Sirius by Olaf Stapledon

Author:Olaf Stapledon
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: SciFi-Masterwork, Science Fiction, Fiction
ISBN: 9780575070578
Publisher: Gollancz
Published: 1944-01-27T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER IX

SIRIUS AND RELIGION

AS Sirius walked home to the Laboratory after his day with Plaxy, brooding on the shortcomings of man, and his own loneliness, and the indifference of the universe, he began to slip into the wolf-mood. Frustration always tended to have this effect on him, and he was feeling desperately frustrated. He longed for self-expression, and could find no means of attaining it. When he was a puppy he had decided that he would be a general, deploying his human troops with super-human skill, charging with them to superhuman victory. Ludicrous, impossible dream! Later he had determined to be an explorer of the Siberian Tundra or prairies (a country that he thought suited to his powers); but how could a dog take the necessary gear with him without causing excitement among the human inhabitants? Or perhaps Australian sheep-farming would suit him, or some kind of hunting career in the north of Canada. No, by now it was all too clear that nothing would suit him, nothing was possible but to be a super-lap-dog-cum-super-laboratory-animal.

Yet always there was a strange nagging "something" within him which said, "Get on with it! You have unique powers. There is only one of you, and you exist to make your contribution to the world. Find your calling. It is difficult for you, no doubt, but you must find it or be damned." Sometimes the voice said, "For you, humnanity is the pack. You are not one of them, but they made you and you are for them. And because you are different you can give them a vision which they can never win for themselves," Could he, after all, fulfil his task, perhaps, through music? Grandiose fantasies assailed him. "Sirius, the unique canine composer, not only changed the whole character of human music, importing into it something of the dog's finer auditory sensibility; he also, in his own incomparable creations, expressed the fundamental identity-in-diversity of all spirits, of whatever species, canine, human or super-human."

But no! It could not be. Man would never listen to him. And what reason had he to suppose that he had the genius to strike his music into the deep incomprehensible heart of man?

On the way back to the Laboratory Sirius heard the familiar nagging voice, calling him to express the "spirit" in him. He greeted it with an inward snarl. What could he possibly do about it? Nothing. He was a misfit, a mistake. He ought never to have occurred.

He felt an increasing impulse to run amok in the street. Life was no good to him. Why not throw it away, why not kill as many as he could of these ridiculously bedecked, swelled-headed apes, until they managed to destroy him? "I won't, I won't," he kept saying to himself. "Even if they are apes, or forked worms, they are the same stuff really as I am." Fleeing from himself, he broke into a trot, a canter, a real gallop, needing the seclusion of his own room. There, he paced up and down for many hours, far into the night.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.