by John Brunner
Meantime the planet strained and sweated and creaked.
“Do I understand because I came close to understanding Shyalee?”
That was a fraction of himself-as-was—barely enough to formulate the question.
But there was not enough of Shyalee in the dramaturge to know what he was talking/thinking about.
Awed, Dr Lem watched the spectacle on the screens. On the downlands of Hom the silver-tailed deer-like creatures fled from the heat which made the ghul-nut trees crackle into flame. The Plateau of Blaw cracked and trembled and cracked again, and the neat orchards, the tidy fields of Rhee scorched, convulsed, tossed their plants to the wind and let go of their rich ancient soil in the form of dust.
Meantime the image of the sun, on the day side, was perceptibly smaller.
Dr Lem nodded. Yes. What he had long loved was dying. And of its own free will.
He caught a glimpse, through a remote which had not previously been activated, of a tribe of wilders on a hillside, dancing exultantly as though their whole bodies had been caught up in a colossal shared orgasm. Two or three children stared at them dazedly, and one whimpered for food. But to the dramaturge that was irrelevant, as though a cell of skin had been damaged through the failure of a microscopic capillary.
The sun grew smaller yet in the sky, and darkness blotted out the blue.
He did not look at him, but was aware of him, lying on the yellow floor apparently unconscious.
So far, so good… except that there is simply not the energy for the dream to come true.
(That was recognisable as himself, colouring the—the concepts. Not words. Words were too small to communicate with this incredible mind.)
Like a man running with a gash in his femoral artery, losing so much blood at every step that no matter were he the galaxy’s finest athlete he must fall before the finish.
The planet bled. Heat roared from cracks in the bed of the Ocean of Scand. Mountains crashed into valleys. The great desert of Kralgak began to slide away from the geographical relationship it had maintained for ten millennia, as though its friction against the northern and southern continents had abruptly become less than its friction against the molten core below.
If I had enough contact with my body, I would weep. It makes me afraid, it makes me terrified, to see this happen!
The planet was far from its orbit now, curling outward towards the bleak deeps of space, and the Earth-sent monitors and remotes paced it faithfully. The merest quiver of its dying agony must be noted, studied, interpreted…
Marc wanted, unexpectedly, to scream. More than he wanted to weep. But that was a brief horror. It ended with the moment at which the Mutine Mandala ceased to shine. The roiling clouds of smoke and dust from the volcanoes had blotted out even the immensely magnified solar radiation which Chart’s satellites had caught and concentrated for it.
It was like stepping from a hot to an icy planet on a single stride across the go-board. And there was a—a voice? Not quite. A personality. A presence. (All this was being remembered in the brain belonging to Marc Simon. It might never be fully understandable. It might be the raw material, one day, for a poem. It might be the making of a style which would enable tens of millions of people to say, “Ah, that’s by Marc Simon!” But it was also as cruel as a hot branding-iron, and the message he could read as though it were flayed into his skin told him that it would scar him for ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever…)
They built that Mandala as you build computers. You understand?
Yes.
I am using a person you called Gregory Chart. I would have used the one you called Morag Feng. Only she was used before, and she is so tainted with the now-vanished message of the Mandala—
Yes.
This is the story of the Mutine Epics. It is a story without an ending. Only a conclusion. There will be nothing left, in a very little while, except a cold bare ball of rock shrouded in chill mist, and certain strange relics which performed certain actions.
Yes.
(It seemed to be seeking reassurance from him, every few moments, asking that he at least would remember and recount.)
Once there was a planet whose people called it Yan. It was fertile, hospitable, even beautiful. A species evolved on it which was so far beyond your little isolated individuality that you can have no conception…
Go on. You lost me.
No. I was reconsidering. You do have a conception. It is what frightens me.
Frightens?
Yes. You are a poet, as Gregory Chart is/was an artist (but not will be because he is burning out). There is a mode of communication among you which is like that among my/our species, but which cannot take control of you. I am dying because while your dreams lure you my/our dreams had the power to drive us.
I think I understand that.
Yes, you do. And because you understand it is right that your isolated, lonely, separated scraps of protoplasm should do what I/we failed to do.
If it had been possible, the planet would have begged for mercy. Its crust was skidding on its core, the primeval magma was bursting out like arterial blood, its last few surviving inhabitants were struggling to breathe. On its tormented surface a human-built impervium dome bobbed like a bubble on a rough river. The Smor had long ago been choked with debris and carrion. One after another the remotes were failing as landslides overwhelmed them, or crevasses opened and swallowed them up. Prell had gone to join its predecessors under water, but this water had been boiling, now was cooling or seething or…
The dream broke you.
Because the dreaming part of me/us has never had to fight the harsh intractable reality of matter and energy. Do you see?
Yes. For you, who were the sum of the lower ganglia of a multi-million species, the universe was a concept, to be toyed with. Survival was dealt with by your separate members. So was hard work. So was reproduction. In other words…
Think it. I am past being insulted. I am reduced to a series of resonances in the badly-adapted circuits of a human computer, and one point of contact with your species: the failing brain of a once-great artist, whom I infected with my own vision… and burned out, as I burned out the victims of my earlier grandiose ambition.
You no longer say/think I/we.
There is no more “we”. What oxygen in the air of the planet Yan has not been consumed in this colossal burning will shortly fall on its rocks as snow. We are half a lightyear from the sun it used to circle. Complete the thought you had in mind.
You’re insane.
If sanity consists in doing what the universe permits, then—yes.
The last of the remotes failed. The informat said, “It is necessary now to convert to survival mode. Do not be alarmed. Adequate supplies and protective equipment are available to ensure your safety.”
Dr Lem was shaking as though he had been an inch from death and not realised until the danger was past. His teeth chattered and his eyes were watering. He could barely make out Marc’s body writhing on the floor. But none of the medical automatics had come to attend it.
It is something to have had a dream.
It is nothing to have become that dream. And not even a dream in myself. I am a fading echo in computer circuits, poorly adapted to resonate with my type of consciousness. Were it not for the minimal cerebral activity I can still detect in Gregory Chart, I would already have been—
Stop.
Marc sat up slowly, every limb aching as though he had been whipped and then crushed under very heavy weights. He heard Dr Lem say, “Marc—?”
And put his head in his hands, and wept, for Shyalee, for the dramaturges of Yan, for the Mutine Epics, for the dream that became the dreamer and when the time came to wake ceased to exist.
A voice said, “Malfunctions aboard the ship of Gregory Chart passed the permissible percentage. An automatic survival programme has been instituted. Requests for emergency assistance are being automatically broadcast.”
“Marc?�
� Dr Lem said.
Marc looked at him and saw that he was whiter than paper. He said, “It was like what Chart did on Hyrax. There was a dream. It ended, and it had to be paid for. Only this time the dreamer was aware that it was dreaming. It was able to plan during the dream how to avoid payment.”
“I don’t understand,” Dr Lem said, staring.
“Nor do I,” Marc said. He felt his cheeks. They were wet. He looked at the little glistening drops he had transferred to his fingertips and found them very funny. He began to laugh. After a moment Dr Lem joined in, in a high old-man’s neigh, with the hysteria of relief at having not after all been part of the dream which now was ended.
XXI
“You know Marc better than I do—or the automatics. Is he all right?”
Softly, from Trita Garsonova, that extraordinary woman who had so unexpectedly brought the support and comfort of grandmother Earth across the parsecs when everyone on Yan imagined it to be out of reach.
Dr Lem cast a worried glance in Marc’s direction. He seemed to be sitting there quite calmly… but of course he had undergone terrible strains during the death of the planet Yan—torn apart by its own internal fires, then frozen in the wastes of interstellar space, as a result of the release of forces which humans admitted they could not control. And of those who had been most directly exposed to such forces, at least two were unlikely to recover. Both Gregory Chart and Morag Feng were completely insane.
“We’re worried,” Garsonova whispered. “He had such an emotional commitment to the Yanfolk.”
“Like Chart?”
“Oh, on the contrary! Chart’s commitment was only to himself; it was his ambition to be admired by us, by mankind, when he had transcended our natural limitations and conquered the mental territory of another race. When he found he couldn’t… But Marc is different.”
“Yes,” Dr Lem said. “Marc is different.”
And at about the same instant, Marc thought, “Ah, of course—I’m on Earth…?”
It seemed that he had a moment ago re-connected with his physical personality, after a period of non-time, after mere interval. He tried not to show alarm as he groped for memory. A go-board trip? Logically, yes. Since he was on Earth.
And not just on Earth. In a committee-hall of the High Planetary Senate. He was distantly aware of that fact, as though he had been told it by someone he didn’t know well and didn’t particularly trust. He stared in vague surprise at the high-roofed hall, at the people present—of all skin-colours, wearing an amazing range of garb, each seated at an informat-desk which tapped such stores of data that it was rather like combining them all into a collective… organism?
“Hello, Marc,” a voice said without sound. Deep in his brain, on a level he was not consciously in control of.
But there was a familiar accent to the message. It reminded him of a slender, graceful body pressed to his own, uttered kinesthetic and tactile signals and a scent like night-breeze drifting off the orchards of Rhee.
He felt himself, in Earthside clothing, his Earthly weight pressing him into a padded chair, one of a whole line of people facing these committee-members under an illuminated ceiling designed to duplicate Earthly sunlight. It was comforting to be so thoroughly reinforced by all the ancient racially-familiar symbols. So comforting, indeed, that he was able to answer.
“Hello.”
“You know what I am. If you want me to be more precisely Shyalee, for example…?”
But she was a few bones, charred, then frozen. He made a negative.
“She was never you. Even at the end, her consciousness drowned out with sheyashrim, she wasn’t you.”
“Define me, then.”
“What little of the dream of Yan survived the extinction of the species that created you, and then the intolerable pressure of a starship computer which rejected you—and which now must endure the reflex prejudices of another race.”
The… Could one use the term? Yes, it was inescapable! The dramaturge said, “Also Chart. He was arrogant, and tried to fight me. He had intended to use the Yanfolk as a stepping-stone to an ambition of his own. You are humble. You are the greater artist.”
“Nonsense!” Marc snapped—silently. “Merely a younger man. Does age mean nothing to you at all?”
There was a pause. During it, Marc noted that someone who had helped co-ordinate data concerning the fate of Yan was delivering a prepared speech. He ignored the flow of words. He had something in his memory which transcended them.
“Yes,” the presence inside his head indicated abruptly. “The proportions are different, though… You do understand what Chart originally overlooked, the most obvious explanation for the thousand-year quiescence of the Yanfolk?”
“I’ve talked about this with Dr Lem. He sensed it from the moment he arrived there. Exhaustion.” And, hastily, he added, “What I and so many others mistook for fulfilment.”
“In a way it was… but exhaustion is closer. Superorganism or not, I/we was/were worn out. It is not to be regretted that I/we died.”
“?”
“Of course. What survives is only your awareness of what I/we were. I found something relevant in your mind; here!” And, as though a tape were being replayed: the memory of talking to Dr Lem, speculating about the chain of comprehension which might ultimately link all the intelligent species in the universe. It shone briefly in his mind like a necklace, every jewel of which was more brilliant than the Mutine Flash. He almost cried out for the shock.
At once melancholy darkened the vision, and he realised why. There were certain species doomed never to know whether the vision had a chance of coming true.
“I will now call on Marc Simon for his subjective analysis of…”
“I sense you appreciate why the planet had to die. But can you make them understand too?”
“That’s not up to me. That’s up to you.”
He was already rising to his feet, staring out over the serious, intent faces before him. All strangers. But all the personification of that comforting grandmother, Earth: isolated, perhaps stupid, certainly insensitive and beyond doubt inquisitive simians, worried by having lately heard about a creature, or a being, which regarded the displacement of heavenly bodies from their orbits as no more than a supreme effort of will, like a man lifting a heavy rock.
And it was up to him to make them see not only what was wrong with that approach to the universe, but also what had—after a fashion—been right about it…
He began to speak.
It was his voice that was heard in the hall, but it was not his mind that shaped the message. He listened, along with everyone else—though only he perceived the movements of tongue and lips, sensed the strangeness of having to draw breath (Shyalee who had not needed to interrupt her kisses)…
“The real problem was this,” he heard himself say. “There was only one intelligence on Yan. And a single consciousness is simply not various enough to cope with the universe.”
There were nods around the hall. The data-processing devices which mankind had adopted as prosthetics to underpin its own fallible reasoning power had presumably already pointed out something of the kind, just as the informat on Yan had known about shrimashey and would have told anyone and everyone about it had not the relevant data-circuits been cunningly blocked.
“By ten thousand years ago this intelligence, confined to its own resources, had exhausted the possibilities of its own planet and wanted to explore the local galaxy. It had treated Yan exactly as a human might treat his home: in other words, made it over to conform with a set of ideal preferences. It had devised the telescope, but the techniques which led us to the starship and the go-board were down an avenue of knowledge it had not discovered. To transport itself to the stars it could imagine no other vehicle than its home planet, and to launch the planet it could conceive no other means than conversion of the kinetic energy of its moon into propulsive force.
“To help the individuals of its species survive the pr
ojected voyage, it fined down their characteristics, sacrificed their imagination and initiative in favour of a totally stable, perfectly self-regulating reflex process, ideal just so long as the goals of the race were so far ahead of those of the individual that the latter were negligible.
“Only the moon broke apart.
“The kinetic energy which should have catapulted the planet out of its solar system paid no greater dividend than earthquakes, tidal waves and the formation of the Ring.
“If there’s a human experience which corresponds to the shock of that event, it can only be amnesia. The—the Yan, one has to say, considering it was a world-wide awareness—the Yan, then, became… unconscious. Its components systematised what they recalled into obscure poems, but they could no longer even interpret the data compressed into the Mutine Flash, which was what might be called a set of notes, prepared in just the same way a human might write down references, or programme a computer, before tackling a particularly complex and demanding task, to inform him at every stage not merely what had to be done next but what had been done up until now.
“Only the pattern in the Mutine Flash was as much a conscious process as the web of neural currents in the brain. It grew frustrated, and of its own accord began to search for ways to complete its assignment. It found me, when I ran the crazy risk of witnessing the Flash from inside the Mandala; similarly, it found Morag Feng, and through her Gregory Chart.
“By the time the Yan consciousness was functioning fully again, though, humans had been on the planet for a long while. And humans, and the human artefacts it investigated, such as the computer from Tubalcain built into Chart’s ship, were calculating with concepts far beyond its grasp. It could never, for instance, have imagined the go-board—not because it was incapable of understanding the physical principle, but because it could not envisage the distribution of its parts among the planets of scores of different suns.
“Yet it could not bear to believe that these sons of monkeys were intrinsically its superiors. It wanted to make some colossal gesture to impress them. Unfortunately there was only one such gesture in its repertoire, and it failed. You might compare it to what Chart did on Hyrax. A dream was brought to life, but it had to end with an awakening in the real world. The real world rejected it. Natural law would not permit the hurling of the planet Yan through null-space to another sun. The planet broke!