The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (56 page)

But if the Lagashans are more regular-minded than we when the lights are on, they overcompensate for this by flying all to pieces when the lights go out. Sheerin tells Theremon about one particularly vivid example of the power of this phobia—a world exposition two years earlier where thrill-seekers were exposed to the Tunnel of Mystery, a fifteen-minute ride through total darkness. Most people were left breathless and trembling by this experience, but some were actually driven crazy or even outright frightened to death.

Sheerin provides Theremon with a sample of this disorienting alternate state by having him draw the curtains against the last ruddy light provided by the distant red dwarf, Beta. And sure enough, Theremon finds the darkness far more upsetting than he is willing to admit and is thoroughly relieved when the curtains are thrown open again.

The many parallels that exist between Lagash and Earth become all the more remarkable when we discover how very different Lagashan history actually is from our own. It seems that time and time again the Lagashans have worked themselves up to something like their present level of civilization, only to crash out.

This becomes one of the subjects expounded by Sheerin. He says:

“You realize, of course, that the history of civilization on Lagash displays a cyclic character—but I mean,
cyclic!
”

“I know,” replied Theremon cautiously, “that this is the current archaeological theory. Has it been accepted as a fact?”

“Just about. In this last century it’s been generally agreed upon. This cyclic character is—or rather, was—one of
the
great mysteries. We’ve located series of civilizations, nine of them definitely, and indications of others as well, all of which have reached heights comparable to our own, and all of which, without exception, were destroyed by fire at the very height of their culture.”
⁴²⁴

The planet of Lagash must be the ultimate spawning ground of lost civilizations! Again and again and again these people build, they crash, they forget.

It seems that the Lagashans have been up and down, up and down forever like a yo-yo, each time putting the previous go-around out of mind completely, except for imperfect and distorted accounts like the one to be found in the “Book of Revelations.” Their Stone Age now lies so deeply buried in the past that they know nothing about it at all and even imagine that men of those distant days must have been little more than intelligent apes—which, if true, would certainly make the original establishment of civilization on Lagash all the more marvelous.

If anyone ever needed to escape from the eternal round of cyclical history, it surely must be these people. And because they have finally managed to apply the tools of modern science to the problem and figure out what has been happening to them, they may actually accomplish the feat this time.

In this world, the most novel and advanced concept of science is the Law of Universal Gravitation—so abstruse a subject that popular wisdom holds that only a dozen men on the whole planet are capable of understanding it. Sheerin tells Theremon—and us—about that, too:

“After Genovi 41 discovered that Lagash rotated about the sun Alpha, rather than vice versa—and that was four hundred years ago—astronomers have been working. The complex motions of the six suns were recorded and analyzed and unwoven. Theory after theory was advanced and checked and counterchecked and modified and abandoned and revived and converted to something else. . . . It was twenty years ago . . . that it was finally demonstrated that the Law of Universal Gravitation accounted exactly for the orbital motions of the six suns. it was a great triumph.”
⁴²⁵

There is, however, one major exception to the perfection of this theory:

“In the last decade, the motions of Lagash about Alpha were computed according to gravity, and
it did not account for the orbit observed;
not even when all perturbations due to the other suns were included. Either the law was invalid, or there was another, as yet unknown, factor involved.
⁴²⁶

It was Aton 77—an astronomer as well as a university director—who solved this particular mystery by calling upon certain data held by but not understood by the Cult. This new information has led him to theorize the existence of a moon of Lagash that is too dull to be seen in the brilliant wash of light from the six suns, but whose presence would account for the deviations in Lagash’s orbit. And in further leaps of insight, Aton has come to recognize that a satellite of the proper mass and distance and orbit to affect Lagash in exactly the right way would inevitably eclipse a lone Beta once in every two thousand forty-nine years. And also to realize that just such an epochal eclipse is due
now.

If we add all these various elements of mystery together—the mystery of the periodic event described in the “Book of Revelations”; the mystery of darkness and its destabilizing effect on the Lagashan psyche; the mystery of one civilization after another inevitably destroyed at its height by fire; and the mystery of the invisible moon of Lagash—we begin to see the picture that Sheerin is drawing for Theremon.

Sheerin summarizes it like this: “ ‘First the eclipse—which will start in three quarters of an hour—then universal Darkness, and, maybe these mysterious Stars—then madness, and end of the cycle.’ ”
⁴²⁷
If Aton and Sheerin and the other scientists are correct, then just one mystery remains to be unveiled: the actual nature of the Stars. And one member of the observatory staff has a speculation to offer on that score, too. He suggests that these unknown whatever-they-ares just might be other suns too distant to be detected by their gravitational effects. Perhaps as many as a dozen or even two dozen such suns. Maybe as far away from Lagash as four light years.

This great speculative leap captures the imagination of Theremon the reporter. He can’t help blurting out, “ ‘What an idea for a good Sunday supplement article. Two dozen suns in a universe eight light years across. Wow! That would shrink our universe into insignificance. The readers would eat it up.’ ”
⁴²⁸

But Theremon may never have his chance to print all the juicy stuff he has been told. The hour for good Sunday supplement articles may be past and not return again for a couple of thousand years.

Already the outline of Beta has begun to be chipped away by blackness, and at the sight, Theremon grows pale and trembles. There can be no question now about the existence of that invisible moon or about the true meaning of the mumbo-jumbo in the “Book of Revelations.” Soon the mysterious Stars will become visible and then there will be no need for speculations.

Here is the climactic moment of total eclipse as Theremon experiences it:

With the slow fascination of fear, he lifted himself on one arm and turned his eyes toward the blood-curdling blackness of the window.

Through it shone the Stars!

Not Earth’s feeble thirty-six hundred Stars visible to the eye—Lagash was in the center of a giant cluster. Thirty thousand mighty suns shown down in a soul-searing splendor that was more frighteningly cold in its awful indifference than the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world.
⁴²⁹

This last paragraph—with its apt but almost certainly unintended pun of “shown” for “shone”—was an interpolation by John Campbell. And even though Asimov would retain the paragraph in all later reprintings of “Nightfall,” he would never really be happy about it. Not only isn’t it written in that cool, unadorned style that Asimov had worked so hard to cultivate, but it makes explicit mention of Earth, which Asimov had been at particular pains throughout the story not to do.

Asimov would be half-right in having negative feelings about this; no caring writer ever enjoys having his work tampered with. But he would also be half-wrong.

It is true that Earth is nowhere else mentioned directly in this story, but as we have already seen and will see further, its existence is certainly reflected everywhere. So this flaw, if it is one, may be relatively minor.

And if the paragraph isn’t written in Asimov’s own usual style it also may be that a cool and unadorned modern style wasn’t appropriate or adequate to express this moment of cosmic breakthrough. “Nightfall” is simultaneously an old-time scientifiction story and a story of modern science fiction. But Isaac Asimov was by now so much the modern science fiction writer that the old purple-tinged scientifictional manner didn’t come easily to him, even when a touch of emoting was called for.

And that old-style scientifictional paragraph with its “soul-searing splendor,” its “awful indifference,” and its “cold, horribly bleak world” did have an important emotional point to put across that otherwise would not have been fully made. Ultimately, in “Nightfall,” it is not just the darkness that overwhelms the people of Lagash, unbalances their reason, and causes them to trash their civilization. What gets to them and brings them down is the sudden recognition of their own cosmic insignificance.

Ordinarily the people of Lagash live in a vest-pocket universe composed of six suns, and regard that as a sufficiency, an all-in-all. By straining their imaginations to the utmost, they can envision and mentally accommodate the existence of a hidden universe that is as much as four times larger than this. Instead, however, in the space of a single instant they find themselves drowning in a great sea of stars—not the mere thirty-six hundred suns visible to us, but thirty thousand Stars blazing down on them at once.

The sudden revelation of a universe this many times more vast and complex than even imagination has allowed for could be sufficient to chill the heart and unhinge the mind of one of our own Techno Age citizens—H.P. Lovecraft, say. In the dark, it is quite enough to overtopple the poor children of Lagash.

There is a certain grand inevitability about the end of the story and the conclusion of the latest cycle of civilization on Lagash. At the sight of the Stars, all of the men present in the astronomical observatory—skeptical reporter, sober scientist and Cultist true believer alike—promptly fall to pieces without regard to what each of them may think he believes. They whimper, they scream, they cry, they giggle hysterically as they are overtaken by their ineluctable Fate:

Someone clawed at the torch, and it fell and snuffed out. In the instant, the awful splendor of the indifferent Stars leaped nearer to them.

On the horizon outside the window, in the direction of Saro City, a crimson glow began growing, strengthening in brightness, that was not the glow of a sun.

The long night had come again.
⁴³⁰

And so “Nightfall” ends.

This is a scientifiction story, for sure. Just like Asimov’s “Cosmic Corkscrew” or Don A. Stuart’s “Night” or H.G. Wells’s
The Time Machine
or a hundred other stories of the Technological Age, “Nightfall” displays a catastrophic cosmic situation before which mankind is helpless. And that is that, or so it seems. The long night has come again. Chalk up another fallen civilization and start the next cycle.

But, of course, that isn’t simply that. “Nightfall” may be an epitomal presentation of cyclical history and cosmic horror, but it isn’t just another scientifiction story. Even as we gaze at it, its nature alters and it stands revealed as modern science fiction.

The first things that identify “Nightfall” as modern science fiction are its distant location and its highly special circumstances.

As we have seen, a typical Techno Age scientifiction story that invoked either cyclical history or the impact of the wider universe upon the vulnerable psyche of man would be likely to find its setting at the focal point of human concern, on Village Earth. Or, at most, it might trail along after an adventurer from Earth out exploring the Solar System in search of the ruins of past civilizations.

But, for all the evocations it makes of Earth, Asimov’s story is neither tied to Earth nor to a protagonist from Earth. As a modern science fiction story, “Nightfall” can take place anywhere at all. It can search through all of time, space and alternate dimensions to find exactly what it is looking for—the ultimate scientifiction-like situation, the place where cyclical history and the suddenly revealed wider universe are not only literal fact, but even turn out to be the very same thing.

However, this special effect does take a lot of arranging. Asimov has to present a situation of incredible complexity—six cooperating suns, the crucial one of which is a red dwarf so that the last light before the eclipse may appear properly terminal and melancholy; a planet that is physically and also culturally a twin of present-day Earth; a moon of exactly the right composition to be unobservable; and a race of men that is given to pyromania and amnesia under conditions of stress—with all of these peculiar elements interacting just so. Then, behind the glitches and blank spots of their natures and interweaving, the spook of cyclical history in the form of a cluster of thirty thousand suns can lurk until just the right moment to pop out and go, “Boo!”

But what an effort it all takes! Simply by the distance that must be traveled and the amount of puffing and straining that is necessary to arrange and maintain the special scientifictional situation of “Nightfall,” this story contrives to make cyclical history and cosmic freakout seem a highly unlikely fate for us on Earth.

The duality of “Nightfall” also marks it as modern science fiction. Once again, as in Asimov’s earlier story “Reason,” we both experience the events of a story and stand outside them looking on.

We are, quite naturally, ignorant of the situation in which we find ourselves. We identify with Aton and Sheerin and Theremon in their quest for knowledge, and along with them we put together details, fragments, and scraps of information as they become available to us and do our best to make sense of them. When these citizens of Lagash break down and Saro City goes up in flames, we care about all that has been lost.

At the same time, however, we also manage to stand at a comfortable distance from the disaster. We know all kinds of things that the characters in this story do not, and our privileged knowledge separates us from the doom suffered by Lagash and allows us to look upon it with a certain objectivity.