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  “Indeed, careful comparison of the surviving records of the Second Expedition with the version of the story given above (which was collated from written and oral versions current on all 736 populated islands on the planet) suggests that there were real personages corresponding to every one of the named characters, although the roles allotted are not always as logically assigned as in the case of ‘Kitty, sister of the winter storm’. This would presumably have been Kitty Minakis, the meteorologist.

  “Precisely how Parvati—if this is Parvati Chandra, as one might expect—acquired the epithet of ‘Great Mother’ is still debatable, however, as is the remarkable transformation of the character presumed to be the counterpart of the historical Dennis Malone into a kind of fusion of Odin, Osiris, Attis, Jesus and all the other resurrection-symbols of Earthly mythology. That some such equation is intended cannot be contested; he is the spouse of the Great Mother, the father of the first child to be born alive on Asgard, and the patron ancestor of the quasi-guild (see Division of Labour) responsible for opening up new islands for habitation. Indeed the current head of this guild claims direct descent from him in the male line.

  “And he, like all his contemporaries, takes it for granted both that ‘Dennis’ was a man like himself, and that he died and rose again. Furthermore, he maintains that this altruistic saviour committed premeditated mass murder by poisoning one hundred and seventy-four (the figure is invariable and hence probably literal) of his companions, stealthily by night, with the aid of what Staff Psychologist Nefre-Bell has astutely termed his ‘disciples’, although as Staff Psychologist Jensen-Juarez points out they have many of the attributes of a pantheon rather than a group of mortals.

  “As a consequence of this poisoning, the others went holily insane (see Section IX of the narrative, above). We are tentatively inclined to the view that this extremely dramatic passage enshrines memories of a real event, possibly the discovery that certain Asgard plants can be digested by human beings after a period of acclimatisation, and that some process analogous to the deification or sanctification of men who brought useful arts (e.g. writing) to primitive cultures on Earth is operating here. Nefre-Bell has nicknamed it the ‘Prometheus’ syndrome, but not all the staff psychologists go along with his view that the motivating force behind it is the rescue of the colony from an otherwise certain doom.

  “Indeed, it is impossible to see from what doom the colony might have needed to be rescued! Setting apart the loss of one of the three ships—believed from examination of the wreckage embedded in the surface of the moon to have been the Pinta—-and the catastrophes immediately following the landing which resulted in such lesser setbacks as the wiping of most of the computer memories and the outbreak of a serious fire owing to faults in the cooking equipment, which seems to have destroyed several of the first buildings to be erected on the base island, the colony’s progress appears to have been astonishing and continuous.

  “It was only to be expected that the transfer of humanity from its home planet to another, foreign world would result in a kind of culture-shock. Accordingly it is of small importance to find that at present we are baffled by the mixture of hard historical truth and near-legendary exaggeration which we find in such stories as the foregoing. The language may look familiar, but we should bear in mind that it is being employed by people whose life-experience differs totally from our own on Earth. This is a point well appreciated by the people of Asgard themselves, who—when we expressed our inability to grasp the subtler referents compressed into a particular phrase—declared cheerfully that from our point of view they were all completely insane, so they’d expected us to have trouble! (This, incidentally, is something they claim to have been taught by the Great Mother Parvati and her spouse Dennis.)

  “Nefre-Bell has suggested that what we found on Asgard is a human culture which begins where our own leaves off—in other words, that the highly elaborate and sophisticated traditions of Earth constitute for the inhabitants of that planet only the base-line from which they will advance in a new direction we can barely guess at. This is a fascinating and tantalising concept, but as Jensen-Juarez justifiably points out it will require far more exhaustive investigation than we were able to give it during our brief stay of one quarter-year.

  “In any case, though, the foregoing narrative is proof in itself that the brave pioneers who are now long dead on an alien planet left behind them a branch of mankind both sufficiently endowed with animal vigour to establish themselves in face of competition from species whose native world they had trespassed upon, and—what may after all be far more important—sufficiently human to create within a few generations their own indigenous myths, legends, epics, traditions: in sum, everything which constitutes ‘a culture’ in the ordinary sense. We may look forward…”

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  Also by John Brunner

  A Maze of Stars

  A Planet of Your Own

  Age of Miracles

  Bedlam Planet

  Born Under Mars

  Castaways’ World

  Catch a Falling Star

  Children of the Thunder

  Double, Double

  Enigma from Tantalus

  Galactic Storm

  Give Warning to the World

  I Speak for Earth

  Into the Slave Nebula

  Manshape

  Meeting at Infinity

  More Things in Heaven

  Muddle Earth

  Players at the Game of People

  Polymath

  Quicksand

  Sanctuary in the Sky Stand on Zanzibar Telepathist

  The Atlantic Abomination

  The (Compleat) Traveler in Black

  The Altar on Asconel

  The Avengers of Carrig

  The Brink

  The Crucible of Time

  The Dramaturges of Yan

  The Dreaming Earth

  The Gaudy Shadows

  The Infinitive of Go

  The Jagged Orbit

  The Ladder in the Sky

  The Long Result

  The Martian Sphinx

  The Productions of Time

  The Psionic Menace

  The Repairmen of Cyclops

  The Rites of Ohe

  The Sheep Look Up

  The Shift key

  The Shockwave Riders

  The Skynappers

  The Space-Time Juggler

  The Squares of the City

  The Stardroppers

  The Stone That Never Came Down

  The Super Barbarians

  The Tides of Time

  The World Swappers

  The Wrong End of Time

  Threshold of Eternity

  Times Without Number

  Timescoop

  To Conquer Chaos

  Total Eclipse

  Web of Everywhere

  John Brunner (1934–1995) was a prolific British SF writer. In 1951, he published his first novel, Galactic Storm, at the age of just 17, and went on to write dozens of novels under his own and various house names until his death in 1995 at the Glasgow Worldcon. He won the Hugo Award and the British Science Fiction Award for Stand on Zanzibar (a regular contender for the ’best SF novel of all time’) and the British Science Fiction Award for The Jagged Orbit.

  Copyright

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © John Brunner 1968

  All rights reserved.

  The right of John Brunner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in Great Britain in 1968

  This eBook first
published in 2011 by

  Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London, WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 575 10143 2

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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