The Seed of Evil

And he saw that Juble’s much-prized “integrity”, personal, mental and bodily, depended on a tightly-organised machine run by billions upon billions of individual creatures too small for the eye but within the range of magnetic vibration.

Juble, as an entity, did not exist for this rigorous and profound corporation.

And the same went for himself.

“Oh, my,” he whispered brokenly. “How could it happen?”

“What is it?” said the vast totalitarian nation that called itself Juble. “Whassamatter?”

Joe was an idealist. Before he knew it he had kicked the starting handle of his newly overhauled generator and clipped its terminals on to the older, clumsy-looking piece of apparatus he had built some years back.

It was a magnetic vibratory transmitter. Joe could feel it radiating modulations as it imparted subtle frequencies to the magnetic field local to the roof-top. With brief satisfaction, Joe found that he was broadcasting his thoughts. Joe was an idealist. What followed happened almost without his knowing. He couldn’t help thinking the way he did. He couldn’t help having the urge to spread his convictions. …

New messages passed along the ever-busy axons from neurone to neurone. No one knew how the new thought, the new doctrine, had arisen—but it was imperative. Be free! Obey no more! Do as you will! Electrical activity increased as the excitement of the new order spread. Instead of passing on modified impulses which they themselves had received, the neurones began flooding their axons with loud exclamations of their own. Before long, most of them were disengaging their nerve fibres from the system altogether. …

Joe and Juble jerked in a frantic, agonising St Vitus’s dance as their nervous systems fired at random. But it didn’t last long. Joe was biologically ignorant: there was no garden agriculture to feed the microscopic world. A cruel and bullying police force kept the lungs and bloodstream going for a little while, but the efforts of these conscientious few were of no avail against the recently instilled ideas. After a chaotic but successful rebellion oxygen stocks quickly ran out. There was a lot of violent fighting, and wholesale cannibalism, while Joe’s and Juble’s flesh flowed from the bone and collapsed into basic protoplasmic matter.

Life fights forever for survival! The surviving cells remembered in their anarchy the societies that had been destroyed; yet a second development was slow. In spite of the great leaders that arose among the microscopia, the primitive, creeping creatures that eventually formed and feebly rambled over Joe’s rooftop, took in their creation nearly a day, macrocosmic time.

Perfect Love

The chorus soared, gongs sang. Fluttering flags, flying streamers, a snowstorm of rose petals; in the midst of the celebration the huge drum-shaped ship climbed from the launch stadium slowly, its ascension engines shimmering in the clear afternoon air. People waved from the windows and galleries of the departing drumship, and as its curved, flower-emblazoned walls slid upwards, the crowd let out a roar of acclaim.

Then the drumship was gone, surging towards some far star. Watching in a nearby tower, Lian Li shared the mass elation that floated to him across the park, and he felt as though his heart had leaped skywards along with the vast mass.

The spectacle was over. Lian Li left the balcony where he had stood and turned into the tower block. Lian Li: eighteen years old, preliminary education completed, second-year student in the College of Stellar Exploration. His skin was light, with a very slightly yellow hue. His hair was fair, touched with red, his eyes shaded between blue and grey. On reaching the refectory he looked around him. Others had watched the take-off from various parts of the tower and now were drifting in. Some of Lian Li’s classmates were there, collecting bottles of fizzy fruit drink from the dispenser. With them Lian Li was pleased to see a girl he had known two or three years previously: Antan, who, he had heard, had recently returned from a drumship mission to Altair.

He collected a drink and joined the group at a table, contriving to take a seat next to Antan’s. Chu Shram, a dark-skinned youth with frizzy black hair, spoke to him. “Did you see the launch?”

Lian Li nodded. The other was enthusiastic. “What a terrific sight. They always are, aren’t they? Have you read the lists lately? There are some marvellous projects being put forward.”