Earth is but a star, p.1
Earth is But a Star, page 1
21-07-2023
Extracted from Science Fantasy Magazine
No 29 Volume 10 - June 1958
Later expanded into
"Catch a Falling Star" and "The 100th Millennium".
Every once in a while we receive a story which
is so well written that it is difficult to eulogise
about it without appearing to be trite. We will
content ourselves by saying that not only is this
story the finest John Brunner has ever written,
but it is the outstanding fantasy story in recent
years.
EARTH IS BUT A STAR
By JOHN BRUNNER
——
1
“ It’s a very small star,” said the man in gold doubtfully.
“ Big enough,” said Creohan, and thought how tiny Earth was in comparison. The man in gold eyed him, and then gave another glance at the image in the field of the great telescope.
“This, then, is your device for seeing into the years to come ?” he asked. “ And is that all it will show? Man, I can go out o’ nights—or could, did I not have better uses to put my time to—and stare my fill of stars ! You told me you had a way of looking into the future, and I followed you because I grow weary of looking at the past But this— this is nothing!"
“ Is it nothing that that star will pass so close to Earth that the seas will boil and the land will parch, cities rise in smoke and flame towards the sky ? Is that nothing ?”
Creohan’s vehemence took aback the man in gold, who withdrew a step, his hand falling to the hilt of his jewelled poignard. “ Show me this thing, I say !” he demanded.
Creohan sighed, but he knew already he had failed. “ I cannot bring it to your sight like the Lymarian Empire whose clothes and manners you affect. But it will surely come about, and in a much lesser space of time in the future than your beloved Lymarians are in the past.”
“ How soon ?” There was almost greed in the eyes of the man in gold.
“ In less than three hundred years.”
The man’s unease vanished like mist on a sunny morning. He relaxed with a sneer. “ Three hundred years ! Write it down for the future to read, then, you fool—by that time I’ll be dead, and you, and what shall we know of it ? Bah ! I should never have believed you when you made your promise.” “ I have given you the chance to see into the future,” Creohan snapped. “ Is it to be blamed on me that you have neither the wit nor the will to use that chance ?”
Very nearly, the sting of the insult caused the man in gold to draw his poignard. But he was a Historian—a man who spent his moments gazing with a voyeur’s greed into the long-dead past—and his appetite was small for the reality of cold iron. He would wear the costume and the weapon fashionable in his vanished Empire, but he would not match its deeds with actions of its own. Abruptly he turned on his heel, his cape swinging out as he spun around, and strode from the house, leaving Creohan clutching the smooth metal uprights of the telescope mounting and lost in a deep blank despair.
He had thought that this knowledge at least would strike through the man’s defences, bring him to share the feelings that had torn him all the day long.
Across the object mirror of the telescope the image of the stellar runaway crawled. As yet, it was tiny. He might never have paid it any special attention, but for Molichant.
That small, dark, astute man was a Historian likewise, and last time he had dropped by, full as ever of enthusiasm and proselytising zeal—he would probably never learn that Creohan had no mind to be a Historian—he had suffered his friend’s talk about the stars in the sky with his usual good grace. Indeed, he had mentioned casually that this star, now so bright, had not been visible in the time of the Mending of Men, less than ten centuries before, into which he had lately been peering.
Intrigued, Creohan had indulged in a few measurements, a little calculation—the sort of thing he loved. And last night he had remained awake checking and re-checking his calculations, until he was certain beyond a possibility of error.
In two hundred and eighty-eight years, that star would pass close to Earth ; it would be drawn in to circle the sun in a dwindling spiral until the two united in a giant hell of flame.
Only there would be no one to see it—on Earth.
In the first few minutes, Creohan had wished fervently that he might have been born a Historian by inclination, a Dreamer, or anyone who did not have to meddle with knowledge of reality. In the next, he had resigned himself to the facts of his existence, and had determined to alert someone—anyone.
All that day he had walked the streets, accosting strangers, being rebuffed or laughed away like a man crazed. The man in gold had been his last attempt; a momentary inspiration had supplied the promise of a glimpse into the future, and the man—a sensation-seeker like all his breed—had taken the bait. And to no purpose.
But was the fate of Earth, which had brought forth the manifold richness they turned to their unworthy ends, of no interest to these people? Had they no love at all for the planet which bore them ? Creohan could not bring himself to believe that true. Surely, somewhere in the city, he must find someone who could feel with him for a disaster which would not occur till he was long dead and forgotten, except perhaps by Historians of that future day.
That was something he had often posed to Molichant, when his friend called by. In response to the memory, the room— having gathered an excellent image of Molichant from his frequent visits—conjured up the man’s likeness in the air so vividly that Creohan all but addressed him aloud.
“ Have you not thought ”—so he would say—“ that in a few centuries men like yourself will be turning to this time, our own time, and finding it superior to theirs ?”
He had thought Molichant—addicted as he was to a time less than ten centuries ago, moderation as Historianism went (the Lymarian Empire which had taken the fancy of the man in gold lay fourteen thousand years in the past)—he, then, should be vulnerable to such an argument “ Find this age worth living in ?” Molichant had chuckled to think of such an amusing idea. “ Maybe, compared to theirs, it will be ! Maybe each age is indeed inferior to its predecessors.”
“ In what sense ? You choose your time; another man will take the era of the Brydwal, or the Gerynts, or the Minogovaristo. On your argument, why does not every Historian go as far back as is possible ?”
Molichant had shrugged. “ In the last resort, it’s something impossible to define. Maybe it happens that some people, owing to their ancestry and their way of thinking, are better suited to ages other than our own.”
“ What then of a man who can find no age in all the past to suit him ? Surely there must be some such.”
“ I never heard of anyone like that,” Molichant mused. “ And yet there may not, as you say, be a place for everyone in history. The lure, then, may have to do with the security one feels in an age of which one knows the outcome.”
On that, Creohan had left the dispute unresolved. Now, coming back from memory, he dismissed the image of Moli-chant and it faded abruptly.
Now he knew the outcome of this age he and the Historians and everyone else lived in : would that make it more tolerable to live in ? Would Molichant become secure, knowing what Creohan knew ? No, never—he would flee further and more often into the years gone by.
He desired to be outside, and the room around him closed like a tired flower, leaving him standing on its roof. There was something he had never questioned, and now he started to wonder about it, as though in the instant when he knew it must end, Earth had become an object of total and complete fascination to him.
The house had been—not a part of him, exactly, but an extension of him, since he acquired it. He had taken it because of its telescope; before he came along, it had stood empty, as all houses had to, forgetting its previous owner. Perhaps he had been a little too hasty to take it on; even now, it occasionally displayed a trait which he did not recognise as his own ; conversely, he wondered on occasion how many of the habits he did now so recognise were in fact unconsciously inherited from his predecessor.
Once, a few years ago, he had been sufficiently moved by curiosity to ask the house, “ Who was your former occupier ? Can you show him to me ?”
The room shivered; the whole house seemed to strain in recollection. But by that time the house did in fact know only Creohan as owner, and the image it projected for him was a slightly younger edition of himself.
Well, it didn’t matter. The long-gone owner of the house would—seeing that he had had this telescope and the curiosity to use it, presumably—have understood the emotions which now racked Creohan. But he must be long dead. There was only one way to find out who he had been, and that was to turn Historian ; he had considered asking Molichant, as already an addict, to do the task for him, but had refrained— Historians begrudged the periods they had to spend in the past, and would not readily spend them on others’ purposes. “ Find out for yourself!” would be even his friend Moli-chant’s reply.
Cool night breezes tugged at his full beard as he stood on the roof; in the distance, over the calling and the music of the city going about its affairs, he could faintly discern the insane laughter of the next day’s meat as it assembled on the gentle slopes of the hills inland prior to descending to the shore and dying there. Overhead, hordes of circling lights blinded the people to the stars.
On impulse, he whistled one of the lights down to him, and gazed at it as it perched on his outstretched hand, its mindless head cocked on one side, its beady eyes closed. This one was green, for his street was green and had been for the past week —roadway, the walls of the houses, and in consequence the lights circling in the air. Some elementary reflex in their nervous systems drew them always to places of their own colour.
He had never given the lights much thought; they existed, served their purpose, and that was all. Now he found himself wishing to know where they came from—there were so many of them, and when he turned on his killer screen to clear the view for his telescope they fell from the air by thousands. Did they eat ? If so, what ? Surely they must breed and reproduce, presumably during the length of the day when they fluttered out of sight of the sun.
Suppose one put up a killer screen all around the city, so that the people could see the stars ? Would that bring home to them the menace threatening Earth ?
He shook the creature back into the sky, and it spread its radiance-shedding wings and resumed its aimless circling.
Once more, he decided, once more he would make the attempt to find a companion to lament the fate of Earth. He could hope for no more than a fellow-mourner’s solace—he had no means to turn the stars aside in their courses and so spare the planet its fate.
Somewhere in the city, then, he would find the person he needed. Or if not in the city, then out in the wide world— inland across the plains of Cruin, or across the near and far Arbelline Oceans . . .
He needed some way to impress people with the reality of his pleading ; after a moment’s thought, he commanded the house to bring him a suit of mourning clothes: a hat with a brim that cast a melancholy shadow on his face, a slashed tunic the colour of drying blood, and leggings that appeared to be plastered from ankle to knee with slowly crusting mud.
Arrayed in this garb, Creohan set out to find his fellow-mourner.
II
For hours he walked. The streets were all the same, superficialities aside. His own street—that of the Musicians—was currently green ; earlier it had been blue and before that again orange-yellow. Now it was the Street of the Carvers that was orange-yellow and the Street of the Travellers beyond it was while. He noted the fact in passing ; often, when he needed a white light for some special task, he found it hard to whistle down one of that colour if his street was of another tint.
Except for the Historians—and at this time of night most of them were mentally far away in the past—one could tell a man’s street by his clothing, which would be of the same colour. His friends would call to him, his neighbours would exchange a greeting. To one wearing mourning clothes, however, no one chose to speak, and on Creohan’s addressing them the people he stopped as he went returned a blank, uncomfortable gaze and no attention.
He grew weary, and found that he was far from home, his purpose unaccomplished. He had come right down the length of the city towards the sea ; he stood on a broad road that curved with the shore around a bay and towards a headland where it vanished from sight. A quiet succession of waves rolled inwards off the ocean, leaving the sandy beach littered with crabs and molluscs which were dying in luminescent pulses of ice-green and white. In response to them a few white and green lights circled overhead, but the road was a sombre purple like a shadow, and the lights that were actually over his head were so few that they did not altogether hide the stars.
A solitary tavern grew from the beach.
Creohan had not been into a tavern for years, since he seldom felt the need for refreshment in company, but now he wanted to be with people—and besides, someone sitting or lying in a tavern would be less likely to move away before he could speak his knowledge than someone made to halt at random on the street. He made towards it.
It was circular, like all taverns ; seven rooms followed spiral curves outwards from a central circle, and in this centre grew the waiter, blind, slow-thinking, and at his—at everyone’s—service.
The dull green knob, as high as a man and studded with the sphincter-muscled projections from which it served the clients, did not ask him what he wanted. It was content to wait, as content as the jugs on the low counter ringing it, as content as the sea outside.
There was only one other person in the central circle at the moment, though the sound of voices and laughter came from two of the curved side-rooms ; the customers were out of sight beyond the bend. This person that Creohan could see was a Historian, a woman, addicted to the period of the Glorious Gerynts, and she was drawing her liquor directly from the projection on the waiter which secreted it, like an infant at the breast.
Creohan debated a few moments as to which of the infinity of liquors he should choose, but before he could make up his mind, the woman drew back from her sucking. She had a heavy body which sagged and heaved as she panted, making her drab black chiton stretch and hang loose by turns. That was the Gerynt way : they had scorned ornament or decoration And in this case, perhaps, Molichant’s theory had been correct —being neither decorative nor interesting herself, she might well have fled to that undecorative, uninteresting age.
Then, as she caught sight of him and started to approach, Creohan realised what she was doing here. He glanced about for a way of escape as she fumbled for the ugly sword at her waist, but she had come between him and the exit. Her words only confirmed his fears.
“ You mourn,” she said thickly. “ Is it your custom to mourn in taverns? That is unfitting.”
No wonder she had been sucking directly at the waiter. Intrigued sufficiently at long last, she had come here to try the Gerynts’ “ blood of women ” for herself; the waiter, as was its purpose, had provided it for her, and now the co-life would be whispering its sibilant words inside her brain. Thrice a year the Gerynts had imbibed their drink from the full breasts of their lobotomised repositories of right thinking, for in their day the co-life could only be kept alive in the human environment; once in a lifetime was once too many for a citizen of the modern age.
“ Give me poison,” said Creohan to the waiter. “ In a jug.”
Ice-cold liquid that burned with a black glow rushed from the living spigot; before the jug was a quarter full the woman had spoken again.
“ Whom do you mourn, or is your mourning a lie ?”
“ I mourn for Earth,” said Creohan, and knew as he uttered the words that he had made a mistake. The co-life that had entered the woman’s brain was remorseless—that was why the Gerynts had disappeared.
“ Earth is not alive, and therefore cannot be dead,” the woman stated. “ Earth is still in existence, and therefore it is stupid to mourn it. You are plainly a person incapable of logical reasoning, or very dishonest. In either case it is a public duty to dispose of you.”
Just so had the Gerynts thought and spoken; for that reason too they had disappeared.
The sword left its scabbard ; at the same moment the jug was filled, and Creohan took it and dashed it in the woman’s face. The sword tinkled as it fell ; she made only a thud. She was finished, but the co-life that shared her brain was not, and as it oozed from the openings of her ears Creohan poured the last few drops of the poison on to its naked protoplasm. It writhed and died.
Wiping his forehead, he put the jug back on the counter. The waiter said suddenly, “ You asked for poison.”
He nodded, forgetting it could not see, and it went on, “ You are not dead. When one orders poison, one must die. Was it not strong poison ?”
“ It was very strong poison,” said Creohan. “ Is it not enough that one should be dead ? The poison did not go to waste.”
With that he left the central circle of the tavern, and entered the nearer of the two occupied rooms. He withdrew hastily; the couple in there would be interested in nothing but each other at such a moment.
In the other occupied room sat three women and a man, watching a small creature picked up on the sea-shore die in a series of graceful gyrations. It was not until it had performed the last of its antics and lay still on the floor between their four tall glasses of bluish liquor that they looked up and saw him.
