Galaxies Like Grains of Sand (18 page)

“My God!” Jeffy said. “It’s coming here.”

As he backed away from the window to his cell door, the creature, with one bound, appeared between the bars and dropped the keys into the cell. It jumped in after them.

Bit by bit, more of the thing arrived, dropping down before Jeffy’s petrified gaze and finally building into — Gerund, or an intolerable replica of him.

Gerund put out a hand and touched his servant, almost as if he was experimenting.

“It’s all right, Jeffy,” he said at last, speaking with obvious effort. “You have nothing to fear. No harm will come to you. Take these keys, unlock your cell door, and come with me up to the warden of the prison.”

Grey in the face, shaking like a leaf, Jeffy managed to pull himself together enough to obey. The keys rattling in his hand, he tried them one by one in the lock until he found a key that fitted. Like a man mesmerized, he led the way into the corridor, the pseudo-Gerund following closely behind.

No one was about. At one point a guard slept in a tipped-back chair, his heels resting high above his head on the whitewashed wall. They did not disturb him. They unlocked the big, barred door at the foot of a private staircase and so ascended into the warden’s office. Open doors showed them the way to a balcony overlooking the bay and the central peaks of the island.

On the balcony, alone as usual, drinking wine as usual, a man sat in a wicker chair. He looked small and — yes, alas! — infinitely tired.

“Are you the prison warden?” Gerund asked, stumping into the room.

“I am,” I said.

He looked at me for a long while. I could tell then that he was not — what shall I say? — not an ordinary human being. He looked what he was: a forgery of a human being. Even so, I recognized him as Gerund Gyres from the photographs the police had circulated.

“Will you both take a chair?” I asked. “It fatigues me to see you standing.”

Neither servant nor master moved.

“Why have you — how have you released your man?” I asked.

“I brought him before you,” Gerund said, “so that you may hear what I have to say, and so that you may know that Jeffy is a good servant, has never done me harm. I want him released forthwith.”

So, this was a reasonable creature which had compassion. Human or no, it was something I could talk to. So many men with whom I have to deal have neither reason nor compassion.

“I am prepared to listen,” I said, pouring myself more wine. “As you see, I have little else to do. Listening can be even pleasanter than talking.”

Whereupon Gerund began to tell me everything I have now set down here to the best of my ability. Jeffy and I listened in silence; though the bondman undoubtedly understood little, I grasped quite enough to make my insides turn cold. After all, was not my copy of Pamlira’s work on paraevolution lying at my elbow?

In the quiet that fell when Gerund finished, we heard the sunset Angelus ringing out from a Praia steeple; it brought me no anodyne, and the hard, hot wind carried its notes away. I knew already that a darkness was falling that no prayers would lighten.

“So then,” I said, finding my voice, “as warden, the first point I must make is that you, Gerund Gyres, as I must call you, have committed murder: on your own admission, you killed my chief guard.”

“That was an error,” Gerund said. “You must realize that I — who am a composite of Je Regard, Cyro Gyres and Gerund Gyres, to say nothing of the numerous fish absorbed on my swim up from the subport — I believed I could absorb any human being. It would not be death; we are alive. But your guard defied absorption. So did Jeffy, here, when I touched him.”

“Why do you think that is?” I asked stiffly.

He grew a smile on his face. I averted my eyes from it.

“We learn fast,” he said. “We cannot absorb humans who are not conscious of themselves as part of the process of nature. If they cling to the outmoded idea of man as a species apart, their cells are antagonistic to ours and absorption will not take place.”

“Do you mean to tell me you can only — er — absorb a cultured man?” I asked.

“Exactly. With animals it is different. Their consciousness is only a natural process; they offer us no obstacle.”

I believe it was at this point that Jeffy jumped over the balcony rail into the bushes below. He picked himself up unhurt, and we watched his massive frame dwindle from the road as he ran away. Neither of us spoke; I hoped he might go to bring help, but if Gerund thought of that he gave no sign.

“Really, I don’t think I understand what you mean at all,” I said, playing for time. And I don’t think I did grasp it then; to tell you the truth, I was feeling so sick that the whole prison seemed to reel around me. This heavy pseudoman made me more frightened than I knew I could be. Though I fear neither life nor death, before the half-alive I was shivering with the chill of horror.

“I don’t understand about absorbing only cultured people,” I said, almost at random.

This time it did not bother to open its mouth to answer.

“Culture implies fuller understanding. Today there is culturally speaking only one way to that understanding: through Galingua. I can only liberate the cells of those who are able to use that semantic tool, those whose whole biochemical bondage has already been made malleable by it. The accident that happened to Je Regard releases abilities already latent in every Galingua-speaking person throughout the Galaxy. Here and now on Yinnisfar, a giant step ahead has been taken — unexpected, yet the inevitable climax to the employment of Galingua.”

“So then,” I said, feeling better as I began to comprehend, “you are the next evolutionary step as predicted by Pamlira in
Paraevolution?”

“Roughly speaking, yes,” he said. “I have the total awareness Pamlira spoke of. Each of my cells has that gift; therefore I am independent of fixed form, that bane of every multicelled creature before me.”

I shook my head.

“You seem to me not an advance but a retrogression,” I said. “Man is, after all, a complex gene hive; you are saying you can turn into single cells, but single cells are very early forms of life.”

“All my cells are
aware,”
he said emphatically. “That’s the difference. Genes build themselves into cells and cells into the gene hive called man in order to develop
their
potentialities, not man’s. The idea of man’s being able to develop was purely an anthropomorphic concept. Now the cells have finished with this shape called man; they have exhausted its possibilities and are going on to something else.”

To this there seemed nothing to say, so I sat quietly, sipping my drink and watching the shadows grow, spreading from the mountains out to sea. I was still cold but no longer shaking.

“Have you nothing else to ask me?” Gerund inquired, almost with puzzlement in his voice. You hardly expect to hear a monster sound puzzled.

“Yes,” I said. “Just one thing. Are you happy?”

The silence, like the shadows, extended itself toward the horizon.

“I mean,” I amplified, “if I had a hand in modelling a new species, I’d try and make something more capable of happiness than man. Curious creatures that we are, our best moments come when we are striving for something; when the thing’s achieved — la — we are full of unrest again. There is a divine discontent, but divine content comes only to the beasts of the pasture, who regardlessly crop down snails with their grass. The more intelligent a man is, the more open he is to doubt; conversely, the bigger fool he is, the more likely he is to be pleased with his lot. So I’m asking, are you, new species, happy?”

“Yes,” Gerund said positively. “As yet I am but three people: Regard, Cyro, Gerund. The last two have struggled for years for full integration — as do all human couples — and now have found it, a fuller integration than was ever feasible before. What humans instinctively seek, we instinctively have; we are the completion of a trend. We can never be anything but happy, no matter how many people we absorb.”

Keeping my voice steady, I said, “You’d better start absorbing me then, since that must be what you intend.”

“Eventually all human cells will come under the new regime,” Gerund said. “But first the word of what is happening must be spread to make people receptive to us, to soften further what Galingua has already softened. Everyone must know, so that we can carry out the absorption process. That is your duty. You are a civilized man, warden; you must write to Pamlira for a start, explaining what has occurred. Pamlira will be interested.”

He paused. Three cars swept up the road and turned in at the main gate of the prison. Jeffy, then, had had enough intelligence to go for help.

“Supposing I will not aid you?” I asked. “Why should I hurry man’s extinction? Supposing I acquaint the Gal-Fed Council with the truth, and get them to blow this whole island to bits? It would be a simple — get out! — a simple matter — confound it!”

We were suddenly surrounded by butterflies. In impatiently brushing them away, I had knocked over my bottle of wine. The air was full of thousands of butterflies, fluttering around us like paper; the darkening sky was thick with them. The angriest gestures of the hand could not clear them away.

“What is this?” Gerund spluttered. For the first time, I personally saw him out of shape, as he grew another attachment to wave the dainty creatures off. It sprouted from what had been his ear, and flailed the air about his head. I can only say I was nauseated. It cost me the greatest effort to keep a grip on myself.

“As a creature so aware of nature,” I said, “you should enjoy this spectacle. These are Painted Lady butterflies, blown in thousands off their migratory tracks. We get them here most years. This hot wind, which we call the marmtan, carries them westward across the ocean from the continent.”

Now I could hear people running up the stairs. They would be able to deal suitably with this creature, whose reasonable words were so in contrast to his unreasonable appearance. I continued, speaking more loudly, so that if possible he would be taken unawares. “It’s not entirely a misfortune for the butterflies. There are so many of them, no doubt they have eaten most of their food on the mainland and would have starved had they not been carried here by the wind. An admirable example of nature looking after its own.”

“Admirable!” he echoed. I could scarcely see him for bright wings. The rescue party was in the next room. They burst out with Jeffy at their head, carrying atomic weapons.

“There he is,” I shouted.

But he was not there. Regard-Cyro-Gerund had gone. Taking a tip from the Painted Ladies, he had split into a thousand units, volplaning away on the breeze, safely, invincibly, lost among the crowd of bright insects.

So I come to what is really not the end but the beginning of the story. Already, a decade has passed since the events in the Capverde Islands. What did I do? Well, I did nothing; I neither wrote to Pamlira nor called Gal-Fed Council. With the marvellous adaptability of my species, I managed in a day or two to persuade myself that “Gerund” would never succeed, or that somehow or other he had misinterpreted what was happening to him. And so, year by year, I hear the reports of the human race growing fewer and I think, “Well, anyway, they’re happy,” and I sit up here on my balcony and drink my wine and let the sea breezes blow on me. In this climate, and at this post, nothing more should be expected of me.

And why should I excite myself for a cause in which I have never believed? When Nature passes a law it cannot be repealed; for her prisoners there is no escape — and we are all her prisoners. So I sit tight and take another drink. There is only one proper way to become extinct: with dignity.

The Megalopolis Millennia

It is ironical that when men could finally have liberated themselves from dependence on the machine with the help of that philo-somatic tool, Galingua, they should have found themselves facing an overwhelming danger for which Galingua itself was responsible.

By no means all of them faced this danger with the weary resignation of the prison warden. Give a man an enemy and you bring out both the best and the worst in him. With its hackles up, humanity went in to fight. Yet it is worth noting that even in this crisis there were many people who took the long view and resigned themselves — not from indifference but for finer reasons — to what they saw as their inevitable fate.

These reasons were set forth cogently enough by Chize Dutremey, writing some five hundred years after Pamlira’s time, when a quarter of Yinnisfar’s population had faded into individually sentient cells and the whole complex structure of stellar intercourse was disintegrating.

“The Dual Theory, that religion most generally accepted by enlightened men throughout the Galaxy,” Chize wrote, “claims that the universe was created by two similar but opposed forces, To and Pla-To. To created nonsentient matter; Pla-To, coming later, created sentient matter. The two forces are hostile to — or at best indifferent to — each other. Pla-To is by far the less powerful, for sentient matter must always depend to some extent upon nonsentient.

“The objectives of the two forces are as opposed as their natures. As far as man can comprehend To at all, his objectives may be described in the word endurance. He must endure through the matter he has created, perpetuating himself as it is perpetuated; and its perpetuation is only challenged by Pla-To.