Gift From The Stars

by Gunn, James

“And I said there was no way to do that,” Adrian said, “or any reason to think going twice as fast would get us anywhere.” He looked around at the control room. In spite of the glare, for the first time he was seeing things clearly—Frances, Jessica, the aliens and their plans. “We’ve been trying to reconcile the irreconcilables, the time anomalies, our own inability to adjust to inversions and potentials.”

  Jessica looked at him hopefully, the way an apprentice looked at her master, anticipating wisdom.

  “We’ve got to turn the ship around,” Adrian said. He turned to the controls. “Go back the way we came. If we were in real space, we’d have to decelerate for as long as we’ve accelerated, but this is hyperspace and we haven’t moved far from where we entered.”

  “Let me do it,” Jessica said. She began punching instructions into the computer. “But isn’t that just giving up?”

  “Maybe,” Adrian said. He tried to isolate a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. Maybe it was giving up. “Logically we should come out the way we came in, and then everything will have been for nothing—all our psychological torment, the felt years of experience, Frances’ sacrifice—”

  “But maybe not?” Jessica said.

  Adrian could feel the ship swinging even though there was nothing to see, no way to get information from gauges, nothing but glare. . . .

  Something surged.

  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. Then the glare and the gravity fluctuations stopped suddenly. Adrian and Jessica looked at each other, remembering everything that had happened or might have happened inside the wormhole. They turned to look at the vision screens. The glare was gone. Outside was the blackness of space with here and there the pinpoint hole of a star. It could have been anywhere in the galaxy, including back near the spot from which they had been drawn into the wormhole.

  Jessica adjusted the controls and new arenas of space swam into view. The stars were few and distant. A single star loomed closest, but it was old and faint.

  “That isn’t our solar system,” Jessica said. “That isn’t our sun.”

  Adrian shook his head. “Wherever we were going, we’ve arrived.”

  “How did you figure it out?” Jessica asked.

  “If time was inverted,” Adrian said, “maybe space was, too. In order to get out, we had to reverse our course. But then, I had some help.” He thought about the other Adrian, who now would never exist, except maybe in the never-never world of the wormhole, and how he had caught up with him only when he went the other way. But maybe that never-never existence, like that of the children and maybe even of Cavendish, was as real as any other. “Maybe I’ll tell you some time.”

  “Meanwhile,” he continued, “I think we have managed our rite of passage and have a rendezvous with destiny.”

  “Whatever that means,” Jessica said.

  Adrian smiled at her. There would be great moments ahead, he thought, and moments of tenderness and fulfillment and maybe distress and regret and pain. But it would be living.

  He heard a noise behind him and turned toward the entrance.

  “Frances?” he said. “Frances?”

  For who would lose,

  Though full of pain, this intellectual being,

  These thoughts that wander through eternity,

  To perish rather, swallow’d up and lost

  In the wide womb of uncreated night,

  Devoid of sense and motion?

  JOHN MILTON, PARADISE LOST

  Part Five

  UNCREATED NIGHT

  THE IMAGE IN THE VISION SCREENS frightened Frances in ways she could not identify.

  The small K-type star hung against the backdrop of empty space like a lantern set out for the weary traveler. Beyond loomed the impenetrable night of the intergalactic void. Behind glowed the remote swarm of what Adrian thought was the Milky Way galaxy. In front of the spaceship from Earth waited the goal of their long journey, this odd single planet, a bit larger than Mars but smaller than Earth, in an eccentric orbit around an old sun, here at stars’ end.

  The battered spaceship had been making its way toward the strange system for six months at one-gravity acceleration and six months more at one-gravity deceleration. A year of travel after their emergence from the wormhole that had spit them out on the far edge of what might be still the local galaxy. “But it could be any galaxy, couldn’t it?” Frances asked. “What’s distance to a wormhole? If it’s like jumping across a folded sheet of paper, one place is as close as any other.”

  Frances stood behind Adrian and Jessica. They were seated in the control room of the ship they had decided to call Ad Astra but Frances insisted on referring to as Aspera—since she had suffered from space sickness and other problems during the trip. The control room provided evidence of long occupation: the air was thick with humidity and the odors of imperfect human bodies and not-quite-perfect machines, paint was worn down to bare metal in places, panels were dented, gauges flickered or were dark. But the vision screens were clear, and what they revealed was disturbing.

  “True,” Adrian said, “but it’s difficult enough to keep track of intelligent life in one galaxy. Why cross intergalactic space? What could be the purpose of that?”

  “What could be the purpose of sending spaceship plans across the galaxy and building a wormhole to bring us here?” Jessica asked.

  That question had propelled them and their crew across measureless space and across twenty-five years from its obscure beginning. And a disorienting few hours—or many subjective years—in the wormhole had brought them to the place where they could see their journey’s destination. But they still had no answers to the question of why the aliens had sent them the plans, what the aliens wanted from humanity—or any other creature who might receive those cosmic rays and have the scientific understanding to record them and the wit to decipher them and the technology to turn them into a vessel capable of traversing space. Did they want to help humanity, or themselves? Were they benefactors or predators, or simply disinterested observers? These were the questions that had toppled the original genius, Peter Cavendish, over the precipice edge of sanity into the chasm of madness.

  And now they were close to their destination and maybe to their answers. The little world they were approaching seemed to be studded with objects like cloves in a Christmas orange. When they got near enough they realized the studs were spaceships like their own. Or maybe not quite like their own, and maybe only the starting point for new questions. Like: what were all those other strange ships doing in orbit around the little planet? It was like a Sargasso of space. They had thought the message was a summons just to them, but maybe the invitation had been broadcast to the universe and they were only the last to respond. . . .

  Within a few hundred kilometers from the world—if that was what it was—Adrian and his fellow travelers could make out finer detail on the vision screens of the control cabin. The ships were of many sizes and shapes and colors, as if the only thing they had in common was that they could traverse space. Some of the colors were so strange that the viewers could scarcely perceive them—or the vision screens could scarcely record them.

  “Maybe,” Adrian said, “they come from places that radiate mainly in the infrared or ultraviolet.” He was seated in front of the main forward vision screen, at a control panel whose purpose was mostly psychological; the computers handled everything except intentions.

  Some of the shapes seemed to twist into another dimension and disappear, or the human eye was not trained to follow their pathways.

  When they were close enough they saw that the ships were arranged symmetrically around the world, like the outdated concept of electrons around a nucleus. “Must be hundreds of them,” Jessica said, standing behind Adrian, on her hip a three-month-old baby clad only in a diaper.

  “None of them human,” Frances added grimly. She was standing beside Jes
sica as if ready to catch the baby if it fell from its perch, even though, in weightlessness, it would fall gently if at all.

  “No prejudice,” Adrian said. “We’re aliens among aliens, and we’re likely to suffer as much from discrimination as they are.”

  They guided the Ad Astra around the little world, studying the ships and looking at the world they orbited with emotions ranging from concern to dismay. The planet was not much larger than Mars. It had a surface that was rocky in most places and in others softened, perhaps, by areas of sand. There was no sign of water and no perceptible atmosphere. It was a rocky asteroid blown up to planet size.

  The motley collection of ships around it offered no evidence of life, no light, no exhalations of rocket or waste exhaust. The ships orbited in silence. The Ad Astra found an empty place in the shell—there weren’t many—and eased itself into it. And waited. And waited.

  “Nobody seems in any hurry to welcome us,” Jessica said. She was slender and athletic and seemed as comfortable in weightlessness as under deceleration, but Frances was swallowing and the baby seemed as happy as if it were still floating in the womb.

  “What is one more guest among so many?” Adrian said.

  “You think they’re all in the same situation?” Frances asked. She held out her arms for the baby and Jessica surrendered him without hesitation.

  “I think they all got the same message, or a similar one,” Adrian said. “Some a lot sooner than us, or they were prepared to receive it sooner, or they deciphered it sooner.”

  Some of the ships looked far older than the Ad Astra, as if they had been in space—bombarded by space dust—for centuries, maybe even millennia.

  “If they got the same plans,” Jessica said, “why are they so different?”

  “Maybe they got plans suited to their own technologies and cultures,” Adrian said.

  “Or maybe they got the same plans,” Frances said, making faces at the baby, distracted from her zero-gravity unease, “and read them differently, like people reading the same novel or watching the same movie.”

  “If that’s the case,” Jessica said, “we may spend a long time waiting for the welcome wagon. Whoever the others are, and whoever brought us here, probably doesn’t have the same concept of hospitality, or of courtesy.” She took the baby back from Frances. “It’s time for Bobby’s nap,” she said. The baby didn’t complain, as if it were accustomed to being parented by many different adults.

  “I don’t know why you call him ‘Bobby,’” Frances said.

  “We have enough Adrians,” Jessica said.

  “Only four,” Frances said.

  “And at least one on the way,” Jessica said. She moved out of the control room toward the ship’s living quarters.

  “They could have longer lives than we do,” Adrian mused, “and thus time doesn’t have the same urgency. Particularly if they’ve been in this business for thousands of years.”

  “What business is that?” Frances asked.

  Adrian waved his hand at the display of ships on the vision screens. “The contact business. The summons business. Bringing sentient species here. We thought it was just us, but it wasn’t. The message seems to have been intended for any technological species. But if that is the case, why are they still here?”

  Frances clenched her hands around the armrests of her chair. “I didn’t want to mention it in front of Jessie, but this is like a Sargasso of space. Ships are stuck, unable to move, unable to leave.”

  “You’ve been reading too much romantic fiction again,” Adrian said.

  “All this may be the realization of poor Peter’s worst fears. The aliens’ purpose in sending the plans was to collect specimens, or to restock their larder.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Adrian said. “There are easier and cheaper ways to get food.”

  “But not specimens,” Frances said. “The zookeeper doesn’t even have to send out an expedition; the specimens come to him and deliver themselves up.”

  “Now you’re into the horror genre,” Adrian said.

  “Or maybe sick comedy.”

  “So what do you recommend?” Adrian asked. “That we turn around and go back? It’s going to take a while to replenish our antimatter supply, particularly from this old sun. And even if we had the fuel, how are we going to face traveling all this way and going back without any answers?”

  “Maybe we should knock on a few doors,” Frances said.

  “That sounds like human impatience,” Adrian said. “And, as Jessie pointed out, we’re not sure how the aliens welcome newcomers, if at all. Maybe we have to prove our good intentions by waiting; maybe a decent interval is an essential element in civilized relationships.”

  “Maybe it’s hazing,” Frances said.

  “Let’s give it a better name: an initiation ceremony. We’ll wait a reasonable time, and in the meanwhile, we’ll send out our antimatter collectors to replenish our fuel supply, just in case we need to leave in a hurry.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Frances said. “Are there any other antimatter collectors in orbit around that weak nuclear furnace they have for a sun?”

  “Not that we can detect,” Adrian said. “But our instruments may not be sensitive enough, or the other collectors may not be the same design, any more than the spaceships that brought them.”

  So they sent their antimatter collectors to orbit the K-type sun and waited. And waited.

  After thirty-five days—they still counted days and weeks and even months— human impatience being what it is, they decided to do something. Frances had said a week was long enough and Jessica, a month, but Adrian wanted to give the aliens more time. Finally he decided that five weeks was sufficient delay, for the human crew if not for the aliens. “It may be unwise to investigate the other ships,” Adrian said. “Even if we knew how to enter one; even if we knew they were empty. And they probably aren’t. They’re probably filled with aliens doing their alien things.”

  “You mean, it would be like us going around to the other guests at the party, asking impertinent questions, like why they got invited, what they know about the hosts?” Frances said.

  “That leaves the planet itself,” Jessica said.

  “But what is there to look at?” Frances asked.

  “There must be something there,” Jessica said. “Clearly the other ships think it’s the focus of something, and clearly it is what drew us—and them—here.”

  Adrian’s fingers moved over the buttons of the control panel. “I’ve been using our ground-penetrating radar. There seem to be cavities.” He motioned toward the screen.

  “Caves?” Jessica asked.

  “Or tunnels. And scattered across that landscape”—Adrian motioned once more toward a scene that now showed, close-up, the surface of the planet—“are hot-spots. They look like ordinary rocks but they are hotter than their neighbors by one hundred degrees or more.”

  “If the aliens live inside, they would need to get rid of waste heat,” Jessica said. “Particularly if they use a lot of machinery.”

  Frances looked back and forth between them, as if she were a spectator at a tennis match.

  “And they would have to use a lot of machinery to live inside,” Adrian said, “and those might well be radiators. They can recycle air and water and whatever else they find essential, but they can’t recycle heat.”

  “So,” Frances said, “they live inside. With a world like that, it makes sense. But how do we get in to let them know we’re here?”

  “That’s a good question,” Jessica said. “If they have camouflaged their radiators, it may mean they don’t want to be found.”

  “But they brought us here—all this way!” Frances said.

  “Maybe,” Adrian said, “they want to be found but not too easily.”

  They looked at each other. It was another question whose answer could only be discovered by pursuing it to the end. “We’ll never know,” Adrian said finally, “until we make th
e effort. Radar suggests several places where the tunnels—if that is what they are—approach the surface. We can’t just sit here; it’s not just us—the rest of the crew is getting restless. I am, too. I suggest we go down and see.”

  Frances insisted on being a member of the exploration team. It would give her a chance, she said, to feel real gravity again. Jessica, however, was placed in command of the expedition to the surface because of her greater athleticism and quicker reflexes, and both Frances and Jessica insisted that Adrian was too essential to the Ad Astra and its crew to risk on this kind of mission. Since he was a reasonable man, he agreed, but he grumbled about not being among those who would experience the culmination of their long labors.

  “If you’re comparing yourself to Moses,” Frances said, “remember that he died before he saw the Promised Land. At least you’re still alive.”

  “And, unless we run into real trouble, there will be other opportunities to get our questions answered,” Jessica said.

  “And if we do run into real trouble,” Frances added, “you’ll still be here to try something else.”

  So, in a small craft powered by chemical rockets, they went down to the surface, Frances and Jessica, a pilot, and two sturdy engineers. They landed gently enough for a pilot who hadn’t had much experience in small craft and none in landings on airless planets of this size. “We’re here,” Jessica said shakily. Frances noticed that she had been holding her breath. She had been doing that a lot lately.

  They were dressed for vacuum, complete with helmets, and the voices came by way of intercoms. The surface of the planet was airless, and even if they found a way inside the likelihood of the air there being breathable , or, if breathable, not poisonous to humans, was close to zero.

  They stood upon this ancient world, feet planted firmly in dust and rock, and looked around at the unpromising landscape: rocks, rocks, and more rocks illuminated by the feeble orange rays of the sun. Frances looked up at where the Ad Astra had orbited and saw scattered glints of orange where sunlight touched ships, probably not the Ad Astra, which had moved on since they had left it.