The Best of John W. Campbell. (2/2)
Title: The Best of John W. Campbell.
Author: John W. Campbell.
Genre: Fiction, science fiction, fantasy, horror, alien fiction, short stories.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1937, 1938, 1939 (this collection 1973).
Summary: A collection of 5 short stories. In Out of Night (1937), on an Earth where a matriarchal clan of aliens called Sarn, ruled by the Sarn Mother, have taken over, a faction of free-thinkers get involved in a brutal civil conflict with the humans fighting for the aliens. In Cloak of Aesir (1939), a direct sequel to the last story, the humans decide to stand up to their Sarn overseers once and for all, using a uniquely human weapon to do so. (Only the stories 4-5 in this post, refer to PART 2 for stories 1-3).
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥ "Aye, different races we are; the Sarn are the ruling race. The Sarn-Mother will be obeyed by the slaves of her people no less than by her people. For many centuries the crazy patchwork has persisted - that the men have had freedoms that the masters have denied themselves. Henceforth men shall be ruled as the Sarn.The Sarn have been just masters; this is no more than justice. But be warned, you will see that this thing is administered at once - or the Sarn will administer it themselves."
Grayth spoke for the first time, his voice deep and powerful. "Four thousand years ago your people came to Earth and conquered our people, enslaved them, destroyed all our leaders, setting up a rabble of unintelligent slaves. Since your atomic energy, your synthetic foods, your automatic production machinery, and the enormous decrease in human population you had brought about made more of goods for each man, it worked no great hardship.
"Before ever the Sarn came to this world, your race was ruled by a matriarchy, as it is today, and must always be. To your people it is natural, for among you the females born in a generation outnumber the males five to one. You stand near seven feet tall, while the Sarn Father - as the other males of your race - is but four feet tall, but a quarter as powerful physically. Matriarchy is the inevitable heritage of your race.
"You differ from us in this fundamental of sex distribution. By pure chance our two races resemble each other superficially - two eyes, two ears, rounded heads. Your race has two, wide-separated nostrils, four arms in place of two. But internally there is no resemblance. No bone of your body is three inches long; your arms, your legs are made as a human spine, of many small bones. Your copper-bearing foods are deadly poison to us. Your strath, though it seems like human hair, is a sensory organ sensitive to radio waves, and a radiator of those waves. We are two races apart, fundamentally different.
"Now, like your own matriarchy, you wish to establish upon us a matriarchal government; for this reason alone, you state, the number of males to be allowed in succeeding generations is to be reduced.
"What is natural for your race is an unnatural crime upon ours. Would you insist that we should eat no better food than you eat, as we should obey no different laws? Would you legislate that we should eat your foods, as we should obey your laws? Equally, in either case you destroy us. It is to the advantage of neither race. ..Your race does not know of the ancient powers of man; you are a race of people knowing and recognizing only the might of the atomic generator, the flare of the atomic-blast as power. The power of the mind is great. For ten thousand years before your coming men thought, and united in their thoughts of the unseen powers. In a hectic week your ancestors destroyed all of man's chaotic civilization, clamped on him suddenly a new world state. Before a union of thought could be attained, the thing was done, and as slow crystallization of feeling came, the poor survivors found that the conditions were not impossible. Our very difference of race protected them, to an extent, against mistreatment.
"But a crystallization has taken place during these forty centuries, a slow uniformity has built up. The mighty, chaotic thought wills of five hundred million men during three thousand generations were striving, building toward a mighty reservoir of powers, but their very disordered strivings prevented ordered formation.
"During a hundred centuries of chaotic thought, turbulent desire, those vast reservoirs of eternal, indestructible thought energies have circled space, unable to unite. During these last four millenniums those age-old forces have slowly united on a single, common thought that men destroyed by your race during the conquest have sent out.
"We of our race have felt that thing in these last years, that slowly accreting oneness of age-old will and thought, developing reality and power by the gathering of forces generated by minds released by death during ten thousand years. He is growing, a one from many, the combined thought and wisdom and power of the fifteen hundred billions of men who have lived on Earth. Aesir, he is, black as the spaces in which he formed."
♥ The very atomic bombs that had brought that ruin to man's cities were dead now. The last traces of the cities being succumbing to the returning thrust of green, burying life. The Sarn were old on Earth and this city they had caused to be about them was old, the hard granite cobbles of the walk worn smooth and polished with the soft tread of ages.
The Sarn-Mother had sat on her golden throne and watched the rains of summers smooth them, and the tread of generations of men polish them. The Sarn-Mother had been old when the Sarn landed; she was unchanged now, after the passage of more than a hundred generations of men, after ten generations of the rest of her people. She was eternal.
♥ "It's true enough, Carron. Those noble forefathers of ours were no great men; the great died killing Sarn, rebelling, fighting. The unconquerable spirits died because they could not be conquered-and could die.
"Four thousand years the Sarn-Mother has sat on her throne and watched mankind - listened, it would seem' - Grayth nodded toward the glowing aerial of the demodulator apparatus - "to its most secret councils. She knows man with the knowledge of one hundred and twenty generations. Unfortunately, man evolves, and being a short-lived animal, evolves more rapidly than do the Sarn. The weakness that made him submit to slavery has died out in four thousand years. For a millennium the Mother has seen man rapidly becoming man again."
♥ "That she learned from forgotten records, but this she has learned from watching one hundred and twenty generations of us. Man will fight and die for what he has not; woman will fight and die for what she has. Man will sacrifice everything he has for something he hopes for, an ideal; but while woman will fight for an ideal, she will not give up the good she has to gain it.
"The Sarn-Mother knows that man is thinking again, after four thousand years, of the freedom he has not."
♥ In the bright radiance of the atom flames, across lancing beams of early sunlight, vague, amorphous thing moved, a thing of utter blackness. Shifting suggestions of blocky, heavy legs moved it forward. Slowly, in the sunlight and the radiance of the projectors, it seemed to solidify, condensing upon itself. A gigantic, manlike figure looming twelve feet - a figure not in black, but of blackness, a sheer absence of all vision, a solid shadow of utter night.
As it moved closer in ponderous, soundless strides, the condensation and solidification went on, more clearly the arms, the great legs became visible. A great, featureless head of jet surmounted the heroic figure, a face of eyeless, mouthless, noseless blackness, swirling, moving unsteadily.
And behind it on the great floor, where the formless feet touched, white sprang out, white flowers of frost. Slowly, the figure moved forward, an aura of cold, a faint, whispering wind from unguessed, icy spaces drawing about it, behind it. A stabbing beam of brilliant sunlight struck down from a high window, lanced into it like a great shaft - and vanished. It did not illuminate nor reflect from that figure of blackness.
"Aesir-" Grayth gasped the name, falling back a step.
..The Sarn-Mother's hand moved like a flashing serpent's tongue to a tiny stud set in her throne. A pencil of ravening, intolerable fury burst from the carven mouth of the crouching metal beast at her side, a pencil of inconceivable energies that reft the air in its path in screaming, shattered atoms - and died soundless, lightless on the breast of the lord of blackness. From her massed guards a thousand tongues of death shrieked out, ravening rods of annihilation - that died unseen in his blackness. From the plaque above the throne of the Sarn-Mother a roaring column of the atomic-blast, a force designed to wash down mountains, vomited forth, drowning in colossal thunders the pricking bubbles of the lesser rays. No spark of light, no faintest sight of illumination appeared on the motionless giant.
The shouting voice of the rays died out, stopped, and their echoes wandered lonely in the vast silence of the hall. The blackness spoke again, in a soundless voice that seemed to echo like a vast organ's song, yet lacked all quality of sound.
"I am not matter, nor of forces such as your beams, your rays can touch, daughter of the Sarn. Your wisdom, the ancient powers of your race are useless. You are still but one; I am all of mankind that has ever been, the fifteen hundred billions who have died since the first man. I a the billions you slaughtered at the Conquest. Ten thousand generations of mankind have willed, dreamed and struggled for success and freedom. I am the crystallization of those wills, those dreams. I am mankind, an incarnate ideal half formed. No force, no ray, no thing of matter can influence my being.
"All space was saturated with the deathless energies of forgotten strivers, the eternal wills of all man's myriads since the lost beginning of time. In glacial epoch I died under rending tiger's claws, yet lived in the child protected by that sacrifice. I died while the world was young - and I died last night under the rays you gave these men, and with the leaden shot of the air guns in me.
"I am the wills of mankind, raised into substance by your own acts, daughter of the Sarn. Three billions died at the Conquest, and their wills released to eternal space carried one single thought: to save Earth from your slavery. They were the crystallizing point, on that heart and nucleus the space-ranging wills of unremembered generations have united into me. Four thousand years have passed, and slowly I have grown, till my powers made contact with Earth's space and time last night, when once again wills and minds went from Earth in striving for freedom.
"I am Aesir, the pantheon of mankind, and mankind itself. All that ever died, under blazing desert sun or in freezing arctic waste, when the first dim stirrings of mind arose and struggled with a tool, and through all time to the will that became of me while I spoke here-the will of one wounded last night and dying this morning.
"For whatever cause they strove and died, they are of me, daughter of the Sarn. Mankind must have justice, for each of those who died sought in his own way for what his mind believed was truth. Grayth and Bartel have striven that justice might be, and they shall go on with their works.
"Drunnel and Rendan have sought to sell mankind for their own ends. They, too, shall have justice."
~~Out of Night.
♥ For the eight City-Mothers, taking their places about the Conference Hall of the Sarn, were not going to be sympathetic to the Mother's story.
To them, the ancient Sarn-Mother well knew, the humans of Earth were slaves. Slaves bred for work, of little mentality and no importance. Earth was the planet of the Sarn, the planet the Sarn had taken, some four thousand years before, from the race of small-bodied, small-minded weaklings called Man that had originally inhabited it.
And that idea was going to be extremely hard to change. Particularly, it would be hard for the Sarn-Mother to change that idea, for she was somewhat-not of them. The Sarn-Mother was the Immortal. She was, therefore, disliked.
These eight, these Mothers of Cities, were the matriarchic governors of Earth under the Sarn. Each had risen to overlordship of a continent, or near-continental area, by competitiv brilliance among all their people. They had won their places, merited them, they felt.
But the Sarn-Mother? The ultimate ruler of all Earth, all Sarn and humans alike? She had not inherited her position exactly-she had simply been there forever. Her winning of it was forgotten in the mists of antiquity. The Sarn were a long-lived people - some lived a thousand years - but the Sarn-Mother was immortal; she had lived in the mythical days of the Forgotten Planet, before the home world of the Sarn had disrupted in cosmic catastrophe, forcing the race to seek new worlds.
The Sarn-Mother had won this world for them, but that - and all others who had fought mankind in that four-thousand-years-gone time - was forgotten. The Sarn-Mother was simply a hang-over from an era that should have died. So felt the Mothers of Cities, ambitious Sarn who saw a place above them that-because of the Mother's cursed immortality - they could never hope to reach.
The Old Sarn-Mother knew that, and knew, too, that only her own possession of secret science those millenniums of her life had given her, made her place safe. The City-Mothers feared two things: that well-held secret science, and the jealousy of their sisters.
The old Sarn was tired with mental struggle, and she knew, as soundly as she knew the City-Mothers hated her, that she was facing another struggle. The humans of Earth were rising in a slow, half-understood revolt. She and these eight City-Mothers knew that.
But the City-Mothers did not, and would not, admit that those humans were capable of revolt. For all their lives humans have been slaves, pets, a sort of domesticated animal. That they or the similarly domesticated cows might attempt to set up a civilization-
For the Sarn-Mother alone had been alive the four thousand years that had passed since mankind's defense of Earth all but succeeded in defeating the invading Sarn. The City-Mothers could not understand. Subconsciously they had no intention of understanding anything so unpleasant.
♥ Sixty centuries are long, for any intellect. All things exhaust themselves in that long time, save one: the curiosity of the mind, the play and counterplay of intellect. The Mother was the perfect seeker after knowledge, for no other thoughts could ponderably intrude. Those others she had met long ago.
She was un-Sarn by her immortality, by her separation of six thousand years from all direct contact with her equals.
She was unhuman only by a different in body. And the body is wearied and forgotten in that time. Only the intellect, the mind, remains of interest, expanding and changing forever.
The intellect behind Aesir's cloak of blackness was the keenest, the finest, this planet had ever seen. And - that human appreciated that she, the Sarn-Mother, was a keen intelligence.
The City-Mothers did not.
♥ "Briefly, when we landed, the humans had had civilization for some fifteen thousand years. It was, by their calendar, 1977. They had recently developed atomic power of the first order, involving vapor turbines heated by atomic combustion, driving electromagnetic generators. They mined the world, their transportation systems were heavily interlinked and efficient.
"And - of our fifty-two ships, we lost thirty-nine during the Conquest. They were intelligent, efficient and deadly fighters. We captured and enslaved only the scum of the race; the best of humankind died fighting with a grim tenacity that appalled us. They were a fighting breed, slightly given to attack, but utterly and insanely given to defense.
"It is worth nothing in this case. If they once attack us, then we will, of course, attack, in reply. Whereupon their inherited defensiveness will come into play. If it does, I seriously assure you that, whether they have weapons or not, even if they fight with their bare hands, you will find the human race a perfectly deadly thing to tangle with. They have no conception of when to stop. It is good military tactics to stop, if any reasonably equitable settlement can be reached, after losing ten percent of your forces. The human race does not know that, and never will. They stop when, and only when, they are convinced they have won their point. They simply do not show good sense.
"But they are extremely deadly.
"That is true of the mass of humanity."
♥ lso, one more. Darak, Grayth's subspokesman. He sat silent now, making occasional pothooks on the pad of paper, his round, uninteresting face bored and boring. Darak's office was appointive, given him at Grayth's order for the blankly unimpressive face and uninteresting character of the man made him few friends-as he had found by many years of careful study of the subject. Few friends, and few who paid him any attention whatever.
Darak had no need of the Cloak of the Mother; his own, based not on laws of physics but of psychology, was nearly as effective. People did not see Darak. He wasn't worth seeing.
♥ Four humans at the ancient Council table, four men as free as possible in this day of the Sarn, each wearing on his cloak the symbol of his rank in human society. Each wearing on a band round his forehead the medallion given every human at the age of eighteen. The band of Manhood or Womanhood, the Sarn informed them. The mark of Mankind's submission to the Sarn.
Or was, till Ware made certain slight alterations, alterations that hollowed out the solid three-inch disk of silver to contain a minute thing of spider-web coils and microscopic crystal oscillators. The first of the telepaths that rendered this soundless Council meaningful.
And rendered quite useless the listening devices that had followed every Council of Mankind for a thousand years. Grayth smiled upward to the swell of the atom-flame lamp. In the mechanism of that device, in a dozen other places in the room, the Sarn had long ago hidden radio transmitters. For a millennium, every Council of Mankind had been directly open to the strange radio-sense of the Mother and her advisers. For the hairlike growth on the Sam's skulls were the sense organ of a type Man did not have, directly sensitive to radio.
"Four men in here," Grayth thought to his companions, "four men rustling papers. But the Sarn must be very curious as to the silence."
♥ His feet made no noticeable noise on the floor - an accomplishment far more difficult than a soundless tread. An unnoticeable step involves exactly sufficient sound to satisfy the ear, without enough to attract it. A soundless tread is very startling, particularly in a rather stout, heavily built man.
♥ "What have you there? My slowly thawing bones give me a very personal interest in that cloak of yours."
Ware sighed gustily, "It's hard to explain. About ninety percent of it isn't in words, or explainable in words. It's a mathematical concept that has reality.
"Wherefore I will now give you a typical pre-Sarn analogy, because neither you nor Grayth can get pictures from mathematics. It's a language, you know - as much a language as the one we normally speak, or the Sarn language. Some terms you can translate, and some can't be. For instance x2 + y2 = c2 in mathematics language for 'circle.' I will give you analogies which I guarantee are not sound, and neatly conceal the truth. But I can't do any better.
"Dirac, a physicist of the pre-Sarn days, explained the positron as a whole in a continuum of electrons in negative energy states. Space, he said, was completely filled with electrons possessed of negative energies. It was full to the brim, and overflowed into the electrons we can detect - ordinary matter electrons.
"Shortly before the Sarn came, men were developing hints that there might be more t that. There was. Electrons in positive energy states, when vibrated, gave off radiation-light, heat, and so on. If you use energy concentrated enough, you can vibrate electrons in negative energy states. You might say they give off negative energy radiation. They produce photons of energy in negative energy states.
"As I said, it's an analogy that I can't honestly describe, but the effect is radiated negative energy. Radiant cold or radiant darkness or radiant lack-of-X-rays - whatever you want.
"Energy being conserved, of course, the result is that the source of that radiation, instead of consuming energy; gives it off. My pack does not radiate negative energy; it sets up a condition in the air about me that makes the air atoms radiate negative energy.
"The atomic flame the Mother turned on me satisfied, to some extent, the ravening demand for energy that negative energy setup caused. The force that makes the air atoms radiate in that way makes them unstable - sort of splits them into two parts, two half-formed atoms of matter. In that state, neither half is real, but each has a terrible demand for sufficient mass - in the form of energy - to raise it to reality. In that median state, matter is interpenetrable. We walk through steel doors and stone floors, for instance. It will hang on that unstable point of half-and-half momentarily, before reforming to matter. It's as dependable as a rattlesnake or a 'tame' tiger. While we're interpenetrating, it may fall off that delicate balance and consume our mass-energy in reforming. When Sarn guards send atomic flames after us, the unstable matter greedily drinks in the energy, and starts definitely toward reforming with the air of that energy. If left alone, one-half of the semiatoms absorbs the other half, and it's normal again. In the meantime, it's black. And cold-like the Mother's Hall of Judgment right now.
"When the Mother's beams were tearing at me, the energy was actively making extra atoms of air. It didn't make any difference what kind of beam she used - the energy was consumed. Her atomic flame had lots of power - and made a lot of air. Her curious atom-disruption beam didn't carry much energy, but the particular form of the beam was most deadly. The form passed through my shield quite unchanged, theoretically. But the energy had been removed from it.
"Naturally, the Mother's physicists are badly puzzled now by a completely unanimous report of 'nothing' on the part of then- instruments. None of them, of course, read below absolute zero. That shield has a temperature of -55,000° Absolute - or thereabouts.
"I could wipe out the Sarn very readily. But' - Ware shrugged his shoulders - "they'd wipe out all humans while I was at it."
♥ "Down, Simons," said Dr. Wesson's voice. There was a gentle urgency in it, a pitying yet firm tenderness. A pair of feet appeared, slowly, wearily, with an air of terrible, unending exhaustion - tired beyond all rest, misery and hopelessness subtly expressed in the dull, shambling descent of those heavy feet.
Loosely, miserably they came down the long flight, their mechanical, rhythmic drumming a muffled beat of defeat. The man came into view. His figure was lax, powerfully muscled arms and shoulders bent under a soul-deadening weight of overwhelming despair. Down - down -
"Down, Simons." The doctor's voice was weary with a queer despair caught somehow from that doom-weighted figure.
Ware turned slowly to look at Deya, at Grayth. "Who is he - Simons?"
They did not answer, and he turned back to look at the figure that stood unmoving now beneath the powerful lights of this buried laboratory. His face was pale and lined, powerful with the strength drained from it, set in a dead mask of uncaring despair. His eyes were black, black pits that looked without hope, or hope of hope, into the keen gray eyes of Aesir.
Ware felt something within him chill under the gaze of those eyes that no longer cared or hoped. The soul beyond them was not dead and longed for death. The lights of the bright room seemed cold and drear. Fatigue and hopelessness of the endless struggle against the overwhelming Sarn surged up in Ware, hopelessness and despair so deep he did not mind that the cause was lost before-
He tore his eyes away. 'Deya - in the name of the gods, what - who - what is this thing!" he gasped.
"That is negative energy, Ware. That is the negative energy of the mind, the blackness of Aesir applied to all hope, all ambition. He is mad; he is a manic depressive. He has no hope, no thought of escape from that negative hell of despair that is beyond despair. He is mad, for no sane mind could conceive that awful blackness, the hopelessness that is a positive, devouring force that infests his being.
"If ever his mind should start to mend, he will become a suicidal maniac, driven to kill himself in any way he can, at any horrible expense. He cannot think of that escape now. That is struggle, that is in itself a hope - and he has none. To conceive of death as an escape is to hope, to believe that something better can be.
"That is beyond him now, for hope - struggle - effort to escape - all involve a will that mind has lost.
"He is mad, Ware, because no mind can hold the terrible despair his thoughts now know and remain sane.
"Record his thoughts. Record them there on that silver ribbon. Record that hopelessness that knows no resistance, no will to struggle. Record it, and broadcast that through the Sarn City!"
♥ Dull eyes looked at the sweating walls. Cold, stone walls. When had it ever been that she had ordered stone? Warm marbles of rose and green. Warm? The rose of dying day before night's chill. The green of endless arctic ice. It mocked her and drove its chill to her age-old body.
Age-old. Unending years that had wheeled and rolled while she waited, useless. Waited for the coming of her people, or when she might again seek in space. Useless years of fruitless attempts to learn that one, lost secret of speed bettering light's swift flight. Lost - lost with the ten trained Sarn that died those four thousand years gone in the blasting of this city once called New York. Too much else she'd had to do then to learn that secret.
Time she had now; four thousand wheeling years. But now she could not learn; it eluded her dulled mind, and the weakened minds of the decadent race.
As Aesir eluded her, and squatted miserable in the midst of misery his works had brought.
She stirred. The cold worked through. Hot food, hot drinks-they warmed a moment, then added dead, cold mass to the chill within her. A deadness that, she knew now, had been within her before this glooming chill had made her more aware. Her Sarn were weak; the soft product of an easy world, too sanely organized to require of them sharp, sharpening competition in endeavor.
And she was old. Immortality she had, and everlasting youth of tissue. But the mind grew old and dull, the courses of its thoughts narrowed and chilled with years and millenniums that passed. She was never to recall that exact age - but what matter? A stupid thing. What mattered that she thought of it or not; the years had passed, they'd graved their mark and narrowing on her. And on her race.
They had weakened. Humankind had strengthened, grown with the years that sapped the Sarn. Now, in her gardens, that hunched figure of dejection squatted, chilling all her city, defying the minds of all the Sarn. It had been a matter of time, inevitable as the fated motion of the planets. And the time had come. The humans were the stronger.
♥ Her eyes closed, and she did not see through the dissolving clouds to the black figure that slowly rose erect, nor to the ordered division of the legion of peace that marched toward the blank, silent windows of the Sarn Palace. Behind them came a loose group of work-clad men to disperse among the dead, lightless shops of this, the city that had marked the landing of the Sarn.
~~Cloak of Aesir.