Mountain, and suddenly he resolved to climb it. Perhaps the winds of
the mountain being stronger, the fuzziness of his thought would be blown
away? Perhaps the arrangement of the crystalline structures, the arches
and spires, might catch his brain waves, modulate them, transform them,
strengthen them, feed them back, himself a part of the design instead of
outside it?
In the framework of physical science a nonsense notion. But what harm to
try?
He sought out Tom and Jed, the two who would miss him, the two who would
care.
"There ain't no water up there, far as I know," Jed said. "And you can't
carry none, now. Me and a party scouted the mountain once. It's mighty
purty, but useless. The quartz ain't valuable enough to cover its
shipping costs back to Earth. The ground is too rocky to farm. Not much
in the way of food growing there. So we never went back."
"The scientists surveyed it when the planet was first discovered," Cal
said. "One of the first places they went because it was so outstanding.
But they found nothing interesting and useful either. Still, I think
I'll go."
"Well," Jed said with a shrug. "You can't get lost. If you should lose
your bearings, just walk downhill and you'll come to food and water.
Follow the shore line until you get back, either direction. And, I
reckon, the way things go now, you ain't goin' to hurt yourself. We
won't worry about you none. We're all gettin' along all right, so you
needn't worry about us either."
"You want me to come with you, Cal?" Tom asked.
"No," Cal answered, "I think better if I'm alone."
He left them then, went past some colonists who were picking berries and
eating them, and on up the valley that ran between two ridges.
It was only a few miles to the foothills, a gradual rise of the valley
floor, a gradual shallowing and narrowing of the stream, a gradual
drawing in of the spokelike ridges until the valley at last became a
ravine. The morning air was clear and still, the scent of flowers and
ripening fruit was sweet.
Before he left the ravine to begin his climb he ate some of the fruit,
and washed the lingering sweet taste from his mouth with a long, cool
drink of water from one of the many springs that fed the stream.
He looked up at the mountain above him, and his eye picked out the most
likely approach to its summit. It was not a high mountain, not in terms
of those tremendous, tortured skin folds of other planets. Hardly more
than a high hill in terms of those. Nor, as far as he could see, would
the climb be difficult or hazardous.
The fanciful thought of Mount Olympus on Earth came into his mind,
although this one was not so inaccessible, so parched and barren. The
gods of Greece would have found this a pleasanter place, although they
might not have lived so long in the minds of man, since the mountain was
more easily climbed, and therefore man would have been the more easily
convinced after repeated explorations that no gods lived there after
all.
Would the Greeks, as with the later religions, have placed the site of
heaven farther and farther away, retreating reluctantly, as man explored
the earlier site and found no heaven there? Retreat after retreat until
at last the whole idea was patently ridiculous?
Dead are the gods, forever dead, and yet--to what may man now turn in
rapture? In ecstasy? In communion? What, in all physical science, filled
the deep human need of these expressions?
The climb of the first slope, up to the crest of the ridge he intended
to follow, was quickly done. He turned there and looked behind him, at
the valley of the colonists below, and far down where the valley merged
into the sea, and far on out at the hazy purple line of another island.
As he started to turn back again, to resume his climb, his eye caught a
flash of something moving in the ravine below him, sunlight on brown,
bare skin.
He waited until he caught another glimpse through the trees. As he had
suspected it was Louie, still trying to keep him always in sight.
His first impulse was to call out, to wait for Louie, ask him to join in
the climb. He discarded the impulse. His need was to get away from all
others. And sympathetic and compassionate though he might be, the
confusion in Louie's mind seemed to intrude upon his own. Nor had his
earlier attempts to comfort Louie met success.
Let Louie follow if he willed. Perhaps the clean air would clear his
mind as well. He feared no physical harm, even if Louie's tortured mind
intended it. There were no tools to strike at him from a distance. Even
a boulder pushed from a height above him would not strike, for that
would be the physical use of a tool to gain an end. He feared no bodily
attack from ambush, for his own strength and knowledge were dependable.
He began his climb again, followed the crest of the ridge where it swept
upward to buttress the side of the mountain. The going was not
difficult. The trees and shrubs grew thinner here, and provided clear
spaces for him to wind among them. The stones, at first a problem to his
bare feet, bothered him less and less until he forgot them. He felt no
physical discomfort, neither from tiredness nor thirst, nor from the
branches scraping his bare skin, nor anything to drag his mind into
trivialities.
Nor tortured theories such as had plagued him in trying to reason out
the new concepts of a proportionate, variable reality.
Instead, there was a sense of well being, anticipated completeness, a
merging of the often quite separated areas of thought, intuition, and
appreciation.
Although at no great height, now the trees no longer grew so tall that
they obscured his vision of the heights above. As he climbed they were
replaced by shrubs shoulder high, then waist high, then merely low,
creeping growths which his feet avoided without mental direction.
A curve of the ridge brought him to the first outcroppings of
crystallized quartz. On them he saw no signs of scar left by the
geologist's hammer, no imperfections where nodes may have been broken
away. They were complete, singularly unweathered.
There was no path, nor hint of one, nor sign that either scientist or
colonist had ever passed this way.
The ridge swung back into line, and still he climbed, effortlessly and
without consciousness of passing time. Time and space and matter seemed
to have receded far into the background of consciousness. Man's
star-strewn civilization was no more than a dream. It was as if he,
alone and complete, occupied the whole of the universe, encompassed it
as he was encompassed by it.
Yet not alone! Their presence, which seemed so evanescent on the valley
floor, was closer now, more clearly sensed. Almost as if, at any
instant, the veil of blindness would disperse and They would stand
revealed.
Now up the final slope of the mountain he threaded his way through
higher outcroppings of a more perfectly formed quartz, with deeper
amethystine hue scintillating in the Ceti sun's light, diffracted not
only in the purples but into greens and reds and blues.
As he came around the base of one of these, there towering above he
caught his first full view of the greater spires, pinnacles, buttresses,
and arches of the mountain's crest.
It was the crystal palace.
The climb had been steep, steeper than it had appeared from below, yet
his breathing was not labored, his mouth was not dry from thirst, nor
were his muscles protesting the effort. He did not need to stop and
rest, to gather his energy for the last steep assault upon the peak.
Far below him he saw Louie toiling up a slope, then dropping with every
appearance of exhaustion when he came to each level place. Still he
would rest no more than a minute, and always his head was turned to keep
sight of Cal above him. He would push himself to his knees, then to his
feet; and slowly, step by step, begin his climb again.
As if from far away, Cal felt a pity at the uselessness of the
self-torture, the senseless need of man to punish himself for the guilt
of imagined wrongs; and felt a wonder if the strangely developed moral
sense of man had not, after all, done more harm than good. For in the
ordered universe, where everything fitted into the whole, what could be
either good or bad, right or wrong, except as a reflection of man's
inadequacies in his imaginings? Rightness and good, wrongness and evil,
these could not possibly be other than assessments of furtherance or
threat to the ascendancy of me-and-mine at the center of things, and had
no meaning beyond that context.
He turned from watching Louie, pitying him, and made the last sharp
climb with no more effort than the whole had been. Now he drew near to
the towering structures of the crest, now he was beside them. Now he
walked beneath and through an arch which seemed almost a gothic
entrance.
And stood transfixed in ecstasy.
Magnificent the dreams of man that took form in steel and stone and
glass, yet none matched the lightness, the grace, the intricacy, the
sublime simplicity of these interwoven crystalline structures where
light from the noonday sun separated prismatically until it filled the
air with myriads of living, darting, colored sparks of fire above him.
Where the breeze that blew through the vibrating spires made blended
sounds the ear could barely endure in rapture.
As once, in childhood, he had stood in a grove of giant trees that laced
their limbs in gothic splendor above him, now again he stood, lost in
time and space and being, lost in vision and in music which neither had
nor needed form nor beginning nor end.
And knew it was a simple tool; Their concession to the mind of man, to
bridge the gap between Their minds and his.
Without wondering more, he sank down upon the mossy turf of the floor
and lay supine to gaze upward, to follow line to blended line until they
seemed mirrored into infinity.
The darting lights above him whirled, spiraled up, then down, clockwise,
then counterclockwise, reminding him ... reminding him ...
... the internal structure of crystals....
25
Across the universe, two billion years ago, there too a planet coalesced
from the mutually attracted vortices of twisted space; gases compelled
by gravitational forces solidifying to hardened matter, forming a crust
over a molten core. In the soupy atmosphere of metallic salts and gases,
tortured and rent by electrical storms of incalculable fury, among the
vibrating crystals one formed that was aware.
Not in the sharp awareness of later times, but at the first only
ill-defined, perhaps no more than the awareness of acid chains of
molecules that formed into non-crystalline viscid protoplasm on another
planet across the universe. No distinct line of cleavage where affinity
to other chemicals left off and sentient selectivity began marked the
distinction here as in that protoplasm.
As with its cousin across the universe, the one-celled amoeba, these
crystals too were sensitive to light, to heat, to cold--to food.
Ill-defined, but distinct already from the non-sentient crystals about
them, these life forms grew through absorbing from the rich and soupy
atmosphere those elements necessary to growth, to branching, to cleavage
into new individuals.
What is awareness? At what point even in protoplasmic life does it
appear? The amoeba avoids pain, seeks food, reproduces itself, and
blunders blindly through its environment in search for condition more
favorable to its continuance.
In the monotony of a purposeless existence, most humans do no more than
that.
Must awareness, too, be defined in terms of the consciousness of
me-and-mine? Defined only by what me-and-mine can feel, know? A
protoplasmic growth feeling awareness, excluding all possibility of
awareness in other kinds of growth because they are not a part of
me-and-mine, therefore too inferior to know awareness?
Each crystal structure has its own vibration characteristic, and on that
planet, in time, one special vibratory rate knew awareness of self.
Mutation here too gave added complexity to the structure, and
self-awareness took on that added growth of awareness of surroundings.
Through eons of time, and the mutations brought by time, awareness of
self and surroundings grew into awareness of wider peripheries, to
sensing their world, its structure, its nature.
Another mutant leap and there was comprehension of other worlds, of
other stars. Theirs was a vibratory awareness, directly akin to the
vibrating fields of force which compose the material universe, and the
vibrations of fields of force can be altered. To change their
surroundings to a more suitable environment through vibration rates of
things led surely to negation of distance. To change from crystal form
to fields of energy and back again combined with negation of
distance--they too spread out and out among the stars.
At first it was enough. But awareness is never still. Questions form.
In all the universe were they the only sentient thing? Did any cry but
theirs rise to the stars, seeking to know? Because of the nature of
their being their search was unconcerned with the outer shape of things
which could be changed by them at will, but rather with the inner
vibratory rate which would signal sentience, awareness.
They found no more than unconscious interaction of forces. Water runs
down hill without knowing that it does, without the internal structure
to provide the vibratory rate which would permit knowing.
For long eras they too were imprisoned within the confines of a
me-and-mine envisioning, and it took a major leap for them to conceive
that other structures than the crystalline might have a form of
awareness. Alien to their kind, perhaps, yet a kind which must be
acknowledged.
For they found something, at last, in a viscid non-crystalline
substance, protoplasm.
On one distant planet this substance was already differentiated and
specialized to a high degree. From the simplest to the most complex of
its organization there were degrees of awareness, and in the most
complex of these there was undeniable evidence of sentience outside of
self.
Joy! Unparalleled ecstasy!
Recognition is not wisdom. With the unwisdom of inexperience in
communicating with an unlike thing, not realizing that the values of
their kind of awareness might not be the values of this differing kind,
they rushed in with all their powers and forces, a joyful rapturous
pyrotechnical display of material manipulation to show this new life
form that they too were aware--to communicate that the loneliness of one
might now be softened by the presence of the other.
And man fell down to the ground and groveled his face in the dust.
His awareness was of the outer shapes of things, his security lay in
adapting himself to those shapes, his certainties lay in the
dependability of those shapes. A rock was a rock.
But no! The crystals were delighted that they had brought something
which they could share with this new life form. The rock could be a
tree! See!
And lo, the rock was a tree.
And the people were sore afraid.
For that which had been certain and sure was no longer so. This
mountain wall which had formed an impassable barrier to migration into a
new and richer valley was rent asunder, so! And beyond, the new valley
beckoned. But the people huddled in their caves and dared not venture
forth.
The vibrating entities, no longer dependent upon their crystalline
forms, withdrew to confer among themselves. To one life form, awareness
composed of the outer shape of things, the relationship of those shapes,
security in the unchanging shape. To the other life form, awareness
composed of the inner vibration, the relationships of those vibrations,
with outer shapes changed at will, and therefore meaningless.
Yet even this protoplasmic life must see the changing shapes of things.
The clouds that formed and disappeared; the seed that became root and
stem and leaf and flower; the infant that became man, and man that
decomposed as corpse. Surely this life form must see an inner cause!
Surely they must see that even the permanent rock changed slowly into
dust, that the eternal sea was restless, never still; that stars moved
in the vault of heavens, warmth changed to cold and night to day. How
did they account for changes in these outer forms if not by inner cause?
They changed the shapes of things themselves, these men; the seed ground
into meal, the moving animal shot down with stick or stone and stilled
and changed to food, the moving of the smaller rocks, erection of a
dwelling made of poles and thatch to change environment for the man
inside. Change, then, man knew; why fear the greater change, the easier
one? Why tug and lift and strain to move the boulder from the path, when
all was needed was to shift proportion in one tiny way, rebalance the
equation of relationship with one slight thought, and lo, the stone no
longer barred the way?
Too long ago, lost in the distant past, the crystals had forgot their
own once-orientation of all other things to me-and-mine, forgot to
credit it to man. To lift the boulder with one's strength to serve a
purpose was within the ken of man, a thing that he could do. To see it
lifted, moved, without his strength, bespoke a greater strength than
his, and purpose that he could not understand. And man fell to his knees
in fear and awe.
For man knew only one relation to all things--to conquer if he could,
and force acknowledgment of superior strength and purpose. To kill if
that acknowledgment was not given. To survive by giving that
acknowledgment to a stronger one than he.
Man groveled in the dust, the only pattern of survival that he knew when
strength beyond his own was shown. But even while he knelt, to scheme a
way that he-and-his might find ascendancy in future days. The one
invariable pattern persisting from the cave man dressed in furs to
diplomat in striped pants, the only pattern possible while me-and-mine
ascendant is the aim and goal.
To show another pattern then, the crystals aim. Ascendancy of
me-and-mine was meaningless, belonged to orders of awareness lower than
intelligence that they could meet in partnership. Instruct them, then.
No joy or purpose in conquering them. No companionship in these
disgusting grovelings. Show them the inner forces that controlled the
outer shapes of things.
Once crystals, now divorced from hardened form, the outer shape of
things was no longer a consideration in their life; but for this form of
life, still dependent for that life upon the maintenance of material
form, no doubt the shapes and forms of things were paramount to them.
Well then, show them the true relationship, sketch out upon the sands
the diagram of how the forces that control the shapes of things are
interwoven, interact.
Before the kneeling men, the cabalistic diagrams took shape, and lo, a
spring of water flowed from dry and barren stone.
But man saw only shape of diagram, its cabalistic lines and form. A
sacred thing, a magic thing, a sign that he might draw with finger in
the air or in the sand, protection from the evil forces that surrounded
him.
The sentient fields of force withdrew. Too soon, too soon. Man was not
ready for communication. Too soon, too soon.
But man did not forget, the memory lived on. And fathers spoke to sons,
and made the outer forms of gestures, drew the cabalistic signs, and
told of magic things and powers that these signs could do. To some, one
diagram was shown, a way to build a house of stone that better weathered
the storms of Earth. The house of stone became a holy place, a thing
existing in its own right, and not, as was intended, an example of one
use to which this arrangement of forces might be put.
And to some other man another diagram was shown, this time to slay an
animal for food. And men fought wars over these differing symbols, each
side determined to make its symbol ascendant over the other.
Deep within the Asian land where contact had been made, the memories
lived on, and some of the meaning of the diagrams beyond their outer
shape had gained sway. The racial memory persisted, and in the latter
Pleistocene epoch the knowledge of altering shapes through force of mind
became a racial memory, coalesced into cults of belief, degenerated into
forms and phrases; but from generation to generation the memory was kept
alive that once, when the world was new, the form of things was indeed
changed by thought. This holy man, far away and long ago, had pointed
his finger at a tree, and lo! a beautiful nymph had stepped forth clad
in jewels and coins to make him rich. This hero climbed a mountain and a
voice spoke unto him, and proof of this were letters cut in stone.
Well-witnessed, this divine one changed some water into wine, and fed a
multitude from five small loaves and fishes.
A kind of radiation of its own, always the cults who sought the inner
meanings formed within that Asian land and spread outward through the
world.
But out on the periphery, and not exposed to thought of inner meanings,
another cult took shape. Here concern was solely with the outer shape
and size and weight and measurement of things, and how the size and
shape and weight of one interacted with another. The Dravidian culture,
which grasped only the idea but not the method of how the inner
vibration could change the outer shape receded and became submerged in
the Western cult that found a method in the measurement of shape and
weight of things to make them change.
It was Rabindranath, centuries later, who described the essential
difference between the Indian and the Grecian civilization as that
between a forest culture which had known no walls, and a city culture
where everything has limit and every inch must be mapped.
But perhaps, also, the Greeks had never seen this tree changed into
bird, this cloud changed into flower. Not trapped by memories grown into
tradition that must not die, they hit upon an approach that man could
master. For it was the Greek beginnings which led to the Oxford
definition of how to make scientific inquiry into the properties of
things.
Inquiry into the properties, at first the outer shapes and weights, led
inevitably straight back to vibrations. All matter is merely a specific
vibration of energy, a range of vibrations feeling solid to the senses,
as a range of light vibrations translate into color through the eyes.
E = MC^2!
It took man far. He too began an exploration of the stars!
Failure in their first attempt had brought a wisdom to the sentient
fields of force. This time they did not rush in with pyrotechnic
displays to show the wondrous power they knew. Observing patiently
through the centuries, by now they knew man well. They knew his
weakness, yet by making thing react with thing, he'd proved his
strength. For here he was among the stars.
Perhaps by now he might communicate? Perhaps, by now, he would not
prostrate himself and grovel in the dust, if someone said, "Hello!"
But careful, perhaps he would.
There had been a man by name of Galileo, with the first crude telescope
he'd made, who first saw the rings of Saturn. But not as rings, but
rather in the planet's tilting, he had seen a spot of light on either
side. And sometime later, when he looked again, the tilting of the
planet back had made the rings edge on, and so they disappeared. He
never looked again, nor told of what he'd seen; for legend had it that
the god Saturn periodically devoured his own children, and this
phenomenon he'd seen, if it became widely known, would be interpreted as
the proof the legend was correct--and do incalculable damage to
scientific inquiry. He'd known the temper of his fellow man well enough
to take no chances of this kind, to note the experience in his works,
perhaps discuss it with a cautious friend or two, but to add no further
fuel to the raging fires of superstition that consumed men's minds and
seared out possibility of rational thought.
So walk with care. For superstition still is paramount, despite the fact
that some men know how to reach the stars.