Galaxies Like Grains of Sand

by Brian W Aldiss

  Timing his exits was a speciality with Rhapsody. He had them awake and now he’d show them no more. He came slowly down the few steps into the auditorium.

  “So there’s the story of a man called Ars Staykr,” he said, as his right foot left the last step. “He couldn’t take it. After he beat up that little tailor, he dropped everything and disappeared into the stews of Nunion. He didn’t even stay to round off his picture, and Unit Two folded then and there. He was a quitter.”

  “How come we’ve had to wait twenty years to hear all this?” came a shout from Rhapsody Double Seven.

  Carefully, Rhapsody 182 spread his hands wide and smiled.

  “Because Ars Staykr was a dirty word when he first quit,” he said, aiming his voice at Big Cello, “and after that he was forgotten. Then, well, it happened I ran into Staykr a couple of days back, and that gave me the idea of working over the old Unit Two files.”

  He tried to move in front of Big Cello, to make it easier for the chief to compliment him on his sagacity if he felt so inclined.

  “You mean Ars is still alive?” Double Seven persisted. “He must be quite an old man now. What’s he doing, for To’s sake?”

  “He’s a down-and-out, a bum,” Rhapsody said. “I didn’t care to be seen talking to him, so I got away from him as soon as possible.”

  He now stood before the chief.

  “Well, BC,” he said, as calmly as he could, “don’t tell me you don’t smell a solid there — something to sweep ‘em off their feet and knock ‘em into the aisles.”

  As if deliberately prolonging the suspense, Big Cello took another drag on his aphrohale, then removed it gently from his mouth.

  “We’d have to have a pair of young lovers in it,” Big Cello said.

  “Sure,” Rhapsody exclaimed, scowling to hide his elation. “Young lovers! There’s an idea! A great idea!”

  “I see it as a saga of the common man,” Hurricane 304 suggested. “We could call it Our Fair City — if that title isn’t legally sequestered.”

  “It’s a vehicle for Edru Expusso!” someone else suggested.

  They were playing with it. Harsch had won the day.

  He was hustling out of the little theatre when a hand touched his arm and Rhapsody Double Seven pulled him back.

  “How did you happen to find Ars Staykr again?” he asked.

  “Well,” Rhapsody said happily, “I happened to have a rendezvous a couple of nights back. I was looking for a helibubble afterward when I happened to walk through Bosphorus Concourse. This old wreck hanging about in a doorway recognized me and called out.”

  “It was Ars?”

  “It was Ars. I kept on going, of course. But it put me onto the concept of this solid.”

  “Didn’t you ask Ars if he’d found out what was at the heart of the city? That was what he’d gone looking fix, wasn’t it?”

  “What’s it matter? That quaint had nothing we’d want to buy. His clothes were in rags, I tell you; why, the crazy fool was shivering with viro! I was lucky that bubble came when it did!”

  They made the solid — one of Supernova’s big-budget productions for the year. It took in credits on every inhabited planet of the Federation, and Rhapsody 182 was a powerful, respected man thereafter, They called it Song of a Mighty City; it had three electronic orchestras, seventeen hit tunes and a regiment of pneuma-dancing girls. The solidization was jelled in the studios using the pastel shades deemed most appropriate, and they finally selected a more suitable city than Nunion for backgrounds. Ars Staykr, of course, did not come into it at all.

  The Ultimate Millennia

  Again we must use the symbol: Time passed. Time is stretched to its limits, extended almost beyond meaning, for Time now rolls down a gentle decline of innumerable centuries toward the sunset of Yinnisfar and its Galaxy.

  It was a time of contrast. Those planets and systems which, while the Self-perpetuating War was in full spate, had once been linked by the bond of enmity had now not enough in common even to be rivals. It was a time of discovery and consolidation; of experiment and abdication; of hope and resignation; of the historian and the prophet. It was a time of the exploration of the inner resources of man: with his last frontiers tamed, man turned in toward the self. There he went on foot, alone, without that grey steed Science in which he had trusted for so long, alone into the labyrinth of his own devices.

  Humanity had multiplied. Every world bore a mighty crowd of people, but the crowd no longer jostled and shouted. Each individual remained by choice to himself an island. It was the silver period of the Age of Splendour and Starlight. Soon only the starlight would remain.

  Toward the end of a great pageant, it may be, the stage is at its most crowded; a sea of faces, brightly lit, greets us even as the curtains begin their final downward sweep. Toward the end of a symphony, it may be, the whole orchestra puts forth its full efforts only a minute before silence falls and the music becomes a memory.

  Throughout one vast arena, silence was falling, the last silence of all.

  1

  You never knew the beginning of that train of events which led you to Yinnisfar and a world of shadows.

  You never knew Shouter by name. He operated far from what most men reckoned as civilization, right out on the rim of the Galaxy, so that on his frequent sweeps from one planet to another he rarely saw stars on both sides of his cabin. There they would be, a whole galaxyful on one side, burning bright and high, and, on the other — a cliff of emptiness that stretched from eternity to eternity, the distant island universes only accentuating the gulf.

  Shouter generally kept his eyes on the stars.

  But not on this trip. Shouter was a spool-seller by trade; his little star craft was packed with rack upon rack of microspools. He stocked all kinds, new and antiquarian; philosophical, sociological, mathematical; if you went through them systematically, you could almost piece together the eon-old history of the Galaxy. It was not, however, on these learned spools that Shouter made his best money; they paid for the fuel, but not the drinks. The spools that really brought in the profits dealt with a subject older than history, and with figures more ineluctable than any in the mathematician’s vocabulary; their subject was Desire. Erotic spools depicting the devices of lust formed Shouter’s stock in trade; and because such items were illegal, Shouter stood in perpetual fear of the customs officials of a hundred worlds.

  Now he was elated. He had just neatly outwitted the petty guardians of morality and sold about half his holdings under their very eyes.

  That he took too much drink in celebration was to influence your entire life. An empty merrit bottle rolled by his feet. It was hot in the small cabin of his ship, and he dozed off, sprawling over the controls...

  Shouter woke muzzily. He sensed something was wrong and his head cleared at once as he peered anxiously into the forward vision tanks. No clouds of accustomed stars were in view. Hurriedly, he flipped on rear vision: there lay the Galaxy like a tinsel disc — far behind him, Shouter swallowed, and checked fuel. Low, but enough to get back on. Fuel, however, was in better supply than air. His oxygen tanks had not been replenished in the hurry of his last departure. He would never get back to the Galaxy alive on the thimbleful that remained.

  With an abyss opening in his stomach, Shouter turned to the forward ports again to examine an object he had previously ignored. Apart from the distant phantoms of other galaxies, it was the only object to relieve the inane ubiquity of vacuum — and it was showing a disc. He checked with his instruments. Undoubtedly, it was a small sun.

  It puzzled Shouter. His astronomical knowledge was negligible, but he knew that according to the laws there was nothing between galaxies; that long funnel of night shut off galaxy from galaxy as surely as the living were cut off from the dead. He could only suppose this sun ahead to be a tramp star; such things were known, but they naturally roved inside the giant lens of the home Galaxy, in conformity with its gravitational pull. Shouter threw the problem aside unso
lved. All that vitally concerned him was whether the sun — wherever it came from — had one or more oxygen planets in attendance.

  It had. The sun was a white dwarf with one planet almost as big as itself. A quick stratospheric test as Shouter glided into breaking orbit showed a breathable nitrogen-oxygen balance. Blessing his luck, the spool-seller sped down and landed. A valley fringed by hills and woods embraced him.

  He walked out of the airlock in good fettle, leaving the compressor-analyzer systems working to insure full tanks of purified oxygen drawn from the planet’s air.

  It was hot outside. Shouter had an immediate impression of newness everywhere. Everything seemed fresh, gleaming. His eyes ached at the vividness.

  The shores of a lake lay a few yards away. He began to walk toward it, conscious at the same time of a vague discomfort in his breathing. With deliberate effort, he inhaled more slowly, thinking the air might be too rich for him.

  Something rose to the surface of the lake a distance away. It looked like a man’s head, but Shouter could not be sure; a mist rising from the surface of the lake, as if the waters were hot, obscured detail.

  The hurt in his lungs became more definite. He was conscious, too, of a smart spreading across his limbs, almost as if the air were too harsh for them. In his eyes, all things acquired a fluttering spectrum. He had had the assurance of his instruments that all was well, but suddenly that assurance meant nothing: he was in pain.

  All in a panic, Shouter turned to get back to his ship. He coughed and fell, dizziness overcoming him. Now he saw it was indeed a man in the misty lake. He shouted for help once only.

  You looked across at him, and at once started to swim in his direction.

  But Shouter was dying. His cry brought blood up into his throat, splashing out over one hand. He choked, attempting to rise again. You climbed naked out of the lake toward him. He saw you, turning his head heavily, and flung one arm out gesturing toward the ship with its imagined safety. As you got to him, he died.

  For a while you knelt by him, considering. Then you turned away and regarded the small starship for the first time. You went over to it, your eyes full of wonder.

  The sun rose and set twenty-five times before you mastered all that Shouter’s ship contained. You touched everything gently, almost reverently. Those microspools meant little individually to you at first, but you were able to refer back to them and piece the jigsaw of their secrets together, until the picture they gave you formed a whole picture. Shouter’s projector was almost worn out before you finished. Then you investigated the ship itself, sucking out its meaning like a thirsty man.

  Your thoughts must have moved strangely in those twenty-five days, like sluice gates opening for the first time, as you became yourself.

  All you learned then was already knowledge; the way in which you pieced it together was genius, but nevertheless it was knowledge already held by many men; the results of research and experience. Only afterward, when you integrated that knowledge, did you make a deduction on your own behalf. The deduction, involving as it did all the myriad lives in the Galaxy, was so awing, so overwhelming, that you tried to evade it.

  You could not; it was inescapable. One clinching fact was the death of Shouter; you knew why he had died. So you had to act, obeying your first moral imperative.

  Just for a moment, you looked at your bright world. You would return to it when duty had been done. You climbed up into Shouter’s ship, punched out a course on the computer, and headed toward the Galaxy.

  2

  You came unarmed into the warring city. Your ship lay abandoned on a hill some miles away. You walked as if among the properties of a dream, carrying your own supplies, and demanded to see the leader of the rebel army. They put innumerable difficulties in your way, but eventually you stood before him because none could gainsay you.

  The rebel leader was a hard man with an eye missing, and he was busy when you entered. He stared at you with deep mistrust through that single eye; the guards behind him stroked their fusers.

  “I’ll give you three minutes,” One Eye said.

  “I don’t want your time,” you said easily. “I have plenty of my own. I also have a plan bigger than any plan of yours. Do you wish me to show you how to subjugate the Region of Yinnisfar?”

  Now One Eye looked at you again. He saw — how should it be said? — he saw you were not as other men, that you were vivider than they. But the Region of Yinnisfar lay long light years away, impregnable, in the heart of the Galaxy; for twice ten million years its reign had been undisputed among twice ten million planets.

  “You’re mad!” One Eye said. “Get out! Our objective is to conquer this city — not a galaxy.”

  You did not move. Why did the guards not act then? Why did not One Eye shoot you down before you had begun your task?

  “This civil war you wage here is fruitless,” you said. “What are you fighting for? A city. The next street! A powerhouse! These are spoils fit only for scavengers. I offer you the wealth of Yinnisfar!”

  One Eye stood up, showing his teeth. The unkempt hair on his neck rose like prickles. His leather cheeks turned mauve. He jerked up his fuser and thrust it toward your face. You did nothing; there was nothing you needed to do. Confounded, One Eye sat down again. He had not met such relentless indifference to threats before, and was impressed. “Owlenj is only a poor planet with a long history of oppression,” he muttered. “But it is my world. I have to fight for it and the people on it, to protect their rights and liberties. I admit that a man of my tactical ability deserves a better command; possibly when we’ve brought this city to its knees...”

  Because time was on your side, you had patience. Because you had patience, you listened to One Eye. His talk was at once grandiose and petty; he spoke largely of the triumph of human rights and narrowly of the shortage of trained soldiers. He wanted heaven on earth, but he was a platoon short.

  He was a man who won respect from his fellows — or fear, if not respect. Yet his principles had been old-fashioned a million millennia ago, before the beginnings of space travel. They had worn wafer thin, used over and over again by countless petty generals: the need for force, the abolition of injustice, the belief that right would win through. You listened with a chill pity, aware that the age-old and majestic intricacies of the Self-perpetuating War had shrunk to this pocket of trouble on Owlenj.

  When he stopped orating, you told One Eye your plan for conquering Yinnisfar. You told him that living on Owlenj, on the cold rim of the Galaxy, he could have no idea of the richness of those central worlds; that all the fables the children of Owlenj learned in their meagre beds did not convey one-tenth of the wealth of the Suzerain of Yinnisfar; that every man there had his destiny and happiness guarded imperishably.

  “Well, we were always underprivileged out here,” growled One Eye. “What can anyone here do against the power of the Region?’

  So you told him, unsmilingly, that there was one aspect in which Yinnisfar was inferior; it could not, in all its systems, command a general who displayed the sagacity and fearlessness that One Eye was renowned for; its peoples had lost their old lusty arrogance and had declined into mere reverie-begetters.

  “All that is so,” One Eye admitted reluctantly, “though I have never cared to say so myself. They are a decadent lot!”

  “Decadent!” you exclaimed. “They are decadent beyond all belief. They hang like a giant overripe fruit, waiting to drop and splash.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Listen. How long has there been peace throughout the Galaxy — except, of course, for your little difference of opinion here? For millions of years, is that not so? Is it not so peaceful that even interstellar trade has dwindled almost to nothing? I tell you, my friend, the mighty nations of the stars have nodded off to sleep! Their warriors, their technicians, have been untested for generations. Their science rusts beneath a pool of complacency!”

  Now you had One Eye on his feet again. This time h
e was yours, the first of your list of conquests. He let out a roar of excitement.

  “By Thraldemener, it is as you say!” he shouted. “They wouldn’t know how to fight. They are degenerate! Come, there is no time to be lost. We will begin the liberation of the peoples of Yinnisfar tomorrow, my friend. Why couldn’t I have thought of the idea myself?”

  “Wait!” you said. You touched his tattered sleeve as he came around the desk; he felt something of your vitality course through him, and waited obediently. “If Owlenj is to conquer, it must be united. Your forces are not sufficient in themselves to match the dying might of the Region. The civil war must end.”

  At this One Eye frowned, looked uncertain. Above all else he had wanted to reduce this little city to ashes.

  “You can’t stop a civil war just like that,” he protested.

  “You and I go and see the enemy commander,” you said.

  And although he protested and swore, that was what you and One Eye did.

  Treading carefully over the debris, you left by what had been the West Gate and came to the improvised shields of lead and sand which marked One Eye’s present forward position. Here One Eye began to argue again; you silenced him. With one man to accompany you and bear the white flag of truce, you put on a radiation suit as One Eye had done and climbed out into the street.

  This had once been a fine avenue. Now the tall exoquag trees were splintered like bone, and the fronts of many buildings demolished. Several robotanks lay locked together on the scarred pavements. Nothing moved. But as you walked, you must have been aware of the unseen eyes of the enemy watching you behind their levelled sights.

  At the top of the avenue, a mechanical voice halted you and asked you what you wanted. When its attendant echoes had gone chattering away among the ruins, One Eye bellowed out his name and demanded to see the enemy general.

  Within two minutes, a transparent disc using beamed power dropped out of the sky. A door slid open and the mechanical voice shouted, “Please get in.”