Clowdis, lacking the psychologist’s trained capacity for empathy, still felt a shattering change of perspective.

  He had been out of touch. He had forgotten the pull of men toward the soil, the drive that made men fight and die for possession of a few square yards of it. He and Barbour and Vesari were in their own way pioneers, latter-day Boones and Houstons and Carsons, cramped when they saw the figurative smoke of other human occupation. To them in large measure was due the credit for man’s early leaping across the spatial frontier, but now, as always, it was the settlers who carried with them the dogged unyielding spirit of humanity. Those poor idealistic fools going to their deaths out there were of the same breed that had slogged patiently in the steps of all pioneers, to hold the conquered land in perpetuity for their children and their children’s children forever.

  But not this time, Clowdis thought. The T’sai—

  Wilcox appeared briefly upon the trampled grass below, turning a flushed face up to Clowdis and Barbour at the open port.

  ‘You’d better take the ship away, commander,’ he called. The deadline—’

  Clowdis threw a glance toward the sunset washing the low hills to the west, and flinched when the T’sai ship sprang into view and blocked out the sun. His immediate reaction, curiously, was not the belated panic he had anticipated but a blast of red anger against the T’sai.

  ‘Damned if I’ll try to lift her now,’ he said.

  Then, before Barbour could move to prevent, he dropped down the personnel ladder to where Wilcox had stood.

  ‘Here we are,’ he shouted. He shook his fist at the lowering ship. ‘Blast the lot of us and be—’

  The T’sai appeared beside him like a solid projection that denied transit time, tiny face inscrutable behind his force field.

  ‘Watch,’ the T’sai said.

  The alien ship grounded, feather-soft, on the grass. Korivian police marched out upon the meadow like orderly ranks of reddish reptilian automatons and bore down upon the huddled colonists. Clowdis caught the glint of late sunlight on enigmatic weapons, and stiffened with a sick chill of horror when he saw that the few colonists who had clung to their commandeered heat guns had aligned themselves before the rest.

  He saw Wilcox in the forefront, keeping his wife behind him so that his body shielded her own. Her own and the other life not due for half a year, the unborn son or daughter they had confidently expected to inherit their share of the new Earth.

  The T’sai raised a hand and the Korivians stopped like snouted statuary.

  The colonists shifted uneasily and stilled. For a moment the tableau held fast in static suspense, a dragging eternity in which Clowdis forgot to breathe.

  Then the Korivians turned as if on prearranged signal and marched back to their ship.

  The proof is sufficient,’ the T’sai said. His voice, amplified without apparent mechanism, carried the length of the meadow. The world is yours.’

  And left them alone with their victory.

  The ship did not lift that night. Clowdis got roaring drunk with Barbour and Vesari and Buehl on the powermaster’s whiskey, and put off questioning Shassil until late the next day.

  The Cetian made explanation when they were sober, his lucid monologue falling with clear logic even upon their dulled minds.

  The T’sai ruled the galaxy,’ Shassil said, ‘before the first life crawled up from the sea of your world. They ruled because they, of us all, possessed both intelligence and initiative, the restless drive toward perfection that was somehow left out of the lesser races. The T’sai sought us out one by one and helped us up the long path to self-sufficiency, but they had despaired of finding another race with purpose like their own until you appeared.

  They watched over you from the beginning but without interfering; if your species was to prove itself worthy it would find its way to the T’sai when the time was right, and the T’sai would weigh it and pronounce judgment. You passed their test because your kind possesses the same initiative and idealism that made the T’sai what they are, the loyalty and belligerence necessary to make you their proper successors.’

  They stared at him unbelievingly. ‘Successors?’ Clowdis repeated. ‘What—’

  ‘The T’sai have grown old in fulfilling their obligations to the rest of the galaxy,’ the Cetian said. ‘And a renewal of lost racial virility depends upon their finding new fields to explore. Other galaxies are waiting for them, as this one waited for you. The T’sai will go when you are ready to step into their place.’

  And in leaving their presence Shassil, for the first time, touched his goatish beard in respect.

  EPILOGUE

  Before and after man’s troubled life we saw other humanesque races rise in scores and hundreds, of which a mere handful was destined to waken beyond man’s highest spiritual range, to play a part in the galactic community of worlds. These we now saw from afar on their little Earth-like planets, scattered among the huge drift of the star-streams, struggling to master all those world-problems, social and spiritual, which man in our ‘modern’ era is for the first time confronting. Similarly, we saw again the many other kinds of races, nautiloid, avian, composite, and the rare symbiotics, and still rarer plant-like beings. And of every kind only a few, if any, won through to Utopia, and took part in the great communal enterprise of worlds. The rest fell by the way.

  Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker

 

 

  Brian W. Aldiss, Galactic Empires 2

 

 

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