The Wanderer

Chapter Thirty-six

Paul Hagbolt stared down into the bottomless dark as if the circular window on which he rested were the top of a great aquarium, the stars and the tiny semicircles of Earth and Wanderer a mysterious marine luminescence, or as if the round were that of a glass slide under a microscope, and the stars, diamond infusoria.
There was a faint rustling and then a little cry  -  Miaow crawling weightless through the flowers and calling some discovery to Tigerishka.
From beside Paul, the larger cat said: "Because mankind is young, you think the universe is, too. But it is old, old, old. Tomorrow and tomorrow...petty pace...last syllable of time...tale told by an idiot...yes!
"You think that space is empty, but it's full. Your own solar system is one of the few primeval spots left, like a small, weed-grown lot overlooked by builders in the heart of a vast and ancient city that has overgrown all the countryside.
"In the galaxy where the Wanderer grew in orbit, the planets are so thick around each sun they shroud its light and make a slum of space, a teeming city of a galaxy. It is the boast of our engineers, 'Wherever a sunbeam escapes, we place a planet' Or they moor a field, to turn the sunlight back.
"Tens of thousands of planets around each sun, troubling each other with ten thousand tides, so that tidal harmonizing is half our civil engineering. Planets following each other so closely in the same orbit that they make elliptical necklaces, each pearl a world. You know those filigree nests of balls your Chinese carve of ivory, so that you peer and peer to find the center, and end with the feeling that there's a little of infinity locked in there? That's how solar systems look, most places.
"You haven't yet heard this news, simply because of the snaily slowness with which light travels. If you could wait a billion years, you'd see the galaxies grow dim, not by the death of stars, but by the masking and miserly hoarding of their light by the stars' owners.
"All but a tiny remainder of the star-shrouding planets are artificial. Billions of trillions of dead suns and cold moons and planetary gas giants have been mined to get the matter to make them  -  your Egyptian pyramids multiplied by infinity. Throughout the universe, natural planets are as rare as young thoughts.
"Your own galaxy of the Milky Way is no exception. Planet-choked suns chiefly make the great dark central cloud which puzzles your astronomers.
"A pond can fill with infusoria almost as quickly as a ditch-water puddle. A continent can fill with rabbits almost as swiftly as a single field. And intelligent life can spread to the ends of the universe  -  those ends which are everywhere  -  as swiftly as it grows to maturity on a single planet.
"The planets of a trillion suns can fill with spaceship-builders as quickly as those of one. Ten million trillion galaxies can become infected with the itch of thought  -  that great pandemic!  -  as readily as one.
"Intelligent life spreads faster than the plague. And science grows more uncontrollably than cancer. On every undisturbed natural planet, life crawls and flutters for billions of years, then overnight comes the blossoming, the swift explosion across the great black distances of seeds that grow like weeds wherever they fall, and then the explosion of their seeds on, on, to the incurving ends of the universe.
"There is the drama of meeting other life forms  -  shocks, moments of poignant wonder. And then, much too soon, comes the ennui.
"The ditch-water puddle, where yesterday a few amoebas swam, is thick with writhing life  -  and the pond, too. The algae gleam like jewels. Then soon the pool grows clouded." She pointed a claw toward the thick stars. "Those diamonds you see out there are lies. The suns that sent that bright light now are masked."
Tigerishka turned her tapering muzzle from the star-spangled window and spoke to Paul directly.
"The universe is full, Paul. Intelligent life is everywhere, its planets darkening the stars, its engineers recklessly spending the power of the suns to make mind's environment  -  burning matter to energy everywhere to make more form, more structure, more mind. The Word  -  to call mind that  -  goes forth, and soon there is nothing but the Word. The universe with all its great reaches and magnificent privacies becomes a slum, begins to die of too much mind  -  though they can never see that  -  just as a shallow sunlit bay can die of too much life.
"Immortality is achieved, breaking down the individual mind's limits future ward. Your world, Paul, is one of the few islands of death left in the sea of life everlasting.
"With hyperspatial travel and psionic communication, the ends of the universe are closer together than the planets of your solar system. The far-flung galaxies are more centralized than the countries of your world, than even your country's fifty-one states. And the affairs of the cosmos are ordered by a democratic rulership more benign and more terrible than that of any imagined god.
"It may be that your own primitive visions of heaven  -  and especially your ambiguous attitude toward it: that heaven is both a great wonder and a great bore  -  are merely valid intuitions of that government.
"Security and safety are its watchwords. It is conservative, ruled by the old, who are everywhere a great majority since the achievement of immortality. It is painstaking, patient, just, merciful  -  but only to the weak!  -  and infinitely stubborn. Its records alone, etched on molecules, occupy the artificial planets of two star clusters. Its chief aim is simply to remember and treasure  -  but only as a memory!  -  everything that has ever happened.
"Any minimally intelligent, respectable, safe race of beings can confidently expect from it support for their life-ways. It is always against the expenditure of energy for any purpose except conservation and security: it opposes the exploration of hyperspace, or even its use, except for the transport of its police. Its greatest fear is of something that might seriously injure or altogether disrupt the universe, for now that  -  bar hyperspace  -  it is no longer possible to think of safety in infinity and the unexplored, a great cosmic death-dread has arisen.
"Yet since even immortals must reproduce, if only at a minimal rate, to keep up the illusion that they are still truly alive, the government must continually find space for new beings. They'll be coming for your space soon, Paul. There's been a change in the policy toward the remaining wild worlds. Heretofore they were looked on as preserves of novelty, to be shielded until they grew to galactic stature. But now their living surface is needed, and their matter, and the energy of their suns. They are to be integrated into the cosmic super-culture. Carefully, thoughtfully, and with kindness  -  but it will happen to you and probably within the next two hundred of your years. And it will not be a slow process  -  once it begins, all the wild worlds will be occupied and integrated within decades.
"To reduce its policies to a single statement, the aim of the cosmic government is to conserve intelligence until the cosmos dies. There was a time when this meant 'forever,' but now we see it means until mind is maximized, until all matter that can be is shaped to the service and sustaining of intelligence, until entropy is reversed to the greatest degree possible within the limits of this universe.
"They look on this as the millennium. We look on it as death.
"My people are the Wild Ones  -  the younger races, races like my own which grew from solitary killers, which have lived closer to death and valued style more than security, freedom more than safety; races with a passionate sadistic tinge; or coldly scientific, valuing knowledge almost more than life.
"We rate growth above immortality, adventure higher than safety. Great risks and dangers do not trouble us.
"We want to travel more substantially in time. Not just observe, but change the past, make it a fuller one, revitalize the countless dead, live in a dozen  -  a hundred!  -  presents and not one, go back to the beginning and rebuild.
"We will explore the future time-wise, too, not just to reassure ourselves that there's a comfortable hearth fire dying there  -  Intelligence in its last bed and moribund. We'd grow another cosmos to live on in!
"We want to range through mind more thoroughly  -  that crumpled rainbow plane inside our skulls. Although telepathy and psi are commonplace, we still don't know if there are other worlds upon the other side of the collective inward darkness  -  and how to visit them, an undared dream.
"We'd change all that: explore the realms of the spirit like strange continents, sail them like space, discover if all our minds rest like tiny rainbow seashells on the shores of the same black, storm-beaten, unconscious sea. Maybe that way there lie untrodden worlds. Also, we want machines that make thoughts real  -  another little job no one has done.
"But mostly we would open hyperspace  -  not use it just for rapid coastal trips, navigating only its surge-troubled fringes and keeping always in sight, however dimly, the shores and headlands of our own particular cosmos...but boldly sail beyond the universal shelf into the deep unknown with its vaster storms. That is a task for galaxies, not for planets  -  one or a hundred  -  though we will take our chances if we must.
"We think that countless cosmoses besides our own ride in the whirlwind void of hyperspace  -  a billion trillion scraps in the tornado, a billion trillion snowflakes in the storm. These won't be cosmoses like ours, we think, but built of different basic particles  -  or never particles at all, but ever-changing continuities. Worlds of solidity or holes in that. Worlds without light. Worlds in which light may move as slow as spoken words or swift as thought. Worlds in which bits of matter grow on thought as here mind seems to grow on molecules.
"Worlds with no wall between mind and mind, and worlds that are more prison-celled than ours. Worlds where thought is real and every beast's a god. A fluid universe  -  its planets bubbles  -  and worlds that branch in time like mighty vines.
"Worlds in which space is crossed with spiderwebs instead of flecked with stars  -  cosmos of vines or roads. A cosmos with solids but no gravity, worlds of dimensions more and less than ours, worlds different in every basic law  -  chromatic scale of cosmoses, spectra of creation.
"Or if we find no worlds in hyperspace, then build them there!  -  create the monster particle that births a cosmos, bursting from this cosmos as from a chrysalis, no matter if this cosmos be destroyed.
"So much for our larger aims. Our smaller ones: a screen for all we do. Privacy for our planet and our thoughts. Weapons as we may need them. Free research, as secret as we want it. No inspection! The right to take our planet where we will, even if there's no orbit waiting us which we have paid the rent on. To live between the stars if we so choose, out in the chilly, sunless wilderness, burning the prairie grass of hydrogen  -  or in the oceanic spatial deeps that lie between the island galaxies. The right always to travel hyperspace, now reserved for government and police. The right to take a chance, the right to suffer. The right to be unwise, the right to die.
"These aims are hateful to the government, which values every frightened mouse and falling sparrow as equal to a tiger burning bright. The government wants a police station winking blue by every sun, a cop pounding a beat around each planet, squad cars roaming the interstellar dark  -  fuzz everywhere, blurring the diamond-pristine, lucent stars.
"Millennia ago the government began to nibble at our freedoms  -  we Wild Ones, we Recalcitrants, we Untamed. We banded on one planet of our own, won some prestige and powers, kept up our screens, lived our own lives, seemed to be gaining ground  -  only to find we'd made ourselves a single easy target for the police.
"A century ago we all were put on trial. Soon it was clear the case would go against us: no privacy, no secret research, no hyperspatial traveling, no chance to solve the universe's problems on our own.
"Surrender then  -  or die? We cut and ran.
"Since then it's been a never-ending chase. The Hounds of Heaven always on our track: planet pursued by planets untiring. No spot in all the cosmos safe for us. No outback far enough in all the galaxies, except the hyperspatial storm we have not mastered  -  reality's hurricane.
"Think of the sea as being hyperspace, its surface as the universe we know, its ships as planets, we, a submarine.
"We surface near some solitary sun not yet built up with artificial orbs. Then they appear, and we must dive again. Sometimes we stay too long, must fight a battle before we vanish in the void's cruel dark. We've blown up three suns just for diversions! Those novas are in distant galaxies. We may have killed a planet; can't be sure.
"Sometimes our cold pursuers make a truce and plead with us a while, and make us offers before they aim their killing bombs and rays  -  hoping we'll see the arc light of their reason that glares always above the cosmic prison yard.
"Twice we risked all to find another cosmos  -  cut loose in hyperspace and sailed off blind. But by some twist of hyperspatial gusts we were brought back to this same universe  -  enchanted thorn-forest around a castle, or tunnel ending by some trick of space inside the same jailyard that it was dug from.
"We are the Vanderdecken Planet of the Cosmos, making our knight's tour 'round the universe  -  but always comes the untiring pursuit along the crooked curves of hyperspace.
"We try to keep our standards, but we slacken. We didn't need to hurt your planet, Paul!  -  or so I think, I really can't be sure  -  I'm but a servant on the Wanderer. But though I can't be sure, I'll say this now: I hope before we harm one creature more, we plunge forever into the dark storm. They say the third time you drown  -  May that be so!"
Her voice changed and she cried out sharply: "Oh, Paul, we're charging around with all these beautiful dreams and yet all we can do is hurt people. Should you wonder that we're falling in love with death?"
Tigerishka broke off. After a bit, her voice neutral yet tight, as if she had drawn into herself, she said: "There, I've told the monkey everything now. The monkey may feel superior to the cat, if he wishes."
Very quietly, Paul drew and let out a deep breath. His heart was thudding. At another time he might question Tigerishka's story and his understanding of it, but now it simply stood there as she had told it, as if the stars beneath him were an emblazoning of it  -  a diamond script spelling only what she had said.
This fantastic eyrie was so like the viewpoint of dream, so like what is lightly called "the mind's eye," that Paul could hardly say whether he were living only in his fancy or in the whole great starry cosmos; for once, imagination and reality were seamlessly mated.
Pushing his shoulders from the great warm window with less effort than a sigh, he looked sideways and down at the fantastic figure beside him, seeming in silhouette more than ever like a slim woman costumed for a cat ballet. Her hind legs were sprawled out, her forepaws folded together-to cushion her chin, so that her head was up and he saw in black outline the snub nose, the height of her forehead and the spearpoints of her ears. Her tail arched off beyond her, where its tip twitched in a slow rhythm against the stars. She looked like a slim black sphinx.
'Tigerishka," he said softly, "there was once a long-haired monkey who lived hungry and died young. His name was Franz Schubert. He wrote hundreds of monkey songs  -  pongo ballads and ape laments. One of them was to words written by an altogether forgotten monkey called Schmidt von Lbeck. That monkey song strikes me now as if it had been written for you and your people. At least, it's named for your planet  -  Der Wanderer...The Wanderer. I'll sing it for you..."
He began, "Ich komme von Gebirge her...
"No," he said, breaking off, "let me put it in my own language and change some of the pictures just a little, to fit better, without changing any of the key lines or the feeling."
The words and phrases he wanted came effortlessly.
He heard a soft rustling wail, all exactly pitched, in more voices than one, and he realized that Tigerisbka was lifting the piano accompaniment from his mind and reproducing it with a lonelier beat than even the piano gets.
After the sixth bar, he came in:
I come here from the stars alone, The way is twisted, the deeps moan. I wander on, am seldom gay, And keep on asking, "What's the way?" All space is dark, the suns are cold, The flowers are pale and life is old. Talk that's not noise is getting rare  -  I am a stranger everywhere. Where are you, world that's all my own?  -  Longed for and sought, but never known; The cosmos that's as green as hope, One fiercely flowered, starward slope; The world where all my friends can walk, My dead stand up, nor white as chalk, The universe that talks my talk  -  Where are you? I wander on, am seldom gay, And keep on asking, "What's the way?" A ghostly answer comes from space: "There where you are not  -  there's your place."
When the last line was sung, and Tigerishka had hummed the accompaniment out to its end, she sighed and said softly: "That's us, all right. He must have had a little cat in him, that Schubert monkey  -  and that Schmidt monkey, too. You've got a little cat in you, Paul..."
He looked for a moment at the slim, star-edged figure beside him and then he reached out a hand that was star-edged, too, and laid it on her shoulder. He sensed no tightening, no anger, under the faintly warm, dry, short soft fur. After a moment, although it was nothing he'd consciously planned  -  perhaps the fur was giving cues to his fingers  -  he began to scratch gently the curving margin between shoulder and neck, exactly as he might have done to Miaow.
For a while she did not move, although he thought he felt muscles relaxing under the fur. Then there was the faint murmur of a barely-breathed purr  -  just a flutter of sound  -  and she leaned her head against his hand so that her ear brushed his wrist He shifted his kneading toward the back of her neck and she raised her head, rolling it from side to side with a deeper fluttering purr. Then she rolled her body away from him a quarter turn, and for a moment he thought it was to tell him to stop, but quickly discovered it was only that she wanted to be scratched under the chin. And then he felt a silky finger press against the back of his neck and draw smoothly down his body and he realized it was the tip of her tail caressing him.
"Tigerishka?" he murmured.
"Yes, Paul..." she answered faintly. With a tiny dragging of elbow and knee against the warm transparency he drifted against her, and his arms met around her slim, brushy back and, while the tail-tip continued to caress, he felt her velvet pads resting lightly against his spine with only the ghosts of claws at their tips. He heard Miaow mewing plaintively. "She jealous..." Tigerishka breathed with the faintest chuckle as her cheek brushed against his, and he felt her harsh narrow tongue lightly touch his ear and begin to scrub against the back of his neck.
Up to this moment he had done everything quite gravely, as if his every gesture were part of a ritual that he must get just right and never be excited, but now safely welded to this fantastic feline Venus in Furs the excitement did come, and the images began to flood up into his mind, and he let go altogether, though strangely without losing control. For the images came with a queer orderliness, as when his mind had first been riffled through by Tigerishka, but now they came slowly enough so that he could see them all clearly, through and through. They were pictures of men, women, and beasts. They were pictures of erotic love, rape, torture, and death  -  but he realized that even the deaths and the tortures were only to underline the intensity of the contacts, the exquisite violation of all bodily taboos, the completeness of the togetherness; they were the inward decor for the actions of two bodies. These pictures alternated regularly with mind-filling symbols like elaborate jewels and patterned enamelings, or meaningful shapes in a richly bright kaleidoscope. After a long while the symbols began to dominate the pictures; they began to throb like great drums, to shiver and resound like great cymbals; there was a feeling of the universe around, of darting out toward it in all directions, of outspreading to totality in one great series of building and diminishing surges that went plunging through the stars to velvet darkness.
After a space he came slowly floating up out of the infinite softness of that bottomless black bed, and there were the stars again, and Tigerishka lifted up a little above him so that very faintly, by starlight, he saw the violet of her petaled irises and the bronzy green of her cheeks and her mulberry lips parted, careless that she showed her whitely-glinting fangs, and she recited:
Poor little ape, you're sick again tonight. Has the shrill, fretful chatter fevered you? Was it a dream-lion gave you such a fright? And did the serpent Fear glide from the slough? You cough, you moan, I hear your small teeth grate.
What are those words you mutter as you toss? War, torture, guilt, revenge, crime, murder, hate? I'll stroke your brow, poor little ape  -  you're cross. Far wiser beasts under far older stars Have had your sickness, seen their hopes denied, Sought God, fought Fate, pounded against the bars, And like you, little ape, they some day died. The bough swings in the wind, the night is deep. Look at the stars, poor little ape, and sleep.
Tigerishka," Paul wondered with a sleepy puzzlement, "I started to write that sonnet years ago, but I could get only three lines. Did you - "
"No," she said softly, "you finished it by yourself. I found it, lying there in the dark behind your eyes, tossed in a corner. Rest now, Paul. Rest..."