Read Online Galaxies Like Grains of Sand by Brian W. Aldiss - Free Book Online Page A

ground where the slope was steepest. He moved as silently as moonlight among the apple trees, dislodging never a pebble, until he came behind the last, the poorest, the most exposed and loftiest apple tree of the Vale, its fruits no bigger than grapes. The old figure cut out of blue sky was now so close that his breathing, his occasional muttered word, the rustle of his robes, came to the watchful presence pressed against the bark. Yalleranda could hear his thoughts.
    Young men think about the women they will love, more gorgeous than the sky, old men think about the women they have loved, more warming than the sun; but Chun Hwa was older than that and he peered down at the shadows in the grass and thought of philosophy.
    “They don’t appreciate me enough, though I’m so rare and ancient. But perhaps that’s what everyone thinks at my age. My bones grow as thin as smoke. Why am I not more content? Why am I so self-indulgent still when there is no longer much of me left to indulge?
    “Something still must remain to be done. What it could be I can’t fathom. Something must remain to be done. Funny, an essence of the real me still remains with me, something that was with me as a child and is still undiminished and individual. The only thing I can recognize myself by. If only I could be less querulous, let that undiminished thing out. If it’s lived in spite of me, then it can live after me.
    “What else am I? How can I know? Just a little flesh and bone, still able to enjoy the sun. If only I had it in me to round off my life properly...”
    He raised his head and peered about him, screwing up his withered cheeks to assist the stiff muscles of his eyes.
    Yalleranda watched the gesture. Raising his hands before his face, he made a pyramid of them and set one pupil so that it gazed through the dark tent at the old man in the saddle. By moving one of the dark fingers, Yalleranda could bring blackness like a blade cutting across the old man’s shoulders until his head disappeared.
    Unaware of the decapitations befalling him, Chun Hwa surveyed the landscape laid before him. The Vale of Apple Trees fell away to his left hand, complex in its vegetation. A river ran through the Vale, appearing to push brooks like snail trails up the surrounding slopes. Beside the river was a village; now and again a figure could be seen. A herd of cattle approaching the village seemed to be frozen by distance. Chun Hwa liked to think of this panorama as the present
    Falling away to his right hand were the burnt lands, simple in their desolation, and these Chun Hwa thought of as the past. The natural fertility had been burnt from the land, irreparably, as the bottom is burnt out of a pot. The weapons of man had become as potent as the hand of God. Nothing lived. There were dead river beds where mud curled like shards of broken earthenware. Two giant machines of a bygone age had met in the black valley beside the river course. They lay now, locked together, their sides tigerish with rust, slowly demolishing each other.
    “This is the diagram of our situation,” Chun Hwa said to himself, “planned by a celestial hand. All men should come here to Blighted Profile to view it and learn from it. My daughter Cobalt should come here. She would see the two sides of man written into — bitten into the landscape, the black side and the green.” He sighed. “Is the black side burned out for ever? There must be no rebuilding. Man must remain close to Nature.”
    He felt again the undiminished thing fluttering in him. Its precise virtue came from the vague entity, Nature.
    “Cobalt doesn’t understand. She wishes to see mankind powerful again. If only I could go into the future as I came from the past then I would see and know, and have power to warn her and her generation. That would be the last thing I could do before I’m really finished.”
    The dark fingers snipped and he was divided; but of that he was unaware. Nevertheless, he stirred uneasily