Seed of Light

by Edmund Cooper

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi; Space Opera

Synopsis

TEN MEN AND WOMEN ESCAPED IN THE STARSHIP - THE ONLY HOME THEY WOUKD KNOW FOR GENERATIONS - THE SEED FROM WHICH THEY WOULD BUILD A NEW RACE. The Solarian was a hundred metres high and, at its broadest point, twenty metres in diameter. It was designed to carry an initial crew of ten people - five men and five women - with provisions for subsequent children. Yet in that vast hull every cubic metre of space was indispensable, for the ship was a self-contained world, required to support human life independently for centuries. No member of the crew, male or female, could regard themselves as a separate entity, an individual personality. But each person was a part of a total life-unit, a dedicated nucleus that might one day expand into a tribe; that might, phoenixlike, bring forth a new human race.

Release date: December 14, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 155

Sample

Once, perhaps, Neanderthal Man felt like a conqueror. Was he not the Upright Animal—a weapon-maker, a tool-maker, an organizer of society? And with his weapons, his tools and his capacity for organization, could he not attack and overcome other individually more powerful animals?

Given enough time, his numbers would have increased and his skills developed sufficiently to make him Lord of the Forests; perhaps, ultimately, Lord of the Earth.

But he was not given enough time. He was already obsolete. For strangers came from the south and from the east. They, too, were upright animals—weapon-makers, tool-makers, organizers of society.

They came drifting into the world of Neanderthal Man in twos and threes, in families and tribes. And they brought with them weapons that were sharper, tools that were more functional, a society that was more tightly organized. They brought with them greater intelligence. They brought a death sentence.

They dispossessed the Neanderthals of their caves and their hunting-grounds, their food and even their children. For the newcomers were ruthless; and they fought a war of extermination.

So, after enduring for thousands of years, Neanderthal Man—the elite of European animal life—disappeared in a matter of generations. The conqueror had fallen before a greater conqueror. And the world was reserved for the exclusive domination of homo sapiens…

The history of Man is a history of conquest: the conquest of hunger and superstition, disease and ignorance. Beginning as a nomadic hunter, a seeker of berries and nuts and roots and small game, Man was not content with a simple destiny.

In the conquest of hunger, he learned how to make weapons that would kill at a distance; how to construct ingenious, self-operating traps. And eventually, he learned how to return the seeds of the wild wheat to the earth and thus safeguard himself against future hunger; how to domesticate and breed animals whose sole function was to serve, in living and dying, the needs of Man the master.

Families united into tribes, and tribes into nations. Cities and civilizations came into being—monuments to the abilities of Man as an organizer, Man as a builder, Man as an artist-scientist-priest. Man as a conqueror …

Records were made, sicknesses were cured, laws were formulated, empires were conceived, oceans and continents were crossed. Machines that were driven by wind and water gave way to machines that were driven by steam.

Intoxicated by his own genius, Man rushed headlong into the age of the powered machines. Coal and oil extended his conquests of land and sea and air. Electricity made a wishful daydream of remote and instantaneous communication into a commonplace reality …

But no conquest is absolute. What of the conquest of hunger if one man or one nation starves? What of the conquest of superstition if it is replaced by rigid orthodoxy? What of the conquest of power if Man wastes his surplus energy in destruction?

Man, the conqueror, ignored the problems posed by his triumphs. Instead, his pride sought new challenges.

Even before the old knowledge was integrated, before the old machines had been given a chance to fulfil their purpose, Man’s curiosity, his intellectual arrogance, his insatiable desire for power drove him to reproduce the fantastic energies of the sun and lift his covetous eyes towards the stars.

In the beginning, Man was a hunter and a warrior. His nature had not changed. Even as he hunted down the secrets of the fierce energies of the sun, even as he used them to create new and terrible weapons, even as he dreamed of harnessing them to extend his conquest to the stars, all his triumphs were overshadowed by one lasting defeat.

He had survived every natural hazard of existence. He had triumphed over hunger, climate and disease. He had accepted every challenge the planet had to offer. And he had conquered everything—except himself.

Neanderthal Man had gone down before a superior enemy.

But, with the power at his command, Modern Man had no superior enemy—except himself.

There remained, therefore, only one basic threat to his ancient desire for racial immortality.

It was a threat that, until the atomic age, he had never seriously considered.

It was racial suicide.

It was a fine June evening, and a pall of heat hung over the city like a sad benediction. The faint nostalgia of summer crept along dusty streets and half-deserted squares, feeling its way gently as a blind man towards the city’s heart.

The man at the window stared out through a turquoise patch of sky between the hazy defiance of St. Paul’s and the sharper outline of the Old Bailey. Those venerable landmarks still stood, quietly enduring; but even they had begun to wear the bright ephemeral glory of the doomed.

However, Sir Charles Craig was not at that moment engaged in his frequent and bitter pastime of counting the few architectural survivors of an atomic war. His grey, tired eyes were focussed upon some non-physical horizon, some elusive dimension where the past and the future were one and indivisible, and where the present was an abstraction without meaning. He was seeking an answer that he already knew—seeking it in the forlorn hope that history might be wrong; that some latter-day miracle might even yet fasten on to the heart of civilized man; and that London, as a fact and a symbol, might still be saved.

But there would be no miracle, for the future belonged to the past and the past could not be changed. For a hundred thousand years man had roamed heedlessly in his own condemned playground, fashioning club, axe, arrow, sword, cannon and bomb; tirelessly giving battle to the enemy that could never be defeated, the enemy within. And now, because of this, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Birmingham, Sheffield, Hamburg, Marseilles, Kharkov and Leningrad were no more: London, Paris and all the cities in the world were dying.

It was not pleasant to watch a civilization die; nor was it reasonable to carry on as if it would never happen.

As he gazed with unseeing eyes through the deepening patch of sky, Sir Charles wondered how he could hope to raise any confidence in a project which he himself regarded as already destined to fail. At best, this latest achievement was a shabby emulation of what had already been accomplished years ago—before atomic war wrought havoc with the economies of the great nations. It was a project that had virtually crippled the resources of the Commonwealth. And, at best, it would delay Armageddon until the eastern economy and the eastern scientists produced their inevitable answer. Unless… unless a miracle happened. A miracle of faith and understanding. A miracle of acceptance.

But while Sir Charles was prepared to work for a miracle, he could not bring himself to believe in it. Miracles were obsolete. They had gone out of fashion nearly two thousand years ago.

As he contemplated the latest synthetic star to be flung up into the heavens, Sir Charles remembered once more that first giant mushroom which, decades ago, had towered with sudden deathly beauty over a city called Hiroshima. Since then its terrible spores had blown about a helpless, fear-ridden world, swallowing city after city until those who remained intellectually alive knew that the end was in sight.

Sir Charles Craig, Prime Minister of what was still optimistically termed the United Kingdom, shrugged his shoulders and wished that he had never been born …

There was a movement in the room behind him. That would be Lord Drayton, his scientific adviser—the incomprehensible Drayton, whose mere presence was sufficient to make the Prime Minister believe that he was only a neurotic old pessimist, viewing the world with the jaundiced attitude of one who is too much alone.

Sir Charles gave a barely perceptible sigh, and turned his attention back to the room. Lord Drayton met him with a cheery smile.

“Ninety seconds to go, Charles. You ought to settle yourself in front of the stereo-camera and look a bit more confident … Is your chair still on the chalk-mark? There, that’s better. You are supposed to be giving a message of hope, not a funeral oration.”

“That,” said Sir Charles, permitting himself a thin smile, “is a debatable point.”

However, with a facility born of much experience, his features began to register an expression of confidence—the discreet mask of the statesman.

Presently, the red light flickered. Sir Charles fingered his typescript nervously and cleared his throat.

“You know what they will be saying,” whispered Drayton with a grin. “Twinkle, twinkle, little star. How I wonder what you are!”

An appreciative gleam came into the Prime Minister’s eyes; and at that moment, his three-dimensional image came to life on ten million stereo-screens.

The man and the girl walked hand in hand along the edge of the fen. They watched the sun sinking low over fields of corn and sugar beet, over tumbledown thatched cottages and a ruined windmill. The air was heavy with all the scents of summer; heavy, too, with a dreamlike unreality. It was as if the whole scene was a backcloth which, presently, would be lifted when the lights died and the audience went home.

There was no visible indication that a landscape which had endured for centuries was nearing its end; but the signs were there for those who wished to read them. Over the hill behind the windmill was a large crater, a dustbowl, hundreds of yards in diameter. Once it had been an airfield runway; and before that, good farming land. Eleven miles to the east was another crater, a dead town, surrounded now by a pathetic fringe of prefabricated houses, shops and offices—more dead than ever with its thin halo of glass and concrete, its perimeter of insistent life.

Michael Spenser looked at his companion and wondered why she chose to isolate herself in this drowsy corner of East Anglia; why she should waste herself upon the routine activities of country life when there was so much to be seen, so much to be done, and so little time left? Then he looked again at the placid landscape and suddenly had the odd thought that she was no longer concerned with reality but with the preservation of this, her private dream.

She was twenty-three—seven years younger than himself. It was strange that Professor Bollinden’s daughter should live here in an almost medieval simplicity while her father pushed the frontiers of science out into space once more.

But Mary Bollinden, as Michael had quickly learned, was a person who knew her own mind. She had inherited her father’s characteristic determination, his ability to follow the course he had set himself with little or no compromise.

“People still get married, you know,” said Michael, tentatively reopening an argument in which he had already been checkmated. “There have been wars before, and there will be wars again. History itself is one long blasted crisis. But the human race has survived it so far.”

She gave him a quick smile, poised between affection and mockery.

“So far!” echoed Mary. “We have been incredibly silly and incredibly lucky… But it’s not that. You know the real reason, don’t you?”

“Like hell I do!” he expostulated. “There is no real reason. You’re either in love so that you want to spend the rest of your lives together, or you’re not. I think we’re in love. What do you think?”

“That your terms of reference are wrong.”

“Stop talking like your father.”

She laughed. “You are a scientist, too. You should appreciate the objective approach … How long have we known each other?”

Michael gave her a glance of accusation. “Three years.”

“Yet we have spent less than three months together.”

“Is it measurable in time?”

“No, but it would have to be—if we were married.”

“I haven’t the slightest idea what you are getting at.”

“Don’t be angry, Michael, not on the last night… I’m only trying to say that you and I live in separate worlds. You are only really happy when you are in the desert, working on the project. I’m only happy here in England, living in what’s left of the countryside.”

“Living in the past!”

But Mary Bollinden was not to be drawn. “Perhaps,” she said quietly. “And perhaps it is not such a bad thing to live in the past… Would you like to settle down here in the country, Michael?”

“I would not.”

“Then you’ll understand why I don’t want to come with you to the Australian desert.”

“At least, something is being built there,” he countered. “Here everything is dropping to bits. All England is in a state of senile decay.”

“No, it’s not dropping to bits,” she retorted. “It’s being blown to bits—by the latter-day empire builders.”

“Your father, apparently, is one of them.”

“I know,” she said evenly. “So are you. And I’m sorry for you both.”

Michael shrugged. “We seem to be getting nowhere,” he said in a voice that was strangely tired. “I wish I could take you with me, Mary. I wish—oh, I wish the whole bloody world was in love; then we could all begin to build a single cosmopolitan city that would make Utopia seem like a nineteenth century slum-town.”

Detecting the note of weariness, Mary Bollinden tried to infuse a little gaiety into her own voice. “No more ifs and buts,” she said lightly. “Let’s go and watch Sir Charles let the cat out of the bag; and then we’ll drink a bottle of wine to the new star.”

Michael made an effort to respond. “All right, we’ll declare an armistice… Just for tonight, I’ll turn into a super-physicist and take the mainspring out of time.”

Mary looked up at the deepening eastern sky. “When shall we be able to see it?”

“In about an hour and a half—with luck.”

Hand in hand they walked up a drive lined with apple trees, and entered the small Tudor cottage. Its interior was a hotch-potch of now valuable period furniture. The only incongruous piece was a wide stereo-screen.

Glancing at the clock, Mary Bollinden went across to the screen and touched a small stud.

The two caretakers sat in magnetized tubular chairs by a table that was bolted to the deck. Through the plastiglass port window, the dark cloudy sub-continent of India seemed to be whirling in a slow flat spin.

One thousand and seventy-five miles below, what appeared to be a vast moonlit relief map was in reality a land teeming with four hundred million people—four hundred million different dream-worlds coursing through the great terrestrial night.

The view had lost much of its novelty. During the last twenty-four hours, the caretakers had watched the sun rise and set a dozen times. They were beginning to be immune to wonder.

Dr. Otto Rehn stared at Kingsford, his companion, speculatively and raised his glass.

“Already, John, we are what you would call, I think, a star-turn—literally so. Presently, the limelight will intensify … I wonder how many million pairs of eyes will be searching for our new star?”

Kingsford smiled absently. He was a much younger man than the grey-haired Austrian scientist. At that moment, his thoughts were centred upon personal things—his wife waiting patiently, anxiously, in a tiny room lost in the immense stretches of the Australian desert; the baby that would be born remote from civilization, at the centre of a new civilization, in the growing world of Rocket City. Kingsford was restlessly enduring a seventy-two hour tour of duty in the deep and silent world of space. He was more homesick than those first Spanish seamen stranded on the bright beaches of Mexico.

“Stop worrying about her,” added Dr. Rehn before his companion could speak. “There are six more months to wait. It is going to seem a long time. I insist on delivering the baby myself, and you may shoot me out of hand if there is the slightest complication.”

Kingsford gave a short embarrass. . .