Galaxies Like Grains of Sand

by Brian W Aldiss

  “Admirable!” he echoed. I could scarcely see him for bright wings. The rescue party was in the next room. They burst out with Jeffy at their head, carrying atomic weapons.

  “There he is,” I shouted.

  But he was not there. Regard-Cyro-Gerund had gone. Taking a tip from the Painted Ladies, he had split into a thousand units, volplaning away on the breeze, safely, invincibly, lost among the crowd of bright insects.

  So I come to what is really not the end but the beginning of the story. Already, a decade has passed since the events in the Capverde Islands. What did I do? Well, I did nothing; I neither wrote to Pamlira nor called Gal-Fed Council. With the marvellous adaptability of my species, I managed in a day or two to persuade myself that “Gerund” would never succeed, or that somehow or other he had misinterpreted what was happening to him. And so, year by year, I hear the reports of the human race growing fewer and I think, “Well, anyway, they’re happy,” and I sit up here on my balcony and drink my wine and let the sea breezes blow on me. In this climate, and at this post, nothing more should be expected of me.

  And why should I excite myself for a cause in which I have never believed? When Nature passes a law it cannot be repealed; for her prisoners there is no escape — and we are all her prisoners. So I sit tight and take another drink. There is only one proper way to become extinct: with dignity.

  The Megalopolis Millennia

  It is ironical that when men could finally have liberated themselves from dependence on the machine with the help of that philo-somatic tool, Galingua, they should have found themselves facing an overwhelming danger for which Galingua itself was responsible.

  By no means all of them faced this danger with the weary resignation of the prison warden. Give a man an enemy and you bring out both the best and the worst in him. With its hackles up, humanity went in to fight. Yet it is worth noting that even in this crisis there were many people who took the long view and resigned themselves — not from indifference but for finer reasons — to what they saw as their inevitable fate.

  These reasons were set forth cogently enough by Chize Dutremey, writing some five hundred years after Pamlira’s time, when a quarter of Yinnisfar’s population had faded into individually sentient cells and the whole complex structure of stellar intercourse was disintegrating.

  “The Dual Theory, that religion most generally accepted by enlightened men throughout the Galaxy,” Chize wrote, “claims that the universe was created by two similar but opposed forces, To and Pla-To. To created nonsentient matter; Pla-To, coming later, created sentient matter. The two forces are hostile to — or at best indifferent to — each other. Pla-To is by far the less powerful, for sentient matter must always depend to some extent upon nonsentient.

  “The objectives of the two forces are as opposed as their natures. As far as man can comprehend To at all, his objectives may be described in the word endurance. He must endure through the matter he has created, perpetuating himself as it is perpetuated; and its perpetuation is only challenged by Pla-To.

  “The sentient forces of Pla-To are infinitely weaker than his opponent’s. For one thing, the very nature of sentience is transient, for sentience entails development, which in its turn entails decay. Sentient objects, moreover, are easily overcome by nonsentient ones: floods, earthquakes, novae. And not only overcome, but totally destroyed — and in that destruction, converted into nonsentient objects.

  “Pla-To has only one effective defence against the vast opposed ranks of nullity. The total material in the universe is finite and (eventually) exhaustible; the forces of To cannot therefore increase. But the forces of Pla-To can, for life and sentience are created out of the nonsentient, thus increasing themselves and decreasing the enemy. Man is one of Pla-To’s finest instruments, for through him sentience is spread from planet to planet, banishing nullity.”

  So said Chize Dutremey, in her exposition of the Dual Theory. Put briefly, it may be said that total feeling was to the total good, while the total triumph of To would bring the evil of total non-feeling. Many men were quick to observe that the evolution of sentient cells was a further, major step toward To’s defeat; it represented an increase in feeling: for every small beacon called man, there could now be thousands of thousands of small lights launched against To’s darkness.

  The Dual Theory was the first galactic religion. From its inception of the hub world of Rolf, it stood as cool and aloof from men as a tall mountain and as distant from their affairs as a Plutonian Hill. It recognized life and the finish of life; it recognized the chill of the night and the length of its ultimate duration; it recognized the shortness of day and its beauty. It knew that beyond all joy lay a curtain of something too cruel to be called sorrow, too noble to be called misery; that all flesh was air, breathed and finished in a minute — but that in that minute, in that time for doing, lay all the truth that was. It was a galactic religion, hard to grasp and uncomforting when grasped, for which very reason the true adults of those days turned to it. It offered them no afterglow beyond the grave, nor did it speak, of golden voices from other spheres; it bestowed no rewards for virtue or punishments for weakness. It had no altars. No one decked its shrines with flowers; no one set its tenets to a trumpeting music. Yet their hearts took on strength and depth from its sober truth.

  The believers were accordingly not afraid to demonstrate that the Dual Theory set little store by man and his glories. Man was an incidental in Pla-To’s path to full sentience. The prime sentient unit was the cell. Now that it had learned to be itself by itself, it was forsaking that grouping called man to which it had so long adhered, just as man had long since abandoned the tribe structure necessary to his primitive days. Therefore believers could not, had no right to, oppose a step which according to their faith furthered the aims of Pla-To.

  All of which, for many men, smacked of stupidity and suicide. Whatever theories they held or did not hold, in practice they believed in the survival of man — and, more particularly, of themselves.

  The use of Galingua was prohibited. This meant the severing of those close bonds with which the planetary concourse had joined itself. Even the Self-perpetuating War lost impetus, ceasing entirely in many regions. Although the old “solid” system of space travel by spaceship was slowly reintroduced, the Galaxy — even like man himself — began disintegrating into its individual members.

  War against the conqueror cell was on. Mainly it had to be a defensive battle. At the same time religious strife broke out, non-believers fighting the Theorists who, as we have seen, were bound to oppose those they regarded as unwitting agents of To.

  Eventually the believers were massacred almost to a man. The legions which overcame them, driven by fear, gave no quarter; clothed in fantastic antibiotic armours which lent them some protection against vagabond cells, they filled their already threatened worlds with death.

  On Yinnisfar, the strife was particularly bitter, dying down only when the menace of the cells itself became no longer a vital issue.

  Many ways of combating this menace were introduced, but the most effective were the aerostomas. The aerostomas represented a compromise between To and Pla-To. They were semisentient flying things made of Pyrocathus 12, a malleable material susceptible to human thought impulses. Little more than airborne stomachs, the aerostomas flew low over land and sea on every planet threatened with cellular disintegration, swallowing the vagabond cells, compressing and stifling them. Of noncellular origin, the aerostomas were immune to disintegration.

  A new princely order arose on Yinnisfar, the Triumphing Men, who went forth like knights to battle with the invisible foe, aerostomas perching on their shoulders or circling restlessly in the air above.

  Hard the Triumphing Men were, hard and brave. In the millennia that followed, they became a legend, and the legend was embodied in Thraldemener. Thraldemener’s exploits were many and his victories frequent, although there seems little doubt that his deeds have gained in the retelling.

 
Whether humanity would ever have succeeded in vanquishing a foe which swelled its ranks from humanity is debatable. A rapid form of cancer destroyed the cells. In their struggle for survival, they had overreached themselves. Virtually a new form of life, they were unstable, and their instability was their undoing. When diseased matter was first incorporated into their ranks, they had no way of combating it. The cancerous cells were a ravening enemy in their midst, maiming, destroying, obliterating. Man awoke one day to find himself again master of his worlds, with only a thin ash in the meadows to mark end of one of nature’s strangest experiments.

  This is no place to describe in detail the reconstruction of a federated Galaxy, which man undertook in a mood compounded at once of savagery and despair. It took more than a million years, for something of his old thrust had gone. He had learned a new lesson: that he could be superseded from within, that even in his keenest hour of triumph those cosmic chess players, To and Pla-To, regarded him simply as a seedbed for future experiment. The Federation was patched; its old easy confidence lay beyond mending.

  Yinnisfar, under the Galingua regime for a far shorter period than most of its sister planets, had solid spaceships still in commission. With these, it was able to take a lead in galactic trade. The spirit of its people, hardened under the regime of the Triumphing Men, rendered it fit to compete with the most mercenary of rivals.

  Its banks swelled like overfed bellies. Its merchants walked in golden slippers. The city of Nunion sprawled and lost its shape like a gorged python. Mammon was back on his throne, and the following fragment reflects only a tiny portion of his face.

  The mighty creature was reeling. The hunter’s last shot had caught it right between its eyes. Now, all fifty graceful tons of it, the beast reared up high above the treetops, trumpeting in agony. For a moment the sun, beautiful and baleful, caught it poised like an immense swan, before it fell — silent now, no more protesting — headlong into the undergrowth.

  “And there lies another triumph for Man the Unconquerable,” proclaimed the commentator. “On this planet, as on others, all life finally bows before a man from Yinnisfar. Yes, every one of these monsters will be slaughtered by the time — ”

  By this time someone had warned the projectionist of the new arrival now waiting to use the little editing theatre, and the projectionist, in a panic, cut everything. The 3-D image vanished, the sound slicked out. Lights came on, revealing Big Cello of Supernova Solids standing by the entrance.

  “Hope we didn’t disturb you,” Big Cello said, watching everyone hustling up to leave.

  “Not at all, Cello 69,” a subdirector replied. “We’ll solidify this one tomorrow.”

  “I wouldn’t like to think we’d interrupted,” Big Cello said blandly. “But Rhapsody 182 here has something he seems to want to show us.” And he nodded, not without easy menace, at the lean figure of Harsch-Benlin, known to the inmates of Supernova as Rhapsody 182.

  Two minutes later, the last minion had fled from the theatre, leaving the intruding party in occupation.

  “Well, Rhapsody, let’s see what you have to show us,” Big Cello observed heavily, settling his bulk in one of the armchair seats.

  “Sure thing, BC,” Harsch-Benlin said. He was one of the few men on the Supernova lot allowed to call the chief by initials, rather than by the full United name. He jumped now, with a parody of athleticism, onto the narrow stage in front of the solid screen and smiled down at his audience. It consisted of some twenty-five people, half of whom Rhapsody knew only by sight. The company broke down roughly into four groups: the chief and his orgmen; Rhapsody’s own orgmen, headed by Ormolu 3; a handful from Story and Market Response with their orgmen; plus the usual quota of attractive stylus recorders.

  “The idea’s imbedded in a solid,” Rhapsody began, “that’s going to give Supernova a terrific boost, because it’s going to have our studios as background, and some of our personnel as players. At the same time, it’s going to pack colossal punch in terms of human drama and audience appeal. Not only that — it’s backdrop is Nunion, the greatest planetary capital in the Galaxy.”

  Rhapsody paused for effect. Several members of his audience were lighting up aphrohales. All were quiet.

  “I can see you’re asking yourselves,” Rhapsody said, essaying a smile, “just how I intend to cram so much meat into one two-hour solid. I’ll show you.”

  He raised a hand eloquently, as a signal to his projectionist. A solid appeared on the screen.

  It was the face of a man. A man in his late forties. The years that had dried away the flesh had only succeeded in revealing, under the fine skin, the nobility of bone structure: the tall forehead, the set of cheekbone, the justness of the jaw. He was talking, although the sound was off, leaving the animation of the features to speak for themselves. The countenance completely dwarfed Rhapsody 182.

  “This, ladies and gentlemen,” Rhapsody said, clenching his fists and holding them out before him, “is the face of Ars Staykr.”

  The audience began sitting up, looking at one another, gauging the climate of opinion. Rhapsody had deliberately called Staykr by his true rather than his United name. It was customary in big combines like Supernova to use people’s district plus block number as names. Not only did this serve to present a united front to confuse outsiders; it helped insiders to place you financially, for districts in Nunion were islands divided according to grandeur. You had to be a credit king to live on Cello, whereas on Pelt and Trickle no one but deadbeats were permitted to live.

  Ars Staykr had been an individualist. Somehow, his United name of Bastion 44 had never fitted, as Rhapsody now emphasized. Gratified at the audience’s response, he continued.

  “The face of a great man. Ars Staykr! A genius known only to a narrow circle of men, here in this very studio where he worked; yet all who knew him admired and — why don’t I say it? — loved him. I had the honour to be his right-hand man back in the days when he was boss of Documentary Two. I plan this solid to be his biography — a tribute to Ars Staykr, Bastion 44.”

  He paused. If he could swing this one on Big Cello and Company he was made, because if it boosted Ars Staykr it was also going to boost Harsch-Benlin until that erstwhile Rhapsody ended up mellow on the Cello levels.

  “Staykr ended up in the gutter!” someone called out. That was Starfield 1337, a troublemaker.

  “I am glad someone raised that point,” Rhapsody continued, carefully snubbing Starfield by omitting his name. “Staykr finished up in the gutter. He couldn’t make the grade. This solid is going to show why. It’s going to show just how much grit is needed simply to stay sane in Nunion. It’s going to show how much grit is needed to serve the public as we serve them — because, like I said, it’s going to be a solid not just about Ars Staykr, but about Supernova, and about Nunion, and about Life. In short, it’s going to have everything.”

  The gentle face faded from the screen, leaving the small figure of Rhapsody standing on the platform alone. Although thin to the point of emaciation, Rhapsody perpetually consumed slimming tablets for the luxury of hearing his underlings refer to him as “gangling,” which he held to be a term of affection.

  “And the beauty of this solid is,” he continued dramatically, “the beauty’s that it’s already half-made! Written, directed, solidified.”

  Images began to grow in the seemingly limitless depths of the cube. Something as intricate and lovely as the magnification of a snowflake stirred and seemed to drift toward the audience. It enlarged, sprouting detail, elaborating itself, until every tiny branch had other branches. It seemed, thanks to clever camera work, to be an organic growth; then the descending, slowing viewpoint at length revealed it to be a creation of concrete and imperve and ferroline, moulded by man into buildings and thoroughfares, into levels and mazes, stabbing into the air or burrowing into the earth.

  “This,” Rhapsody pronounced, “is the fabulous city — our fabulous city — the city of Nunion. Nunion — jelled by Unit Two under
Staykr at the height of his powers, twenty years ago. This solid was to be his greatest work; it was never completed, for reasons I will tell you later. But the sixteen reels of unedited cathusjell he left behind as his greatest memorial have lain in our vaults all that time. I dug them out the other day.

  “Now I’m not going to talk for a while. I’m going to ask you to sit back and appreciate the sheer beauty of these shots. I’m going to ask you to try and judge their value in terms of aesthetic reaction and viewer appeal. I’m going to ask you to relax and watch a masterpiece, in which I’m proud to say I had something of a hand.”

  The image continued to sink gradually, below the highest towers, through the aerial levels, the pedestrian (human and ahuman) esplanades, the various transport and service strata, down to the ground, the imperve pavement, at which point a convex glass traffic guide reflected in miniature the whole of that long camera descent from the skies. Then the focus shifted laterally, taking in the vermilion boots of a Flux officer.

  Almost unnoticed, a commentary had begun. It was a typical Unit Two commentary: quiet, unemphatic, spoken in Ars Staykr’s own voice.

  “On the seventy thousand planets which occupy the single Galaxy inhabited by man, there is no more vast or diverse city than Nunion,” the commentary said. “It has become a fable to all men of all races. To describe it is impossible without descending into statistics and figures, and this is to lose sight of the reality; we ask you to explore some of the reality with us. Forget the facts and figures: look instead at the fluxways and mansions and, above all, at the individuals which comprise Nunion. Look, and ask yourself: How does one find the heart of a great city? What secret lies at the core of it when one arrives?”

  Nunion had grown over the ten islands of an archipelago in the temperate zone of Yinnisfar, spreading from the nearby continent. Five hundred bridges, a hundred and fifty subfluxes, sixty heliplane routes, and innumerable ferries, gondolas and sailing craft interconnected the eleven sectors and forty-five districts. Lining the water lanes or breaking the seemingly endless phalanxes of streets went avenues of either natural or polycathic trees, with here and there — perhaps at some focal point like the Ishrail Memorial — the rare and lovely jenny-merit, newly imported, perpetually flowering. The camera swept over Clive Amethyst Bridge now, hovering before the first block beyond the waterway. A young man was coming out of the block, springing down the outer steps three at a time. On his face were mingled excitement, triumph and joy. He could hardly contain himself. Buoyed with exultation, he could not walk fast enough. He was the young man in any large city: the man about to make his mark, to score his first success, confident beyond sense, exuberant beyond measure. In him one could see the drive that had reached out to seventy thousand planets and dreamed of seventy thousand more.