“They made the choice,” said Danivon, looking into the distance to avoid their eyes. “They didn’t trust change, or growth if it felt like change. It made them fearful, so they made the choice first to define man as the crown of creation and then to be forever no more than they were….
“We respect their choice. It would be … inappropriate to interfere.”
Say the name enthusiastically. Say it with joy. Say it as you might utter the holy name of God.
Brannigan Galaxity:
The academic center of Fauna Sapiens. The repository of everything known to be so. The hub around which all interesting questions are asked. The quintessential fount of academe.
“Brannigan Galaxity,” says the teacher in the remote village on the tiny world, laying its appendages upon the heads of the young. “Question well, and maybe you’ll go to Brannigan.”
“Imagine diligently,” cry the docentdroids on the eduscreens, to isolated individuals they will never touch, never see. “You may be selected for Brannigan!”
There is every likelihood they will. Those who desire Brannigan almost invariably end up there. Unquestioned and prodigious genius is the standard, of course, when each one can know what everyone knows, but there is great need for more than merely that! Great need for questioners, seekers, unravelers, and untwisters, great need for those who will push the boundaries of mystery out a little farther yet. Fauna Sapiens sometimes sings:
Brannigan, we sing to thee!
Fount of magnanimity….
Brannigan Galaxity.
Here twisting stairs clatter beneath niagaras of pounding extremities. There dim corridors, endless as roads, run into cavernous spaces where dinka-jins and other strange peoples ask those questions peculiar to themselves.
May thy ancient precincts be …
Wondrous with discovery….
Tourists still come to Brannigan, still wander in gaping groups among the quadrangles, along the gardens, beneath domes and vaults decorated with murals so recently painted they are scarcely faded at all. On one of the paintings most frequently visited, all the figures are joined by planes and lines of light and dark that, from a distance, make them seem the parts of some glittering and wonderful machine. The mural is, in fact, referred to by the docents as the Destiny Machine.
“The creatures at the very top of the dome …” cries a guide directing their eyes upward, “… are the Arbai, creators of the Arbai Device that saved mankind from itself through the establishment throughout the galaxy of Fauna Sapiens. A remnant of the Arbai is now in stasis upon the planet Elsewhere.”
The tourists finger their pocket files, recording this experience for later delectation.
The docent moves her light pointer to the left: “The figure on the east of the dome is Marjorie Westriding, who saved mankind from the Arbai plague. She was a prophetess of the mid-dispersion period, and the man beside her is her companion, Samasnier Girat, sometimes called St. Sam because of his dedication to the perpetuation of the device.
“The Prophetess Marjorie and St. Sam were sometime resurrectees upon planet Elsewhere. Approved pilgrimage schedules are available in the office of the Vice-Chancellor for Historic Realization.”
At least one or two in every tour group seriously consider going on pilgrimage. Almost no one ever gets around to it, which disappoints neither the prophetess nor the saint, who have proven insusceptible to further resurrection.
“The figures to the west of the dome are the Zy-Czorsky twins, Nela and Bertran, saviors of mankind in predispersion times. Nela points upward, toward the mystic turtledove, while Bertran holds the symbolic jackplane. Beside Nela is her lifetime companion, Danivon Luze. The Zy-Czorsky twins also succored the planet Elsewhere by summoning to its aid the inscrutable Celerians—shown to the left.”
It is easier to believe the Celerians saved Elsewhere than to believe the truth. Besides, no one is entirely sure what the truth is.
Around the bottom of the dome, only briefly mentioned by the docent, are many other images: among others, a woman with apricot-colored hair and bangles on her arms; a scatter of dinka-jins; a stocky man with a long gray braid and a badge on his shoulder; a fat man holding a teacup, his other hand resting on the shoulder of a smiling youth.
One likeness to which eyes return again and again is at the edge of the vault, a woman striding away across the stars, dressed in purple coat and purple plumes and carrying in one hand a turtle shell. Her expression is one of ferocious joy. Behind and around her, the artist has conveyed the impression of something wonderful and mostly invisible, so that though the woman is painted as a solitary figure, the observer understands clearly that she is not alone.
Brannigan is no longer preoccupied with emeriti. What one knows, all know. It is not individual lives but the pursuit of knowing that matters—any tangled mystery, any challenging wonder, any great question—though one in particular is much discussed by Fauna Sapiens. The Celerians are said to know the answer to it. If they do, they have not shared it with the people at Brannigan, who are determined to find out for itself/themselves.
Laughingly, they speak of appointing a committee to find an answer for this new Great Question (For which one who was of mankind may have already found an answer. Old beast voices forgotten, old forms and sensations vanished, the birth galaxy like strewn sand behind, a sparkling whirl, a fading gather. Here, an arrow of intellect, a flight of imagination. Light ahead, an ascending path. A new wonder teasing the edges of the universe. Farther. Farther. Farther yet. One rider, one ridden. Companions, urging one another on….):
WHAT SHALL WE BECOME,
NOW WE ARE NO LONGER MAN?
About the Author
SHERI S. TEPPER is the award-winning author of A Plague of Angels, Sideshow, Beauty, Raising the Stones, Grass, The Gate to Women’s Country, After Long Silence, and Shadow’s End. Grass was a New York Times Notable Book and Hugo Award nominee and Beauty
