always found peace when the spacers were gone.
This I have never understood. I, the machine, the space-spider, cannot understand. But I have seen it—the exodus of the hungry, the settling of peace over those who chose to linger. The hungry drink of the emptiness of space, and their hunger grows. The placid eat of the earth, and find peace, yet somehow—they seem to die a little.
Ever deeper pressed the starships, deeper into Sagittarius and Scorpius, and Lupus, Ophiuchus and Sagitta. Now and then they paused to colonize and conquer. A planet devoured a handful of men and tormented them with its biological devices. But the men grew and beat the savage planet into a slave after long ages, forced it to pay tribute to its king. Once more they coveted the stars. Once more they darted heavenward, leaving reluctant brothers in peace.
They wrote a song. They called it “Ten Parsecs to Paradise.” They sang the song as if they believed it. This I have never understood.
It was always ten or twelve parsecs to another sun with a class G spectrum, with a planet chastely clad in green forests and white clouds. There he landed to rebuild, to furrow the fertile earth, to rock in a porch swing at twilight sucking his pipe, and to thoughtfully stare at the stars while his grandchildren romped like young chimpanzees on the cool lawn.
He had forgotten Earth—this old man—his race had forgotten its history. But he knew a little. He knew the star-going cycle—the landing of the starships, the regression to savagery, the painful rebuilding, the cruelty, the re- learning, the proud exodus. He knew these things because Man had learned to keep a little of the past in tact throughout a cycle. He no longer fell back to chipping arrowheads. Now he managed to begin again in an age of bronze or soft iron. And he knew in advance that he would carve mighty industries out of savage wilderness.
But the old man was sad as he sat on his porch. He knew so little of the Great Purpose. Why must his seed fling itself starward? He knew that it
There was a small boy on the lawn who tried to tease the girls, but the girls put on masks of superior sophistication and ignored the little man. Disgruntled, he looked up and saw the old man dreaming on the porch.
“Gramp’s got star-craze!”, he shrieked. “Look at Gramp menting! Nnyahh! Gramp’s got star-craze.”
Musical laughter tittered over the lawn. Another voice took up the cry. The old man chuckled affectionately ‘but wistfully. They were young, but they knew about the star-thirst. The planet was young, too young for starships, even though the priests preserved the records and scientific writings in the temples. The planet knew about space and coveted it. Yet, the children would all be dead before the first vessel was launched.
The laughter on the lawn subsided. The eldest child, a gawky and freckled girl of eight years came trudging up the steps to sit against the post and stare at him quietly in the gloom. He felt a question lurking in her silence. He nudged her ribs affectionately with his toe.
“What weighty matter worries you, Nari?” he asked pleasantly.
“Why is star-craze, Gramp?”
He rocked thoughtfully for a moment. “Why are there men to feel it?” he countered.
The child was silent.
“I know only what the priests say, Nari;” he told her gently. “They say that man once owned a paradise planet, and that he ran away in search of a better one. They say he made the Lord Bion angry. And the lord hid the paradise, and condemned Man to forever wander, touched his heart with eternal hunger for the place he lost.”
“Will people find it again, Gramp?”
“Never—so the priests say. The hunger is on him, Nari.”
“It’s not fair!” said the little girl.
“What isn’t, my child?”
“Star-craze. Last night I saw a lady crying. She was just standing there crying at the sky.”
“Where?”
“On the street. Waiting for a motor bus.”
“How old was she?”
Nari scraped her heels and muttered doubtfully. “It was kind of dark.”
Gramp chuckled reassuringly. “I bet she wasn’t over fourteen. I bet she was still a kid. Star-craze comes to little girls about the time they start being interested in little boys. Works the other way, too. But you grow out of it, Nari. By the time you’re twenty, it won’t make you miserable any more. It gives you a goal. Gives everyone a goal. Something to work for. Something to long for and fight for. The stars—you’ll want to give them to your grandchildren.”
“Won’t I get to go?”
“Not ever, Nari.”
They fell silent again, and the old man peered up into the deepening blackness with its countless array of suns sitting like hens on their nests of planets. He scarcely believed the legend of the lost paradise-planet, but it was a good story to tell little girls. It made him sad though, and revived a little of the forgotten restlessness of his youth. If only he could have lived two centuries later—
But then a gust of wind brought the sweet perfume of freshly cut hay from the field to the east of the farmhouse, and the odor made him smile. The field would have to be raked tomorrow, and the hay brought in to the barn. A lot of things like that needed to be done before the starships could rise again. And every straining muscle helped toward the ultimate goal. The hay fed the animals whose flesh fed the men who made the tools which built the factories which fashioned more complicated tools—and so the journey, down the long road to space again.
The old man didn’t know why the road had to be traveled, nor did he really care. The road was there, and it beckoned, and it gave meaning to life, for surely the Lord Bion was less cruel a tempter than the priests sometimes proclaimed Him. Surely there was something more than despair at the end of the long, long road.
The old man grew older, and died peacefully, and his ashes were scattered across the fields he had tilled since boyhood. His children, and his grandchildren, followed in his patient steps, and their ashes were mingled with his own before the first gleaming sky craft burst star fire in the night.
When the skycraft at last rumbled upward, the crowd thundered a triumphant roar, the crowd gathered to witness the culmination of their labors, and the labors of their ancestors. Men walked with shoulders erect and with pride glowing in their faces. Again they triumphed over forces that held them bound to a grain of sand in the sky. Again they slashed through the knot that held them in the web of the continuum, and shed the weights that dragged at their feet.
I noticed a subtle difference in those who lingered be-hind. They no longer lingered of their own choosing. They were no longer the peace-seekers and placid ones. They were those who could not go because they were old, or sick, or because the industries were half-deserted and there was no one left to build the ships. They still stared longingly upward on dark nights.
“We’ll do it again,” they promised. “We’ll repopulate and do it again.”
But the bitterness of their plight was upon them, a sense of defeat and doom. They fought savagely among themselves. They fell in feudal wars, while the starward wave receded.
I am the acolyte of the space-priest, the server of the pale proud biped. I have taken him onward across the void, to the Hercules Cluster, and beyond it to the uncharted regions past the dust clouds of the Great Rift, into the star-pact heartland of the galactic nucleus where other races were testing their space wings and tasting of the great freedom. I have watched him, and have felt the life-aura of his longing. And I have wondered. What is his goal? Where is an answer to his hunger?
My neural circuits are not of flesh. My circuits are of glass and steel. My thought is a fanning electron stream. But I have prayed. I, the spider who builds around space, have prayed to the gods of the biped I serve. I have prayed to the God of the North End of Space. I have asked, “Where is his peace?”
I have seen my Master change.
The biped was thunder across the galaxy. The biped was a swift and steel-clad spear hurtling ruthlessly on- ward. He made no friends; for he came as a being who owned the stars, and he took what he wanted along the
