Galaxies Like Grains of Sand (9 page)

“Yes, yes. We did a fine job of patching.”

“That green wave will join with the green wave growing from the coast, where Cobalt’s new city confronts the sea at Union Bay. Isn’t that forgiveness of sins? Can you still pretend we have accomplished nothing? Could we have accomplished anything better?”

He smiled at her and put an arm about her shoulder, but would say nothing, would not say what he thought.

Turning slightly, he said, “You have every right to be pleased. Now you can be more pleased, for a ship is coming up from the coast.”

Once he had flown his own ship, had driven at night on glowing wings above the burnt-out bulk of the planet, changing things, immersed in the taste of his task. He had seeded sterile and stormy oceans, to watch them later flash with phosphorescence like dawn in a dark sky. The drama had always been of life, of procreation, of waves breaking on wild and prospering shores.

The oblate spheroid grew in their windows as they watched with unkeen eyes. It flashed a recognition signal, flicked on a fresh course, dived, unrolling behind it one long white vapour breaker down the wan air. Then it touched their hull, discharged momentum in a hiss, and was steady.

A screw turned, a door widened. Their daughter, Cobalt Ilsont, came to them, smiling, taking their hands. She was sturdy and beautiful and bright, her eyes blue, her curls copper, her cheeks lean and freckled. She spoke in a voice they found loud. Perhaps she believed they were deaf.

“I’ve two days leave from Union so I thought I’d get away and come and visit you. How are you both? You look well and, Wangust, you look more elegant than ever.”

She kissed her mother’s cheek and her father’s forehead. “You should have come by portmatter instead of indulging in aerobatics.”

Cobalt laughed. “You don’t know what the younger generation is coming to, do you, Hwa?”

They ate a delicate meal where they were, suspended over the Earth, allowing evening to flood in below them. In their glasses was a tawny wine and with the wine went silver carp and damson tart — a small abundance.

Afterwards, Cobalt insisted that they flew back in her machine to catch a glimpse of her city, her growing city of Union.

It was growing fast. Both Chun Hwa and Wangust could see how it had grown. It spread along the coast. There were new harbours and ships moored there. A new pier, its lights already burning, pointed out across the grey ocean.

“And there’s our fishing fleet,” Cobalt said, indicating where small lights dotted the sea. “They are sowing as well as reaping. The fish is good and quite plentiful now. Oh, it’s all so wonderful. And do you know, if we flew out across this ocean, we’d see no more lights for seven thousand miles. This is only the beginning.” She added inconsequentially, “Next winter solstice, we are starting a new calendar in Union. To mark the New Age. Everything’s going to be better from now on. Union’s going to be the greatest city in the world, and the Solites are going to have to cease thinking of themselves as savages. We’ve now got two reading schools in operation, for adults as well as children.”

She stared down proudly at the city. Though darkness was coming on fast, they could see raw gashes in the hillsides, where new roads and new houses were being created.

“It is wonderful,” said Wangust.

But Chun Hwa said irritably, “You are mouthing parroted phrases, Cobalt. ‘Everything’s going to be better from now on...’ We used to say that back in my time, and look what happened. The Solites have always been a happy people, enjoying a close relationship with Nature. You’re going to change all that. Solites don’t need information when they have wisdom. Information drives out wisdom. Their skills are better than all book-learning. You deceive yourself if you believe that cities can create happiness.”

“You shouldn’t discourage her,” Wangust said.

After a moment’s silence, Cobalt said, “Hwa, you helped start all this. You first sowed the sterile seas with life which we are now culling. Why turn against the things you once fought for? Union will be a happy city, creatively happy. We are barbarians with inherited machines — should we not attempt to be something more?” She turned to her mother for support. “What do you say? Haven’t we all lived in wildernesses long enough? Someone must rebuild the world. The Vehicularies went out into the galaxy and, if machines can do it, then we certainly can.”

Wangust shook her head. “The future is with your generation, my dear. You must decide.”

“We have decided.” Setting her mouth, she turned the vessel for home. The lights and the ocean faded from view behind them.

His first reflections next morning were confused and sluggish. He was watching the bottom step of a long flight of stairs down which he had come. The sound of water teased him. At the same time, a dead leaf whisked through the circle of vision, over the step, and was gone into the darkness. Even when he propped himself up and became conscious, the dead leaf drifted through his mind.

Comfortless, Chun Hwa dressed and left the summer home. It was dawn. In the night, countless small spiders had sheeted the grass with their webs, which looked lustrous as frosted steel.

Returning to the house, he went in to Leg of Leather, who stood awaiting him. Once the wooden pulpit saddle was strapped in place, Chun Hwa heaved himself up by the stirrup and put a gentle spur to the stallion’s flank. Like a phantom, he rode off into the misty groves.

Again they went by the old water way and the burnt lands. One ruined machine still picked clumsily at the carcass of another, reiterating an old argument through broken antennae.

“...condemnation perversion sacred rights humanity counteracting insane ideologies committed sacred name liberty liberty liberty...”

“Vile strategies domination complete subju- subju- subjudication...”

Under the stallion’s hooves, the obliterated floor of the crater curled upwards. Chun Hwa leaned forward in rapport with the movements of his mount. They climbed Blighted Profile. Occasionally, they crushed a rare clover, causing tiny pseudo-bees to hum away to safety.

As they neared the top of the ridge, the first green leaves of the apple tree waved above the rocks. Early sunlight filled the vale. A far dog barked and was answered.

Yalleranda sat in his usual coign of vantage, on his father’s roof beside the stone chimney-stack. His keen eyes picked up the movement on the ridge. The stallion showed dazzling against the black sky behind as it climbed over the crest. Yalleranda whistled to himself and flung away the stick he was peeling.

The boy slid and jumped to the ground. His thin bare legs carried him through the garden, across a path, and up the slope, where he went dodging, ducking, climbing, among the apple trees. Then his pace slowed. He sidled up to where the stallion was cropping grass, and waited to gather himself only a few strides away.

Chun Hwa was nodding in the saddle in time with the horse’s cropping. He stared down at his old leathery hands holding the reins, pursuing his thoughts.

If he could find his way into the future, past all equations, he could uncover there proof or otherwise of the danger of the activist policies of Cobalt’s generation. Union was cancer, as had been all cities from Ur onwards. The cities were a sort of machine which intensified the evil side of man. Hives of culture, they were also hives of conquest. How to separate the two? Perhaps the future would tell. Perhaps problems would blow away like dead leaves from steps. But of course he would never get there. That was just an old man’s dream. And the dreams were wearing thin.

He realized he was falling asleep, and sat up with a start. He climbed down stiffly from the saddle, remembering there was food stowed in the saddle-box. A small boy confronted him.

The boy was almost as tall as Chun Hwa. The hair on his head was tawny, and as wild as a lion’s, but his face was covered with funny bristling black hair like a boar’s. His appearance alarmed Chun Hwa.

“You nearly went to sleep,” said the boy.

“I was dreaming,”

“You were dreaming of visiting the future.” The boy took hold of Leg of Leather’s bit, and pulled the soft mouth up to his shoulder.

Chun Hwa recalled local talk about people with wild talents, people with contaminated blood, with strange abilities and unusual desires. Some said that they were the sports of the aftereffects of high-radiation war, others that their fathers had mated with machines. Cobalt had once talked about them. He laughed wheezily to hide his anxiety.

“What do
you
dream about?”

“Did you know there are hard stones in the middle of clouds? Boulders. That I dreamed.”

“Take care with Leg — he’s mettlesome. Where do you live?”

The boy distained to answer that. Putting his arm up round the stallion’s neck, he said confidentially, “I know where there is a machine that will send you into the future. It still works.”

Acknowledging his own weariness, Chun Hwa had climbed back into the saddle. The boy with the hairy face was leading Leg of Leather down Blighted Profile, away from the trees and the cultivation. He was too proud to ask the boy where they were going. His own life had been a more fantastic journey than this savage child would ever take.

Eventually, in a cascade of pebbles underfoot, they came to a cave set in the rocky slope.

“Machine’s in here,” said the boy. “Wait.”

He disappeared into the gloom of the cave. As far as he knew, he was the only person in generations who had come across the machine. It looked old. It was warted and riveted and scratched and scoured. Probably it had backed its way into the cave for protection. When you touched it, it throbbed and was cold, as if with a dreadful rage.

Chun Hwa waited outside as directed. “Why not?” he asked himself. “During the millennia of war, those terrible technologies reached their climax. Everyone has forgotten what could be done, what couldn’t, or even why it could be done, why it couldn’t. This child... Well, why not?”

A great beam like mist, like a searchlight in mist, sprang out of the cave mouth. The stallion shied and snorted. Chun Hwa stared in fascination, not knowing that he looked at one of the disintegrator beams which had helped form the burnt lands.

Yalleranda came sliding round the edge of the beam and raised his skinny arms in triumph.

“There you are, see. Ride into that mist, old man. It’ll carry you into the future!”

“I... I ought to leave a message.”

“Spur your horse! Go on!”

The child was persuasive. Chun Hwa breathed deep. He spoke to Leg of Leather. The stallion tossed his head, then moved forward smartly.

Hugging his ribs, Yalleranda watched his ancient prize ride into the disintegrator beam. Its surface was smooth, as smooth as an inland sea. It lapped up greedily round horse and rider, took them atom by atom. Like a man riding under a current, Chun Hwa rode forward without turning or looking back — into infinite future.

The undiminished thing that was in him, and the undiminished thing in Leg of Leather — both were free at last. They rose to a galaxy inaccessible to consciousness or to machines, where generations are unknown, and continued still to rise.

The Dark Millennia

Against the Law of Transience may be set one of its ancillary laws. The Law of Endurance. The planet Earth plies (almost) eternally about its sun, swinging its small cone of night with it like a blue sail. For the solar system there is only one long day, an energy bath of radiation without end. That day is the prime product of the sun. The night — each planet fashions its own nights. As long as the sun burns, trailing out its marigold veins of fire across the adjacent void, life devours its uninterrupted day. Only the tiny individual lives must endure their own nights.

With the gaudy glare of the solar system, that whirlpool of heat and noise, night has little place. It must hide where it can, behind planetary bodies, inside skulls, at submarine depths.

Between the last fragment of the story and this next lies a metaphorical night, a night of ignorance which intelligence has been unable to bridge. We hurry across it in silence.

Through our silence drift names, and mirages of civilizations known by little but their names. The Threshold Consortium, The Vehicularium, The Calloban Empire, The Solite Commonwealth. The Solites are remembered to those people who discovered the means of time travel, perhaps because their brains, in that particular stage of development, established a special relationship with the laws of the physical world which was for ever after unattainable; their talent died with them, never to be resurrected.

According to the legends which come down to us, the Solites were extinguished by a great religious machine culture, the Vehicularium, when Functional Ultimate ruled, not merely Earth or the solar system, but the entire galaxy. We can only hypothesize regarding it, and know it to be unique. Unlike all other cuptures, the Vehicularium did not die, it did not succumb to decadence from within invasion from without; it simply disappeared one clear morning. Perhaps it withdrew its presence entirely to another galaxy with more favourable properties.

When it was gone, a great and terrible vacuum existed. In that vacuum drifted some forty million years of silence, covering its progeny with the dust and ceaseless concatenations of time.