Nebula Maker

by Olaf Stapledon

  Nebula Maker

  By Olaf Stapledon

  This undated manuscript was finally published in 1976, but it obviously predates Star Maker’s publication in 1937.

  1. Starlight on a Hill

  2. Creation

  3. The Cosmos is Launched

  4. The Great Nebulae Appear

  5. A Biological Study

  6. Outline of a Strange Mentality

  7. The Social Nebulae

  8. The Martial Groups

  9. The First Cosmical War

  10. Bright Heart

  11. Bright Heart and Fire Bolt

  12. Death of Bright Heart

  13. Fire Bolt

  14. The Last Phase of the Nebular Era

  15. Interlude

  1

  STARLIGHT ON A HILL

  I have seen God creating the cosmos, watching its growth, and finally destroying it.

  Call me, if you will, a liar or a madman. Say I lack humour, say that my claim is sacrilegious and in the worst taste. Yet I have indeed seen God. I have seen him creating, watching, destroying.

  I tell myself that I must have been affected not through the bodily eye. but through the eye of the mind, that the whole experience must have flooded up within me from the hidden springs of my own imagination. But whether the teeming and fantastic events that I have witnessed were revealed by external or by internal vision, revealed they surely were. I did not construct them. They thrust themselves upon me, compelling belief.

  Others have no reason to share my conviction. Therefore simply as a story I set down the record of my hypercosmical experience, confidant that, if I can present it clearly, it must by its sheer strangeness and majesty compel at least attention, if not belief.

  But can human language convey even a thousandth part of the wonders that I still so vividly remember? They unfolded themselves before me with all the forcefulness and detail of perceived reality. But how can I describe them? Here is the white page, and there “in my mind” the crowded and overburdened memory of aeons past and future, and of time systems wholly distinct from ours. By what magic can I so guide my pen that from its grey trail, and from the printed pages which its course will determine, some glimmer, some pale distorted reflection, of my experience may be projected into other minds?

  The vision occurred about two hours after midnight. I cannot bring myself to describe the torturing personal contact that had befallen me earlier in the night. I will say only that it had filled me with an overwhelming, a blinding sense of the beauty and the precariousness of human personality, and indeed of one person, in whom, as it then seemed to me, all sweetness and all bitterness were together embodied. So complete was my preoccupation that I had lost sight, so to speak, of the universe. I could no longer rise above my own misery by reminding myself that personal calamity, even the complete ruin of many fair personal spirits, is demanded for, the wholeness and beauty of the cosmos.

  When I had left the mean little villa and the presence of the being that had so moved me, I must have hurried along the empty streets in complete abstraction, with my mind nailed still to the immediate past; for suddenly I found myself sitting on the heathery top of the hill which overlooks the suburb and the sea. I found also that I was weeping. This was a novel experience.

  Whether in self-pity or self-mockery, I performed the gesture that millions of my fellow mortals must have carried out in faith and hope. I looked up to heaven.

  The stars glittered with a brilliance and profusion rare in England. The Milky Way, a vague and feathery stream, phosphorescent, pricked with diamonds, divided the heavens. I was infuriated, and then utterly cowed, by the insensitiveness and vastness of the cosmos. By what right, by what right could these mindless gulfs drown the personal loveliness that had become all in all to me?

  Still gazing upward, I noticed something in the darkness between the stars. At first it seemed no more than the vague shifting illumination which the eye discovers in itself when robbed of external light. But now, to my amazement, to my bewilderment and horror, but also to my incredulous amusement, I recognized that an immense and dimly lucent face was regarding me from behind the stars, from behind the Milky Way.

  The fearsome thing was spread over half the sky. And it was upside down. The eyes were low in the south. The chin mounted to the zenith and beyond. Down toward the northern horizon loomed titanic shoulders, and far below them a confusion of many arms.

  Such a vision clearly meant madness. It was impossible that there should be anything of the nature of a human or half-human form behind the galaxy, peering through a veil of stars. The apparition, taken at its face value, violated the whole teaching of modern science.

  I know not whether I was more distressed at my derangement, or shocked at the devastatingly bad taste of the hallucination which confronted me, or tickled by the thought of the discomfiture which our scientists would suffer were it after all proved a true perception.

  Anxiety for my own sanity forced me to take firm, hold on myself. Derisively I reflected that this was too crude, too banal an illusion for a scientifically minded person like me. Maidservants or savages might be haunted by such a phantom; but I, with my sceptical intelligence, could surely dismiss it by ; merely ridiculing it. Still gazing skyward, I recalled to mind the empty vastness of transgalactic space. But the image remained in view, and grew clearer.

  Panic threatened me; but with a desperate effort I thrust it back. In order to calm myself, I undertook a careful study of the apparition, which indeed was so novel that even the dread of insanity could not wholly quench my curiosity.

  So as to see it in the normal position, I lay flat on the heather with my head thrown back. The celestial face was like no other face, or like all faces. It was human, yet not human, animal, yet not animal, divine, yet surely not divine. I was subtly reminded of the grotesque gods of Egypt and of India, and also of the mild enigmatic expression of certain African carvings. I found myself thinking both of beasts of rapine and of gentler beasts. I saw expressions not only of tiger, hawk and snake, but also of ox and deer, elephant and gentle ape. But in the visage which overhung me, these characters, though seemingly alien to one another, were so subtly blended that they presented not a composite form made up of features selected from all living things, but one archetypal unity, from which the terrestrial creatures might well have borrowed each its distinctive nature.

  The longer I regarded it, the more the apparition mastered me. It compelled me into an amazed, reluctant admiration. To call it merely beautiful would be to malign it. It was ugly, damnably ugly, almost satanic. Its anthropomorphism, hideously mixed with sheer animality, violated the austere inhumanity of the night sky. Yet in its own unique manner it was mysteriously, piercingly beautiful. It gave me a strange sense that hitherto, all my life long, I had looked in the wrong direction for the most excellent of all kinds of beauty. It outraged me as some new mode in music or sculpture may at once outrage and revitalize the mind. Its significance tantalized and escaped me. The celestial eyes gazed at me, or gazed seemingly at me, from under the bright brow so darkly that they seemed to express equally a Buddhalike serenity, a brute’s indifference, and a rapier alertness.

  Presently the apparition was transformed. I discovered that it was no single constant face but a succession of face forms imperceptibly changing into one another. It was as though the flux of thought in this being so remodelled the whole structure of its visage that nothing was left the same but a subtle air of personal continuity and identity. As a cloud changes from shape to shape, so this phantom suffered a continuous metamorphosis in such a manner that I saw it now as a mythical beast, now as a fair young man with battle in his nostrils, now as a sphinx, now as a mother bowed over her child, now as the child crucified, now as
a jesting fiend, now as a huge inhuman insect face with many-faceted eyes and pincer-mandibles, now for a fleeting moment as the white-bearded Jehovah.

  Yet, mysteriously, I continued to feel through all, these transformations the presence of the one unique and superb personality which had at the.. outset confronted me.

  The transformations became more rapid, more bewildering. The features disintegrated from one another. Instead of a face there were a thousand eyes intermingled with a thousand searching or constructing hands. I seemed to detect also, in the obscure depths of the vision, a thousand phallic shapes, flaccid, rampant.

  Yet even through these many and fantastic changes I retained the sense that I was beholding no mere chaos of images but manifestations of the unique, the superb one.

  “It is God, it is God,” I said to myself. But I knew that if indeed there is a God he is no more visible than the theory of relativity. With ever lessening conviction, I reminded myself that I was mad. Even so it was impossible to believe that so novel, so overmastering an apparition was nothing whatever but a figment of insanity.

  “It is indeed God,” I affirmed to myself. “It is God stirring my mad mind to create true though fantastic symbols of himself.” So at least I comforted myself.

  By now I had lost sight of the stars. I had lost all perception of the planet to which I was clinging. Even my own body seemed to have melted and vanished. Yet inwardly my mind was clear, and indeed quickened to an unaccustomed agility. I remembered minutely the sequence of events that had led me to this vision. I remembered the whole trend of my life, with its many groping and unfulfilled activities. I remembered the contemporary world crisis in human affairs, the millions of unemployed, the recrudescence of barbarism in Europe and America, the forlorn struggle for a new world.

  Under the innumerable and cryptic eyes of God I found myself searching in all these terrestrial aspects for some new significance. But I could not seize it.

  2

  CREATION

  A startling change now took place in my mind. My reverie was shattered as a dream at the moment of waking, and I became aware that I had long been observing a vast pattern of cosmical and hypercosmical events. I remembered that I had been watching the visible apparition of God not for moments but for aeons, and that I had seen him create cosmos after cosmos. Now at last I was to behold God’s latest creation. I was to attend the birth of that intricate and tragic cosmos, fashioned of nebulae and stars, in which mankind occurs. Would this, his latest, be also his final sketch, before he should venture on some more finished work, which perhaps would raise his spirit from time into eternity, from mere progress to perfection?

  Out of the confusion of limbs and organs which had confronted me, a face now formed itself, displaying its profile. Recognizably it was the face of God, the unique one; but this was not the God of the Jews nor of the Christians, nor was it Zeus nor Allah, nor any other deity of men. It was feline, snakelike. It was lean and keen and ruthless.

  Horror seized me. Could this, this living pole-axe, be the face of the true God? Could the spirit that this thing expressed be the one reality behind men’s dreams, the dreams that they had reverently perfected through the ages? Where was the Love, and where the Wisdom; where even the Justice and the Righteousness?

  In a mean suburb of a dark commercial city, had I not known a woman? Was she not fair though marred, gentle, though turning to bitterness? Surely in her there was more divinity than in this deity.

  Yet as I watched I was compelled to worship.

  Beneath God’s face the innumerable, shadowy, restless creative hands aimlessly fingered the pale glimmer which I knew was chaos, the formless potentiality of matter, the sleeping potentiality of mind.

  ***

  It seemed that in the dark spirit which is God there was not peace but restlessness, and the insistent need to create.

  But presently I observed in God’s eyes, God’s serpent eyes, a sudden intentness; as though, peering into the jungle of his own nature he had glimpsed some new, some exquisite idea.

  And now I seemed to discover in my memory that though God had triumphed in each of his many created universes, yet he had every time destroyed what he had made. Always there had come a stage in the growth of his creature, when though perfectly fulfilling his plan, it had also stung him into new percipience, and into vague new desire beyond the capacity of the poor creature to satisfy. And so, time and again God had reduced his cosmos to chaos, either with one swift, tender-contemptuous stroke of his almightiness, or slowly, delighting to observe its cycle completed by long drawn out senescence and death.

  A full light, a full intelligence, now gleamed in the eyes of God. The quarry was now clearly visible, the new conception apprehended. Looking down once more upon his chaos, God now took purposeful hold of it with all the sinewy cooperative gangs of his hands.

  He drew out from chaos a minute portion, so minute that it lay on the point of his finger as a mote upon a continent.

  Earnestly for a while God gazed upon this infinitesimal, considering how to work his will upon it. Then delicately he rolled it between a finger and a thumb, vitalizing it with the novel urge of his conception. But he sealed its potencies within it, so that for the present it should express nothing of its nature. Yet to my divinely stimulated vision it appeared as a very minute dark pearl, dimly shining by the reflected light of God’s own person.

  Earnestly God regarded his little creature. And he saw that it was indeed made according to his plan, that he had indeed with agile fingers fashioned it to be the bearer of lofty and diverse potentialities; so that, when he should see fit to unseal its energies, it might be the vehicle both of physical power and of mentality, that it might playa part equally well in the interior of a star or in the brain of a man, and equally in the life of a saint or of a blackguard.

  And now God set about to pass the whole of chaos between his fingertips. As flax issuing from between the fingers of a woman spinning, comes forth as thread, so from God’s countless fingers chaos issued as fine threads of smoke.

  As the ultimate electric and vital units came into being, God counted them. Soon there were as many of them as would go to the making of a spermatozoon, and soon as many as would be contained in a sun. And presently there was so much of the tenuous and granular substance of the cosmos as might form the warp and weft of a million galaxies. But God did not stay until he had used up all chaos, and the number of the beings which he had made was the number which his conception demanded, even to the last unit.

  The host of the units was an obscurity floating around the hands and arms of God, and over his; thighs and genitals, and above his head.

  With all his hands, God now took hold of sleeping matter and gathered it in as a seaman a bellying sail. He furled it in upon itself. And in so doing he geometrised it according to his conception. Searchingly he threaded his new-made matter through and through with the tracks of his ubiquitous and correlating fingers; so that, when he should give the word, the potencies of the cosmos should issue orderly.

  Then God withdrew his hands from the entrails of his creature. And his many hands poised lovingly over it and around it and under it.

  And now, looking once more at God’s face, I saw that it was kindled, enspirited with expectation of the beauty and the horror which were to come.

  The slumbering cosmos appeared to me now as a smooth orb of darkness. For all its energies were still sealed within its unit members. The black sphere of the cosmos shimmered between God’s hands like a huge inky bubble. Its surface reflected to me a dim and contracted image of his hands and of his lucent face.

  It seemed to me that creation was now completed, and that God’s new cosmos was ready to set out upon its long adventure. But I was mistaken.

  For now with sudden violence God pressed upon his creature with all his hands and from every side, so that the tenuous dark orb was crushed together, and the myriad floating units were crowded ever closer and closer.

  And
God constricted the cosmos until every unit coincided with every other, and the cosmos was no larger than any single one of them. It now lay upon the fingertip of God, and the rest of his hands were drawn away from it.

  Within the atom-cosmos were all the potencies for many million galaxies, and for storied worlds innumerable. Yet the pregnant members of the cosmos, though coincident each with all, remained inert to one another. For God had not yet broken the seals that he had set on them.

  God gazed long upon his creature. And he smiled. And all his hands were still.

  Then God spoke to the dark and slumbering germ of the cosmos. And he said, “Let there be light.”

  Immediately the seals were broken that God had set upon the myriad primal members of the cosmos. And the cosmic germ burst into life.

  3

  THE COSMOS IS LAUNCHED

  A dazzling, an unsupportable brilliance leapt at me and engulfed me. Around, above, below was light fiercer than the sun’s disc at noon. Light stabbed me through and through from every side with its innumerable incandescent blades

  I had a strange sense that these transfixing blades were the stings of live things, or the claws of some great beast that had burst its fetters and now ranged free. This conviction my reason firmly rejected, but in vain. I could not but believe that the myriad primal members of the cosmos were now at last wilfully putting forth their strength against one another in furious glee. Clearly they had extricated themselves from one another so violently that the atom-cosmos had exploded and become a firmament of light.

  Presently I noticed a very distressing conflict in my experience. Though I was immersed in the cosmical explosion, I continued nevertheless all the while to see the cosmos as a minute and gloomy pearl quiescent on God’s finger. All the while it reflected in miniature the hands and intent eyes of God.

  At first I was stunned by the disaccord of these experiences, but presently I understood what had happened.