The Alchemists Read online

  THE ALCHEMISTS by Geary Gravel.

  PRELUDE: THE MURAL

  How is an eon captured? What thickness of chains will bind a century? Which unraveling of the design reveals a single perfect year, complete and untouched at its heart?

  A year. What are its colors, and how loud its cries, and where does it begin and end?

  There is a museum on Commons, the Great World, which has grown so famous in the past few centuries that it is referred to simply as The Museum on eighty-seven of the two hundred and twenty-eight Worlds of the Human Community.

  If you are reading this, there is a good chance that you yourself have been to Commons, a fair chance that you have visited The Museum, a chance that you have strolled along the rose-crystal skywalk connecting Musical Instruments of Old Earth (A .D. 1646-2308) and Unidentified Artifacts of the Years of Expansion. If, in the course of your promenade, you had chosen to pause at the approximate midpoint of the skywalk and turned to face the rising suns, you would have found yourself staring directly into the Belthannis Mural, that last creation

  of the pan-imagist Mig which has become almost as widely known as The Museum itself.

  The mural, which towers forty meters above the curving glass and sculplate of the Grand Mall, is in the form of a huge tessellated disk, somewhat reminiscent of the Aztec stone calendars found in the Terminal Cultures exhibit on the sixteenth floor of the White Wing.

  Visible to the thousands arriving daily at Green Tower Landing Stage as a faceted, multicolored medallion, the mural resolves itself when approached by way of the eastern ramps into a vast spiral constructed of more than four thousand individual tiles, beginning at the upper rim of the disk and circling grandly inward till the last tile stares out triumphantly from the exact center of the mural.

  As a prime example of the pan-imagist ideal, the paintings combine narrative, philosophy, aesthetic achievement, and personal expression in one coherent statement—a masterpiece of overwhelming unity composed of four thousand and seven discrete works of art. It is a tribute to Mig's craft that each fragment of the spiraling mosaic is at once totally subjective and brilliantly evocative; it is Mig telling himself The Tale of the Lonely Man in symbols which none of us should fully understand.

  And yet we do.

  As different as ash and seaspray we come, no two of us alike, to gaze awhile at a spiraled complexity, a nautilus shell of shape and color. We stand before fragments, hints, shadows, and we comprehend the whole and it is beautiful, superbly flawed, the history of our worlds and of our people.

  The first square captures the eye immediately: a dark gleam from the distant past. Here is chaos personified, the grinning devil of confusion and mistrust which the folk of Antique Earth let loose upon themselves in the final devastation of the Sigh Wars, the last chapter in the dream-time of prespace human history. Self-destruction is^a bloody tide in these days, and humankind is swept before it again and again, till hope is all but quenched. Among the record keepers a new word is coined combining suicide and genocide into a single act: crime and punishment skillfully wedded at last. Nation-states are smashed

  into rubble and then the rubble is smashed, changing places into names, names into memories, with the relentless regularity of an automated scythe.

  But humanity is tenacious: a limpet on a battered rock. Each sweep of the tide leaves survivors to crawl erect once more, to stretch their mouths in rage and build new instruments of war until, finally, a limit of some sort is passed and silence falls: peace born not of maturity, but of exhaustion.

  Beyond all odds the silence lengthens, old angers forgotten or obliterated. One more try at civilization is cautiously scraped together from pieces of the shattered past. Peace reigns; yet the legacy of fear is an almost palpable presence in this curve of the mural, and the ancient cautions flow unbidden into the viewer's mind. Know thyself, old chronicles admonish, but not thy neighbor. Fray's dead: Stay out of my head! Mig's skill transports us through time to an era when psychological manipulation was the chief obscenity, and the slightest attempt to influence the will of another human being was met with swift and deadly punishment. The scars of captation—mind control—lay deep in the people of Earth, and they took many years to heal, many thousands of years to be forgotten.

  Humankind grew restless in the lull following this latest in a long succession of Last Wars, and the mural's next segments suggest an overcrowded, minutely factioned society which tejs-ters on the verge of yet another conflict. Dark-webbed, clouded, these tiles are rescued from despair by the tiny glimmer of color, the bare hint of precious order just beginning to emerge. In the next section the glimmer has become a radiance; the hint of structure has crystallized into an image, a dash of vivid pigment.

  Space travel!

  A sudden sense of movement, of purposeful growth, of breaking free and bursting outward. Here is the miraculously recovered, newly vigorous Man as he appeared at the dawn of Mirin— literally "the wave," in the Lower Tongue of World Hinderlond—the Years of Expansion, building the massive Cold Ships that would ferry him to the stars in centuries-long voyages, the passengers frozen into cargo and stacked like kindling in the holds.

  And then a tile devoted to the silent agony of the Wait and

  the Watch, the Look and the Listen. No one could say with certainty which Ships, if any, would find haven at the end of the passage: it is said that there were so many "ifs" involved in the first Expansion that those who waited back on Earth made a new religion out of their uncertainties and chanted them in long litanies before they went to bed at night.

  But the next scene is bright, lit by the flickering glow of both joy and terror that accompanies the early colonization, with the ancient Ships crawling finally, one by one, into grateful orbits around a double handful of newfound worlds. Names whisper in the mind: Cibola, Weldon, Green Asylum, New World, Chalice, Stone's Throw, Maya, Babel, Dunbar's World, Street of Dreams...

  It is the first fruition of Mir in. Each world is unique, and each is beautiful, clothed by Mig in radiance as if seen through the eyes of the voyagers themselves, newly roused and peering for the first time through the eye devices of their great-bellied Ships. Look with them: a new world!

  Many feel that the underlying emphasis in these segments of the disk is on separation and isolated metamorphosis. The Cold Ships were snails crawling between the stars. Centuries would pass before the first word of success reached the dreaming Earth, and all the while the child-planets grew, each one different and each alone.

  Struggle.

  Solitude.

  Change.

  This is the lexicon of the Expansion.

  Yet some say that it is paradise that flickers briefly through these scenes, a dance of exultant discovery that humanfolk were destined to learn, and for them this turn of the spiral grows wholly joyous. World after world is discovered, possessed, catalyzed. Millennia pass in a dozen tiles.

  Minn-time ends abruptly with the completion of the first great circle of tiles. The painting begins anew, as does the history of humankind, with the Encounter, the first meeting between Man and Otherman on a nameless planetoid, a numbered speck near a dying star strung like a bead between ancient Earth and the galaxy's distant center.

  First Meeting.

  Mig presents us with a swirl of dark colors, an eternal moment of frozen shock as a lone explorer comes face to face with the most unexpected sight of all: her own image.

  In image they are like us. In essence they prove unfathomable.

  Soon after the Encounter they are given the name which they will bear through history: the Ely ins, we call them, the Others. From the beginning they are the gift-givers, we the recipients, for they come with ships that skip like thoughts between the stars, making ours snails in
deed.

  They come among us unafraid, sharing all but themselves and their origin, picking up our languages like playthings, curious but not prying, reserved but never cold, bringing us crashing together in their wake as they visit worlds which have remained isolated since their first colonization thousands of years before.

  They are like Man to the hundredth power stronger, smarter, more beautiful. They are like Man as an abstraction or a pure concept: focused, distilled, clarified. They are enough like Man that often their appearance is greeted with hysteria. Old doctrines are reexamined: And humankind was made in the image of God.... Is this the pattern to which we were shaped? Is Elyin the name of the master template?

  From the humans come fear, hatred, distrust, mingled crazily with envy and near-worship, blind love and reasoned affection. From the Elyins come reactions for which we have no reliable labels.

  One thing seems clear: they are here because they wish to be, not because they need to be. Trade is proposed, but they will not trade with humanfolk; they bring their gifts with no thought of recompense, gifts which shake our many cultures to the roots. Along with the snatches of oblique advice, the quiet encouragements and cryptic cautions, comes a golden gel that tastes of fire and slows the human aging process till Man's days promise to extend beyond his dreams. A device given casually to a child on Cibola begins a communications revolution that will link world to far-off world through Screens of liquid light. And the ships: the Darkjumpers themselves, miraculous vessels capable of skimming beneath the skin of normal space to span impossible distances, leaping through

  light-years which the ancient Cold Ships had translated into human centuries.

  With these gifts come the tantalizing possibility and gradual reality of an interstellar empire—though "empire" seems too-strong a word for those worlds wary of subjugation or loss of autonomy. An Imperial Trust is formed, complete with many-layered bureaucracy and coordinated by an elected Trustee whom custom immediately retitles Emperor. The Great Years begin with the establishment of the Blue Shell Council, a representative body which attempts to oversee the actions of the many human worlds from the one Great World, Commons.

  In time, other sentient races are encountered by Man, some incredibly alien in thought and form, others deemed more humanlike—though none are found which share the look-alike bond of Man and Otherman. Now comes a long quiet time, the period of almost four hundred years which some have called the Pax Elyannin, and peace prevails among the worlds touched by humankind. Peace dominates these tiles, yet through the artistry of Mig there is a subtle undertone, a contrast between the human men and women, and their Ely in counterparts, the beauty of whose faces is touched in the paintings with an absent, faraway cast, as if the entire race shared a single consuming desire, a yearning for something unknown to Man.

  Peace.

  In a flash of jarring hues, the second great ring of the spiral is concluded and Man crawls from his too comfortable bed, rubs the dreams from his eyes on a too pleasant morning, and finds that he is once again alone. In the span of a few hours, on every world, planetoid, construct, ship, or bit of rock trod upon by Man, the Ely ins have vanished.

  It is the Day of Departure, and there is no return. Man calls this day Ansat, the Hinderlond Low Tongue word for a small wound which, though initially insignificant in appearance, causes eventual death.

  Mig devotes this entire turn of the spiral to the Departure, correctly gauging its importance in the history of humanity. The next scenes detail the years of painful adjustment as Man— the deserted child, the abandoned lover—attempts to cope with his loss.

  Contemplating Mig's portrayal of the chaos that follows the

  Departure—the swift and shocking suicide of placid Fleyn, human Emperor of the Imperial Trust; the massive shifts in population created by the expanding Drifter class; the brutality of the Blink Wars—one recalls the analogy of the historian Boesgaard:

  We made wonderful candles for Hearth Day when I was a child. We began by pouring the hot colored wax into containers already filled with chunks of ice. For a time there was equilibrium and the mass appeared solid. But when the wax had hardened and we removed the candle from its container, we found that all of the ice had melted away, leaving sudden gaping holes. We were amused and charmed. Such grotesque creations are fascinating as children's candles, unsuitable as governments. We should have been prepared for the ice to melt.

  Mig delineates the situation in harsh, decisive strokes. Faced with disaster, Man is the creature that improvises. A Human Community is proposed to replace the Imperial Trust. The three most respected Secretaries of the Trust's administration are drafted as a temporary triumvirate to rule in Fleyn's stead, and the few alien races involved in the old federation are by various methods discouraged from joining the new Community, as a slumbering xenophobia reasserts itself on many worlds.

  There are two turns left to the spiral. The first is a tableau of increasing horror as it becomes apparent that humanity's new and solitary realm may yet contain an unknown quantity of "ice."

  The scene is ten years after the numbing blow of the Departure, the three hundred and sixty-fifth Great Year, according to the now ironic reckoning still standard throughout the Community. The luxurious Via Maria, a Darkjumper bound for World Babel out of old Earth, ceases functioning without warning in midjump and erupts convulsively into normal space, fantastically off course. Attempts to regain power prove futile; before another ship can arrive to evacuate the forty-two thousand passengers, the Via Maria drifts leisurely into a small white sun and explodes.

  Three months later, the Pourquoi enters the Dark near Chalice, never to be seen again. Lost and presumed dead are thirty thousand passengers, colonists en route to the frontier worlds of the Maren.

  Eleven months later, the Dustapple detonates gracefully on its landing stage on Weldon, leaving thousands dead or injured. Other Darkjumpers die less dramatically in the months and years to come, as engines sigh into dust or wheeze into permanent silence.

  For three and one-half centuries, humanfolk have looked upon the Darkjumpers as the paramount symbol of those Others who had come among them. They were the Gift, the Legacy, the unquestioned and unquestioning servants. For three hundred and fifty years it has seemed neither imperative nor possible to unravel the fantastic complexity of their functioning. Now they have begun to die, and no human possesses the knowledge to build new vessels with jump capabilities, or to diagnose and cure the ills of the present finite shock. The Darkjumpers continue to malfunction at unpredictable but increasingly frequent intervals. They voyage in pairs whenever possible, and still it is a gamble. One-tenth of the total number of Darkjumpers give up the ghost in slightly less than five years.

  The Cold Ships lie in their storage orbits like hibernating snails. Centuries from star to star. Visions arise of a civilization utterly sundered. The gnawing questions, never wholly stilled, grow louder. Did they plan this? Are they watching us, perhaps? Is it some immense genocidal joke—slaughter by remote control?

  Twenty years after the Departure, two factions dominate a frightened humanity. The Builders are a decided minority, mostly Scholars who speak of lengthened lifespans and counsel patience and ingenuity, seeking to calm the babble of fear while attempts are made to repair or recreate the dying ships. More numerous by far on most worlds are the Expansionists, called the Parad Mir from the Hinderlond Low Tongue word for "wave unending." The Parad Mir predict a shattered, scattered humanity and point to the glorious days of early colonization. If Man is to be so cruelly fragmented, they cry, should he not be allowed a final chance to fill the Galaxy with his seed before the last Darkjumper's death brings impotence and isolation?

  With an evangelical fervor not seen since the death or metamorphosis of the old religions, Parad supporters initiate a relentless drive for the acquisition of new worlds, and Survey ships are dispatched by the administrators on Commons to comb

  the Galaxy for planetary systems. Increased levels
of population are encouraged on many Community worlds, justified by the promise of adventure on rich new planets.

  But the habitable planets encountered by Survey are few; when one is located it is a precious discovery. During the Great Years of the Trust, planets inhabited by any but the most primitive forms of life had been routinely classified [closed] and left monitored but untouched to develop without interference. Now, spurred on by the politically powerful Expansionists, the Surveyors find themselves reluctant to give up these rare jewels, and a frenzied humanity becomes dangerous. New amendments to the ancient Laws of Man are passed which establish a Code of Human Criteria, to be applied to advanced life forms on all newly discovered worlds. If there is conformity to the requirements of the Code, the indigenes are declared "human beings" and grudgingly left alone. If they do not conform, they are pronounced animals and confined, evacuated, or eliminated.

  Very few races survive the Code, for Man is a singular creature in many respects, and an extra appendage or a plumed tail is enough to condemn as the zeal of Survey grows. In a few cases there is sufficient doubt, and the Builders pounce on these. Decision-makers are brought in from World Lekkole, also called University, a hearthplace of the Scholar class devoted to the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge. Though the participants' sympathy lies with the planetary indigenes, all decisions are bound by the inflexible Code, and in case after case the final verdict is the same. Thus, the penultimate turn of the spiral ends on a note of frenzied exhilaration for some, of horrified remorse for others, of barbaric cruelty and cold fear.

  The final cycle of tiles, ending in that famous scene by the river beneath the silver sky, is devoted entirely to a single year, to GY 380: the Year of Belthannis, the time of the Lonely Man.

  It begins, of course, with the Survey Ship Ecco, drawn by a dim notation on an ancient Elyin starmap to the single habitable satellite of Pwolen's Star: an Earth-sized planet christened Belthannis Autumnworld by a poetic crewmember. "Habitable" becomes "inhabited" when robot probes betray the presence of a highly developed form of animal life. The view-