Blish, James - And all the Stars a Stage

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AND ALL THE STARS A STAGE

JAMES BLISH

AVON

PUBLISHERS OF BARD, CAMELOT, DISCUS, EQUINOX AND FLARE BOOKS

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A some-what abridged version of this novel first appeared in AMAZING SCIENCE FICTION STORIES,

Vol. 34, Nos. 6 and 7, June

and July 1960; that version Copyright @ 1960 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company.

AVON BOOKS

A division of

Ile Hearst Corporation

959 Eighth Avenue

New York, New York 10019

library of Congress Catalog Card

Number: 77-144250.

ISBN: 0-380-00013-X

form whatsoever. For

information address Doubleday and Company, Inc., 277 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10017.

First Avon Printing, May, 1974.

AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. 0". AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES, REGISTEREI? TRADE34ARKMARCA REGISTRADA,

HECHO EN CMCAGO, U.S.A.

Printed in Canada

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To Robert and Barbara Silverberg

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It had all begun, Jorn Birn thought dispiritedly, with the exploding star.

The thought did not cheer him much. It is a hard thing to have to blame

one's troubles upon an event which took place three hundred years ago,

particularly when one's troubles are present, immediate, and full of

nagging little details which seem to have nothing to do with history at

all-let alone with so remote a subject as astronomy.

Take for example the present instance. Given, to begin with, a young

bachelor sitting alone in his government-allotted room in an all-male

"residence concIave"-the government's totally transparent euphemism for a

barracks or dormitory, combining only the grimmer features of each. Given,

secondly, the morning television newscast, with its usual quota of stories

which seemed to differ from day to day but actually were always the same:

the swearing-in of the first World Legislature to be composed entirely of

women delegates; the failure (again) to meet the year's food production

quota, despite the most intensive, back-

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8 lames Blish

breaking exploitations of hydroponics, undersea farming, cloud culture,

desert irrigation, deep-tank mass cell culture and half a dozen other

techniques the names of which conveyed absolutely nothing to Jorn; the

successful landing of a robot-probe expedition on the tiny, sunbaked, and

intransigently useless planet nearest the Sun, whose name fled out of Jorn's

head as slipperily as it had skidded in on the oil of the newscaster's

voice, the verdict in a sensation trial involving a minor government

functionary who had brought a paternity suit against someone in her official

familias -sensational only in that the usually conclusive blood tests having

failed for some complicated genetic reason, she seemed to want to establish

paternity, rather than to disavow it and thus take the child into her own

cr6che (and two seconds after he had heard the verdict, Jorn could not

remember whether she had won or lost, and could think of no reason why he

should care).

And given, finally, the spectacle of an unusually intelligent young man,

still almost fully in possession of the standard engineer's education of

his time, desperately sitting through this barrage of unchangingly

insignificant news stories, as daily and as interchangeable as a dish of

catmeat, in the sole hope of hearing something which might lead him to a

job. Of course a television newscast is a wholly inappropriate medium in

which to run a Help Wanted column, since the listener cannot decide whether

or not he is interested in a given bid until he has heard it all, by which

time it is too late for him to write down the address and the telephone

number and such other details as he may need to study or to carry out onto

the beItways with him. Employers who were really seriously in search of

skilled help invariably still resorted to the newspapers, and in the very

rare cases where they also

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And all the Stars a Stage 9

Inserted a television appeal, they took it for granted that anyone in whom

they were likely to be interested would be making a telefax transcript of

the entire jobopenings announcement. This was nonsensical, since nobody but

an unmarried male would be desperate enough to hope to locate a job through

these television announcements in the first place, and the sets in the

residence conclave rooms did not include telefax equipment; it was of course

true that the set in the recreation hall had a telefax: attachment, but no

bachelor in his right mind could hope to compete with two hundred others for

that single sheet of blurrily printed brown paper, which even when new

looked as though it had been rescued almost too late from a fire, and still

have any time left over for tracking down the very few jobs it announced. If

you had hoped to have a hearing at all, you had to hop, the moment you got

the word. You couldn't afford to waste time hanging around the orifice of a

community telefax, until it should choose-as it did only once an hour-to

protrude the long sickly brown tongue of its transcript.

All this was difficult enough to blame upon a star that had exploded three

hundred years ago; but in view of the persistent triviality of the news,

and the high unlikelihood that the job-opportunities commercial could offer

anything whatsoever worth pounding the beltways to get, Jorn managed. In a

world in which hardly anything satisfied him, it was easy enough to wonder

how today might have differed from itself if history could somehow have

been re-arranged; and the exploding star was a natural beginning to such a

daydream, since before that event nothing, really, could be said to have

happened at all.

Oh, there had been the usual wars, the usual pestilences, the usual

migrations, the usual births and declines of nations, but the details of

daily life for the

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10 fames Blish

ordinary human being hardly changed from age to age. The industrial

revolution, of course, overturned all that; in the short course of slightly

more than a century, the average citizen of the wealthier countries found

himself in possession of riches beyond even the dreams of kings of any

earlier time; but even that great event was dwarfed by the supernova. In

fact, if Jorn remembered correctly, the industrial revolution had been still

in progress when the star exploded, though bow far along it had progressed

he could not be sure-his historical daydreams being more than a little

impeded by the fact that history had always been his weakest subject; the

might-have-beens kept getting mixed up with the facts.

In any event, when that mighty star rose in the night, everything was

changed. For a week it grew brighter and brighter, until it far outshone

any other object in the sky but the sun. At the peak of its 55-day life, it

was clearly visible in the daytime, a spearpoint of light too intense to be

looked at directly. At night, it cast distinct shadows and indeed was more

than bright enough to read by, so that for a little while the night as

everyone had known it in all the centuries before was effectively

abolished.

Thereafter it waned, slowly. It was still there, and could still be seen by

the naked eye if one knew where to look: a dim, ghostly blob of light, like

a flower in a medieval field of uncut grass, of about the eighth magnitude.

Through the telescope it was a spreading, crawling cloud of incandescent

gas something under two light years in diameter, vaguely crablike in shape,

still expanding in the sky at the rate of about four angular seconds per

year. Its apparent diameter was already so great that a half-credit coin

held at arm's length would not quite cover it, although of course the

nebula itself was quite invisible to the naked eye.

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And all the Stars a Stage 11

There was still a star in its heart, but it was a shrunken corpse now, well

on its way toward becoming a white dwarf.

But the naked eye had not been the only observer even then. By an amazing

stroke of luck-bad luck, in Jorn~s soured view--one of history's greatest

astronomical theorists had been watching it, through one of history's first

really efficient large electronically amplified telescopes, at the instant

it had exploded. Since it proved to be located in a thin dust cloud,

undetected until then, the expanding globe of light racing outward from its

first brightening afforded a direct visual check of the speed of light, in

the vastest laboratory imaginable; while successive spectrographs of the

entire cataclysm unveiled the secrets of not just one, but a whole series

of nuclear reactions, several of which proved to be duplicatible- with

considerable effort--on a controllable scale. The Age of Power had arrived,

borne upon-starlight.

A head poked around the door into Jorn's ruminations.

"Got the news on?" it said. "Who's ahead?"

It was Jurg Wester, a fellow resident; Jorn was not particularly fond of

him, but a prudent man did not invite animosity in quarters as close and

lacking in privacy as a conclave. Today be was looking unusually seedy; his

state-issue suit looked as though it might have been slept in. But then,

they all got to looking like that after a while; the fabric wrinkled

readily and getting the wrinkles pressed out was too expensive for a

bachelor to undertake very often-too expensive, and mostly too purposeless.

"The women, who else?" Jorn said. "Sit down and shut up a minute, Jurg. I

want to hear this."

"You want a job shoveling garbage?" Jurg said, but he subsided after that

accommodatingly enough, his

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12 fames Blish

eyes slowly glazing as he watched the screen. jorn, only a little

distracted, did not find it difficult to recapture the skein of his musings.

For the Age of Woman had indeed followed almost directly upon the Age of

Power, though nobody had accurately foreseen it at the time. Probably such

a prophet, had he existed, would not have been heeded anyhow. The relevant

technique was called sperm electrophoresis, a ridiculously simple trick to

perform in glassware-and the pharmaceutical manufacturers had quickly come

up with a medium, an anion or cation exchange gel, which made it equally

easy to perform in situ. Its purpose was sex deten-nination of the child at

conception.

By hindsight, jom thought gloomily, it ought to have been realized that the

first several generations to have the trick made available to them would

respond by "starting with a boy." That preference had already existed, and

indeed was so primitive that it might possibly be instinctual. The result,

in any event, was the world of today, heavily overburdened with males, most

of them useless-at least in the sense that neither the economy nor the

society couldfind places for most of them.

Being a man, jom was inclined to think that the real death blow had been

struck by the release of Selektrojel to the populace as an over-the-counter

or nonprescription item. Possibly if its use bad been restricted to couples

psychiatrically certified to need a baby of a given sex-like, say, a couple

to whom unaided nature had given only a string of five daughters, or, no,

better make it nine ... But that would not have worked either. The demand

for the stuff had been far too great. Like alcohol, the trade in it could

be regulated more or less effectively but it could never be restricted in

any meaningful sense.

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