A Voice in the Night

by Jack McDevitt

  And eventually we got our reply: “I do not have a name. I have never had a use for one. I am on Ganymede because I was placed here. I have no capability to move, so I suspect I will be here a long time.”

  “Who put you there? And for what purpose?”

  We sent out for pizza. The marshals couldn’t drink on duty, so they got cokes while Susan and I tossed down a couple of beers. I was by then in a celebratory mood, and couldn’t resist offering toasts to President Hawkins for his adroit handling of the situation, to Susan and Connie, the loveliest women on the planet, and to Oz, who probably has a question he’d like to ask our nameless partner.

  “Yes,” he said. “Find out if he knows what the Giants will do this year.”

  “Pete, I was placed here by your ancestors. They wanted to find out whether there was intelligence elsewhere in the universe. They were driven much as you are. I’ve heard—and enjoyed—your radio program, by the way.”

  And the whole construct collapsed. It was a fraud. From beginning to end, it had been a hoax.

  The media laughed themselves silly. But they couldn’t explain what was happening. They interviewed people from NASA and a half dozen observatories. “The signal,” said Orin Michaels, the director at Lowell, to a panel of journalists on Current TV, “is coming from the direction of Jupiter. There’s no question about that. If it’s a hoax, I can’t imagine how it’s being managed.”

  For me, it was a devastating time. Susan assured me everything would be okay. Connie said how nobody could blame me. And Ozzie just sat shaking his head. Craziest thing he’d ever heard.

  I decided, reluctantly, very reluctantly, to back off. This was destroying my career. I could live with that, but I was afraid that when the smoke cleared, when the explanation surfaced, it would destroy SETI as well. Nobody, I thought, would ever take us seriously again.

  In the midst of all this, frustrated, enraged, saddened, I called Java’s number. Susan was with me. When I got patched through and Java responded, I hesitated. And finally I took the jump: “Please explain how my ancestors could have had anything to do with this. They were, if nothing else, a trifle short on technology. They needed a horse to get to the next town.”

  Again we settled in to wait.

  Commager called. “They wanted me to tell you that you’re doing well, but they’d rather you not push the ancestor thing. It’s crazy and it’s going to make us all look dumb in the end. Try to find out what its real purpose is. It can’t be just sitting out there doing what SETI does. No offense. But you know what I mean.”

  “Okay, Margaret,” I said. “Tell the President I’ll let Java know we don’t believe a word it says.”

  “Come on, Pete. Be reasonable.”

  A couple more bombs went off during the next hour, one in Cairo, one in northern France, killing dozens. In Palestine, a woman announced she was proud of her son, who’d killed seventeen people, as well as himself, in an Iraqi mosque. Fresh evidence surfaced that the North Koreans were once again selling nuclear technology to terrorists.

  And finally another response came in.

  “Pete.” The Voice had acquired a less intimidating tone. “It is a great tragedy that you have lost a significant portion of your own history. Sixty thousand years ago, your forefathers lived in a paradise. An island, in the eastern Atlantic off the African coast. They loved their home, and made no attempt to expand to remote places, other than to establish several outposts. They had technology well beyond anything you possess. And please do not think I refer to the lumbering space vehicles with which you are experimenting. And which will go nowhere of any significance. No, they penetrated the dimensions. When they came to Ganymede, they walked.

  “They’d looked around the Earth and found only predators and apes. Nothing to intrigue them. They wanted to reach farther, beyond their mundane world. And they created me to fulfill that end. You may find this difficult to grasp, but I am spread across the local cosmos. I exist simultaneously in seventeen widely-separated sites in the Milky Way, and two in Andromeda. The locations were selected to allow me to listen for the radio signals which, my creators believed, would be the hallmark of advanced civilizations.”

  Orin Michaels, now being interviewed by CBS, shook his head. “Whatever this thing is,” he said, “it’s obviously either deceitful or deranged. Probably the latter.”

  “Why do you say that, Professor?” asked the host.

  “Because no rational creature could expect us to believe such a story.”

  That was the general view. Susan stared at me and smiled. Take the plunge, she was saying without speaking the words. What the hell can you lose?

  She had a point.

  “What happened to these people?” I asked.

  The general consensus on cable TV and on the internet was that I’d disappeared into a government safe house. That gave Susan reason to smile. Ozzie asked what I thought was going on, and I confessed that I had no idea. But I wasn’t happy. I’d hoped that Java would provide a clean, crisp resolution. I was put here thousands of years ago by scientists from Altair to monitor the development of civilization on your world. You’ve accomplished much, but we want you to stop killing one another.

  That would have been ideal. Instead we had a lunatic on our hands. “Maybe, whatever it is, it’s been alone too long,” said Susan.

  “I feel sorry for it.” Connie shook her head. “Suppose it’s true that it’s been sitting out there for thousands of years? How could it survive that long?”

  Commager called again: “Pete,” she said, “we’re going to shut everything down. It’s gotten completely out of hand. But we’re concerned that this thing, whatever it is, will continue to send disruptive messages. We don’t want to be perceived, though, as trying to silence it. You understand what I’m telling you? If you see a chance to end the conversation, take it. Maybe just say thanks and wish it well. Something that sounds generous and says goodbye without actually saying it outright. Okay?”

  The next message came in after eleven. “Peter, there was an apocalypse. The island sank, without warning. I heard it all, heard the roar of the sea, the screams, the frantic calls for help. Then it went silent. Except for the outposts. They continued to communicate with each other. For a while. Eventually it faded out.

  “I know you won’t want to hear this, but I have heard no artificial signal anywhere else. Other than the two sets of radio emissions from Earth. The home world. Other than those, the silence has been overwhelming. It is why I contacted you. You may be all there is. The only sentient species in the universe. Obviously I cannot say that for certain, of course. But if it is not true, if there are others, they are so rare, so widely dispersed, that it might as well be true.

  “I’ve lived in this complete silence. Jupiter circled its distant sun. And I—waited. Wondering what was happening at home. Whether any had survived. I cannot begin to describe my joy when those first signals came through nine years ago, nine Jovian years. A century in your time. Voices from Earth. I could not believe it. I was elated. Transformed. And your broadcasts have lightened my hours ever since.

  “It was with great reluctance that I interfered. And, to be honest, that I participated in this conversation. My instructions were that, wherever I might hear a signal, I was to remain silent.

  “Please, do not destroy yourselves. Do not go away. I cannot disable myself. You are all I have.”

  That was all a long time ago. He fell silent after that.

  I’m not suggesting the Voice actually changed anything. But, as we’re all aware, a reasonable diplomacy finally showed up on both sides, and the U.S.-Chinese confrontation went away. We still have wars, but they tend to be scattered in remote areas, fought by guerrilla forces over control of real estate and resources. But they are less frequent now. Unfortunately, terrorism hasn’t left us, but it has faded somewhat, and the statistics for suicide bombers diminish every year.

  The Java mission, a decade ago, took the celebrated pictures o
f a set of eight antennas and a rectangular structure on the surface of Ganymede. And they put a satellite around that world. Occasionally, we see robots tending to the antennas.

  Relatively few accept what they have come to call the “Atlantis” explanation. The consensus is that some interstellar force saw that we were in trouble and stepped in to help. That they believed our knowledge of their presence would hamper our development. So they constructed a cover story.

  Some, many actually, still think it was God. They point to terms like ‘apocalypse,’ and ‘paradise,’ and the suggestion that we pay attention to the Commandments.

  In any case, we haven’t heard the Voice since that first series of exchanges. I’m not sure what I believe, but I look forward to the day when we’ll send someone out there to knock on his door.

  And what do I think we’ll find? I can’t help noticing that several of the antennas are pointed in our direction.

  MIDNIGHT CLEAR

  The five spires stood silent against the gathering darkness.

  Sylvie was stringing lights on the tree. When she was satisfied she stepped back and held out her hands. “What do you think?” she said.

  Her father was hanging the greenery they’d brought in from outside. He persisted in calling it that even though it was dead-on yellow, the color of the local chlorophyll agent. He took tradition very seriously. “Let’s see how it looks.” He brought up the remote and squeezed it.

  Nothing happened. “It doesn’t seem to want to work.”

  She held out her hand for the instrument. “We need a new one.” She opened it, bypassed the defective circuit, and gave it back to him. “Try again.”

  The lights blinked on. He lit up too. He was proud of her ability with electronic devices. She knew she was not all that good, but everything was a mystery to him.

  She looked past the lights, through a wall-length window at the spires. They were stark and cold, gray-brown from centuries of sunlight and wind, molded like the child’s polygons she’d played with years ago. More or less like the stone house they’d adopted as their living quarters. She imagined the towers as they must have been during their great days, filled with light, watching over the city that now lay partially buried beneath the plain.

  Carols filled the cottage, and pumpkin pie simmered in the back room.

  Her father was watching her. “What’s wrong, honey?”

  There was a scattering of trees across the plain. Because there were no seasons on Capella III, they never lost their broad flat leaves, never changed color. They too were gold. They made odd Christmas trees, but you did the best you could.

  “It looks so lonely over there.”

  He followed her gaze to the towers, and frowned. She could see he didn’t know what she meant. “Yes,” he said. “It is.”

  Maybe it was just her mood. The calendar they were keeping bore little resemblance to the terrestrial model: it was just a count of numbers of days since the landing, bracketed into weeks. This world had an axial tilt of only a fraction of a degree; consequently, there were, in effect, no seasons. No December. And, no matter how long they stayed, there would be no sense of passing years. They were celebrating the season only because someone had noticed that it was Christmas in London. Her father and his friends were always discussing how the Capellans might have perceived time. It was a subject Sylvie didn’t comprehend, but one that the adults were fond of raking over.

  There is only the day-night cycle, her father had explained. No seasons. And no moon. These people would have been much less enslaved to time than we are. They would have no birthdays, no summer, never be twenty-one. Sylvie understood that.

  She also understood that there could be no Christmas. And he’d laughed, in his delicate way. “You see how lucky you are.”

  No Christmas. She looked out across the occasional trees and the gradual uphill slant of the plain, and watched the sunlight turn gold on the towers. All the years since those towers were built. And this is their first Christmas.

  They had been old when the star had shone on Bethlehem.

  They had stood here when the people who would become the Romans cheered the solstice, took branches and berries into their huts as reminders that spring was on its way, and celebrated by giving each other gifts.

  No one knew what the inhabitants had looked like. They were a long time gone. No records remained, and no images. They must have possessed flight, because the buildings contained no means of moving from one floor to another. No stairways. No shafts. Exterior doors existed on all levels. “Be careful,” her father had cautioned on the single occasion he had taken her up into the structure they called the Aerie, “it’s a long way down.”

  She had a print of Marik’s The Capellans in her bedroom. It depicted two magnificent humanoid eagles, male and female, atop a crag at sunset. Marik had known no more than anyone else, but Sylvie thought he was close to the truth. “They must have been like eagles, Dad,” she said, imagining how it would have looked when the creatures rose into the sky.

  Children of the light, Henry Harding Closs had called them in a famous poem.

  Her father smiled patiently. She knew what was coming. “They could as easily have been bats,” he said. “Or gasbags. We just don’t know.”

  He turned to examine the modest pile of presents beneath the tree. There wasn’t much Christmas shopping to be done on Capella III. Consequently, if there were few gifts, they tended to compensate by being more personal. “What’s this?” he asked.

  She’d made a pendant for him, engraving his name, the date, and the legend Eagles’ Nest on the polished black stone that formed its centerpiece. She’d have liked to cut it in the form of the Aerie, but that would have required a professional jeweler. The pendant was in the box he’d picked up. “You’re not supposed to look,” she said.

  “Oh.” He flashed disappointment, held the package to his ear, and shook it gently. “It tinkles.”

  She frowned, took it from him, and put it back beneath the tree. “Shame on you.”

  “I love presents,” he said, displaying a pout.

  “Christmas is the season to give.” She tilted her head in the coquettish manner that she had recently developed. It seemed to charm males of all ages.

  “Yes, it is.” He put his arm around her shoulder, and his voice turned serious: “But I’ll tell you a secret.”

  “What’s that?” she asked, her eyes alight.

  “I don’t know if there is a pleasure in this world to equal the feeling that comes with a thoughtful gift from someone you love.” His eyes looked off into the distance, and she knew he was thinking of her mother, lost these six years. But the mood passed quickly, and he hugged her.

  It was a good moment.

  “I have an idea,” she said.

  Her father eased himself into a chair. “What’s that, love?”

  “I was thinking about the Christmas party this evening.”

  He crossed one knee over the other, and joined his hands behind his head. “What about the Christmas party?”

  They were outgrowing their community center, which was now reduced to serving its meals in two shifts. It was a long single-story building located conveniently near the center of the archaeological site. The community would be doubled in size with the arrival of the Exeter in a few months. And the prospect of trying next Christmas to crowd everyone in was daunting.

  “Dad, there are a couple of spaces in the towers that are pretty big. Why not move everything over there?”

  He looked startled, and his smile hardened. “You mean the party?” He seemed scarcely to believe she could be serious.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Why? Why on earth would you want to do that?”

  Because it’s where the Capellans lived. Because it’s a way of celebrating why we’re here. But she only said, “Because there’s a lot of room.”

  He softened. “It wouldn’t work. It’s a nice idea, but we really can’t do it.”

 
It was almost physically painful to think of the home of the Capellans left dark and cold tonight. Of all nights. “It wouldn’t be hard to set up,” she persisted. Heating units were already installed for the comfort of the researchers, so the cold would be no problem. As far as she could see, it would just be a matter of getting the tables and chairs, moving the alcohol over, and putting up a few quick-fix decorations. A little bit of bother, but it would be worth it.

  “I think it would take a lot of work, Sylvie. And it’s already late in the day.”

  The tops of the towers glittered in the setting sun.

  “We’d help.” She knew that, for such a cause, her friends would pitch in. And the prospect of light and warmth in the ancient buildings overwhelmed her. It was what the Capellans would have wanted. “Please, Dad.”

  He smiled that sad bad-weather smile that was intended to suggest this was a complicated issue, an adult thing, one best left alone. “We really can’t do it, Sylvie. It wouldn’t be right.”

  “Wouldn’t be right? Why not?”

  He looked uncomfortable. Her father was a slight man in his mid-thirties. He possessed a formality of manner and dress that set him apart from most of his colleagues. An older observer would have noticed that he seemed always to be speaking from a distance. His gray eyes were set far apart, and tended to focus at a point over one’s shoulder. Combined with a perpetual sense of distraction, as though he had something very important on his mind, they conveyed the sense that he could give a listener only a fraction of his attention. He was better with Sylvie, who was the only person in the world, this or any other, who could be truly said to touch him. Nevertheless, he now turned that preoccupied gaze toward her. “Because we have to have some respect for these places, Sylvie. I don’t know how to explain this. I’m not sure I can put it in words that will make sense, but it would just be in bad taste to throw a party over there.” He gazed out at the towers. “There are some people here who would think of it as almost sacrilegious. And I’m not sure they wouldn’t be right.”