Jack Vance: Big Planet

Glystra held out his arms while Pianza helped him into his pack. He said with a grin, “Dance a couple sets for me.”

“You’ll be a-dark!”

“We’ll be a-dark more times than this once.”

“Inauspicious, importunate.” He broke into a chant such as children might sing at their games. “The hop-legged sprites abound in the dark; skin to skin they will weld your legs. Bone to bone, flesh to flesh, and all your life shall be hop-step-one, hop-step-one”

Nancy caught Glystra’s eye, shook her head slightly. Glystra turned away, looked out over Big Planet, already flooded in light of a darker gold. Behind him were the dancers in groups of five, wheeling, kicking out their legs at the knee, wagging their heads drolly, and the music waxed shrill and happy. Looking down the vast slope, Glystra suddenly felt weak before the immensity of the journey ahead. Jubilith seemed warm and secure. Almost like home. And ahead—distance. Sectors and sections, extents and expanses. Looking to where Earth’s horizon would lie, he could lift his eyes and see lands reaching far on out: pencil lines of various subtle colors, each line a plain or a forest, a sea, a desert, a mountain range… He took a step forward, looked over his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

For a long time the merry music followed their backs, and only when the sun passed behind the slope and mauve dusk came down from the sky did the sounds dwindle to the silence of distance.

The way led across the bracken, a thick resilient mat of gray stalks beaded with dull green nodules. The slope was gentle and uniform, and the coming of Big Planet night brought no difficulties; it was only necessary to walk down the fall of the ground.

Cloyville and Darrot strode together at the head of the group; then came Glystra, with Nancy at one elbow and Pianza at the other. To their left walked Ketch a little apart, and behind came Bishop, eyes on the ground. At the rear, twenty paces behind, walked Corbus, striding easily, and Vallusser, picking his way as if his feet hurt.

Twilight waned and stars appeared. Now there was nothing in the world but darkness, the sky, the breast of the planet and their own infinitesimal persons.

Nancy had been carefully quiet, but now in the dark, she pressed closer to Glystra. Glystra, expecting various wiles and persuasions, grinned to himself and prepared to withstand an assault on his senses.

She spoke in a soft low voice. “Tell me, Claude, which of those stars is Old Sun?”

Glystra scanned the heavens. The constellations were strange and made no particular pattern.

He remembered that on leaving Earth for Big Planet, Cetus was astern till they arrived at Index… There, was Spica, and nearby the black bulge of the Porridge Pot. “I think that’s the Sun there—right above the bright white star, in toward the big blot of fog.”

She stared wide-eyed into the sky. “Tell me about Earth.”

“It’s home,” said Glystra. He looked for several seconds up at the white star. “I’d like to be there…”

“Is Earth more beautiful than Big Planet?”

“That’s a hard question to answer. Offhand—no. Big Planet is—big. Impressive. The Himalayas on Earth are foothills beside the Sklaemon Range or the Blackstone Cordillera.”

“Where are they?” Nancy asked.

Glystra’s mind had been wandering. He looked at her blankly. “Where are what?”

“Those mountain ranges? Here on Big Planet?”

“The Sklaemons are about thirty thousand miles northwest, in a part of Big Planet called Matador. The Ski-men live there, I believe. The Blackstone Cordillera is to the southeast, about five thousand miles above the Australian Peninsula, in Henderland.”

“There’s so much to be learned… So many places to see…” Her voice broke a trifle. “The Earth-men know more about us than we know ourselves. It isn’t fair. You keep us in mental shackles…”

Glystra laughed sourly. “Big Planet is a compromise of many people’s ideas. Nobody thinks it’s right.”

“We grow up barbarians,” she said passionately. “My father—”

Glystra looked at her quizzically. “A barbarian is not aware that he is a barbarian.”

“—was murdered. Everywhere is murder and death…”

Glystra tried to hold his voice at a dispassionate level. “It’s not your fault that this is so—but it’s not the fault of the Earth people either. We’ve never attempted to exercise authority past Virginis Reef. Anyone passing through is on his own—and his children pay the price.”

Nancy shook her head—a kind of personal little jerk with head cocked sidewise, indicating incomplete conviction.

Glystra tried to think. There was little he could say to her that was concrete and definite. He detested human pain and misery as whole-heartedly as she did. He was equally convinced that Earth could maintain authority only through a finite volume of space. It was likewise impossible to prevent people who so desired to pass the boundaries and declare themselves free of supervision. He also admitted that in such a case, many might suffer from the mistakes of a few. It was an injustice arising from the very nature of human beings. Nancy had known the injustice—the murder, the grief, the anger, the aberrations which reinforcing and building up down the generations, now infected tribes, peoples, races, continents, the entire world. These immediacies would be in the forefront of her mind; his problem was to convey a sense of more-and-less relationships, to endow these vaguenesses and conditionals with enough power to counter the force of her emotion.

“On Earth, Nancy, ever since our first archaic histories, the race has graduated into levels. Some people have lived in complete harmony with their times, others have in their core a non-conformist independence—an apparently built-in trait, a basic emotion like hunger, fear, affection. These people are unhappy and insecure in a rigid society; through all the ages they have been the unclassifiables: the pioneers, explorers, flagpole-sitters; the philosophers, the criminals, the prophets of doom, and the progenitors of new cultural complexes. Akhnaton—Brigham Young— Wang Tsi-po—John D’Arcy…”

They walked on through the dark. The matted bracken crackled underfoot, muffled voices sounded ahead and behind them.

The air was cool and warm at once—balmy, soothing, smelling of a peppery lavender from the bracken.

Nancy, still watching Old Sun, said, “But these people whoever they were, they have nothing to do with Big Planet.”

“Jubilith,” said Glystra, “was founded by a ballet troupe who apparently desired solitude and peace to perfect their art. Perhaps they only intended to come out for a year or two, but they stayed. The first settlers, almost six hundred years ago, were nudists—people who dislike the wearing of clothes. Convention on Earth forbids nudity. So they bought a ship and went exploring past the edge of the System. They found Big Planet. At first they thought it too big to be habitable—”

“Why should that be?”

“Gravity,” said Glystra. “The larger a planet is, the stronger the pull of its gravity. But Big Planet is made of light materials with a specific gravity only a third of Earth’s. Earth is a very dense planet, with abundant metals and heavy elements, and so the gravity works out about the same—although there’s thirty times the volume here… The nudists liked Big Planet. It was paradise— sunny, bright, with a mild climate, and—most essential it had an organic complex similar to that of Earth. In other words Big Planet proteins were not incompatible with Earth protoplasm. They settled here, and sent back to Earth for their friends.

“There was room for other minorities—endless room. Out they migrated—all the cults, misanthropic societies, primitivists, communists, religious monasteries, just people in general. Sometimes they built towns, sometimes they lived by themselves—a thousand, two thousand, five thousand miles from their nearest neighbor. Useful ore deposits are non-existent on Big Planet; technical civilization never had a chance to get started, and Earth refused to allow the export of modern weapons to Big Planet. So Big Planet evolved into a clutter of tiny states and cities, with stretches of open country in between.”