Nebula Maker

by Olaf Stapledon

  This phase of carefree sportive behaviour, I observed, might be brief or lengthy or even perennial. But in the career of every normal nebula there occurred sooner or later a stage when the life of play began to pall, and the mind was invaded by strange images and formless longings.

  In many respects this phase is like human adolescence. The zest of play would steadily fade, and the vigorous young creature would be vaguely longing for new worlds to conquer.

  For a while, sometimes indeed for aeons, the nebula would now vacillate between sheer indolence and bouts of fantastic play, more difficult and dangerous than the normal kind. In this stage many a vital but foolhardy young nebula has lost its life or crashed into insanity. Yet even the most intricate and daring sport has failed to satisfy. Only the most obtuse, the most coarse-grained nebular minds have persuaded themselves that sheer physical prowess and physical courage were able to fulfil the obscure demands of their nature. And even in these I found no real contentment, but a never consciously recognised despair.

  The main character of nebular adolescence was a surprised zest which could never find full expression. It was as though in all experience there was not a new and teasing flavour, a hint, never fulfilled, of some exquisite way of life awaiting discovery. I was reminded of certain moments of my own youth when I was suddenly and unaccountably seized with a conviction that the secret of existence was about to be made plain to me. But in the young nebula this sense of impending revelation was not fleeting and occasional but an enduring state that dominated the whole behaviour.

  As the ages passed, and the main host of the nebulae advanced each toward its lonely maturity, one or two seemed to discover the solution of their problem. For after a long spell of almost complete quiescence they plunged into resolute and costly action, at first confused, and then sustained and orderly. Savouring their experience, I found that they were now in a state of fervent endeavour and exaltation. In time almost the whole company was thus occupied, each isolated individual passionately striving after an ideal of self-expression in complete; ignorance of the rest. Only in the comparatively rare J social nebulae did adolescence take a different turn.

  When I examined more closely the kind of behaviour which the isolated nebulae were now pursuing so ardently, I could not at first make anything of it. When I tried to discover in their minds intelligible sources of their exaltation, I was defeated.

  Patiently, but with increasing hostility and contempt, I now watched the incomprehensible antics of these hugest creatures. I had been able to appreciate their play, simply as unpretentious play; but this passionate devotion to a seemingly barren athletic skill nauseated me even more than the vapid mentality of the primal units. Surely these nebular minds, which I knew to have percipience and intelligence to a high degree, were capable of some richer life!

  That the activity called for courage, I recognized, for many a nebula, confronted by some desperate crisis in its athletic adventure, gallantly took the course demanded by its insane ideal, and was destroyed. That skill of a high order was demanded was no less obvious, for as I watched I discovered the main principles which governed this strange occupation and was over and over again amazed at the ingenuity with which, in seemingly hopeless circumstances, they were fulfilled. But why, why was all this courage and skill exercised in so puerile a manner?

  In time, something of the truth began to dawn on me. I began to realize that for the nebulae this passionate athleticism was pure art of the highest order. It was not, after all, a subtle and inverted kind of self-indulgence, a sort of masturbatory ecstasy, a lethal sop to the ever hungry and lonely spirit. No, for these strange beings this was indeed the way of life, the straight and narrow way. And age by age, as I watched, I myself came to enter sympathetically into it.

  All the detailed action and the governing principles of this fantastic terpsichorean display derived a profound symbolism from associations in the age-long nebular past experience. The whole matter and the whole form of this art was deeply significant. By playing upon the secret strings of the past, it wakened the nebular mind to a new order of percipience for the future. What I had regarded as barren athleticism, no more significant than the slavery of golf or football, turned out to be in fact something which combined the nature of abstract art with the nature of ritualistic dancing.

  I was amazed and not a little humiliated to find that I, who had so recently pitied the isolation and self-absorption of these imprisoned spirits, had now to learn from them. With mingled awe and discontent I now wandered from one hermit mind to another, allowing each in turn to dominate me with the strange impersonal yet passionate music of its life. Their creations differed in form and mood with all the diversity of human art. Some were naive, some subtle; some more passionate, some more formal, and so on. But in all those that had successfully passed beyond the initiate stages I found the same identical ecstasy.

  7

  THE SOCIAL NEBULAE

  It was with mingled awe and amusement that I ranged among the many groups of the social nebulae, awe at the vast and stormy universe into which I had fallen, amusement at the blend of the fantastic and the human in their behaviour.

  At this early stage of cosmical expansion, groups of nebulae having constant intercourse were common. Moreover, there was occasional intercourse between groups. One small family or great tribe would drift within. “speaking distance” of another, and signals would pass between them, at first unintelligible. More rarely, two groups would actually collide. Each would then desperately seek to preserve its own group life and bend the other to its will. Sometimes, a number of groups, drifting more or less in proximity along the same stream (so to speak) of cosmical movement, would grow up as a community of separate clans, possessing in spite of local differences a common basis of culture, though no common allegiance. In these groups of groups intertribal Warfare was perennial.

  But most groups of nebulae throughout the cosmos grew up to maturity in complete isolation from one another. Not till certain exceptionally favoured groups began to feel curiosity about the more remote objects around them was any attempt made to communicate by light signals between the groups. Not till the utilization of subatomic power was there any possibility of voyaging from group to group.

  All nebulae, social and solitary alike, are so fashioned as to find their deepest satisfaction in dance-like physical activity internal and external. At the lowliest this terpsichorean behaviour is sheer animal play, but at its loftiest it is best described as pure art of a peculiarly subtle and powerful kind. By its veiled creative symbolism this art, as I have said, can raise the nebular spirit to the highest reaches of religious ecstasy. In the social nebulae the dance life is of course socialized and pregnant with all manner of social symbolism. In the solitary nebulae its aim is simply the perfection of self-expression.

  Among the social nebulae, as among human beings, there arose inevitably all kinds of conflicts between the individual perfection and the social perfection. But in the nebular world these conflicts often took forms unknown on Earth.

  With the nebulae the conflict was always at bottom an aesthetic conflict between the individual dance rhythm and the social dance rhythm. Each social individual experienced the urge to aesthetic self-perfection; but also he recognized, grudgingly or with delight, the rights of others to their own aesthetic policies, and the aesthetic excellence of the group itself.

  Sometimes an unfortunate solitary nebula would happen to drift within range of a group and would be seized upon by the members of the group, either in the hope of gaining his support for one social party against another, or, if the group were a harmonious one, simply for the embellishment of the group by the presence of an interesting and beautiful foreigner. For the lone nebulae, being exempt from external influences, attained a perfection of physical form which was ever a source of wonder to the social nebulae. The captured solitary would of course prove quite incapable even of realizing that the shocking distortions and agonies which now beset him
were caused by the efforts of other minds to communicate with him. It would very soon appear to the social nebulae that, for all his physical perfection and symmetry, the foreigner was but an abject savage, unable to appreciate the beauties of group life, and incapable even of intelligent intercourse; in fact, that he was a mere brute, physically superb, but blind, deaf, and incredibly stupid. For to the excited and babbling observers he offered no hint of the strange solipsistic intelligence and will at work within him.

  Sometimes the stranger would be forcibly retained within the group as a curiosity, like a beast in a zoo. But more often he would be roughly expelled as a mere irrelevance in the group pattern. Probably he would be so mauled in body and shattered in mind by the hurricane of incomprehensible experiences, that the upshot for him would be either insanity or death.

  The social life of the nebulae impressed me with extraordinary vividness because it was so clearly embodied in perceptual and aesthetic forms. I could actually see the conflict between the individual and the group. I could see the individual struggling to maintain the symmetry and the spontaneous rhythms of his own body against the compulsive and distorting influences of the group. Also, it must be remembered, I could feel in his mind the two conflicting apprehensions of beauty. I could savour both his passion for the lyrical freedom of his own dance life, and his ecstatic self-subjection to the dance life of the group as a whole.

  I could enter into his personal loves and hates, too, all the more vividly because, in time, I became sensitive to the perceptual harmonies and discords between the private dance rhythms of diverse individuals. When I had been so immersed in nebular life that I could appreciate the exquisite expressiveness of nebular forms and actions, it became visually patent to me that such and such a nebular mind must inevitably be enthralled by the sight of such and such a beauty of tresses and core; or that such and such a style or mode or mannerism in the dance life of one individual must to the vision of a certain other individual be significant of a base spirit.

  The nebulae, I found, were capable of every kind of personal relationship known to us. Even sexual partnership had its counterpart among these asexual beings. For though there were not two definite sexual types, many dance unions included physical caresses, and even a transmission of substance from individual to individual, for mutual invigoration, though not for procreation.

  As with human beings, so with nebulae, love was broadly of two kinds. There was a simple love hunger directed upon any individual that promised enrichment to the pattern of one’s own life. This kind of love led often to partnerships between two or three nebulae, each of which sought merely personal enrichment from the union, each of which willed merely to impose on the partnership his own aesthetic ideal. Needless to say, the result of such unions was invariably disaster. There was also love that included genuine admiration of the other’s physical beauty and prowess, or of his mental or moral perfection. Sometimes, indeed, this passion was so intense that the lover dared not approach at all near to the beloved for fear of marring his beauty by his own extraneous gravitational sway. But in the happiest cases, where admiration and desire were mutual, each would conceive a craving to complete his own form by responding to the other’s influence.

  The most impressive of all nebular societies were those few small communities in which all the members were thus inwardly united by bonds of mutual understanding and affection, and all were also constantly, and sometimes passionately, raised above the individual plane by a common social purpose, namely the will to work out together an ever more harmonious and more significant dance life for the whole group.

  Very few groups attained this perfection. Most were either too closely or too loosely knit. In the former the individual spirit was stifled by the proximity of his neighbours. He was a mere herd member, with no inner being. And because society was composed of barren individuals, social life was barren also. The dance pattern of the group was, so to speak, geometrical and fatuous. In the too loosely knit groups, on the other hand, there was no willed community at all, but only a grudging contract by which all engaged to refrain from interference with their neighbours, so as to secure the maximum freedom of individual behaviour.

  In very many cases the group was perennially torn between two or more parties with opposing aims. One, for instance, might be seeking a more free and open formation of the group life, the other a dance form more close-knit and disciplined, in which every individual’s shape and activity should be through and through determined by the pattern of the whole. Or one party might strive for an aristocratic society of dance leaders with satellites, the other for a more democratic arrangement. One might wish to see the group life controlled by predominantly athletic principles, another might demand a more genuine aesthetic mode, another might wish to subordinate the pure aesthetic to the religious in the significance of the dance. In a few groups there were intellectualists who wished to subordinate all activity to theoretical enquiry into the mysteries of physical and mental phenomena.

  Sometimes in a group torn by conflicts or oppressed by some powerful oligarchy an individual with a strong urge toward self-perfection would seek to escape from the group into outer space, purposing to live the life of a hermit. Or a couple or triplet of ardent lovers would try to break away from the prying and tyrannously moral supervision of their fellows. Or an oppressed aesthetic or religious sect would seek to found an independent society. But seldom did the fugitives attain their end. Either by physical violence or by subtle moral pressure they would be compelled to remain and to subordinate the pattern of their lives even more rigorously than before to the dance rhythms of the groups.

  In some groups I found two parties identical in disposition and policy in all respects save that each considered that itself should rule and the other be a subject race. In some others, one party, through long subjection, had lost the power of independent choice and had become inherently servile. In extreme cases the subject race was so debased that they were mere cattle under the control of the master race. And often the masters themselves were by now so modified in actual physical constitution that, had their slaves deserted them, they would have been undone; for little by little they had come to effect a style of athleticism and even a physiological habit which would have broken down completely if menial service had ceased to be available. Their dance measures were so difficult, their bodily constitution and mental operations so subtle and precarious, that they needed constant assistance from the simpler, tougher, and automatically loyal “cattle” attendant on them.

  One other kind of group should be mentioned, namely that in which a great nebula imposed its dance measures on a number of minute satellites. These little creatures, which were as a rule bald cores shorn of all tresses, were generally unable to advance beyond that grade of consciousness which we attribute to our simian relatives. They were indeed mere domestic animals, unintelligent dance minions to the dominant partner; and mostly they were treated with no more consideration than our backward races expend on their cattle and poultry. But a few of these satellite nebulae, wrought and tempered by exceptional circumstances, developed a keen and fearless intellect such as the normal nebulae seldom attained. And one member of this dwarf race made history upon the grandest scale.

  8

  THE MARTIAL GROUPS

  In most nebular societies, at one time or other in their career, conflict between opposed parties would flare up into actual warfare. One side would seek to overcome the other either by bombarding their most vulnerable organs with concentrated radiation, or by actually grappling with them and striving to tear them into fragments.

  It is difficult to give any idea of the horror with which I observed these battles. Superficially the spectacle was nothing but a confused tempest of whirling gas clouds in the depths of space; but to me, who had by now learned the emotional significance of all these changing shapes, to me who moreover could experience at first hand the agony of these torn tresses and shattered cores, the spectacle was no less
nerve-racking than the sight of human bodies dismembered by shellfire.

  Though not wholly unknown among the normal groups, war was a comparatively rare disaster. But there was one very remarkable kind of group in which fighting was perennial, and indeed essential to the group life. A permanent peace would have brought about a far-reaching degeneration of the individual character and the end of all social feeling, which in these groups could never assume any form but that of the comradeship of brothers-in-arms, opposed by a common foe.

  This state of affairs was the result of causes in the remote past. Sometimes the group was in origin a composite of two groups which had collided long ago in the time when the nebulae were still young and mentally unformed. Whatever the cause, the individuals in these martial groups had specialized little by little both physically and mentally for combat. If combat was long denied them, they tended to become morbidly depressed; and ultimately each would succumb to serious mental disorder, snatching a crazy gratification for its pugnacity from the internal conflict of its own dissociated personalities.

  In these curiously bellicose communities there sometimes arose a truly astounding culture unlike anything known on earth, though containing suggestions of mediaeval chivalry and modern sport. The opposing forces would be precisely matched, each individual of one troop having a special opponent in the other. Though each warrior might on occasion fight any member of the enemy force, one particular enemy was his peculiar property, his “dear enemy.” In combat with this individual he not only rose to the extreme of fury or cold hate, but also he attained a unique exaltation which might almost as well be called love as hate, since it included, along with the lust to destroy, a chivalrous and passionate admiration of the foe. This strange movement of the spirit was accompanied at its height by a violent physical orgasm which ejaculated a murderous flood of radiation into the body of the enemy and reduced the subject himself to exhaustion.