Olaf Stapledon

by Nebula Maker

  In answer to God’s command, the atom-cosmos had burgeoned not only with light but with a space and time peculiar to itself. And I, by some means or other, had gained a footing therein; but without ceasing to participate in the space and time peculiar to God.

  Thus, so long as I gazed at the dark seed-pearl of the atom-cosmos, passive on God’s finger, I saw also, all around me, though as it were with another vision, the process of cosmical events.

  There now came to me a vivid and terrifying realization that between me and the human world which was my true concern there lay aeon upon aeon of cosmical history, and nearly all of it inhuman.

  “Oh God,” I cried, “let me be again among my own kind. Blot out from my mind the memory of all this irrelevance. Let me play out my little past oblivious of the immensities. Let me take up once more the threads of a life distressed, bewildered, futile, but my own. Let me watch the spectacle of my own world. Futile it may be, tragic it is, but I am shaped for it. And in it there are little creatures like myself whose lives intertwine with mine.”

  Thus I prayed. But then I remembered the thing that God was, and I knew that it was useless to pray to him; useless, and also, in some manner which I could not comprehend, base.

  With a heavy heart I settled myself to the task of watching the bleak and intricate unfolding of the physical cosmos, not as yet feeling its perfection, not as yet realizing that some insight into these remote events was needed to prepare me for insight into the passionate themes which were to follow.

  In this book I shall set down only the slightest record of these difficult and wearisome experiences, lest I should inflict on the reader the tedium which I myself suffered, toiling through that desert. But somehow I must entice him at least to fly rapidly with me over the huge wilderness of the early cosmos, and note its features with watchful and interested eyes, so that he may grasp what follows.

  By now the unit members of the cosmos, which had first been laid together in one identical volume, were already separated by wide gulfs. Between them was nothing but the tempestuous undulations which they scattered in all directions throughout the cosmos.

  These undulations, these ubiquitous light rays, were actually visible to me. Seemingly they were for me illuminated by that other, swifter, more searching and more revealing light, which cast by the lucent person of God himself, pervades and drenches all things.

  I could see also the primal members themselves, the radiant centres of all this rippled light. And though they were now once more distinct and scattered, I could see, or rather by a kind of microscopic telepathy I could feel, that each one preserved within itself, like a forgotten memory, the presence and the influence of all the others. Each must now and forever be a true member of the cosmic unity, possessed by the whole, but also pervading the whole with its own unique nature.

  Presently I found that I could move hither and thither within the cosmos as I willed, simply by looking in whichever direction I chose to go. Thus, as on the wings of thought, more easily than a bird overtakes a snail, I could outstrip and pass the sluggish lightrays of the cosmos.

  Seeing clearly that all things in the cosmos were flying apart from one another, I now set out to seek the boundaries of the ever expanding cosmos. But it turned out that this was a very strange and incomprehensible expansion. For although again and again, and swiftly as thought, I travelled in search of the expanding frontiers, I could not find them. Always my straight course led me continuously through the host of the primal members back to my starting point. The cosmos had no frontiers which could be extended.

  Yet as time passed I found upon such journeys that the primal members fell ever further and further apart, or at least that they were ever more minute in comparison with the distances between them. I found also that the light waves of the cosmos took ever longer on their travels before they reached again the points whence they had started.

  Thus, after all, the cosmos was in some sense expanding. It was at first a mighty bursting bomb of the jostling members and the tumultuous light; and then a spreading cloud, huge as a galaxy, but congested with the matter and the energies for many million galaxies.

  For as it continued to swell it disintegrated into innumerable separate clouds, which sped ever away from one another. At first shoulder to shoulder, they were presently continents separated by oceans; then islands very remote from one another in the boundless and ever more capacious ocean of cosmical space.

  Between the clouds, an inconceivably faint mist grew fainter and fainter as the cosmos enlarged itself.

  Both clouds and mist were composed of the primal members which God had made. And even in the clouds they were soon as remote from one another, in proportion to their size, as star from star.

  And I, who in some other existence am one of the little creatures called men, vermin upon a minute planet of a mediocre star, I who so lately (or in the remote future?) gazed (or should gaze?), tortured but enraptured, into the sad mocking eyes of another of my kind—now drifted, disembodied but percipient, within the unimaginably tenuous sandstorm, snow-storm, pollenstorm of the primaeval cosmos.

  The minute simplest members of the cosmos quivered around me like an all-pervading swarm of midges, unpeaceful, fatuous; but vital. With insupportable fatigue I witnessed their endless barren agitation; while the cosmic time settled upon my strained mind softly, irresistibly, without relief, aeon after aeon, like a deepening snowdrift, like that dust which sinks through the oceanic depths year by year, settling to form the rocks of future ages. Never surely was explorer more crushed by monotony and tedium than I, crossing the desert of the earliest cosmical era.

  While I was still toiling in this desolation, there came a moment that I realized that I had all along been confronted by something more than the physical aspect of the cosmos, namely its inchoate and profoundly slumbering mentality, in fact by the cumulative impact of the myriad primal mindlets upon my mind. Or should I say the impact of the foetal spirit of the cosmos itself? It matters not which, for at this time the spirit of the cosmos was dissociated into the myriads of the simple spirits of its members.

  I was like one who cannot escape from a tiresome companion. But this cosmical companion of mine was legion, and he had entry into my very mind. He quenched my thoughts with the ceaseless murmur of his own vapid, almost featureless experience.

  For though with my strange power of microscopic telepathy I could for a while distinguish a few of the individual mindlets, I could discern nothing whatever in their devastatingly similar experiences but the vaguest unrest and the vaguest tactual, or I should I say sexual, titillation; nothing but an inconceivably faint and somnolent appetite, which at rare intervals was gratified by an instantaneous orgasm and ejaculation of the divine physical energy.

  I could not for long discriminate the individual experiences of the mindlets. Fatigue soon blurred my insight. The minute prickling of distinct primal beings against my mind gave place to the confused and indescribably nauseating impression of the I whole myriadfold cosmic experience.

  In utter boredom and indignation I cursed my fate. Why, why had I been snatched out of the vivid though distressful world of men to be subjected to all this irrelevance? Had I not a life to live, entwined, with other lives?

  4

  THE GREAT NEBULAE APPEAR

  I need not have been so despondent, for I was soon to find myself in a world of passionate beings whose alien, yet not entirely inhuman nature was to tax my comprehension and to wring me with conflicting sympathy and loathing. In a few brief aeons of cosmical time I was to be the spectator of a drama the very existence of which my fellow men had never suspected.

  The clouds continued to drift apart from one another, continued to contract and gyrate and define themselves. Presently they were but small soft globes or flecks of light, snowflakes whirling in the huge gulf of space. They seemed to me minute; yet in each one of them was material for a host of suns, and worlds innumerable. For these were the Great Nebulae.

/>   I had at first no inkling that these largest of all physical objects were alive, that each one of them in its own unique way was a sensitive and intelligent being, that every movement of this great host was no less significant of joy and grief than the gestures and facial expressions of men and women, that here before me were many which, though possessing nothing at all like a human eye, regarded one another’s eloquent forms with joys and longings no less vivid than the personal loves of men and women, and many more which, though blind and deaf to the, external world, lived out a strange, passionate yet solipsistic life.

  In time I was to learn, through long and difficult experience, not only to understand these beings up to a point, but also to respect them. But how can I give by means of a few printed pages the insight which I myself took aeons to acquire? There is nothing for it but to beg the reader once more to have patience while I try to describe as briefly as possible the physical and mental nature of the great nebulae. For without understanding the great difference between nebular and human nature he cannot possibly appreciate the strange and moving story which will follow.

  In the earliest age of nebular history, when the expansion of the cosmos was not yet far advanced, the nebulae were very much closer to one another than in the age of man. They were also far more numerous; for many, as I shall tell, have been destroyed, and their flesh converted into energy to carry out the all too human activities of their fellows. They were also, at this time, much less evenly distributed than in our day. Most lay even now remote from all neighbours, lone sails on the ocean. These were the “lone nebulae” which spent their formative youth each in its own solipsistic universe. Others voyaged in convoy of a dozen or a score, or eddied together in shoals of hundreds or even a thousand. Here and there a leviathan made progress amid encircling satellites. These minute satellite nebulae constituted a race apart. Of one individual I shall say much at a later stage. Like their larger companions they were destined in the fullness of time to crumble into stars; but they would form not huge galaxies but the crowded swarms which we call the globular clusters.

  Already the normal nebulae were very diverse. Some were greater, some smaller; some mere smudges of mist, some compact and formal. Each feathery ball, I noticed, was slowly shrinking. And as it shrank, it whirled more rapidly. And as it whirled, it was flattened. And as the flattening continued, there appeared in the centre a bright and swollen core. The outer parts of the nebula were flung by their own movement far out into space; but seemingly the tugging core still kept a hold on them, so that they developed into an attenuated disc around the heart of the nebula, and were torn into streamers and spreading convolutions. So might a dancer, pirouetting, halo her bright head with far-flung, tangled whirls.

  Such at least was the form of these nebulae that were too far apart to distort one another. But those that were members of compact groups expressed by their very deformity their dependence upon one another. As woodland trees mould one another, so these great clouds, though at a distance of several light-years, moulded one another with their tidal sway.

  It was an unearthly but a rich and subtle spectacle that now confronted me on every side. With slow rhythmic movements, the airy creatures floated around me delicately featured with many colours imperceptible to the normal human eye. Their cores were mostly tinged with violet or blue, their tresses nacrous grey, iridescent with green and gold and crimson and many unimaginable hues. In every direction and at every depth they appeared, the most distant as a very faint host of misty points. Between them spread the deep, the absolute blackness of the void.

  The nearer nebulae reminded me ever more forcibly of living things. They displayed even that appearance of intelligence and purpose which is manifested by animalcules on a microscope slide. They were in continual oozy movement. I could imagine that they were seeking food, or some needed but unconceived fulfilment. Sometimes they would seem to pursue and avoid one another. Occasionally a giant would absorb and assimilate a dwarf. Or two peers, after long lonely voyaging, would come within close range of one another and protrude, each toward the other, a searching excrescence, as though yearning for intercourse. Sometimes the contact would fail to be achieved, or would be a mere moth’s kiss, and the two would be borne apart with altered forms and courses. Sometimes the “lovers” would meet and mingle, to become a single great and brilliant organism, which, a pike among the small-fry, would proceed to devour all that crossed its path.

  Could these lifelike creatures, I asked myself, be mere vortices of radiant gas? But I reminded myself that the briefest of the movements which I now witnessed must in fact occupy millions of terrestrial years, and that this impression of vital activity was an illusion. Age upon age must pass, I knew, before these clouds would condense into stars, and further ages before the rare meetings of stars should produce habitable worlds.

  Why, I wondered, should God so long toy with lifeless matter before undertaking the main purpose of his work? And why should I, forlorn little terrestrial intelligence, be forced to watch this aimless, this puerile sport?

  But at last I began to realize that, all unnoticed, new and strange experience had for some time been welling up within me, and was now clamouring for recognition.

  Out of the confused and fatuous murmur of the primal mindlets of the cosmos there had emerged something new and uncouth and formidable. To use an image, the shrill and monotonous pipings of innumerable midges had been drowned by the boisterous incantation of a hurricane; or was it some more significant music, unintelligible to me?

  Columbus, when he stumbled on a new world, a world of novel vegetation, beasts and men, cannot have been half so bewildered as I, who now found myself inwardly confronted by this new world of alien and primaeval spirits.

  My poor human mind was at first overstrained and tortured by the flood of uncouth perceptions and novel hungers and fears which now flooded in upon me. But little by little, with many timorous tastings and agonized revulsions, I was able to accommodate myself so far as to receive without undue stress at least a muted and schematic echo of the mentality that had at first so jarred me. To do this, I had first to discriminate within the general babel some one theme of experience, the life story of some particular nebula. Attending to this, I found that the rest faded into the background, leaving me free to study, if I dared, and if I could endure it, the ardent and voluminous experience of being fantastically alien to man.

  By what laborious and often painful experiment I learned at length to range at will among the minds of the nebulae, even as, with physical vision I could look now at this airy creature, now at that, I need not tell. Nor need I recount the long drawn out research by which I passed from sheer incomprehension to some degree of understanding of the nebular mentality. Instead I will present at once the fruits of my toil. I will at once try to give some idea first of the nature, and then of the impassioned history of these most immense of all living creatures. It is a history which reaches its climax before the first stars were born, and it is not completed even in our own age of terrestrial intelligence.

  5

  A BIOLOGICAL STUDY

  The newborn nebulae existed for aeons as mere lucent clouds of gas, featureless and mindless. But when within each flattening globe a bright dense core had appeared, this came to rule the whole mass with its preponderant sway, and with the ceaseless and violent outrush of its radiation.

  And presently, when the primal beings within the core had become very crowded, and very subject to mutual influence and to the overmastering tempest of light on which they were tossed, there was formed, deep within the incandescent heart of the core itself, a unifying centre of life, a region no larger than the bulk of a thousand stars, but dense almost as a liquid, and turbulent with such fury of radiation as had not occurred since the atom-cosmos first responded to God’s word.

  Within this boiling cauldron of the divine physical energy, within this tense and enduring system of intricate currents, antagonized yet cooperative, within this vast germ
cell set in the vaster yoke of the nebular core, the new vital order was mysteriously welded, and the myriad dissociated primal beings were at last harnessed an domesticated for the support and service of a theme of spirit more admirable than their own, namely for the embryonic mind of the nebula.

  Little by little, this vital centre organized the whole core as a balanced yet ever-changing system of hurricanes, trade winds, tornadoes, subservient in all their operations to the vital needs of the whole.

  And as the airy streamers and filaments of the nebular disc began to appear, these also were inwardly organized to the requirements of the new being. They became in fact true living tissues, fulfilling all manner of delicate vital functions, though they were but ordered winds, more tenuous than any, man-made “vacuum.” Strange that such loose-knit material could form the body of such a vivid spirit!

  It is not surprising that I could not discover the mechanism of this steady internal evolution. But one point seemed to me certain. Natural selection played an important part within each nebula, favouring some experiments in vital organization and destroying others, much as on earth it favours some races of organisms and destroys others.

  The living nebula has no need to gather energy from the world outside its own substance. Its font of power lies in the very matter which is its flesh. Its hunting ground and its prey are within its own intestines. It feeds upon its own secretion. For the primal beings within it provide by their myriadfold ejaculations a lavish source of power.

  Thus the living nebula is exempt from that necessity which is of the first but not of the highest importance to every terrestrial creature, namely the need to reach out into the environment for light and food. Yet in spite of this heavensent exemption, there was to come a time when it would be flung away, and the whole cosmical community of nebulae would be shattered by conflict over mechanical power.