Yet as he descended the spiral stairs – ignoring the elevator – Rajasinghe did not feel at all in a valedictory mood. On the contrary, it seemed to him that he had shed quite a few of his years (and, after all, seventy-two was not really old). He could tell that Dravindra and Jaya had noticed the spring in his step, by the way their faces lit up.
Perhaps his retirement had been getting a little dull. Perhaps both he and Taprobane needed a breath of fresh air to blow away the cobwebs – just as the monsoon brought renewed life after the months of torpid, heavy skies.
Whether Morgan succeeded or not, his was an enterprise to fire the imagination and stir the soul. Kalidasa would have envied – and approved.
II – THE TEMPLE
While the different religions wrangle with one another as to which of them is in possession of the truth, in our view the truth of religion may be altogether disregarded… If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilised individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.
Freud: New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1932).
Of course man made God in his own image; but what was the alternative? Just as a real understanding of geology was impossible until we were able to study other worlds beside Earth, so a valid theology must await contact with extra-terrestrial intelligences. There can be no such subject as comparative religion, as long as we study only the religions of man.
El Hadj Mohammed ben Selim, Professor of Comparative Religion: Inaugural Address, Brigham Young University, 1998.
We must await, not without anxiety, the answers to the following questions; (a) What, if any, are the religious concepts of entities with zero, one, two, or more than two ‘parents’ (b) is religious belief found only among organisms that have close contact with their direct progenitors during their formative years?
If we find that religion occurs exclusively among intelligent analogs of apes, dolphins, elephants, dogs, etc., but not among extra-terrestrial computers, termites, fish, turtles or social amoebae, we may have to draw some painful conclusions .. Perhaps both love and religion can arise only among mammals, and for much the same reasons. This is also suggested by a study of their pathologies; anyone who doubts the connection between religious fanaticism and perversion should take a long, hard look at the Malleus Maleficarium or Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon.
(Ibid.)
Dr. Charles Willis’ notorious remark (Hawaii, 5970) that “Religion is a byproduct of malnutrition” is not, in itself, much more helpful than Gregory Bateson’s somewhat indelicate one-syllable refutation. What Dr. Willis apparently meant was (i) the hallucinations caused by voluntary or involuntary starvation are readily interpreted as religious visions (2) hunger in this life encourages belief in a compensatory afterlife, as a – perhaps essential – psychological survival mechanism…
It is indeed one of the ironies of fate that research into the so-called consciousness-expanding drugs proved that they did exactly the opposite, by leading to the detection of the naturally occurring “apothetic” chemicals in the brain. The discovery that the most devout adherent of any faith could be converted to any other by a judicious dose of 2-4-7 ortho-para-theosamine was, perhaps, the most devastating blow ever received by religion.
Until, of course, the advent of Starglider.
R. Gabor: The Pharmacological Basis of Religion (Miskatonic University Press, 2069).
12. Starglider
Something of the sort had been expected for a hundred years, and there had been many false alarms. Yet when it finally happened, mankind was taken by surprise.
The radio signal from the direction of Alpha Centauri was so powerful that it was first detected as interference on normal commercial circuits. This was highly embarrassing to all the radio astronomers who, for so many decades, had been seeking intelligent messages from space – especially as they had long ago dismissed the triple system of Alpha, Beta and Proxima Centauri from all serious consideration.
At once, every radio telescope that could scan the southern hemisphere was focused upon Centaurus. Within hours, a still more sensational discovery was made. The signal was not coming from the Centaurus system at all – but from a point half a degree away. And it was moving.
That was the first hint of the truth. When it was confirmed, all the normal business of mankind came to a halt.
The power of the signal was no longer surprising; its source was already well inside the solar system, and moving sunward at six hundred kilometres a second. The long-awaited, long-feared visitors from space had arrived at last.
Yet for thirty days the intruder did nothing, as it fell past the outer planets, broadcasting an unvarying series of pulses that merely announced “Here I am!”. It made no attempt to answer the signals beamed at it, nor did it make any adjustments to its natural, comet-like orbit. Unless it had slowed down from some much higher speed, its voyage from Centaurus must have lasted two thousand years. Some found this reassuring, since it suggested that the visitor was a robot spaceprobe; others were disappointed, feeling that the absence of real, live extra-terrestrials would be an anti-climax.
The whole spectrum of possibilities was argued, ad nauseam, in all the media of communications, all the parliaments of man.
Every plot that had ever been used in science fiction, from the arrival of benevolent gods to an invasion of blood-sucking vampires, was disinterred and solemnly analysed. Lloyds of London collected substantial premiums from people insuring against every possible future – including some in which there would have been very little chance of collecting a penny.
Then, as the alien passed the orbit of Jupiter, man’s instruments began to learn something about it. The first discovery created a short-lived panic; the object was five hundred kilometres in diameter – the size of a small moon. Perhaps, after all, it was a mobile world, carrying an invading army.
This fear vanished when more precise observations showed that the solid body of the intruder was only a few metres across. The five-hundred-kilometre halo around it was something very familiar – a flimsy, slowly revolving parabolic reflector, the exact equivalent of the astronomers’ orbiting radio telescopes. Presumably this was the antenna through which the visitor kept in touch with its distant base. And through which, even now, it was doubtless beaming back its discoveries, as it scanned the solar system and eavesdropped upon all the radio, TV and data broadcasts of mankind.
Then came yet another surprise. That asteroid-sized antenna was not pointed in the direction of Alpha Centauri, but towards a totally different part of the sky. It began to look as if the Centauri system was merely the vehicle’s last port of call, not its origin.
The astronomers were still brooding over this when they had a remarkable stroke of luck. A solar weather probe on routine patrol beyond Mars became suddenly dumb, then recovered its radio voice a minute later. When the records were examined, it was found that the instruments had been momentarily paralysed by intense radiation. The probe had cut right across the visitor’s beam – and it was then a simple matter to calculate precisely where it was aimed.
There was nothing in that direction for fifty-two light-years, except a very faint – and presumably very old – red dwarf star, one of those abstemious little suns that would still be shining peacefully billions of years after the galaxy’s splendid giants had burned themselves out. No radio telescope had ever examined it closely; now all those that could be spared from the approaching visitor were focused upon its suspected origin.
And there it was, beaming a sharply-tuned signal in the one centimetre band. The makers were still in contact with the vehicle they had launched, thousands of years ago; but the messages it must be receiving now were from only half a century in the past.
Then, as it came within the orbit of Mars, the visitor showed its first awareness of mankind, in the most dramatic and unmistakable way that could be imagined. It started transmitting standard 3075-line television pictures, interleaved with video text in fluent though stilted English and Mandarin. The first cosmic conversation had begun – and not, as had always been imagined, with a delay of decades, but only of minutes.
13. Shadow at Dawn
Morgan had left his hotel in Ranapura at four a.m. on a clear, moonless night. He was not too happy about the choice of time, but Professor Sarath, who had made all the arrangements, had promised him that it would be well worthwhile. “You won’t understand anything about Sri Kanda,” he had said, “unless you have watched the dawn from the summit. And Buddy – er, the Maha Thero – won’t receive visitors at any other time. He says it’s a splendid way of discouraging the merely curious.” So Morgan had acquiesced with as much good grace as possible.