Galaxies Like Grains of Sand Read online

  “Well, Gerund, what has happened in the world since I’ve been out of it?” Cyro asked, settling herself carefully opposite her husband.

  “Nothing very exciting. The Dualists wish to register every planet in the Federation. The Barrier Research City has been opened with due pomp. And the world of learning is at loggerheads over Pamlira’s new work, Paraevolution.”

  “I must certainly read it,” Cyro said, with a trace of excitement. “What’s his theory this time?”

  “It’s one of those things that don’t summarize easily,” Gerund told her, “but briefly Pamlira accepts the Pla-To position of the Dual Theory and claims that evolution is working toward greater consciousness. Plants are less conscious than animals, animals less conscious than men, and men came after the animals which came after the plants. Plants, animals, men, are only first steps in a long ladder. Pamlira points out that man is by no means fully conscious. He sleeps, he forgets, he is unaware of the workings of his body — ”

  “Which is why we doctors exist,” Cyro inserted.

  “Exactly. As Pamlira himself says, only certain unusual individuals, associated together into our present Orders of Medicine, can to some extent participate consciously in somatic activity.”

  She smiled a neutral smile.

  “And where does he go from there?” she asked.

  “He postulates that the next evolutionary step would be something — a being — conscious in every cell; and that Nature may be already preparing to usher it onto the stage. The time, apparently, is ripe for the new being.”

  “Already?” She raised a quizzical eyebrow. “I should have thought he was a few million years early! Have all the permutations of which man is capable been played through already?”

  “Pamlira spends half the book explaining why the new species is due,” Gerund said. “According to him, evolution accelerates like scientific progress; the more protoplasm available for modification, the sooner the modification appears. On thirty thousand planets, you have quite a weight of protoplasm.”

  Cyro was silent. With a slight ache in his heart, Gerund noticed that she asked him nothing about his personal opinion of Pamlira’s book, though it must have been clear from what he said that he had read it. She would consider that his opinion as an industrial ecologist was not worth having, and refuse to yield enough to convention to ask him anyway.

  Finally Cyro said, “Whatever this superconscious new species might be, man would give it little chance to establish its supremacy — or even to survive. It would be blotted out before it had a chance to multiply. After all, we could hardly be expected to be hospitable to the usurpers of our comfortable place in the cosmos.”

  “Pamlira says,” Gerund told her, “that evolution would take care of that if it really wanted man out of the way. The new species would be given some sort of defence — or weapon — to render it invulnerable against the species it would be superseding.”

  “How?” she asked indignantly, as if he had said something stupid. “Evolution is a completely neutral — blind — process.”

  “That’s what worries Pamlira!” Gerund said. He could see she considered this remark superficial. So it was; it had been designed to cover his uncertainty of what Pamlira had actually said on that point. Paraevolution was stiff reading; Gerund had only waded through it for Cyro’s sake, because he knew the subject would interest her.

  Paraevolution and its attendant woes were to be driven out of both their minds. Jeffy appeared, framed bulkily in the door dividing the control room from the cabin, while the aircar roared on above the Sara on autopilot.

  “There’s a call coming in for a doctor,” he said, trundling his words out one by one. “It’s coming from Capverde subport, almost dead ahead. They’ve got an underseaman in urgent need of healing.” He looked at Cyro as he spoke.

  “Of course I’ll take it,” she said, getting up and brushing past him into the control room.

  The call was coming through again as she reached the wireless. She listened carefully to it, and then answered.

  “Thank you, Doctor Gyres,” the Capverde operator said relievedly. “We’ll wait for your arrival.”

  They were now only some six hundred miles from the Capverde Islands; already they had covered nearly twice that distance from Barbe Barber. Even as Cyro left the wireless, the Lanic Sea showed ahead. On this desolate stretch of the continental coast, the saddest on Yinnisfar for all its blinding sun, the desert stretched right to the water’s edge — or, to take it conversely, the beach extended from here to Barbe Barber. They flashed across the dividing line between sand and sea and headed WSW. Almost at once, cloud formed like a floor below them, blotting out the turning globe.

  Within ten minutes, checking his instruments, Jeffy took them down, finally skimming under low nimbo-stratus to find the fourteen islands of the Capverde archipelago to their left ahead.

  “Nicely calculated,” Gerund said. Jeffy played the metal think-box like a child genius conjuring Britziparbtu from a cello-organ; he had that flair for machines only granted to the half-witted.

  The aircar banked to port around Satago and plunged toward the sea, dropping vertically. The grey waters came up to meet them like a smack in the face, boiled around them, swallowed them, and the altimeter finger on the instrument panel, swooping past the Zero sign, began to read fathoms instead of feet.

  Jeffy was in radio contact with the subport again. Beacons at ten-fathom intervals lit their way down to the underwater city. Finally a hangar, poised above a hundred-fathom gulf, loomed whale’s-mouth wide in front of them; they jetted in and the jaws closed behind them. Powerful valves immediately began to suck the water from the hangar, replacing it with air.

  Already mentally composing herself for what was to come, Cyro was out of the flier before the dock hand on the vacobile could collect the trapped fish and blow the floor dry. Gerund and Jeffy were left to follow as best they could.

  Outside the hangar, two port officials greeted Cyro.

  “Thank you for coming so quickly, Doctor Gyres,” one of them said. “They probably told you the details of the case on the wireless. It’s the chief engineer of the undersea trawler Bartlemeo who’s in trouble...”

  As he related the cogent facts of the case, the official ushered Cyro, Gerund and Jeffy aboard a small, open vehicle. The other official drove, and they sped along the strange waterfront where, despite all the usual bustle connected with a dock, no water could be seen.

  For ages, the human species had regarded the seas as either a perilous highway or a suitable place in which they could make hit-and-run raids on shoals of fish; then, belatedly, it had taken the oceans in hand and tended them with the same care it bestowed on the land; now they were farmed rather than fished. As more and more personnel turned to work on the savannas of the deep, so the subports had grown up, underwater towns that paid little homage to their softer counterparts on dry land.

  Capverde subport, because of its favoured position in the Lanic and its proximity to Little Union, the second greatest of Yinnisfar’s cities, had been one of the first such ports to be established. The quarter of the city in which the open machine now stopped was more than ten centuries old. The hospital into which they were ushered presented a crumbling façade.

  Inside were the monastic arrangements usual to hospitals everywhere. From a cloister, doors gave onto a waiting room, a primitive kitchen, a radio room, small cells; in one of the cells lay Je Regard, chief engineer of the Bartlemeo, with a dose of hard radiation in his kidneys.

  An ancient bondman, bent and grey-bearded, announced himself as Laslo; he was on duty. Apart from him and the sick man, the musty-smelling place was empty.

  “See what you can do for the poor fellow, doctor,” one of the officials said, shaking Cyro’s elegant hand as he prepared to depart. “I expect the captain of the Bartlemeo will call through soon. Meanwhile, we will leave you in peace.”

  “Thank you,” Cyro said, a little blankly, her mind already
far from them. She turned away, went into the sick man’s cell and closed the door behind her.

  For some time after she had gone and the officials had left, Gerund and Jeffy stood aimlessly in the cloister. Jeffy wandered to the archway and looked out at the street. Occasionally a bonded man or woman passed, looking neither to the right nor to the left. The dully lighted fronts of the buildings, many of them carved from the rock, looked like the dwellings of the dead.

  Jeffy wrapped his great arms about his torso.

  “I want to go home,” he said. “It’s cold here.”

  A bead of moisture fell from the roof overhead and splashed on his cheek. “It’s cold and damp here,” he added.

  The grey-bearded guard regarded him speechlessly with a sardonic eye. For a long while there was no more speech. They waited almost without thought, their level of consciousness as dim as the lights outside.

  As soon as Cyro Gyres entered the cell, she climbed onto the bunk with the sick man.

  Regard was a heavy fellow. Under the single blanket, his vast frame laboured up and down with the effort of breathing. The stubble on his face thrust up through three great, pallid jowls. Lying beside him, Cyro felt like Mahomet visiting the mountain.

  That the mountain was unconscious only made Cyro’s task easier. She placed her bare arm over Regard’s bare arm and closed her eyes. She relaxed her muscles, slowing her breathing rate. This was, of course, all standard professional procedure. Efficiently, Cyro reduced the rate of her hearts beat, concentrating on that vital pulse until it seemed to grow and grow, and she could submerge herself in it.

  She was sinking down through a dull red haze, a featureless haze, a haze stretching from pole to pole. But gradually, a mirage forming in a distance, striations appeared through the haze. As her viewpoint sank, it magnified; the islands of the blood slid up to meet her. The islands moved with the clerical purpose of vultures, expanding, changing, ranging, rearranging, and still she moved among them. Though she moved, all sense of direction was entirely shed. Here the dimensions carried no sense of up or down; even near and far were confused to her sight, which was no longer sight.

  Not only sight had she lost. Almost every other ability except volition had been stripped from her when she took this plunge into the somatic world of her own bodily universe, as a man throws off all his clothes before diving into a river. She could not think, remember, taste, touch, turn, communicate, or act; yet a shadow of all these things remained with her; much as the dragonfly larva, climbing its reed out of the ooze, carries a vague image of the creature it will become, Cyro had some memory of herself as the individual she had been. And this pale memory stayed with her by dint of the years of training she had received in Medical Meditation at Barbe Barber, otherwise she would have been lost in that most terrible trap of all: the universe of one’s own body.

  Almost without will, she headed down her bloodstream. It was swimming — flying? crawling? — through an endless everglade, flooded above the treetops, treacle-thick with fish, minnow, mackerel, mace and manta ray. It was creeping — climbing? drifting? — down a glass canyon, whose walls flickered with more-than-earthly firelight. So, so, until before her loomed a wavering cliff.

  The cliff ran around the universe, tall as time, insubstantial as muslin, pock-marked with rabbit holes, through which phantasmic creatures came and went. She drifted through it almost without resistance, like plankton sucked through a sponge.

  Now she had passed her lobe of consciousness, her psyche, into Je Regard’s arm, into his soma.

  Her surroundings were as weird, as strange, as familiar, as they had been before. Submerged on this cellular level, there could be no difference between his body and hers. Yet a difference was there. From the forests of his flesh, strange and always unseen eyes watched her, and a silent and malevolent regard traced her course; for she was an intruder, venturing into the interior of an alien world especially designed to show an intruder no mercy. Little jellies of death twinkled as she passed, and only the confidence of her step held the defending powers at bay.

  As she moved on, corpuscles like stars about her, the surrounding activity grew more intense. She was swept along, as by a glutinous current, moving under arches, among branches, past weed tangles, through nets, and the way ahead grew dark and stagnant; though she still drifted forward, the half-live things about her were squirming away, repulsed, flickering with crude blueprints of pain.

  She was nearly at the infected kidneys now.

  Only the stern disciplines of Medical Meditation now prompted her on. The atmosphere was so thickly repellent that she might have been wallowing in a sewer. But medicine had long ago discovered the powers of self-healing that lie within a body; high-ega and the yogas on which it was founded had pointed the way to releasing those powers. Nowadays, with the psyche of one of the Order of Medicine to spur it on, a patient’s body could be made to regenerate itself: to grow a new limb, a new lung, a new liver. The doctors, the modern skin-divers, submerged to marshal the forces of the anatomy against its invaders.

  Cyro called to those forces now. About her, layer on layer, horizon high, the cells of the invaded body, each with its thirty thousand genes, lay silent and seemingly deserted. Then, slowly, reluctantly, as her summons persisted, reinforcements came to her, like rats crawling out of a ruined city. The enemy is ahead! she pulsed to them, moving forward into the tattered darkness. More and more, they were coming to her cause, lighting the sewer with their internal fires.

  Things like little bats hurtled, chittering, out of the heart of the darkness, were struck down, were devoured. And then the enemy launched his assault. He struck with the suddenness of a closing trap.

  He was one, he was a million!

  He was nothing the textbooks know of — unknown, unknowable.

  He fought with laws and powers entirely his own.

  He was monstrous, bestial, occult, a greed with fangs, a horned horror, newly hatched. He was so overwhelming that Cyro hardly felt fear: the puissance of the unknown can kill everything but calm in us. She was aware only that a random radioactive particle had struck down and buried itself in a random gene, producing — with a ferocious defiance of the laws of chance — a freak cell, a mutant cell with unfamiliar appetites; nothing in her training prepared her to understand what the appetites were.

  Those appetites had lain dormant until she approached. She had triggered them, woken them. She had breathed her touch of consciousness onto them, and at once the cell had filled with its own awareness. And its awareness was of the desire to conquer.

  She could see, feel, hear, sense, that it was tearing through cell after cell, a maniac through empty rooms, filling them with its rebellion. The healing forces about her turned and fled in panic, winging and swimming against a wind which held them helpless. Cyro, too, turned to escape. Her own body was her only refuge, if she could get there.

  But the nailed streamers came out of the darkness and wrapped themselves about her. She cracked open her jaws to their toothed extremes, struggling to scream; at once her mouth was filled with sponge, from which little creatures flung themselves and scampered wildly through her being, triumphing...

  Gerund and Jeffy sat smoking on a bench under the eyes of the grey-bearded bondman, Laslo. Empty mugs stood beside them; Jeffy had boiled them a hot drink. Now they sat waiting uneasily for Cyro to reappear, their uneasiness growing as the time slipped away.

  “I’ve never known her to take so long on a case before,” Gerund said. “Five minutes is generally all she needs. As soon as she has organized the powers of recovery, she comes back.”

  “This engineer — he sounded pretty bad,” Jeffy said.

  “Yes, but all the same... Five minutes more and I’m going in to see her.”

  “That’s not permitted,” declared the greybeard; it was almost the first time he had spoken. What he said was no less than the truth. The etiquette governing doctor and patient was strict, in their own interests; they could not be vie
wed together, unless by another doctor. Gerund was perfectly familiar with this rule; he had, indeed, a reluctance to see his wife in a trance state, knowing that the sight would only serve to emphasize the constraint he felt between them. All the same, Cyro had been in that room for half an hour; something must be done.

  He sat there for two more minutes before getting up and going over to the cell door. Laslo also rose, shouting angrily. As he started to intercept Gerund, Jeffy blocked his way.

  “Sit down or. I’ll pull your nose off,” Jeffy said unemotionally. “I’m very strong and I got nothing better to do.”

  The old man, taking one look into Jeffy’s face, went obediently back and sat down. Gerund nodded at his servant, opened the cell door, and slipped inside.

  One glance told him that something was wrong — gravely wrong. His wife and the massive engineer lay side by side on a bunk, their arms touching. Their eyes were open, bulging coldly out into space like cod’s eyes on a slab, containing no life whatsoever. But their bodies were alive. Every so often, their frames vibrated and bulged and settled again. Cyro’s right heel kicked briefly against the bunk, beating a meaningless rat-tat on the wooden bed foot. Her skin was gradually suffusing with a crimson blush like a stain; it looked, thought Gerund, as if every shred of flesh in her body had been beaten to a pulp. For a while he stood there transfixed with horror and fear, unable to collect his wits and decide what to do.

  A cockroach swarmed up the leg of the bed. It passed within six inches of Je Regard’s foot, which protruded bare from under his blanket. As the cockroach moved by, a section of the sole of the foot suddenly grew into a stalk, a dainty thing like a blade of grass; the stalk licked out as quickly as a tongue and caught the cockroach, its legs waving. Gerund slid quietly to the ground in a faint.