Star Maker - Olaf Stapledon (the top 100 crime novels of all time .TXT) 📗
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gladly entertain me. It was with extravagant joy that I made contact at
last with a being who recognized in me a human personality.
2. A BUSY WORLD
So many important characteristics of this world-society need to be
described that I cannot spend much time on the more obvious features of
the planet and its race. Civilization had reached a stage of growth much
like that which was familiar to me. I was constantly surprised by the
blend of similarity and difference. Traveling over the planet I found
that cultivation had spread over most of the suitable areas, and that
industrialism was already far advanced in many countries. On the
prairies huge flocks of mammal-like creatures grazed and scampered.
Larger mammals, or quasi-mammals, were farmed on all the best pasture
land for food and leather. I say “quasi-mammal” because, though these
creatures were viviparous, they did not suckle. The chewed cud,
chemically treated in the maternal belly, was spat into the offspring’s
mouth as a jet of pre-digested fluid. It was thus also that human
mothers fed their young.
The most important means of locomotion on the Other Earth was the
steam-train, but trains in this world were so bulky that they looked
like whole terraces of houses on the move. This remarkable railway
development was probably due to the great number and length of journeys
across deserts. Occasionally I traveled on steam-ships on the few and
small oceans, but marine transport was on the whole backward. The screw
propeller was unknown, its place being taken by paddle wheels.
Internal-combustion engines were used in road and desert transport.
Flying, owing to the rarified atmosphere, had not been achieved; but
rocket-propulsion was already used for longdistance transport of mails,
and for long-range bombardment in war. Its application to aeronautics
might come any day.
My first visit to the metropolis of one of the great empires of the
Other Earth was an outstanding experience. Everything was at once so
strange and so familiar. There were streets and many-windowed stores and
offices. In this old city the streets were narrow, and so congested was
the motor traffic that pedestrians were accommodated on special elevated
tracks slung beside the first-story windows and across the streets.
The crowds that streamed along these footpaths were as variegated as our
own. The men wore cloth tunics, and trousers surprisingly like the
trousers of Europe, save that the crease affected by the respectable was
at the side of the leg. The women, breastless and high-nostriled like
the men, were to be distinguished by their more tubular lips, whose
biological function it was to project food for the infant. In place of
skirts they disported green and glossy silk tights and little gawdy
knickers. To my unaccustomed vision the effect was inexpressibly vulgar.
In summar both sexes often appeared in the streets naked to the waist;
but they always wore gloves.
Here, then, was a host of persons who, in spite of their oddity, were as
essentially human as Londoners. They went about their private affairs
with complete assurance, ignorant that a spectator from another world
found them one and all grotesque, with their lack of forehead, their
great elevated quivering nostrils, their startlingly human eyes, their
spout-like mouths. There they were, alive and busy, shopping, staring,
talking. Children dragged at their mothers’ hands. Old men with white
facial hair bowed over walking-stocks. Young men eyed young women. The
prosperous were easily to be distinguished from the unfortunate by their
newer and richer clothes, their confident and sometimes arrogant
carriage.
How can I describe in a few pages the distinctive character of a whole
teeming and storied world, so different from my own, yet so similar?
Here, as on my own planet, infants were being born every hour. Here, as
there, they clamored for food, and very soon for companionship. They
discovered what pain was, and what fear, and what loneliness, and love.
They grew up, molded by the harsh or kindly pressure of their fellows,
to be either well nurtured, generous, sound, or mentally crippled,
bitter, unwittingly vindictive. One and all they desperately craved the
bliss of true community; and very few, fewer here, perhaps, than in my
own world, found more than the vanishing flavor of it. They howled with
the pack and hounded with the pack. Starved both physically and
mentally, they brawled over the quarry and tore one another to pieces,
mad with hunger, physical or mental. Sometimes some of them paused and
asked what it was all for; and there followed a battle of words, but no
clear answer. Suddenly they were old and finished. Then, the span from
birth to death being an imperceptible instant of cosmical time, they
vanished.
This planet, being essentially of the terrestrial type, had produced a
race that was essentially human, though, so to speak, human in a
different key from the terrestrial. These continents were as variegated
as ours, and inhabited by a race as diversified as Homo sapiens. All the
modes and facets of the spirit manifested in our history had their
equivalents in .3. the history of the Other Men. As with us, there had
been dark ages and ages of brilliance, phases of advancement and of
retreat, cultures predominantly material, and others in the main
intellectual, aesthetic, or spiritual. There were “Eastern” races and
“Western” races. There were empires, republics, dictatorships. Yet all
was different from the terrestrial. Many of the differences, of course,
were superficial; but there was also an underlying, deeplying
difference which I took long to understand and will not yet describe. I
must begin by speaking of the biological equipment of the Other Men.
Their animal nature was at bottom much like ours. They responded with
anger, fear, hate, tenderness, curiosity, and so on, much as we respond.
In sensory equipment they were not unlike ourselves, save that in vision
they were less sensitive to color and more to form than is common with
us. The violent colors of the Other Earth appeared to me through the
eyes of its natives very subdued. In hearing also they were rather
ill-equipped. Though their auditory organs were as sensitive as ours to
faint sounds, they were poor discriminators. Music, such as we know,
never developed in this world.
In compensation, scent and taste developed amazingly. These beings
tasted not only with their mouths, but with then-moist black hands and
with their feet. They were thus afforded an extraordinarily rich and
intimate experience of their planet. Tastes of metals and woods, of sour
and sweet earths, of the many rocks, and of the innumerable shy or bold
flavors of plants crushed beneath the bare running feet, made up a whole
world unknown to terrestrial man.
The genitals also were equipped with taste organs. There were several
distinctive male and female patterns of chemical characteristics, each
powerfully attractive to the opposite sex. These were savored faintly by
contact of hands or feet with any part of the body, and with exquisite
intensity in copulation.
This surprising richness of gustatory experience made it very difficult
for me to enter fully into the thoughts of the Other Men. Taste played
as important a part in their imagery and conception as sight in our own.
Many ideas which terrestrial man has reached by way of sight, and which
even in their most abstract form still bear traces of their visual
origin, the Other Men conceived in terms of taste. For example, our
“brilliant,” as applied to persons or ideas, they would translate by a
word whose literal meaning was “tasty.” For “lucid” they would use a
term which in primitive times was employed by hunters to signify an
easily runnable taste-trail. To have “religious illumination” was to
“taste the meadows of heaven.” Many of our non-visual concepts also were
rendered by means of taste. “Complexity” was “many flavored,” a word
applied originally to the confusion of tastes round a drinking pool
frequented by many kinds of beasts. “Incompatibility” was derived from a
word meaning the disgust which certain human types felt for one another
on account of their flavors.
Differences of race, which in our world are chiefly conceived in terms
of bodily appearance, were for the Other Men almost entirely differences
of taste and smell. And as the races of the Other Men were much less
sharply localized than our own races, the strife between groups whose
flavors were repugnant to one another played a great part in history.
Each race tended to believe that its own flavor was characteristic of
all the finer mental qualities, was indeed an absolutely reliable label
of spiritual worth. In former ages the gustatory and olfactory
differences had, no doubt, been true signs of racial differences; but in
modern times, and in the more developed lands, there had been great
changes. Not only had the races ceased to be clearly localized, but also
industrial civilization had produced a crop of genetic changes which
rendered the old racial distinctions meaningless. The ancient flavors,
however, though they had by now no racial significance at all, and
indeed members of one family might have mutually repugnant flavors,
continued to have the traditional emotional effects. In each country
some particular flavor was considered the true hall-mark of the race of
that country, and all other flavors were despised, if not actually
condemned.
In the country which I came to know best the orthodox racial flavor was
a kind of saltness inconceivable to terrestrial man. My hosts regarded
themselves as the very salt of the earth. But as a matter of fact the
peasant whom I first “inhabited” was the only genuine pure salt man of
orthodox variety whom I ever encountered. The great majority of that
country’s citizens attained their correct taste and smell by artificial
means. Those who were at least approximately salt, with some variety of
saltness, though not the ideal variety, were forever exposing the deceit
of their sour, sweet, or bitter neighbors. Unfortunately, though the
taste of the limbs could be fairly well disguised, no effective means
had been found for changing the flavor of copulation. Consequently newly
married couples were apt to make the most shattering discoveries about
one another on the wedding night. Since in the great majority of unions
neither party had the orthodox flavor, both were willing to pretend to
the world that all was well. But often there would turn out to be a
nauseating incompatibility between the two gustatory types. The whole
population was rotten with neuroses bred of these secret tragedies of
marriage. Occasionally, when one party was more or less of the orthodox
flavor, this genuinely salt partner would indignantly denounce the
impostor. The courts, the news bulletins, and the public would then join
in self-righteous protests.
Some “racial” flavors were too obtrusive to be disguised. One in
particular, a kind of bitter-sweet, exposed its possessor to extravagant
persecution in all but the most tolerant countries. In past times the
bitter-sweet race had earned a reputation of cunning and self-seeking,
and had been periodically massacred by its less intelligent neighbors.
But in the general biological ferment of modern times the bitter-sweet
flavor might crop up in any family. Woe, then, to the accursed infant,
and to all its relatives! Persecution was inevitable; unless indeed the
family was wealthy enough to purchase from the state “an honorary
salting” (or in the neighboring land, “an honorary sweetening”), which
removed the stigma.
In the more enlightened countries the whole racial superstition was
becoming suspect. There was a movement among the intelligentsia for
conditioning infants to tolerate every kind of human flavor, and for
discarding the deodorants and degustatants, and even the boots and
gloves, which civilized convention imposed.
Unfortunately this movement of toleration was hampered by one of the
consequences of industrialism. In the congested and unhealthy industrial
centers a new gustatory and olfactory type had
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