Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon (best mobile ebook reader TXT) 📖

he would very

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