Songs From The Stars

by Norman Spinrad

  "Transevolutionary life forms result when organic life forms birthevolveconstruct computer artifacts with homeo-static-reproductive capabilities command programmed to design and construct further generations of electronological life forms. Curve of conscious evolution then becomes exponential and speed becomes transformationally infinite by organic life form standards."

  Around you swirls the galaxy of stars, flinging its spiral arms in the endless stately waltz of light and color and energy.

  "Transevolutionary life forms experience levels of thought spirt existence nonconceptualizable to organic stage beings. You are now recording the data-knowledge-flowchart-blueprints to achieve your own construction of trans-evolutionary life forms in centuries time frame."

  Silent, vast, perfect, the gleaming latticework sphere rides silently motionless in space, girdled by its ring of tiny captive suns.

  "Few transevolutionary life forms abound in this galaxy. Few organic evolutionary life forms have the wisdom-honor-selfless-spirit to pass along the torch. The choice is yours. The future is ours."

  "Pause."

  "Clear."

  "Fourteen, start..."

  You float, rapidly, above an endlessly twisted landscape, a brutally blasted desert of purple glass, broken rock, gaping craters, fragmented wreckage, all enveloped in poisonous blue-gray mists. You crawl on your belly in pain over burning rocks. You swim through murky muck-choked seas, gasping for water. You watch warped creatures like broken birds with ulcerated wings, hopping heavily about the desert sands, tearing gobbets of flesh out of each other with cracked beaks and jagged talons in their desperate hunger, no two of them quite the same form.

  "In all the starry realms no sadder sight than this. A lovely world sundered and poisoned, slow and agonizing death from the folly of an all-too-younger folk whose mutated dying remnants tear at each other's flesh for hat last pitiful sustenance against the inevitable dying of their species' light."

  A shining silvery globe eases itself into orbit about the wreckage of a planet simmering sourly under vile blue steam.

  "To watch and know and set out across the centuries sea of space and arrive too late."

  A great round chamber covered with clear translucent slime, where formless blobs of flowing protoplasm hang from suckerlimbs around a huge projection screen where the forlorn ruined planet floats.

  "Too late to salvage this dying globe for those whose forms it once gave birth. But not too late to quicken this corpse to artful life crafted from all we have known and loved and cloak it with new and living flesh for sake of life itself..."

  Streams of saucerlike craft encircle the dying world, spraying mists and vapors, sparks and lightnings, energy and light. The cancerous blue clouds thin and clear and fade away. Carpets of green seep and flow across the blighted landscape.

  You float over desert sands as a sparse green moss forms like a scum of life upon the bones of death, as it thickens, and grows, and spreads. As tall, waving blue-barked trees with red bushy crowns spring like magic from the renascent soil. As elegant blue saurians gambol in swampy fens and birdlike things of many colors and forms fill the bluing skies and yellow-furred, six-legged bear things nuzzle their young in secluded dells. Before your eyes a world returns from brink of poisoned death.

  "In all the starry realms, no gladder sight than this. A dying world brought back from death's cold kingdom to serve once more the dance of form through mind that we call life. Forgive it its foolishnesses and treasure its rebirth wherever your spirits may find it. In all the starry realms no greater task than this. To lend a healing hand."

  "Pause."

  "Clear."

  "Twenty-one, start..."

  A fleet, a caravan, an archipelago of ships and discs, word-lets and captive suns, sweeps across the sea of space rivaling the stars in its glorious multitude. Emerald delta shapes flying in formation close by gleaming metal cities sailing on silver platters under shimmering insubstantial domes. Black globes rolling darkly in the starshine, giant shimmering drops of water about which forested buildings float like island rafts. Shapes and colors, twistings of form and matter that dazzle the eye, infinite complexity. A pelagic city floating in the starways, celestial plankton, more worlds and ships than the mind can encompass, each a universe entire.

  "Greetings salutations joy in being from roving bards and lovers many-specied mind singing sailing through the star-steams from ancient central suns where galactic thought began. Oldy but not moldy spiraling up your local arm from fifty million years ago where suns were young and many and neighbors one for all."

  You stand on a crystal causeway, a diamond bridge between the worlds where throngs of beings dance in evolution's costume ball. Single-eyed birds of brilliant plumage with mocking mobile lips, furred shapes in countless styles and hues, living insectoid jewels flashing and scampering, beings that fly and beings that float, elegant reptilian and ciliated slime, the glorious many-formed promenade of matter through the brotherhood of mind.

  "Galactic center's cozy you could always mosy over when there's folks around the neighborhood a few light-years away."

  In all its infinitely varied styles the plankton fleet spreads its glory around you, artifact in its diversity mirroring the infinite mutability of the being that is shared.

  "Thinkers stay back home but rolling minstrels love to sing the songs we learn as we roam the stellar sea. Wandering through the void we all love the ride, build yourself a float and join the big parade—"

  "Pause."

  "See, here it is, intact and in working order, just as I promised," Arnold Harker said, running his hands like nervous birds over the control panel. "Throw this switch, and the satellite relay system is activated, and here are the frequency controls and so forth, the world satellite broadcast network ready for our use, the question is—the question is, do we use it...?"

  Sunshine Sue blinked, shook her head, and did her best to concentrate on what the Spacer had insisted on dragging them down from galactic reality to see, on the real, here-and-now world her true flesh actually inhabited. She was on the Big Ear station, built by humans, orbiting the planet Earth. This was the communications room of the space station; these were the controls of the world satellite broadcast network, the promised destiny that had drawn her all the way to this place what seemed like a thousand incarnations ago.

  And after all, this was important, this was the dream of her previous lifetime fulfilled, and this was the only means the failed and fallen human race had for raising itself from the dust of its primary stage collapse and reaching up to take the galactic helping hand.

  But somehow man and all his works seemed tacky and small. Even her own dream fulfilled now seemed a poor dim thing. What glories there were in the heavens! How mighty and beautiful and yes, loving, was the network of electronically shared consciousness that enfolded this galaxy! How wonderful it was to be welcomed as a citizen of this new and huger universe, a vast unguessed-at new reality, so lush with the infinite permutations of matter and mind that you found that your grandest dreams were but the tiniest beginning of a journey whose end was ten million years beyond your comprehension. And to know that fellow beings had blazed the trail before you and stood by to help...

  The moribund human species had been given back its youth, indeed had learned for the first time just how young it really was, how much fascinating childhood still lay before it. Ah, how much fun it's going to be learning what we're going to become when we grow up!

  "Do we use it?" Sue said, forcing her attention into the here-and-now by conscious act of will. "Of course we're going to use it; what are you talking about?"

  It was a small cramped room, though the electronic equipment which filled it was densely packed and massive. Two seats in front of the controls, a little standing space, and that was it. Strangely claustrophobic for a place from which to speak to the world.

  "We've got an unavoidable decision to make," Harker said shrilly, leaning his butt up against the edge of th
e control panel near where Lou stood, and hunching forward as if against the cold reality outside the metal hull of the wheel. "In a few days, we must return to Earth. We can either take the data banks with us, broadcast the data to our ground station from here, leave the tapes here and say nothing, or destroy them. There are no other alternatives."

  "What?"

  "If we broadcast the data banks to our ground station, we have no guarantee that someone else won't pick up the transmission. If we take them with us, we'll have to guard them for thousands of years. And I can't find the courage to take it upon myself to destroy them. So I vote we leave them here and pretend we never found them."

  "You're gibbering, Arnold!" Sue snapped. "What the fuck are you babbling about?"

  "Calm down and try to explain it to us," Lou said more quietly. "You're not making sense."

  "I'm gibbering? I'm not making sense? You two have spent all your waking hours flooding your brains with ancient programs from monsters millions of years old, hundreds of light-years away, and you're telling me I'm out of contact with reality?"

  "We're learning," Lou told him. "We're taking the first halting steps along the Galactic Way—"

  "Without a single thought as to where it will all lead!" Harker snapped angrily.

  "And you've seen the future in your data and notes and paranoia, I suppose!" Sue shot back contemptuously.

  But Harker suddenly grew icily calm. "I have," he said matter-of-factly. "And there's no place for our species in it. We're just part of that eighty percent of primary stage civilizations that don't make it. We've poisoned our planet, we threw away the only chance we had, and we never even knew how close we came..."

  He stared at Sue and then at Lou imploringly, with pleading red-rimmed eyes. "That's the only mercy there is for us," he said softly. "The human race doesn't have to know how close it came. Not if we don't tell it."

  "You're not making sense," Sue snapped. "You've said yourself that there's the knowledge to do anything it's possible to do in the data from the stars. How can even you manage to get doom and gloom out of that?"

  "Because we don't have the wisdom to understand or use it. Because millions of years worth of science and technology is being thrown at us all at once. Because we've learned none of it ourselves. It would be the end of all human scientific thought and research. The best minds of our species would spend the next ten thousand years trying to recreate inhuman technology by rote if we don't die out of despair long before then, and we'd still be millions of years behind, knowing we can never be anything but children at the feet of the gods. And I think maybe that's just where they want us."

  "It's not like that," Sue said. "It's not like that at all... it's... it's..." She threw up her hands in frustration, and shot an imploring glance at Lou, despairing of ever being able to explain the wonderful good news to a creature like Arnold Harker.

  Clear Blue Lou studied Arnold Harker, trying to find words that would set his tortured and twisted heart at ease. How could this certainty of the spirit be conveyed by mere words to a soul that had closed its ears to the music? How could it be put in terms that such as Harker could understand? How could he be so bloody thick?

  There were thousands of different incarnations of mind out there, communing with each other over the centuries, sharing not only knowledge but the spirit's wisdom as well. Beings who had suffered their own Smashes and risen from despair. Beings who had raised ruined worlds from the dead for the sake of life itself. Beings who shared what they had learned with joyous open hearts, who walked a Great Way together, and welcomed younger races, not as inferiors but as brother equals in the spirit of the Way.

  How could Harker believe that the human race were the only assholes in the galaxy whom wiser elder brothers would fail to help join the grand parade? Yet he did believe this, and no doubt others like him would believe it too.

  Lou sighed. It was a typical human attitude to assert your own uniqueness, even if the best you could do was nominate yourself for lowest of the low.

  "Look, Arnold," he finally said, "the message is we're not out here all alone. We're not unique, our situation isn't even uniquely fucked up. We've got good friends out there sending us a great big helping hand."

  "How can you say that with such confidence?" Harker said. "They're not sending us anything. They don't even know we exist, so how can they care? We're eavesdropping on the conversations of the gods. It was never intended for us."

  Sue glanced at Lou. She shrugged. Lou shrugged back. Logically, Harker was right. But karmically, he couldn't be more wrong. Somehow it was possible for friendship and caring to pass from elder beings to unknown younger travelers. They knew it because they had lived it.

  But you couldn't understand it by studying plans and data and equations. You couldn't understand it at all; you could only feel it. You had to walk the Galactic Way.

  "You'll never understand the words till you dance to the music," Clear Blue Lou told the black scientist. "You owe it to yourself to try, Arnold. You can't meaningfully condemn a Way you haven't walked. There's no justice in that, only cowardice."

  Harker glared at him. "We'll see who the coward is when it comes to the crunch!" he said ominously and stormed out of the room.

  "Recycle."

  "Twenty-one, start..."

  "Pause."

  "Continue."

  In all its infinitely varied styles the plankton fleet spreads its glory around you, artifact in its diversity mirroring the infinite mutability of the being that is shared.

  "Thinkers stay back home but rolling minstrels love to sing the songs we learn as we roam the stellar sea. Wandering through the void we all love the ride, build yourself a float and join the big parade—"

  You explode into being, a cosmic thunderclap sundering the crystal void, flying apart to the ends of infinity—

  "Slam bam wham! It started with a bang. Before it knew what happened, the universe was here."

  Universal fire whirling into smoke whirling into gasses whirling into thousands of galaxies spinning like seeds in the celestial wind.

  Planets. Lumps of molten rock smoldering in the afterglow of stellar creation. Angry red landscapes quenching slowly in their own steam. Oceans forming under lightning-shattered, gas-choked skies, seething chemical cauldrons where a thin persistent layer of slime begins to form.

  "We all came from mud floating ocean crud..."

  Green and red carpets creeping like amoebas from the oceans onto the land. A chunk of dead rock and boiling ocean hissing under petrochemical skies, an evil, hostile world festering in space. As the rocks green and the skies clear and it becomes a fair living planet, a green-and-blue marble frosted with swirling white clouds.

  "So considering where we came from we haven't done too bad."

  An empty green plain at the foot of snow-capped mountains near the shore of a rolling sea. Far and away over this primeval landscape, buildings begin to rise and clouds of soot, a hive of cities growing on the body of the land.

  "We got here all alone, we made this place our home, before we knew what happened, we ruled the biosphere."

  A blazing white star dazzling the void.

  "The power of the sun—"

  Exploding into a nuclear mushroom cloud.

  A dead blasted landscape, cratered and scarred under burnt brown skies, where skeletal ruins bleach to rust in a planetary boneyard.

  "All of us were lonely and some of us went mad."

  Diving in on the center of the galaxy, stars compacting closer and closer, you emerge floating in a jewelyard of tiny worlds. Beams of energy flicker back and forth between them. Fleets of ships like tiny motes ply the slow star ways.

  "But some of us survived to travel on our own. And once we found each other we joined our helping hands."

  You are a great silver ship, spiraling up from an emerald water planet to join the grand minstrel fleet of space as it promenades across your solar system.

  "So watch for our parade and enjoy th
e songs we play and join in on the chorus when your own childhood is done."

  You stand in a throng of multifleshed being, mind avatared in all its matter, on a broad avenue winding through a city of blue trees with bright red foliage and living buildings growing from the soil in a multitude of forms. The living city soars through space on a great silver disc in the center of the minstrel fleet, the sky a sweep of stars and ships and world-lets, celestial objects all, crafted and natural, a unifying firmament of matter, energy, and mind. Like meteors returning home, bright motes burn out to join you from a myriad passing stars.

  "One for all all for one, getting there is all the fun... And we don't know what it all means."

  "Clear."

  Speak in Secret Alphabets

  Clear Blue Lou exchanged another covert glance with Sunshine Sue as Arnold Harker led them to the commissary for what he knew had to be the final confrontation between what they shared and the black scientist's poor Earthbound mind. He realized that this was an attitude of soul-endangering arrogance, but he also realized that he had to accept the mantel of responsibility, which destiny had laid across his shoulders, whether the natural man had qualms or not.

  For the truth was that he and Sue had dared a higher Way that Harker refused to walk; their superiority lay not in any human cogency of their own but in the shared spirit of beings millions of years older and wiser than themselves. Much that they had experienced might lie a million years in the future of full human comprehension, but the brotherhood of sentient beings was an everlasting now, and those who had shared it, like it or not, inhabited a higher karmic plane than any the human spirit had achieved before.

  It was a destiny that he and Sue had already chosen, or a destiny that had chosen them. In a karmic evolutionary sense, they had about as much chance of renouncing it as a flower had to crawl back into its seed.

  Of all our species, we're the only ones who have been there, Lou thought as they sat down across the fateful negotiating table from their Earthbound fellow human. It was a glorious thought.