Gift From The Stars

by Gunn, James

  “And where do you want to go?” Adrian asked.

  Jessica was silent for a moment. “I don’t know. I just don’t want to be—abducted.” She swung back around to face them.

  “Frances,” Adrian said, “I think it’s a good idea to develop the skills to reprogram the computer. Between Jessie and me, and whoever else has some talent for it, we ought to be able to figure out how to do that.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Frances said.

  “But, Jessie,” Adrian said, “once we do regain control, I think we’ll have to consider leaving Peter’s programming intact.”

  “But why—?” Jessica began.

  “I think he programmed in the instructions about how to get to the aliens, the part of the original message he never revealed to anyone. And I think we won’t ever find a more suitable goal, and we’ll never be satisfied until we find the answers to our questions as well as Peter’s.”

  “Why did they send us the plans?” Frances said. “What do they want from us? Who are they?”

  Jessie turned back toward the vision screen that showed the depthless blackness littered with tiny lights that represented the long way ahead. Everything was orientation and a constant adjustment of one’s relationship with the universe. If their acceleration remained constant, the ship would leave the Solar System in thirteen days and in another four hundred days or so they would pass beyond the Oort Cloud.

  Behind them, looking at it from the viewpoint of the universe, would be cosmic debris. Ahead would be the abyss, the bottomless pit of interstellar space.

  And even deeper, the mysteries of where they were going and what strangeness waited for them at the end of their voyage.

  “Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice.

  LEWIS CARROLL

  Part Four

  THE RABBIT HOLE

  THEY EXISTED INSIDE AN EXPLOSION OF LIGHT. It filled their waking moments and their dreams. They heard it as a background of white noise; they smelled it underlying a stench of human and machine effluvia; they felt it like the warp of their world; they ate it with their breakfast cereal.

  The external vision screens were blank. They had been turned off; nobody remembered who had done it or when. But they knew the glare was out there just beyond the walls of the ship. It was the only thing they knew for certain since they had entered the wormhole.

  “No one knows what happens inside a wormhole,” Adrian Mast said, turning in the swivel chair that faced the useless controls.

  “Except us,” Frances Farmstead replied.

  They were inside the control room of the spaceship they had helped build. Although there was nothing to control, they found themselves meeting there as if by prearrangement. But that was impossible.

  “If we really knew what was happening,” Adrian said. “Or remembered from one encounter to the next.”

  “We should make notes.”

  “I’ve tried that,” Adrian said. He wrote a note to himself on a pad of paper. He showed it to Frances. It read: make notes. “But I’ve never come across any record of anything I’ve written, on the computer or by hand.”

  “That’s strange,” Frances said, leaning back. “I’ll have to try it.”

  “It’s as if there is no before and after,” Adrian said.

  “It’s a mystery,” Frances said. She was seated in the swivel chair next to him. She was wearing loose-fitting khaki coveralls. Moments earlier, he thought, she had been wearing a kind of body stocking. No, that had been Jessica, and it wasn’t moments earlier. It had been before they entered the wormhole.

  “We’ve got to solve it like a mystery,” Frances said. “Like Ellery Queen or Nero Wolfe. Putting together clues.”

  “There’s something wrong with that,” Adrian said, “but I can’t remember what. Maybe that’s the trouble. We can’t remember.”

  “We should make notes,” Frances said.

  “I’ll try that,” Adrian said. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  “We had been accelerating for a long time, and then—and then—”

  The crew had built the ship from alien plans. But when they had started the ship on its first test run, the computer had implemented a program that sent them hurtling toward outer space.

  They tried to reprogram the computer to take back control of the ship. But when they succeeded, they had to ask themselves: where else would they go? If they continued toward an alien-chosen destination they might find the answers to the other questions that had plagued them from the beginning: Why had the aliens sent the spaceship designs? What did they want from humans? What would humans find at the end of their journey, and what would happen when they arrived? If they arrived.

  The ship had worked. Unlike most human designs, even though fallible humans had put the ship together, often from salvage, it worked the way machines and creatures in space had to work if they were to survive, that is, without a glitch. That nothing malfunctioned was due, as well, to Adrian’s obsession with perfection, with his insistence on checking and rechecking everything. The ship had accelerated at one gravity past the orbits of Mars, of Jupiter, of Saturn, of Uranus, of Neptune, and finally of Pluto, and they had left the Solar System.

  That took thirteen days. Moving beyond the Oort Cloud consumed another four hundred days. After a hundred days more of plunging into the abyss—a year-and-a-half of living in enforced proximity to two hundred other people, smelling their body odors, hearing their familiar anecdotes, speech patterns, and throat clearings, and eating recycled food—their tempers shortened and their anxieties grew. By that time Jessica Buhler had isolated Cavendish’s program, and they had to fight the temptation to push the button that would put the ship back under their control and maybe cut them off forever from what had started them on this journey.

  “I remember all that,” Adrian said, rubbing his temples. “But what happened then?”

  Behind them the sun had dwindled into just another star, and although the stars were everywhere all the time, they could not escape the feeling of being far from everything that mattered. Then the blankness of space opened a blazing eye and glared at them.

  “It was like a white hole,” Frances said, “suddenly in front of us. . . .”

  Conflicting gravities tugged at their bodies, as if all their loose parts wanted to go in different directions, as if their internal organs were changing places. . . . The glare was blinding. Jessica reached out with a hand that seemed to know what it was doing and slapped off the external vision screens. The relative darkness was blessed, but the wrenchings continued. If time had existed, the sensations would have seemed to go on forever, but then the twistings and displacements stopped as if they had never been.

  The odor of fear filled the control room.

  “I think we’re in a wormhole,” Adrian said, as if that explained everything.

  “What’s that?” Frances asked. She was seated in one of the chairs in front of a panel that had been useless for control since the ship began moving. Now its readouts were gyrating wildly.

  “Some kind of distortion in space. Physicists have said they could exist, in theory, but nobody has ever seen one.”

  “What good is a wormhole?” Frances asked.

  “It’s supposed to take us somewhere else,” Adrian said. “We entered one mouth; presumably there’s another somewhere and the two are connected through hyperspace. Physicists thought they would look like black holes but without horizons.”

  “It looks more like a white hole,” Frances said.

  “Some scientists speculated that the relative motion of the wormhole mouths would boost the energy of the cosmic microwave background into visible light and create a kind of intense glare.”

  “Too bad they’ll never know they were right,” Jessica said. She was standing between Adrian and Frances with a hand on the back of each chair.

  “These things, these wormholes, they’re everywhere?” Frances said.

  Adrian shook his head. “Natural wormhole
s ought to be small and ephemeral. This one was created.”

  “Why would somebody create a wormhole?” Frances asked. She didn’t like anything that she couldn’t connect with something that she had read or seen.

  “To get from one part of the universe to another in a hurry. It may explain why Peter got a message in energetic cosmic rays. Sending a message over interstellar distances would have taken centuries, or millennia if the distances were really great. But if they were emitted from the end of the wormhole near the Solar System, the message would have arrived in little more than a year. And whoever is at the other end could have used it to know we were here, maybe even keep track of us.”

  “Surely they couldn’t see anything from here,” Jessica said. “Even the sun looked like just another star.”

  “They might be able to pick up energy transmissions, radio, television,” Adrian said. “Maybe that’s why they created it in the first place—because we started broadcasting back in the 1920s.”

  “This is so weird,” Frances said. “Who could do something like this?”

  “We couldn’t,” Adrian said. “Creatures far beyond our technical capabilities, maybe they could. What a physicist named Kip Thorne called ‘an infinitely advanced civilization.’ Damn! There’s no ‘maybe’ about it. They did it, so they could do it.”

  “You said wormholes ought to be ephemeral,” Jessica said. “This one seems to be persisting.”

  “So they not only had to create it,” Adrian said, “they had to keep it from collapsing. Scientists think that would take something they call ‘exotic matter,’ something with negative average energy density, one of whose characteristics would be that it would push the wormhole walls apart rather than letting them collapse.”

  “Like antigravity,” Jessica said.

  “So what does it all mean?” Frances asked.

  “We’re inside something that doesn’t belong to our reality,” Jessica said, “and it is going to take us, if we’re lucky, somewhere so far from Earth and our sun that we won’t even be able to identify them in the night sky.”

  “And if we’re not lucky?” Frances asked.

  “We could spend our lives in here,” Jessica said, “or have it collapse with us inside it, which might strand us in hyperspace, if we survived. I think that would be pretty bad.”

  “That’s about it,” Adrian said absently. He was looking at a pad of paper.

  “What’s wrong?” Frances asked. “Besides being lost.”

  Adrian showed them the pad. On it someone had written: make notes.

  “Seems like a good idea,” Frances said.

  “Sure,” Adrian said. “But I didn’t write it. That is, I don’t remember writing it. I remember that I will write it.” He looked confused.

  “I remember that,” Frances said. Her voice was excited. “But it won’t happen—”

  “What’s going on?” Jessica asked.

  Adrian drew a square around the words on his notepad and then constructed a square on each side. “Space is different inside a wormhole. Maybe time is, too. Space and time are part of the same continuum. We may be in for some strange effects. At some point, for instance, I’m going to say, ‘It’s as if there is no before and after.’ But that’s wrong. The before may come after the after.”

  “Like remembering what hasn’t happened yet?” Frances said as if she were making a joke.

  “And maybe not remembering what has already happened,” Jessica said.

  “‘It’s a poor sort of memory,’” Frances said, “‘that only works backward.’”

  “Why does it sound like you’re quoting from something?” Jessica asked. “Aside from the fact that you’re always quoting from something.”

  “It’s from Alice in Wonderland,” Frances said. “Or rather from the sequel, Through the Looking Glass, and the reason it comes to mind is that, like Alice, we’ve fallen into a rabbit hole, and in Wonderland everything is topsy-turvy.”

  “I don’t think we’re going to find any answers in children’s stories,” Jessica said.

  “I’ve always found Frances’ fictional precedents helpful,” Adrian said.

  “The point is,” Frances said, “that we’re going to experience something that is likely to make us crazy unless we have something to cling to.”

  “Like what?” Jessica asked skeptically.

  “When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, she encountered talking rabbits and caterpillars that smoked and cats that disappeared and who knows what all. Maybe we’re going to run into the same sorts of things. If we can treat it like a kind of wonderland experience, meeting the strange but not surrendering to it, we can cope.”

  A patter of feet came from beyond the hatchway that led to the rest of the ship. Frances and Jessica looked at each other and then at Adrian.

  “That sounded like children,” Jessica said.

  “‘Curiouser and curiouser,’” Frances said.

  In the middle of the night Adrian heard a rustling sound and something that sounded like a sigh. He pushed the switch beside his bunk, and overhead light flooded the tiny room. Jessica was standing just inside the open door, one arm out of the body stocking that was all she wore and the other arm halfway removed.

  “What’s going on?” Adrian asked, sitting up so suddenly the room spun around him.

  “I didn’t want to wake you,” Jessica said.

  “I mean, what are you doing in my room?”

  Jessica looked around, as if the question that Adrian had asked was being processed. “I don’t know. It seemed—natural,” she said. “But now I can’t remember why.”

  Adrian looked at the portions of Jessica’s body that had been revealed: the smoothness of her skin and the curvature of what seemed, under most circumstances, athletic and slender. It was as if he were seeing her for the first time as a woman instead of a member of the crew.

  “It’s this damned wormhole,” Jessica said, shrugging her arms back into the body stocking and closing the top with one stroke of her right hand.

  But it wasn’t the same as it had been before. Maybe it was because he had no imagination, Adrian thought, or maybe because his imagination was focused on distant goals, but now that he had seen Jessica as a woman it was difficult to see her as anything else. But he would, he knew; the wormhole would see to that.

  “What’s going on in here?” another voice asked from the doorway. It was Frances, solid and square in her pajamas, almost filling the space. The room was so small that she was standing next to Jessica.

  “That’s hard to say,” Adrian replied.

  Frances looked from Adrian to Jessica and back again. “Doesn’t look that difficult to me. If this were a romantic film, the next scene would show lovers springing apart guiltily, or waking up together. If this were a suspense film, they would be plotting some kind of caper. If it were a mystery, one would be planning to kill the other.”

  “It’s a farce,” Adrian said.

  “People wandering into each other’s rooms without any reason and finding themselves in embarrassing circumstances,” Jessica said.

  None of this eased Frances’ air of suspicion. “Oh, there’s a reason. There’s always a reason.”

  “You forget our wormhole inversions,” Adrian said. He had his feet planted firmly on the deck.

  “Whatever the problems we’re having with cause and effect,” Frances said, “a midnight meeting doesn’t happen by accident.” She frowned at Jessica as if they were in a contest and Jessica had broken the rules.

  “I admit it looks suspicious,” Jessica said, “but I wasn’t trying to seduce Adrian.”

  Adrian flinched. The deck didn’t seem so firm.

  “It just seemed natural,” Jessica said.

  “Of course it did,” Frances said.

  “You know what I mean. Not something that was planned. God knows we can’t do that inside this damned hole. Just something that seemed as if it had happened before.”

  “I’m not surprised,”
Frances said.

  “If it did,” Jessica said.

  “And it didn’t,” Adrian said.

  “You keep out of this,” Frances and Jessica said almost simultaneously.

  Adrian looked from one to the other. Frances started laughing. “You look like Cary Grant in The Awful Truth.” Then her expression sobered. “We really need to come to an understanding.”

  “I know,” Jessica said. “If we get out of this place, we’re going to need children.”

  “They don’t have to be his,” Frances said. “There are lots of other men.”

  “We can’t afford to waste any genetic material,” Jessica said. “Chances are we’ll never get back. Or if we get back, it may be in the remote past or the distant future. We may be all that’s left of the human species. All of space-going humanity anyway.”

  “That’s as it may be,” Frances says. “But what’s to say I couldn’t have children?”

  “No reason you couldn’t,” Jessica said. She put her arm around Francis’ shoulder. “We’ve got doctors and we downloaded to our computers all the medical information available. Your uterus might not be up to the pregnancy bit, but your ova may well be harvestable.”

  “Thanks,” Frances said. “But there’s the emotion part.”

  Jessica hugged Frances harder. “We’re going to have to get over that part. There’s too much at stake.”

  Frances smiled and put her hand over Jessica’s. “That’s settled then. I’m glad we had this talk.”

  Jessica smiled back. “Me, too. I just wish we could remember it later.”

  Adrian looked from one to the other. “Wait a minute! What’s going on here?”

  “None of your business,” Jessica and Frances said together.

  “Come on, now,” Adrian said, feeling confused and maybe frightened. “You’re disposing of me like a prize cow—”

  “Bull,” Frances said.

  “And you say it’s none of my business?”