by Ian Whates
FAR DISTANT SUNS
NORMAN SPINRAD
Norman Spinrad is the author of over twenty novels, including Bug Jack Baron, The Iron Dream, Child of Fortune, Greenhouse Summer, and The Druid King. He has also written some sixty published short stories collected in half a dozen volumes, and his work has appeared in about fifteen languages. His most recent novel in English is He Walked Among Us (Tor, April 2010). His teleplays include the classic Star Trek, “The Doomsday Machine”, and he has produced feature films Druids and La Sirene. He is a long time literary critic, sometime film critic, perpetual political analyst, and sometime songwriter. In addition, he has been a radio phone show host and a vocal artist on three albums. He occasionally performs live. He’s been a literary agent, and President of the Science Fiction Writers of America and World SF. Norman grew up in New York, has lived in Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and Paris, and travelled widely in Europe and rather less so in Latin America, Asia, and Oceania.
OF COURSE WE knew we came from one in the distant past. We knew that Homo sapiens evolved on the surface of a planet called Earth with a stable orbit around a star. And indeed we still calculate our base unit of absolute time, what we still call the ‘year,’ as the duration of its full orbit around that star, and all our units of time as fractions or multiples of that so-called ‘year.’
What other absolute unit of time could be possible for the diverse clade of civilizations that we have become, inhabiting hundreds, if not thousands, of everything from planetary-sized bodies to entirely manufactured habitats to archipelagos of bits and pieces, all tumbling and jumbling their merry ways through the sea of space between the few and distant stars as we slowly expand and exfoliate through it?
And of course we knew that the lights in our firmament were stars, and our instruments told us just what stars are – globes of largely hydrogen gases of a sufficient mass for their gravity to induce a stable fusion reaction akin to the miniature versions we use to power every human habit and enterprise.
My specialty is comparative xenological anthropology, the study of the alien civilizations we have never met and know only from their broadcasts and probes, isolated as we are, isolated as they are, by the absolute limit of the speed of light.
Some century in the far future, our slow but steady advance, expanding our sphere of habitation through the sea of ejected planets, planetoids, rocks and pebbles, and assorted other debris of birthing ‘solar systems’ that form the rich galactic soup upon which we feed and from which we build may intersect with one of theirs. But in this era, comparative xenological anthropology has remained a frustrating science, or, as some say, hardly a science at all.
Although, or perhaps because of that, I have at least gained a certain general notoriety and professional standing in the scientific sphere by extending comparative xenological anthropology to the study of the cultures of our own beginning species on the planet ‘Earth’. After all, the word ‘anthropology’ originally meant exactly that, since at the time it was coined our distant ancestors hardly had the concept that other intelligent species inhabited the galaxy at all. And it isn’t as if our ancestors, even before they began escaping the gravity well of their planetary surface, hadn’t created a complex information storage technology so that much has survived even the millennia between then and now.
So I knew that there were two words in every language our species had ever evolved for these stellar phoenix phenomena that had spewed forth the chaos of debris into what otherwise would have been an empty void, thus condemning us to being eternally wandering sailors in arkologies and caravans. Could the material exist to build them, and if we could exist in such a galaxy at all.
And not only did I believe I knew why, but I had published an explanation which had gained general acceptance in circles where such things were of interest. Namely that what to us appeared as points of light and which the ancients had called ‘stars’ appeared as something else on a planet in a so-called stable solar system up close to a ‘sun,’ so that they didn’t even comprehend that they were the same things until they had devised sufficient instrumentation, and so they had two words for what appeared to be two different phenomena.
I knew, but I didn’t understand until I stood there at the bottom of a planetary gravity well like the natives, watching a sun arising from the star-spangled crystalline blackness of our home, like one reality blasting its way into another.
Contrary to a hoary maxim whose origin is lost in the mists of time, getting there was not at all half the fun.
We had detected something like a hundred artifact-creating species in our arm of the galaxy, and some of them seemed to possess technologies which we presently did not, and which we had long yearned to study first-hand; but faster-than-light travel was not among them and never would be, and so they were out of our reach.
But then a probe that had been sent out less than two ‘centuries’ ago (a ‘century’ being the measure of one hundred ‘years’) broadcast back imagery and data from a planet about forty ‘light years’ out, (a light year being the distance light traveled in a year), which, with our now-current technology, was within our reach, if barely.
It would take about a century to get there and a century to get back but only forty years to transmit the data and imagery, and the time-dilation effect of moving at a significant portion of the speed of light would lessen the biological time expended to go and return ourselves, so it could be done within a single human lifespan.
And there was a very good reason indeed to attempt such an arduous journey, no more so than to myself. The planetary biosphere had evolved a sapient species of lithe warm-blooded saurian-appearing creatures, and while these lithe saurians had yet to even reach outside their planetary gravity well, they had built actual cities of a primitive level.
So as luck would happen, if one could deem such a situation luck, this primitive civilization of sapient saurians was the closest to our tribes of civilizations now only extending our tendrils into the fringes of the Oort Cloud of nearby Centaurus; which of course was the only reason to choose it for our first expedition to the habitation of another intelligent species.
Which is to say because it was the only possible choice.
Convincing the scientific and financial spheres to do it was in the end more arduous than the voyage itself, which we slept through in relatively blissful hibernated sleep. The considerable effort and energy to build and launch the vessel was not the main issue, although it took no little appeal to public romanticism to pressure the economic sphere to finance it. The main objection came from the scientific sphere itself.
Something called the ‘prime directive’ of comparative xenological anthropology, whose origin was lost in time, the gist of which was that it would be immoral to meddle in the evolution of any civilization more primitive than our own. If nothing more, then at least a kind of anthropological Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, that our very presence would interfere with and change what we were studying.
This seemed idiotic to me, since after all, we would dearly love to have some sapient species more advanced than ourselves arrive with knowledge and technology beyond our ken, and I repeatedly said so.
The clincher finally came as another and far more sensible dictum which I at length discovered. The very first probe our ancestors had sent into the sea of interstellar space bore a message that said it all – “to learn if we are fortunate, to teach if we are called upon to teach.”
Once this was taken into the philosophical sphere the issue was finally decided in my favor, that is, once I had compromised by accepting what I considered unnecessary “rules of engagement.” Observation from a distance only. No meeting with the natives, not so much as a revelation of our existence. No landing on the planetary surface.
The voyage itself passed without incident, or, if there were one, we slept through it, and as required, we put our vessel in a synchronous orbit around a gas giant, which would have kept us out of view even if the sau
rians had advanced telescopes, which they did not. We sent down probes, and when they confirmed that the natives had no aerial technology, we sent down manned skiffs; though they were not to dip into visibility from the surface, let alone land, though this was agreed upon against my strenuous objections.
The full report of this imagery and data is part of this data packet, but before anyone plows through it at random, be advised that the most bizarre and existentially important phenomenon observed from afar and one which I suspect will have drastic impact on our own cultures is how thoroughly the natives are in thrall to their sun.
A species that built large flat habitats, that had fairly sophisticated power sources – internal combustion engines, hydroelectric generators, steam generators, and so forth – and yet they allowed their sun to dominate all their planetary cultures.
View these recordings first, for while they do not explain why it occurs, they do present the phenomenological fact around which the data and imagery packet coheres:
Observe these otherwise modestly advanced and intelligent sapiens arising from torpid sleep as their locus on the planet revolves into its light and sinking back into it when the natural darkness returns, even though they have powerful, universal, and even esthetically pleasing illuminative arts. As if they were plants or autonomats programmed to obey an overwhelming phototropism that overcame their sapient consciousness.
Observe that in some score of their cultures, these sapient saurians even dance to welcome this ‘sunrise’ and apparently mourn ‘sunset’. Or perhaps the reverse, welcoming the return of the comforting blackness of ‘night’ studded with our familiar sprinkling of stars, and mourning its destruction before their eyes by the dawning light of their implacable sun.
And this bizarre and universal behavior cannot be explained by their ‘saurian’ nature, for we were able to discover from the probe data that these are warm-blooded creatures, who only appear reptilian to our subjective eyes.
What transpires within their consciousnesses at these times cannot be discerned from the physical facts. That is the province of xenological anthropology and the most fascinating conundrum it has ever confronted. And perhaps the most dire.
There was a general longing to – in some era safely in the far future – reach one of those myriad points of light which were far distant suns.
But what would happen to our far-future descendants if they did? The same thing that seems to have happened to these saurians? Might it be preventing them from reaching beyond their gravity well? Might we succumb to the same mindless tropism?
We had to actually understand this phenomenon, and I insisted that it was obvious that the only way to do that was to experience it ourselves from the surface of the planet.
But that would be a violation of the prime directive, I was told.
The debate immediately became heated.
Might we not be putting our own civilization in jeopardy by failing to perform the necessary task due to excessively punctilious adherence to a so-called prime directive concocted by our distant ancestors?
It would be a violation of our rules of engagement.
Was not the survival and continuing progressive evolution of our species and its spreading expansion into the outer reaches of the Oort Cloud of Centaurus the ultimate prime directive? Surely you don’t have to be a xenological anthropologist or moral philosopher to understand that? To feel from within that we simply cannot send back a packet of imagery and data without experiencing the phenomena directly? For if we don’t, we have no hope of actually understanding what it implies for the continued free consciousness of our own sapient species.
And if we don’t, we can have no informed knowledge of what we might be releasing into our culture, and no idea what it may have devolved into when we return, thanks to whatever cultural meme we inserted into it like a retrovirus into a genome.
Thanks to our moral cowardice.
That was enough to begin to win them over, however grudgingly; and however grudgingly the agreement was sealed by my acceptance of the collectivity’s version of my manned mission’s rules of engagement, namely that we would land in an isolated area so that the natives would never know we existed, and observe the phenomenon for only one cycle.
We landed on the most desolate rocky coast we could find so as to minimize any chance encounter. Here not even a hint of vegetation grew to draw any desperate herders or foragers. A noxious chloride stench wafted in on the unprogrammed air currents from an enormous reservoir of undrinkable hydrogen dioxide. We were the aliens in this strange, distasteful, and therefore threatening, planetbound environment.
The only comfort for our trepidacious spirits was the familiar starry blackness, if only as a kind of great ceiling over our heads as we awaited the sunrise, and we found ourselves gazing towards the presently invisible horizon line over the mercifully black ocean, as if trying to merge them into the familiar three dimensional matrix of our homes far from any star, like a cloak to shield us from what was shortly to come.
And then as we stood beneath rather than within a black firmament of stars, one of them, the one around which this planet orbited, became a sun as the planet revolved around its axis, bringing it slowly into view.
Or somehow, it seemed vice versa.
The line of the horizon brightened like the edge of a knife under a halogen spotlight, separating the blackness of the sky from the blackness of the ocean and destroying any remaining illusions of three dimensionality.
We were standing on the flat surface of a planet as the black sky morphed into deep purple into mauve into iridescent blue, heralding the sunrise radiating from the line of the terminator as it swept slowly towards us.
And then a far greater blade of light, the very top of something enormous, brilliant as an exploding fusion bomb, peered out over the horizon at us balefully, rising as if to display itself to our vision, or somehow to see all the better into our beings as it arose majestically from the stellar deeps, burning away the sight of any other star, and becoming a Sun.
Awesome. Overwhelming. Greater than anything in our millennial experience in the spaces between the distant stars.
No longer just a star.
The Sun.
A huge ball of white light too bright to burn with a coherent hue, too searing to gaze upon without pain for even a moment, dominated everything visual, turned the ceiling above us to a cruel whitened blue and the ocean into a mirroring surface as it began its agonizingly slow journey through the sky towards a sunset it seemed would never come.
Beautiful? Horrible?
Neither and both.
The words had no meaning in this context. The recorded imagery cannot convey the subjective experience, we were so small and the sun was so large. But we were sapient creatures, and it was not; it was not even a creature at all but an immense globular fusion reactor, and that is all you will see in the recording.
How then can I explain that being there made it seem something terrifyingly more?
This was a Sun.
One of billions glittering beyond our present reach but beckoning us towards them like insect lifeforms to a lamp. Collectively the creators of our homelands in the galactic flotsam and jetsam, but each one a stellar phoenix, a power, a reality, on an absolute scale exponential orders of magnitude greater than we were.
Greater than we were but not alive as we conceived it. No consciousness, no will, no intent, only physics, only the blindly amoral and insensate power of the Sun that dominated the saurians, and the Suns that by their billions dominated creation.
And we were naked before it.
To endure this was to understand how the Sun could bring a species to its knees, and why I feel I must write its name with a capital letter. Not a matter of ‘worship’ of a ‘god’, but mere brute phenomenological force, for these Suns, these masters of the galactic main, were not beings in any way that being may be scientifically described, nor philosophically understood by anyone who had not experienced the
subjective reality, and yet they had a kind of existence which transcended our own.
Duty demanded that we remain under this searing and blinding and daunting ball of nuclear fire to record a ‘sunset’. An agonizingly slow wait, but in the end, we were relieved that we had, as the Sun finally slid down the opposite ‘horizon’ with the same breathtaking visual display of ‘sunrise,’ only run in reverse, and the stars emerged into the welcoming darkness from the brutal and implacable light of the departing Sun.
And now we know.
We know that consciousness is a frail orphan in a creation in which it is merely a third-degree byproduct of non-being and all too capable of falling under its uncaring sway. We know that this was what our species escaped from into the freedom of the galactic main, now no further than the outer fringes of the Oort Cloud of Centaurus, in the future, further, and infinitely further still.
We must not cease exfoliating forward into our galactic destiny, but we must turn our caravans aside from the Suns. If it is not already too late when you receive this packet, venture no further towards the Sun called Centaurus, and however we might grow in time and space and evolutionary grandeur, let us remain free beings in the vast richness of the spaces between the stars.
That is our home.
That is where we belong.
Let us steer well clear of those far distant suns.
THE LIGHTHOUSE
LIZ WILLIAMS
Liz Williams lives in Glastonbury, England, where she is co-director of a witchcraft supply business. She is currently published by Bantam Spectra (US), Tor Macmillan (UK), and Night Shade Books. Her short fiction has appeared regularly in Realms of Fantasy, Asimov’s, and elsewhere. She is the secretary of the Milford SF Writers’ Workshop, and teaches creative writing and the history of Science Fiction. Her first short story collection The Banquet of the Lords of Night is published by Night Shade Books, and her second, A Glass of Shadow, by NewCon Press. Her novel Banner of Souls was nominated for the Arthur C Clarke Award and was also her fourth finalist for the Philip K Dick Memorial Award. Liz writes a regular column for the Guardian and reviews for SFX.
