Brian Aldiss, page 1
A SPACE FOR REFLECTION
BRIAN W. ALDISS
Very much in the superior English tradition, Brian Aldiss presents us with a Stapledonian story of a philosophical quest that embraces the universe of the macrocosm and the universe of the microcosm within us all. Perhaps any young lad blessed with three successive letter f's in his name would tend to a philosophic bent. It might also be that any energy-hungry society that dismissed a device for mass-producing suns would inevitably suffer from economic decline; but then, this apparent suicidal waywardness but in reality vision beyond materialism, is just what is reflected from that certain small dark corner of the universe...
* * * *
THERE once lived a man called Gordan Ivon Jefffris who achieved galaxy-wide fame at the age of five. This is his story.
Gordan Ivon Jefffris was born in a period when the major cultures of the galaxy were suffering from a combination of economic depression and spiritual uncertainty. The achievements of man, as he diversified on a million planets, were many and various. And yet, and yet... among the thinking people everywhere - even among ordinary thoughtless people - grew the suspicion that achievement was somehow hollow, as if success were an apple that, once bitten, yielded no juice.
In an attempt to combat the disillusion, a consortium of leading planets which dubbed itself The Re-Renaissance Worlds arranged a curious competition. The terms of this competition were deliberately left vague. The winner was to be the man or woman who presented something that would contribute most to a fresh direction for mankind. The nature of the submission was left to the ingenuity of the entrants. The prizes were enormous.
This competition met with almost universal criticism. It was said that it would deflect useful endeavour into what was a dead end, that the idea of competition itself was one of the main concepts which required combating, that things philosophical were best left to philosophers, and so on.
Those who launched the competition were not deterred. They set no particular store by the idea of one outright winner; their hope was that the whole body of entries might together contribute the sort of vital injection of innovation for which they sought; and they believed that the kinds of entries they got would provide some consensus of opinion as to which way galactic culture was moving, as diagnosed by the best brains.
Unhappily, the best brains considered themselves above such a competition, and forebore to enter. Submissions were nevertheless almost countless, pouring in from every civilized planet. Some were works of art conceived to inspire; some were technical ingenuities designed to improve the daily lot of ordinary citizens; some were vast works of analysis; some were computerized plans for changing whole societies; some were projects for novel transmutations, for instance for transmuting light into food directly; some were syntheses of different disciplines, expressing gravity as music, or whatever; new languages, new media, new symbolic systems, were put forward; und so weiter.
In short, the organizers of the competition, and their committees and computers, were provided with much material over which to scratch their heads, much muddle from which they never, ultimately, achieved any significant order.
They bestowed first prize on a child of five, Gordan Ivon Jefffris, who presented the briefest entry of all. That entry was a sheet of plakin on which the boy had written in a childish hand, 'The universe has a dark corner, the human soul, which is its reflection.'
A fresh storm of almost universal criticism greeted the award. It was said that the thought was banal, that the concept of human souls was obsolete by about a million years, that the idea expressed was so pessimistic that it had no place in a competition designed to generate fresh directions, that there was no practical application, that in any case Ching Pin Jones's prospectus for mass-producing suns was a thousand times more brilliant, und so weiter.
The organizers stuck to their guns. (They were old and stubborn, and in any case had nothing else to stick to.) They held that one of the things which had brought near-stagnation on a galactic scale was an insane optimism which lent a cloak to exploitation and tyranny in all their forms; that they were on the side of youth, even extreme youth; and that they admired the way in which the boy Jefffris had linked macrocosm and microcosm. Und so weiter.
Both competition and controversy ensured that livgrams of the five-year-old, his fair hair tousled and becoming, his round face smiling, were flashed to every planet in the galaxy. Fame had never been so universal.
Gordan Ivon Jefffris was brought from his backwoods planet and his parents' cloned-clatbuck farm and installed in the Institute for Creative Research on Dynderkranz, in the Minervan Empire at the heart of the galaxy. There, for twelve years, he specialized in non-specialization, learning randomly from computers, superputers, and parent-figures.
The teaching was liberal (it was generally agreed that liberalism contributed to the decay of the Minervan Empire), and Jefffris was allowed to some extent to follow his natural bent. He was a perfectly normal child - a fact greeted with delight by half his teachers and dismay by the other half - while manifesting a tendency, evidenced in his prize-winning dictum, to regard man as a vital manifestation of the universe. He divided his study time between the phenomena of the external world and the phenomena of man and his culture.
The long training was only the preliminary part of Jefffris' prize. As his days at the Institute drew to a close, the superputer Birth Star, which now administered all his affairs, revealed that unlimited funds were at his disposal for the rest of his days, as long as he maintained an inquiring mind, moved about the galaxy, and reported reflections and findings back to the superputer.
There was no conflict between superputer's intentions and boy's ambitions. Jefffris' intellectual curiosity had been whetted. He longed to set out into the universe and experience its conditions for himself; the odyssey could last ten lifetimes for all he cared. With a male friend and two girls, competition-winners all, he set out in a superbly equipped flittership to travel whatever distances could be travelled.
* * * *
'The universe has a dark corner, the human soul, which is its reflection'. The words had travelled round the known galaxy, together with the livgrams of the five-year-old face. The face had been forgotten for almost as long as Jefffris had outlived it; yet the words had not been forgotten. It could not be said that they changed anything, for a general decline continued. But it could be said that people discovered some mystery in them (if only the mystery in what is familiar) and were perhaps reminded that, for all the vastness of the humanized galaxy, it still rested upon the power of words to transmute formlessness into design. So it might be argued that the decline would have been faster had it not been for Jefffris' dictum.
However that might be, Jefffris and his companions travelled the civilized worlds without being recognized -fortified by the knowledge that he had lit a light, however tiny, in the skulls of almost everyone he ever met.
Everywhere, he talked and listened, building up a picture of the spectre that had laid its spell over the galaxy.
'What is wrong with humanity is an ancient wrong,' said an ancient lady living on a core of a burnt-out sun. She had been an organizer in her day, and understood so much that most people became bemused just by gazing on her face. Consequently, she wore a mask; but she removed it to speak with Jefffris.
'What is wrong with humanity is not what philosophers of this world commonly suppose,' she said. 'I mean, that man's involvement with technology, with its consequent divorce from what is called Nature, impoverishes him. True, that may be the case, but if so it is merely a reflection of a deeper division between intellect and the passions. The Babylonian invention of a written language, back on Earth so long ago, institutionalized a division that was already latent in the psyche of humanity. Writing departmentalizes, detaches. It bestows upon the ratiocinative faculties a dominance they should not have over the play of human emotions. The passions become feared, mistrusted.'
'Whole planets full of people have reverted to Nature, have abandoned literacy,' said Jefffris. 'The results have never been anything that responsible people would wish to copy. I visited one such planet, Bol-Rayoeo. Everyone's every breath was ruled by a maniacal belief in astrology, the human instruments of which were an iron priesthood. That priesthood had control over a series of holy factories in which machines were made - elaborate but non-functional machines. The machines were sacrificed in specific dates at specific hours. A paranoid mathematics was their language, yet such was their fear of a written alphabet that a mere glimpse of the letter A scrawled on a rock could kill them at once.'
'The first effect of a written literature,' said the ancient dame, 'is that it undermines the power of Continuers. In the Old World, Continuers were as vital to society as kings or slaves. They moved among all ranks and ages of society, conveying in their persons - in their gestures, their faces, their very breath - history, myth, story. Those elements which were alive, and lived through countless generations, became dead when impaled on a page, and the Continuers ceased. Records have been substituted for legend, the letter for life.
'You yourself, Gordan Ivon, may through fortune regard yourself as a free agent. Yet you are a slave of history. You are gathering facts, a profession which superseded hunting, a dusty parody of it, sans blood. The search for knowledge is too highly lauded.'
'You are yourself consulted as a repository of knowledge, madam.'
'The search for knowledge is an artificial goal - and, even worse, an achievable one. Eventually, all kn
He laughed. 'You speak as if it were a mystical process.'
'It is a mystical process. The further we go, the closer we come to our origins.'
'Nevertheless, I am sorry to find you so pessimistic.'
'Operative in each of us is the blind optimism of biological process; but you will appreciate from what I have already said that words themselves, in my view, tend towards the pessimistic, since they represent an energy-sink from life to abstraction.'
Jefffris was silent a while, picking his way among her statements. 'Is it mere coincidence that you speak more than once of breathing, as if it holds a special symbolism for you?'
'There is no "coincidence",' the ancient lady said, resuming her mask. 'Consciousness is the breath of the universe.'
* * * *
Jefffris visited the system of Trilobundora, where the three central planets had been welded into one unit by means of transuranic metals. These enormous struts formed FTL roads for UMV traffic. Trilobundora was famed as one of the great industrial centres of the galaxy; in proof of this, all about it for many light years were impoverished planets, populated only by old and broken people. Trilobundora was a Mecca to which all went hoping to be turned into gold.
He visited a great school on Primdora, where children were trained to be administrators from the age of two onwards. The children poured out after class, flocking at every level of the enormous tower to meet every sort of flying, leaping, and wheeled vehicle which came to bear them away.
Plunging to the lowest level, Jefffris found a stooped man of middle age waiting at an entrance with his hands in his pockets. A gale blew, carrying rain with it, although the air was still and dry at higher levels.
'It's always like this here,' said the man. 'Something to do with the structure of the building, I guess. Creates its own storms.' His voice was neutral, passive. He never looked directly at Jefffris.
A small boy came running out of the entrance and stopped before he got to the stooped man. The man put out his hand, took the boy's, and, with a word of encouragement, started to walk away with him. Jefffris fell in beside him.
'Are you the only parent here who meets his child on foot?'
'I have to watch every cent. Besides, public transport doesn't run where we live. It's a slum district. I'm not ashamed; it's not my fault. You may have noticed I'm the oldest person to collect a child. I'm not this lad's father. I'm his grandfather. His parents were killed on their holiday, so now I look after him.'
The boy glanced up at Jefffris to see how he took this information but said nothing. Then he turned his pale face down again to his shoes.
'Is he a consolation?' Jefffris asked.
'He's a good enough lad.' The man had a listless way about him which seemed to have communicated itself to the boy. After a pause in which he appeared to weigh whether it was worth saying more, he went on, 'You see the trouble is that the accident which killed my daughter and her man occurred on the V-lane of the FTLR between Primdora and Secdora. Their vehicle collided with a Secdora vehicle right at mid-point between planetary demarcations. Legislation could not decide which planetary government should pay compensation, Primdora or Secdora. The issue is still being heard in the courts. That's been the situation for five years now.
'Meanwhile, I couldn't work because I had to look after the boy. So I've forfeited my state pension. Now he has started school, I have a small morning job, which helps. I could have got someone in to look after him and worked myself, but that would have brought legal complications, since I am still not officially his guardian, and they might have taken him away into care. I want to be his official guardian, but I'm separated from my woman and she is litigating to become his guardian. I think she's only after the money which may accrue, so I fight back.'
'I don't want to go to grandma,' said the boy. It was the first time he had spoken since leaving school. 'I don't know grandma, she don't know me.'
'The uncertainty makes his life difficult,' said the man, ignoring the boy's remark. 'He can have no proper career without an official guardian or parent to sign forms - you have to sign forms every day on Primdora - and so he is getting sidetracked and will probably be Z-graded. I do my best but I get sick of it all. Everywhere there's regulations. They keep bringing in more regulations. I just found today that they're re-structuring the educational system, so he may be sent to another school further away. Then we'll have to move rooms. More expense. All these regulations, you can't escape them ... They're supposed to rationalize community life, aren't they? Instead, they're like a wall round you.'
'I hope the lad's a comfort to you,' Jefffris suggested.
'Who makes all these regulations? I can't understand how they get so complex. It didn't used to be like this. Where did they start, where do they stop? Do you know, I get a small supplementary family allowance for the boy which is taxed with my wage so that I in reality keep less cash than I would if I didn't get the allowance?'
'Can't you forgo the allowance?'
'I went to see the computer about it. If I forgo the allowance now, I can never reclaim, and the tax structure might change next year in my favour. Then again, the rating scale comes into it - the amount of living-space we can claim ... it's a headache.'
'Your grandfather has a lot of problems,' Jefffris said to the boy.
The boy nodded. 'He has a lot of problems.' He kept looking down at his shoes.
* * * *
In the Beta arm of the galaxy, Jefffris rested with his companions on a delightful satellite called Rampam. It was a pastoral world, where a simple philosophy ruled and crime was almost unknown.
Wandering down a country lane by the sea, one moonlit night, Jefffris encountered a slender man who appeared to be of no more than late middle age, yet claimed he was a million years old.
'Longevity and immortality are among the oldest dreams,' said Jefffris, 'and are likely to remain dreams. No biological structure is stable enough to remain intact over long periods of time.'
'A biological structure is only a highly organized state of inorganic material. All material carries the potential of life. The secret of continuous organization was discovered right there on Argustal,' said the ancient youth.
He pointed up at the gibbous moon sailing over the tree-tops.
'If you've got time, stranger, I'll tell you a story about it.'
'I'd be glad to listen.'
'That's a rare talent, stranger,' said the slender man. His expression cheered slightly, and he launched into his story.
Argustal is the parent world of Rampam. Long ago, there lived on Argustal a regal young man called Tantanner. He possessed an equable temperament, and was content to let the years drift by in sport and laughter. Happiness came easily to him because he was married to a beautiful lady called Pamipamlar, whose nature was fully as sunny as his.
I have to pass over all their years of content together, for contentment has no history - it leaves its traces, indeed, but they cannot be described. Suffice it to say that one day Tantanner saw strange marks upon his beloved's face. He said nothing to her, so as not to alarm her, and imagined that the marks would fade away. Dawn followed dawn, and the marks did not fade. They deepened. He watched more anxiously. The times of snows came and went. The marks remained. They formed little lines upon Pamipamlar's forehead, below and beside her eyes, and about her pretty mouth.
