A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  And Aum. A part of the mystical processes of Yoga. A great sound symbol which was supposed to set up certain rhythms and vibrations to enforce one’s fusion with the allness, the oneness, of Karma.

  Well, Conrad was no mystic; he wasn’t a positivist either. He had always enjoyed the freedom of abstract theory. But he wasn’t anything now; he was lost. It looked as though everyone was lost, caught at the end of a blind alley.

  The Eastern cults had said materialism was the wrong course, an illusion. And the development of atomic weapons had made such a philosophy most attractive. But during their absence, in suspended animation, while cities rose and fell and ideas with them, what had really happened?

  “Ah—hold it a minute will you?” called Conrad.

  The man turned. “Call me Risha. What’s on your mind, Conrad?”

  “But how did you know,” Conrad began, then dropped it. “This is Kaye.”

  Risha nodded. “I know. There are few secrets among true Upinshads.”

  Risha, Conrad knew, had meant sage or teacher. He said. “Risha, we’re strangers in our own house, or our own world. I’ll explain to you about us before we go on any further, if you have the time.”

  “Go ahead. Talk,” said Risha, “I’d appreciate it if you would hurry though. I’d like to get to the Rigeda Fire before the attack.”

  The attack. Conrad had almost forgotten about Lingan’s statement about the extermination of the Upinshads. But he went on, explained everything about themselves. He was brief. You could be brief with words. With one word, one could say—eternity.

  l

  AFTER HEARING their story, Risha looked up at the sky. His long leathery face shone oddly in the pale light.

  “You believe me, Risha?”

  “Of course. Our Rigeda includes your journey from earth. Few records survived the war except in song.”

  “There was war after we left?” said Kaye in a hushed whisper.

  “Yes.” Risha moved away. “Only a few survived.” His voice lightened. “We’ll sing about your flight tonight at the Rigeda Fire.”

  His gaunt figure passed into dense shadow, back into a splash of moonlight. A large dark shape crashed away through the undergrowth. Fireflies wavered among the leaves. Somewhere below them an invisible stream churned down over worn stones.

  “It’s beautiful, this kind of life,” said Kaye. “And they are going to destroy it—”

  Conrad called to Risha. “Why are the Kshatriya going to attack you? What have they to gain?”

  Risha’s voice floated back to them, seeming a part of the wind through the pines, the soft voice of the night. “Because we spurn the use of machines and all the mores of their kind of culture, they think we’re inferior beings. And it is part of their belief that ‘inferior’ peoples should be exterminated. Then, in spite of their thinking us inferior, they fear us a little; they know we’ve developed mental abilities they don’t understand. There are three castes of us Upinshads living in isolated Leagues in this valley. The Kshatya will finish us this time; there’s nothing we can do. There’s really nothing we want to do.”

  “Don’t you want to go on living?”

  asked Kaye.

  “Yes. It would be more interesting to know what part of reality the surface called ‘death’ is before meeting it, but it doesn’t make any difference. In Samyama we have learned much. Still we’ve found only a small part of reality. Given more time, we might know Karma. But we haven’t the time; perhaps in some other plane we will go on with the search.”

  “We know nothing about what happened during our absence,” said Kaye.

  “Much has happened. Much destruction, regression, near extinction. The ancients knew the road to Karma, the road through three-dimensional illusion into fourth-dimensional reality; they knew many centuries even before your time, before any records of the Western world began. But the Destroyers came and distorted it, and materialism hid reality. Remember—through history there have always been these people who sought only to destroy and conquer and destroy. There have been others, the thinkers and philosophers; but the Destroyers have won because they forced the thinkers to accept their illusory philosophy. Now it’s too late to fight back; we would have to fight them on their own materialistic plane which would be futile. Violence only creates more violence; means must justify the ends.”

  “The war must have been a horrible thing,” said Kaye. “When we left for Andromeda, there seemed little chance for a war—not with atomic power.”

  “People feared an atomic war,” said Risha sadly. “But trapped by unreal material philosophies they seemed helpless. Eastern philosophy swept the world, urging non-attachment to the ‘things of this visible world’. Even scientists flocked into the various cults by the thousands. For it was science, really—cosmology that was aware of many other realities underlying the narrow concepts of the phenomenal world. This ancient Eastern philosophy spread like a great fire. But it came too late. War. It was almost final. Only a few left . . .”

  RISHA WALKED silently for a while. The night seemed to echo an unfinished thought, a voiceless whisper of horror.

  It left few people on the Earth. Most of the heavily-inhabited places became radioactive seas of poison. Certain parts of the world remained untouched. This was the one most attractive to those wretched people who still lived. And the City of Shiva rose. The others, the Upinshads who sought true reality, were driven into the forests and scorned as idiots. For we retained the old teachings, and we knew that the ‘reality’ of the materialists was illusion, and that it led only to final destruction.

  “Now the Kshatya are through with Earth. It offers no roads to conquest; they’re abandoning it in ruins and death.”

  “I saw the spaceships,” said Conrad. “They’re all leaving?”

  “Most of them; the others will be killed. There are only a few thousand of them.”

  Risha paused and looked to the West. “They never intend to come back to Earth. They’re going to burn their conquered worlds behind them. Conquered worlds, conquered galaxies. For them, there’s no end.”

  Conrad felt Kaye’s hand, suddenly damp and cold. “It seems too fantastic and ridiculous, yet it isn’t really,” she said. “It was bound to end this way.”

  If the pattern is conquest, it must find expression. What man imagines, he creates. What he imagines, he destroys.”

  “And the attack will be soon,” said Conrad.

  “We know it will be within a day. We’ve studied, spent many years and generations in the halls of Samyama. But Karma’s still a very distant concept for us. We’ve caught moments of reality through the three dimensional veils. But we haven’t even started yet. If we only had more time; relaxing time—”

  “But surely there’s some way to fight or resist them,” insisted Conrad.

  “Violence?” Risha laughed softly. “That’s only part of the old, old fallacy. The means determine the nature of the ends produced. Violence can never end in anything but more violence; that’s only part of the illusion of a restricted illusory three dimensional world.”

  “Babes in the woods,” said Conrad, and caught himself smiling grimly, without humor.

  Kaye said. “Remember, Alan, how positivistic methods were breaking down? People were dissatisfied.”

  “Naturally,” said Risha. “Everyone was afraid. Five senses, three dimensions. And the rulers held people within that restricted area like herded animals, wouldn’t let them escape. But these five organs of sense are in reality just feelers by which we feel the world around us. The three-dimensional man lives groping about. He’s never seen anything!”

  “Scared of the dark,” said Conrad.

  Her hand tightened. Far away toward the West they heard a rumble of what might have been thunder. “They’re getting ready,” said Risha.

  The three walked on, coming to a sheer cliff looming up blackly, and Risha led them inside, around a black corridor and after a while into a large subterranean cavern. There we
re people, people in animal skins sitting around a fire. Philosophers in caves.

  The Rigeda Fire. The people were singing. Hymns out of a lost Hindu history sixty thousand years old, interwoven with many sagas of the intervening centuries.

  THE PEOPLE greeted them, acknowledged their presence, their history, with gentle tolerant smiles, then returned to their singing, dark eyes reflecting the flames of the Rigeda Fire.

  Risha stood silhouetted against the flames.

  “Manu,” he said ringingly. The singing died. “Samyama.”

  There was wisdom here, thought Conrad. He saw it in the twisting shadows in the cave, in the faces staring into the flames. Wisdom of many ages. Mysticism had fused with science; science’s primary concern, ultimately, had always been with the invisible. Twentieth century mysticism had been the beginning of a newer science of the fourth dimension, of non-Aristotelianism, the same as alchemy and astrology had led the way into ‘sciences’ of a more acceptable kind.

  They had felt the fourth dimension.

  “When we reach the fourth dimension, we’ll see that the world of three dimensions doesn’t really exist, and has never existed! That it was the creation of our own fantasy, a phantom host, an optical illusion—anything one pleases excepting only reality.”

  But Ouspensky had talked only to the stars. A few people heard. Too late. Shiva ruled.

  “Infinity isn’t an hypothesis, but a fact, and such a fact is the multi-dimensionality of space and all it implies, namely the unreality of everything three dimensional.

  “A restriction of only two dimensions is inconceivable to a man. A restriction of three dimensions is equally inconceivable to a fourth-dimensional consciousness. And the fourth dimension . . .”

  The Hindus had called it Karma: “Everything will exist in it always.” It was the eternal now of the Hindus. But whatever one labeled it, perhaps these Upinshads, hindered by ancient forest mysticism, were again on the right track. They needed time.

  People had broken faith with ‘science’ and had sought a higher reality which they called Karma. The dissatisfaction with science had been well grounded, and the complaints about its insolvency entirely just, because science had really entered a cul de sac out of which there had seemed no escape; and the official recognition of the fact that the direction it had taken had been wrong had been realized—too late!

  These philosophers living in caves practicing ancient Hindu rituals of non-attachment, were on a saner road. But the Men of Shiva were destroying them. Because the Men of Shiva had been made for destruction.

  Aum. Aum. Aum.

  The chant rose stronger and vibrantly from those around the fire. Conrad gazed into the hypnotic flames.

  And suddenly, without any physical motivation, the flames burst, lifted up and up, roaring and sighing. But no one had put any fuel in the fire!

  He remembered. The power to identify oneself with any object!

  Samyama!

  The brilliant body of the Rigeda Fire lifted higher and higher, ate out the high cold shadows of the cavern’s roof.

  And died.

  6

  THE DISTANT thunder sounds continued, rolling nearer and nearer from the City of Shiva.

  The ceremony of Samyama, of identification, continued also, oblivious to their approaching destruction.

  Aum. Aum. A urn. Aunt—

  Kaye whispered. “The psychologists had words for this sort of thing. Auto-suggestion was one. That was a good word, then; what does it mean now? Alan—look!”

  The pile of wood fuel beside the fire seemed to shimmer, shift. The top piece shivered, trembled as though some invisible nervous hand were grasping it. Abruptly it rolled down from the top of the heap, scuttled across the stone floor like a live thing; It slowed, slowed, did not quite reach the flames.

  The chanting of the sound-symbol Aum died in a sigh of resigned failure; then the Rigeda hymns began again.

  Risha sat down beside them. “You see. We only touch the barest fringe of the higher plane of reality in which all is one. We need so much more time. But Shiva wins.”

  He sat staring into the flames, his lean face like rough brown stone in the light. “Karma,” he whispered. “The unbroken oneness—only the invisible, the hidden, preserve for us the illusion of time.”

  “You believe that everything is—is one,” said Kaye. “So death is only a part, a facet of a larger perspective?” Risha nodded, his eyes bright with inner fire. “We know nothing of reality. Only glimpses, touches. Death isn’t an end, any more than birth is a beginning. It’s all part of the ‘eternal now’. Our three dimensional world we see is only surface, part of the fourth dimensional plane. Death’s only a part of a part of a surface. We have no fear of it.”

  Conrad was on ‘his feet. “I wish I had your faith, Risha, my friend. To me, the invisible remains invisible. Death has a horrible finality for me.” He lifted Kaye by the hand. “Let’s get out of here—as far from this valley as we can.”

  She nodded. “I guess I’m still with you in the third dimension; I think I’d prefer almost any dimension to the third right now. Let’s go.”

  “You can’t escape the Men of Shiva,” said Risha. “Or even if you could, why prolong the inevitable?”

  “We’ve got to live,” said Conrad. “I don’t know why; maybe with you Upinshads, working long enough, we could find out why.”

  Risha smiled with sad tolerance. “You still think in positivistic terms, but you’re a real Upinshad, anyway. You’re not evil; you have little of the Kshatya’s blood. Just remember, Conrad, that your three-dimensional world is narrow, only a concept involving small sections and surfaces of reality. Remember that the cause of the visible is the invisible.”

  Conrad smiled tightly. “You coming with us, Risha?”

  “Where? The Ship of Shiva will turn this whole continent into a radioactive hell. They’ll leave no intelligent life on this world when they go!” But he followed them out of the cavern into the clear cool night, and a soft-voiced grey-haired woman held his hand and walked with him.

  OUTSIDE they stood for a moment listening to the distant thunder. “Have you no machines, no weapons at all?” persisted Conrad.

  Risha shrugged. “The mind is its own reality—it contains the stuff from which we create our illusory machines. The mind needs no shiny symbols, no machines to grind it to destruction. Wha—”

  Interrupting Risha’s ‘truth’, a shape stumbled toward them from the line of darkly ingrown trees. “Koehler!” yelled Conrad.

  The big man stumbled to his knees. Conrad dropped beside him, supported him there. Koehler’s face was scratched and bloody; he gazed blindly at Conrad and the others, then groaned sudden recognition. “Hello, Conrad. How’s the coordinating business?” He coughed, gasped for breath.

  Conrad felt his big frame shiver. “Where’ve you been, Koehler? What’s happened? Where’s the ship?”

  Koehler licked his heavy lips. “I guess I’m insane. I can’t figure anything; I feel like I’ve been walking in a fog; I can’t see anything!”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “The Ship brought me. It landed over there about a hundred yards. I heard your voices, I guess, I don’t know. I saw a light. Something chased me, something big that roared. If it had caught me—”

  “What happened after we landed? You were going to unlock Hudson—”

  “Yes, well—I stayed in the ship, tried to get to the locker and get Hudson out. I didn’t make it; the ship knocked me out. Hudson was still in that locker when I came to. He was yelling. He kept saying, ‘Stop the ship! Damn them! Stop the ship!’ ” Koehler lifted a big raw hand to his eyes. “You won’t believe this—but about then I began to realize that the ship was in the air, coasting along oil stratospheric power. I ran into the control chamber. There wasn’t anyone there, never had been. Listen now—I know that the ship blasted off alone!”

  “What?”

  “Sure, I’m crazy; I can’t help it. It landed
again, too—and no one was at the controls. The ship went out to sea, landed out there in the water, just off shore in a fog, and sat there. It was waiting for something. I could hear Hudson screaming, but I knew I shouldn’t let him out.”

  Koehler raised his tortured eyes. “Conrad! The ship’s alive!”

  Koehler threw off Conrad’s hands, staggered to his feet, weaved. He stared at Risha, at the woman standing beside him gazing serenely at the sky. A flash of white fire curved upward exploding in pyrotechnic pillars far away above the mountains. “You say the ship brought you here, Koehler?”

  Koehler’s mouth twitched. “You don’t believe me, and I don’t care.”

  “I believe you,” said Conrad. “The ship brought you here, right?”

  “Right or wrong, it did,” said Koehler. His hands trembled as he pushed them through his thickly entangled hair. “Look, I don’t know what really happened. I know Hudson wasn’t piloting the ship, nor I. I kept Hudson locked up and as far as I know he still is. I wouldn’t let him out; he’s a screaming maniac. Stop the ship! he keeps yelling over and over. Destroy the ship! I don’t know why he keeps yelling that, do you?”

  “Not yet,” said Conrad half to himself. “The ship landed on the sea, you say—then what?”

  “Well, it just sat there on the water; it was waiting. I don’t know what for. It was so still there, so quiet in the fog. I tried to get out of the ship, but the doors wouldn’t open. When I tried to work the lever, I couldn’t. I couldn’t touch it. I tried—” Koehler sucked in his breath. “I wondered about the ship. I couldn’t stop moving. I was afraid; I admit it. Every time I started to think, I got scared. ‘Eighteen hundred thousand light years,’ I’d say to myself, ‘and no one remembers anything. Six hundred years all shot to hell.’ And all the time I could feel the ship around me. It’s alive, I know it’s alive!”

  Koehler’s shaggy head twisted. “Who’s this?”