. When the parent is devoured, the worms metamorphose into a legged larval stage, which crawls back to sea so assatassi cycle is reborn.

This minor curiosity in galactic natural history had a disproportionately weighty effect upon the future of Galcondar. The colonists, arriving at last at their promised land, were bombarded by high-speed fish. By ill luck, they had chosen the suicide season in which to pitch camp. A fifth of their number was killed or wounded by the first death flights. The remainder split into two groups, one travelling inland north, one south, in search of a less lethal environment.

So the two great empires of Galdid and Gal-Dundar were founded. For nearly two hundred years they flourished without any intertraffic between them. When contact was re-established, it was to the great subsequent enrichment of their cultural life. In the renaissance that followed, many new art forms were born, and spaceships (the technological expression of what is frequently an aesthetic impulse) were launched for the nearer planets. On one of these planets a friendly race of humanoids, the Lapracants, were discovered.

The congress that took place between the wise men of Lapraca and the savants of Galdid and Gal-Dundar marked one of the turning points of the expanding interplanetary concourse. During these congresses were laid the foundations of the first cosmic language: Galingua.

Many centuries later, a Galingua-speaking junta marooned Ishrail on Earth.

 

The more one investigates this exiling of Ishrail, the more interesting the whole affair becomes.

Two facets in particular need attention here: one, the galactic position vis-a-vis Earth, and the other, the curiously codified war maintained among the “new” planets.

Man’s civilization spread outward from planet to planet; in the course of forty million years, some twenty thousand worlds came to foster human settlements of widely varying standards. Yet — at least at first — all had one salient feature in common: they were out of touch or barely in touch with each other. Communication over a multitude of light years was all but impossible. It was this factor, coupled with the variety of new environments, which bred such a diversity of cultures from one original Earth-type stock. And inevitably, under these conditions, the whereabouts of Earth became forgotten.

Spreading outward at random, the progeny of Earth left their womb world far behind. As world after world grew to seniority, the idea of a mother planet was scorned, or distorted, or completely mislaid. On the other hand, some worlds — Droxy is a well-known instance — retained the idea of Earth as a kind of supermyth, building their main religion about the conception of a matriarchal figure. The Droxian articles of faith postulated a sort of pastoral female deity called Lady Earth, who had thrown away some bad apples which displeased her; if the apples grew into fine trees, Lady Earth would come to them and walk among them, forgiving and praising them.

Such myths thrived, especially in the early days. Yet, however ardently man in his meditative periods might liken himself to maggots in an apple, in his everyday moods he continued to behave like a lord of creation. Though he abased himself, he continued to conquer.

When the planets finally bound themselves together into a multiplanet federation, attempts were made, by rationalizing the myths, to find one common source-planet for man. The movement failed, not least because there were more than a dozen score of worlds cheerfully calling themselves Earth, as well as others whose legends claimed for them the dubious glory of being source-planet.

As the nonmaterial or interpenetrator type of travel was developed, communication between the federated planets greatly improved. Interplanetary relations correspondingly deteriorated. Man — it is at once his making and his undoing — is a competitive animal. Although, for various reasons — most of which are immediately obvious when one considers the distances involved — interstellar war was impossible, states of hostility sprang up all around. Intercourse between planets, both commercial and cultural, suffered in consequence. The federation was on the verge of falling back into an unrelated series of provincial outposts.

From this crisis was evolved the Self-perpetuating Galactic War which, besides being no war at all in the orthodox sense, created a revolution in human understanding. The gerontocracy which devised this sagacious formula for interstellar communitism finally acknowledged the competitive nature of man, for which any international or interstellar culture must make full allowance or perish. The unstable history of every planet revealed mankind rebelling against its destiny by striving to live in peace-geared communities which eventually lapsed into barbarous wars. Now this situation was reversed. By establishing a perpetually warring culture, man would have both the stability and the stimulation needful for him to produce the fruits of peace.

Such a war had to be severely conventionalized, its risks modified, its fatalities curtailed; its harshest penalties had to fall upon those most actively engaged, rather than those innocently involved. Above all, its methods had to be as socially valuable as was possible, and its end made unforeseeable and inaccessible.

The gerontocracy planned well. The mock war began.

By the time Ishrail was exiled on Earth, the war was as much a part of galactic life as was Galingua. It fitted like a light harness over everyman’s affairs, binding together the civilized universe as an ivy will cover a giant sequoia. And just as ivy will ruin the finest tree, so this humane and irresolvable war was destined eventually to pull down the most prodigious of all cultures.

As yet, however, in its thousandth millenary, only the war’s advantages were observable. True, trade and invention had reached a lull which the Galactics believed to be temporary; true, too, that art had become a series of formalities, that politics had dwindled to a hobby, that theologies were again replacing natural piety, that salvation seemed a more valuable goal than self-knowledge; but by the rules of the war, the federation still expanded, and adventure at least was not dead. Though the cities slept, there was always a new jungle to explore. Though the arteries hardened, new blood flowed in them.

For one of the most rewarding devices of the Self-perpetuating War was that system of exiling defeated warriors to which Ishrail fell victim. The exiles, stripped of all proof of their former way of life, were marooned on unfederated planets. There they had to battle with what the uninvestigated local life had to offer.

After a decade, however, inspectors were dispatched to see what had become of the exile. Often they found him dead; often they found him lord of a local tribe. If the former, nothing was lost except obsequies; if the latter, much might be gained, for the natives were being helped toward a point where they might be deemed fit to join the federation. When the inspectors, after the statutory decade, came to look for Ishrail, they found him still surviving; indeed, the natives had by now impelled him into a top income bracket.

Reports on the situation flashed back to Galactic HQ. Stipulations, specifications, recommendations circulated around the solemn tables of the Galactic Council. Motions were proposed, facts were tabulated, statistics were discussed, files were filed. The debate creaked to a conclusion. Ishrail was dead when Earth was voted into the Federation.

If it could be said that a stale air lay over the heart of government, few would have ventured to detect it elsewhere. For most people; as ever, the past was no more than a time in which their grandfathers lived, the future meant the next few decades. Hope manifested itself everywhere, like phosphorescence in a dark sea; and why not?

For it was — again, as ever — a time of miracles.

 

The ocean seemed to be breathing shallowly, like a child asleep, when the first lemmings reached it. In all the wide sea, no hint of menace existed. Yet the first lemmings paused daintily on the very verge of the water, peering out to sea and looking about as though in indecision. Unavoidably, the pressure of the marching column behind pushed them into the tiny wavelets. When their paws became wet, it was as if they resigned themselves to what was to come. Swimming strongly, the leaders of the column set off from the shore. All the other lemmings followed, only their heads showing above water. A human observer would have said they swam bravely; and unavoidably he would have asked himself: To what goal do the lemmings imagine they are heading? For what grand illusion are they prepared to throw away their lives?

 

All down the waterway, craft moved. Farro Westerby stood at the forward port of his aquataxi, staring ahead and ignoring the water traffic moving by him. His two fellow Isolationists stood slightly apart, not speaking. Farro’s eye was on the rising structure on the left bank ahead. When the aquataxi moored as near to this structure as possible, Farro stepped ashore; glancing back impatiently, he waited for one of his companions to pay the fare.

“Wonderful, isn’t it?” the taxi man said, nodding toward the strange building as he cast off. “I can’t ever see us putting up anything like it.”

“No,” Farro said flatly, walking away ahead of his friends.

They had disembarked in that sector of the capital called Horby Clive Island. Located in the government centre of New Union, most of it had been ceded to the Galactics a year earlier. In that brief time, using Earth labour for the rough work, they had transformed the place. Six of their large, irregular buildings were already completed. The seventh was now going up, creating a new wonder for the world.

“We will wait here for you, Farro,” one of the two men said, extending his hand formally. “Good fortune with the Galactic Minister. As the only Isolationist with an extensive knowledge of the Galactic tongue, Galingua, you represent, as you know, our best chance of putting our case for Earth’s remaining outside the Multiplanet Federation.”

As Farro thanked him and accepted the proffered hand, the other man, a stooping septuagenarian with a pale voice, gripped Farro’s arm.

“And the case is clear enough,” he said. “These aliens pretend they offer us federation out of altruism. Most people swallow that, because they believe Earth ingenuity must be a valuable asset anywhere in the galaxy. So it may be, but we Isolationists claim there must be some ulterior motive for a superior race’s wanting to welcome in a junior one as they appear to welcome us. If you can get a hint from this Minister Jandanagger as to what that motive is, you’ll have done more than well.”

“Thank you. I think I have the situation pretty clear,” Farro said sharply, regretting his tone of voice at once. But the other two were wise enough to make allowance for nervousness in time of stress. When he left them to make his way toward the Galactic buildings, their faces held only sincere smiles of farewell.

As Farro pushed through the crowds of sightseers who stood here all day watching the new building develop, he listened with interest and some contempt for their comments. Many of them were discussing the current announcement on federation.

“I think their sincerity is proved by the way they’ve let us join. It’s nothing but a friendly gesture.”

“It shows what respect they must have for Earth.”

“You can’t help seeing the future’s going to be wonderful, now that we can export goods all over the galaxy. I tell you, we’re in for a boom all around.”

“Which goes to prove that however advanced the race, they can’t do without the good old Earth know-how. Give the Galactics the credit for spotting that!”

The seventh building, around which so many idle spectators clustered, was nearing completion. It grew organically like some vast succulent plant, springing from a fiat metal matrix, thrusting along curved girders, encompassing them. Its colour was a natural russet, which seemed to take its tones from the sky overhead.

Grouped around the base of this extraordinary structure were distilleries, sprays, excavators and other machines, the function of which was unknown to Farro. They provided the raw material from which the building drew its bulk.

To one side of these seven well-designed eccentricities lay the spacefield. There, too, was another minor mystery. Earth governments had ceded — willingly when they sniffed the prizes to be won from federation — five such centres as that on Horby Clive Island in various parts of the globe. Each centre was being equipped as a spaceport and educational unit in which terrestrials would learn to understand the antiphonal complexities of Galingua and to behave as citizens of a well populated galaxy.

Even granting vast alien resources, it was a formidable project. According to estimates, at least eight thousand Galactics were working on Earth. Yet on the spacefield sat but one craft, an unlikely looking polyhedron with Arcturan symbols on its hull. The Galactics, in short, seemed to have remarkably few spaceships.

That was a point he would like to investigate, Farro thought, speculatively eying the inert beacons around the perimeter of the field.

He skirted them, avoiding the crowds as far as possible, and arrived at the entrance to one of the other six Galactic buildings, quite as eccentric in shape as its unfinished brother. As he walked in, an Earthman in dark-grey livery came deferentially forward.

“I have an appointment with Galactic Minister Jandanagger Laterobinson,” Farro announced, pronouncing the strange name awkwardly. “I am Farro Westerby, special deputy of the Isolationist League.”

As soon as he heard the phrase Isolationist League, the receptionist’s manner chilled. Setting his lips, he beckoned Farro over to a small side apartment, the doors of which closed as Farro entered. The apartment, the Galactic equivalent of an elevator, began to move through the building, travelling upward on what

Farro judged to be an elliptical path. It delivered him into Jandanagger Laterobinson’s room.

Standing up, the Galactic Minister greeted Farro with amiable reserve, giving the latter an opportunity to sum up his opponent. Laterobinson was unmistakably humanoid; he might, indeed, have passed for an Earthman, were it not for the strangeness of his eyes, set widely apart in his face and half hidden by the peculiar configuration of an epicanthic fold of skin. This minor variation of feature gave to Jandanagger what all his race seemed to possess: a watchful, tensely withdrawn air.

“You know the reason for my visit, Minister,” Farro said, when he had introduced himself. He spoke carefully in Galingua, the language he had spent so many months so painfully learning; initially, its wide variation in form from any terrestrial tongue had all but baffled him.

“Putting it briefly, you represent a body of people who fear contact with the other races in the Galaxy — unlike most of your fellows on Earth,” Jandanagger said easily. Expressed like that, the idea sounded absurd.

“I would rather claim to represent those who have thought more deeply about the present situation than perhaps their fellows have done.”

“Since your views are already known to me through the newly established Terrestrial-Galactic Council, I take it you wish us to discuss this matter personally?”

“That is so.”

Jandanagger returned to his chair, gesturing Farro into another.

“My role on Earth is simply to talk and to listen,” he said, not without irony. “So do please feel free to talk.”

“Minister, I represent five per cent of the people of Earth. If this sounds a small number, I would point out that that percentage contains some of the most eminent men in the world. Our position is relatively simple. You first visited Earth over a year ago, at the end of Ishrail’s decade of exile; after investigation, you decided we were sufficiently advanced to become probationary members of the Galactic Federation. As a result, certain advantages and disadvantages will naturally accrue; although both sides will reap advantages, we shall suffer all the disadvantages — and they may well prove fatal to us.”

Pausing, he scrutinized Jandanagger, but nothing was to be learned from the Minister’s continued look of friendly watchfulness. He continued speaking.

“Before I deal with these disadvantages, may I protest against what will seem to you perhaps a minor point. You have insisted, your charter insists, that this world shall be arbitrarily renamed; no longer shall it be known as Earth, but as Yinnisfar. Is there any defensible reason why this outlandish name should be adopted?”

The Minister smiled broadly and relaxed, as if the question had given him the key he needed to the man sitting opposite him. A bowl of New Union sweets lay on his desk; he pushed them across to Farro and, when the latter refused, took a sugary lump and bit it before replying.

“About three hundred planets calling themselves Earth are known to us,” he said. “Any new claimants to the title are automatically rechristened upon federation. From now on you are Yinnisfar. However, I think it would be more profitable if we discussed the advantages and disadvantages of federation, if that is what you wish to talk about.”

Farro sighed and resigned himself.

“Very well,” he said. “To begin with, the advantages to you. You will have here a convenient base, dock and administrative seat in a region of space you say you have yet to explore and develop. Also, it is possible that when arrangements are worked out between us, terrestrials may be engaged to help colonize the new worlds you expect to find in this region. We shall be a cheap manufacturing area for you. We shall produce such items as plastics, clothes, foodstuffs and simple tools which it will be easier for you to buy from us than transport from your distant home planets. Is this correct?”

“As you point out, Mr Westerby, Earth occupies a key position in the Federation’s present thousand-year plan for expansion. Although at present you can only regard yourselves as a frontier world, at the end of that period you may well be a key world. At the end of ten thousand years — well, your peoples are full of confidence; the omens are good.”

“In short, there is promotion ahead if we behave ourselves?”

The acid note in Farro’s voice merely brought a slight smile to Jandanagger’s lips.

“One is not made head boy in one’s first few days at school.”

“Let me then enumerate the advantages, as opposed to the promises, which Earth will enjoy from entering your Federation. In the first place, we shall enjoy material benefits: new machines, new toys, new gadgets and some new techniques like your vibro-molecular system of building — which produces, if I may say so, some excruciatingly ugly structures.”

“One’s tastes, Mr Westerby, have to be trained to appreciate anything of aesthetic worth.”

“Quite. Or to regard the hideous as normal. However, that brings us to the nonmaterial assets inherent in belonging to your Federation. You plan to revolutionize our educational systems. From nursery school to university, you will inculcate mores, matters and methods foreign to us; Earth will be invaded not by soldiers but by teachers — which is the surest way of gaining a bloodless victory.”

The wide eyes regarded Farro calmly, but still as if from behind a barricade.

“How else are we to help Yinnisfarians become citizens of a complex civilization? For a start, it is essential your people learn Galingua. Education is a science and an art for which you have not yet begun to formulate the rules. The whole question is enormously complicated, and quite beyond brief explanation — not that I could explain it, for I am not an educational specialist; those specialists will arrive here when my work is done and the formal membership charters are signed. But to take just one simple point. Your children first go to school at, say, five years old. They go into a class with other children and are separated from their homes; learning becomes at once an isolated part of life, something done in certain hours. And their first lesson is to obey the teacher. Thus, if their education is rated a success, it is because, to whatever extent, they have learned obedience and forfeited independence of mind; and they are probably set at permanent odds with their home environment.

“Our methods differ radically. We allow no children to enter our schools before the age of ten — but by that time, thanks to certain instructive toys and devices they have been familiar with for years, they will come knowing at least as much as your child at school-leaving age. And not only knowing — behaving, feeling, understanding.”

Farro was at a disadvantage.

“I feel like a heathen being told by a missionary that I should be wearing clothes.”

The other man smiled, got up, and came over to him.

“Be consoled that that’s a false analogy,” he said. “You are demanding the clothes. And when you wear them, you are certain to admire the cut.”

All of which, Farro reflected, made the two of them no less heathen and missionary.

“Don’t look so disconcerted, Mr Westerby. You have a perfect right to be distressed at the thought of your planet being depersonalized. But that is something we would not dream of doing. Depersonalized, you are nothing to yourselves or us. We need worlds capable of making their best personal contribution. If you would care to come with me, I should like to give you perhaps a better idea of how the civilized galaxy functions.”

Farro rose to his feet. It consoled him that he was slightly taller than the Minister. Jandanagger stood courteously aside, ushered his guest through a door. As they walked down a silent corridor, Farro found his tongue again.

“I haven’t fully explained why I think that federation would be such a bad thing for Earth. We are progressing on our own. Eventually, we shall develop our own method of space travel, and come to join you on a more equal footing.”

Jandanagger shook his head.

“Space travel — travel between different star systems — is not just a matter of being able to build starships. Any post-nuclear culture can stumble on that trick. Space travel is a state of mind. The journey’s always hell, and you never find a planet, however lovely, that suits you as well as the one on which you were born. You need an incentive.”

“What sort of incentive?”

“Have you any idea?”

“I take it you are not referring to interstellar trading or conquest?”

“Correct.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what sort of an incentive you mean.”

The Minister gave something like a chuckle and said, “I’ll try and show you presently. You were going to tell me why federation would be a bad thing for Earth.”

“No doubt it has been to your purpose to learn something of our history, Minister. It is full of dark things. Blood; war; lost causes; forgotten hopes; ages in chaos and days when even desperation died. It is no history to be proud of. Though many men individually seek good, collectively they lose it as soon as it is found. Yet we have one quality which always gives cause for hope that tomorrow may be better: initiative. Initiative has never faded, even when we crawled from what seemed the last ditch.

“But if we know that there exists a collective culture of several thousand worlds which we can never hope to emulate, what is to prevent us from sinking back into despair forever?”

“An incentive, of course.”

As he spoke, Jandanagger led the way into a small, boomerang-shaped room with wide windows. They sank onto a low couch, and at once the room moved. The dizzy view from the window shifted and rolled beneath them. The room was airborne.

“This is our nearest equivalent to your trains. It runs on a nucleonically bonded track. We are going only as far as the next building; there is some equipment I would like you to inspect.”

No reply seemed to be required, and Farro sat silent. He had known an electric moment of fear when the room first moved. In no more than ten seconds they swooped to the branch of another Galactic building, becoming part of it.

Once more leading the way, Jandanagger escorted him to an elevator, which took them down into a basement room. They had arrived. The equipment of which Jandanagger had spoken was not particularly impressive in appearance. Before a row of padded seats ran a counter, above which a line of respirator-like masks hung, with several cables trailing from them into the wall.

The Galactic Minister seated himself, motioning Farro into an adjoining seat.

“What is this apparatus?” Farro asked, unable to keep a slight tinge of anxiety from his tone.

“It is a type of wave-synthesizer. In effect, it renders down many of the wave lengths which man cannot detect by himself, translating them into paraphrased terms which he can. At the same time, it feeds in objective and subjective impressions of the universe. That is to say, you will experience — when you wear the mask and I switch it on — instrumental recordings of the universe — visual and aural and so on — as well as human impressions of it.

“I should warn you that owing to your lack of training, you may unfortunately gather a rather confused impression from the synthesizer. All the same, I fancy that it will give you a better rough idea of what the galaxy is like than you would get from a long star journey.”

“Let’s go,” Farro said, clutching his cold hands together.

 

Now the entire column of lemmings had embarked into the still water. They swam smoothly and silently, their communal wake soon dissolving into the grandly gentle motion of the sea. Gradually the column attenuated as the stronger animals drew farther ahead and the weaker ones dropped behind. One by one, inevitably, these weaker animals drowned; yet, until their sleek heads finally disappeared below the surface, they still pressed forward with bulging eyes fixed upon the far and empty horizon.

No human spectator, however devoid of anthropomorphic feeling, could have failed to ask himself what might be the nature of the goal that prompted such a sacrifice.

 

The inside of the mask was cold. It fitted loosely over his face, covering his ears and leaving only the back of his head free. Again a touch of unreasoning fear shot through him.

“The switch is by your hand,” the Minister said. “Press it.”

Ferro pressed the switch. Darkness submerged him.

“I am with you,” the Minister said steadily. “I have a mask on, too, and can see and feel what you do.”

A spiral curled out into the darkness, boring its way through nothing — an opaque, smothering nothing as warm as flesh. Materializing from the spiral there issued a cluster of bubbles, dark as polyhedric grapes, multiplying and multiplying as if breathed from an inexhaustible bubble pipe. The lights on their surfaces, glittering, changing, spun a misty web which gradually veiled the operation.

“Cells are being formed, beaten out in endless duplication on the microscopic anvils of creation. You witness the beginning of a new life,” Jandanagger said, his voice sounding distant.

Like a curtain by an open window, the cells trembled behind their veil, awaiting life. The moment of its coming was not perceptible. It was only that now the veil had something to conceal within itself; its translucence dimmed, its surface patterned, a kind of blind purpose shaped it into more definite outline. No longer was it beautiful.

Consciousness simmered inside it, a pinpoint of instinct-plus without love or knowledge, an eye trying to see through a lid of skin. It was not inert; instead, it struggled on the verge of terror, undergoing the trauma of coming into being, fighting, scrabbling, lest it fall back again into the endless gulf of not-being.

“Here is the afterlife your religions tell of,” Jandanagger’s voice said. “This is the purgatory every one of us must undergo, only it comes not after but before life. The spirit that will become us has to tread the billion years of the past before it reaches the present it can be born into. One might almost say there was something it had to expiate.”

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 the 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.