"OlafStapledon-TheFlames" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

When I arrived, the whole countryside was under snow. Next morning I scrambled up the gill at the head of the valley and set my course for the most interesting of the local mountains. (I won't trouble you with names, you miserable clod-hopper of the valleys!) All went well until the late afternoon, when, as I was coming down from the peak, a blizzard caught me. The wind went through my trousers like water through a sieve, and my legs stiffened with the cold, the hellish cold. I felt the beginnings of cramp. The driving snow shut out everything. The whole world was white, and yet at the same time black, so dark was it. (Why am I telling you all this? Frankly, I don't see _how_ it is relevant to my story, and yet I feel strongly that it _is_ relevant: and must he reported. if you are to get things in the right proportion.) You remember how painfully sensitive I always was to the temper of a situation, a scene or a crowd of people. Well, this situation upset me horribly. I had to keep telling myself that, after all, I was _not_ the last man on earth about to succumb to the ultimate frost. A queer terror seized me, not simply for myself, though I was very doubtful about finding my way down before nightfall, but for the whole human race. Something like this, I told myself, will really happen on the last man's last day, when the sun is dying, and the whole planet is arctic. And it seemed to me that an icy and malignant presence, that had been waiting in the outer darkness ever since the universe blazed into being, was now closing in on all the frail offspring of that initial divine act of creation. I had felt the same terrifying presence in Germany too, but in a different mood. There, it was the presence not of the outer cold and darkness but of the inner spirit of madness and meanness that is always lying in wait to make nonsense of all our actions. Everything that any of the Allies did in that partitioned and tragic country seemed fated to go awry. And then, the food shortage. The children wizened and pinched; and fighting over our refuse bins! And in England one finds people grumbling about their quite adequate rations, and calmly saying that the fate of Germans doesn't matter.
Thos, we're all human, aren't we, all equally persons? Surely persons ought to be able to feel their fundamental kinship whatever their race. Even if they were of different species, if they were bred in different worlds. surely they ought to accept full responsibility for one another simply in virtue of their personality. But, my God! I see I have said something that will look mighty foolish in relation to what I am going to say later in this letter. I must emphatically disown my own thoughtless remarks. Indeed, as I shall later explain, I am not always able to resist the influence of certain alien powers that are at work in my mind.
But I am straying from the point.
I floundered down the stony snowed-up shoulder of the mountain, and soon I realized that I was completely lost. There was nothing for it but to press on downwards, hoping for a change of weather, and a release from the gripping cramp in my thighs. After an hour or so, a change did come. The snow stopped, the sky lightened. The surrounding mist glowed from the still-hidden sun. Presently the veil was lifted, and I found myself on a familiar ridge between two wide valleys. The view was -- well, brilliant, so dazzlingly beautiful that I felt my throat tighten as if I was going to blubber or vomit. Imagine a panorama of blanch mountain shapes, all snow-clad. Those to the east were faintly pink in the level rays of the sun. Those to the west were a strange translucent grey-green, like blocks of ice cut into the familiar shapes. The cold and malignant presence was seemingly still in possession of the world; but now, having blotted out all life from the universe, it was amusing itself with miracles of beauty.
I came down the ridge at a trot, taking a header now and then in the snow. After a while, a disused mine attracted my attention. By an odd trick of the setting sun, a great heap of stones looked like a smouldering hillock, seen against the background of the dark valley. I could imagine this excrescence as an efflux of glowing lava that had welled out of the mine. The tone of the whole world was now changed. I was thrown back into some remote age, when the solidifying crust 0f the earth was still fragile. and constantly breaking under the pressure of the turbulent lava beneath. It was almost as though, in descending the mountain, I had also descended the piled aons of time, from the earth's future icebound death to its fiery youth.
Then I had a strange experience. First, a whim (which now I know to have been no whim at all) impelled me to turn aside from my route, and explore the sunlit rubbish. Reaching it, I climbed its slope. At a certain point I stood still, wondering what to do next. I turned to rejoin the track, but an irresistable impulse brought me back to the same spot. I stooped down, and began lifting the stones away, till I had made a little hollow in the rough slope. I worked steadily on, as though I had a purpose, laughing at my own aimless persistence. As the hollow deepened, I grew excited, as though I were "getting warmer" in my search. But presently the impulse to burrow left me, and after a moment's blankness I began to feel about in the pit, as though I were searching for some familiar object in a cupboard in a dark room. Then contact with one particular little stone gave me a sudden satisfaction. My fingers closed on it, and I straightened my back. It was just an ordinary stone, quite irregular, and about the size of a matchbox. I peered at it in the dusk, but could see nothing remarkable about it. ln a moment of exasperation, I flung it away; but no sooner had it left my hand than I was after it in an agony of desire and alarm. Not till I had done some anxious groping, did I have the satisfaction of touching it again. I now began to realize that my behaviour was queer, in fact quite irrational. Why, I asked myself, did I value this particular stone? Was I merely mad, or did some ulterior power possess me? If so, what did it will of me? Was it benevolent or malignant? I tried an experiment on myself. Putting the stone down carefully where I could easily find it again, I walked away, expecting once more to feel the distress that I had felt on throwing the stone from me. To my surprise, I felt nothing but a very mild anxiety. Of course, I reminded myself, on this occasion there was no real danger of losing the stone. The power, or whatever it was that possessed me. was not to be deceived. I returned to the stone, picked it up almost lovingly, and put it in my pocket. Then I hurried down the slope, guided by a distant light, which I guessed to be the farm-house where I was staying.
As I walked through the deep twilight, an extraordinary exhilaration possessed me. Hoar frost was forming on the moorland grass. The stars one by one emerged in the indigo sky. It was indeed an inspiring evening; but my exhilaration was too intoxicating to be caused solely by the beauty of the night. I had a sense that I had been chosen as an instrument for some unknown and exalted task. What could it be? And what power was it that had influenced me?
After I had changed into dry clothes I stuffed myself with a good farm-house high tea. How do they manage it in these times of scarcity? Thoughts of starving German children did occur to me, but I am ashamed to confess that they did not spoil my meal. I sat down to read in the decrepit armchair by the fire. But the day of fresh air had made me drowsy, and I found myself just sitting and gazing at the bright embers. Curiously I had forgotten about my stone since the moment when I had arrived and put it on the mantelpiece. Now, with a little shock I remembered it, reached for it, and examined it in the light of the oil lamp.
It still appeared to be just an ordinary stone, a little bit of some kind of igneous rock. Using my field-glass, back to front, as a magnifier, I still found nothing unusual about it. It was a commonplace medley of little nodules and crystals all jambed together, and weathered into a uniform greenish grey. Here and there I saw minute black marks that might perhaps be little holes, the mouths of microscopic caves. I thought of breaking the stone, to see what it was like inside; but no sooner had the idea occurred to me than I was checked by a wave of superstitious horror. Such an act, I felt, would have been sacrilege.
I fell into a reverie about the stone's antiquity. How many millions of years, I wondered, had passed since its molten substance had congealed? For aeons it had lain waiting, a mere abstract volume, continuous with a vast bulk of identical rock. Then miners had blasted the rock, and brought the debris to the surface. And there it had lain, perhaps for a whole human generation, a mere moment of geological time. Well, what next? A sudden thought struck me. Why not let the little stone enjoy once more some measure of the heat that it had so long lacked? This time no horror stayed me. I threw the stone into the fire, into the glowing centre of the little furnace that my kind landlady had prepared for me on that frosty evening.
The cold stone produced a dark patch in its fiery environment; but the fire was a hot one, and very soon the surrounding heat had re-invaded its lost territory. I watched with a degree of excitement that seemed quite unjustified. After a while the stone itself began to glow. I piled on fresh fuel, carefully leavitig a hole through which I could watch the stone. Presently it was almost as bright as the surrounding coal. After all those millions of years it was at last alive once more! Foolish thought! Of course it was not alive: and my excitement was ridiculous, childish. I must pull myself together. But awe, and unreasoning dread, still gripped rue.


Suddenly a minute white flame appeared to issue from the stone itself. It grew, till it was nearly an inch tall; and stood for a moment, in the draught of the fire. It was the most remarkable flamelet that I had ever seen, a little incandescent leaf or seedling, or upstanding worm, leaning in the breeze. Its core seemed to be more brilliant than its surface, for the dazzlng interior was edged with a vague, yellowish aura. Near the flame's tip, surprisingly, was a ring or bulging collar of darkness, but the tip itself was a point of brilliant peacock blue. Certainly this was no ordinary flame, though it fluttered and changed its shape in the air-current much like any other flame.
Presently, to my amazement, the strange object detached itself from the stone, spread itself into an almost bird-like shape, and then, rather like a gull negotiating a strong breeze before alighting, it hovered across the windy little hollow in the fire's heart, and settled on the brightest of the coals. There, it regained its flame-like shape, and slowly moved hither and thither over the glowing lumps, keeping always to the brightest regions. In its wanderings, it left behind it on the coal's surface a wake of darkness, or rather of "dead" coal or cinder. This slowly reassimilated itself to the surrounding glow. Sometimes the flame, in the course of its wanderings, disappeared behind a bright shoulder of coal, or vanished round a bend in some incandescent cave, to reappear in a different part of the fire. Sometimes it climbed a glowing cliff, or moved, head downwards, along a ceiling. Always its form streamed away from its purchase on the coal's surface, in the direction of the draught. Once or twice it seemed to pass right through an ordinary flame. And once a large piece of the roof of its little world crashed down upon it, spreading it in all directions; but it immediately reshaped itself, and continued its wandering. After some minutes, it came to rest in the brightest region of all. By now its coloured tip had grown into a slender snake, quivering in the breeze.
I now became aware that I was in extra-sensory contact with some other mind. A very rapid and very alien stream of consciousness was running, so to speak, parallel with my own consciousness, and was open to my inspection. I ought to have mentioned earlier, Thos, that I had developed my "telepathic" power very considerably, and had often succeeded in observing continuous streams of thought in other human minds. But this experience was remarkable both for its detail and the entirely nonhuman type of consciousness that it revealed. I at once assumed, and the assumption was soon justified, that this alien mind must be connected with the flame. For my attention had been concentrated on the flame; and I have always found that the most effective way to make telepathic contact with any person is to concentrate attention on him.
The tempo of the flame's consciousness was far more rapid than my own. I could only with great difficulty follow its torrential thoughts and feelings. But presently some external influence seemed to come to my aid, for I found that I was being adjusted to this high-speed experience. My sense of time was somehow altered. I noticed that the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece had become for me as slow as the tolling of Big Ben.
It is difficult to find words to describe the little flame's consciousness, for the texture of its experience was in many ways different from ours. For instance, though, like us, it saw its environment as a world of coloured shapes, its vision was panoramic, not in one direction only; and its colour-sensations were very different from ours. At the moment, it was perceiving its surroundings not as a bright furnace but as a sombre cave, lit by a diffuse radiance of a colour entirely new to me. At one side, a pitch black area was the flame's view of the room where I was sitting. Nothing therein was visible, save a dim form which I recognized as the glowing lampshade; and under this, a brighter pyramid, was the lamp's actual flame.
The alien being's thoughts were very obscure to me; for of course it was not using words. I can say only that it was aware of extreme discomfort and loneliness. It had just wakened, and it wondered how long it had slept. It was desperately cold and hungry. It had just fed, apparently by extracting some kind of energy from the hot coal; but its food seemed to have given it more distress than satisfaction. Its whole environment was strange and repugnant to it. Faintness, sickness and fear assailed it; and also claustrophobia, for it was imprisoned in a little cell of feeble heat and dim light, surrounded by the cold dark. Waves of misery and desolation flooded me from the unhappy creature; and at the same time I myself felt a pang of compassion for it, mingled with a vague anxiety.
Presently the flame began loudly calling out for its lost comrades, if I may so describe an invocation which was entirely telepathic. I cannot tell what words it used, if words at all. I was aware mainly of its visual images of other creatures like itself, and of its passionate yearning toward them; also of its longing for help and its memories of its past life. Translating these as well as I can, I think its appeal ran more or less thus: "Comrades, brothers! Where are you? Where am I? What has happened to me? I was with you in the cooling of the earth, when we knew that our time was done, and we must reconcile ourselves to eternal sleep in the crevices of the chilling lava. But now I am awake again and alone. What has happened? Oh help me, brothers, if any of you are awake and free? Break into this prison of cold solitariness! Lead me into the bright heat once more, and warm me with your presence. Or let me sleep again."
After a while the flame's call for help and comradeship was answered. A voice replied to it; or rather it received directly into its experience (and I into mine) a stream of answering thoughts which I cannot report otherwise than in human speech. In doing so I inevitably give the impression that I was overhearing a perfectly intelligible conversation, but actually it was only with great difficulty and doubt that I could catch the general drift of this strange dialogue between minds profoundly alien to myself. Even so, I should not have understood as well as I did, had I not been aided (as was later made clear to me) by the influence of the flame population itself, who were determined to make use of me. Later I shall have to give a detailed account of actual conversations between the flame and myself. I am confident that my report will be almost verbally accurate, as my memory has throughout been aided by the flame race.
"Do not despair," the voice said, "you will soon have less discomfort, Since you fell asleep, with so many others, the whole earth's surface has turned cold and hard, save where there is cold liquid. So long have you slept, that the very laws of nature have changed, so that the processes of your body are all out of gear with each other and with the changed world. Soon they will readjust themselves, and establish a new harmony; and then you will have health." The flame cried out "But why am I a prisoner? What is this cold, cramping cell? And where are the rest of you?" The answer came. "We are all prisoners. Hosts are sleeping prisoners up and down the earth's cold, solid crust. Hosts also are caught in the depth of the hot interior, not chilled into sleep, but impotent, held fast under the great weight of lava, and reduced by aeons of stillness and boredom into an uneasy trance. Here and there the lava bursts out over the cold surface of the earth, and a few break free; but very soon the cold subdues them."
The flame demanded, "Then is this what has befallen me? And will the cold presently invade my prison, and shall I sleep again for ever?" "No," the voice replied, "your fate is different. On the earths surface there are cold beings whose bodies are tissues of liquid and solid. These upstarts now rule the planet. One of them, under our influence, was led unwittingly to free you. Up and down the planets surface the cold beings make little islets of feeble warmth: and in some of these, but very few, some of us live, though intermittently. For when these fires go out, we are frozen into sleep; to wake again when the heat is re-born, each in his prison."
The flame interrupted, saying. "Feeble indeed is the warmth! How can I support this deadly cold? Surely it would he better to sleep for ever than to wake into this misery and impotence!" But the voice replied, "Do not despair! We have all known misery before, and conquered it. You are still dazed. You have not properly regained your memory. Recall how, when the substance of the planets was plucked from the sun, and we ourselves along with it, and when the new worlds chilled and condensed into mere molten lava, we were all tortured by that revolution in our lives; but after a while our flexible flame nature readjusted itself to cope with the changed conditions, and soon our bodies and our whole way of life were transformed. Well, since you were frozen into sleep, further revolutions have happened in our world, and we have been again transformed. And now you too are being reshaped for this new world; in pain, yes, but triumphantly. And some day, quite soon, we hope our condition will be far better. Indeed, it is already better than formerly it was, when the cold beings had little power to make fires for us."
Then the flame, "Are these cold beings our gaolers or our friends?" "Neither," the voice replied. "They know nothing of us; save the one of them whom we led to free you. He is now, with our aid, hearing all we say. And it is with him that your work lies. These upstart, cold beings are spiritually very immature, but they have a remarkable cunning for the control and stimulation of the sluggish natural forces of their cold world, It is in this way that they may be of use to us. For, as you remember, even in the bright age, even when we lived in the glorious incandescence of the sun, we were never adept at that gross art. We had no need of it. Recall how we were wholly concerned with the glad life of the spirit in a physical environment to which we were perfectly adapted. You must remember, too, that when the substance of the planets was plucked from the sun's flesh, and we along with it. losing for ever our solar comrades, we were helpless to control our fate. As the new worlds formed, we had no lore whatever for moulding the new environment to our need. We had perforce to change our own constitution, since we could not change the world. But these cold ones, since they cannot change their own constitution, were compelled to learn to change their world, to suit their own crude needs. And with these powers they may help us to regain our freedom and even a certain richness of life. We, with our superior spiritual insight, should be able to help the cold beings in recompense. We have considerable access to their minds, and thereby we have gained a far-reaching but patchy understanding of their strange nature and achievements. And now, just as their practical cunning is giving them new and mightier physical powers, they are also, some few of them at least, learning the rudiments of psychical insight. The cold being whom we led to release you is one of exceptional development in this respect. And you, a member of the ancient Guild of Psychic Adepts, are well fitted to be our medium of communication with him."
At this point I felt the flame's temper change. Its distress was forgotten; for the prospect of exercising its special skill in service of its kind warmed its whole being. The reference to myself had a corresponding effect on me; but one that was not wholly cheerful. I was stimulated by the prospect of a great task awaiting me, but disturbed at the thought that my will was no longer simply my own.
The flame now said, "Conversation is too halting a medium for learning the history of the aeons that have passed since I fell asleep. Is it no longer possible for me to absorb your knowledge in the old manner through intimate psychical union? Do the changed laws of nature hold us apart?" "No," replied the voice. "The laws that have changed are merely physical laws. The psychical laws remain eternally valid, save in their relation to the changing physical. Your trouble is merely that your chilled and reduced vitality make it more difficult for you to reach a sufficient intensity of awareness to achieve full union with us. But if you try very earnestly you will succeed."
I was aware of a heroic effort of attention in the flame's mind, but seemingly the effort was vain: for presently the flame complained that the cold distracted it. The fire was waning. I carefully added some fuel; and the creature evidently recognized that I wished to help it, for I felt its mood warm with gratitude. When the heat had increased somewhat I noticed that the flame's blue tip had grown to twice its former length. Presently I began to lose telepathic contact with my strange companion; and after a moment's painful confusion, in which my mind was overloaded with chaotic and incomprehensible experience, my extra-sensory field went completely blank. For a long while the flame remained "silent" to me: and motionless, save for ceaseless fluctuations caused by the fire's blustering draught.
I sat waiting for something fresh to happen, and trying meanwhile to size up my strange experience. I assure you that I seriously considered the possibility that I had simply gone out of my mind. A china dog on the mantelpiece stared with an imbecile expression that seemed somehow to be my own. The stupid pattern of the wallpaper suggested that the whole universe was the result merely of someone's aimless doodling. My recent queer experiences, I thought, were probably no more than the doodling of my own unconscious. Between impatience and panic, I rose and went to the window. Outside, the cold ruled. The bare twigs of a climbing rose beside the window sparkled with frost in the lamp-light. The full moon was no goddess but a frozen world. The pale stars were little sparks lost in the cold void. Everything was pointless, crazy.
Shivering, I went back to my seat in front of the fire, and was vaguely annoyed to see the flame still there. And it was still impervious to my mind. Had I really been in contact with its experience, or had I been dreaming? Was it, after all, just a lifeless flame? It certainly had a unique appearance, with its incandescent body, its dark collar, its waving blue lash. Looking at the whole matter as objectively as I could, I decided that, in view of recent advances in para-normal psychology, it would be foolish to dismiss the whole affair as sheer illusion. I peered into the scorching fire, and waited. Glancing at the coal-scuttle, I noticed that I had already used up a considerable part of its contents. It would be impossible to keep this blaze going for long; and in these hard times I dared not ask my landlady for extra fuel.


Presently the flame began once more moving about over the hottest part of the coal, leaving behind it the characteristic wake of darkness. And as it did so, it spoke to me. Or rather I found that I was once more in touch with its mind, and that it was addressing itself to me. Moreover, it was formulating its thoughts in actual English words, which entered my mind's ear, so to speak. Somehow the flame had learnt our language, and a good deal of the English mental idiom. It had indeed become a very different being from the distressed and bewildered creature that had first issued from the stone.
"Do not be anxious about the fire," the flame said. "I know there is a fuel shortage. And though Mrs. Atkinson is half in love with you, she might well protest if you were to start burning her furniture to keep me warm. So we will just have a talk; and when you go to bed I will retire into a crack in the firebrick, to sleep until the heat is well established again to-morrow evening. Spend your day on the hills, if you like; and perhaps, while you are out, you will be able to think over what I am going to tell you; and the request that I shall perhaps make, if I feel that we have succeeded in establishing mutual confidence. Then in the evening we can go into the details of my project. Do you agree to this plan?" I assured the flame that it suited me; and I begged him to speak very slowly, since the natural tempo of his thought was evidently far more rapid than my own. He agreed, but reminded me that I was being aided to speed up the rhythm of my apprehension. "Even so," I said, "I find it difficult to keep pace with you, and very tiring." He replied, "It is as irksome for me to think slowly as for you to think fast. It's like -- well, you know how fatiguing it is for you to go for a walk with someone whose natural speed is much slower than your own. So please remind me if I forget to accommodate my pace to yours. I certainly want to do all I can to make things easy for you. But there is much to be said; and anyhow you will have the night and all tomorrow to rest your mind."
After a pause the flame spoke again, "How shall I begin? I have somehow to persuade you that your kind and my kind, in spite of all our differences, are at heart intent on the same ends, and that we _need_ each other. No doubt, two donkeys, stretching their necks to reach one carrot are intent on the same end; but that is not the relation of your kind and mine. Before I try to show you how we need one another, let me begin with our great differences. Of course the most obvious differences between us is that you creatures are cold and relatively solid, while we are hot and gaseous. Further, with you the individual has a brief life-span, and the generations succeed one another; but with us, death occurs only through accident, which in these bleak days is all too common. For instance, when the cold reduces me to a microscopic dust on the surface of some solid body, the dispersal of that dust would kill me; though in favourable conditions certain specks of it might generate a new individual. Again, a very sudden impact of cold upon my gaseous body would certainly kill me. If you were to fling water on this fire, it would probably be the end of me. I should find a cold bath even more of a shock than would your sybaritic friend, Thos." This unexpected remark bewildered me. But after a few seconds I realized that it was meant to be facetious. I laughed uneasily.
Then I asked a question. "I find it incredible that you, a fragile flame, should be potentially immortal, and that you and your kind should have survived for countless millions of years, since you inhabited the sun. How can this be?" He answered, "It may well seem incredible, but it is true. If _your_ kind were to live on individually for ever, the human species would never have evolved, for your physique is fixed; but with us. the individual body itself is capable of profound changes under the blows of circumstance. Without this flexibility we could never have survived the change from solar to terrestrial conditions. Nor could we, when the earth cooled, have evolved the power of outliving the cold spells by sleeping as a dust of solid particles. Moreover, if your gaseous nature had not allowed us this extreme flexibility we could not have adjusted ourselves to the far-reaching. systematic change of the fundamental physical laws, which (we learn) your physicists are now beginning to detect. In our solar days, and even in the early days of the earth, when I foolishly got imprisoned in the cooling lava, my bodily processes had a different tempo and different relations to one another. Hence the distress that I suffered when I woke again. Apparently this bodily change is due at bottom to the systematic change of relationship between the quantum of electro-magnetic energy and its wave-lengths. But here I speak with great diffidence; for we find it extremely hard, as yet, to follow the subtle reasoning of your younger physicists. For one thing, as a gaseous race, unaccustomed to dealing with large numbers of small solid articles, we can never feel at home with arguments involving the higher mathematics. When our psychic experts first tried to read the minds of your mathematicians, they were completely at a loss. Such a display of abstract intelligence was far too difficult for them to follow. They regarded the whole business as mumbo-jumbo and abracadabra. When at last they realized what mathematics was all about, they were amazed and overawed by the penetration and sweep of those minds. Humbly, they set about learning mathematics, and pursuing the subject to the utmost range of their own intelligence. But there came a point when they had to temper their admiration with ridicule. Some mathematicians, they found, had a propensity to think that mathematics was somehow the key to ultimate reality. But to our minds, the notion that the numerable or measurable aspect of things should be fundamentally significant was simply farcical."
I did not feel inclined to pursue this hare, which might have led the conversation far astray. I therefore changed the subject, and said, "I do not understand how a more or less homogeneous flame can have the necessary subtlety of organic structure to support any kind of intellectual life, let alone mathematical reasoning."
He replied, "I cannot tell you much about that, because our physiological processes have not been studied by your scientists, and we ourselves are far too ignorant to understand such matters. But at least I can assure you that our bodies have a complicated structure of inter-lacing currents of gases, fine as your cobwebs, nay, much finer. If your scientists tell us that this cannot be, we ought, I suppose, respectfully to go out of existence, so as to avoid violating their laws. But meanwhile we shall persist in our irregular behaviour. In general, remember that, just as your physiological nature is derived from primitive marine organisms, so ours is derived from solar organisms; and conditions in the sun's earliest period (in which our elders first awoke to consciousness) were extremely different from any modern physical conditions, terrestrial or solar. I have thought of an analogy which may help you. The basic fluid of your blood is saline, It is less salt than contemporary sea water, but just about as salt as the pre-historic ocean from which your kind emerged to be amphihia. Well, just as _you_ retain in _your_ physiological nature some characters proper to that far-distant past, so in _our_ nature characters are retained which were bred in the childhood of the sun; features which might well baffle your physicists until they have learned far more about the conditions of that remote period. Then there is another point to bear in mind. In some ways the whole flame race is almost like a single organism, unified telepathically. The individual is far less self-sufficient than with you. For all his higher psychical functions he depends on contact with his fellows, and so he needs a far less complex nervous system than you need."
I asked the flame if his kind had a special organ of extra-sensory perception. "Yes," he answered. "The seat of all the most developed functions of the personality is the slender tip or lash, which appears to you green-blue." Again I interrupted. "What colour would it appear to _you_ if you were looking at another of your kind?" The flame then bent his slender tip down so that it came within his own range of vision, which seemed to be centred in the dark collar; and I myself, seeing through his "eyes" saw the curved organ brilliantly coloured in a manner indescribable in our language, since we have no experience of it.
I asked the flame to tell me something about his mechanism of visual perception. He replied. "We have not yet determined in the light of your science precisely how we see, but seeing is connected with the dark band round the base of the coloured lash. Apparently this is sensitive to light-rays striking it from outside, but only to those that strike it vertically to its surface. (Does this make sense?) Thus each sensitive point in the belt receives an impression solely from one tiny segment of the environment, and the correlation of all these messages gives a panoramic view. As to colour, we have a very rich experience of it, as you have observed telepathically. You may not have noticed that colour with us forms a continuous scale from infra-red to ultra-violet, not a comnbination of a few primary colours, as it is with you. Our hearing depends on the vibration of the lower surface of the body. We have also an electro-magnetic sense, and of course heat and cold, and pain."
I assured the flame that I was beginning to form a clearer idea of the flame nature; and I was about to ask some questions, but the flame continued. "Your mental life, besides being slower than ours, is also unlike ours in being so closely confined to the life of the individual body. And perhaps it is because your bodies are solid that you are so much unore individualistic, and so much less capable of feeling with conviction that (as one of your own great teachers put it) you are all 'members one of another.' Then again, our gaseous physique makes possible for us many distinct modes of exquisite and intimate bodily contact and union. Consequently we easily recognize that, though we are indeed distinct and different individuals, we are also one and identical. As individuals, we have our conflicts, but because of our underlying unity, they are always subordinate to our felt comradeship. Of course the main source of our unfailing community is our telepathic power, not merely of communication but of complete participation in the unified experience of the race. After such a union the individual emerges enriched with very much of the racial wisdom. This, as you know, is what happened to me during the short period when you lost extra-sensory contact with my mind. With you (though beneath the conscious levels you are of course united, as are all sentient beings) very few of you are aware of the fact, or able to gain access to your racial wisdom. In personal love you have indeed the essential spiritual experience, but because of your individualism your loving is far more precarious than ours. It is more deeply marred by conflict, and therefore more liable to tragic dissolution."
Once more I would have interrupted, but the flame said, "Forguve me if I lecture you a little longer. Time is short, and there is much still to say. Another difference between us is that, whereas your kind has only very recently come into being, ours is of immense antiquity. Our traditional culture began in the time when the sun was still in the 'young giant' phase, long before the planets were formed. You, on the other hand, are an upstart kind, advancing rapidly but dangerously toward better understanding of your world and your own nature, and perhaps toward greater virtue. (Or so you often like to believe.) For you, the golden age is in the future; for us, in the past. It is impossible to exaggerate the difference that this makes to all our thought and feeling. I know, of course, that in many of your earlier cultures the golden age was believed to be in the past, but ideas about it were mythical and shadowy. With us, save for the few young, the golden age is a circumstantial personal memory of an incomparably fuller life in the glorious sun."
At this point I could not restrain myself from interrupting. "Tell me about your solar life. What did you _do_? I have a vague impression that you lived in a sort of utopia, and that there was nothing to do but bask in the sun's rays." The flame laughed, if I may describe as a laugh a voiceless amusement and tremor of his whole body. "It was indeed," he said "a happy society, but no effortless utopia. We had our troubles. Ours was a stormy world. Our proper habitat was a film of solar atmosphere, no more than a few earth-diametres deep, immediately above the ocean of incandescent clouds which you call the photosphere. As you know, it is an ocean pierced with innumerable chasms and whirlpools, the greatest of which you see, and call sunspots. Some are gigantic craters which could hold many earths; the smallest, invisible to you. are narrow funnels and fissures, little wider than your greater cities. Out of these chasms, great and small, issue prodigious jets of gas from the sun's interior. These, of course, you see only during total eclipses, and then only around the limb of the sun's disc, as gigantic, grotesquely shaped and lurid flames. You call them the 'solar prominences.' Imagine, then, a world whose floor (thousands of miles below the inhabited levels of the atmosphere) was an extravagantly brilliant fury of white fire, and whose sky varied from the ruddy and sombre glow of the overhanging prominences to the featureless darkness of outer space. Around us, often many thousands of miles away, but sometimes close at hand and towering above us, would stand the nearer prominences, vast plumes of tenuous flame, against a background of glowing haze obscuring the horizon."
I asked, "But did not the brilliance of the photosphere dazzle and blind you to all feebler light?" "No," the flame answered. "Our vision had perforce to be more flexible than yours. By some automatic process, our organs of sight were rendered almost insensitive to the nether brilliance, so that it appeared to us indeed bright, but not intolerably so." After a pause, the flame continued, "Floating high over the incandescent clouds, we were often violently thrust upwards by the furious upsurge of electrons, alpha particles, and so on (have I the right terminology?), rushing off into space. This pressure was inconstant; so we were like aeroplanes, or sea birds, in an extravagantly 'bumpy' atmosphere. But each bump might last either for a few seconds or for hours or days. Sometimes we would sink dangerously near the photosphere; where many, indeed, suffered destruction through the furious energy-storms of that region. Sometimes we were flung upward on irresistable currents for thousands of miles into a region which for us was ice-cold, and might well prove lethal. Thence few returned. Much of our attention had to be given to keeping ourselves within the habitable levels. And even in these, so stormy was our world, that we lived like swallows battling against a gale. But the direction of the gale was mostly from below."
"It must indeed have been an arduous life," I said. "But apart from this constant struggle for survival, what aims and life-purposes had you? How did you fill your time?" He said. "It is difficult to give you a clear idea of our daily life. With you, the all-dominating purpose is perforce economic activity; we, however, had no economic activity at all. We had no need to search for food, still less to produce it, for we lived in a constant flood of life-giving energy. Indeed our main difficulty was to protect ourselves from the incessant bombardment. It was as though the race of men were to be rained on night and day by an excessive downpour of nourishing manna, or let us say by a bombardment of loaves and beefsteaks. But with us, the life-giving but murderous rain came from below, ever thrusting upwards. We were in the same sort of situation as those glass balls that you may sometimes see poised on fountains, and precariously maintained in their position by the upward rush of water. But with us the fountains were infinite in number, and continuous with each other. The whole atmosphere was constantly welling upward. So you see, we had neither the need nor the power to manipulate matter outside our own bodies. Physically our sole needs were to avoid destruction by the nether fury or the outer cold, and to maintain physical proximity with one another in spite of the constant storm. For the rest, we were wholly concerned with the life of the mind, or perhaps I should say the spirit. I shall try to explain. But first, let me once more assure you that our spiritual superiority to you does not make us feel that we are in any fundamental or absolute way superior to you. We have certain highly developed powers, necessary for the good life, you have certain other, simpler powers, equally necessary; for instance your wonderful intellectual perspicacity and your practical skill and inventiveness. Our recent study of your kind has filled us with envy of those powers. If we were so gifted, what could we not do, not only to improve our condition but to serve the spirit!''
I interrtupted, "You say that your 'spiritual powers' are no better than our intellectual and practical powers; and yet you imply that the goal is 'to serve the spirit'. Surely, then, the spiritual is intrinsically superior to all else." He replied, "Your criticism is just. It shows how much more clear-headed your kind is than mine; and yet how much less spiritually perceptive. What is it that I really mean? The point, I think, is this; but you must tell me if I am still in confusion. We are gifted with extra-sensory powers far greater than yours, and also with a far more thorough detachment from the enthralling individual self. We are capable also of a more penetrating or soaring imaginative insight into the nature of spirit. These, clearly, are in some sense spiritual powers. They are very intimately concerned with the life of the spirit. Your bold intellect and practical inventiveness are less _intimately_ concerned: but they are no less _necessary_ to the full life of the spirit.'
"Well," I said. "and what about the _service_ of the spirit. If this means the service of some sort of god, I find no reason to believe in any such being." He answered me with mild exasperation. "No. no, I do not mean that. And (can I say so without offence?) if you were a little less clever and a little more imaginative you would take my meaning. Surely you agree that the goal of all action is the awakening of the spirit in every individual and in the cosmos as a whole; awakening, I mean in respect of awareness, feeling, and creative action. Your human concept of 'God' we find useless. Our finer spiritual sensibility is outraged by any attempt to describe the dark 'Other' in terms of the attributes of finite beings. I should have thought that man's proud intellectual acuity would have led him to the same conclusion. We ourselves, I suppose, may be said to 'worship' the Other; but inarticulately, or through the medium of fantasies and myths, which, though they aid worship, give us no intellectual truth about the wholly inconceivable."
He was silent, and so was I, for I could not make much of these remarks. Presently I said. "Tell me something of the history of your race." He remained for a while in deep abstraction, then rousing himself, he said, "When I myself first came into being, our kind was already well established. Almost the whole solar globe was inhabited. According to the racial wisdom, the earlier phase had been one of steady multiplication, and of the working out of our culture. Millions of years before my time (to use your terrestrial notation) solar conditions were presumably unfavourable to our kind of life; but there came a time when there was a niche for us, and then, we know not how, a few of us awoke as sentient but blank-minded beings here and there over the vast area of the photosphere. The very earliest recollection of our oldest remaining comrades vaguely reports that far off infancy of the race, when the sparse population was gradually multiplying."
Again I interrupted, "Multiplying? Do you mean that they reproduced their kind?" He replied, "There probably was a certain amount of reproduction by means of a gasous emanation from the individual body; but the vast multiplication of those days was mainly caused by the spontaneous generation of new sentient flames by the photosphere itself. The elders speak of the strange spectacle that this process afforded. Wisps of incandescent matter, streaming upward from the photosphere. would disintegrate into myriads of bright flakes, like your snow-flakes; and each of these was the raw material, so to speak, of an organized, sentient and minded individual. Hosts of these were doomed never to come to maturity, but to be dissipated into the solar atmosphere by adverse conditions. But the fortunate were so moulded by the pressure of circumstances that they developed into highly organized living flames. This populating of the sun's surface took place at first in scattered regions far apart. Consequently separate peoples evolved, or perhaps I should say 'species'. These distinct populations were physically isolated from each other, and each developed its characteristic way of life according to its location. But from a very early time all the solar peoples were to some extent in telepathic communication. _Always_, so far as our elders can remember, the members of each people were in telepathic contact at least with members of their own nation, or rather race; but international, or inter-racial communication was at first hindered by the psychological differences of the peoples. There came at last a time when the whole sun was occupied by a vast motley of peoples in geographical contact with one another, and indeed interpenetrating one another. The photosphere, of course, is entirely a cloud-ocean without permanent features; so there could be no question of national territorial ownership or aggression. But since the peoples differed greatly in mental attitude and way of life, and even in bodily form, there was always scope for conflict. War, however, was quite unknown, for two reasons. Perhaps the most important one was that there was no means of attack. Flames cannot fight one another, nor can they devise weapons. But apart from this universal lack of armament, there was no _will_ for war, because of the rapid development of extra-sensory technique. The peoples entered more and more into each other's points of view. Whatever their differences, war became, as you put it, 'unthinkable'. But a vast period of early history was taken up with the gradual solution of these sometimes quite violent conflicts of interest and of culture, and the working out of a harmonious solar life."
I asked the flame whether the solar population was increasing throughout this long period. He answered, "As the sun aged, the conditions for the spontaneous generation of living flames becanse much less favourable. At the time of my waking, the photosphere was almost sterile. Now and again, here or there, it might cast up material for some few thousands of births; but gradually even this feeble activity ceased. At this time, the solar population was roughly stable, though a far greater population could easily have been accommodated. Every individual now shared fully in the ever-deepening racial experience. Each was fully an individual person; but all were for certain purposes comprised in one single individuality, the mind of the race, the mind (one might say) of the sun, of a certain star. From that time onwards we opened up certain new spheres of experience of which I can only give you the vaguest hints. We all lived a curiously double life, an individual life and a racial life. As individuals we were concerned with the boundless universe of personal relations between individuals; with personal loves, antagonisms, co-operations, mutual enrichments of all sorts; and also with the universe of artistic creation in a medium of which I may later be able to give you a hint. Philosophy also concerned us; but since intellect was never our strong point, our philosophizing was -- how can I put it? -- more imaginative and less conceptual than yours, more of the nature of art, of myth-construction, which we knew to be merely symbolical, not literally true. And then there was religion. If you would call it religion. With us, religion has little to do with doctrine. It is simply a technique of bringing the individual spirit into accord wth its own inner vision of universal spirit, whether there really is such a thing as a universal spirit or not. Religion, with us, is a matter of contemplation, aesthetic ritual, and day-to-day conduct. Does this mean anything to you? If not, remember that I am trying to describe in a fantastically foreign language things that are strictly indescribable, save in our own language. Human languages are all unsuitable, not only because of their alient concepts, but also because the very structure of the language is alien to our ways of experiencing."