Dark Benediction

by Walter Michael Miller

  They wrote a song. They called it “Ten Parsecs to Paradise.” They sang the song as if they believed it. This I have never understood.

  It was always ten or twelve parsecs to another sun with a class G spectrum, with a planet chastely clad in green forests and white clouds. There he landed to rebuild, to furrow the fertile earth, to rock in a porch swing at twilight sucking his pipe, and to thoughtfully stare at the stars while his grandchildren romped like young chimpanzees on the cool lawn.

  He had forgotten Earth—this old man—his race had forgotten its history. But he knew a little. He knew the star-going cycle—the landing of the starships, the regression to savagery, the painful rebuilding, the cruelty, the re-learning, the proud exodus. He knew these things because Man had learned to keep a little of the past in tact throughout a cycle. He no longer fell back to chipping arrowheads. Now he managed to begin again in an age of bronze or soft iron. And he knew in advance that he would carve mighty industries out of savage wilderness.

  But the old man was sad as he sat on his porch. He knew so little of the Great Purpose. Why must his seed fling itself starward? He knew that it must—but he lacked a reason. His grandchildren played in the twilight, played space-games, although there was not yet a starship on the planet.

  There was a small boy on the lawn who tried to tease the girls, but the girls put on masks of superior sophistication and ignored the little man. Disgruntled, he looked up and saw the old man dreaming on the porch.

  “Gramp’s got star-craze!”, he shrieked. “Look at Gramp menting! Nnyahh! Gramp’s got star-craze.”

  Musical laughter tittered over the lawn. Another voice took up the cry. The old man chuckled affectionately but wistfully. They were young, but they knew about the star-thirst. The planet was young, too young for starships, even though the priests preserved the records and scientific writings in the temples. The planet knew about space and coveted it. Yet, the children would all be dead before the first vessel was launched.

  The laughter on the lawn subsided. The eldest child, a gawky and freckled girl of eight years came trudging up the steps to sit against the post and stare at him quietly in the gloom. He felt a question lurking in her silence. He nudged her ribs affectionately with his toe.

  “What weighty matter worries you, Nari?” he asked pleasantly.

  “Why is star-craze, Gramp?”

  He rocked thoughtfully for a moment. “Why are there men to feel it?” he countered.

  The child was silent.

  “I know only what the priests say, Nari,” he told her gently. “They say that man once owned a paradise planet, and that he ran away in search of a better one. They say he made the Lord Bion angry. And the lord hid the paradise, and condemned Man to forever wander, touched his heart with eternal hunger for the place he lost.”

  “Will people find it again, Gramp?”

  “Never—so the priests say. The hunger is on him, Nari.”

  “It’s not fair!” said the little girl.

  “What isn’t, my child?”

  “Star-craze. Last night I saw a lady crying. She was just standing there crying at the sky.”

  “Where?”

  “On the street. Waiting for a motor bus.”

  “How old was she?”

  Nari scraped her heels and muttered doubtfully. “It was kind of dark.”

  Gramp chuckled reassuringly. “I bet she wasn’t over fourteen. I bet she was still a kid. Star-craze comes to little girls about the time they start being interested in little boys. Works the other way, too. But you grow out of it, Nari. By the time you’re twenty, it won’t make you miserable any more. It gives you a goal. Gives everyone a goal. Something to work for. Something to long for and fight for. The stars—you’ll want to give them to your grandchildren.”

  “Won’t I get to go?”

  “Not ever, Nari.”

  They fell silent again, and the old man peered up into the deepening blackness with its countless array of suns sitting like hens on their nests of planets. He scarcely believed the legend of the lost paradise-planet, but it was a good story to tell little girls. It made him sad though, and revived a little of the forgotten restlessness of his youth. If only he could have lived two centuries later—

  But then a gust of wind brought the sweet perfume of freshly cut hay from the field to the east of the farmhouse, and the odor made him smile. The field would have to be raked tomorrow, and the hay brought in to the barn. A lot of things like that needed to be done before the starships could rise again. And every straining muscle helped toward the ultimate goal. The hay fed the animals whose flesh fed the men who made the tools which built the factories which fashioned more complicated tools—and so the journey, down the long road to space again.

  The old man didn’t know why the road had to be traveled, nor did he really care. The road was there, and it beckoned, and it gave meaning to life, for surely the Lord Bion was less cruel a tempter than the priests sometimes proclaimed Him. Surely there was something more than despair at the end of the long, long road.

  The old man grew older, and died peacefully, and his ashes were scattered across the fields he had tilled since boyhood. His children, and his grandchildren, followed in his patient steps, and their ashes were mingled with his own before the first gleaming sky craft burst star fire in the night.

  When the skycraft at last rumbled upward, the crowd thundered a triumphant roar, the crowd gathered to witness the culmination of their labors, and the labors of their ancestors. Men walked with shoulders erect and with pride glowing in their faces. Again they triumphed over forces that held them bound to a grain of sand in the sky. Again they slashed through the knot that held them in the web of the continuum, and shed the weights that dragged at their feet.

  I noticed a subtle difference in those who lingered behind. They no longer lingered of their own choosing. They were no longer the peace-seekers and placid ones. They were those who could not go because they were old, or sick, or because the industries were half-deserted and there was no one left to build the ships. They still stared longingly upward on dark nights.

  “We’ll do it again,” they promised. “We’ll repopulate and do it again.”

  But the bitterness of their plight was upon them, a sense of defeat and doom. They fought savagely among themselves. They fell in feudal wars, while the starward wave receded.

  I am the acolyte of the space-priest, the server of the pale proud biped. I have taken him onward across the void, to the Hercules Cluster, and beyond it to the uncharted regions past the dust clouds of the Great Rift, into the star-pact heartland of the galactic nucleus where other races were testing their space wings and tasting of the great freedom. I have watched him, and have felt the life-aura of his longing. And I have wondered. What is his goal? Where is an answer to his hunger?

  My neural circuits are not of flesh. My circuits are of glass and steel. My thought is a fanning electron stream. But I have prayed. I, the spider who builds around space, have prayed to the gods of the biped I serve. I have prayed to the God of the North End of Space. I have asked, “Where is his peace?”

  No answer came.

  I have seen my Master change.

  The biped was thunder across the galaxy. The biped was a swift and steel-clad spear hurtling ruthlessly onward. He made no friends; for he came as a being who owned the stars, and he took what he wanted along the way. He left his seed to grow anew. A creature of fierce pride! And fiercer longing. He trampled hatelessly such races as he encountered. He crushed them, or harnessed them to his plow, or borrowed their neural circuits for his bio-computers. Sometimes he fought against his own race, men who had traveled other routes to the galactic heart-land. When man battled against man, they fought with hatred and cruelty and bitterness—but never with contempt. Man saw a rival king in man. Against other races, he waged only cool contempt and hot death.

  Sometimes a thoughtful old man would say, “Seems to me they’ve got as much right to live as we ha
ve. Seems to me all intelligent creatures have got a common denominator. God, maybe.” But he muttered it quietly, speculatively. Even if he believed it, he never objected to the swift ambush of the alien ship, nor to the razing of the alien city. For the biped stalked a new frontier. The ape-tribe stole across a field where danger lurked. He was fresh from the branches of the trees, not wise to the ways of the plains. How could he risk offering peace to the shaggy beast who crouched in the tall grass? He could only weigh the odds—then strike or run away.

  He took the planets of the yellow suns—deep in the galactic heartland. He skipped from one to the next in jumps as long as his patience would last. He captured the globular clusters. He inhabited each planet for a few generations. He built ships, and battled with his brothers for the right to take them. Many were left behind. They repopulated after an exodus, rebuilt, launched a second flight, and a third—until those who finally remained at home were those who lacked the incentive of the big hunger.

  Those who lacked incentive sought their peace. They molded a pleasant place to live in and infested it. Or else they scorned pleasantry and made themselves a battleground.

  My Master is the Nomad, gaunt and tall. My Master grits his teeth in staring at the stars, and his eyes go narrow and moist. I have mirrored his hunger, have allowed his life-aura to seep into the cold steel and hot glass of me, have reflected his thoughts in my circuits. Sometimes he wonders if I am alive. But then he remembers that he built me. He built me to think, not to be alive. Perhaps I am not alive, but only a mirror that catches a little of my Master’s life. I have seen him change.

  The spearhead groups pushed relentlessly across the gleaming blackness, and each generation grew more restless than the one before it. The restless moved ahead. The contented remained at home. Each exodus was a separation, and a selection of the malcontent.

  The biped came to believe his priests. He believed the legend of the lost home. He believed that Bion had touched him with the hunger curse. How else could they explain the pressing cry of the heart? How could they interpret the clamor of the young, the tears—except as a Divine Thirst.

  The star-craze. The endless search.

  There was a green planet beyond the heartland, and it was ripe for bursting its human star-seed. There was a launching field, and a ship, and teeming crowd, and a fence with guards to keep the others out. A man and a girl stood at the fence, and it was nearly dawn.

  He touched her arm and gazed at the shadows on the launching site.

  “We won’t find it, Marka,” he said quietly. “We’ll never find it.”

  “You believe the legend, Teris?” she whispered.

  “The Planet of Heaven? It’s up there. But we can never find it.”

  “Then why must you look?”

  “We are damned, Marka.”

  There was a silence, then she breathed, “It can be found. The Lord Bion promised—”

  “Where is that written, Marka?” he scoffed coldly.

  “In a woman’s heart.”

  Teris laughed loudly. “What does the heart-writing say?”

  She turned to stare at the dark shadow of the ship against the graying sky. “It says: ‘When Man is content—without his lost paradise—when he reconciles himself—Bich will forgive, and show us the road home.’”

  He waved his hand fiercely at the fading stars in the west. “Ours, Marka. They’re ours! We took them.”

  “Do you want them?”

  He stiffened angrily and glared at the shadow of her face. “You… you make me sick. You’re a hanghacker.”

  “No!” She shook her head wildly. “No!” She caught at his arm as he retreated a step. “I wish I could go! I want to go, do you hear?”

  “I hear,” he snapped. “But you can’t, so there’s no use talking about it. You’re not well, Marka. The others wouldn’t let you aboard.” He backed away another step.

  “I love you,” she said frantically.

  He turned and stumbled away toward the sky-chariot. “I love you!”

  He began to trot, then burst into a wild sprint. Afraid, she thought in triumph. Afraid of turning back. Of loving her too much.

  “You’ll never find it!” she screamed after him. “You can’t find it up there! It’s here—right here!”

  But he was lost in the crowd that milled about the ship. The ship had opened its hatches. The ship was devouring the people, two at a time. The ship devoured Teris and the space crew. Then it closed its mouth and belched flame from its rockets.

  She gasped and slumped against a fencepost. She hung there sobbing until a guard drove her away.

  A rocket bellowed the space song. The girl tore off her wedding bracelet and flung it in the gutter. Then she went home to fix breakfast for the children.

  I am the Weaver of space. I am a Merchant of new fabrics in flux patterns for five-space continua. I serve the biped who built me, though his heart he steeped in hell.

  Once in space, a man looked at me and murmured softly, “You are the cross on which we crucify ourselves.”

  But the big hunger pushed him on—on toward the ends of space. And he encountered worlds where his ancestors had lived, and where his peaceful cousins still dwelt in symbiosis with their neighbors. Some of the worlds were civilized, some barbaric, and some were archaeological graveyards. My nomads, they wore haunted faces as they re-explored the fringes of the galaxy where Man had walked before, leaving his footprints and his peace-seeking children. The galaxy was filled.

  Where could he go now?

  I have seen the frantic despair in their faces when, upon landing, natives appeared and greeted them politely, or tried to kill them, or worshiped them, or just ran away to hide. The nomads lurked near their ships. A planet with teeming cities was no place for a wanderer. They watched the multifaceted civilizations with bitter, lonely eyes.

  Where were new planets?

  Across the great emptiness to the Andromeda galaxy? Too far for the ships to go. Out to the Magellanic clouds? Already visited.

  Where then?

  He groped blindly, this biped. He had forgottgn the trail by which his ancestors had come, and he kept re-crossing it, finding it winding everywhere. He could only plunge aimlessly on, and when he reached the last limit of his fuel—land. If the natives could not provide the fuel, he would have to stay, and try to pass another cycle of starward growth on the already inhabited world. But a cycle was seldom completed. The nomads intermarried with the local people; the children, the hybrid children, were less steeped in hunger than their fathers. Sometimes they built ships for economic purposes, for trade and commerce—but never for the hysterical starward sweep. They heard no music from the North End of Space, no Lorelei call from the void. The craving was slowly dying.

  They came to a planet. The natives called it “Earth.” They departed again in cold fright, and a space commander blew out his brains to banish the memory. Then they found another planet that called itself “Earth”—and another and another. They smiled again, knowing that they would never know which was the true home of Man.

  They sensed the nearness of the end.

  They no longer sang the old songs of a forgotten paradise. And there were no priests among them. They looked back at the Milky Way, and it had been their royal road. They looked ahead, where only scattered stars separated them from the intergalactic wasteland—an ocean of emptiness and death. They could not consign themselves to its ultimate embrace. They had fought too long, labored too hard to surrender willingly to extinction.

  But the cup of their life was broken.

  And to the land’s last limit they came.

  They found a planet with a single moon, with green forests, with thin clouds draping her gold and blue body in the sunlight. The breath of the snowking was white on her ice caps, and her seas were placid green. They landed. They smiled when the natives called the planet “Earth.” Lots of planets claimed the distinction of being Man’s birthplace.

  Among the natives ther
e was a dumpy little professor—still human, though slightly evolved. On the night following the nomad’s landing, he sat huddled in an easy-chair, staring at the gaunt nomadic giant whose bald head nearly touched the ceiling of the professor’s library. The professor slowly shook his head and sighed.

  “I can’t understand you people.”

  “Nor I you,” rumbled the nomad.

  “Here is Earth—yet you won’t believe it!”

  The giant snorted contemptuously. “Who cares? Is this crumb in space the fulfillment of a dream?”

  “You dreamed of a lost Earth paradise.”

  “So we thought. But who knows the real longing of a dream? Where is its end? Its goal?”

  “We found ours here on Earth.”

  The giant made a wry mouth. “You’ve found nothing but your own smug existence. You’re a snake swallowing its tail.”

  “Are you sure you’re not the same?” purred the scholar. The giant put his fists on his hips and glowered at him. The professor whitened.

  “That’s untrue,” boomed the giant. “We’ve found nothing. And we’re through. At least we went searching. Now we’re finished.”

  “Not you. Its the job that’s finished. You can live here. And be proud of a job well done.”

  The giant frowned. “Job? What job?”

  “Why, fencing in the stars. Populating the galaxy.” The big man stared at him in horrified amazement. “Well,” the scholar insisted, “you did it, you know. Who populates the galaxy now?”

  “People like you.”

  The impact of the scaring words brought a sick gasp from the small professor. He was a long moment in realizing their full significance. He wilted. He sank lower in the chair.

  The nomad’s laughter suddenly rocked the room. He turned away from his victim and helped himself to a tumbler of liqueur. He downed it at a gulp and grinned at the professor. He tucked the professor’s liqueur under his arm, waved a jaunty farewell, and lumbered out into the night.