Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Vol. 11: The Nail and the Oracle [S.S. Col.] by Sturgeon Theodore

Author:Sturgeon, Theodore [Sturgeon, Theodore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Modern Classics, Sci-fi, Short Stories
ISBN: 9781583947555
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2007-01-23T02:00:00+00:00

THINK

sign.”

She said, “I never know when you’re kidding.”

If All Men Were Brothers,

Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?

The Sun went Nova in the Year 33 A.E. “A.E.” means “After the Exodus.” You might say the Exodus was a century and a half or so A.D. if “A.D.” means “After the Drive.” The Drive, to avoid technicalities, was a device somewhat simpler than Woman and considerably more complicated than sex, which caused its vessel to cease to exist here while simultaneously appearing there, bypassing the limitations imposed by the speed of light. One might compose a quite impressive account of astrogation involving the Drive, with all the details of orientation here and there and the somewhat philosophical difficulties of establishing the relationships between them, but this is not that kind of a science fiction story.

It suits our purposes rather to state that the Sun went Nova with plenty of warning, that the first fifty years A.D. were spent in improving the Drive and exploring with unmanned vehicles which located many planets suitable for human settlement, and that the next hundred years were spent in getting humanity ready to leave. Naturally there developed a number of ideological groups with a most interesting assortment of plans for one Perfect Culture or another, most of which were at bitter odds with all the rest. The Drive, however, had presented Earth with so copious a supply of new worlds, with insignificant subjective distances between them and the parent, that dissidents need not make much of their dissent, but need merely file for another world and they would get it. The comparisons between the various cultural theories are pretty fascinating, but this is not that kind of a science fiction story either. Not quite.

Anyway, what happened was that, with a margin of a little more than three decades, Terra depopulated itself by its many thousands of ships to its hundreds of worlds (leaving behind, of course, certain die-hards who died, of course, certainly) and the new worlds were established with varying degrees of bravery and a pretty wide representation across the success scale.

It happened, however (in ways much too recondite to be described in this kind of a science fiction story), that Drive Central on Earth, a computer central, was not only the sole means of keeping track of all the worlds; it was their only means of keeping track with one another; and when this installation added its bright brief speck to the ocean of Nova-glare, there simply was no way for all the worlds to find one another without the arduous process of unmanned Drive-ships and search. It took a long while for any of the new worlds to develop the necessary technology, and an even longer while for it to be productively operational, but at length, on a planet which called itself Terratu (the suffix meaning both “too” and “2”) because it happened to be the third planet of a GO-type sun, there appeared something called the Archives, a sort of index and

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