Galaxies Like Grains of Sand

by Brian W Aldiss

  Galaxies Like Grains Of Sand

  Brian W. Aldiss

  For Ann and Tony Price —

  with renewed affection over the millennia

  Introduction to this Edition

  If it happens that you are in the army, a moment dawns when you realise your fate is in the Captain’s hands. You hope he knows what he’s doing.

  Perhaps it was something like that when, in 1960—back at the dawn of time!—Signet Books of New American Library accepted a collection of Faber-published short stories entitled CANOPY OF TIME and they decided to move the furniture around.

  Signet reduced the eleven Faber stories to eight. While bestowing upon the older selection the more swash-buckling title, GALAXIES LIKE GRAINS OF SAND. Wow! Unlike many captains, this one really did know best.

  I’ve always liked the new title.

  In the Faber hardcover, I claimed that all the stories were ‘slices off the enormous carcass of the future’. The note I produced for the Signet paperback was more grandiose, as befitted the new title:

  “Of the laws we can deduce from the external world, one stands above all: the Law of Transience; Nothing is intended to last.

  “The trees fall year by year, the mountains tumble, the galaxies burn out like tall tallow candles. Nothing is intended to last—except time.”

  I positively glowed when I was permitted to write so grandly, so pretentiously. I was going to be a writer who wrote like myself. Whether for better or for worse, I would write like, be, myself.

  There was the excitement of developing, not so much my style, but an extension of my thoughts. This shows in the story, “Who Can Replace a Man?”

  While I was most lively, beginning to make my annual visits to the States, I was telling this tale of multitudinous galaxies, each galaxy a cosmic laboratory for the blind experiments of nature.

  Well, we thought like that in those days, when galaxies were much like dreams; we had come through a World War where at least seventy million people had been killed. At last, the heavily mechanised Axis powers had gone with the wind.

  We who survived had reason to celebrate. But those of us who remained, if we thought about it, saw the impermance of things.

  The last story in this selection is about the death of a galaxy, sinking like the S.S.’Titanic’ into an ocean of stars.

  The stories we wrote were neglected, if not actually scorned, by society’s literati. We had dethroned the gods; we had to rely on what moved in the troubled streams of our subconscious.

  Were I writing this last story, “Visiting Ameoba”, today, I would write it entirely differently. So I should hope, after thirty years of practice...

  Brian W. Aldiss

  2012

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This volume boasts a curious publishing and pre-publishing record. It represents the major part of a larger chronicle-novel with divergent histories in the UK and the USA.

  In Britain, the expository narrative, on which I set great store, was discarded, and some of the stories were published separately as The Canopy of Time. In America, the book fared better, but nevertheless some of the stories and part of the narrative were discarded, to make a paperback volume called Galaxies Like Grains of Sand.

  This latter volume was eventually reprinted in the States in hardcover, with an Introduction by Norman Spinrad. This edition follows the American hardcover edition with two exceptions: Spinrad has kindly revised his Introduction for the English market, and one of the original stories, ‘Blighted Profile’, has been reinserted in its correct place in the narrative. This is a completely rewritten version of the story and its expository material is new. So this edition of Galaxies Like Grains of Sand most nearly conforms to my original intentions, and I am happy to see it published after so long (and so brief) a time.

  B W A

  Of the laws we can deduce from the external world, one stands above all: the Law of Transience. Nothing is intended to last.

  The trees fall year by year, the mountains tumble, the galaxies burn out like tall tallow candles. Nothing is intended to last — except time. The blanket of the universe wears thin, but time endures. Time is a tower, an endless mine; time is monstrous. Time is the hero. Human and inhuman characters are pinned to time like butterflies to a card; yes, though the wings stay bright, flight is forgotten.

  Time, like an element which can be solid, liquid or gas, has three states. In the present, it is a flux we cannot seize. In the future, it is a veiling mist. In the past, it has solidified and become glazed; then we call it history. Then it can show us nothing but our own solemn faces; it is a treacherous mirror, reflecting only our limited truths. So much is it a part of man that objectivity is impossible; so neutral is it that it appears hostile.

  Some of the accounts that follow were written by the people concerned. Some are reconstructions. Some may be myths, having masqueraded as truth long enough to be accepted as truth. All are fragmentary.

  The long mirror of the past is shattered. Its shards lie trampled underfoot. Once it covered all the walls of all the palaces; now only a few fragments are left, and these you hold in your hand.

  The War Millennia

  To begin then — though it is certainly no beginning — the first fragment is of a strange past world, where clouds of nationalism have gathered and broken into a storm of war. Over the forgotten continents — Asia, America, Africa — missiles of destruction fly. The beleaguered people of that day have not fully comprehended the nature of the struggle in which they are engulfed.

  Those simple blacks, whites and greys which constitute the political situation are grasped readily enough with a little application. But behind these issues lie factors scarcely understood in the council chambers of Peking, London, Cairo or Washington — factors which stem from the long and savage past of the race; factors of instinct and frustrated instinct; factors of fear and lust and dawning conscience; factors inseparable from the adolescence of a species, which loom behind all man’s affairs like an insurmountable mountain chain.

  So men fought each other instead of wrestling with themselves. The bravest sought to evade the currents of hatred by turning outward to the nearest planets in the solar system; the cowardly, by sleeping away their lives in vast hives called dreameries, where the comforts of fantasy could discount the depredations of war. Neither course ultimately offered refuge; when the earthquake comes, it topples both tower and hovel...

  It is fitting that the first fragment should start with a man sitting helplessly in a chair, while bombs fall.

  The Director of Dreamery Five slid out of his chair before the silent control panels, the question of Floyd Milton making him ungovernably restless. Every so often a distant crump outside announced that the enemy attack was still on; that made the Director no more easy. Although he would be safer down in the vaults, peering into Floyd Milton’s dreams, other considerations caused him to take the elevator and sink to the cool depths of Dreamery Five. He had seen Milton’s face when he came in that afternoon. Milton had looked like death.

  The sleep levels were as humid as usual, and reeked of the spirit used by the robot masseurs.

  “You slugs!” the Director said aloud in the direction of the rows of sleepers.

  They lay dormant, heads concealed in the feedback phones. Occasionally, a sleeper would be rolled up until his toes rested on his shoulders and his behind pointed into the air; rubber-covered machinery would flick up and pummel him. Then it stretched him out again and pummelled his chest, carefully avoiding the intravenal feed pipes which hung from the ceiling. Whatever their mental state, sleepers were maintained in good physical condition. And all the time they slept and dreamed their dark dreams.

  �
�Slugs!” the Director said again. It would never have done to have a director who loved the sleepers in his charge; alone in the vast, automated dreameries, he would have been too likely to pry into the reveries of these hopeless introverts.

  Apart from a few young people moved by genuine curiosity, only psychopaths and misfits lay in the dreameries, playing out their lives in useless reverie. Unfortunately, they accounted for a fair percentage of the population; the sixty-years cold war — now broken into something horribly hot — had produced an amazing number of mental invalids who were only too glad to retreat by the escape route of the dreameries into their own fantasy world.

  Floyd Milton had not looked the type, nor had he looked like one of the tough spacers who, after the ardours of a long run to

  Mars or Ganymede, came here sometimes to recuperate for a while. He looked like a man who had betrayed himself — and knew it.

  That was why the Director had to see his dreams. Sometimes men — real men — could be saved from themselves before they sank too low.

  The Director paused in front of Milton’s bed. The latest arrival was silent, breathing shallowly, his face hidden under the visor and feedback phones. Noting his number, the Director hurried into the nearest control booth and dialled it. He assumed a visor and phones himself.

  In a moment he would be plugged automatically into Milton’s reveries; from the look on Milton’s face when he had entered Dreamery Five, it would not be pleasant, but tuning circuits insured that the Director could always modulate the empathy effect enough to retain his own consciousness.

  As always when about to undergo these supervisions, the Director hurriedly made a mental survey of his own world; once in someone else’s dreams he had difficulty in orienting himself. It was not a comfortable world. The ideological barriers erected all over Earth since the forties of the previous century had precluded any advance in human happiness.

  In the late sixties, the first manned ships had plunked themselves down on the moon. In the late eighties, the principles of subthreshold suggestion had been applied to the sleeping brain; coupled with feedback techniques, this had permitted a method to be evolved for making one’s own dreams more vivid than a 3-D film. Within three years, Dreamery One had been built.

  Just before the turn of the century, the Solites had arrived. They came not in spaceships but in vessels they termed portmatters, houselike affairs which broadcast themselves to Earth from the Solite world. Their science was a parascience far beyond Earths understanding, yet they took an innocent delight in Earth.

  “They loved Earth!” the Director said. He had seen the Solites, with Earth’s blessing, load their portmatters with Earth’s riches — which meant for them not gold or uranium but Earth’s plants and animals and butterflies. They had been adorable people, sophisticated savages welcoming all of life. When the cold war suddenly blew hot, they had disappeared, declaring they could never return.

  That moment, to sensible people everywhere, had seemed the moment that hope died. Earth was alone again, derelict by its own woes.

  “You are through, sir,” a metallic voice announced.

  The Director braced himself. Next second he was plunged into the dreams of Floyd Milton.

  It was pleasant. After the creepy vaults of Dreamery Five and the murmurs of a global war, it was doubly pleasant.

  All the same, for the Director it was strange, incredibly strange.

  The plants sported flowers as lovely as girls’ mouths; the flowers budded, blossomed, faded and produced streamers fifty yards long which billowed lightly in the breeze, scattering perfumed seeds. The plants grew in a circle, and the circle was a room.

  Only one room. Another room had for its walls a twinkling myriad of fish, little grey fellows with forked black tongues like snakes. They swam in towers of water that wet your finger if you touched them. The matter-transmitter fields, two molecules thick, held them in place, towering into the vermilion air.

  Another room seemed to be sheathed in stars; giant moths flew about and settled on the stars. The stars chimed as they were touched.

  In another room, tall grasses glistened with the heavy-lidded dews of dawn.

  In another room, snow fell eternally, magnifying itself as it sank into crystals three inches across which vanished as they touched the floor.

  In another room — but every room was different, for this was the palace of Amada Malfreyy, and the palace was on Solite. Amada herself was here, just returned from her visit to Earth, loaded down with flowers and tigers. She was giving a party to reunite all her old friends and introduce them to her second husband.

  The guests numbered under five hundred. A good proportion of them had brought their husbands, brightly dressed men whose frivolous robes contrasted with the black-draped semi-nudity of the women. Many women and some men came escorted by animals — cheetahs, macaws, or a sort of superb lizard that was three feet high when it walked erect. Animatedly, they thronged through the magnificent rooms.

  Gay balloons, wafted on artificial trade winds, floated glasses of drink about the rejoicing palace. Everyone appeared to be drinking; no one appeared to be drinking too much. Another thing made the party quite unlike an earthly party — although everyone talked, no one did so at the top of his voice.

  Dazzled as he watched it all, the Director thought that he had never seen a fantasy half so fantastic as this. He could tell by its careful detail that it was memory rather than the wish-fulfilment stuff most of the inmates of Dreamery Five brewed in their dark little brains. Floyd Milton had actually walked through this incredible building.

  He had walked among these gay avenues of cold-burning argon, playing its rainbow light over the guests’ faces. He had strolled along this invisible path above a gurgling stream. He had eaten those fantastic foodstuffs and spoken to guests in his halting version of the Solite tongue.

  All these things Milton had done because it was his palace. He was Amada’s second husband, and the party was being given in his honour. The guests flocked here to meet him. This was the great night of his life; yet he was not happy.

  “You look worried, pet,” Amada said to him. She might have been a woman of Earth, and a lovely woman at that, except for the scanty thatch of hair which curled tightly across her head. Now she wore the martyred look any woman wears when her husband is being awkward at an awkward moment.

  “I’m not worried, Amada,” Milton said. “And please don’t call me ‘pet.’ Your blue tiger here is a pet.”

  “But it’s a compliment, Floyd,” she said, patting the creature’s head. “Is not Subyani a beautiful pet?”

  “Subyani is a tiger. I am a man. Can’t you try and remember that little distinction?”

  Amada never looked angry, but now the martyred expression deepened; it made her, Milton had to admit, extremely desirable.

  “The distinction is quite obvious to me,” she said. “Life is too short to waste pointing out the obvious.”

  “Well, it’s none too obvious to me,” Milton said angrily. “What do your people do? You come to Earth, and you proceed to take everything you can — trees, grass, fish, birds — ”

  “Even husbands!” Amada said.

  “Yes, even husbands. You do all this, Amada, because you people have fallen in love with Earth. You ship just about everything you can here. It makes me feel no better than an exotic plant or a poodle.”

  She turned her beautiful back on him.

  “Now you are acting as intelligently as a poodle,” she said.

  “Amada!” he said. When she turned slowly around, Milton said penitently, “I’m sorry, darling. You know why I’m irritable; I keep thinking of the war back on Earth. And — the other thing...”

  “The other thing?” she prompted.

  “Yes. Why you Solites are so reticent about where in the universe this world is. Why, you wouldn’t even point out its direction to me in Earth’s night sky. I know that with your portmatters distance is immaterial, but I’d just like to kn
ow. It may be a detail to you but it s the sort of thing that bothers me.”

  Amada let an image of a big butterfly settle on her finger as she said, carefully, “In Earth’s present state of civilization, she cannot reach this world; so why should it matter where we are?”

  “Oh, I know our little spaceships are just a beginning...”

  He let his voice trail away. The trouble was, Solite civilization was too big and too beautiful. They might look like Earth people, but they thought and acted differently; they were — alien. That, basically, was what worried Milton. A lingering puritanism made him wonder if he was not, perhaps, committing some nameless sin in marrying a woman of another planet.

  After only a month of marriage, he and Amada had had several — no, they were not quarrels, just differences. They loved each other. That, yes; but Milton, questioning his own love, wondered if perhaps his hand had not been forced by the knowledge that by marrying her he could get to fabulous Solite. Only by marrying a citizen of the matriarch-dominated planet could one visit it; otherwise, it hung remotely in other skies, completely out of reach.

  Despite himself, Milton tried to make his point again.

  “Earth’s a poor world,” he said, ignoring the boredom on her face. “Solite is a rich world. Yet you fall in love with all terrestrial things. You import them. You give Earth nothing in exchange — not even your location.”

  “We like the things of Earth for aspects in them you do not see,” she said.

  There it was again, the alien line of thought. He shivered, despite the warmth of the room.

  “You don’t give Earth anything,” Milton repeated, and was at once aware of the meanness of what he had said. He had spoken without thought, his mind filled with a host of other things.

  “I’m trying to give you all this if you will accept it,” she answered lightly. “Now please come and smile at some people for my sake.”