Galaxies Like Grains of Sand

by Brian W Aldiss

  Wangust shook her head. “The future is with your generation, my dear. You must decide.”

  “We have decided.” Setting her mouth, she turned the vessel for home. The lights and the ocean faded from view behind them.

  His first reflections next morning were confused and sluggish. He was watching the bottom step of a long flight of stairs down which he had come. The sound of water teased him. At the same time, a dead leaf whisked through the circle of vision, over the step, and was gone into the darkness. Even when he propped himself up and became conscious, the dead leaf drifted through his mind.

  Comfortless, Chun Hwa dressed and left the summer home. It was dawn. In the night, countless small spiders had sheeted the grass with their webs, which looked lustrous as frosted steel.

  Returning to the house, he went in to Leg of Leather, who stood awaiting him. Once the wooden pulpit saddle was strapped in place, Chun Hwa heaved himself up by the stirrup and put a gentle spur to the stallion’s flank. Like a phantom, he rode off into the misty groves.

  Again they went by the old water way and the burnt lands. One ruined machine still picked clumsily at the carcass of another, reiterating an old argument through broken antennae.

  “...condemnation perversion sacred rights humanity counteracting insane ideologies committed sacred name liberty liberty liberty...”

  “Vile strategies domination complete subju- subju- subjudication...”

  Under the stallion’s hooves, the obliterated floor of the crater curled upwards. Chun Hwa leaned forward in rapport with the movements of his mount. They climbed Blighted Profile. Occasionally, they crushed a rare clover, causing tiny pseudo-bees to hum away to safety.

  As they neared the top of the ridge, the first green leaves of the apple tree waved above the rocks. Early sunlight filled the vale. A far dog barked and was answered.

  Yalleranda sat in his usual coign of vantage, on his father’s roof beside the stone chimney-stack. His keen eyes picked up the movement on the ridge. The stallion showed dazzling against the black sky behind as it climbed over the crest. Yalleranda whistled to himself and flung away the stick he was peeling.

  The boy slid and jumped to the ground. His thin bare legs carried him through the garden, across a path, and up the slope, where he went dodging, ducking, climbing, among the apple trees. Then his pace slowed. He sidled up to where the stallion was cropping grass, and waited to gather himself only a few strides away.

  Chun Hwa was nodding in the saddle in time with the horse’s cropping. He stared down at his old leathery hands holding the reins, pursuing his thoughts.

  If he could find his way into the future, past all equations, he could uncover there proof or otherwise of the danger of the activist policies of Cobalt’s generation. Union was cancer, as had been all cities from Ur onwards. The cities were a sort of machine which intensified the evil side of man. Hives of culture, they were also hives of conquest. How to separate the two? Perhaps the future would tell. Perhaps problems would blow away like dead leaves from steps. But of course he would never get there. That was just an old man’s dream. And the dreams were wearing thin.

  He realized he was falling asleep, and sat up with a start. He climbed down stiffly from the saddle, remembering there was food stowed in the saddle-box. A small boy confronted him.

  The boy was almost as tall as Chun Hwa. The hair on his head was tawny, and as wild as a lion’s, but his face was covered with funny bristling black hair like a boar’s. His appearance alarmed Chun Hwa.

  “You nearly went to sleep,” said the boy.

  “I was dreaming,”

  “You were dreaming of visiting the future.” The boy took hold of Leg of Leather’s bit, and pulled the soft mouth up to his shoulder.

  Chun Hwa recalled local talk about people with wild talents, people with contaminated blood, with strange abilities and unusual desires. Some said that they were the sports of the aftereffects of high-radiation war, others that their fathers had mated with machines. Cobalt had once talked about them. He laughed wheezily to hide his anxiety.

  “What do you dream about?”

  “Did you know there are hard stones in the middle of clouds? Boulders. That I dreamed.”

  “Take care with Leg — he’s mettlesome. Where do you live?”

  The boy distained to answer that. Putting his arm up round the stallion’s neck, he said confidentially, “I know where there is a machine that will send you into the future. It still works.”

  Acknowledging his own weariness, Chun Hwa had climbed back into the saddle. The boy with the hairy face was leading Leg of Leather down Blighted Profile, away from the trees and the cultivation. He was too proud to ask the boy where they were going. His own life had been a more fantastic journey than this savage child would ever take.

  Eventually, in a cascade of pebbles underfoot, they came to a cave set in the rocky slope.

  “Machine’s in here,” said the boy. “Wait.”

  He disappeared into the gloom of the cave. As far as he knew, he was the only person in generations who had come across the machine. It looked old. It was warted and riveted and scratched and scoured. Probably it had backed its way into the cave for protection. When you touched it, it throbbed and was cold, as if with a dreadful rage.

  Chun Hwa waited outside as directed. “Why not?” he asked himself. “During the millennia of war, those terrible technologies reached their climax. Everyone has forgotten what could be done, what couldn’t, or even why it could be done, why it couldn’t. This child... Well, why not?”

  A great beam like mist, like a searchlight in mist, sprang out of the cave mouth. The stallion shied and snorted. Chun Hwa stared in fascination, not knowing that he looked at one of the disintegrator beams which had helped form the burnt lands.

  Yalleranda came sliding round the edge of the beam and raised his skinny arms in triumph.

  “There you are, see. Ride into that mist, old man. It’ll carry you into the future!”

  “I... I ought to leave a message.”

  “Spur your horse! Go on!”

  The child was persuasive. Chun Hwa breathed deep. He spoke to Leg of Leather. The stallion tossed his head, then moved forward smartly.

  Hugging his ribs, Yalleranda watched his ancient prize ride into the disintegrator beam. Its surface was smooth, as smooth as an inland sea. It lapped up greedily round horse and rider, took them atom by atom. Like a man riding under a current, Chun Hwa rode forward without turning or looking back — into infinite future.

  The undiminished thing that was in him, and the undiminished thing in Leg of Leather — both were free at last. They rose to a galaxy inaccessible to consciousness or to machines, where generations are unknown, and continued still to rise.

  The Dark Millennia

  Against the Law of Transience may be set one of its ancillary laws. The Law of Endurance. The planet Earth plies (almost) eternally about its sun, swinging its small cone of night with it like a blue sail. For the solar system there is only one long day, an energy bath of radiation without end. That day is the prime product of the sun. The night — each planet fashions its own nights. As long as the sun burns, trailing out its marigold veins of fire across the adjacent void, life devours its uninterrupted day. Only the tiny individual lives must endure their own nights.

  With the gaudy glare of the solar system, that whirlpool of heat and noise, night has little place. It must hide where it can, behind planetary bodies, inside skulls, at submarine depths.

  Between the last fragment of the story and this next lies a metaphorical night, a night of ignorance which intelligence has been unable to bridge. We hurry across it in silence.

  Through our silence drift names, and mirages of civilizations known by little but their names. The Threshold Consortium, The Vehicularium, The Calloban Empire, The Solite Commonwealth. The Solites are remembered to those people who discovered the means of time travel, perhaps because their brains, in that particular stage of development, esta
blished a special relationship with the laws of the physical world which was for ever after unattainable; their talent died with them, never to be resurrected.

  According to the legends which come down to us, the Solites were extinguished by a great religious machine culture, the Vehicularium, when Functional Ultimate ruled, not merely Earth or the solar system, but the entire galaxy. We can only hypothesize regarding it, and know it to be unique. Unlike all other cuptures, the Vehicularium did not die, it did not succumb to decadence from within invasion from without; it simply disappeared one clear morning. Perhaps it withdrew its presence entirely to another galaxy with more favourable properties.

  When it was gone, a great and terrible vacuum existed. In that vacuum drifted some forty million years of silence, covering its progeny with the dust and ceaseless concatenations of time.

  Earth turns through many nights and myriads of individual deaths during that length of time. It all makes no difference. Life, death, and the sun: these are the constants. We call this period ‘The Dark Millennia’ and pass on, because there is no point in looking back. Nor do we find a great deal changed on Earth at the end of ‘The Dark Millennia’. The constants see to that. True, there is a new stratum of sedimentary rock; another Ice Age has come and gone; modifications to the lower jaw and the intestinal flora of humankind are barely discernible; a few modest cities huddle on some of the other solar planets; the continents have changed and fresh sands gleam at their edges; a new animal runs on the savannas, rejoicing in its strength. And, of course, many inhabited planets are in communication with Earth, as the races of the galaxy go about their transactions.,.

  The mental-health ship Cyberqueen lay quietly against a long wharf. Alone in one of its many cabins, Davi Dael sat waiting. The buttercup in his tunic was beginning to wilt. He half-smiled down at it because it seemed the one connection between him and the Bergharra township he had left early that morning; he had picked it before catching a gyro into New Union. Nothing else Davi could see, either here in the waiting room or outside, had as much colour as his buttercup.

  The waiting room was all greens and greys, relieved only by the faumium fittings. Outside, there were only greys and blacks, as evening yawned on acres of shunting yard; on the other side of the ship, the Horby River would echo the same sober tones.

  Quiet. Quiet for parsecs around, that treacherous quiet in which nothing stirs but the anxiety deep in the bowels.

  In Davi’s mind, the ordinary worries of a busy man were eclipsed by larger preoccupations which grew and grew, as if nourished by the silence. He waited tensely while these preoccupations rumbled as raggedly as thunder around his head. Nothing constructive would come of them; the elephantine anxieties padded head to tail like a series of catch phrases: parsecs, galactic federation, hyperspace, interpenetrators.

  These were the words that bothered Davi. His unquick brain turned them over time and again, as if hoping to find something relevant beneath them. Nearing fifty, he had known most of the words for years; they had been just words, without any attachments to experience, dictionary words. Only in this season had they come to unsettle his whole life.

  A silent, quick footstep passed the door. Davi was at once on his feet, a sick feeling rising with him. What conclusion had they come to here about Ishrail? Was he born on Earth or not? Or — it was really all the same question — had he been proved sane or insane?

  For a minute Davi stood trembling, then sat wearily down again as he realized the footsteps had no connection with his existence. He resumed his bored scrutiny of the marshalling yards; this kind of sight was unfamiliar to him, living as he did deep in the country. Here, the imports of a great, sea-fringed city were borne away to their destination. His interests generally confined to the cattle he bred, Davi would have been indifferent to the spectacle at any other time; now, it did possess a faint tinkle of interest, for he saw it through Ishrail’s eyes. And that changed the pattern entirely.

  The uncountable miles of track, from Ishrail’s viewpoint, belonged to a primitive transport system on a remote globe. All around this globe stretched — not sky, as Davi had once idly thought — but the great, complicated highway called space. Not a simple nothingness; rather, Ishrail explained, an unfathomable interplay of forces, fields and planes. Ishrail had laughed to hear that Earth word “space”; he had called it not space but a maze of stresses. But of course Ishrail might well be crazy. Certainly nobody in Bergharra had ever talked as he did.

  And through the maze of stress fields, Ishrail had said, rode the interpenetrators. Davi thought of them as spaceships, but Ishrail called them interpenetrators. They apparently were not made of metal at all, but of mentally powered force shields, which fed on the stress fields and changed as they changed; so the people of the Galaxy rode in safety between the civilized planets. At least, that was what Ishrail claimed.

  And the planets warred on one another. But even the war was not as Davi understood the term. It was as stylized as chess, as formal as a handshake, as chivalrous as an ambulance, as unrelenting as a guillotine. Its objectives were more nebulous and vast than materialist Earthmen could visualize. Or so said Ishrail, but of course Ishrail might be mad.

  Even if he was, that did not affect Davi’s loving admiration of him.

  “Don’t let them find him insane! Don’t let them find him insane!” Davi said, in an agony of repetition, speaking to the grey walls.

  And yet — if you proved Ishrail to be sane, you had to accept his mad version of reality.

  After all his hours of waiting, Davi was unprepared when the cabin door opened. He was standing with his fists clenched to his tunic, and dropped them in confusion as the white-haired man came in. This was Brother Joh Shansfor, the psychiatrist who had interviewed Davi in the Cyberqueen — one of the roving fleet of specialist ships which had replaced the old static conception of a hospital — when Davi had first asked for help for Ishrail in Bergharra. Shansfor was tall, thin and brisk, and remarkably ugly, although age had now taken the sting out of his features, leaving them little more than notably rugged.

  Davi went straight over to him.

  “Ishrail?” he asked.

  Under that tense, eager stare, Shansfor flinched.

  “We aren’t actually certain yet,” he said in his formal way. “Some of the factors involved invite very cautious evaluation indeed...”

  “It’s a month since Ishrail came aboard here, three weeks since you brought him to New Union,” Davi said. “I introduced him to you for his own sake, but he can’t like it here, being under constant observation and everything. Surely in all that time — ”

  “A quick decision would only be a foolish one,” Shansfor said. “Ishrail is entirely happy and safe here; and you may rest assured he is not being treated like an ordinary patient.”

  “You told me that before!” There were angry tears in Davi’s eyes. He had the sensation that the whole organization of the mental-health ship was rearing up against him. “In the short time since I found him, I’ve grown to love Ishrail. Surely you people here can feel his goodness of character.”

  “His character is not in question. We are examining his mind,” Shansfor replied. “Excuse me if I sit down; it has been a trying day.”

  He sat down on a hard chair and allowed his shoulders to sag slightly. Davi, old enough to understand the weariness that might lie behind that innocent-looking gesture, felt his wrath deflected. Distrusting psychiatrists enough to wonder if the incident might not be a covert attempt to win sympathy, he still kept hardness in his tone as he said, “All the same, Brother Shansfor, you must have felt his gentle nature. Give me a personal opinion, for heaven’s sake; I’m a stock-breeder, not a lawyer. Ishrail’s saner than you or I, isn’t he?”

  “No,” Shansfor said slowly. “If you want a personal opinion, your protégé is sinking rapidly into schizophrenic trauma. Paranoia is also present. He is, in popular usage, a hopeless case.”

  Colour drained from under Davi’s tan
. He fumbled wordlessly for words among the green and grey slices of whirling room.

  “Let me see Ishrail!” he finally gasped.

  “That will not be possible, Mr Dael, I regret to say. The medical council have agreed that the patient will be happier in isolation, away from disturbing external influences.”

  “But I must see him,” Davi said. He could not believe what Shansfor was saying; for an insane moment he thought the man must be talking about someone other than Ishrail. “I’ve got to see him. I’m his friend, Ishrail’s friend! You can’t keep him here!”

  Shansfor stood up. His face, like Davi’s, was pale. He said nothing, merely waiting for Davi to finish. That was more ominous than words.

  “Look here,” Davi said, unable to resist argument, although guessing already how useless it might be. “This tale Ishrail has told us about the great civilization of the Galaxy, the stress fields of space, the interpenetrators, all the details of life on other planets, strange animals and flowers — you can’t believe he made it all up in his head? Some of these planets he talks about — Droxy, Owlenj — you surely don’t think they’re just fictitious?”

  “Mr Dael,” Shansfor said in a brittle voice, “please credit us with knowing our business here. The patient has a fertile imagination; it has finally collapsed under the stress of too much reading — omnivorous reading, I may add, which has encompassed both learned works and trash.”

  “But his story of this galactic war — ” Davi protested.

  “Tell me,” Shansfor said with dangerous calm, “do you believe a galactic war is now raging, Mr Dael?”

  The engine yards outside were floating away on a tide of darkness in which isolated lights strove to act as buoys. The sky was one big cloud, cosy over New Union. Supposing I do believe, Davi thought, supposing I do believe the whole fantastic business, how can I prove I’m sane any more easily than Ishrail can? How can I prove to myself I’m sane? Two months ago, I would have laughed at this galactic rigmarole. It’s just that the way Ishrail told it, it had the ring of truth. Unmistakable! And yet — why, it is all frighteningly farfetched. But that’s why I believe it; it’s too tall not to be true. Believe? So I do believe. But I’m not sure. If I were really sure, they’d lock me up, too. Oh, Ishrail... No, better play safe; after all, I’m no use to Ishrail once they have doubts about me. Before the cock crows twice...