Galaxies Read online

  “Listen here to me,” he says again, “and I’ll put the full and final truth of this to you.”

  “That’s why you’re here.” She speaks in a rather dull and abstracted fashion, her glance frozen inward to confront the dead as if he were some aspect of herself. Is he? This is a theme which the novel cannot touch. “If I didn’t understand what was happening here, you never would have been summoned.”

  “Nonsense,” the other says briskly. ‘That’s easy sophistry, and while it may work with those other fools, you’re not going to manage it with me. I’m not like them at all. Remember, I’ve already passed over the edge. You’re only going to get the truth from me. There’s nothing else.”

  “What’s the truth?”

  “The truth is that you cannot possibly leave here.”

  “I’m going to try,” she says,

  “I didn’t say that you couldn’t try. You may well succeed in breaking from the field, your thinking is correct on that issue, there may be a means of exit. But what I’m saying is that you can’t do it because it’s only going to make things much worse.”

  “Impossible. Nothing could be worse.”

  “Not impossible but quite true. Better the death we know than the death that you want to give us. The one is eternal and we can dwell within it. The other is final and will cancel all possibility of time.”

  “The decision is made,” Lena says. Her fingers clamp against one another; she adopts an earnestly penitential position. “It has been made and there will be no turning back from this.”

  “We are dead now. At least let this death continue. At least in the field of this galaxy where there is no time at all we have a kind of life or at least we have that nullity of which we have always dreamed. I wish I could tell you some of the things that we have learned together during these seventy thousand years of perceived time, but they would make no sense to you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “There is no order.”

  “Everything is ordered,” Lena says; “everything, ultimately, does make sense.”

  Her tone is so flat, so deprived of affect, that she might be dead herself. One must understand the degree to which she has reached an absolute communion with her cargo. She sees no disparity between her position and theirs. In a way she wishes that she did, because if she could see herself as different from the dead, she would not be faced with the need she feels to persuade the spokesman that she is right But she is one of them, and what she does to them, then, she does to herself.

  She knows that to share with the dead, to understand them, is to pass the last of all barriers. To understand that in the jaws of the universe biting down hard, biting down harder, more toward blankness, that aberration known as humanity is so slight as to make even discrimination between its living and dead components no more significant than the differentiation one might make between the halves of an ameba in mitosis. Living and dead, they have been joined in this everlasting and terrible vault, and she wishes somehow that she could make the dead understand this, too.

  But he would not. Not ever. The pain of the dead is even greater, she supposes, than the pain of the living, and their bitterness, too, must increase. So all that she can do now is to listen submissively although her heart itself would scream, and if she could embrace this man, this dead, this specter, this craziness, she would, only to hold him against the anguish … but here is an irrationality, she knows, of such dimension that even in these altered circumstances she would not try to explain it. Certain things can never be understood, can never be confronted, but must be put from all of us. In that is the beginning of implication.

  She faces the dead, voyaging within her to find the part where it has spoken, still without face and says, “I know what you are going to say.”

  “Do you? Do you really? Then do you know that we have found resignation, and can you even understand what resignation would be to us?”

  “Yes, I know that.”

  “Do you know what is meant by the peace that passeth all understanding? Do you grasp what I am trying to say to you for all of us?”

  “Yes,” she says, “I know of that. I know of the peace that passes understanding.”

  “Passed. It’s Biblical.”

  “All right. Biblical. I seek it in my way, and that is why we must leave, for there is no peace here.”

  “It is perfect. There is perfect and complete peace.”

  “That is an illusion. You have suffered greatly, and you prefer what we have found to the possibility of more suffering. But there is no accommodation. There is no way in which this can be adjusted to. Time is infinite but our own capacities are not We will fall and fall. Forever.”

  ‘Toward oblivion.”

  “No. Toward madness.”

  “This is already madness.”

  “No, oblivion,” she says; “that is what you do not see. We would have lost control, we would be utterly mad, and yet for the rest of all time we would know this, and that is what I cannot bear and why we must leave. Whatever the risk.”

  “You cannot measure the risk.”

  “This is merely a transitional stage. It is not the last which has been planned for us. If we do not get out, things will become even more terrible.”

  “No, they would not. We have gone through the other end; we are already dead and know the difference.”

  “You do not know madness or what they have in store for us. You understand none of that None of it.”

  “You have no right to say that. That is merely arrogance. Once dead we have passed through to the realization of all.”

  “No,” she says. She would stake everything on this denial. “No, that is not so.”

  “Are you dead?”

  “We are the same here.”

  “Yes, but have you died?”

  “I don’t know. Who can tell? I know what we have passed through together, and I have seen much more than death.”

  “No,” the dead says, “you are terribly wrong there. You have misunderstood utterly. There are absolutes,” he says; “damn it, damn you, there are absolutes after all,” and then he seems able, at least momentarily, to say no more.

  XLI

  The speed of light is one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second, which would seem to be fast enough, and yet in astronomical terms, in terms of space exploration, it would be the Seventh Avenue local with brake trouble.

  It takes, for instance, more than four years for light to travel from the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, to the Earth, about nine or ten times that for light to travel from Sirius, which we take to be virtually the nearest star with the possibility of a planetary system and conditions that might support our own kind of life. Just in the Milky Way, that corner of the galaxy occupied by Sol, thousands of years elapse in the passage of light from one side to the next. There are galaxies whose light we now see is the expression of energy emitted hundreds of thousands of years ago.

  And far beyond the realm of sight or even the most powerful telescopes lie the pulsars, believed to be the waves of energy emitted by galaxies at such inconceivable distance that their light has not reached us, may not reach us for millennia, may never reach us at all, because by the time their light has traveled here, Sol itself may have died, and the Earth may be a burned pellet circling the ruined star. Or may have been absorbed in the final explosion.

  Consider these two factors: the dimension of the universe and the impossibility of tracking it through any speeds up to the speed of light-. The Bureau had to consider them in the early years of the fourth millennium, just as science-fiction writers of our own day had had to deal with them. It might have served the purposes of the Bureau if it had had access to these texts … but of course none of them existed.

  (No records remained of that period toward the end of the second millennium. There was not a single scrap of evidence showing how the folk of that time had dealt with their problem, not even a sacred scroll embodying the words of the followers ensh
rined in some buried museum of artifacts. All of it had been destroyed much earlier, as if someone in the eras succeeding that millennium had made a unilateral decision that there should be no trace whatsoever of the past. Civilization appears to have been virtually reconstructed beginning around the year 2200; there is little bridge between that second era and all that preceded.

  (Nor had there been such a museum, a collection of artifacts, would they have been closely observed. This is a notably phlegmatic and unsentimental age, without any sense of history or interest in pursuing a past deemed irrelevant. Human endeavor is cyclical, and there was a period in the 2500s when archaeology flourished: there was a stochastic frenzy and a desperate interest in finding how civilization had once destroyed itself through technology so that it would not happen again, and there had been a tyranny of researchers which had led to colorful and vicious episodes of political brutality, proving that historians and archaeologists were no less intrinsically violent than those who cared not of the past. But the 2500s are quaint now, have long passed into anonymity, and little traces of that civilization likewise remain. In the year 3902 there are virtually no archaeologists.)

  That problem the Bureau faced was the development of a practical, faster-than-light drive.

  The galaxy, let alone the universe, could not be colonized without it. It is impossible to conceive of any flight that could last hundreds or thousands of years without the descendants of the original crew having lost any sense of mission, any desire for completion, any understanding of origin, and, furthermore, there is no level of alienation as complete as to make competent people consent to spending the remainder of their lives in a ship moving at impossible but still finite speeds toward an unknown destination. People could not even be bred for this, although there were some rather horrid experiments conducted at mental institutions hundreds of years ago.

  Accordingly, the Bureau researchers had to understand, man’s tenuous efforts to populate or at least chart the universe which had moved at geometric rate through the conquest of the Centaurus and even toward the initial hold on Sirius—thirty-six years to the hardy explorers of that time was just barely feasible, what with the enormous bonuses the Bureau paid as well as the parole from death sentences —would come to a complete stop. Science-fiction writers of this time, then, were not the only group that could not deal with that possibility. The Bureau writhed under it as well. How was it going to evolve a drive that would bring it the stars? How would it get around the chronological gap? What was the point in having a Bureau at all? What was the point in evolving interplanetary travel and sophisticated devices of colonization and exploration if they were cut off at a given point? The Bureau might have to dissolve. This was impossible, since in certain crucial senses, ways which the population did not entirely understand, the Bureau ran the world.

  The work of Einstein had been buried with that of all his contemporaries, but his work was painfully reconstructed by physicists of the 3500s who worked independently, as if Einstein had never existed. Like him, they postulated at first that faster-than-light travel was impossible under all terms of conceptually grasped Euclidean physics. As speed approached that of light, these neo-Einsteinian theories of relativity held; mass and time would dwindle inversely so that a ship traveling right up to the speed of light (and never exactly at it, since it could only be approached, not met) would remain in static time at microscopic size. When it decelerated and reached its destination, the occupants would find that hundreds, perhaps thousands of years had passed while they had undergone only the relative time span of the trip. Thirty-six years to Sirius, then, only to find oneself utterly separate from the culture he had left!

  Of course this would not matter on Sirius, but it would matter very much indeed in terms of obtaining contact with the culture from which you had left. Would it have kept proper records of your flight or would it have disappeared under another millennial frenzy?

  During the course of the Bureau’s cautious experimentation through the mid- to late thirties, it was found that this part, at least, of the relativity equation did not apply. Crews did not become microscopic nor did time pass at a shuddering and insurmountable rate outside of the space capsule. What the neo-Einsteinians had postulated just did not check out to the relief, of course, of the Bureau.

  But the other significant section of the relativity theory did appear to hold. Although a faster-than-light drive might have been theoretically possible under non-Euclidean physics, no one could make it practical. The speed of light could not be exceeded. And a ship walled in by that upper limit might as well not be traveling—in terms of cosmic exploration—at all.

  It was then that the Bureau embarked upon its long, secret and dangerous experiments in search of a hyperdrive, one that would indeed exceed the speed of light. At the time of this novel, the bureaucracy, as the reader can well sense, had long since fallen into decadence, self-contempt, rigidified forms and custom, but it would do discredit to Ate brilliant and courageous researchers and voyagers of this early time who were responsible for the great days of an institution that for the last five hundred years had merely been moving on the inertial impact of those energies. The experiments went forward; they caused great loss of life and circumstance, but they can be said to have given man the universe. They opened up the possibility of the faster-than-light drive.

  That drive was predicated upon tachyonic force: the conversion, that is, of the constituent ions of the ship to particles which assumed the qualities of faster-than-light atoms. These atoms are different in all of their properties from those of the “normal” universe, although they can be reconstituted. The atoms, in short, can change their condition.

  That was the most brilliant insight of the Bureau researchers and voyagers in those early days … that they were able to change the literal constituent qualities of atoms so that a ship could slip in and out of the field of faster-than-light drive in some exact reclamation of its original form. There was less trouble in sending a ship into hyperspace than in getting it out in its original condition. That could only be accomplished by a trial-and-error process which was, to be sure, intermittently disastrous.

  There were failures: experiments which resulted in hideous effects upon those returned in different form or no form at all, grotesques shambling from the converters, creatures which were of no universe we can name seen in the force fields shimmering before return, destroyed by the technicians before they could come put … and of these failures as much should be written as of the successes, for only through failure can humanity transcend itself. Success teaches nothing; failure presents limits, gives us the tragic sense without which understanding is impossible. Successes are composed of a thousand failures like the way the photos in newspapers reduce on inspection to myriad scattered dots, each expressionless, all comprising vision. And of the Bureau in those middle years of the fourth millennium, a great and grave instrument, something must be written and someday will because this is a history accessible to many.

  The author may charge himself to the task. What is a body of work in our field without somewhere tucked in a future history? The idea of a future history may seem frivolous: after all, it might well be presumptuous to sketch a future when too few of us have any grasp whatsoever of the past let alone the present, and if we cannot comprehend our future without a sense of history, then science fiction must be the least relevant of all branches of literature. And then again, assuming that we will never possess our history (the people of 3902 have utterly lost theirs), assuming that our history is being eradicated through event and in our culture has become almost instantaneous, certainly always contemptible … then if that is the case, perhaps the future can replace the past. By knowing where we thought we might go, we can reconstruct what we might have been. One will work as well as the other. Chronology is only a function of personality-in-culture. One may, scratching out didacticism where it can be found, take on a new kind of cunning.

  So there might at some time b
e other works which will paint in some of the gaps only suggested here. The struggles of the Bureau to perfect the hyperdrive in the face of the pain, the losses, the ships that never returned and those which did in altered form and those few, gallant stragglers which by docking in the Antares system or traversing corners of the Milky Way proved that it was possible that the tachyons could hold matter as well as the tardyons and that the only barriers which held man to his limitations were self-erected.

  There are stories here of schemes and wonder: the courage of the Bureau and many of those who, seeing what the Bureau would become when the struggles were over, did all they could to subvert it, but, losing, did away with themselves. There are the stories of the lost ships and the monsters within, some who sacrificed themselves willingly when they could have returned and exposed themselves to the world, brought about the end of the program in revulsion. Most of those stories would do more credit to the Bureau than what does exist here. But it would not be entirely fair to the Bureau to judge it by what it has become; not fair either to judge history either by the point that it has reached in 3902. There is much to be said, then, which can only be inferred here; there will be time, later on, to go back and to pick out, chiaroscuro fashion, notes toward a larger and more definitive series of novels which will explore the history of the Bureau from the days of origin until its bleak and somehow pathetic end in the year 4911 when its total membership had been reduced to four.