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Paul Hagbolt stared down into the bottomless dark as if the circular hich he rested were the top of a great aquarium, the stars and the tiny semicircles of Earth and Wanderer a mysterious lass slide under a microscope, and the stars, dia and then a little cry - Miaoling weightless through the flowers and calling soer cat said: "Because , you think the universe is, too But it is old, old, old Tomorrow and tomorrowpetty pacelast syllable of timetale told by an idiotyes!
"You think that space is empty, but it&039;s full Your own solar systerown lot overlooked by builders in the heart of a vast and ancient city that has overgrown all the countryside
"In the galaxy where the Wanderer grew in orbit, the planets are so thick around each sun they shroud its light and alaxy It is the boast of our engineers, &039;Wherever a sunbeam escapes, we place a planet&039; Or they ht back
"Tens of thousands of planets around each sun, troubling each other with ten thousand tides, so that tidal har each other so closely in the same orbit that they make elliptical necklaces, each pearl a world You know those filigree nests of balls your Chinese carve of ivory, so that you peer and peer to find the center, and end with the feeling that there&039;s a little of infinity locked in there? That&039;s how solar systems look, most places
"You haven&039;t yet heard this news, siht travels If you could wait a billion years, you&039;d see the galaxies grow di and ht by the stars&039; owners
"All but a tiny re planets are artificial Billions of trillions of dead suns and cold et the yptian pyrahout the universe, natural planets are as rare as young thoughts
"Your own galaxy of the Milky Way is no exception Planet-choked suns chiefly reat dark central cloud which puzzles your astronomers
"A pond can fill with infusoria almost as quickly as a ditch-water puddle A continent can fill with rabbits alent life can spread to the ends of the universe - those ends which are everywhere - as swiftly as it grows to le planet
"The planets of a trillion suns can fill with spaceship-builders as quickly as those of one Ten alaxies can becoht - that great pandeent life spreads faster than the plague And science grows more uncontrollably than cancer On every undisturbed natural planet, life crawls and flutters for billions of years, then overnight coreat black distances of seeds that grow like weeds wherever they fall, and then the explosion of their seeds on, on, to the incurving ends of the universe
"There is the dra other life fornant wonder And then, much too soon, comes the ennui
"The ditch-water puddle, where yesterday a few a life - and the pond, too The algae glearows clouded" She pointed a claard the thick stars "Those diaht light now areledand spoke to Paul directly
"The universe is full, Paul Intelligent life is everywhere, its planets darkening the stars, its engineers recklessly spending the power of the suns toy everywhere to make more form, more structure, more mind The Word - to call oes forth, and soon there is nothing but the Word The universe with all its great reaches and ins to die of too h they can never see that - just as a shallow sunlit bay can die of toodown the individual mind&039;s limits future ward Your world, Paul, is one of the few islands of death left in the sea of life everlasting
"With hyperspatial travel and psionic coether than the planets of your solar systealaxies are more centralized than the countries of your world, than even your country&039;s fifty-one states And the affairs of the cosn and od
"It may be that your own primitive visions of heaven - and especially your areat wonder and a great bore - are overnment
"Security and safety are its ords It is conservative, ruled by the old, who are everywhere a great majority since the achieve, patient, just, merciful - but only to the weak! - and infinitely stubborn Its records alone, etched on molecules, occupy the artificial planets of two star clusters Its chief aim is simply to remember and treasure - but only as athat has ever happened
"Any s can confidently expect froainst the expenditure of energy for any purpose except conservation and security: it opposes the exploration of hyperspace, or even its use, except for the transport of its police Its greatest fear is of soether disrupt the universe, for now that - bar hyperspace - it is no longer possible to think of safety in infinity and the unexplored, a great cosmic death-dread has arisen
"Yet since even immortals must reproduce, if only at a minimal rate, to keep up the illusion that they are still truly alive, the governs They&039;ll be coe in the policy toward the re orlds Heretofore they were looked on as preserves of novelty, to be shielded until they grew to galactic stature But now their living surface is needed, and their rated into the coshtfully, and with kindness - but it will happen to you and probably within the next two hundred of your years And it will not be a slow process - once it begins, all the orlds will be occupied and integrated within decades
"To reduce its policies to a single stateence until the cosmos dies There was a time when this meant &039;forever,&039; but noe see it means until mind is maximized, until allof intelligence, until entropy is reversed to the greatest degree possible within the limits of this universe
"They look on this as the millennium We look on it as death
"My people are the Wild Ones - the younger races, races like rew from solitary killers, which have lived closer to death and valued style more than security, freedoe; or coldly scientific, valuing knowledge alrowth above iers do not trouble us
"We want to travel e the past, make it a fuller one, revitalize the countless dead, live in a dozen - a hundred! - presents and not one, go back to the beginning and rebuild
"We will explore the future time-wise, too, not just to reassure ourselves that there&039;s a co there - Intelligence in its last bed and row another cosh hly - that cruh telepathy and psi are commonplace, we still don&039;t know if there are other worlds upon the other side of the collective inward darkness - and how to visit thee all that: explore the reale continents, sail them like space, discover if all our minds rest like tiny rainbow seashells on the shores of the same black, storm-beaten, unconscious sea Maybe that way there lie untrodden worlds Also, ant hts real - another little job no one has done
"But mostly ould open hyperspace - not use it just for rapid coastal trips, navigating only its surge-troubled fringes and keeping always in sight, however dimly, the shores and headlands of our own particular cosmosbut boldly sail beyond the universal shelf into the deep unknoith its vaster storalaxies, not for planets - one or a hundred - though ill take our chances if we must
"We think that countless cosmoses besides our own ride in the ind void of hyperspace - a billion trillion scraps in the tornado, a billion trillion snowflakes in the storm These won&039;t be cosmoses like ours, we think, but built of different basic particles - or never particles at all, but ever-changing continuities Worlds of solidity or holes in that Worlds without light Worlds in which light ht Worlds in which bits of row on molecules
"Worlds with no wall between mind and mind, and worlds that are ht is real and every beast&039;s a god A fluid universe - its planets bubbles - and worlds that branch in tihty vines
"Worlds in which space is crossed with spiderwebs instead of flecked with stars - cosravity, worlds of dimensions more and less than ours, worlds different in every basic law - chromatic scale of cosmoses, spectra of creation
"Or if we find no worlds in hyperspace, then build them there! - create thefrom this cosmos as from a chrysalis, no er aims Our smaller ones: a screen for all we do Privacy for our planet and our thoughts Weapons as we may need them Free research, as secret as ant it No inspection! The right to take our planet where ill, even if there&039;s no orbit waiting us which we have paid the rent on To live between the stars if we so choose, out in the chilly, sunless wilderness, burning the prairie grass of hydrogen - or in the oceanic spatial deeps that lie between the island galaxies The right always to travel hyperspace, now reserved for governht to suffer The right to be unwise, the right to die