Their cores were mostly tinged with violet or blue, their tresses nacrous grey, iridescent with green and gold and crimson and many unimaginable hues. In every direction and at every depth they appeared, the most distant as a very faint host of misty points. Between them spread the deep, the absolute blackness of the void.

The nearer nebulae reminded me ever more forcibly of living things. They displayed even that appearance of intelligence and purpose which is manifested by animalcules on a microscope slide. They were in continual oozy movement. I could imagine that they were seeking food, or some needed but unconceived fulfilment. Sometimes they would seem to pursue and avoid one another. Occasionally a giant would absorb and assimilate a dwarf. Or two peers, after long lonely voyaging, would come within close range of one another and protrude, each toward the other, a searching excrescence, as though yearning for intercourse. Sometimes the contact would fail to be achieved, or would be a mere moth’s kiss, and the two would be borne apart with altered forms and courses. Sometimes the “lovers” would meet and mingle, to become a single great and brilliant organism, which, a pike among the small-fry, would proceed to devour all that crossed its path.

Could these lifelike creatures, I asked myself, be mere vortices of radiant gas? But I reminded myself that the briefest of the movements which I now witnessed must in fact occupy millions of terrestrial years, and that this impression of vital activity was an illusion. Age upon age must pass, I knew, before these clouds would condense into stars, and further ages before the rare meetings of stars should produce habitable worlds.

Why, I wondered, should God so long toy with lifeless matter before undertaking the main purpose of his work? And why should I, forlorn little terrestrial intelligence, be forced to watch this aimless, this puerile sport?

But at last I began to realize that, all unnoticed, new and strange experience had for some time been welling up within me, and was now clamouring for recognition.

Out of the confused and fatuous murmur of the primal mindlets of the cosmos there had emerged something new and uncouth and formidable. To use an image, the shrill and monotonous pipings of innumerable midges had been drowned by the boisterous incantation of a hurricane; or was it some more significant music, unintelligible to me?

Columbus, when he stumbled on a new world, a world of novel vegetation, beasts and men, cannot have been half so bewildered as I, who now found myself inwardly confronted by this new world of alien and primaeval spirits.

My poor human mind was at first overstrained and tortured by the flood of uncouth perceptions and novel hungers and fears which now flooded in upon me. But little by little, with many timorous tastings and agonized revulsions, I was able to accommodate myself so far as to receive without undue stress at least a muted and schematic echo of the mentality that had at first so jarred me. To do this, I had first to discriminate within the general babel some one theme of experience, the life story of some particular nebula. Attending to this, I found that the rest faded into the background, leaving me free to study, if I dared, and if I could endure it, the ardent and voluminous experience of being fantastically alien to man.

By what laborious and often painful experiment I learned at length to range at will among the minds of the nebulae, even as, with physical vision I could look now at this airy creature, now at that, I need not tell. Nor need I recount the long drawn out research by which I passed from sheer incomprehension to some degree of understanding of the nebular mentality. Instead I will present at once the fruits of my toil. I will at once try to give some idea first of the nature, and then of the impassioned history of these most immense of all living creatures. It is a history which reaches its climax before the first stars were born, and it is not completed even in our own age of terrestrial intelligence.

5

A BIOLOGICAL STUDY

The newborn nebulae existed for aeons as mere lucent clouds of gas, featureless and mindless. But when within each flattening globe a bright dense core had appeared, this came to rule the whole mass with its preponderant sway, and with the ceaseless and violent outrush of its radiation.

And presently, when the primal beings within the core had become very crowded, and very subject to mutual influence and to the overmastering tempest of light on which they were tossed, there was formed, deep within the incandescent heart of the core itself, a unifying centre of life, a region no larger than the bulk of a thousand stars, but dense almost as a liquid, and turbulent with such fury of radiation as had not occurred since the atom-cosmos first responded to God’s word.

Within this boiling cauldron of the divine physical energy, within this tense and enduring system of intricate currents, antagonized yet cooperative, within this vast germ cell set in the vaster yoke of the nebular core, the new vital order was mysteriously welded, and the myriad dissociated primal beings were at last harnessed an domesticated for the support and service of a theme of spirit more admirable than their own, namely for the embryonic mind of the nebula.

Little by little, this vital centre organized the whole core as a balanced yet ever-changing system of hurricanes, trade winds, tornadoes, subservient in all their operations to the vital needs of the whole.

And as the airy streamers and filaments of the nebular disc began to appear, these also were inwardly organized to the requirements of the new being. They became in fact true living tissues, fulfilling all manner of delicate vital functions, though they were but ordered winds, more tenuous than any, man-made “vacuum.” Strange that such loose-knit material could form the body of such a vivid spirit!

It is not surprising that I could not discover the mechanism of this steady internal evolution. But one point seemed to me certain. Natural selection played an important part within each nebula, favouring some experiments in vital organization and destroying others, much as on earth it favours some races of organisms and destroys others.

The living nebula has no need to gather energy from the world outside its own substance. Its font of power lies in the very matter which is its flesh. Its hunting ground and its prey are within its own intestines. It feeds upon its own secretion. For the primal beings within it provide by their myriadfold ejaculations a lavish source of power.

Thus the living nebula is exempt from that necessity which is of the first but not of the highest importance to every terrestrial creature, namely the need to reach out into the environment for light and food. Yet in spite of this heavensent exemption, there was to come a time when it would be flung away, and the whole cosmical community of nebulae would be shattered by conflict over mechanical power.

In spite of deep differences, the nebulae and the living things of earth are at bottom akin, for in each the prime vital tendency and the most urgent desire are directed toward self-maintenance and development; and in both kinds of life there is needed for this end a constant flow of energy. Further, just as for terrestrial creatures the procuring of physical energy is the main practical enterprise, so in the living nebula the first of all tasks is to secure to its own vital processes a lavish supply of its own internal radiation.