Galaxies Like Grains of Sand

by Brian W Aldiss

  “They don’t appreciate me enough, though I’m so rare and ancient. But perhaps that’s what everyone thinks at my age. My bones grow as thin as smoke. Why am I not more content? Why am I so self-indulgent still when there is no longer much of me left to indulge?

  “Something still must remain to be done. What it could be I can’t fathom. Something must remain to be done. Funny, an essence of the real me still remains with me, something that was with me as a child and is still undiminished and individual. The only thing I can recognize myself by. If only I could be less querulous, let that undiminished thing out. If it’s lived in spite of me, then it can live after me.

  “What else am I? How can I know? Just a little flesh and bone, still able to enjoy the sun. If only I had it in me to round off my life properly...”

  He raised his head and peered about him, screwing up his withered cheeks to assist the stiff muscles of his eyes.

  Yalleranda watched the gesture. Raising his hands before his face, he made a pyramid of them and set one pupil so that it gazed through the dark tent at the old man in the saddle. By moving one of the dark fingers, Yalleranda could bring blackness like a blade cutting across the old man’s shoulders until his head disappeared.

  Unaware of the decapitations befalling him, Chun Hwa surveyed the landscape laid before him. The Vale of Apple Trees fell away to his left hand, complex in its vegetation. A river ran through the Vale, appearing to push brooks like snail trails up the surrounding slopes. Beside the river was a village; now and again a figure could be seen. A herd of cattle approaching the village seemed to be frozen by distance. Chun Hwa liked to think of this panorama as the present

  Falling away to his right hand were the burnt lands, simple in their desolation, and these Chun Hwa thought of as the past. The natural fertility had been burnt from the land, irreparably, as the bottom is burnt out of a pot. The weapons of man had become as potent as the hand of God. Nothing lived. There were dead river beds where mud curled like shards of broken earthenware. Two giant machines of a bygone age had met in the black valley beside the river course. They lay now, locked together, their sides tigerish with rust, slowly demolishing each other.

  “This is the diagram of our situation,” Chun Hwa said to himself, “planned by a celestial hand. All men should come here to Blighted Profile to view it and learn from it. My daughter Cobalt should come here. She would see the two sides of man written into — bitten into the landscape, the black side and the green.” He sighed. “Is the black side burned out for ever? There must be no rebuilding. Man must remain close to Nature.”

  He felt again the undiminished thing fluttering in him. Its precise virtue came from the vague entity, Nature.

  “Cobalt doesn’t understand. She wishes to see mankind powerful again. If only I could go into the future as I came from the past then I would see and know, and have power to warn her and her generation. That would be the last thing I could do before I’m really finished.”

  The dark fingers snipped and he was divided; but of that he was unaware. Nevertheless, he stirred uneasily and gazed about him. The image of his lovely and headstrong daughter knocked against his head. “Cobalt, when you are an old old woman — I pray that time will never come for you — but when it does...your father’s love will still nestle with you. I shall be gone, but my love will remain in your bones.”

  Eventually he climbed stiffly down from the stallion and ate a small meal from porcelain bowls packed in a china bowl. He wiped his lips on a silk napkin.

  “Hup, now, Leg of Leather,” he called, when he had packed the box in place behind the saddle, and the stallion began to carry him home. The Vale disappeared behind their backs, sinking beneath the spine of the ridge; the apple trees sank. Man and horse jogged down the black side of Blighted Profile, jogged among the hard-boiled boulders, through the little landslides of dust and quartz, towards the arid plain. It was possible to see now that they were going down into an almighty crater hundreds of miles in diameter, of which Blighted Profile was a crumpled lip.

  The ground was like a scab. Making their way to the river course, they had to skirt the machines locked in frigid battle.

  “...clear and hold operation Flea...self-making severe R Level stratum forecast Lockwood 546 Rising 541...clear and hold...”

  “Cancelled liaison random territory sweep parameters 577819 closing vector 772816... Punitive cover, punitive cover...”

  “Zero. Counteract...” Their voices were harsh and crackling.

  Man and horse continued down the river bed. Far behind, a boy followed, forlorn as a hawk, and as determined.

  The ashes grew thin, the mud crumpled into a sandy soil. Trees grew again, standing apart from each other.

  “Nearly home now, Leg of Leather,” Chun Hwa said. The trees never quite became a wood. They emerged from among their slim trunks, where painted posts marked new territory.

  The country grew green ahead. Fenced parkland was as bright and trim as a sunshade. As man and animal approached it, a section of parkland began to change, to become unclear, like an image in a looking glass slowly misted by breath. Illusions grew in the air, huge cubes of nothingness interpenetrated other similar cubes, the looking glass gave back an insubstantial image of itself. Responding to the creatures which approached, curtains of molecules rose into the air as if fountains had been brought into play. The molecules twisted, misted, glittered, frosted, and formed reflecting surfaces, one behind the other, ranked and arranged, to define the walls of the rooms of Chun Hwa’s summer home.

  By the time man and mount reached the home, its walls were opaque.

  Coaxing the stallion, Chun Hwa rode it slowly through the house, and called in a low voice for his wife, Wangust Ilsont. Leaving Leg of Leather in his own quarters, he went on foot to seek her. The temperature, like winter sunshine, warmed and refreshed him.

  Wangust was integrating with two servants. She dismissed them, came forward, and placed her vellum palms against his paper ones. They matched their breathing, working carefully down from pectoral to abdominal, till their heartbeats slowed to a unified beat which reached throughout the arched structure of their touch.

  Age had her in its web. Its strands slowed her when she sought to move, capturing limbs that had so long been lithe. Now only her eyes were not grey. Beside her waited her leopardess, Coily, gazing up at her with a love like gorsefire.

  Only when their pulses modulated each other in a Pasanarada rhythm did Wangust gently resolve the contact, letting her fingers fall until they buried themselves in the fur of the cat. “I have not seen you for a week, Sustainer. A tour time of life, that is too long. Days are shuttered without you. What quest have you been pursuing?”

  “What quest? Is quest the word? Thinking, my Love, and addressing empty words to myself. They were not fit for those ears of yours. But they suited the weather. I have so little future that I’ve taken to worrying about other people’s futures.”

  She clapped her hands at her cat. “Coily, go and find Leg o’Leather. Keep him company.”

  As the leopard bounded away, she caught up her long gown with one hand and motioned Chun Hwa towards a bank which shaped itself comfortably about them while they sat.

  “You have no need to be unsettled. I know it is Cobalt you worry about and, beyond her, the developing world. The world is always brand new, and worrying won’t help it. Be at peace.”

  He tried to laugh. “Please be more impatient with me. Shake me, take from me the sense of the sound of the approach of the hounds of...”

  He would not pronounce that last word, and could not know how the incomplete sentence played upon the boy who had felt compelled to trail him even into his home.

  Clenching his weak fists, he gazed at her, smilingly but searchingly, till she said, “Oh, my Hwa, I despair. We did wrong, didn’t we? — That’s a fine philosophical conclusion to arrive at for one of my years. You’re lonely, I know, lonely whatever happens.”

  He shook his head, givin
g a dry laugh which caused him to cough. “Loneliness! You make so much of loneliness. It’s not important.” He received a sense that they had worked their way through this conversation before and never quite delivered the confused meanings within them. “Yes, I’m lonely, but it doesn’t matter. All mankind’s activities since the dawn of history have been communication devices to stave off loneliness. Animals don’t feel lonely, so they need no communication, no machines. That human loneliness stems from his knowledge of — lifespan...”

  Wangust shook her head, still smiling. “That is not so. You project your character on civilization and misread it. The world’s dynamism is to do with competition, with crowds, with great affairs and enterprises — ”

  “Well, I’m displaced from my time, so maybe I see things differently. I have spent the last few mornings up on Blighted Profile, overlooking the green present and the black remnants of the past, and trying to think beyond myself. I’ve always been a refugee from reality, as I’m a refugee from my own time. You’re real, Wangust, but otherwise I am not much convinced by reality...” He gave her a sly smile. “Your life has been an inspiration to all of your people, whilst mine has been a walk in your shadow. Necessarily. I suppose I resent that. I resent the favour you did me.

  “In your portmatters, you ventured back to the dark period in which I was born, the war millennia trying to save Earth itself — rescuing animals and birds and fish and plants — and me! I became bric-a-brac. Oh, you saved my life, but by so doing you turned me into a sort of fossil.”

  “Nonsense, your genes — ”

  “Leave my genes out of it and listen to what I say. My epoch is eternally cursed for starting the wars of destruction. You and your people worked heroically, rescuing what you could. By contrast, I just hid away — I hid from a man’s first obligation, which is to face the evils of his own time.”

  “This is your time, Hwa,” Wangust said. “You are of us, your children are here, your sanity has been our mainstay. Forget your guilt. You say I should forget loneliness — I say you should forget guilt. You had no obligations except to fulfil the best side of your nature; that you could not do in your own time. You have forgotten the strength we found and used together, the two of us, when we were young.”

  He turned away, shaking his head. “No, I don’t forget, I don’t forget.”

  He stood with his feet apart, hands locked behind his back, staring into the distance. She recalled his standing in the same attitude long ago, when his hair was thick and black and they swam most days in the sea.

  She left him standing where he was.

  A while later, when ragged red cardinals flew to announce the house, Wangust returned in a greener gown. Chun Hwa was busy imprinting the systoles of young alligators on wolf embryos.

  “I have a message from our daughter. She is on her way here from Union, and wants us to fly to meet her. Will you come with me?”

  “Gladly. And I’m sorry if I was being cranky.”

  She laid a hand gently on his sleeve as they proceeded through the home.

  “I wish we could travel into the future as easily as we travel through the air,” he said. “I long to travel into the future and see how certain current events resolve themselves.”

  With a slight show of impatience, Wangust said, “Recall the equations. Consciousness can travel only into the past, the paved way, and return only to the present. There is no future. The future is unmade, a way unbuilt. Tomorrow does not exist until tomorrow. The equations explain.”

  “The equations have not taken everything into account; that’s the conclusion I have come to.” He set his face into stubborn lines. “I will sail into the future.”

  Yalleranda, skipping behind barriers of gossamer, checked his pace, letting the old man’s words whisper to him. Everything was boundless, all was possible; he alone would do a million million things when he grew up that no one else had ever done. He knew how to jump that barrier. Why should not this ancient crust of manhood hurl himself into some remote future, full of gold and high buildings and apples stuffed with stoneless dates?

  He crouched concealed behind a furred honesty as the man and woman climbed into their flying machine. It rose into the air vertically, like a lift, making the air momentarily visible.

  The summer home faded away about him, ebbing like a dying tide of light. He stood alone in parkland, ankles deep in grass, face upturned, mouth open, blinking, wondering.

  From the airborne machine as it rose, more and more territory came to view, flattening in amazing fashion. Five miles above the ground, they hovered. They could see in the distance the dark finger of burnt lands, where machines still played their paralysed battles. Elsewhere, all was green.

  Chun Hwa remembered. He said, “When you were last away, one of the scunging machines ran amok. The house intercepted it and turned it away. We traced it until it plunged into a ravine and was dead. They are still active after all these centuries; only their programming is a little awry.

  “We should send an expedition into the burnt lands to remove their solar receivers and de-activate them.

  “After that day, I dreamed that the programming of the whole universe was a little awry. And there were other universes where circumstances turned out better.”

  Ignoring his remark, Wangust continued to gaze down on the fertile landscape. “That is all our work, the work of the simple, uncoordinated Solites. When we first came here, the entire land was dead. When you arrived, it was still as black as desert, supporting only cacti and camels. With our hands and our empathies, we established that beautiful harmonious world of seeds, insects, birds, animals, spirits. Now they are self-sufficient, and promote their own green wave, farther and farther. There’s no stopping it now.”

  “Yes, yes. We did a fine job of patching.”

  “That green wave will join with the green wave growing from the coast, where Cobalt’s new city confronts the sea at Union Bay. Isn’t that forgiveness of sins? Can you still pretend we have accomplished nothing? Could we have accomplished anything better?”

  He smiled at her and put an arm about her shoulder, but would say nothing, would not say what he thought.

  Turning slightly, he said, “You have every right to be pleased. Now you can be more pleased, for a ship is coming up from the coast.”

  Once he had flown his own ship, had driven at night on glowing wings above the burnt-out bulk of the planet, changing things, immersed in the taste of his task. He had seeded sterile and stormy oceans, to watch them later flash with phosphorescence like dawn in a dark sky. The drama had always been of life, of procreation, of waves breaking on wild and prospering shores.

  The oblate spheroid grew in their windows as they watched with unkeen eyes. It flashed a recognition signal, flicked on a fresh course, dived, unrolling behind it one long white vapour breaker down the wan air. Then it touched their hull, discharged momentum in a hiss, and was steady.

  A screw turned, a door widened. Their daughter, Cobalt Ilsont, came to them, smiling, taking their hands. She was sturdy and beautiful and bright, her eyes blue, her curls copper, her cheeks lean and freckled. She spoke in a voice they found loud. Perhaps she believed they were deaf.

  “I’ve two days leave from Union so I thought I’d get away and come and visit you. How are you both? You look well and, Wangust, you look more elegant than ever.”

  She kissed her mother’s cheek and her father’s forehead. “You should have come by portmatter instead of indulging in aerobatics.”

  Cobalt laughed. “You don’t know what the younger generation is coming to, do you, Hwa?”

  They ate a delicate meal where they were, suspended over the Earth, allowing evening to flood in below them. In their glasses was a tawny wine and with the wine went silver carp and damson tart — a small abundance.

  Afterwards, Cobalt insisted that they flew back in her machine to catch a glimpse of her city, her growing city of Union.

  It was growing fast. Both Chun Hwa and Wa
ngust could see how it had grown. It spread along the coast. There were new harbours and ships moored there. A new pier, its lights already burning, pointed out across the grey ocean.

  “And there’s our fishing fleet,” Cobalt said, indicating where small lights dotted the sea. “They are sowing as well as reaping. The fish is good and quite plentiful now. Oh, it’s all so wonderful. And do you know, if we flew out across this ocean, we’d see no more lights for seven thousand miles. This is only the beginning.” She added inconsequentially, “Next winter solstice, we are starting a new calendar in Union. To mark the New Age. Everything’s going to be better from now on. Union’s going to be the greatest city in the world, and the Solites are going to have to cease thinking of themselves as savages. We’ve now got two reading schools in operation, for adults as well as children.”

  She stared down proudly at the city. Though darkness was coming on fast, they could see raw gashes in the hillsides, where new roads and new houses were being created.

  “It is wonderful,” said Wangust.

  But Chun Hwa said irritably, “You are mouthing parroted phrases, Cobalt. ‘Everything’s going to be better from now on...’ We used to say that back in my time, and look what happened. The Solites have always been a happy people, enjoying a close relationship with Nature. You’re going to change all that. Solites don’t need information when they have wisdom. Information drives out wisdom. Their skills are better than all book-learning. You deceive yourself if you believe that cities can create happiness.”

  “You shouldn’t discourage her,” Wangust said.

  After a moment’s silence, Cobalt said, “Hwa, you helped start all this. You first sowed the sterile seas with life which we are now culling. Why turn against the things you once fought for? Union will be a happy city, creatively happy. We are barbarians with inherited machines — should we not attempt to be something more?” She turned to her mother for support. “What do you say? Haven’t we all lived in wildernesses long enough? Someone must rebuild the world. The Vehicularies went out into the galaxy and, if machines can do it, then we certainly can.”