Sagittarius And The Magellanic Clouds

In Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, the colonized planet, Nerthus, is on the Sagittarian border of the Stellar Union and, many millennia later, human civilization moves beyond Sagittarius to the Galactic centre.

In After Doomsday, the USS Benjamin Franklin went through Sagittarius to galactic centre (sometimes capital "G," sometimes small) and returned to Earth in three years. The later all-male European expedition had:

"'...planned on at least three years in the Magellanic Clouds.'" (4, p. 40)

- which means that I was mistaken when I stated here that there was no mention of any extragalactic travel.

The Greater and Lesser Magellanic Clouds are satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. In Anderson's last future history, members of the galactic brain have spread through the galactic halo:

"...as far as the Magellanic Clouds."

-Poul Anderson, Genesis (New York, 2001), PART TWO, I, p. 101.

- and some have reached the Andromeda galaxy.

World Without Stars, Tau Zero and The Avatar present three different kinds of extragalactic travel.

I did not expect to survey all that when I started this post.

Milky Way And Magellanic Clouds

Poul Anderson, Harvest Of Stars, 26.

Kyra in Kestrel leaves L-5:

"Star hordes gleamed. The Milky Way cataracted hoar across crystal black. In a corner of the viewfield before her Kyra saw the Magellanic Clouds." (p. 346)

I think that Kyra flies to a confrontation with the reprogrammed Guthrie but that will have to wait until tomorrow evening. Tomorrow, we will revisit Lichfield. (Scroll down.) Good night.

"A Wilderness of Stars"

Even with faster than light spacecraft, science fiction (sf) characters rarely venture outside their home galaxy. While traveling within the galaxy, Poul Anderson's David Falkayn sees "...a wilderness of stars...," including the Milky Way, its satellite galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds, and its sister galaxy in Andromeda. (1) These names evoke a few other sf works. Both Isaac Asimov and Larry Niven present an entire species fleeing from the Milky Way to a Magellanic Cloud. Asimov's non-human beings, few in number, need only a hyperspace ship or two whereas Niven's beings, an entire population, travel at sub-light speeds in a Fleet of Worlds.

 

In James Blish's Okies tetralogy:

New York flies to the Greater Magellanic Cloud;
Mayor Amalfi of New York becomes Mayor of the Cloud;
the dirigible planet He flies from the Milky Way to and through the Andromeda galaxy, then to the Greater Magellanic;
Hevians, accompanied by Amalfi and other New Earthmen, fly He to the Metagalactic Center where they briefly survive a cosmic collision;
the concluding one and a quarter volumes are, unusually, set entirely outside this galaxy.

Although Falkayn, while viewing the Magellanic and Andromeda galaxies, makes only a comparatively short interstellar journey, he addresses cosmic issues, like the aftermath of a supernova, that match those presented by Blish. Falkayn does not expect to travel much further:

"...the Magellanic Cloud and the Andromeda galaxy made small and strange by distances he would never see overleaped." (1)

Centuries after Falkayn, human beings have travelled around two or three spiral arms but remain within the galaxy. 

 

Elsewhere, Anderson does present:

faster than light intergalactic travel by human beings in The Avatar;
an intergalactic civilization in World Without Stars;
slower than light (STL) travel as far as the Magellanics and the Andromeda by self-programming artificial intelligences in Genesis; 
relativistically accelerating STL flight between clusters of clusters of galaxies and into the next universe in Tau Zero.

In World Without Stars, human beings no longer die of old age or disease and spaceships can make instantaneous jumps across intergalactic distances albeit with time-consuming spatial journeys between jumps. There is therefore both time and capacity for intergalactic exploration and for trade with the "Yonderfolk" of other galaxies although most of the action of the novel occurs on a planet orbiting a lone star located between galaxies. Anderson's attention to details and to scientific precision ensure that his works match the sometimes more spectacular-sounding events of Niven's Known Space or Blish's Okies.

(1) Poul Anderson, Mirkheim, London, 1978, p. 59.

Galactic SF II

After "galactic sf" would come "inter-" or "trans-galactic." However, there is not a great deal of this and the subject has been addressed in some previous posts. See here.

Regarding the features of this galaxy:

in "Starfog," Earth lies in the spiral arm behind the one containing the interstellar civilization served by the Commonalty, an organization covering an estimated ten million planets;

the human race has occupied two or three spiral arms in total;

the colonized planet Serieve is near the northern edge of the Commonalty's spiral arm;

thus, beyond Serieve is only the galactic halo containing thin gas with little dust and old, widely scattered, globular clusters.

In two different works by James Blish, it seems that random stellar movements have opened a galactic chasm or valley called "the Rift" which is so immense that it is difficult or impossible to traverse it even with the existing faster than light drive. But random movements do not work like that, do they? In conversation, Blish said that he probably had in mind something like the space between two of the spiral arms.

In The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1983), Blish describes a color-coded photograph, taken from at least ten million light years distance, of the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds. A southern area of the disc and the Clouds are colored red and the north is green while gray wanders between them and spreads to the west. The colors are political and need not concern us here but I find it interesting to read of the points of the compass being applied to the galaxy. Earth, in this period called "High Earth," is "...far out on a spiral arm in the red area, near the Clouds..." (p. 95).

In Blish's Mission To The Heart Stars (London, 1980), Jack Loftus views "'...a galactic model or map...'" (pp. 31-32) that appears initially as a glowing sphere, each evenly distributed point of light within it representing a three-hundred-light-years-diametered globular cluster of about a hundred thousand Population One stars. Secondly, the map adds a line representing the galactic equator; thirdly, a central sphere, occupying a fifth of the total and containing individual Population One stars; fourthly, the Heart Stars (a political term), a spindle spreading out along the equator; fifthly, all the remaining Population Two stars, which transform the spindle into a lens stretching across the larger sphere along the equator; sixthly, an equatorial band representing remaining dust from which more Population Two stars may condense.

Rivers of dust run from the rim between the spiral arms towards the Heart Stars. In fact, according to this text, the dark areas between the arms are not empty but are places where the dust conceals the stars. Thus, when that dust has condensed into stars, the Milky Way will join the class of elliptical galaxies.

Poul Anderson's World Without Stars is set in a planetary system in intergalactic space. In Cities In Flight (London, 1981), Blish discloses that it was discovered in 1953 that "...tenuous bridges of stars...connected the galaxies like umbilical chords..." (p. 577). This is mentioned only because at that point in the narrative a planet is flying through intergalactic space. Blish hoped to find a way to incorporate the bridges of stars into an sf story.

Galactic North And South

Ferune of Mistwood Choth, First Marchwarden of the Lauran System, expects Terran spacecraft to attack:

"'...from well north and south of the ecliptic plane...'"
-Poul Anderson, The People Of The Wind IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2011), pp. 437-662 AT Chapter VII, p. 518.

We are used to thinking of north and south as directions only on the surface of a single planet. Thus:

northward journeys terminate at the North Pole;
from that single point, no direction is north, east or west, only south.

However, just as each planet has an equator:

the Solar System has an ecliptic;
there is a North Star above the Terrestrial North Pole;
even the galaxy has a North Pole. (See image.)

References to galactic compass points occur occasionally in sf, e.g.:

"Now the screen showed a flat-on photograph of a spiral galaxy. That it was the Milky Way was made plain by the presence of two satellite galaxies which were obviously the Magellanic Clouds...
"The photograph had been turned into a map by the addition of a three-color overlay in red, green, and gray. The red covered a large, irregular area on the southern side of the disc, including the Clouds, while the green covered much more of the northern side. The gray area wandered narrowly between them, but spread out, fan-like, to the west..."
-James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1983), Chapter Nine, p. 95.

"...arms of exploration reach 200 light-years up along galactic north..."
-Larry Niven, "Introduction: My Universe and Welcome to It!" IN Niven, Tales Of Known Space (New York, 1975), pp. xi-xiv AT p. xi.

Anderson-Blish Interaction

For a Poul Anderson fan who is also a James Blish fan, rereading Anderson's "Call Me Joe," set on Jupiter and Jupiter V, automatically led to rereading the "Jupiter V" chapters of Blish's They Shall Have Stars for comparison. This in turn led to rereading the "New York" chapters and "Washington" sections of They Shall Have Stars and the opening chapters of The Triumph Of Time so I am publishing some posts on the James Blish Appreciation blog.

The two novels mentioned are the opening and closing volumes of Blish's main future history which, considerably shorter than Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, is complete, with a beginning, a middle and an end, in just four volumes.

I recently posted remarks about Anderson's two intergalactic novels, Tau Zero and World Without Stars. Blish's equivalent, The Triumph Of Time, is set entirely outside the home galaxy. The flying city of New York has colonized the planet of New Earth in the Greater Magellanic Cloud and, from there, the New Earthmen, as they have become, have colonized other planets in the Cloud.

The moving planet of He leaves the Milky Way, crosses intergalactic space, passes through the Andromeda galaxy, then sets out to return to the Milky Way, passing through M-33 and both Magellanic Clouds en route. Meeting the New Earthmen, who advise them to avoid the home galaxy, now ruled by a new non-human empire, they propose to seek elsewhere for a solution to the problem that they had discovered in intergalactic space, " 'Nothing less...than the imminent coming to an end of time itself.' " (Blish, Cities In Flight, London, 1981, p. 505)

Mayor John Amalfi suggests making the million light year journey to NGC 6822 but a Hevian replies that:

" '...our ultimate destination must be the center of the metagalaxy, the hub of all the galaxies of space-time.'" (p. 508)

Only there can they hope to " '...escape or to modify the end...' " (p. 508)

Like World Without Stars, The Triumph Of Time postulates a faster than light means of intergalactic travel. Like Tau Zero, it presents human beings who survive until, then decide how to respond to, the end of the universe.

Anderson And Blish: Two Tetralogies

James Blish's Cities In Flight is both a tetralogy and a future history and has been collected in a single omnibus volume.

What I call Poul Anderson's Polesotechnic League Tetralogy:

Trader To The Stars
The Trouble Twisters
Satan's World
Mirkheim

- is part of Anderson's main future history series.

Both tetralogies are about FTL interstellar trade. (Anderson also does STL.)

In Cities In Flight, Volume III, Okie culture comes to an end and the main protagonist leads the colonization of the Greater Magellanic Cloud. In Mirkheim, David Falkayn sees the Magellanic Clouds (see here) and witnesses the beginning of the end of the Polesotechnic League. Later, he leads the colonization of the planet Avalon.

Posting about the Polesotechnic League reminded me of Cities In Flight. This is why. There are probably more parallels.

Furniture And Stars

Poul Anderson, The Stars Are Also Fire, 7-8.

"The living couch received them and responded to them." (7, p. 108)

More Futuristic Furniture.

"Night on Lunar Farside is a glory of stars." (8, p. 108)

Another Glory Of Stars. (See also here.)

Six thousand or more stars visible in blue, gold, amber or red, the galactic belt not milky but icy:

"...a winter river banked and islanded with night." (ibid.) (See The Milky Way Thread and The Sea Of Space.)

There are planets, nebulae, the Magellanic Clouds, the Andromeda galaxy and possibly even one or two further galaxies. The observer is one with the universe.

Inner Change II

Poul Anderson, Brain Wave (London, 1977).

Earth passes out of an intelligence-inhibiting field. Within months, the suddenly more intelligent human race reorganizes global society and builds and launches a faster than light spaceship. Unintentionally, the two man crew flies back into the field, returns to their pre-change intelligence level and loses control of the ship which therefore flies on until fortunately it passes back out of the field. At that stage, "...the shock of re-emergence into full neural activity precipitat[es] the change which had been latent..." (p. 137).

I must paraphrase although it would be very easy simply to quote Poul Anderson's succinct prose. Instantly and painfully, the men's nervous systems flare back up to full intensity. Lewis collapses while Corinth experiences nausea, pounding heart and jerking muscles. However, with the full use of his brain restored, he wills calmness, slows his heart, relaxes his muscles and becomes fully self-aware. Seeing the Magellanic Clouds, the Coal Sack and the Andromeda nebula through the viewscreens, he estimates the direction of Sol and the time needed to find it. Realizing that emotion is a psychophysiological state that he should be able to control, he wills rage and grief out and calmness and determination in, then addresses the mathematical problem of the spaceship controls and turns the ship around.

He realizes that in him, as in everyone soon, intelligence, "...the self-created patterns of consciousness...," has won its struggle against instinct, "...the involuntary rhythm of organism..." (p. 137). Men will consciously select their desires and adjust their personalities:

no psychosomatic diseases;
control over organic disorders;
no more pain;
no need for doctors;
life spans of many centuries;
no senility -

- and, of course, Poul Anderson postulates faster than light interstellar travel as well.

Post-Imperialism

Sf writers project the past and present into the future. How many American future history series have interstellar empires? (I am not about to list them all again.) James Blish has the President of the Milky Way announcing federation with the Magellanic Clouds in 3480. See Chronology Of The Beep.

However, in Poul Anderson's "The Chapter Ends," when Jorun flies above the ruins of:

"Sol City, capital of the legendary First Empire..." (p. 209)

- he reflects that:

"...its empty walls and blind windows, crumbling arches and toppled pillars held a ghost of beauty and magnificence which was like a half-remembered dream. A dream the whole race had once had.
"And now we're waking up." (ibid.)

We need to wake up.

The Stars Also

 

In Genesis 1:16, God makes the Sun and the Moon and:

"...he made the stars also."

In Genesis by Poul Anderson, PART ONE ends:

"Consciousness spread ever more widely among the stars. Self-evolved, it gained even greater heights.

"The stars were also evolving." 

-Poul Anderson, Genesis (New York, 2001), PART ONE, IX, p. 97.

I think that Anderson's phrase about the stars "also evolving" echoes, just as it also contrasts with, the Biblical phrase about the stars being made also.

Each member of the galactic brain is a complex of organisms operating mostly on the quantum level and their machines. These "nodes" drift through the spiral arms, the halo and the Magellanic Clouds and some have reached the Andromeda galaxy. Clearly, nodes are immune to the cosmic rays which are lethal to protoplasmic organisms and which therefore are a barrier to interstellar travel by such organisms. Has Anderson imagined a possible future for intelligence?

To respond to obstacles to interstellar travel, we have appealed to Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains and to his Genesis.

Stars Seen From Space

Poul Anderson, Tau Zero, CHAPTER 2.

Stars throng space. They show their colors: Vega blue; Capella golden; Betelgeuse red. We remember Vegans in James Blish's Cities In Flight and Betelgeuseans in Anderson's Technic History. Stars invisible from Earth hide the constellations from untrained eyes.

"The night was wild with suns." (p. 18)

We remember Anderson's phrase, "A wilderness of suns...," see here.

The Milky way belts heaven but we have already quoted this. See The Milky Way Thread. The Magellanic Clouds glow and the Andromeda galaxy gleams. In the Technic History, other galaxies are mere background but Tau Zero will go intergalactic.

Intelligence Bases

The star, Siekh, like Mimir, is furiously white with leaping prominences but must be much older because it is not surrounded by a nebula. Flandry is able to make such deductions when his Merseian captors allow him to observe the approach and landing on the planet Talwin. Like David Falkayn and Coya Conyon, he is also able to deduce approximately where he is in space by:

straining out the less bright stars;
finding landmarks like the Magellanic Clouds;
estimating the distance of the giant Betelgeuse by its magnitude.

Also, Siekh is uncommon enough that not many of its type will exist in any volume of space.

Siekh and Talwin are in no-man's-land but near the Imperial border. The Merseian base on Talwin is:

a watchpost;
a depot;
a receiving station for reports from agents like Rax on the Imperial planet, Irumclaw.

Of his spy ring, only Rax will know the coordinates of Siekh. The ring will have concealed courier torpedoes with preset targets. The Merseians will convey orders to Rax's dope shop by ordinary mail. Flandry wonders whether Terran Intelligence has a base like Talwin near the Roidhunate but thinks not. Later in his career, he will establish an advance Naval base within the Roidhunate and wonder whether the Merseians have done the same within the Empire.

We know of three occasions when Flandry enters the Roidhunate:

his visit to Merseia as an ensign;
his establishment of the advance base;
his raid on Chereion.

Of the Merseian agents, few would have known the coordinates of Chereion. However, hypnoprobing extracted them from the brain of Flandry's son, Dominic Hazeltine.

Ingenious Schemes

After Doomsday.

Chapter 8 is an interesting change, about the European women running Terran Traders, Inc., in an expanding free enterprise civilization-cluster but two of the eight pages are a fight scene. By innovating with profit sharing, systems analysis and motivational research, the women hope to become rich enough quickly enough to hire enough spaceships to search the galaxy for other human survivors. Meanwhile, Donnan hopes, by participating in the Kandemir-Vorlak war, to become notorious enough to attract the attention of any other human beings. Are there other human crews with similar schemes? It seems that some of them will succeed in overcoming the obstacles to the perpetuation of their species. In any case, in this particular fictional scenario, the million civilization-clusters in the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds would continue as before even if the human race were exterminated to its last member.

Long Ships

The Rebel Worlds, CHAPTER SEVEN.

Vikings and Darthans alike raid in long ships. Darthan spaceships are lean with thin noses and fins because they must regularly pass through atmospheres to attack planetary surfaces. The rebel leader, McCormac, has hired Darthan mercenaries. He will not let them loot or settle but his basic offence is to let them in. They probably do not understand Anglic when Flandry transmits a peace message. His ship and its Darthan attacker destroy each other.

Selling spaceships and nuclear weapons to barbarians started in the League period. See "A Little Knowledge." This is one connection between these two historical periods.

"The barbarians in their long ships waiting at the edge of the Galaxy..."

-Back cover blurb on Poul Anderson, The Rebel Worlds (London, 1973).

That blurb more accurately reflects the interstellar situation in one period of the mini-future history of Anderson's "Flight to Forever":

"The barbarians along the Galactic periphery and out in the Magellanic Clouds..."

-Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 207-288 AT CHAPTER THREE, p. 242.

Since we have discussed Catawrayannis, see Catawrayannis Base.  

Pytheas

The Boat Of A Million Years, XIX, 12-13, pp. 498-501.

Pytheas leaves the Solar System.

"...the ship approached Jupiter..." (p. 498)

The ship crosses the orbit of Mars without necessarily passing close to the planet. However, she does approach Jupiter in order to swing around that planet and out of the ecliptic. 

Near Jupiter, Sol is:

"...scarcely more than the brightest among the stars." (ibid.)

Thus, Sol would not appear to be a sun. How would anyone out there know that they were in orbit around it? Saturn and Neptune are even further out.

Although we highlight descriptions of the Milky Way, Poul Anderson's views from space usually encompass:

innumerable stars;

the Milky Way;

nebulae;

the Magellanic Clouds;

at least one other galaxy.

This passage is no exception. The sister galaxy is said to beckon. Such galaxies are usually beyond reach but are visited in Anderson's World Without Stars and Tau Zero.

The Survivors mark the course change with a ceremony involving drum, dance and song. The physical universe and human consciousness interact. The song:

"...called to the spirits." (p. 500)

All eight Survivors know that the spirits are in their imaginations and aspirations. Any local nature spirits have been left behind! As a philosopher, I write "human consciousness" but could have written "human spirit."

(If a "spirit" is an invisible subject of consciousness, then the universe is conscious of itself through individual psychophysical organisms and is mostly invisible so it is the omnipresent spirit of the Upanishads. Thou art THAT.)

Robots leave the ship to deploy the ramscoop and fire chamber. Acceleration under torch drive generates enough speed for the scoop and the computer-controlled harvester fields to gather many hydrogen atoms. Laser beams separate electrons from nuclei. The fields sweep the plasma safely past the hull to the magnetohydrodynamic vortex of the fire chamber where mutual annihilation with a small amount of released anti-matter transforms particles into energy which starts fusion reactions which in turn power the fields to hurl plasma aft so that reaction drives Pytheas forward, restoring full Terrestrial weight to the crew. In less than a year, they will travel half a light-year and approach light speed. 

On The Bridge

We have become familiar with the bridges of large, faster than light, interstellar spaceships through watching Star Trek, even though I strongly doubt that any such craft will ever exist. The Apollo Missions were dissimilar in every way to The First Men In The Moon. Interstellar travel, if it ever happens will not be as it has been imagined. (A good British TV adaptation of The First Men... ingeniously fitted Cavor and Armstrong into a single timeline. See here.)

Poul Anderson, of course, gives us bridges of ships in hyperspace, e.g.:

"On the bridge, optical compensators projected an exact simulacrum of whichever half of the sky they were set to show."
-Poul Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2011), p. 78.

David Falkayn sees:

darkness;
"...a wilderness of stars..." (ibid.);
the Milky Way;
the Magellanic Clouds;
the Andromeda galaxy.

A simulacrum is necessary because stellar images would be Dopplered and distorted at near light speeds and I do not know what would happen to them in hyperspace. We read what Falkayn sees in the projected simulacrum but not what his bridge looks like. The omniscient narrator is more forthcoming in another ship later:

"Save where viewscreens showed heaven, the admiral's bridge was a narrow and cheerless cave. It throbbed slightly with engine beat; the air blew warm, smelling faintly of oils and chemicals." (p. 111)

Descriptions of bridges have become another kind of detail to look out for.

After Genius

I had definitely not read Poul Anderson's "Genius" before and it is an interesting story. After it in the NESFA Press The Collected Short Works Of Poul Anderson (Framingham MA, 2009), there are:

"The Live Coward"
"Time Lag"
"The Man Who Came Early"
"Turning Point"
"The Alien Enemy"
"Enough Rope"
"The Sharing of Flesh"
"Welcome"
"Flight to Forever"
"Barnacle Bull"
"Time Heals"
"The Martian Crown Jewels"
"Prophecy"
"Kings Who Die"
"Starfog"

I had already read all but three of these works and have quickly read the rather lackluster "The Martian Crown Jewels" since acquiring the book so there is not much left before Vol 2, which I have yet to order. However, the remaining stories will be read and commented on.

Despite their exotic interstellar settings, "The Helping Hand" and "Genius" are serious discussions of how societies develop. I thought that I had finished comparing Isaac Asimov unfavorably with Poul Anderson but here again Anderson presents a more interesting account of a ruling group applying to society a mathematically formulated, predictive science of society. Station Seventeen, secretly directing the Empire, is like a Second Foundation but based on intelligence, not on hypnosis.

The geniuses of Station Seventeen, which is an entire planet, are intelligent, perceptive and cooperative enough to share socially necessary menial tasks equally among their entire population rather than relegating a social majority to lifetimes of drudgery. Mass-production will have to wait until mechanical knowledge is sufficient to develop entirely automatic factories because "'...few if any geniuses could stand to work on an assembly line all day.'" (p. 212) However, they "'...are in no hurry to advance their standard of living.'" (ibid.)

Production has, perhaps, four stages:

hunting and gathering;
horticulture and agriculture;
manufacturing, eventually industrialized;
automation.

In our history, the second and third stages necessitated social stratification and competition whereas the eventual production of abundance should make stratification and competition redundant. The geniuses manage every stage of production without either stratification or competition.

A society of geniuses has super geniuses who are as far beyond the ordinary mind as logic is beyond instinct. The surprise ending is a real surprise but also logical. The geniuses have already outwitted the Imperial social experimenters.

Occasional raiders from the Magellanic Clouds are also a neat idea.

Genesis, Part Two, Chapter I, section 1

Poul Anderson, Genesis (New York, 2001), Part Two, Chapter I, section 1 (pp. 101-108).

Millions of post-organic intelligences exploring the galaxy form an infant - or fetal? - galactic brain. We were told that the stars were also evolving. Are the intelligences directing this?

They have spread through the spiral arms, the halo, nearby clusters and the Magellanic Clouds and some seeds of intelligence have reached the edge of the Andromeda galaxy, two million light years away. (Part One, Chapter I, informed us that Christian Brannock as a boy had seen the Andromeda.) Light speed messages take years or decades to cross space but are received, understood, thought about, relayed and replied to in nanoseconds. Intelligences contemplate the universe, virtualities, abstract creations and their own self-evolution.

Each intelligence is a network of machines and "organisms." The latter contain little carbon and most of their processes are on the quantum level. However, they maintain themselves, reproduce and are conscious, sensuously, intellectually or transcendentally. Their numbers rise sharply as intelligences reach new vantage points and initiate new generations. Members of the brain remain individuals and therefore are not cells but nodes, each more unique than a protoplasmic organism. Chaos, quantum fluctuations and environments prevent any node from exactly imitating its initiator. Environments are planets, moons, asteroids, comets, nebulae and interstellar space. Each node decides which bodies and sensors to use and can also divide and reunite its mind. Some nodes specialize in mathematics, aesthetics or the observation or creation of organic life. Continuous inter-nodal communication generates a single united self that does not, however, absorb the nodes. This galactic self contemplates a single appropriately immense thought for millions of years and can consider either an eon or a day in equal detail. Thought has had time for only one or two thousand journeys across the ever-expanding diameter of the brain. Earth is almost forgotten.

I have summarized just two pages of text and must pause there.

"Flight To Forever" Timeline, Part II

4400-25,296	The time projector cannot emerge because it is enclosed by a half mile high stone tetrahedron erected by Ixchulhi conquerors.
25,296	Since the Ixchulhi wars, mathematical psychology has united the Galactic Empire. Primitive landsmen at Sol. Barbarians on the periphery and in the Magellanic Clouds.
26,000	The pyramid has become a wooded hill.
27,000	A small agricultural village.
28,000	Men quarry the pyramid for stone.
30,000	A small city has been built from the stones of the pyramid.
31,000	The Solar Matriarchy pays tribute to the Empire which has stopped expanding.
34,000	The barbarians have moved in and the city has been destroyed.
35,000	Peasant huts.
36,000	The Empire declines. A small troop has been hired to defend Earth.
45,000	Maurco the Doomer, holding only three systems, is the last Emperor anointed according to the proper forms.
50,000	Saunders' time effect wins a space battle. Empire restored. A rival sends Saunders onwards to prevent him from marrying Empress Taury.
60,000	Saunders stops the projector but salt water seeps in.
4 million years	A city full of energies and a telepathic voice warning Saunders that its forces will destroy him if he stays.
100 million	Snow. A being who agrees that he should go on.
1 billion years	Blue grass. A city that warns him away. The sea, then a mountain, the sun changing and Earth spiralling towards it.
100 billion	The Sun is a red giant.
Billions	Darkness. The universe is dead.
Many billions	Light. The universe is reforming.
Later.	On a molten planet.
Geological ages	Rain on naked rock. Then seas, land, jungles.
Millions.	The Moon is recognisable.
Later.	He recognises the village.
1936	He enters a bank and checks the date on a calender.
1973	He returns, a little early.