which any voyage had plenty, Silver once asked the ship’s library to provide her with a copy of Continuous Creation . It couldn’t, but it did furnish this extract from the relevant Ten Worlds Literary Digest – after 167 lines on the book’s contribution towards the rediscovery of paper making.
‘The book’s achievement was that it drew together a few dozen strands of research on archeological, paleontological and astronomical fronts, and wove the Theory out of them. It is easy now to say that, of course, the Theory was obvious. Obvious it was, but it was so obvious that it was almost hidden – except to a planetary designer who was used to thinking in terms of secondary creation, and who was also a voracious reader.’ This was the Theory:
There were the Spindles; telepaths, so telepathic that no more than a thousand of them could occupy a world at a time, because of the mental static. And we humans thought we had a population problem. They left libraries and scientific devices, and it was already known that they could reshape planets more to their liking. They needed room to think. They were proud. When they discovered, on Bery, the remains of a Wheeler strata machine under half a mile of granite, their pride was shattered. Spindles were not, as they had believed, the first lords of Creation – the Wheelers had beaten them to it, half a billion years before. The shock led them to cease reproduction.
One ship, conveniently stocked with library tapes, had eventually tumbled slowly enough across Earth’s system to be stopped. Inside its meteor-ripped skins were three mummies. They had been the crew. Three crew.
The ship had been over a hundred milesacross. Most of it had been empty balloon. Room to think …
The Wheelers were silicon hemispheres, propelling themselves on three natural wheels. Nothing except shell and wheels had survived, but there were, under the granite, the compressed remains of Wheeler cities. Other Wheeler remains began to be discovered.
Wheelers had recorded traces of an earlier race, the paleotechs. Paleotechs were said to have created the Type II stars and their planets. One of their specialities had been the triggering of novas as a crucible for heavy metal creation. Why? Why not? Paleotechs weren’t easily understandable. (Once, Kin Arad answered to her own satisfaction at least the question of why the paleotechs had created stars. ‘Because they could,’ she said.)
In one interstellar gulf a ship dropping out of Elsewhere for repairs had discovered a paleotech – dead, at least by human terms (though Kin Arad has pointed out that paleotechs probably lived by a different time scale and that this apparently lifeless hulk may have been very much alive if considered by slow, metagalactic Time). It was a thin-walled tube half a million miles long.
Wheeler legends spoke of a polished smooth world where paleotechs had inscribed their history, which included the legend of the prepaleotech ChThones, who spun giant stars out ofgalactic matter, and the RIME, who produced hydrogen as part of their biological processes …
This was the Theory: that races arose, and changed the universe to suit themselves, and died. And then other races arose in the ruins, changed the universe to suit themselves, and died. And other races arose in the ruins – and arose, and arose, all the way back to the pre-Totalic nothingness. Continuously creating. There had never been any such thing as a natural universe.
(Kin once heard a speaker refer disparagingly to the Spindles because they had manipulated worlds. She stood up and said: ‘So what? If they hadn’t, Earth would still be a mess of hot rocks and heavy clouds. They changed all this and they brought in a big moon, but do you know the best of all? They gave us a past. They jiggered their strata machines to give us fossils of things that had never existed. Icthyosaurs and crinoids and chalk and ancient seas. Maybe they didn’t feel at home unless they
‘The book’s achievement was that it drew together a few dozen strands of research on archeological, paleontological and astronomical fronts, and wove the Theory out of them. It is easy now to say that, of course, the Theory was obvious. Obvious it was, but it was so obvious that it was almost hidden – except to a planetary designer who was used to thinking in terms of secondary creation, and who was also a voracious reader.’ This was the Theory:
There were the Spindles; telepaths, so telepathic that no more than a thousand of them could occupy a world at a time, because of the mental static. And we humans thought we had a population problem. They left libraries and scientific devices, and it was already known that they could reshape planets more to their liking. They needed room to think. They were proud. When they discovered, on Bery, the remains of a Wheeler strata machine under half a mile of granite, their pride was shattered. Spindles were not, as they had believed, the first lords of Creation – the Wheelers had beaten them to it, half a billion years before. The shock led them to cease reproduction.
One ship, conveniently stocked with library tapes, had eventually tumbled slowly enough across Earth’s system to be stopped. Inside its meteor-ripped skins were three mummies. They had been the crew. Three crew.
The ship had been over a hundred milesacross. Most of it had been empty balloon. Room to think …
The Wheelers were silicon hemispheres, propelling themselves on three natural wheels. Nothing except shell and wheels had survived, but there were, under the granite, the compressed remains of Wheeler cities. Other Wheeler remains began to be discovered.
Wheelers had recorded traces of an earlier race, the paleotechs. Paleotechs were said to have created the Type II stars and their planets. One of their specialities had been the triggering of novas as a crucible for heavy metal creation. Why? Why not? Paleotechs weren’t easily understandable. (Once, Kin Arad answered to her own satisfaction at least the question of why the paleotechs had created stars. ‘Because they could,’ she said.)
In one interstellar gulf a ship dropping out of Elsewhere for repairs had discovered a paleotech – dead, at least by human terms (though Kin Arad has pointed out that paleotechs probably lived by a different time scale and that this apparently lifeless hulk may have been very much alive if considered by slow, metagalactic Time). It was a thin-walled tube half a million miles long.
Wheeler legends spoke of a polished smooth world where paleotechs had inscribed their history, which included the legend of the prepaleotech ChThones, who spun giant stars out ofgalactic matter, and the RIME, who produced hydrogen as part of their biological processes …
This was the Theory: that races arose, and changed the universe to suit themselves, and died. And then other races arose in the ruins, changed the universe to suit themselves, and died. And other races arose in the ruins – and arose, and arose, all the way back to the pre-Totalic nothingness. Continuously creating. There had never been any such thing as a natural universe.
(Kin once heard a speaker refer disparagingly to the Spindles because they had manipulated worlds. She stood up and said: ‘So what? If they hadn’t, Earth would still be a mess of hot rocks and heavy clouds. They changed all this and they brought in a big moon, but do you know the best of all? They gave us a past. They jiggered their strata machines to give us fossils of things that had never existed. Icthyosaurs and crinoids and chalk and ancient seas. Maybe they didn’t feel at home unless they
Similar Books
