This Way to the End Times

by Robert Silverberg

  And what was this familiar song, playing on top of everything else?

  “Dhíyo yó nah pracodáyāt,” Uki chanted, her face composed.

  It’s her. Ashima smiled. The girl had adopted Ashima’s favorite mantra. “Well done,” she said. She paused and allowed herself to glimpse the unlikely beauty of the scene. Despite the crowds, she felt still, at peace.

  Unbidden, words from the fifth and final chapter of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad flowered in Ashima’s consciousness: The prayers to the sun by a dying person—and wasn’t that her in this moment?

  The face of truth is covered with a golden vessel, and so I cannot see the truth behind. Yes, the face of truth. That face was close now. Ashima could feel its divine breath upon her soul. But she could not see it.

  At that moment the deity Surya returned in full glory, a great eye ablaze in the sky. The world seemed to shift and sigh in relief. With all of existence in a state of permanent temporal eclipse, the end of this actual eclipse was even more reassuring than usual.

  Without thinking about it, Ashima reached forward and caressed Uki’s hair, dank from the lake. It smelled rich, like jasmine oil. Minutes passed, or hours. “It is time,” one of them said, and they both stirred. They retreated from the lake, its waters shimmering with reflected afternoon light. Every instant brought impossible, yet inevitable, changes. The weather, the people, the very lake, all transmuted into nearly infinite versions of themselves, all of them existing at once. I can see only the glare of the vessel of gold that is covering the light of truth. Ashima imagined this truth deep within the lake’s waters, in a secret place untouched by the tides of transformation. She dared not look up to see what machines or catastrophes were creating the terrible thunders and darting shadows high above.

  O glorious one! Lift this lid of gold. Withdraw your rays. Uncover this lid and enable me to behold you as you are in essence, so that I may commune myself with your being.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Uki said, perhaps speaking for her own sake as much as for Ashima’s. They moved away from the central mass of people.

  “Let us sing to Shiva of conquering death,” Ashima said. She pulled the girl towards her.

  “The future devours the present,” the girl said. “The world is forever ending, and the sound of its death is a single word: Now. I can help you see the truth inside the golden vessel. Join me.”

  Ashima considered her words. “‘In my beginning is my end.’ What greater truth is there?”

  “In the water, you meditated on the nature of the present moment. But I could tell there were other thoughts inside you, deep within, which you did not allow to surface.”

  “Yes,” Ashima admitted. “Distractions.”

  “They were memories, Ashima. Memories of yourself as a young girl, about my age, being taught to perform charitable acts, no matter the circumstance.”

  Was that so? Ashima had to concede the possibility. Uki’s words created a strange lifting of energies inside her, as though the eclipse had only now truly ended. This realignment of internal forces pushed against her exhaustion, budging it this way and that. Ashima closed her eyes. “Let us sing the Mahamrityunjaya mantra. Oṁ tryambakam yajāmahe sugandhim puṣṭi-vardhanam—”

  The girl joined in, following her rhythms. Ashima pressed the girl against her chest. Their voices became as one and they sang and sang, and when the words ran out they merely hummed, and when the music ran out, their breathing created its own harmonious melody.

  At last Ashima opened her eyes.

  The golden vessel had lifted, and the face of truth was before her.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Uki’s eyes widened and her thin lips parted.

  In the eternity of the instant that followed, the old woman and the girl ceased to be.

  LAST AND FIRST MEN

  — OLAF STAPLEDON —

  EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

  OLAF STAPLEDON’S LAST AND FIRST MEN, first published in 1930, is surely the ultimate end-of-the-world novel. Not a novel, actually, for its form is not that of fiction but that of a chronicle of the next two billion years of human life; it has no real plot, no characters except as incidental figures as the long narrative of the human race’s future unfolds, no dialogue. In form it is a work of history, of sorts, a sober and solemn account of the passing eons to come, written in much the same tone as might be used for a chronicle of our ancestors’ way of life in the Pleistocene or of the development of constitutional theory in Great Britain. It’s a sign of Stapledon’s great artistry that he manages to make his history of the future such compelling reading. He does it by taking the entire unimaginably vast future as his subject—and then by imagining the unimaginable.

  Though he is telling us of the colossal events to come, it is clear right away that Stapledon is not really a prophet, for the early chapters of this extraordinary book are an attempt to depict the very near future, the next few hundred years, and right from the start his picture of what is imminent in the world is awry. Writing in 1930, he fails to foresee the rise of Hitler, speaks of the Germany of the mid-twentieth century as the most enlightened nation of Europe, and envisions a horrendous war between England and France that leaves both countries devastated. He misses the development of atomic energy, too, giving us only the invention of an explosive weapon so terrible that everyone agrees to destroy the formula for it, and does. And he sees America and China as locked in a strange alliance as the two great powers of the world three or four hundred years hence.

  Not prophecy, no. But a work of great poetic power. And the farther he gets from our own time, the more he astonishes us with his imaginative force. A series of catastrophes makes most of the world uninhabitable and brings the total collapse of our civilization; but then a mutation he calls the Second Men emerges, a species of big-brained geniuses who live for hundreds of years, only to be replaced, ultimately, by the Third Men, “slightly more than half the stature of their predecessors,” with immense silken ears and “great lean hands, on which were six versatile fingers, six antennae of living steel. . . .”

  At this point the book is just past the halfway mark, and Stapledon has a long way to go. When he tells us in Chapter Five that we will now skip over the next ten million years, because it was a time of barbarism and stasis, we understand that we are entering a visionary dream. In the remaining pages he unfurls one human species after another, eighteen in all, some of them creatures that we would scarcely recognize as human (the pigeon-sized Seventh Men, for example, with leathery bat-like wings). Our world is destroyed; mankind moves along to Venus and then, in the time of the godlike Eighteenth Men two billion years hence, to Neptune. But now the end has come. A nearby star begins to send out lethal radiation; and, as a representative of the Eighteenth Men, traveling in time, explains to our twentieth-century narrator, all of space in the vicinity of our sun will become uninhabitable in 30,000 years, and there is no hope of escape. It is the ultimate apocalypse; and, in the lyrical epilogue to this extraordinary, even unique book, Stapledon speaks through the Eighteenth Men to provide the finest possible statement to mark the end of the human race. It is that epilogue, reprinted here, that makes what I think is the most fitting conclusion, as well, to this collection of dark but not always pessimistic visions of catastrophes to come.

  LAST AND FIRST MEN

  — OLAF STAPLEDON —

  CHAPTER XVI. THE LAST OF MAN

  I. SENTENCE OF DEATH

  OURS HAS BEEN ESSENTIALLY A philosophical age, in fact the supreme age of philosophy. But a great practical problem has also concerned us. We have had to prepare for the task of preserving humanity during a most difficult period which was calculated to begin about one hundred million years hence, but might, in certain circumstances, be sprung upon us at very short notice. Long ago the human inhabitants of Venus believed that already in their day the sun was about to enter the “white dwarf” phase, and that the time would therefore soon come when their world would be f
rost-bound. This calculation was unduly pessimistic; but we know now that, even allowing for the slight delay caused by the great collision, the solar collapse must begin at some date astronomically not very distant. We had planned that during the comparatively brief period of the actual shrinkage, we would move our planet steadily nearer to the sun, until finally it should settle in the narrowest possible orbit.

  Man would then be comfortably placed for a very long period. But in the fullness of time there would come a far more serious crisis. The sun would continue to cool, and at last man would no longer be able to live by means of solar radiation. It would become necessary to annihilate matter to supply the deficiency. The other planets might be used for this purpose, and possibly the sun itself. Or, given the sustenance for so long a voyage, man might boldly project his planet into the neighborhood of some younger star. Thenceforth, perhaps, he might operate upon a far grander scale. He might explore and colonize all suitable worlds in every corner of the galaxy, and organize himself as a vast community of minded worlds. Even (so we dreamed) he might achieve intercourse with other galaxies. It did not seem impossible that man himself was the germ of the world-soul, which, we still hope, is destined to awake for a while before the universal decline, and to crown the eternal cosmos with its due of knowledge and admiration, fleeting yet eternal. We dared to think that in some far distant epoch the human spirit, clad in all wisdom, power, and delight, might look back upon our primitive age with a certain respect; no doubt with pity also and amusement, but none the less with admiration for the spirit in us, still only half awake, and struggling against great disabilities. In such a mood, half pity, half admiration, we ourselves look back upon the primitive mankinds.

  Our prospect has now suddenly and completely changed, for astronomers have made a startling discovery, which assigns to man a speedy end. His existence has ever been precarious. At any stage of his career he might easily have been exterminated by some slight alteration of his chemical environment, by a more than usually malignant microbe, by a radical change of climate, or by the manifold effects of his own folly. Twice already he has been almost destroyed by astronomical events. How easily might it happen that the solar system, now rushing through a somewhat more crowded region of the galaxy, should become entangled with, or actually strike, a major astronomical body, and be destroyed. But fate, as it turns out, has a more surprising end in store for man.

  Not long ago an unexpected alteration was observed to be taking place in a near star. Through no discoverable cause, it began to change from white to violet, and increase in brightness. Already it has attained such extravagant brilliance that, though its actual disk remains a mere point in our sky, its dazzling purple radiance illuminates our nocturnal landscapes with hideous beauty. Our astronomers have ascertained that this is no ordinary “nova,” that it is not one of those stars addicted to paroxysms of brilliance. It is something unprecedented, a normal star suffering from a unique disease, a fantastic acceleration of its vital process, a riotous squandering of the energy which should have remained locked within its substance for aeons. At the present rate it will be reduced either to an inert cinder or to actual annihilation in a few thousand years. This extraordinary event may possibly have been produced by unwise tamperings on the part of intelligent beings in the star’s neighborhood. But, indeed, since all matter at very high temperature is in a state of unstable equilibrium, the cause may have been merely some conjunction of natural circumstances.

  The event was first regarded simply as an intriguing spectacle. But further study roused a more serious interest. Our own planet, and therefore the sun also, was suffering a continuous and increasing bombardment of ethereal vibrations, most of which were of incredibly high frequency, and of unknown potentiality. What would be their effect upon the sun? After some centuries, certain astronomical bodies in the neighborhood of the deranged star were seen to be infected with its disorder. Their fever increased the splendor of our night sky, but it also confirmed our fears. We still hoped that the sun might prove too distant to be seriously influenced, but careful analysis now showed that this hope must be abandoned. The sun’s remoteness might cause a delay of some thousands of years before the cumulative effects of the bombardment could start the disintegration; but sooner or later the sun itself must be infected. Probably within thirty thousand years life will be impossible anywhere within a vast radius of the sun, so vast a radius that it is quite impossible to propel our planet away fast enough to escape before the storm can catch us.

  2. BEHAVIOR OF THE CONDEMNED

  THE DISCOVERY OF THIS DOOM kindled in us unfamiliar emotions. Hitherto humanity had seemed to be destined for a very long future, and the individual himself had been accustomed to look forward to very many thousands of years of personal life, ending in voluntary sleep. We had of course often conceived, and even savored in imagination, the sudden destruction of our world. But now we faced it as a fact. Outwardly every one behaved with perfect serenity, but inwardly every mind was in turmoil. Not that there was any question of our falling into panic or despair, for in this crisis our native detachment stood us in good stead. But inevitably some time passed before our minds became properly adjusted to the new prospect, before we could see our fate outlined clearly and beautifully against the cosmic background.

  Presently, however, we learned to contemplate the whole great saga of man as a completed work of art, and to admire it no less for its sudden and tragic end than for the promise in it which was not to be fulfilled. Grief was now transfigured wholly into ecstasy. Defeat, which had oppressed us with a sense of man’s impotence and littleness among the stars, brought us into a new sympathy and reverence for all those myriads of beings in the past out of whose obscure strivings we had been born. We saw the most brilliant of our own race and the lowliest of our prehuman forerunners as essentially spirits of equal excellence, though cast in diverse circumstances. When we looked round on the heavens, and at the violet splendor which was to destroy us, we were filled with awe and pity, awe for the inconceivable potentiality of this bright host, pity for its self-thwarting effort to fulfil itself as the universal spirit.

  At this stage it seemed that there was nothing left for us to do but to crowd as much excellence as possible into our remaining life, and meet our end in the noblest manner. But now there came upon us once more the rare experience of racial mentality. For a whole Neptunian year every individual lived in an enraptured trance, in which, as the racial mind, he or she resolved many ancient mysteries and saluted many unexpected beauties. This ineffable experience, lived through under the shadow of death, was the flower of man’s whole being. But I can tell nothing of it, save that when it was over we possessed, even as individuals, a new peace, in which, strangely but harmoniously, were blended grief, exaltation, and god-like laughter.

  In consequence of this racial experience we found ourselves faced with two tasks which had not before been contemplated. The one referred to the future, the other to the past.

  In respect of the future, we are now setting about the forlorn task of disseminating among the stars the seeds of a new humanity. For this purpose we shall make use of the pressure of radiation from the sun, and chiefly the extravagantly potent radiation that will later be available. We are hoping to devise extremely minute electro-magnetic “wave-systems,” akin to normal protons and electrons, which will be individually capable of sailing forward upon the hurricane of solar radiation at a speed not wholly incomparable with the speed of light itself. This is a difficult task. But, further, these units must be so cunningly inter-related that, in favorable conditions, they may tend to combine to form spores of life, and to develop, not indeed into human beings, but into lowly organisms with a definite evolutionary bias toward the essentials of human nature. These objects we shall project from beyond our atmosphere in immense quantities at certain points of our planet’s orbit, so that solar radiation may carry them toward the most promising regions of the galaxy. The chance that any of them will su
rvive to reach their destination is small, and still smaller the chance that any of them will find a suitable environment. But if any of this human seed should fall upon good ground, it will embark, we hope, upon a somewhat rapid biological evolution, and produce in due season whatever complex organic forms are possible in its environment. It will have a very real physiological bias toward the evolution of intelligence. Indeed it will have a much greater bias in that direction than occurred on the Earth in those sub-vital atomic groupings from which terrestrial life eventually sprang.

  It is just conceivable, then, that by extremely good fortune man may still influence the future of this galaxy, not directly but through his creature. But in the vast music of existence the actual theme of mankind now ceases for ever. Finished, the long reiterations of man’s history; defeated, the whole proud enterprise of his maturity. The stored experience of many mankinds must sink into oblivion, and today’s wisdom must vanish.

  The other task which occupies us, that which relates to the past, is one which may very well seem to you nonsensical.

  We have long been able to enter into past minds and participate in their experience. Hitherto we have been passive spectators merely, but recently we have acquired the power of influencing past minds. This seems an impossibility; for a past event is what it is, and how can it conceivably be altered at a subsequent date, even in the minutest respect?

  Now it is true that past events are what they are, irrevocably; but in certain cases some feature of a past event may depend on an event in the far future. The past event would never have been as it actually was (and is, eternally), if there had not been going to be a certain future event, which, though not contemporaneous with the past event, influences it directly in the sphere of eternal being. The passage of events is real, and time is the successiveness of passing events; but though events have passage, they have also eternal being. And in certain rare cases mental events far separated in time determine one another directly by way of eternity.