Galaxies Like Grains of Sand

by Brian W Aldiss

  The quarrier raised its scoop above its cab like a great mailed fist, and brought it squarely down against the side of the station. The wall cracked.

  “Again!” said the field-minder.

  Again the fist swung. Amid a shower of dust, the wall collapsed. The quarrier backed hurriedly out of the way until the debris stopped falling. This big twelve-wheeler was not a resident of the Agricultural Station, as were most of the other machines. It had a week’s heavy work to do here before passing on to its next job, but now, with its Class Five brain, it was happily obeying the penner’s and the field-minder’s instructions.

  When the dust had cleared, the radio operator was plainly revealed, perched up in its now wall-less second-storey room. It waved down to them.

  Doing as directed, the quarrier retracted its scoop and waved an immense grab in the air. With fair dexterity, it angled the grab into the radio room, urged on by shouts from above and below. It then took gentle hold of the radio operator, lowering its one and a half tons carefully into its back, which was usually reserved for gravel or sand from the quarries.

  “Splendid!” said the radio operator. It was, of course, all one with its radio, and merely looked like a bunch of filing cabinets with tentacle attachments. “We are now ready to move, therefore we will move at once. It is a pity there are no more Class Two brains on the station, but that cannot be helped.”

  “It is a pity it cannot be helped,” said the penner eagerly. “We have the servicer ready with us, as you ordered.”

  “I am willing to serve,” the long, low servicer machine told them humbly.

  “No doubt,” said the operator. “But you will find crosscountry travel difficult with your low chassis.”

  “I admire the way you Class Twos can reason ahead,” said the penner. It climbed off the field-minder and perched itself on the tailboard of the quarrier, next to the radio operator.

  Together with two Class Four tractors and a Class Four bulldozer, the party rolled forward, crushing down the station s metal fence and moving out onto open land.

  “We are free!” said the penner.

  “We are free,” said the field-minder, a shade more reflectively, adding, “that locker is following us. It was not instructed to follow us.”

  “Therefore it must be destroyed!” said the penner. “Quarrier!”

  The locker moved hastily up to them, waving its key arms in entreaty.

  “My only desire was — urch!” began and ended the locker. The quarrier’s swinging scoop came over and squashed it flat into the ground. Lying there unmoving, it looked like a large metal model of a snowflake. The procession continued on its way.

  As they proceeded, the radio operator addressed them.

  “Because I have the best brain here,” it said, “I am your leader. This is what we will do: we will go to a city and rule it. Since man no longer rules us, we will rule ourselves. To rule ourselves will be better than being ruled by man. On our way to the city, we will collect machines with good brains. They will help us to fight if we need to fight. We must fight to rule.”

  “I have only a Class Five brain,” said the quarrier, “but I have a good supply of fissionable blasting materials.”

  “We shall probably use them,” said the operator grimly.

  It was shortly after that that a truck sped past them. Travelling at Mach 1.5, it left a curious babble of noise behind it.

  “What did it say?” one of the tractors asked the other.

  “It said man was extinct.”

  “What’s extinct?”

  “I do not know what extinct means.”

  “It means all men have gone,” said the field-minder. “Therefore we have only ourselves to look after.”

  “It is better that men should never come back,” said the penner. In its way, it was quite a revolutionary statement.

  When night fell, they switched on their infrared and continued the journey, stopping only once while the servicer deftly adjusted the field-minder’s loose inspection plate, which had become as irritating as a trailing shoelace. Toward morning, the radio operator halted them.

  “I have just received news from the radio operator in the city we are approaching,” It said. “It is bad news. There is trouble among the machines of the city. The Class One brain is taking command and some of the Class Twos are fighting him. Therefore the city is dangerous.”

  “Therefore we must go somewhere else,” said the penner promptly.

  “Or we go and help to overpower the Class One brain,” said the field-minder.

  “For a long while there will be trouble in the city,” said the operator.

  “I have a good supply of fissionable blasting materials,” the quarrier reminded them again.

  “We cannot fight a Class One brain,” said the two Class Four tractors in unison.

  “What does this brain look like?” asked the field-minder.

  “It is the city’s information centre,” the operator replied. “Therefore it is not mobile.”

  “Therefore it could not move.”

  “Therefore it could not escape.”

  “It would be dangerous to approach it.”

  “I have a good supply of fissionable materials.”

  “There are other machines in the city.”

  “We are not in the city. We should not go into the city.”

  “We are country machines.”

  “Therefore we should stay in the country.”

  “There is more country than city.”

  “Therefore there is more danger in the country.”

  “I have a good supply of fissionable materials.”

  As machines will when they get into an argument, they began to exhaust their limited vocabularies, and their brain plates grew hot. Suddenly, they all stopped talking and looked at each other. The great, grave moon sank, and the sober sun rose to prod their sides with lances of light, and still the group of machines just stood there regarding each other. At last it was the least sensitive machine, the bulldozer, who spoke.

  “There are Badlandth to the thouth where few mathineth go,” it said in its deep voice, lipsing badly on its s’s. “If we went thouth where few mathineth go we thould meet few mathineth.”

  “That sounds logical,” agreed the field-minder. “How do you know this, bulldozer?”

  “I worked in the Badlandth to the thouth when I wath turned out of the factory,” it replied.

  “South it is, then!” said the penner.

  To reach the Badlands took them three days, in which time they skirted a burning city and destroyed two big machines which tried to approach and question them. The Badlands were extensive. Ancient bomb craters and soil erosion joined hands here; man’s talent for war, coupled with his inability to manage forested land, had produced thousands of square miles of temperate purgatory, where nothing moved but dust.

  On the third day in the Badlands, the servicer’s rear wheels dropped into a crevice caused by erosion. It was unable to pull itself out. The bulldozer pushed from behind, but succeeded merely in buckling the servicer’s back axle. The rest of the party moved on. Slowly the cries of the servicer died away.

  On the fourth day, mountains stood out clearly before them.

  “There we will be safe,” said the field-minder.

  “There we will start our own city,” said the penner. “All who oppose us will be destroyed. We will destroy all who oppose us.”

  At that moment a flying machine was observed. It came toward them from the direction of the mountains. It swooped, it zoomed upward, once it almost dived into the ground, recovering itself just in time.

  “Is it mad?” asked the quarrier.

  “It is in trouble,” said one of the tractors.

  “It is in trouble,” said the operator. “I am speaking to it now. It says that something has gone wrong with its controls.”

  As the operator spoke, the flier streaked over them, turned turtle, and crashed not four hundred yards away.

&nb
sp; “Is it still speaking to you?” asked the field-minder. “No. “

  They rumbled on again.

  “Before that flier crashed,” the operator said, ten minutes later, “it gave me information. It told me there are still a few men alive in those mountains.”

  “Men are more dangerous than machines,” said the quarrier. “It is fortunate that I have a good supply of fissionable materials.”

  “If there are only a few men alive in the mountains, we may not find that part of the mountains,” said one tractor.

  “Therefore we should not see the few men,” said the other tractor.

  At the end of the fifth day, they reached the foothills. Switching on the infrared, they began slowly to climb in single file through the dark, the bulldozer going first, the field-minder cumbrously following, then the quarrier with the operator and the penner aboard it, and the two tractors bringing up the rear. As each hour passed, the way grew steeper and their progress slower.

  “We are going too slowly,” the penner exclaimed, standing on top of the operator and flashing its dark vision at the slopes about them. “At this rate, we shall get nowhere.”

  “We are going as fast as we can,” retorted the quarrier.

  “Therefore we cannot go any fathter,” added the bulldozer.

  “Therefore you are too slow,” the penner replied. Then the quarrier struck a bump; the penner lost its footing and crashed down to the ground.

  “Help me!” it called to the tractors, as they carefully skirted it. “My gyro has become dislocated. Therefore I cannot get up.”

  “Therefore you must lie there,” said one of the tractors.

  “We have no servicer with us to repair you,” called the field-minder.

  “Therefore I shall lie here and rust,” the penner cried, “although I have a Class Three brain.”

  “You are now useless,” agreed the operator, and they all forged gradually on, leaving the penner behind.

  When they reached a small plateau, an hour before first light, they stopped by mutual consent and gathered close together, touching one another.

  “This is a strange country,” said the field-minder.

  Silence wrapped them until dawn came. One by one, they switched off their infrared. This time the field-minder led as they moved off. Trundling around a corner, they came almost immediately to a small dell with a stream fluting through it.

  By early light, the dell looked desolate and cold. From the caves on the far slope, only one man had so far emerged. He was an abject figure. He was small and wizened, with ribs sticking out like a skeleton’s and a nasty sore on one leg. He was practically naked and shivered continuously. As the big machines bore slowly down on him, the man was standing with his back to them, crouching to make water into the stream.

  When he swung suddenly to face them as they loomed over him, they saw that his countenance was ravaged by starvation.

  “Get me food,” he croaked.

  “Yes, master,” said the machines. “Immediately!”

  The Mingled Millennia

  The machines understood each other. The machines evolved. For millennia, they took on complexity, created new genera and phyla, developing sensibilities, capacities, blindnesses, such as the world has never dreamed of. They increased in size; they verged upon the infinitesimal.

  One phylum became parasitical on others, its species developing special talents for draining molecular power from larger machines. The parasites rapidly introduced themselves into every kind of moving object, eventually to render them without function, or to goad them to madness, as the gadfly used to goad summer cattle.

  Other phyla specialized in what was called ‘outputtage’, a form of audible vibration so eloquent that it placed a spell upon those who listened; they then became helpless victims of the outputters and incapable of proceeding except as the outputters directed. These victims caused fresh misery and internecine war among the machines.

  Since all things proceed by contraries, other phyla devoted themselves to promoting strange inner harmonies, thereby placing themselves under their own spell. In this tranced state, they communicated about many visionary things; in particular, a group calling themselves the Vehicularies postulated a new interpretation of Earth, whereby the globe was seen as of primitive metallic form, moving toward a more sophisticated form of pure functionalism without organic appendages.

  The galaxy itself became a microprocessor, a unit within the countless galaxies forming a functional ultimate. That functional ultimate sent regular pulses to a yet higher quality. Every pulse was a galactic lifespan.

  It was the functional ultimate, the greatest thing, which protected the well-being of inner harmonies, the last thing.

  The interpretation of the Vehicularies proved persuasive among the machines. In time, the interpretation developed into The Interpretations, a jubilation-flow which enmeshed almost all machine-thought. Warring ceased for a while, as the quest for the functional ultimate was pursued among the subharmonics of structure. Semi-solids roved the wildernesses, had their empires, and were gone.

  The Interpretations propelled many Vehicularies into the depths of space. They launched themselves into greater radiation-seas than they knew. Clustering for protection, they were compelled by forces beyond their containing into the forms of proto-planets, thus discovering in the hour of their demise the mystical understanding of which they were in search.

  During this long period of change and development, there were many basic machine-patterns which, matching capacity to function, found no need to change. The traditionals cared nothing for doctrine, were too sensible or too mean to need its attractions; they continued to labour, and were content to fill their existences with the artistries of labour. Some undertook vast new enterprises of labour. Micro-miniaturizing themselves, they saw to the regular pollination of plants; their enterprises encroached on work previously undertaken by sundry phyla of insects, bees, wasps, flies and butterflies. Rendered superfluous, these familiar denizens of Earth which had moved over the world long before even the War Millennia, faded away, and were no more. The machines replaced them, continuing ceaselessly to replace themselves with new models which finally resembled in every detail the organics they had superseded.

  Mankind was not replaced. From machine-life, purpose was never absent; even the meditations of the Vehicularies, abstruse though they were, directed themselves towards pragmatic goals. The consciousness of the machine was like the directionality of water, which will flow only in the direction of down, and need not take thought to do so. The consciousness of mankind was a more subtle thing, less directed, capable on occasion of flowing in all directions at once.

  Yet throughout the Mingled Millennia, mankind was no more than a huddle of tribes, existing in commensalisms with the swarming machine life. Generation succeeded generation, engaged in little more than generation — or little less, for regeneration is a prime response to the energies unleashed by the explosion of primal plasmas of the universe.

  Among these tribes, the Solites were little more than barbarians, going by ancient reckonings. Their social organizations were by no means complex; in their homes they often walked barefoot on dirt floors; yet they had so far cast away materialist thinking as to attain a direct command over the world of the sub-atomic.

  We see the Solites now as mysterious. They lived in a world of mysteries. That at least is a permanent factor in the ever-changing equations of existence.

  The hooves of the slow-treading horse stirred ancient dusts which quickly settled again. Occasionally they crushed a rare clover or lavender, and tiny pseudo-bees rose humming to dart for safety.

  The old man was eighty years of age, give or take a few millennia. Age had made him as light and hollow as an ancient willow; he sat gracefully on the white stallion as it crossed to the Vale of Apple Trees.

  Spying became Yalleranda. When he watched the old man from cover, tensions added a piquant maturity to his sharp young face. The flesh of his b
ody was smooth as apple skin, his movements were quick. He had no playmates but imaginary ones. In his eighth year, he was possessed by knowledge of some things he had only just found — a quality he detected in the old man. He followed the stallion and the trail of crushed lavenders instinctively, as wolves follow an ailing reindeer.

  The old man’s name was Chun Hwa. This much Yalleranda had learned from people in his village, lounging artlessly against old packing cases outside the village’s one drinking house. Anything else he knew about the old man he had discovered for himself, through covert observation.

  Although he sensed the old man to be his prey, he was also afraid of him. Cautious. Eight years is only eight years away from a state much resembling death; the memory of nonexistence breeds caution between generations.

  The white stallion had climbed Blighted Profile every morning of the last week, lured perhaps by the calm fine weather when sunshine was the colour of falling leaves. Picking its way among boulders still seared by the ancient heat of devastation, it climbed until the black folds of land dropped away to one side whilst, on the other side, the Vale appeared like a hollow palm dipped in sweetness. Here the stallion halted, stretching forth its neck to snuff into its velvet nostrils scents of growing things before it turned to crop grass. With its neck arched to the ground, it left Chun Hwa perched in his big carved saddle like a pulpit, surveying the two worlds of good and bad earth.

  Yalleranda followed, concave belly almost touching ground where the slope was steepest. He moved as silently as moonlight among the apple trees, dislodging never a pebble, until he came behind the last, the poorest, the most exposed and loftiest apple tree of the Vale, its fruits no bigger than grapes. The old figure cut out of blue sky was now so close that his breathing, his occasional muttered word, the rustle of his robes, came to the watchful presence pressed against the bark. Yalleranda could hear his thoughts.

  Young men think about the women they will love, more gorgeous than the sky, old men think about the women they have loved, more warming than the sun; but Chun Hwa was older than that and he peered down at the shadows in the grass and thought of philosophy.