Galaxies Like Grains of Sand

by Brian W Aldiss

  But the Highest brushed the suggestion aside, snapping his fingers. “You are a braggart!” he said energetically. “You waste my time, and there is little enough left. Guards!”

  The guards advanced in a half-circle, eager at an unprecedented chance to try their art on living flesh.

  “This is the sort of demonstration I had in mind,” you said, turning to meet them.

  Fourteen men comprised the guard. Their uniforms were laced, epauleted and braided; but their antique swords looked functional.

  Without hesitation you advanced toward the nearest soldier. He, with equal decision, brought down his sword with a heavy blow at your head. You flung up your arm and caught the blade full on it.

  The sword rang and crumbled into bits, as if turned to dust. The swordsman fell back in alarm.

  The other guards were on you, thrusting and slicing. Their swords crumpled and snapped against you; not one but wrecked itself against your body.

  When it was realized that you had — how would they think of it? — a secret power, they fell back. You saw then that from a balcony the snout of a machine was trained on you.

  “Before you are annihilated,” the Highest said, glancing pointedly up at the balcony, “tell me what form of trickery this is.”

  “Try out your own trick first,” you suggested. To hasten matters, you stepped toward the Highest. You had taken perhaps two paces before the machine on the balcony burst into action. A fusillade of beta pellets screamed toward you, only to fall uselessly to the ground at your feet.

  At last the Highest seemed daunted.

  “Who are you? Where do you come from?”

  “That is what I wish to tell you,” you said. “What I have to say must go out to every one of your people; when a great history ends, it ends most fittingly with everyone knowing why; a man who perishes without reason makes a mockery of all he stands for.

  “I come from a new world beyond this Galaxy — new because there the process of creation still goes on. New galaxies are forming out of the fathomless night, rising out of the margins of emptiness. My planet is new, and I am the first man upon it; it is nameless.”

  Welded said, “So all you told me back on Owlenj was true?”

  “Certainly,” you said. You did not bother to tell him how you had learned to pilot the dead Shouter’s ship. You turned instead to Prim. “Do you recall a conversation we once had about evolution? You claimed that man was its ultimate product.”

  Prim nodded.

  “Man is evolution’s fittest fruit — in this Galaxy,” you told him. You looked at the Highest, at Welded, at One Eye. Without smiling, you said, “You are evolution’s highest flowering here. Think of the multitudes of experiments nature undertook before evolving you. She started with amino acids, then the amoeba, a simple cell... She was like a child at school then, but all this while she has been learning. I use analogies without subscribing to the pathetic fallacy, understand. Many of her experiments — even late ones like the sentient vagabond cells — are failures; man, on the whole, is her best so far.

  “In the new galaxy from which I come, she begins with man. I am the earliest, most primitive form of life in my galaxy — the new amoeba!”

  You went on to tell them how in you radical changes had been made; you were, in truth, a different species. Your waste system was fundamentally altered. Your digestive processes had been changed. Genetically, not only were the old characteristics transferable from one generation to another; walking and language genes insured that those simple human skills were also inheritable. The psychological basis of your mind had been improved; much of man’s old random emotionalism had been eliminated entirely. Yet you had a range of altruism and identity with things surpassing man’s capabilities.

  The Highest heard you out in silence and then said, “As the first of your — ah — species, how is it you can know so much about yourself!”

  You smiled. It seemed a simple question.

  “Because all our other improvements are merely in some way a modification of the pattern used in man’s designing, I have in addition one priceless gift: an awareness not only of my psychological actions — thoughts, if you will — but of my physiological ones. I can control the working of my every enzyme, see into each last blood cell. I am integrated as you could never be. For instance, diseases can never touch me; I should recognize and check each at its inception. Nor do I freeze in a moment of crisis and get taken over by automatic reflexes; knowing myself, I am, quite literally, my own master. Though you have mastered your environment, you have never mastered yourselves.”

  8

  The Highest came down from his dais.

  “There was enough to worry about before you arrived,” he said. “Though I have lived five centuries, I am as a child again. Why, you must feel quite the superman on Yinnisfar!”

  The derision in his tone pricked.

  “Didn’t you understand me?” you flashed. “In my world, I rank as the amoeba. Should that make me proud? As to what supersedes me — ”

  The Highest raised a manicured hand, and said, “I concede your point; you are suitably humble about your own might.”

  “What’s the good of all this talk?” It was One Eye. He had stood helplessly by with Welded and Prim, his mind filled with fruitless plots of escape. Now he came up to you with a mixture of defiance and cajolery.

  “You got us here, you can get us back,” he said. “And let’s not wait. Get us back to Owlenj if you’re such a superman.”

  You shook your head.

  “You’d be no better off on Owlenj, of that I can assure you,” you told him. “I’m sorry you had to be involved in this, but it’s been no worse for you than hiding out in the ruins of a city. And I’m no superman — ”

  “No superman!” One Eye said angrily. He turned to the Highest and exclaimed, “No superman, he says. Yet he drank down enough poison for an army, he fended off those swords — you saw him! — he withstood a bombardment just then — ”

  “Listen to me!” you interrupted. “Those things belonged to a different principle. Watch this!”

  You walked over to a wall. It was built of solid blocks of marble, polished and selected for their delicate patterning. You placed one hand with extended fingers upon it and pushed; when you withdrew your hand, five short tunnels had been pierced in the marble.

  It was a simple demonstration. They were properly impressed.

  You wiped your hand and returned to them, but they shuffled away from you, their lips pale.

  “Yet I am no stronger than you,” you told them. “The difference is only this: that I come from a freshly created world, new minted by the inexorable processes of continuous creation. And you — come from an old world. Think of your Galaxy. How old is it? You do not know exactly, but you know it is incredibly old. The truth is, it is wearing out, as everything wears out in time. Nothing is meant to last. Ask yourself what everything is made of. A tissue of energies which outcrops and becomes matter. That tissue of energy, since the beginning of time, has been running down, wearing thin. All matter, which is composed of it, has worn thin with it. The great magical batteries of your Galaxy are slowing, so all protons and neutrons lose their polarity. Their charges have run low, they cannot combine as they once used to. Steel has not the strength that paper once possessed, wood is water.”

  Prim interrupted.

  “You’re trying to deceive us!” he told you in a trembling voice. “It’s only you who can pierce marble with a finger, or withstand poison, swords, or bombardment. We would die! Do you take us for fools?”

  “No,” you replied. “You would die, as you say. You are composed of the same exhausted nuclei as everything else; that is exactly why you could not detect this process long ago. I can withstand almost anything you have to offer only because the very stuff of which I am made is new. I am the one fresh factor in an exhausted galaxy.”

  You paused and went over to the Highest. He had become very pale. “This ravening mon
ster we loosed between us out in space — I suppose that merely hastens the exhaustion process?” he asked.

  “Yes. The fabric is torn; the gap widens to embrace your island universe.”

  The Highest closed his eyes. When he raised his lids again, his regard fixed on you with the alertness of a bird.

  “Our poisons cannot affect you,” he said. “Yet you manage to live among us. How can our food nourish you?”

  “I brought my private supply of calories with me when I left my own world. I was not unprepared. I had even to bring oxygen concentrates.”

  You then told the Highest of the effects your unexhausted air had had on Shouter, the spool-seller, how he had been riddled as if by unseen radiations. And you told him how useful Shouter’s microspool library had been.

  “An opportunist,” the Highest said. “My congratulations to you.”

  He pulled at his lip and looked, for a moment, almost amused.

  “Have you a moment to spare, if the question has meaning any longer? Perhaps the others will excuse us.”

  Something in his manner had changed. He motioned to you with a sharp gesture and made for a door. What did you do? You took a last look over your shoulder at the desolate group whose function in life had abruptly vanished, gave One Eye a mocking salute and followed.

  The Highest walked down a corridor at a pace which belied his earlier languor. He flung open another door and you both emerged onto a balcony overlooking the proud city of Nion. A cool evening wind blew; clouds masked the setting sun. The great panorama of avenue and river lay strangely deserted, from distant spires to the pavements of a nearby concourse. Nothing stirred except a fabric far below in a mansion window.

  “How long would this exhaustion process have taken had we not accelerated it?” the Highest asked almost casually, leaning on the rail and looking down.

  “It must have worsened for centuries,” you told him. “It might have gone on for centuries more...”

  You felt a softness for him, and for all men, all the myriads of them, whether they cheated or played fair, loved or hated. All their follies and limitations were forgiven; they were primitives, coming from the dark, fading back into the dark, with a glimpsing of awareness to give poignance.

  The Highest took a deep breath of evening.

  “It’s ending! Now comes the time to adventure into death.”

  He took another lungful of the darkening wind.

  “And you have a ringside seat, my friend. It will indeed be a sight to see. But you must get back before our craft disintegrate. They won’t be capable of carrying you much longer.”

  You said, gently, “Everyone must be told what is happening. That seems imperative.”

  “I will not forget.”

  He turned and faced you.

  “What impulse brought you here? Nostalgia? Curiosity? Pity? What feelings do you have for — us shadows?”

  And what unexpected weakness was it that choked the words in your throat? Why did you turn your face away so that he could not see your eyes?

  “I wanted man to be aware of what is happening to him,” you said at last. “That much was owed him. I — we owed it. You are — our fathers. We are your heirs...”

  He touched you gently, asking in a firm voice, “What should be told to the people of the Galaxy?”

  You looked out over a city now pricked with lights, and up to the evening sky. You found no comfort there or in yourself.

  “Tell them again what a galaxy is,” you said. “Don’t soften it. They are brave. Explain to them once more that there are galaxies like grains of sand, each galaxy a cosmic laboratory for the blind experiments of nature. Explain to them how little individual lives mean compared to the unknown goals of the race. Tell them — tell them that this laboratory is closing. A newer one, with more modern equipment, is opening just down the street.”

  “They shall be told,” the Highest said, his face a shadow as night fell upon the old city and the stars.

  We who have already superseded you record these scenes now in your honour, as you once honoured man. REQUIESCAS IN PACE.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1979, 2001 by Brian Aldiss

  ISBN 978-1-4976-0823-8

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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