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.

In answer to God’s command, the atom-cosmos had burgeoned not only with light but with a space and time peculiar to itself. And I, by some means or other, had gained a footing therein; but without ceasing to participate in the space and time peculiar to God.

Thus, so long as I gazed at the dark seed-pearl of the atom-cosmos, passive on God’s finger, I saw also, all around me, though as it were with another vision, the process of cosmical events.

There now came to me a vivid and terrifying realization that between me and the human world which was my true concern there lay aeon upon aeon of cosmical history, and nearly all of it inhuman.

“Oh God,” I cried, “let me be again among my own kind. Blot out from my mind the memory of all this irrelevance. Let me play out my little past oblivious of the immensities. Let me take up once more the threads of a life distressed, bewildered, futile, but my own. Let me watch the spectacle of my own world. Futile it may be, tragic it is, but I am shaped for it. And in it there are little creatures like myself whose lives intertwine with mine.”

Thus I prayed. But then I remembered the thing that God was, and I knew that it was useless to pray to him; useless, and also, in some manner which I could not comprehend, base.

With a heavy heart I settled myself to the task of watching the bleak and intricate unfolding of the physical cosmos, not as yet feeling its perfection, not as yet realizing that some insight into these remote events was needed to prepare me for insight into the passionate themes which were to follow.

In this book I shall set down only the slightest record of these difficult and wearisome experiences, lest I should inflict on the reader the tedium which I myself suffered, toiling through that desert. But somehow I must entice him at least to fly rapidly with me over the huge wilderness of the early cosmos, and note its features with watchful and interested eyes, so that he may grasp what follows.

By now the unit members of the cosmos, which had first been laid together in one identical volume, were already separated by wide gulfs. Between them was nothing but the tempestuous undulations which they scattered in all directions throughout the cosmos.

These undulations, these ubiquitous light rays, were actually visible to me. Seemingly they were for me illuminated by that other, swifter, more searching and more revealing light, which cast by the lucent person of God himself, pervades and drenches all things.

I could see also the primal members themselves, the radiant centres of all this rippled light. And though they were now once more distinct and scattered, I could see, or rather by a kind of microscopic telepathy I could feel, that each one preserved within itself, like a forgotten memory, the presence and the influence of all the others. Each must now and forever be a true member of the cosmic unity, possessed by the whole, but also pervading the whole with its own unique nature.

Presently I found that I could move hither and thither within the cosmos as I willed, simply by looking in whichever direction I chose to go. Thus, as on the wings of thought, more easily than a bird overtakes a snail, I could outstrip and pass the sluggish lightrays of the cosmos.

Seeing clearly that all things in the cosmos were flying apart from one another, I now set out to seek the boundaries of the ever expanding cosmos. But it turned out that this was a very strange and incomprehensible expansion. For although again and again, and swiftly as thought, I travelled in search of the expanding frontiers, I could not find them. Always my straight course led me continuously through the host of the primal members back to my starting point. The cosmos had no frontiers which could be extended.

Yet as time passed I found upon such journeys that the primal members fell ever further and further apart, or at least that they were ever more minute in comparison with the distances between them. I found also that the light waves of the cosmos took ever longer on their travels before they reached again the points whence they had started.

Thus, after all, the cosmos was in some sense expanding. It was at first a mighty bursting bomb of the jostling members and the tumultuous light; and then a spreading cloud, huge as a galaxy, but congested with the matter and the energies for many million galaxies.

For as it continued to swell it disintegrated into innumerable separate clouds, which sped ever away from one another. At first shoulder to shoulder, they were presently continents separated by oceans; then islands very remote from one another in the boundless and ever more capacious ocean of cosmical space.

Between the clouds, an inconceivably faint mist grew fainter and fainter as the cosmos enlarged itself.

Both clouds and mist were composed of the primal members which God had made. And even in the clouds they were soon as remote from one another, in proportion to their size, as star from star.

And I, who in some other existence am one of the little creatures called men, vermin upon a minute planet of a mediocre star, I who so lately (or in the remote future?) gazed (or should gaze?), tortured but enraptured, into the sad mocking eyes of another of my kind—now drifted, disembodied but percipient, within the unimaginably tenuous sandstorm, snow-storm, pollenstorm of the primaeval cosmos.

The minute simplest members of the cosmos quivered around me like an all-pervading swarm of midges, unpeaceful, fatuous; but vital. With insupportable fatigue I witnessed their endless barren agitation; while the cosmic time settled upon my strained mind softly, irresistibly, without relief, aeon after aeon, like a deepening snowdrift, like that dust which sinks through the oceanic depths year by year, settling to form the rocks of future ages. Never surely was explorer more crushed by monotony and tedium than I, crossing the desert of the earliest cosmical era.

While I was still toiling in this desolation, there came a moment that I realized that I had all along been confronted by something more than the physical aspect of the cosmos, namely its inchoate and profoundly slumbering mentality, in fact by the cumulative impact of the myriad primal mindlets upon my mind. Or should I say the impact of the foetal spirit of the cosmos itself? It matters not which, for at this time the spirit of the cosmos was dissociated into the myriads of the simple spirits of its members.

I was like one who cannot escape from a tiresome companion. But this cosmical companion of mine was legion, and he had entry into my very mind. He quenched my thoughts with the ceaseless murmur of his own vapid, almost featureless experience.

For though with my strange power of microscopic telepathy I could for a while distinguish a few of the individual mindlets, I could discern nothing whatever in their devastatingly similar experiences but the vaguest unrest and the vaguest tactual, or I should I say sexual, titillation; nothing but an inconceivably faint and somnolent appetite, which at rare intervals was gratified by an instantaneous orgasm and ejaculation of the divine physical energy.

I could not for long discriminate the individual experiences of the mindlets. Fatigue soon blurred my insight. The minute prickling of distinct primal beings against my mind gave place to the confused and indescribably nauseating impression of the I whole myriadfold cosmic experience.

In utter boredom and indignation I cursed my fate. Why, why had I been snatched out of the vivid though distressful world of men to be subjected to all this irrelevance? Had I not a life to live, entwined, with other lives?

4

THE GREAT NEBULAE APPEAR

I need not have been so despondent, for I was soon to find myself in a world of passionate beings whose alien, yet not entirely inhuman nature was to tax my comprehension and to wring me with conflicting sympathy and loathing. In a few brief aeons of cosmical time I was to be the spectator of a drama the very existence of which my fellow men had never suspected.

The clouds continued to drift apart from one another, continued to contract and gyrate and define themselves. Presently they were but small soft globes or flecks of light, snowflakes whirling in the huge gulf of space. They seemed to me minute; yet in each one of them was material for a host of suns, and worlds innumerable. For these were the Great Nebulae.

I had at first no inkling that these largest of all physical objects were alive, that each one of them in its own unique way was a sensitive and intelligent being, that every movement of this great host was no less significant of joy and grief than the gestures and facial expressions of men and women, that here before me were many which, though possessing nothing at all like a human eye, regarded one another’s eloquent forms with joys and longings no less vivid than the personal loves of men and women, and many more which, though blind and deaf to the, external world, lived out a strange, passionate yet solipsistic life.

In time I was to learn, through long and difficult experience, not only to understand these beings up to a point, but also to respect them. But how can I give by means of a few printed pages the insight which I myself took aeons to acquire? There is nothing for it but to beg the reader once more to have patience while I try to describe as briefly as possible the physical and mental nature of the great nebulae. For without understanding the great difference between nebular and human nature he cannot possibly appreciate the strange and moving story which will follow.

In the earliest age of nebular history, when the expansion of the cosmos was not yet far advanced, the nebulae were very much closer to one another than in the age of man. They were also far more numerous; for many, as I shall tell, have been destroyed, and their flesh converted into energy to carry out the all too human activities of their fellows. They were also, at this time, much less evenly distributed than in our day. Most lay even now remote from all neighbours, lone sails on the ocean. These were the “lone nebulae” which spent their formative youth each in its own solipsistic universe. Others voyaged in convoy of a dozen or a score, or eddied together in shoals of hundreds or even a thousand. Here and there a leviathan made progress amid encircling satellites. These minute satellite nebulae constituted a race apart. Of one individual I shall say much at a later stage. Like their larger companions they were destined in the fullness of time to crumble into stars; but they would form not huge galaxies but the crowded swarms which we call the globular clusters.

Already the normal nebulae were very diverse. Some were greater, some smaller; some mere smudges of mist, some compact and formal. Each feathery ball, I noticed, was slowly shrinking. And as it shrank, it whirled more rapidly. And as it whirled, it was flattened. And as the flattening continued, there appeared in the centre a bright and swollen core. The outer parts of the nebula were flung by their own movement far out into space; but seemingly the tugging core still kept a hold on them, so that they developed into an attenuated disc around the heart of the nebula, and were torn into streamers and spreading convolutions. So might a dancer, pirouetting, halo her bright head with far-flung, tangled whirls.

Such at least was the form of these nebulae that were too far apart to distort one another. But those that were members of compact groups expressed by their very deformity their dependence upon one another. As woodland trees mould one another, so these great clouds, though at a distance of several light-years, moulded one another with their tidal sway.

It was an unearthly but a rich and subtle spectacle that now confronted me on every side. With slow rhythmic movements, the airy creatures floated around me delicately featured with many colours imperceptible to the normal human eye. Their cores were mostly tinged with violet or blue, their tresses nacrous grey, iridescent with green and gold and crimson and many unimaginable hues. In every direction and at every depth they appeared, the most distant as a very faint host of misty points. Between them spread the deep, the absolute blackness of the void.

The nearer nebulae reminded me ever more forcibly of living things. They displayed even that appearance of intelligence and purpose which is manifested by animalcules on a microscope slide. They were in continual oozy movement. I could imagine that they were seeking food, or some needed but unconceived fulfilment. Sometimes they would seem to pursue and avoid one another. Occasionally a giant would absorb and assimilate a dwarf. Or two peers, after long lonely voyaging, would come within close range of one another and protrude, each toward the other, a searching excrescence, as though yearning for intercourse. Sometimes the contact would fail to be achieved, or would be a mere moth’s kiss, and the two would be borne apart with altered forms and courses. Sometimes the “lovers” would meet and mingle, to become a single great and brilliant organism, which, a pike among the small-fry, would proceed to devour all that crossed its path.

Could these lifelike creatures, I asked myself, be mere vortices of radiant gas? But I reminded myself that the briefest of the movements which I now witnessed must in fact occupy millions of terrestrial years, and that this impression of vital activity was an illusion. Age upon age must pass, I knew, before these clouds would condense into stars, and further ages before the rare meetings of stars should produce habitable worlds.

Why, I wondered, should God so long toy with lifeless matter before undertaking the main purpose of his work? And why should I, forlorn little terrestrial intelligence, be forced to watch this aimless, this puerile sport?

But at last I began to realize that, all unnoticed, new and strange experience had for some time been welling up within me, and was now clamouring for recognition.

Out of the confused and fatuous murmur of the primal mindlets of the cosmos there had emerged something new and uncouth and formidable. To use an image, the shrill and monotonous pipings of innumerable midges had been drowned by the boisterous incantation of a hurricane; or was it some more significant music, unintelligible to me?

Columbus, when he stumbled on a new world, a world of novel vegetation, beasts and men, cannot have been half so bewildered as I, who now found myself inwardly confronted by this new world of alien and primaeval spirits.

My poor human mind was at first overstrained and tortured by the flood of uncouth perceptions and novel hungers and fears which now flooded in upon me. But little by little, with many timorous tastings and agonized revulsions, I was able to accommodate myself so far as to receive without undue stress at least a muted and schematic echo of the mentality that had at first so jarred me. To do this, I had first to discriminate within the general babel some one theme of experience, the life story of some particular nebula. Attending to this, I found that the rest faded into the background, leaving me free to study, if I dared, and if I could endure it, the ardent and voluminous experience of being fantastically alien to man.

By what laborious and often painful experiment I learned at length to range at will among the minds of the nebulae, even as, with physical vision I could look now at this airy creature, now at that, I need not tell. Nor need I recount the long drawn out research by which I passed from sheer incomprehension to some degree of understanding of the nebular mentality. Instead I will present at once the fruits of my toil. I will at once try to give some idea first of the nature, and then of the impassioned history of these most immense of all living creatures. It is a history which reaches its climax before the first stars were born, and it is not completed even in our own age of terrestrial intelligence.

5

A BIOLOGICAL STUDY

The newborn nebulae existed for aeons as mere lucent clouds of gas, featureless and mindless. But when within each flattening globe a bright dense core had appeared, this came to rule the whole mass with its preponderant sway, and with the ceaseless and violent outrush of its radiation.

And presently, when the primal beings within the core had become very crowded, and very subject to mutual influence and to the overmastering tempest of light on which they were tossed, there was formed, deep within the incandescent heart of the core itself, a unifying centre of life, a region no larger than the bulk of a thousand stars, but dense almost as a liquid, and turbulent with such fury of radiation as had not occurred since the atom-cosmos first responded to God’s word.

Within this boiling cauldron of the divine physical energy, within this tense and enduring system of intricate currents, antagonized yet cooperative, within this vast germ cell set in the vaster yoke of the nebular core, the new vital order was mysteriously welded, and the myriad dissociated primal beings were at last harnessed an domesticated for the support and service of a theme of spirit more admirable than their own, namely for the embryonic mind of the nebula.

Little by little, this vital centre organized the whole core as a balanced yet ever-changing system of hurricanes, trade winds, tornadoes, subservient in all their operations to the vital needs of the whole.

And as the airy streamers and filaments of the nebular disc began to appear, these also were inwardly organized to the requirements of the new being. They became in fact true living tissues, fulfilling all manner of delicate vital functions, though they were but ordered winds, more tenuous than any, man-made “vacuum.” Strange that such loose-knit material could form the body of such a vivid spirit!

It is not surprising that I could not discover the mechanism of this steady internal evolution. But one point seemed to me certain. Natural selection played an important part within each nebula, favouring some experiments in vital organization and destroying others, much as on earth it favours some races of organisms and destroys others.

The living nebula has no need to gather energy from the world outside its own substance. Its font of power lies in the very matter which is its flesh. Its hunting ground and its prey are within its own intestines. It feeds upon its own secretion. For the primal beings within it provide by their myriadfold ejaculations a lavish source of power.

Thus the living nebula is exempt from that necessity which is of the first but not of the highest importance to every terrestrial creature, namely the need to reach out into the environment for light and food. Yet in spite of this heavensent exemption, there was to come a time when it would be flung away, and the whole cosmical community of nebulae would be shattered by conflict over mechanical power.

In spite of deep differences, the nebulae and the living things of earth are at bottom akin, for in each the prime vital tendency and the most urgent desire are directed toward self-maintenance and development; and in both kinds of life there is needed for this end a constant flow of energy. Further, just as for terrestrial creatures the procuring of physical energy is the main practical enterprise, so in the living nebula the first of all tasks is to secure to its own vital processes a lavish supply of its own internal radiation. But the nebula’s task is in one respect the easier and in another the more difficult. It never suffers from dearth but the torrential violence of its own energy spate is apt to rend and shatter its flimsy tissues.

Since they have no need to seek food abroad or to avoid being preyed upon, none of the young nebulae save those significant few which grow up in enduring groups, develop organs of external sense. For the lone nebula, experience is entirely of events within its own body. But of those internal events it develops a very poignant and subtle awareness. It has an urgent need to be sensitive to the fluctuations of its internal energies, so that it may control and organize their expression and prevent them from damaging its tissues. So varied and inconstant are the patterns of events within the great fluid body, that physiological controls are seldom automatic, as they are with us, but almost always under conscious and intelligent guidance.

The core and the tresses of the living nebula are composed of many kinds of tissues, each a pattern of little enduring whirlwinds of many gasses and dusts in physical relation with one another. Scattered through these tissues are many organs of sensation and of control, and many insulated tracks for the transmission of messages between the core and the tresses. By means of this complex organization the nebula becomes very precisely aware of the intricate pattern of events which constitute its bodily life, and it influences them very minutely according to its wishes. It is sensitive to all the frequencies of radiation, to pressure, to warmth and cold and to many chemical changes. It can retard and quicken the flow of its radiation in different parts of its body. It can also, by stimulating certain regions to expand or contract, alter the shape of its convolutions.

Since a nebula is so large that the cosmical light takes many thousands of years to travel across it, its nerve currents, though moving at the speed of light, are in a sense very sluggish. The whole tempo of nebular life is therefore, from the human point of view, fantastically slow. Passages of thought which a human brain would perform in a few seconds would take the huge nebular brain many years. Yet in terms of its own life its mental operations are rapid. “Quick as thought” is an analogy as true for the nebula as for man. For slow as its thinking seems to us, its responses to events occurring in its remote extremities are far slower. In dealing with such events it has to take into account time lost on the inward and outward passage of the nerve current, just as we, when we carryon a correspondence, have to take into account time lost in the post.

Owing to the extreme slowness of their experience, the nebulae tend to be much impressed by the swiftness and elusive changefulness of events. And when at last, after aeons of maturity, they begin to notice in themselves that decay which we associate with senescence, they are dismayed at the brevity of their life.

In its earliest phase the foetal mind of the nebula hovers long between the deepest slumber and drowsy waking. It basks in its own inherent sunshine. It luxuriates in the confused streaming and stroking and thrusting of its living winds, as they move among one another on their ordered courses. But as the ages pass, it comes to feel more accurately its patterned currents and the spreading torrents of its radiation; and little by little it takes charge of its own economy. It has by now perceptions not only of light and darkness, pressures, balance, and a thousand tactual textures, but also of vigour, faintness, fatigue, restlessness, the glow of health, and innumerable local strains and pains. These manifold characters it experiences with all the precision which we know only in perceiving the external world. It inwardly feels and sees its body in more detail than we achieve in touching and seeing external objects. But of its environment it knows less than we know of our digestive operations.

As a human infant, lying in its cot, discovers its toes and exults in dictating their movements, so the infant nebula discovers not toes and fingers, ears and genitals, but the living and mobile tresses that are its limbs. But whereas the human infant discovers its body’s external aspect and at the same time sets about exploring the vast external world, the lone nebulae is externally blind and numb. Yet internally it encounters such diversified and passionate experience, that in many cases, though this may seem almost incredible, the lone nebulae have developed a considerable intricacy of thought and a vast and subtle gamut of emotions. I shall later try to give some idea of this strange life.

The mental life of the lone nebulae had of course to be carried on entirely without the use of language. That it could proceed at all, thus hobbled, may seem impossible. But I found that the more advanced of the lone nebulae had, as a matter of fact, been driven to develop a kind of “internal language” of symbolic images and incipient gestures. In many cases this proved a very efficient vehicle for the process of their thought and feeling.

Only the relatively few nebulae which were “born” in groups developed normally any perception of events occurring beyond their own bodies. For these it was very important to react to the whole group in which they lived, for they had far-reaching influences on one another, determining their mutual orbits, shaping each other, with their tidal attraction, sometimes tearing limbs from one another, sometimes caressing one another, sometimes fighting to the death, sometimes ecstatically merging.

Even in infancy the social nebulae began to be mutually sensitive. Their external perceptions were derived from experience of the distortion of their vital form by the gravitational sway of their neighbours, and from light which impinged upon their outer tissues.

I need not tell in detail how, from the direction, strength and texture of these external influences, the young social nebulae came to apprehend one another as physical objects. Their visual perceptions were of course very different from those which we obtain by lens and retina. Their grasp of the solid form of seen objects was based on their power of discriminating slight differences in the direction of the light rays which entered their tissues at different points. Thus their seeing consisted of the apprehension of innumerable ever-changing parallaxes, the relations of which were automatically analysed in the brain tracts of the core, and perceived as external objects having precise shapes and colours and sizes, and moving at definite distances from the point of vision.

When I had succeeded in mastering this odd way of seeing, I found it no less subtle and no less aesthetically significant than the familiar human mode.

The nebula’s sense of external attraction was at bottom not unlike a blend of our touch, our balance, and our kinaesthesis. But it was developed with the same subtlety as nebular vision. It afforded very precise perceptions of masses at a distance, discriminating them with surprising accuracy in respect of shape and detailed texture of density. Thus it amounted to a kind of “tactual seeing” entirely unknown to man.

In addition to these two ways of perceiving one another, the social nebulae could sense differences of electric charge in their neighbours. And as electric changes were symptomatic of emotional changes, this electric sensitivity had for the percipient a strong emotive significance.

Along with powers of external perception came powers of voluntary locomotion. In infancy the nebula’s orbit was determined solely by the simpler principles which we call physical. But as the young creatures developed needs to avoid and approach one another, they acquired also, little by little, the power to control their movements. This was done by directing the discharge of their radiation in such a manner that the recoil might propel them whither they willed. At first this voluntary control produced but a slight perturbation of the normal orbit, but in time it came to be used with greater effect. It was not until the discovery of mechanical power, the subatomic energy derived from the disintegration of the flesh of their slaughtered fellows, that the social nebulae were able to make long voyages from group to group.

The social nebulae could communicate with one another. In infancy they learned to associate certain t appearances of their neighbours with impending approach or flight, hostility or friendliness, vigour or fatigue, and so on. In time they came to make deliberate use of these spontaneous “gestures” to communicate their intentions to one another. And, from these clumsy babblings of childhood each group of nebulae developed in maturity a more or less efficient language, which grew up in close association with the internal “language” of symbolic images and movements. The external language in its finished state consisted entirely of delicate rhythmic changes of radiation produced and received by specialized organs.

6

OUTLINE OF A STRANGE MENTALITY

To understand the mentality of the nebulae, one must bear in mind three facts which make them differ through and through from human beings. They do not succeed one another in generations; they are not constrained by economic necessity; the great majority of them have reached maturity in ignorance of other minds.

On Earth, the individuals of a race procreate and die, handing on the torch of evolution and of tradition to their successors. But with the nebulae there is no distinction between the growth of individuals and the evolution of the race. The life arid memory of each nebula reaches back to the racial dawn. The race consists of the original host of individuals that condensed more or less contemporaneously after the explosion of the atom-cosmos. When the last of these dies, the race dies with it.

Nebular evolution has consequently been far less profuse in “experimental” types than terrestrial evolution. It has not proliferated in myriad diverse species. Its advance has been more steady and less varied. It was partly through this lack of variety, partly through the extreme simplicity of the environment (compared with the immense complexity of our terrestrial environment) that even the social nebulae developed a certain naive directness of thought and feeling known only in human children. Owing to this lack of sophistication nebular history displays more starkly and dramatically than human history the great formative influences at work within it.

Another important consequence of the absence of generations is this. The nebulae are in a sense “nearer to God” than any man can ever be. The human child, in spite of our great poet, trails but dim and tattered clouds of glory. He embarks upon life, not fresh from God’s making fingers, but warped by the misfortunes and blunders of countless ancestors; and, no sooner is he born, than he entangles himself further by learning from the example of his elders. But the nebulae wake with the divine lust keen and unconfused within them, and they pursue it untrammelled either by errant instinct or by perverse tradition. Never need they suffer from mistakes not their own, or be led astray by the half-truths of teachers whose very obscurity lends them a baneful prestige. Thus the nebulae, at least in their youthful phase, have been able on the whole to follow the light within them with a steadier will than man, though with less diversity of expression. Stage by stage during their youth, and without any widespread misadventure, they have discovered the true direction of their nature, and have very constantly pursued it. Not till the main host of them was already in the prime was fate to waylay them with an opportunity of destroying themselves by offering them the priceless but dangerous gift of mechanical power.

The absence of generations had another far-reaching effect. In all human cultures the idea of parenthood, birth and death, and all the attributes of youth and age, are familiar and significant. But the nebulae in their early maturity, before they began to conceive their cosmical society, were almost entirely without these experiences. Parenthood and birth were the rarest accidents; death itself was on the whole an unusual calamity, always artificially produced, and common only in periods of warfare. Youth they knew vaguely from recollection of their past phases and the study of their less mature contemporaries. Senescence was as yet not even a rare disease. It was entirely unknown. Not till the last phase of the nebular drama did they discover the inexorable decay and annihilation which plays so great a part in all human experience.

No less important than the absence of generations was lack of constraint by economic necessity. Interest in economic activities, which has played a part in terrestrial life at once so stimulating to the practical intelligence and so hostile to the finer kinds of percipience and thought, finds no place in nebular culture. When at last (as I shall tell) sheer intellectual curiosity stumbled upon the means of utilizing subatomic energy, and militarism found a use for it, economic activity did indeed playa great part in the nebular world; but even then, and even though it brought disaster, it was never (as so often with us) taken to be an end. It was always emphatically subordinated to the true and universally accepted goal of nebular life, a goal which unfortunately the human mind can only very dimly conceive.

Until I became familiar with nebular life I had supposed that without the spur of economic need no progress could be made, and the higher reaches of mentality would never be achieved. This error seems to me now ludicrous.

In the young nebulae another stimulus took the place of the economic; and in those that were mature the habit of ardent endeavour persisted, though its original cause had ceased. Not the need to annex energy, but the need to canalise it so that it should do no damage to the vital organization, was the stimulus to practical activity. All nebulae at every age, but especially in youth and early maturity, are beset by the fear that at any moment they may fail to maintain the structure of their airy tissues and organs. For not only the violence of radiation, but also any sudden voluntary movement, if too vigorous or jerky, may rend them; as with a mere breath one may disintegrate a smoke wreath. Thus all nebulae live in constant dread of physical disorders and mental derangements of the most terrifying kind. And all in their youth have to behave with courage and intelligence in order to cope with these dangers. As terrestrial animals delight in hunting and feasting and fighting, so the young nebulae delight to conquer and tame the fury of radiation within their dense cores. But again and again I have seen, and actually felt, their delicate organs wounded in untoward adventures. In some cases life itself has been destroyed, perhaps to appear again after aeons of quiescence, perhaps to remain forever extinguished. More often the damage would be painfully repaired by conscious remoulding of the wounded parts, and the only scar would be a memory of horror. Sometimes, though life maintained itself, intelligence was abolished; and the unhappy creature must henceforth drift through space forever torturing itself with insane fantasies.

This precariousness of life breeds in the young nebulae something of that directness and heroism which we look for in primitive human societies. But whereas with us the active and “realist” temperament is all too prone to be snared into the pursuit of gross material power, in the nebulae it can as a rule find no such outlet and must instead expend itself in perfecting the vital organization and the instruments of mental life.

The last of the three most important facts for the understanding of nebular mentality is the complete isolation of very many nebulae throughout their youth. Social life was impossible to them. And since self-consciousness depends very largely on the conscious distinction between self and others, this also was unable to develop normally in the isolated nebulae. Only when disease produced in them violent mental conflicts and a state of “multiple personality” did they ever conceive of a plurality of minds. And then, of course, it was regarded by them not as affording the possibility of love and all the loveliest blossoms of the spirit, but as a hideous distemper; which indeed it was.

Yet an extremely complex inner life has combined with freedom from economic servitude to foster in them a kind of self-consciousness peculiar to themselves. They had no opportunity of distinguishing between “I” and “you”; but they had constant need of distinguishing between “I” and the many opposed and often rebellious processes and cravings at work within them. Though normally they could never conceive the possibility of an “ego” or a “stream of consciousness” other than their own, they thoroughly grasped the difference between the lowly and the lofty within themselves.

Moreover, owing to lack of distraction, they were able to apprehend earlier, and to develop more earnestly, certain aspects of “inner” experience or “experience of experience” which terrestrial spirits can only rarely and with austere self-discipline discover at all. I myself, very surely, could never have appreciated this side of nebular life had I not suffered an age-long process of self-discipline under the influence of my cosmical adventure. And now that the adventure is over, and I try to record it, I find that I have lost the insight which was then forced upon me.

Lack of inherited complexity and of cultural sophistication, lack of economic adventures, and lack of social experience combined to give to the lone nebulae an innocence and single-mindedness which at first I mistook for sheer mental poverty. I had long savoured the minds of many mature nebulae before I began to understand what it was that they were seeking to do with their lives. And even when I had gained some insight into their passionately sought, but to my mind “one-dimensional” ideals, aeons had yet to pass before activities which I had hitherto regarded with condescension, sometimes even with disgust, began to display a characteristic beauty and a mysterious, nay, a mystical, significance.

***

As the young nebula advances to maturity, its constitution becomes more hardy and its practical activity more regular and automatic. It now seeks fresh modes of expression. To my surprise I discovered that time and interest were henceforth increasingly given to a strange kind of internal play. For no practical end, but for sheer delight, the great kittenish creature would juggle its living winds into freakish patterns, or thread them together as meshes of interwoven currents. Or it would toss and ripple its flying tresses for sheer joy of “muscular” skill.

This phase of carefree sportive behaviour, I observed, might be brief or lengthy or even perennial. But in the career of every normal nebula there occurred sooner or later a stage when the life of play began to pall, and the mind was invaded by strange images and formless longings.

In many respects this phase is like human adolescence. The zest of play would steadily fade, and the vigorous young creature would be vaguely longing for new worlds to conquer.

For a while, sometimes indeed for aeons, the nebula would now vacillate between sheer indolence and bouts of fantastic play, more difficult and dangerous than the normal kind. In this stage many a vital but foolhardy young nebula has lost its life or crashed into insanity. Yet even the most intricate and daring sport has failed to satisfy. Only the most obtuse, the most coarse-grained nebular minds have persuaded themselves that sheer physical prowess and physical courage were able to fulfil the obscure demands of their nature. And even in these I found no real contentment, but a never consciously recognised despair.

The main character of nebular adolescence was a surprised zest which could never find full expression. It was as though in all experience there was not a new and teasing flavour, a hint, never fulfilled, of some exquisite way of life awaiting discovery. I was reminded of certain moments of my own youth when I was suddenly and unaccountably seized with a conviction that the secret of existence was about to be made plain to me. But in the young nebula this sense of impending revelation was not fleeting and occasional but an enduring state that dominated the whole behaviour.

As the ages passed, and the main host of the nebulae advanced each toward its lonely maturity, one or two seemed to discover the solution of their problem. For after a long spell of almost complete quiescence they plunged into resolute and costly action, at first confused, and then sustained and orderly. Savouring their experience, I found that they were now in a state of fervent endeavour and exaltation. In time almost the whole company was thus occupied, each isolated individual passionately striving after an ideal of self-expression in complete; ignorance of the rest. Only in the comparatively rare J social nebulae did adolescence take a different turn.

When I examined more closely the kind of behaviour which the isolated nebulae were now pursuing so ardently, I could not at first make anything of it. When I tried to discover in their minds intelligible sources of their exaltation, I was defeated.

Patiently, but with increasing hostility and contempt, I now watched the incomprehensible antics of these hugest creatures. I had been able to appreciate their play, simply as unpretentious play; but this passionate devotion to a seemingly barren athletic skill nauseated me even more than the vapid mentality of the primal units. Surely these nebular minds, which I knew to have percipience and intelligence to a high degree, were capable of some richer life!

That the activity called for courage, I recognized, for many a nebula, confronted by some desperate crisis in its athletic adventure, gallantly took the course demanded by its insane ideal, and was destroyed. That skill of a high order was demanded was no less obvious, for as I watched I discovered the main principles which governed this strange occupation and was over and over again amazed at the ingenuity with which, in seemingly hopeless circumstances, they were fulfilled. But why, why was all this courage and skill exercised in so puerile a manner?

In time, something of the truth began to dawn on me. I began to realize that for the nebulae this passionate athleticism was pure art of the highest order. It was not, after all, a subtle and inverted kind of self-indulgence, a sort of masturbatory ecstasy, a lethal sop to the ever hungry and lonely spirit. No, for these strange beings this was indeed the way of life, the straight and narrow way. And age by age, as I watched, I myself came to enter sympathetically into it.

All the detailed action and the governing principles of this fantastic terpsichorean display derived a profound symbolism from associations in the age-long nebular past experience. The whole matter and the whole form of this art was deeply significant. By playing upon the secret strings of the past, it wakened the nebular mind to a new order of percipience for the future. What I had regarded as barren athleticism, no more significant than the slavery of golf or football, turned out to be in fact something which combined the nature of abstract art with the nature of ritualistic dancing.

I was amazed and not a little humiliated to find that I, who had so recently pitied the isolation and self-absorption of these imprisoned spirits, had now to learn from them. With mingled awe and discontent I now wandered from one hermit mind to another, allowing each in turn to dominate me with the strange impersonal yet passionate music of its life. Their creations differed in form and mood with all the diversity of human art. Some were naive, some subtle; some more passionate, some more formal, and so on. But in all those that had successfully passed beyond the initiate stages I found the same identical ecstasy.

7

THE SOCIAL NEBULAE

It was with mingled awe and amusement that I ranged among the many groups of the social nebulae, awe at the vast and stormy universe into which I had fallen, amusement at the blend of the fantastic and the human in their behaviour.

At this early stage of cosmical expansion, groups of nebulae having constant intercourse were common. Moreover, there was occasional intercourse between groups. One small family or great tribe would drift within. “speaking distance” of another, and signals would pass between them, at first unintelligible. More rarely, two groups would actually collide. Each would then desperately seek to preserve its own group life and bend the other to its will. Sometimes, a number of groups, drifting more or less in proximity along the same stream (so to speak) of cosmical movement, would grow up as a community of separate clans, possessing in spite of local differences a common basis of culture, though no common allegiance. In these groups of groups intertribal Warfare was perennial.

But most groups of nebulae throughout the cosmos grew up to maturity in complete isolation from one another. Not till certain exceptionally favoured groups began to feel curiosity about the more remote objects around them was any attempt made to communicate by light signals between the groups. Not till the utilization of subatomic power was there any possibility of voyaging from group to group.

All nebulae, social and solitary alike, are so fashioned as to find their deepest satisfaction in dance-like physical activity internal and external. At the lowliest this terpsichorean behaviour is sheer animal play, but at its loftiest it is best described as pure art of a peculiarly subtle and powerful kind. By its veiled creative symbolism this art, as I have said, can raise the nebular spirit to the highest reaches of religious ecstasy. In the social nebulae the dance life is of course socialized and pregnant with all manner of social symbolism. In the solitary nebulae its aim is simply the perfection of self-expression.

Among the social nebulae, as among human beings, there arose inevitably all kinds of conflicts between the individual perfection and the social perfection. But in the nebular world these conflicts often took forms unknown on Earth.

With the nebulae the conflict was always at bottom an aesthetic conflict between the individual dance rhythm and the social dance rhythm. Each social individual experienced the urge to aesthetic self-perfection; but also he recognized, grudgingly or with delight, the rights of others to their own aesthetic policies, and the aesthetic excellence of the group itself.

Sometimes an unfortunate solitary nebula would happen to drift within range of a group and would be seized upon by the members of the group, either in the hope of gaining his support for one social party against another, or, if the group were a harmonious one, simply for the embellishment of the group by the presence of an interesting and beautiful foreigner. For the lone nebulae, being exempt from external influences, attained a perfection of physical form which was ever a source of wonder to the social nebulae. The captured solitary would of course prove quite incapable even of realizing that the shocking distortions and agonies which now beset him were caused by the efforts of other minds to communicate with him. It would very soon appear to the social nebulae that, for all his physical perfection and symmetry, the foreigner was but an abject savage, unable to appreciate the beauties of group life, and incapable even of intelligent intercourse; in fact, that he was a mere brute, physically superb, but blind, deaf, and incredibly stupid. For to the excited and babbling observers he offered no hint of the strange solipsistic intelligence and will at work within him.

Sometimes the stranger would be forcibly retained within the group as a curiosity, like a beast in a zoo. But more often he would be roughly expelled as a mere irrelevance in the group pattern. Probably he would be so mauled in body and shattered in mind by the hurricane of incomprehensible experiences, that the upshot for him would be either insanity or death.

The social life of the nebulae impressed me with extraordinary vividness because it was so clearly embodied in perceptual and aesthetic forms. I could actually see the conflict between the individual and the group. I could see the individual struggling to maintain the symmetry and the spontaneous rhythms of his own body against the compulsive and distorting influences of the group. Also, it must be remembered, I could feel in his mind the two conflicting apprehensions of beauty. I could savour both his passion for the lyrical freedom of his own dance life, and his ecstatic self-subjection to the dance life of the group as a whole.

I could enter into his personal loves and hates, too, all the more vividly because, in time, I became sensitive to the perceptual harmonies and discords between the private dance rhythms of diverse individuals. When I had been so immersed in nebular life that I could appreciate the exquisite expressiveness of nebular forms and actions, it became visually patent to me that such and such a nebular mind must inevitably be enthralled by the sight of such and such a beauty of tresses and core; or that such and such a style or mode or mannerism in the dance life of one individual must to the vision of a certain other individual be significant of a base spirit.

The nebulae, I found, were capable of every kind of personal relationship known to us. Even sexual partnership had its counterpart among these asexual beings. For though there were not two definite sexual types, many dance unions included physical caresses, and even a transmission of substance from individual to individual, for mutual invigoration, though not for procreation.

As with human beings, so with nebulae, love was broadly of two kinds. There was a simple love hunger directed upon any individual that promised enrichment to the pattern of one’s own life. This kind of love led often to partnerships between two or three nebulae, each of which sought merely personal enrichment from the union, each of which willed merely to impose on the partnership his own aesthetic ideal. Needless to say, the result of such unions was invariably disaster. There was also love that included genuine admiration of the other’s physical beauty and prowess, or of his mental or moral perfection. Sometimes, indeed, this passion was so intense that the lover dared not approach at all near to the beloved for fear of marring his beauty by his own extraneous gravitational sway. But in the happiest cases, where admiration and desire were mutual, each would conceive a craving to complete his own form by responding to the other’s influence.

The most impressive of all nebular societies were those few small communities in which all the members were thus inwardly united by bonds of mutual understanding and affection, and all were also constantly, and sometimes passionately, raised above the individual plane by a common social purpose, namely the will to work out together an ever more harmonious and more significant dance life for the whole group.

Very few groups attained this perfection. Most were either too closely or too loosely knit. In the former the individual spirit was stifled by the proximity of his neighbours. He was a mere herd member, with no inner being. And because society was composed of barren individuals, social life was barren also. The dance pattern of the group was, so to speak, geometrical and fatuous. In the too loosely knit groups, on the other hand, there was no willed community at all, but only a grudging contract by which all engaged to refrain from interference with their neighbours, so as to secure the maximum freedom of individual behaviour.

In very many cases the group was perennially torn between two or more parties with opposing aims. One, for instance, might be seeking a more free and open formation of the group life, the other a dance form more close-knit and disciplined, in which every individual’s shape and activity should be through and through determined by the pattern of the whole. Or one party might strive for an aristocratic society of dance leaders with satellites, the other for a more democratic arrangement. One might wish to see the group life controlled by predominantly athletic principles, another might demand a more genuine aesthetic mode, another might wish to subordinate the pure aesthetic to the religious in the significance of the dance. In a few groups there were intellectualists who wished to subordinate all activity to theoretical enquiry into the mysteries of physical and mental phenomena.

Sometimes in a group torn by conflicts or oppressed by some powerful oligarchy an individual with a strong urge toward self-perfection would seek to escape from the group into outer space, purposing to live the life of a hermit. Or a couple or triplet of ardent lovers would try to break away from the prying and tyrannously moral supervision of their fellows. Or an oppressed aesthetic or religious sect would seek to found an independent society. But seldom did the fugitives attain their end. Either by physical violence or by subtle moral pressure they would be compelled to remain and to subordinate the pattern of their lives even more rigorously than before to the dance rhythms of the groups.

In some groups I found two parties identical in disposition and policy in all respects save that each considered that itself should rule and the other be a subject race. In some others, one party, through long subjection, had lost the power of independent choice and had become inherently servile. In extreme cases the subject race was so debased that they were mere cattle under the control of the master race. And often the masters themselves were by now so modified in actual physical constitution that, had their slaves deserted them, they would have been undone; for little by little they had come to effect a style of athleticism and even a physiological habit which would have broken down completely if menial service had ceased to be available. Their dance measures were so difficult, their bodily constitution and mental operations so subtle and precarious, that they needed constant assistance from the simpler, tougher, and automatically loyal “cattle” attendant on them.

One other kind of group should be mentioned, namely that in which a great nebula imposed its dance measures on a number of minute satellites. These little creatures, which were as a rule bald cores shorn of all tresses, were generally unable to advance beyond that grade of consciousness which we attribute to our simian relatives. They were indeed mere domestic animals, unintelligent dance minions to the dominant partner; and mostly they were treated with no more consideration than our backward races expend on their cattle and poultry. But a few of these satellite nebulae, wrought and tempered by exceptional circumstances, developed a keen and fearless intellect such as the normal nebulae seldom attained. And one member of this dwarf race made history upon the grandest scale.

8

THE MARTIAL GROUPS

In most nebular societies, at one time or other in their career, conflict between opposed parties would flare up into actual warfare. One side would seek to overcome the other either by bombarding their most vulnerable organs with concentrated radiation, or by actually grappling with them and striving to tear them into fragments.

It is difficult to give any idea of the horror with which I observed these battles. Superficially the spectacle was nothing but a confused tempest of whirling gas clouds in the depths of space; but to me, who had by now learned the emotional significance of all these changing shapes, to me who moreover could experience at first hand the agony of these torn tresses and shattered cores, the spectacle was no less nerve-racking than the sight of human bodies dismembered by shellfire.

Though not wholly unknown among the normal groups, war was a comparatively rare disaster. But there was one very remarkable kind of group in which fighting was perennial, and indeed essential to the group life. A permanent peace would have brought about a far-reaching degeneration of the individual character and the end of all social feeling, which in these groups could never assume any form but that of the comradeship of brothers-in-arms, opposed by a common foe.

This state of affairs was the result of causes in the remote past. Sometimes the group was in origin a composite of two groups which had collided long ago in the time when the nebulae were still young and mentally unformed. Whatever the cause, the individuals in these martial groups had specialized little by little both physically and mentally for combat. If combat was long denied them, they tended to become morbidly depressed; and ultimately each would succumb to serious mental disorder, snatching a crazy gratification for its pugnacity from the internal conflict of its own dissociated personalities.

In these curiously bellicose communities there sometimes arose a truly astounding culture unlike anything known on earth, though containing suggestions of mediaeval chivalry and modern sport. The opposing forces would be precisely matched, each individual of one troop having a special opponent in the other. Though each warrior might on occasion fight any member of the enemy force, one particular enemy was his peculiar property, his “dear enemy.” In combat with this individual he not only rose to the extreme of fury or cold hate, but also he attained a unique exaltation which might almost as well be called love as hate, since it included, along with the lust to destroy, a chivalrous and passionate admiration of the foe. This strange movement of the spirit was accompanied at its height by a violent physical orgasm which ejaculated a murderous flood of radiation into the body of the enemy and reduced the subject himself to exhaustion.

In these martial groups there was often a very complicated etiquette of war, meticulously respected by both sides. Life in such a group consisted of personal combats, general warfare, and spells of highly militarised peace. Combats had always a ritual element in them, and were of many degrees of seriousness, from the ceremonial joust to the death struggle. Even the most lethal fighting was terpsichorean in intention, reminiscent at once of the ballroom and the ballet, the football match and the boxing ring, the gladiatorial show, the bullfight, and the sadistic rituals of primitive human societies.

Though the strife was strictly regulated and sincerely aesthetic, it was definitely lethal in intention. In the earlier stages of nebular evolution the opposing warriors could do little serious hurt to one another, but as they advanced in knowledge of physical nature they discovered how to utilize in combat some of the lavish excess of radiation which was constantly issuing from their cores and wasting itself in the void. By damming the flow, and then releasing it in concentrated and focused beams they were able to do one another grievous hurt. The side which was first in the field with the new weapon was duly execrated by the enemy, who then hastened to adopt the same device. Very soon the etiquette of the group Was modified to accommodate it, and war went smoothly on, till some fresh improvement was discovered. This, in turn, was execrated and adopted.

Now it sometimes happened that one side used its new weapon so effectively that it soon found itself in a position to destroy the enemy. But as soon as this possibility was realized by an intelligent victor, he would declare peace and set about salving the host which he had come so near exterminating. Sometimes, if the enemy had suffered many fatal casualties, certain members of the victorious host would be drafted into the defeated army. At all costs the vanquished must be strengthened, so that they might become once more an adequate foe.

I was struck by two great differences between militarised man and the militarised nebulae. In man the militarisation of the individual mind is never as thorough as in the nebulae. His devotion to warfare is never so single-minded. His unmilitary nature is even liable to betray him into phases of pacifism. But in the finest examples of nebular militarism, Mars was worshipped with complete devotion. Only in those groups in which, through the exigencies of fortune, there remained traces of the impulses toward a pacific dance form, or toward mutual service, or toward intellectual pursuits, was the dance of war ever liable to be marred.

The second respect in which nebular militarism differed from our own was this. The nebulae, since they could not propagate their kind, could not rely on an inexhaustible supply of the raw material of slaughter. The average group had only a few hundred members. It was impossible, therefore, not to regret the killing of an enemy, since, once killed, he could never be killed again. It was even regrettable that an enemy should ever be permanently maimed, since as a cripple he could never again be a worthy foe.

But such was the spirit of the militarised nebulae that these regrets were seldom allowed to interfere with the prosecution of the noble dance of war. Only in a few debased groups was war emasculated by the convention that lethal weapons should not be used. In most, the process of mutual slaughter proceeded honourably and steadily; though slowly, for in nebular warfare improvements in defence managed to keep pace with improvements in attack. In many of the martial groups the members were well aware that extinction faced them; but they were convinced that one hour of glorious life was worth an age without a name. Not once but many times have I watched the final scene of such a heroic drama. The last two surviving heroes, locked in graceful but murderous embrace, and surrounded by the corpses of their fellows, have simultaneously penetrated one another’s cores with lethal shafts of radiation. For a while. each has writhed in agony, using his last breath to praise his noble enemy and the noble dance of war. Then death has conquered both.

In other cases, the war has been carried on so vigorously yet so ineffectively that each enemy has actually used up the seemingly inexhaustible springs of his radiation. Each fainting and enfeebled army has been forced to slaughter its own members, one by one, and use their energy for military purposes; until at last the insane and emaciated survivors of each host have even sapped their own vital processes in order to fling a last, impotent but suicidal volley of radiation at the dying foe.

The martial groups were not typical of the social life of the nebulae. They were definitely freaks, whose strange perversion was due to peculiarities in their early history. But though rare, and seemingly doomed to self-destruction, these perverts were to play an important and a baleful part in nebular history.

9

THE FIRST COSMICAL WAR

A certain large group of nebulae had long attracted my attention by the unusual breadth and thoroughness of its mental development. Its culture was less exclusively aesthetic than was usual with the nebulae. Intellectual curiosity played an increasingly important part in the life of this group. One party, it is true, sought to concentrate all the interest of the group upon perfecting the physical dance measures of the group, but another was moved chiefly by the will to understand nebular nature and the nature of the universe.

These intellectualists were prone to sacrifice their duties of dance participation to their passion for exploration and experiment. All their experimentation had to be carried on by daring manipulation of their own tissues and was often very painful; but such was their enthusiasm that these nebular scientists were able to discover a good deal about their own biochemical constitution. In spite of much interference and even persecution by the dominant aesthetic party, they were able to construct out of their own tissues optical instruments for the study of the remoter regions of the cosmos, and they obtained in time a clear apprehension of its boundless finitude.

Here at last, I told myself, is the germ of an ampler and a more balanced nebular culture. From this unique group will emerge the idea of a pan-cosmical society of nebulae, a society in which the diversity of all will be a spiritual enrichment to each.

Peering into the dark spaces beyond the confines of their own group, these scientific nebulae discovered, by means of their new instruments, that the innumerable flecks of light observable in all directions were in fact creatures like themselves. Often they longed to go voyaging through these dark populous depths and to make contact with these remote beings. But they knew well that to reach even their nearest neighbours would demand an immense expenditure of power. For although voyaging in the ether is practically unaffected by friction, so that an initial push will propel the traveller for ever, yet only by the use of tremendous energy could he be given sufficient speed to cope with cosmical distances.

Now these nebular scientists learned in time how to unlock the treasury of subatomic energy contained in all matter. But since practically all matter was organized in the living tissues of nebulae, they could not make use of this discovery on a large scale save by sacrificing life. Such a course was repugnant to these highly civilized beings. The members of this group, no matter what their party, had by now conceived a violent dislike even of killing an enemy in battle. Their controversies were by now carried on by methods which the historian would call either more humane or more cowardly according to his taste.

It so happened that this highly cultured group drifted into the proximity of a purely martial group. When these warriors found themselves within striking distance of another community, they composed their own purely fictitious discords in order to unite for the prosecution of the dance measures of war upon a grander scale. With one will they contrived to deflect their orbits sufficiently to bring them actually into contact with the foreign system. Then gleefully they opened battle.

In the more civilized group each party was so deeply opposed to the other, and both were by now so unaccustomed to serious warfare, that resistance was ineffective. Many of the members were killed in the first attack. A belated attempt to use the corpses for the generation of subatomic energy was frustrated by the conquest of the whole group. The invaders became a military caste which sought to impose its barbarian culture upon the combined community.

***

But peace soon began to undermine the mentality of the invaders. Several of their less disciplined members were infected by the intellectual and aesthetic culture of the enslaved race and were reduced to a state of abject self-loathing by the conflict between their deep-rooted belligerence and the novel ideas which were now germinating within their minds. The leaders therefore determined that a state of war must at once be restored. It seemed at first that, as of old, they would be forced to divide upon some trumpery difference of opinion and organize themselves and their slaves into two armies to fight one another for fighting’s sake. But at this point the natural science of the enslaved intelligentsia came to their aid. A cunning and unprincipled intellectual, hoping to better his position in the society, claimed that by the sacrifice of a single life he could provide energy to carry a troop of warriors at a prodigious speed far away into space to attack the nearest foreign groups.

The military caste at once arranged for the slaughter of the most annoying member of the slave race, a sly wit whose overt respectfulness failed to compensate for constant veiled ridicule of war and of the martial temperament. Under the horrified gaze of his fellow intellectuals this nebula was dismembered. A small portion of his flesh was specially treated by the scientist, and then cunningly inserted here and there within the body of a volunteer from the warrior caste. By a secret and subtle method matters were so arranged that the volunteer, by merely exerting his muscles in the ordinary way, should cause the foreign matter to disintegrate and project him rocketwise through space by the rebound of its subatomic energy.

Unfortunately the gallant warrior paid no heed to the cautions of the scientist and exploded his “fuel” too violently at the outset, so that the concussion killed him, and his corpse was hurtled irrevocably into outer space.

This accident roused fury against the scientist. He was seized and tortured, but managed to persuade the tyrants to give him another chance. Further experiments were undertaken. Finally a speedy but foolproof means of locomotion was achieved, and with it a long-range lethal beam of radiation, which outclassed all former weapons as the machine gun outclasses the spears of savages.

An expeditionary force was now organized. The whole body of the slaughtered slave was divided up amongst these warriors, each of whom was in turn so treated as to have the power of using the stored “fuel.”

Thus equipped, the elated army launched itself into space. Its first enterprise called for no hardihood or skill, for it was concerned merely to acquire a huge store of subatomic energy by mopping up a few score of the nearest lone nebulae. Hundreds of these drifted at no very remote distance from the group, like jellyfish in the neighbourhood of a shoal of more mobile and more predatory creatures.

Though the army moved at a speed which was regarded as incredible, its voyage lasted a long time even from the point of view of the sluggish nebular consciousness. But it was successful. The unfortunate solitaries, incapable of conceiving what had happened to them, were butchered and cut up into convenient volumes for use as “fuel.”

Then followed the first of all imperialistic adventures. The army set out upon a very lengthy voyage to attack the nearest foreign group. This journey took them past many lone nebulae, one or two of which they seized for power. If their aim had been simply exploitation of the economic resources of their neighbourhood, the lone nebulae would have contented them. But it was urgent for the warrior race to find a foe before peace undermined them.

Though the size of the expanding cosmos in relation to the size of a nebula or an electron or a light wave was then very much smaller than it is now, the distance which the little army had to travel in order to reach the nearest foreign community was but a minute fraction of the whole span of the cosmos. And though the speed which they attained was very much faster than the normal drift of nebulae, the impatient warriors found their voyage almost intolerably long and tedious. Before the end of the voyage they fell to quarrelling among themselves. Several of them were killed, more were seriously disabled. But the brawl was a tonic to their pugnacious natures, and when at last they reached their destination, they were in extremely good fettle.

The enemy was a large group whose life was almost entirely devoted to the aesthetic expression of personal relationships and the interaction of these with group feeling. Though the defenders outnumbered the attackers by more than five to one, they were of course impotent against the swift movement and long-range “modern” weapons of their enemy. The exultant warriors circled around the doomed aesthetes, pouring into them a concentrated and ceaseless volley of radiation, which “mowed them down” as by machine-gun fire. In a very short time (measured by nebular standards) all semblance of resistance vanished. The survivors floundered among the disorganized corpses of their comrades. Tresses were torn and cast adrift. Cores were pierced, shattered, disintegrated, exploded.

The conquerors proceeded to impose their own martial culture upon the remnants of the group, assuring them that only in the ritual dance of war could true fulfilment of the nebular spirit be attained. Before leaving, they appointed one of their number to carryon the good work of reorganization and enlightened government.

There is no need to tell in detail how the victors returned to their base, improved their method of locomotion and their offensive weapon (by the help of the enslaved intelligentsia), and finally set out, accompanied by the rest of their peers and all the slaves, to conquer and enlighten.

There is no need to tell in detail how they fared. Group after group of nebulae, busy with its own internal strife, or rapt by some endless and subtle terpsichorean adventure, or exploring for the first time the mysteries of existence or the depths and heights of personality, found itself attacked by an invincible and ruthless foe, and was speedily overcome.

The policy of the imperialists was to destroy only those communities which refused to accept the imperial law and culture. To those which were amenable they permitted life and a certain autonomy within the bonds of empire. To those which were both sympathetic to their aims and at the same time of warlike temperament they offered partnership within the empire.

For by now the imperialists were opposed not merely by isolated and unarmed groups but by a great alliance of groups equipped with modern weapons and transport. (The enslaved scientists had apparently divulged to the enemy the secret of subatomic power.) It was not with regret but with glee that the imperialists at last found themselves opposed by a worthy foe, and began to organize a vast army picked from among their more warlike vassals and officered by themselves.

The check to imperial expansion was brief. The enemy was a medley of very diverse and unmartial groups united only by a common danger. Stage by stage they were overcome, to be slaughtered or enslaved according to the whim of the victors. Not till a considerable tract of the cosmos had come under the imperial sway did the advancing tide of conquest suffer a check, partly through strife within the empire, partly through the increasing resolution of the resistance.

The cosmos was now like an oyster containing a minute pearl built around an irritating foreign body; for around the empire lay a vaster no-man’s-land of perennial warfare, and beyond this again the organized bases of the enemy.

In all these regions the impotent lone nebulae were seized and slaughtered wholesale by both armies for use as power. The strength of the allies was practically inexhaustible. They had the whole cosmos to draw upon, or so much of it as was not too remote to feel the danger or to be brought into action. Behind their front lines rumour of the imperialist danger crept in all directions upon the ether. Translated from language to language, it percolated from remote to ever remoter groups upon the swift-slow rays of cosmical light.

The imperialists, on the other hand, were already being forced to conserve their resources.

The little band of raiders which had originally ignited this huge martial conflagration was now a mere handful. Most had either died in battle or succumbed to assassins; for as time passed there was a great increase of discontent among the subject populations. But though the founders of empire were few and hard-pressed, they were still masters of the whole military organization, and they still hoped that at any moment the imperial forces might break the enemy line and overrun a great tract where the lone nebulae drifted in huge shoals awaiting exploitation.

But the great day never came. The imperialists had to decree that each group within the empire should kill one of its members as a source of power for the army. In spite of careful propaganda in praise of dying for the empire, it proved extremely difficult to enforce this order; and when the power which it did provide had been squandered on a huge but barren offensive, the authorities had to demand a second and then a third victim.

The result of the third order was immediate widespread revolt and the downfall of the empire. The unsupported armies, themselves utterly tired and disillusioned, fell back in disorder. The enemy flooded in on all sides, slaughtering the fugitives and making fair promises to the rebels. A ruinous peace was agreed upon perforce by the several revolutionary succession states. The whole war area, and regions far beyond it, resounded with thanksgiving for the end of war and with praise of brotherhood and of the inoffensive life of dance and song and pure intelligence.

But this rejoicing concluded only the first and local phase of the First Cosmical War. For no sooner was peace declared than the victors, habituated now to all manner of savage passions, to fear, hate, vengeance, and above all to economic greed, began to fight among themselves, and to build up new empires, threading the whole cosmos with the opposed meshes of their alliances.

It would be tedious and unnecessarily harrowing to describe in detail this darkest age of nebular history. Everywhere I “heard” familiar cries, though in nonhuman speech. “Civilization in danger! The war to end war! Wars will never end; you cannot change nebular nature. Reduction of armaments is impracticable. Peace, with security.” Everywhere I saw the fair nebular forms mutilated, dismembered, annihilated for power. Everywhere I felt the agony and spiritual stultification of war. Aesthetic activity was everywhere coarsened, partly by the direct influence of martial rhythms and martial sentiments, partly by sheer neglect of the genuine aesthetic experience. The dance life of the average group, even during times of peace, became a barren ritual significant of a past world, meaningless in the present world of war. The life of intellect was stultified by hates and fears, stifled by the endless emergencies of war.

There was of course an increasing awareness of the folly and baseness of war, and an increasing though ill-directed will for peace. Every army now claimed that it fought for peace and a new world order. Every upstart warlord posed as a militant messiah. Gestures of forlorn pacifism became more and more frequent. Individuals and even whole tribes declared that they would fight no more and never again defend themselves. But when it came to the point either their courage failed them, and they took the accustomed course, or some hard-pressed general had them slaughtered for ammunition.

During a lull in the brawling a Pan-Cosmical League was formed to settle all future disputes between rival powers, and to work out a body of principles to guide their conduct toward one another. This league, which claimed to represent public opinion throughout the cosmos, and counted among its members many former enemies, undertook to enforce its judgments if necessary by punitive expeditions and to suppress all unauthorized warfare.

The League maintained a precarious but on the whole beneficial existence, until at last a brigand empire, breaking all its pledges, overran a neighbouring tract of unorganised groups. Its conduct was formally condemned by the league; but the powers which it represented took no action. This incident had a significance all too obvious. One by one the most powerful members of the league took to arms in aggressive self-defence. Very soon the cosmical war, which had been reduced to a sporadic brawling between the least civilized communities, blazed up once more.

And what was it all about, this universal slaughter? The constant source of discord was exploitation of the lone nebulae. Each empire was determined to control as large as possible a tract of these inoffensive yet baleful creatures, and to prevent its neighbours from competing with it. For each empire was by now controlled by a small military party which saw in the clash of empires the supreme terpsichorean goal of nebular existence. The mass of un militaristic nebulae believed what they were told, namely that for safety against jealous neighbours they must at all costs maintain large reservoirs of power. Thus it was that the nebulae, though beings who were by nature exempt from economic necessity, were trapped into the lust of a power which was useless to them save for mutual destruction. Could anything, I asked myself, be more mad, more barren, more tragically incompetent than this trumped-up greed and mutual fear? But then I remembered my own world.

10

BRIGHT HEART

A new fact, a new movement of the spirit, now emerged in the cosmical drama. It was a twofold and sometimes a self-contradictory movement; and one which, though unique and nebular, was strangely reminiscent of human history. It was one of those great reorientations which are preceded by prolonged chaos and bewilderment. Needs already widespread in the community, and here and there obscurely recognized, remain unfulfilled until they are lived through and expressed and heroically served by a single person of supreme vision and courage. In this case there were two persons, very different in temperament and behaviour, but at heart one.

Of these two great ones, the first to make himself felt was originally a member of a small, isolated and youthful group which had for long escaped the ravages of war, but was at last overrun and broken up by a campaign in which its members had no interest whatever. Most of the members were killed or maimed. The dance life of the little community was destroyed. It had been a singularly idyllic community, in which, though the members had matured in a rather loose social order, and had achieved great diversity of self-expression, they were held together in spirit by vivid personal intercourse. Because of their own happy past and the. unusual depth of consciousness which they had already achieved, the survivors of the disaster experienced perhaps more poignantly than others the spiritual devastation of the cosmos.

One of these survivors was known to his fellows, and later to the whole cosmos, by a name which can best be translated “Bright Heart.” Though this name was given because in his case the nebular core attained an unusual brilliance, it turned out also to be appropriate in a more significant sense.

After the destruction of his community, Bright Heart, wounded but not seriously crippled, set out on a laborious journey through the corpse-strewn war area. Stage by stage, and often on the point of being seized by one army or the other, he crept away (without mechanical aid) into a neighbouring “desert” people only by a few lone nebulae. Here for a while he remained, healing his wounds, bitterly grieving for his slaughtered friends, but above all wrestling in his own mind with the problems of his world.

Now it so happened that in his neighbourhood two of the lone nebulae drifted within close range of one another and became a binary system, each seemingly destined to distort and wound the other for ever after.

With infinite care and tact, Bright Heart managed to induce each agonized mind to conceive that it was not alone in the universe. And since by good luck neither of the solitaries was yet a mature and rigidly self-sufficient organism, he was actually able to kindle in each a bewildered and excited interest in the other and in himself. With infinite patience he taught these two blind beings to see one another, though obscurely, to talk to one another, and above all so to adjust their internal economy that henceforth the proximity of other conscious beings should no longer be a torture but a joy, a stimulus releasing all manner of new delectable activities of body and mind.

To me, who knew well the absolute solipsism of the lone nebulae, it seemed indeed a miracle that through the insight and faith of Bright Heart these three beings should have been formed into a trinity of lovers. For so it was. With incredulity, and then with awe, I watched their orbits interweave, their tresses lightly trend toward one another and withdraw, or delicately touch and part, fulfilling the rhythms of their new dance life. With amazement I experienced in each of the two emancipated minds first the horror and fury of mutual realization, then, stage by stage under the unerring touch of Bright Heart, mutual interest and mutual need. With grave wonder, too, I experienced through these minds the long ardent story which Bright Heart chanted to them during the dance, the story of the great nebular world with all its horror and its hope, the story of his own heart searchings, and of the purpose which was now clearly forming in his mind.

Only for a short while was this personal beatitude allowed to continue. Presently Bright Heart withdrew, little by little, further and further from his companions, gently reshaping their orbits into a binary system, wistfully bidding them for a while to live on without him in mutual delight and in pursuit of a common aesthetic form. Thus, he said, they must prepare their spirits for the great work which he would later require of them, namely to seek communication with other lone nebulae by means of radio messages, and to awaken them from their solipsism. Thus would the gospel of community, passed from solitary to solitary, percolate throughout the cosmos, until all nebulae, solitary and social alike, would be eager to play their parts in the all-embracing dance pattern of the cosmos. Meanwhile he himself must leave them, to go once more among the social nebulae, preaching the gospel and persuading all to will the end of war.

Withdrawn now from effective gravitational contact with his companions, he still called to them enheartening messages, until they lay beyond the range of his “voice.”

For a while the couple carried out faithfully the discipline which Bright Heart had imposed on them. But presently they began to disagree about the interpretation of his teaching, and about their several functions in the immediate dance and in the missionary work which was to come. The quarrel grew bitter, each claiming that he alone was faithful to the spirit of the master. Infuriated with one another, they grappled. The struggle became desperate. The weaker was mangled into insanity. The stronger floated off in proud but guilty self-absorption, seeking in vain to return into solipsistic bliss. Eventually he was butchered for ammunition.

Bright Heart meanwhile had journeyed back among the social nebulae.

Throughout the “modernized” area, which comprised perhaps a third of the cosmos, things were going from bad to worse. War was perennial. Moreover whole populations were now employed in preparing the flesh of the slaughtered for use as “fuel.” Innumerable natural groups had been broken up and their members herded together with vast labour corps. Deprived of their natural dance life, and goaded either by force or by propaganda into working themselves beyond their capacity of endurance, they fell sick in body and mind, and died in hundreds.

To these industrial slaves and to the embattled armies themselves Bright Heart now addressed himself. He could not travel far among them, unaided by mechanical power, but he testified fervently to those near at hand, and these spread the gospel. To me it was a gospel at once familiar and strange.

He told of his experience with the two lone nebulae, how they had at first blindly wounded one another, how through his intervention they had become aware of one another, how the discovery had first outraged, then exalted them, how in cooperation they had achieved what was for them a new order of dance life, how in that new life they had found insight into one another and themselves, and had discovered the underlying principle which moved all things. This principle he called by a word which I hesitate to translate—love—though I can find no other word for it. Literally its significance was “glad beholding and glad dancing with.” Only in “glad beholding and dancing with” one another, he said, could nebulae find peace; and even so, only if they could “gladly behold and dance with” the underlying principle itself. Those who did this could not but long to “gladly behold and dance with” every nebula, could not but strive to turn the cosmos into one great pattern of “glad beholding and dancing,” in which every nebula would be enriched by the dance life of all, and each would contribute his unique beauty to the whole cosmical figure.

All this, he said, the two humble solitaries had seen; and now (so he believed) they were ardently preparing themselves for the great mission with which he had charged them, the salvation of their fellows.

He spoke with an eloquence and passion which it is beyond my power to translate into human speech. All I can do is to indicate the bare outline of his theme.

“Is it not true,” he said, “that one and all we desire in our hearts above everything else to behold one another gladly, to delight in the endless variety and beauty of one another, and to dance with one another in such rhythms as beauty shall dictate, so that we may be possessed ever more and more by the spirit of glad beholding and dancing? But what beauty are we making? The perfect flesh of the lone nebulae we tear to pieces for power to destroy our fellows. And this violated flesh has poisoned our hearts, with meat for the greed of power and for the fear of one another’s greed, so that there is no glad beholding in us, and all our dance is base. Greed and fear are native to us, but in the heart that is possessed by the spirit of glad beholding and dancing they cannot flourish. Then what must we do? We must do always as the spirit dictates, never as greed and fear suggest. We must stop warring. We must give up mechanical power, which is impossible without slaughter of the innocent. And above all, we must look toward one another gladly, even with enemies we must be eager to dance gladly, to express the spirit with them. And if the rulers try to compel us to fight and to use power, we must refuse, even though they punish us with death.”

Thus he spoke, urging his ever-increasing followers to live and die for the faith. In season and out of season they must tell the good tidings and exemplify the new way of life. Never must they fight, but they must have the courage of the boldest warrior, and they must welcome death in the cause.

Almost with the speed of light the gospel spread from nebula to nebula. The maimed and the oppressed welcomed it. The mighty at first scorned it and ridiculed it; but when they found that it was a power in the world, they began to deal ruthlessly with the believers. Yet the faith spread. Whole armies were infected by it and refused to fight. Whole populations allowed themselves to be overrun and decimated without resistance.

Such was the success of the movement that the rulers of the warring empires secretly consulted one another as to the best method of checking this universal rot in the morale of their peoples. It was decided that the best plan would be accept the faith and turn it to good use. One by one the lords of the empire announced their conversion. Persecution ceased. The lieutenants of Bright Heart found themselves treated with respect, and even taken into the counsel of the governors. Under the influence of flattery and sympathetic treatment, they began to see the necessity of compromise. Wild idealism, they told one another, was ineffective or dangerous. Not at a leap, but step by step, the millennium must be reached. The lives of the faithful must not be risked by unilateral disarmament. Diplomacy must aid idealism by a realistic search for security. Stage-by-stage disarmament must be achieved, and demechanization; but not suddenly. The whole social order was at present adapted to warfare and to mechanical power. A violent change would wreck it. The office of Bright Heart had been to inspire, and his work had been nobly done. But the time had now come for sober practical work, and for that he was unfit.

Many of the lieutenants of Bright Heart were hoodwinked by this policy. Under their influence conditions were made easier for the faithful; but the faith waned.

11

BRIGHT HEART AND FIRE BOLT

Bright Heart, in grave perplexity at the turn which events had taken, retired into solitude for a brief spell of meditation and heart searching. It became clear to him that the example which he had set was not enough to grip the simple and inconstant spirits of his followers. He had lived wholly and joyfully according to the faith, but now it was time for him to die for the faith, and in such a manner that his death should set all hearts ablaze.

While he was thus meditating, he was visited by the other greatest mind of the early cosmos. The visitor was a being of a very different kind from Bright Heart. By origin a satellite nebula, he was minute and bald and extremely mobile. But it should be remembered that, though in the nebular view a dwarf, according to our standards he was nevertheless immense. In the normal course of evolution he would end his life by disintegrating into a “globular cluster” of many million stars. At the time of this momentous visit he was still in full maturity and appeared as a bright and definite globe very much smaller than the smallest of nebular cores. His tresses had long since been attracted from him by the mighty central member of his group, around whom he had impotently revolved throughout his bitter youth. Not until the use of subatomic energy had become general had he broken away from that oppressive home life to range about the cosmos at unheard-of speed, replenishing his resources now and then by slaughtering a lone nebula, chastising many a haughty bully, eluding in every region the recruiting sergeants and all those officials who sought to seize him as vagabond, as outlaw, an antimilitary brigand, a disturber of the peace. His success in avoiding capture had depended partly on his extraordinary agility in the use of subatomic energy, partly on his small size; for he was a difficult target, could easily hide among the tresses of a friendly normal nebula, and at no very great distance was invisible to nebular sight.

This unique being bore a name which in his native speech had approximately the significance of the English “Fire Bolt.”

To the earnestly meditating Bright Heart now came Fire Bolt, a meteor out of the darkness. The larger nebula, rapt in thought, aimlessly drifted and rotated, as do all nebulae in inaction. His outermost tresses were gathered in upon themselves, imperceiving, inert. Fire Bolt spun round him shouting ethereal halloes to the abstracted spirit of his companion.

At last Bright Heart was roused. He greeted his small visitor with formal, even reluctant politeness; for his meditations were not yet brought to a conclusion. But very soon he was drawn into earnest parley. So lengthy and so vital was the discussion, that the two incongruous beings entered together unwittingly into a unique dance measure, expressing their varying accord and disaccord by inflection of gesture and orbit.

Fire Bolt began by very respectfully expressing his admiration of Bright Heart’s work and his acceptance of Bright Heart’s aim, namely the creation of the one harmonious and all-embracing dance community in which every nebula should gain fullness of life by faithful participation in the whole cosmical pattern of dance. This, he said, was his own constant aim.

Bright Heart said, “Fullness of life demands not only service in the cosmical pattern but glad beholding of each neighbour as an individual spirit. And this must come first.”

“It is true,” said Fire Bolt. “It is the chief truth of all. But there are some, the warlords and oppressors, whom, though we must behold them gladly as factors in the universe, we must resist and kill as malefactors in our society. As we must freely give our own lives in service of the neighbours and of the cosmical dance, so we must be ready also to kill in that service.”

But Bright Heart said, “That we must never do. That is the great false step, shattering to the dance. Till we are ready in our thousands to die yet never kill, the killers will thrive. Meet evil always with good. Behold all nebulae gladly, even tyrants and hooligans. Expect, and they will dance.”

Then Fire Bolt: “In youth, as you can see by my baldness, I was a satellite. My great bully showed me nothing good, nothing worthy to dance with. And as for these warlords and powerlords, they are past ii savings.”

To this Bright Heart replied, “No one is past saving. The underlying principle of glad beholding is in each one of us, striving for expression. That great principle, that spirit which conceived the cosmos, demands that all shall participate.”

Again there was a pause, then Fire Bolt said, “I have come to persuade you that though your aim is right and glorious, your method is futile. It would be the right method if nebulae were far more intelligent than they are or far more generous. But in the world that is, not killing but limp mildness is the great error. And what has happened to your work? Triumphant at first, it is now stultified by mildness, and the cunning of the rulers. The time is come for ruthless action. If you will consent, and call your followers to arms, I, who am not without experience of action and not without followers, will be your ally. You shall provide the vision. I will provide the ruthlessness in pursuit of the vision. Together, we can make the new world.”

But Bright Heart would not agree. He said only, “No, I will not kill, but I will be killed. And the manner of my dying shall kindle such a spirit as shall never be extinguished.”

In vain Fire Bolt pleaded with him. “Can you not see,” he said, “that we are all directed by the sheer mechanism of our nature, that we are the sport of mighty forces, that you cannot alter the current of history by a fine example and a momentary widespread glow of emotion? The warlords and power-fiends cannot change their nature. They must love mastery, even as I do and you do. And fate has given them a mastery baleful to the people. They are but instruments through which mechanical power enslaves us all. It is useless to appeal to them. We must seize their power. This baleful-precious mechanical power must be controlled by those who will to establish the new world.”

“This mechanical power,” said Bright Heart, “is to be had only by the slaughter of innocents. The dance pattern of the cosmos needs the cooperation of the lone nebulae no less than ourselves. We must forego power forever.”

Fire Bolt answered, “We who are ready to die for the cause must dare to kill. Even when the revolution is achieved, and there is no further need for armaments, we shall still need power, that the lives of citizens may be enriched by swift travel and a thousand joy-giving inventions. Of what use are cattle save for the support of citizens?”

The tresses of Bright Heart quivered and contorted in protest and indignation. But he said only, “Two solitaries I have known, and I have danced long and gladly with them. They are not cattle. They are imprisoned in themselves, but they shall be set free.”

There was a pause, then Fire Bolt said, “I find it in my heart to believe you, and indeed you may well be right. It may be that the new world, when it has been established, will forego power and emancipate the lone nebulae. But meanwhile we must use them, or the revolution will never be achieved.”

For some while, Bright Heart and Fire Bolt continued to plead with one another, but neither was convinced. Finally it was agreed that Bright Heart should first carry out his new plan, challenging the rulers even to the point of martyrdom; but that, if his death failed to bring in the new world, Fire Bolt should let loose his revolution.

12

DEATH OF BRIGHT HEART

Slowly, unaided by mechanical power, Bright Heart returned to the busy and unhappy region whence he had come. With all his strength he broadcast his challenge to the rulers, and to their minions, his own tricked followers.

To the disheartened faithful in all that region he cried, “Away with lying compromise! Refuse, refuse to do the foolish and wicked things that the rulers make to seem prudent and honourable. Refuse in your thousands, and all their power will vanish. They will kill us. Let them kill us by hundreds and thousands. But they cannot kill us all. There will be enough left for the making of the new world. Let us die gladly for the new world.”

The authorities made haste to seize Bright Heart. But his words were already abroad upon the ether, and could not be recalled. So they tortured him to force him to recant what he had said. But he continued to proclaim the truth. When he was at the point of death he cried out, “Look! Look! The great Maker who made all nebulae in his likeness watches us from outside the world. His heart is bright. His tresses can brace the cosmos.”

I, myself, half expecting to see a divine eternal nebula beyond the hosts of mortal nebula, looked. It was a strange shock to me to see, peering through the veil of innumerable nebulae, the almost human face of God, remote, inscrutable, intent, kindled (as it seemed to me) to ecstasy by the creatures of his own artistry.

Looking once more to Bright Heart, I saw that he was dead, and that slaves were taking his flesh to the nearest munition makers.

But the manner of his death and the words that he had spoken were rumoured from empire to empire throughout the cosmos. And it was said that he himself was the bright-hearted God, and that he had come into the world to save nebulae from their own folly.

Everywhere it was said, “Let us set up the new world now without delay, before we forget the glory of this death.” Munition slaves left their battalions in hundreds to join the peace army of Bright Heart’s followers. Warriors broke up the dance life of their regiments and foreswore their weapons, fraternizing with the enemy. Empires were shaken and overthrown by the tidal wave of the new life which advanced in all directions like the tremors of an earthquake.

Fire Bolt, observing these great events, wondered whether after all Bright Heart had been right and the new world was to be without further agony.

But presently he saw that, though many rulers had fallen, their places had been taken by others of the same kind, who, while they spoke fair to Bright Heart’s followers, established themselves by the old methods. Then one by one the rulers told their peoples that some neighbouring power was insincere in its protestations of goodwill and was secretly planning an attack. Secretly each government provided its neighbours with evidence of its own warlike intentions, for use as propaganda. Thus, as the passion caused by Bright Heart’s death waned, and became only a memory, the peoples were tricked once more into fear and hate and war. And the priestly leaders of the followers of Bright Heart told their respective peoples that the divine spirit of Bright Heart, the underlying principle of glad beholding and dancing, was bidding them wage the last of all wars to clear the cosmos of the evil-minded foe.

13

FIRE BOLT

Fire Bolt, after his talk with Bright Heart, had retired to his own much harassed region; and there he had set about inspiring and training a picked band of followers.

He said to them, “We are the instruments of fate. Our wills are the expression of mighty forces at work in the cosmos. Through us the new world will be founded. Hitherto, power has been with the masters, the oppressors. Inevitably they have exercised it in their own interests, not for the world. But now, power is no longer in their hands alone. The knowledge of mechanical power, the skill for using it, has passed to those whom the oppressors enslaved. They have only to will resolutely to overthrow the oppressors and create the new world. If they will it, it will happen; for power is theirs. And it is for us who do will it, and do understand the way in which fate is working, to show the oppressed their opportunity and lead them to victory.”

This he said in season and out of season. And he kindled his followers with his own fire, and he trained them secretly in the technique of obtaining mechanical power from disintegrating nebular flesh, and in the use of it for locomotion and offence.

While he was doing this, he watched the career of Bright Heart. And when Bright Heart died, Fire Bolt said to his followers, “If we were all like him, there would be no need for revolution. Let us wait and see whether the example of his life changes the wills of nebulae, and brings the new world peaceably, as he hoped. It will not; but let us have proof that it will not, so that we may convince the oppressed peoples that there is nothing for it but to destroy their oppressors.”

And when at last the oppressors had tricked the followers of Bright Heart, and the empires were once more at war, and the peoples were everywhere slaving to produce power or to defeat an enemy people, Fire Bolt sent his followers abroad to create more and ever more followers, until in every group, in every munition corps, in every troop of warriors, there was a follower of Fire Bolt, working for the revolution, stirring up discontent, whispering seditious truths, appointing to each convert a particular task in the worldwide preparation and in the worldwide revolution itself.

When all was ready, Fire Bolt gave the signal. Slowly it spread abroad upon the ethereal undulations from nebula to nebula. And as it passed, the conflagration which had been so carefully planned leapt into life. One by one, and with surprisingly little fighting, the peoples came into their own.

But the revolution did not spread throughout the cosmos. The remoter regions had not been well enough prepared. In some the people rose too late to surprise the masters, and after a desperate struggle were subdued. In some they were half-hearted, or did not rise at all. Rather less than a third of the population of the cosmos was set free by the revolution.

The peoples that had freed themselves now set about reorganizing their society, under the leadership of Fire Bolt. It was widely hoped that each nebula would now be allowed to go back to his native group and find full expression in the dance life of the group. For there was a widespread desire to express in significant dance forms all the cumulative passion of revolution. Many said to Fire Bolt, “Help us now at last to work out and establish the first measure of the cosmical dance pattern.”

But Fire Bolt said, “The enemy outnumbers us by two to one, and will surely attack us. We must prepare for a very desperate war. But we shall win, and we shall free the enemy peoples, for we shall be strengthened by our great cause.”

So the freed peoples freely submitted themselves to a very strict discipline. While there was yet time they drilled and practiced all the undertakings of war, and they piled up ammunition. And the enemy, seeing this, hastened their preparations. And the enemy rulers told their peoples that the revolutionary peoples had fallen into a worse servitude than before, that they were being cunningly and brutally used by their tyrants, that all glad beholding and dancing had vanished from them, and that Bright Heart, who watched from his heaven outside the cosmos, commanded all true believers to join together for the overthrow of that evil society.

The war which followed was lengthy and destructive; but, though outnumbered, the peoples of the revolution were in the end victorious. For they had faith, unity of purpose and Fire Bolt. One by one the enemy peoples either suffered defeat, or spontaneously broke out into revolution.

When the war was over, and all social nebulae throughout the cosmos had entered the revolutionary society as free citizens, everyone agreed that it was time to establish the cosmical dance pattern of all nebulae, which alone could afford every nebula the deepest aesthetic satisfaction, and was indeed the whole goal of nebular existence.

Innumerable voices enquired of Fire Bolt how this thing was to be done. Now Fire Bolt was no longer what he had once been. He had used himself up in the revolution, and he was desperately tired. Moreover a strange “crumbling disease” was beginning to attack him, a disease increasingly common among the minute “satellite” nebulae, and by now not wholly unknown among the normal nebulae. His outer tissues were disintegrating into minute dense grains of fiery gas, and where this had happened his flesh was as though it was no longer his own. He could not move it. He could not perceive with it. Fire Bolt, in fact, was growing old. He was beginning to pass over from being a nebula to being a globular cluster of stars, a minute galaxy. But inwardly he was still almost his old ardent self, though tired, utterly tired.

Now there were two views as to the kind of thing the cosmical dance pattern should be. According to one party it should be stately and restrained; and the course of each nebula should lie wholly within his own group. The cosmos should become a lovely pattern of distinct minuet figures. According to the other much larger party the cosmic dance must be far more violent. It must symbolize and commemorate by its far-flung measures the conflicts and agonies of the past. Only by an extravagance of swift intricate movement could it by potent suggestiveness waken the nebulae to a new order of percipience, intelligence and creative power. Moreover it was hoped that from the ecstasy born in every heart by means of this superb communal activity there might emerge an oversoul or single spirit of the cosmos, in whose exalted experience every individual nebula should participate.

Now the less violent dance program could be carried out wholly by means of the native energies of the dancers, but the other entailed a huge expenditure of mechanical power. This would have to be obtained, as formerly, by the sacrifice of the lone nebulae, for there was no other source of energy but the flesh of the nebulae themselves. The advocates of the less violent dance insisted that the office of the lone nebulae could not be merely to give their lives for fuel but to play their part consciously and joyfully in the dance. No cosmical dance pattern could be wholesome, or significant, or satisfying to any sensitive individual, if the greater part of the cosmical population had to be left out of it entirely and murdered for its support. Those world citizens who still accepted the teaching of Bright Heart dared to point out that their master had actually succeeded in awakening two of the lone nebulae to a sense of community. Surely it was a supreme duty to organize a worldwide mission to the lone nebulae, so as to emancipate them from their solipsistic prison cells, and kindle them with the gospel of community, and the holy zest of the cosmical dance.

But the other party would have none of this. They declared that the lone nebulae were mere brutes, cattle to be used up as seemed fitting to the community. The only right which could be claimed for them was the right to humane slaughter. All agreed that the supreme goal of existence was the creation of the cosmical dance pattern. After all then it was a kindness to the lone nebulae to enable them to contribute something important toward this end in the only way which was possible to them, namely by yielding up their flesh for fuel. Confident in their numbers and their realism, this party appealed to Fire Bolt to exercise his presidential fiat and forbid their opponents to disturb the harmony of the great cosmical undertaking by advocating their idealistic yet cowardly policy. Thinking to rouse his jealousy they added a suggestion that this heresy was a symptom of the widespread resurrection of the impracticable and sentimental ideals of Bright Heart.

But Fire Bolt, already fatigued by the effort of “listening” to their lengthy petition, replied in a manner wholly unexpected. “That great seer,” he said, “erred only in having too good an opinion of nebular nature. He underestimated the weakness and stupidity of the peoples, and the self-regard of the oppressors. He thought the new world would be brought into being by the good will of all, not by the hate and courage of a few. But at bottom he was right. Though to overthrow the oppressors we had to do many terrible things and sacrifice many social and many lone nebulae, now that we have freed the world we must ‘gladly behold’ all nebulae, and dance with all nebulae, sacrificing none. I am sick and dying. You will remember me, for without me you could not have made the revolution. But more earnestly, more constantly, remember Bright Heart. For his work is still for you to do.”

The petitioners departed in indignation, murmuring, “His mind is going.” They tried hard to keep Fire Bolt’s pronouncement from being made known, but the old sick nebula gathered his strength together to force his dying flesh to one last effort. One last, long impassioned speech he made, condemning the aims of the majority, pleading for the lone nebulae and for the unmechanized dance, and praising Bright Heart. Before he had said all that was in his mind to say, his speech organs were paralysed.

Not long afterward he lost all power of movement and of external perception. He became as one of the lone nebulae, though rich in precious memories of intercourse, memories of Bright Heart, of sedition, of revolution, and of the new world which he had founded. For a while his old spirit flickered on, imprisoned within an unresponsive dust of stars. And then he died.

But his last appeal spread slowly, irresistibly, upon the ethereal medium, and was passed on from nebula to nebula.

14

THE LAST PHASE OF THE NEBULAR ERA

The party which stood for the more primitive dance and for the emancipation of the lone nebulae was greatly strengthened by the dying speech of Fire Bolt, for the prestige of the great revolutionary was at its height. But most nebulae, and almost all who were in authority, continued to favour the policy of the mechanized cosmical dance life. The delight in the power and freedom of mechanical locomotion was by now too deeply rooted to be easily foresworn. The government, moreover, saw in the more violent dance a far greater scope for governmental control and centralization than in the other.

While the dispute was raging it was suggested that no important decision should be made till experiment had revealed the actual capacities of the lone nebulae to respond to educative influence. Some of the party which advocated the more primitive dance life therefore set about making contact with several of the lone nebulae. They very soon found that the task was far more difficult than they had expected. Not one of them had Bright Heart’s genius for sympathetic insight and tact. Their clumsy efforts to give the solitaries an inkling of their presence were at first entirely unsuccessful. When, later, they managed to develop a partially successful technique, they received an unpleasant surprise. The lonely mind to whom they had with such difficulty revealed themselves had been so mauled and infuriated by their efforts that he regarded the intruders with furious hate, and would do nothing but stab blindly at them with shafts of his native radiation. Even when the technique had been so far improved that mental intercourse could be achieved without distressing the solitary, the attempt to give him some idea of the external world, by speech and by training his rudimentary powers of external vision, generally put him to such a severe mental strain that he had a nervous breakdown. In many cases the unfortunate patient went mad.

Nevertheless the missionaries persevered, and in time they succeeded in producing about a score of “enlightened” lone nebulae, capable of external perception, of speech and of locomotion.

The curious flocked in from every side to meet these emancipated savages; and the solitaries themselves were eager to learn as much as possible (in small doses) of the amazing world into which they had so unexpectedly been flung.

After a while it became clear that the various individual lone nebulae were reacting to their new environment in very different ways. Those that were relatively backward in physical and mental development not only adapted themselves comparatively easily to the life which was going on around them, but declared that in glad beholding and glad dancing with other individuals, especially with one or two intimate friends, they discovered a new joy, and one which was altogether more delectable than any familiar joys. Some went even so far as to say that their earlier life had been obscured by a vague sense of frustration and futility which now at last had given place to bliss. They asked only to be allowed to live the life of personal love undisturbed forever, expressing their inner ecstasy in mystic love dance now with one individual now with another, or with twos and threes, as the spirit moved them.

But the more developed nebulae reacted in a very different manner. The goal of life for every nebula, they said, must ever be to awaken the spirit so far as possible in percipience, intelligence and appreciation. This could be done only by the life of dance action, external or internal. It was true that by the external behaviour of many nebulae acting in relation to one another the dance was made capable of far greater complexity; but, they affirmed, it was made no more significant. What had these proud but brutish social nebulae really achieved by .their vaunted social life? They talked much of glad beholding and dancing, but in truth, instead of dancing in harmony with one another, they had perpetually been in conflict. Each was a curse to his neighbours, and none had been able to attain more than the crudest and most superficial aesthetic perception. Their finer perceptions had been stifled under the urgent need to defend themselves against one another. The hurly burly of social life had deprived them of inner reality. It was this lack of inner being that had made them so obtuse as to suppose that mechanical locomotion could be used to produce significant dance forms. Could anything more fantastically false be conceived than the notion of self-expression by means of power not one’s own, and in terms of a violent kind of locomotion intolerable to the true nebular nature? These empty creatures were only of importance because of their harmfulness. Already they had decimated the population of lone nebulae, and unless prevented they would exterminate them. It was evidently necessary to rouse the lone nebulae from their serious life, not to make them permanently social but in order that, by a temporary cooperation, they might destroy the social nebulae.

Among the social nebulae themselves the dispute over the lone nebulae became more and more violent. Each party claimed that the experiment had proved its case. The advocates of mechanical power argued that although a few lone nebulae might, with infinite trouble, be educated to take a humble part in the cosmical dance, the great majority were clearly too far gone in solipsism to appreciate the beauty of communal life. The advocates of the primitive dance, on the other hand, claimed with reason that the lone nebulae were not mere brutes, that they were intelligent and highly aesthetic minds, and that, if only they could be won over for community, their help in the production of a profoundly significant cosmical dance order would be invaluable.

The conflict was irreconcilable. The advocates of mechanical power took matters into their own hands. They seized government, proscribed their opponents and organized a worldwide heresy hunt. But the party of the primitive dance was not to be so easily crushed. In many regions they were able to paralyse the activities of the government; in one region they were in a majority. There they organized themselves for war and embarked upon a dual policy toward the lone nebulae under their sway. They sent missions among them to rouse them from their solitariness, and gave to the missionaries these instructions. Each lone nebula, when he had been educated into clear awareness of the community, was to be asked whether he wished to participate in the cosmical dance or not. If he was ready to do so, he was to be treated as a citizen; if he refused he was to be slaughtered for power.

The “primitive” party would certainly have been beaten in the struggle which followed, had they not discovered a new weapon, far more destructive than the simple beams of radiation which had hitherto been used. The inventor of the new method of attack was one of the socialized lone nebulae. He was a prince of outspoken ‘cynics, for he had declared that though he cared not a rap for any nebula but himself, he saw the necessity of supporting the “primitives” to save his own life. The end which he desired, he boldly declared, was that all nebulae of every party and type should be destroyed, except himself. But for the present he was willing to help the less dangerous pack of brutes against the more dangerous.

The new weapon consisted of a ray which would not only shatter the enemy but would start in his flesh a process of atomic disintegration so violent that all nebulae in his neighbourhood would be infected. He only wished, he said, that he could safely use this weapon on his friends as well as on his enemies.

Not till the enemy population had been halved did they discover a means of checking the spread of this diabolic infection, and at the same time learn to use the deadly ray upon their opponents.

It would be tedious to follow the course of the war, which dragged on indecisively aeon after aeon. Its end was ignominious to both antagonists. Neither triumphed; both were reduced to impotence by forces independent of the enemy.

Throughout the nebular era two slow but irresistible changes, independent but interacting, were setting a limit to the life of any possible cosmical community of nebulae, and to the-lives of individual nebulae also. The first of these was the continued expansion of the cosmos, the second was the senescence of the individual nebulae.

Owing to the expansion, it became increasingly difficult to communicate with remote groups. Not only did messages take longer and longer, but also they entailed an ever greater expenditure of energy. Even the concentration of radiation into a beam did not do away with this difficulty; for even the finest beam spread to some extent. Actual locomotion from region to region of the cosmos was still more seriously hampered. Distances were so increasing that, though short trips from neighbour to neighbour were scarcely at all affected, long voyages to other groups were becoming ever more lengthy and costly. The cosmos, in fact, was beginning to disintegrate.

The difficulties due to the expansion would not have been so formidable had the nebulae retained their youth. But senescence was by now making it less possible for them to readjust themselves to changing circumstances. They were becoming more hidebound, more sluggish, less percipient. For by now the “crumbling disease” which had destroyed Fire Bolt was a widespread plague, especially among the social nebulae, whose more active life seems to have worn them out more rapidly than the solitaries.

Nebula after nebula, group after group, munition corps after munition corps, regiment after regiment succumbed to the strange disease. It did not suggest the spread of infection from some particular region. It was endemic in every region, and ever on the increase. At first it had been regarded as a curious and unimportant accident, much as we should regard the case of a man who should have the rare misfortune to choke himself with his own saliva. But as the plague increased, it became a matter for public concern; and in time it grew to be even more momentous than the war itself.

For as the war dragged on, aeon after aeon, now this side securing an advantage, now the other, a larger and larger proportion of the combatants was put out of action by the “crumbling disease.” Finally things came to such a pass that war was simply brought to a standstill. Both armies lost heart in the endless campaigns, and melted away. The authorities had not the means, if they had the will, to send them back to the front. A few heroically or fanatically militaristic warriors did indeed struggle to keep up the fray. For a long time it was possible to discover here and there a couple of aged foes still clumsily attacking one another. Purblind, stiff-limbed and mentally enfeebled, they would fumblingly direct their lethal beams at one another; but so palsied and incompetent were they that as often as not they blew up their own bodies instead of striking the enemy.

But most nebulae, as soon as they found their powers decaying, or even earlier, were too depressed to carryon their military duties. They crept away into a quiet place to snatch whatever comfort was possible in their distress, to mumble their store of memories, to lament over their aches and pains, to converse laboriously, like deaf old men, with their aged companions.

Thus one by one these first and hugest of all living things fell into decay. Even now, in our human era, all are not dead. Some, like our own great galaxy, retain a smouldering core, organic and distressfully alive. In this galaxy of ours the vital core is hidden from man by huge clouds of dead and non-luminous matter; but our astronomers have already guessed its existence, though not its vital constitution. Most of the flesh of our once superb and ardent nebula, most of the sensitive and agile organs with which it perceived and created beauty, crumbled long ago into that inconceivably sparse dust of stars which now surrounds us. But the old heart, or rather brain, still maunders on to itself about the glorious and tragic past and about its present blind isolation and misery.

Even in our day a few far-scattered nebulae are still almost untouched by decay. They see around them nothing but the ruins of their world, their dying or their dead companions. They themselves are still alert and sensitive. Like the lone survivor of a shipwreck, each strives to construct for himself a semblance of comfort in the desolation. And since for nebulae the only really satisfying activity is ever the dance, they can but dance to themselves measures symbolic of the ardent past. With subtle rhythms and patterns, they recapture their own lost youth, their loves and hates, their mature ambitions, and all the follies and agonies of the great nebular community. They epitomize and transmute into the language of dance the whole past of their race with all its heroic ventures, its tragically missed opportunities, its conflicting purposes, its horrors and frustrations, its perennial dream of the glad beholding and dancing of every nebula with all others in the never realized cosmical dance life.

But in our day the great majority of the formerly alive and sentient host are already crumbled into stars. Their voluntary movements have long ago ceased. They drift and slowly spin under the influences of gravitation alone. The stars themselves, fiery particles left over from the continuous living tissues, also spin and drift, held loosely together, in the system that we call galaxies, by their combined gravitational influence.

15

INTERLUDE

Watching this universal senescence, this inevitable disruption of the communal life of a whole cosmos, I was oppressed with human pity and with human indignation against the author of a creature at once so full of promise and so futile.

Why, why, I cried in my loneliness, did God endow his cosmos with such wealth of physical power and of spiritual potentiality if the issue was to be nothing but desolation?

For it seemed to me in that long drawn out decline that not merely the nebulae but the cosmos itself had entered into senility, and that any subsequent life or movement of the spirit could only be a dying flicker.

I looked back in memory along the vista of the aeons. As one recollects the earliest recoverable incidents of childhood, I remembered that moment when the atom-cosmos had first responded to God’s word and lavished itself in light. I saw once more the teeming, the jostling and agitated host of the newborn nebulae. I recalled that less distant age, when, more scattered and more mature, those eager spiritual adventurers were discovering the true direction of their nature, and exploring, not without disaster, the strange universe of their dance life. I saw them at last tricked and led astray by the misuse of knowledge, squandering their wealth of power and their strength of spirit on false goals. Not in memory only but in vivid perception I saw them one and all dying, their true life unrealised.

I had a curious fantasy that the cosmos was now like a deserted room, closed up and stifling. From outside, the sunlight, pouring through shut windows, lit up the lifeless dust motes, hanging in the air. The curtains never moved. A flower in an empty vase drooped.

A strange passion of loneliness seized me. Like a prisoner I could have battered on the walls of the cosmos, had there been any walls. But I was imprisoned in a boundless finitude. Around me the dust of a dead world stagnated in the ether.

“Oh God, oh God, let me out,” I cried, “or kill me.” I peered beyond the dead hosts of the nebulae. There, there still, outside the boundless finitude of the cosmos, God still watched the processes that he had set in motion.

From the bottom of my being, I loathed him.

The features became clearer. Dread face of power! Brutish, human, celestial! I strained and strained to read God’s face. But it was inscrutable.

Cruel? Indeed, no! Compassionate? No! Or in a manner, yes? For surely that calm attentive gaze meant not mere calmness, mere aloofness. Did it perhaps mean passion transmuted? Did it speak of inner participation in all grief and joy? Perhaps. Yet it was ruthless, as though compassion had been absorbed and used in some loftier and relentless exaltation.