Galaxies Like Grains of Sand (14 page)

“As you point out, Mr Westerby, Earth occupies a key position in the Federation’s present thousand-year plan for expansion. Although at present you can only regard yourselves as a frontier world, at the end of that period you may well be a key world. At the end of ten thousand years — well, your peoples are full of confidence; the omens are good.”

“In short, there is promotion ahead if we behave ourselves?”

The acid note in Farro’s voice merely brought a slight smile to Jandanagger’s lips.

“One is not made head boy in one’s first few days at school.”

“Let me then enumerate the advantages, as opposed to the promises, which Earth will enjoy from entering your Federation. In the first place, we shall enjoy material benefits: new machines, new toys, new gadgets and some new techniques like your vibro-molecular system of building — which produces, if I may say so, some excruciatingly ugly structures.”

“One’s tastes, Mr Westerby, have to be trained to appreciate anything of aesthetic worth.”

“Quite. Or to regard the hideous as normal. However, that brings us to the nonmaterial assets inherent in belonging to your Federation. You plan to revolutionize our educational systems. From nursery school to university, you will inculcate mores, matters and methods foreign to us; Earth will be invaded not by soldiers but by teachers — which is the surest way of gaining a bloodless victory.”

The wide eyes regarded Farro calmly, but still as if from behind a barricade.

“How else are we to help Yinnisfarians become citizens of a complex civilization? For a start, it is essential your people learn Galingua. Education is a science and an art for which you have not yet begun to formulate the rules. The whole question is enormously complicated, and quite beyond brief explanation — not that I could explain it, for I am not an educational specialist; those specialists will arrive here when my work is done and the formal membership charters are signed. But to take just one simple point. Your children first go to school at, say, five years old. They go into a class with other children and are separated from their homes; learning becomes at once an isolated part of life, something done in certain hours. And their first lesson is to obey the teacher. Thus, if their education is rated a success, it is because, to whatever extent, they have learned obedience and forfeited independence of mind; and they are probably set at permanent odds with their home environment.

“Our methods differ radically. We allow no children to enter our schools before the age of ten — but by that time, thanks to certain instructive toys and devices they have been familiar with for years, they will come knowing at least as much as your child at school-leaving age. And not only knowing — behaving, feeling, understanding.”

Farro was at a disadvantage.

“I feel like a heathen being told by a missionary that I should be wearing clothes.”

The other man smiled, got up, and came over to him.

“Be consoled that that’s a false analogy,” he said. “You are
demanding
the clothes. And when you wear them, you are certain to admire the cut.”

All of which, Farro reflected, made the two of them no less heathen and missionary.

“Don’t look so disconcerted, Mr Westerby. You have a perfect right to be distressed at the thought of your planet being depersonalized. But that is something we would not dream of doing. Depersonalized, you are nothing to yourselves or us. We need worlds capable of making their best personal contribution. If you would care to come with me, I should like to give you perhaps a better idea of how the civilized galaxy functions.”

Farro rose to his feet. It consoled him that he was slightly taller than the Minister. Jandanagger stood courteously aside, ushered his guest through a door. As they walked down a silent corridor, Farro found his tongue again.

“I haven’t fully explained why I think that federation would be such a bad thing for Earth. We are progressing on our own. Eventually, we shall develop our own method of space travel, and come to join you on a more equal footing.”

Jandanagger shook his head.

“Space travel — travel between different star systems — is not just a matter of being able to build starships. Any post-nuclear culture can stumble on that trick. Space travel is a state of mind. The journey’s always hell, and you never find a planet, however lovely, that suits you as well as the one on which you were born. You need an incentive.”

“What sort of incentive?”

“Have you any idea?”

“I take it you are not referring to interstellar trading or conquest?”

“Correct.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what sort of an incentive you mean.”

The Minister gave something like a chuckle and said, “I’ll try and show you presently. You were going to tell me why federation would be a bad thing for Earth.”

“No doubt it has been to your purpose to learn something of our history, Minister. It is full of dark things. Blood; war; lost causes; forgotten hopes; ages in chaos and days when even desperation died. It is no history to be proud of. Though many men individually seek good, collectively they lose it as soon as it is found. Yet we have one quality which always gives cause for hope that tomorrow may be better: initiative. Initiative has never faded, even when we crawled from what seemed the last ditch.

“But if we know that there exists a collective culture of several thousand worlds which we can never hope to emulate, what is to prevent us from sinking back into despair forever?”

“An incentive, of course.”

As he spoke, Jandanagger led the way into a small, boomerang-shaped room with wide windows. They sank onto a low couch, and at once the room moved. The dizzy view from the window shifted and rolled beneath them. The room was airborne.

“This is our nearest equivalent to your trains. It runs on a nucleonically bonded track. We are going only as far as the next building; there is some equipment I would like you to inspect.”

No reply seemed to be required, and Farro sat silent. He had known an electric moment of fear when the room first moved. In no more than ten seconds they swooped to the branch of another Galactic building, becoming part of it.

Once more leading the way, Jandanagger escorted him to an elevator, which took them down into a basement room. They had arrived. The equipment of which Jandanagger had spoken was not particularly impressive in appearance. Before a row of padded seats ran a counter, above which a line of respirator-like masks hung, with several cables trailing from them into the wall.

The Galactic Minister seated himself, motioning Farro into an adjoining seat.

“What is this apparatus?” Farro asked, unable to keep a slight tinge of anxiety from his tone.

“It is a type of wave-synthesizer. In effect, it renders down many of the wave lengths which man cannot detect by himself, translating them into paraphrased terms which he can. At the same time, it feeds in objective and subjective impressions of the universe. That is to say, you will experience — when you wear the mask and I switch it on — instrumental recordings of the universe — visual and aural and so on — as well as human impressions of it.

“I should warn you that owing to your lack of training, you may unfortunately gather a rather confused impression from the synthesizer. All the same, I fancy that it will give you a better rough idea of what the galaxy is like than you would get from a long star journey.”

“Let’s go,” Farro said, clutching his cold hands together.

Now the entire column of lemmings had embarked into the still water. They swam smoothly and silently, their communal wake soon dissolving into the grandly gentle motion of the sea. Gradually the column attenuated as the stronger animals drew farther ahead and the weaker ones dropped behind. One by one, inevitably, these weaker animals drowned; yet, until their sleek heads finally disappeared below the surface, they still pressed forward with bulging eyes fixed upon the far and empty horizon.

No human spectator, however devoid of anthropomorphic feeling, could have failed to ask himself what might be the nature of the goal that prompted such a sacrifice.

The inside of the mask was cold. It fitted loosely over his face, covering his ears and leaving only the back of his head free. Again a touch of unreasoning fear shot through him.

“The switch is by your hand,” the Minister said. “Press it.”

Ferro pressed the switch. Darkness submerged him.

“I am with you,” the Minister said steadily. “I have a mask on, too, and can see and feel what you do.”

A spiral curled out into the darkness, boring its way through nothing — an opaque, smothering nothing as warm as flesh. Materializing from the spiral there issued a cluster of bubbles, dark as polyhedric grapes, multiplying and multiplying as if breathed from an inexhaustible bubble pipe. The lights on their surfaces, glittering, changing, spun a misty web which gradually veiled the operation.

“Cells are being formed, beaten out in endless duplication on the microscopic anvils of creation. You witness the beginning of a new life,” Jandanagger said, his voice sounding distant.

Like a curtain by an open window, the cells trembled behind their veil, awaiting life. The moment of its coming was not perceptible. It was only that now the veil had something to conceal within itself; its translucence dimmed, its surface patterned, a kind of blind purpose shaped it into more definite outline. No longer was it beautiful.

Consciousness simmered inside it, a pinpoint of instinct-plus without love or knowledge, an eye trying to see through a lid of skin. It was not inert; instead, it struggled on the verge of terror, undergoing the trauma of coming into being, fighting, scrabbling, lest it fall back again into the endless gulf of not-being.

“Here is the afterlife your religions tell of,” Jandanagger’s voice said. “This is the purgatory every one of us must undergo, only it comes not after but before life. The spirit that will become us has to tread the billion years of the past before it reaches the present it can be born into. One might almost say there was something it had to expiate.”

The foetus was all Farro’s universe; it filled the mask, filled him. He suffered with it, for it obviously suffered. Pressures racked it, the irremediable pressures of time and biochemistry, the pain of which it strove to lessen by changing shape. It writhed from wormhood to slughood, it grew gills and a tail. Fishlike, and then no longer fishlike, it toiled up the steep slope of evolution, mouselike, piglike, apelike, babylike.

“This is the truth the wisest man forgets — that he has done all this.”

Now the environment changed. The foetus, exerting itself, had become a baby, and the baby could only become a man by the proddings of a thousand new stimuli. And all these stimuli — animal, vegetable, or mineral — lived too, in their different way. They competed. They inflicted constant challenges on the man creature; some of them, semisentient, invaded his flesh and bred there, creating their own life cycles; others, nonsentient, were like waves that passed unceasingly through his mind and his body. He seemed hardly an entity, merely a focal point of forces, constantly threatened with dissolution.

So complete was the identification between the image and the receiver that Farro felt he was the man. He recognized that everything happening to the man happened to him; he sweated and writhed like the foetus, conscious of the salt water in his blood, the unstoppable rays in the marrow of his bones. Yet the mind was freer than it had been in the foetus stage; during the wrenching moment of fear when environments had changed, the eye of consciousness had opened its lids.

“And now the man changes environments again, to venture away from his own planet,” the Galactic Minister said.

But space was not space as Farro had reckoned it. It struck his eyes like slate: not a simple nothingness, but an unfathomable web of forces, a creeping blend of stresses and fields in which stars and planets hung like dew amid spiders’ webs. No life was here, only the same interaction of planes and pressures that had attended the man all along, and of which even the man himself was composed. Nonetheless, his perceptions reached a new stage, the light of consciousness burned more steadily.

Again he was reaching out, swimming toward the confines of his Galaxy. About him, proportions changed, slid, dwindled. In the beginning, the womb had been everywhere, equipped with all the menace and coercion of a full-scale universe; now the galaxy was revealed as smaller than the womb — a pint-sized goldfish bowl in which a tiddler swam, unaware of the difference between air and water. For there was no spanning the gulfs between galaxies: there lay nothing, the nothing of an unremitting Outside. And the man had never met nothing before. Freedom was not a condition he knew, because it did not exist in his interpenetrated existence.

As he swam up to the surface, something stirred beyond the yellow rim of the Galaxy. The something could hardly be seen; but it was there on the Outside, wakeful and clawed, a creature with senses, though insensate. It registered half as sight, half as noise: a smouldering and delayed series of pops, like the sound of bursting arteries. It was big. Farro screamed into the blackness of his mask at its bigness and its anger.

The creature was waiting for the man. Stretching, it stretched right around the Galaxy, around the goldfish bowl, its supernatant bat’s wings groping for purchase.