“And yet,” Suleiman said in Anglaic, “God is ultimately unknowable. As a child, I believed that the way to God lay in study of the Holy Koran, and later that the way to enlightenment and perhaps some knowledge of God, insofar as he chose to reveal himself, lay in the study of the sciences. But I have come to comprehend the truth of what the believers have always known, that God is ultimately transcendent and unknowable.”
The air of the Seeker’s Heart felt colder; Mahala shivered. “Why did you come aboard the Seeker?” she asked.
“I had my reasons, most of which could probably be summed up as being curious and wanting to engage in an entirely new human enterprise. Now it seems as though I was led here, that others might have been led here, for an entirely different purpose.”
She did not want to ask the next question, but sensed that Suleiman expected it of her. “And what is that purpose?” she asked.
“We can never be certain of any of God’s attributes except for those he chooses to reveal,” Suleiman said, “but we can know his will for us through the Holy Koran and the Law. I shall admit something to you, Mahala. When I knew that another intelligence existed in the universe, that it was calling out to us, doubt and skepticism overtook me. You see, I knew what Islam would demand of us, that we bring God’s Word to those beings, that they be brought under the rule of God’s Law, and I came to see that as an imposition, as a cruelty, as a way perhaps of denying our species the truths that a society of alien minds might impart to us, assuming that we were capable even of understanding what they might be able to tell us.”
“Your faith once demanded the same for Earth,” Mahala murmured.
“That is true, and the Council of Mukhtars came to power, and Islamic law came to govern all of Earth, and because of that, believers could be merciful to unbelievers. In the Dar al-Islam, Muslims could allow others to follow their traditional customs and ways, to practice their own beliefs, for the Shari’a, the Way, remained open to all who were willing to choose it. One cannot revoke divine law, but one can choose not to enforce it when that seems advisable.”
He paused. “But how can we apply this to other species,” he went on, “to nonhumans? God’s Word and God’s Law were meant for all sentient beings. How do we tell any aliens of God’s Messenger Muhammad, may his name be forever blessed, and of the truths God revealed to his Prophet? What would we have to do if they are able to understand our words, yet still refuse to heed them? What if we realize that they will never know what we are saying to them at all, that too wide a gap divides us? What if instead of leaving themselves open to submission to the Way, whatever practices they might follow in the meantime, they turn away from the truth completely and reject it? Some of us might choose mercy and tolerance. But others might argue, with some justice, that a jihad, a Holy War, is required to bring the unbelievers to the truth.”
“No,” Mahala whispered.
“Now I pray that we are unable to understand them,” Suleiman said, “that we will not be able to communicate with them, that the gap between our species remains unbridgeable. For if we cannot reach out to them, then we would be under no obligation to tell them of God’s Word. They would be completely unknowable to us, and we to them.”
He leaned forward, and his gaze was filled with an intensity that made her draw back from him. “Perhaps God has designed things that way so that our species can disperse itself throughout all of God’s creation, but without cruelty and bloodshed. We may receive signals from others, we may travel to their worlds, but I pray that they will remain forever alien to us, forever unknown.”
Mahala thrust out an arm. “Suleiman—” she began.
“You think I am mad,” he said. “I see it in your face, Mahala.” He looked more like his old self now, with his half-smile and his usual skeptical, slightly mocking expression. “But such musings have enabled me to submit to God’s Will once more and to accept what he has ordained for me. I can hope that we will not find what we are seeking, that God will show us that mercy, and that has brought me a kind of peace.”
She got to her feet, bowed her head slightly in his direction, then left him sitting outside his mosque.
Mahala took to roaming around more widely in the Seeker’s Heart more often after that, sometimes following the stone walkways or the paths through our gardens, sometimes wandering into the wilder, more untamed regions of the environment. A few cycles after her encounter with Suleiman, she followed a trail through a wooded area to a cliff dotted with caves and found crosses or holo images of the Virgin Mary and her Son Jesus in almost every cave entrance. The people there welcomed her, invited her to share a meal with them, but did not stop her when she left them before they gathered to say their prayers. During another sojourn, she found what seemed to be a kind of shrine, a pavilion that had been raised over an image of the Buddha. Occasionally, she came upon wooden structures where a lone person was praying or meditating; she often could not tell the difference and hesitated to interrupt those she found at their devotions.
How many people were wandering into the Seeker’s Heart or living there for long periods, engaged in prayer, contemplation, metaphysical musings, readings, and other spiritual pursuits? Mahala asked that question of us, but we could not give her a precise answer. Those who sought such consolations did not often open their Links while engrossed in them and did not usually share such thoughts with us at other times. Our estimate was that some fifty to one hundred thousand people inside the Seeker were occasionally or largely occupied in matters involving the practices of the unverifiable beliefs that they called their faiths, but that was only an estimate. There might have been others who harbored such notions, but who kept them to themselves.
“What is going to happen to us,” Mahala asked, “if even more people fall under this metaphysical spell?” She was asking that question of Benzi, who was on the bridge, and of Ragnar, Ah Lin Bergen, and Tomas Sechen, who were there with them, but she was also asking it of us. To her, those like Suleiman seemed as lost as people who were caught in the trap of endless synthetic experience.
“This is what we get,” Mahala continued, “for wanting so many of our kind on this journey. Perhaps a smaller ship with fewer but saner people would have been better.”
Ragnar shrugged; what others chose to do, as long as it did not affect the Seeker’s mission, was their concern and not his. In that, he reflected our conclusions about the faith-seekers.
Ah Lin said, “There isn’t much we can do to stop them.”
Tomas said, “There isn’t anything we should do to stop them. They’ll find whatever it is they’re looking for and then they’ll rejoin our community, or else they’ll go on searching. The Seeker is our universe now, until we reach our destination. If getting there at last doesn’t bring our spiritual wanderers back to us, nothing will.”
Mahala was troubled by dreams.
Occasionally, she woke abruptly from a recurring dream where she felt herself to be embedded in a thick ebony substance, unable to move, blinded because no light was able to reach her. At other times, she dreamed of running after something without knowing what it was and being unable to catch up with it. As the Seeker continued to decelerate, the dreams passed.
More of the Seeker’s people were forming into various loosely connected groups or bands, gathering with others to study the data we were collecting, to learn new disciplines, or simply to lose themselves in meditation or physical exercise inside the Seeker’s Heart. Mahala found a renewed satisfaction in the company of others and in using her old training as a physician to listen to and advise the more troubled of her comrades.
As Tomas Sechen had predicted, more of those who had been caught up in metaphysical musings were soon rejoining the life of the Seeker’s community. Many of these people shared some of their thoughts and feelings with our net, in the hope that the data provided by their experiences might be useful. We glimpsed human minds that had struggled to a kind of serenity and faith and others who would continue t
o question and seek and doubt. We learned that a new desire had flowered in many of them during their search, replacing the longing for a faith in some of them, and the seeds of that longing were soon passed to others of the human spacefarers.
They wanted new people to join them aboard the Seeker. They longed for children. Yet they hesitated, concerned about what lay ahead, about the ethics of bringing children into existence before they knew what awaited us at our destination. We offered them no guidance, no advice; this was a matter they had to decide by themselves.
They chose to wait.
As the Seeker decelerated, our destination star again became visible; the bright point became a cluster and the heavens gradually transformed themselves into a field of stars. The alien signal was audible once more, singing to us, as we approached the outermost planet of this system, a lifeless mass of ice and rock. We swept toward the star, a G-2 yellow-white star so closely resembling our sun that it might have been its twin, in a long arc, noting the presence of three ringed gas giants in the outer reaches of this system and the two smaller planets nearer their sun, two hot dry worlds with atmospheres of carbon dioxide, planets that Mahala could almost imagine as the sisters of Venus.
Mahala was often on the bridge as we continued toward the alien beacon that orbited the innermost of the two Venusian worlds. Hundreds came to the bridge, crowding around the screens, while others watched on screens in their quarters or Linked themselves to our sensors. Some accepted what we had discovered here as soon as it was verified by our readings, while others continued to hope for more, but all of them had at last accepted the truth when we were within a million kilometers of the alien artifact.
The beacon was a solid round object some four kilometers in diameter. Our scanners could not see into its solid core, and as we sent out our answering call, the alien voices abruptly fell silent. There was no alien life in this system, as we had seen while falling toward its sun; unless some primitive strain of microbial life existed on any of the planets, there was no life at all. We had come six hundred light-years only to reaffirm what we already knew; that another intelligence existed in the universe, and that we might never have contact with that intelligence.
“We are here,” they had told us, and we had gone to them. Now they were mute, and Mahala feared that their voices would never speak to us again. Suleiman would call it God’s mercy, that humankind knew of this alien intelligence without being able to reach out to it. She tried to take some solace in that thought.
We remained in that star system for a time, mapping its planets, confirming that there was no life on any of them, and struck by the resemblance of the planetary bodies to those of our solar system. The alien beacon remained silent and impenetrable to us, and gradually all of our people accepted the truth.
Humankind would have to search for the beacon’s creators elsewhere; we would find nothing of them in this system. There was no life here, and it was probable, based on the data gathered by our sensors and probes, that none had ever existed.
We had come this far, but contact with the alien was never our sole purpose, only the motivation human beings had needed to undertake their long journey. There was still the hope of return, of going back to see what had become of the worlds we had left behind. There was still the hope for children, young people who would not have to live out all of their lives inside a nomad with no destination.
Children would come to the Seeker. The spacefarers would take our children, the children of their bodies and the children of our net, back to our home.
Home
27
A year and a half after we had left the alien star system, measured in our time, Mahala went to the chamber to prepare for sleep and for oblivion. By then, the extreme disappointment many of our human companions had felt at finding only a silent alien beacon, with no sign as to where its creators might be found, had faded.
Perhaps the alien signal had been designed to draw other intelligences capable of interstellar space travel into exploring the universe. Perhaps, Mahala thought, the aliens meant to reveal themselves only after more of her species had ventured beyond their home system. Maybe the aliens would call out to humanity again when people had loosed themselves from more of the ties that still bound them to the past; Mahala was thinking of Suleiman Khan then and his words about unknowable aliens and God’s mercy. She had been quick to see him as deluded by his beliefs, but now, as she contemplated the vast distances between the stars and the temporal displacements of relativistic space travel, it seemed possible to her that an unknowable God might have shown his creatures some mercy by creating such formidable barriers, which would allow each of his life-forms the isolation they might require to attain the wisdom that would be needed before they met other alien mentalities.
We would also be returning to the solar system with our observations of a star system that bore intriguing resemblances to our own. Its star was of a yellow spectral class identical to the sun, while its three gas giants, each with several small moons, were much like Saturn and Neptune. A belt of asteroids orbited the star in a band midway between the gas giants and the two inner planets. We had mapped those two inner planets, with their thick clouds that gave off so much light that they seemed to Mahala like pearls, and had sent our probes to their surfaces, and had seen Venus as she might have been two billion years ago.
Fanciful notions came to Mahala then: Perhaps the aliens had meant for human beings to come here and find those worlds, to make new Earths of them as humankind was already doing with their distant sister world of Venus; and perhaps when we had transformed them, the beings who had signaled to us would return to this system at last and reveal themselves.
Ragnar accompanied Mahala to the chamber, as he had before. Again she dreamed as she slept, this time of rushing toward a world where time was passing so rapidly that every observable event was a blur. Houses inside transparent domes rose and fell and sprang up once more in new patterns; dusters of domes formed on dark plains in an instant; thick clouds evaporated into white wisps; green masses grew until they encompassed continents. It came to her, after she awoke, that she had been dreaming of Venus.
Ragnar was at her side, helping her up gently as she came to herself. She searched his face and saw the distant look she remembered in his grayish-blue eyes, the expression that always reminded her that there were still parts of him that she would never know.
“There is no one left who remembers us,” he said.
“We knew that some time ago,” Mahala murmured.
“I meant there may be no one left who remembers this voyage and the Seeker’s mission.” He held her, not speaking for a while, as others began to wake around them.
Less than twenty years remained of our voyage in relativistic time, but Mahala sensed no time passing as she took up the threads of her life again. She recalled the first time that she had traveled from Oberg to Turing as a child, when she had imagined that the airship might continue on an endless journey, and that she and her fellow passengers would be suspended forever in the restful interlude between what they had left behind and where they were headed; that notion had filled her with an unexpected pleasure.
Mahala was one of those whose medical and biological knowledge had equipped her for helping others during this new stage in our voyage, and yet she felt apprehensive. Having children among the spacefarers would destroy the illusion she could sometimes create of time standing still, of feeling that the people she had left behind might be alive after all. Bringing new human beings to life here seemed an admission that they might be the only remaining members of their species and that the Seeker might become their only world. The rest of humankind might have died out, transformed itself, divided into thousands of unrecognizable species that might be as strange to her and her comrades as any alien.
If so, Mahala concluded, then they had even more of an obligation to build a true human community aboard the Seeker.
A number of choices were available to the spacefare
rs for the creation of the new generation. A gestating embryo might carry the genes of two parents, several people, or only one; instead of simply ensuring that each child was free of obvious physical, mental, or hormonal disabilities, certain qualities could be enhanced through gene manipulation. Mahala found herself increasingly relied upon as an advisor to those who wanted children. To her surprise, almost every prospective parent she counseled decided to use the most conservative and least intrusive biological techniques. Later, she came to see this as an attempt to hold on to a comforting familiarity, an effort by her fellow voyagers to maintain their bond with humankind’s past. The descendants of the spacefarers might eventually choose a more divergent path, but the Seeker would preserve the species as they knew it.
The rooms where our people had slept were transformed into incubators. It soon became customary for parents to visit the ectogenetic chambers where their offspring were gestating. This was ostensibly to monitor that process, and yet it also seemed that most of them were drawn to the chambers by deeper instincts, by an urge to bond with their young even before birth. The parents were also present when their infants were removed from the artificial wombs, an occasion marked by subdued but joyous celebrations. The children were regarded as the children of all, and each child had a number of adults to serve as caretakers, nurses, teachers, and mentors, but the biological parents of the children tended to spend more time than others with their offspring and to develop stronger bonds with them.
We also had reason to welcome these young human beings. We would be able to Link ourselves to fresh youthful minds, and to acquire new perspectives.
During her earlier life, Mahala had rarely thought of becoming a biological parent herself. That possibility had seemed to lie far in her future, after she had sated her curiosity, become more skilled at her work, established her social bonds with her community, fulfilled some of her obligations to the Venus Project, visited new places, and decided what kind of life she wanted within the context of a relatively stable society.
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