Stranger Suns

by George Zebrowski

  Juan grabbed Lena's hand and pulled her aside. Magnus dodged left and slipped, landing on his back. As Juan and Lena backed away, Malachi faced the animal.

  “Mal!” Juan shouted.

  His friend waved at him, as if in farewell, and the tiger slipped through him. Magnus scrambled to his feet. They hurried over to Malachi as the big cat faded into the distance.

  Lena pointed. “Look there.”

  A shape drifted toward them. Juan made out a head and two arms on a massive torso. In a moment they saw a face—human flesh tones, large aqua globes for eyes, a thin slit for lips, and a flattened nose. Grotesque as it was, the face seemed expressionless. The arms hung motionless as the huge body slid forward.

  “Two thumbs on each hand,” Malachi said. “A rather anthropomorphic mollusk, I'd say. Which of us is responsible for this?”

  Magnus said, “It could be an unconscious composite, based on recent conversations we've had.”

  They stood still as the figure passed through them. Juan glanced at Lena. Her face was pale, but she smiled.

  A saw-toothed skyline appeared. “That's mine,” Malachi said, “but not quite.”

  “Maybe the programs can't tell us apart very well,” Lena said, “so we're getting unintended mixes.” She knit her brow as she spoke, Juan noticed, and avoided his eyes. Her hair, although combed, was now a darker blond from lack of washing, but her blue eyes and strong-boned face more than made up for it. He wasn't looking his best, either. “What is it, Juan?” she asked, confronting his gaze.

  “He's just dismayed,” Malachi answered for him, “by our lack of imagination. Give human beings a wish-machine and they'll conjure up banalities.”

  “This place could be dangerous,” Juan said. “Even though the apparitions lack substance, we might be affected.”

  “How?” Lena asked.

  “We might call up very personal, unpleasant things.”

  As they went back toward the ship, Juan noticed that the backache he'd had from sleeping on the floor was gone. Strength crept through his muscles, as if he'd just awakened from a good night's rest.

  He stopped and looked at his friends. “I'm suddenly feeling very fit. Is it the same for any of you?”

  Magnus nodded. “It's very clear. The arthritis in my left shoulder is gone.”

  Malachi examined his left wrist. “The scar I had here from when I cut myself with an ax as a boy is gone.”

  “That means my appendectomy scar may be gone,” Lena said.

  Juan checked his thumbs and right forefinger, each of which had been cut open seriously over the years, and couldn't find these scars. “So this place is more than just a recreational area,” he said.

  “It's an all-around make-you-healthy place,” Malachi said.

  “Which we don't know how to use,” Lena added. She turned away and started to search for her appendectomy scar. “That surgeon did such a bad job—yes, it's disappeared!” She smiled as she turned around; the color was coming back into her face.

  Malachi lifted his arms over his head. “I'm going to try something.”

  “Mal, don't,” Juan said, too late, as a crowd of alien figures appeared around them. Strange, melodious sounds filled the air. The sky turned dark blue. Two large moons rose through snowy white cumulus clouds. Towering, vaguely familiar buildings appeared, creating a wide plaza. Odors of chocolate and baking bread wafted in on a cool breeze.

  Juan looked down and saw a short humanoid pass through his chest and back into Lena. For an instant its alien eyes gazed at him from her face. Magnus and Malachi bumped into each other as the biped retreated through them. Lena whirled around as if asleep. Dancers formed a maelstrom of bodies around them as a distorted love song began to wail over plucked string sounds. Juan heard a distant breathing, which seemed to be trying to catch up with the music. As he was drawn into the rhythms, he wondered if these might in fact be genuine aliens. Evolving under strange suns, they also celebrated life. Did they love and hate beyond the needs of survival?

  The maelstrom quickened. Lena, Malachi, and Magnus seemed to be struggling to learn the dance steps as the figures flowed through them. Juan focused more closely on the alien faces. They seemed to be hairless children, almost cherubic. Then, slowly, as if shy of his scrutiny, the whirling forms began to fade, like a storm moving out to sea. Suddenly he feared that his friends would fade with it, but in a moment he was again alone with them in the quiet, amber afternoon.

  Malachi wandered up to him. “It wasn't all my doing, even though I started it. There's something else here.”

  “It was exhilarating,” Lena cried, radiant.

  “We'll never know,” Magnus said, “what each of us contributed.”

  Juan said, “We can't control it.”

  Lena pointed and he turned around. A huge slug was crawling after them, red eyes full of hatred.

  “Not another mollusk,” Malachi said. “Give it a rest, my friend.”

  “Why do you think it's mine?” Juan asked.

  “Go ahead, wish it away.”

  Juan waved his hand and the slug faded.

  “It must be a deep fear of some kind,” Lena said.

  “Would you prefer giant bunnies or geese?” Juan asked. “How about a dragon?”

  Malachi shook his head. “I don't think arbitrary demands go deep enough to trigger the system.”

  “Dragons!” Juan shouted.

  Nothing happened.

  “You're right,” Juan said. “Only old nightmares or things we take seriously, which suggests a therapeutic function. I wonder if we can influence the ship in this way, but more consciously?”

  “That might require specific commands,” Magnus said, “which we don't know how to give. Closing our eyes and wishing the ship home would be too vague.”

  “But we can't be sure,” Lena said.

  Magnus shook his head. “If there is such a system, it would be too much to hope that we could hack our way into it.”

  “We should try it anyway,” Lena said, “inside the ship.”

  * * *

  The viewspace in the drum-shaped chamber was off when they came back from dinner in the chamber of cubbyholes. Magnus stood up straight, closed his eyes, and concentrated. The viewspace remained off.

  “We're just not matched to this system,” he said, opening his eyes. “If there is such a system.”

  “But we can't be that far off,” Lena said, “since we've done things outside.”

  Magnus smiled. “That doesn't demand specific navigational commands.”

  “I'll go out to the lock,” Malachi said, “and see what's doing out in the station.”

  Lena glanced at Juan as she sat down.

  “I'll go with you,” Magnus added.

  “Don't wander outside!” Juan called after them. He watched them pass through the glow, then lay down on his sleeping bag.

  Lena smiled at him.

  He looked away. “This is no place for matchmaking.”

  “And you don't like me much, do you?” she asked.

  He looked at her. “I do enjoy your company.”

  “And I was sure there was something wrong with the way I chewed my food.”

  He grimaced and turned on his back. “No, there's nothing wrong with the way you eat. Tell me one thing, though, what do you think of Mal and Magnus?”

  “Isn't it obvious? I like them both a lot. Mal is clearly your best friend, and I think you'll come to appreciate Magnus much more than you do.”

  “You're right about Magnus.” He closed his eyes, realizing that he was pushing her away with conversation. Their situation was complicated enough, he told himself, knowing that he was following his usual pattern, backing away from people because they were too hard to understand. Besides, she was only being friendly. He looked over at her and saw that she had closed her eyes and seemed to be asleep.

  * * *

  When they came up to the open lock the next day, a giant figure was kneeling in front of the ship and pee
ring in at them with a single eye.

  Lena grimaced. “I don't like to be startled in the morning.”

  Juan snapped his fingers and Polyphemus dissolved. Lena glared at him, then laughed.

  “In its own way,” Magnus said, “something knows we're here and is responding to us.”

  They sat down in the lock. “Watch this,” Malachi said.

  A lightning storm flashed in the distance. Blue-black clouds rolled toward the ship.

  “It's strange,” Malachi said, “to hold that in my head and see that my will moves it.”

  “Perhaps this place is only a toy,” Lena said. A hand appeared over the storm and crushed it against the amber floor.

  “Juan?” Malachi asked.

  He nodded, then looked up and saw his face hanging over the horizon, eyes closed as if in worry.

  The eyes opened and the face smiled. “I couldn't help it,” Lena said, laughing. As he stared into his own face, the eyes opened wider and stared back at him with reproach.

  Malachi laughed. “This could become embarrassing. But not to worry, we're all youths at heart. No middle-aged angst for us! Just sensible adults facing the unknown.”

  “Quiet,” Juan said as the head faded away. A wail drifted up from inside the ship, reminding him of the tachyon signal. His face tingled. “Move back,” They got up and retreated. The circle glowed, closing the lock. They fell back through the inner lock and watched the glow seal the chamber.

  * * *

  The black sphere was growing smaller when they entered the drum-shaped chamber and hurried down into the pit.

  “Now we'll see,” Magnus said as the station receded into the grayness. The host star appeared in a yellow flash, already showing a diminishing disk. “We've just come out of that sun, and out of another kind of space. The ship's jumps suggested that. Is that a fair guess, Juan?”

  “It seems that the station gets power from the sun, and the ship gets it from the station. What do you think, Mal?”

  “Either the ship stores power after charging up,” Malachi said, “or the station transmits energy to the ship in some way.”

  “There may be other stations,” Lena added. “Why did we leave? Did we make it happen, Magnus?”

  “More likely the station has serviced the ship,” Magnus said, “and sent it on its way. Or it's an emergency departure. Something may be wrong with the station, or with the way it's drawing power from the star.”

  The beating heart, Juan thought, the pulsing he had sensed during the ship's approach to the otherspace station—that had been the subliminal rhythm of the station's mighty core engine draining the star. As he looked up at the bright photosphere, he realized that the star might go nova, or distend into a monstrous red giant, or even collapse into a black hole.

  “I wonder how many other core stations there are,” he said as they sat down on their rolls.

  “A web of suns,” Magnus replied, “would free the ships of a starcrossing culture of all need for fuel. It's possible that power is transmitted to ships through the same kind of short-space the vessel uses when it jumps.”

  Malachi cleared his throat. “A bit hard on suns, don't you think?”

  Magnus sighed. “As one is exhausted, another cuts into the system. It would take some time to exhaust a star.”

  “We're still only guessing,” Juan said.

  Magnus pointed at the receding sun. “This ship is not carrying the fuel it needs to do what we've seen. It's magnificent and wonderfully obvious. That star, and all the others that have been tapped, gave the culture that built this ship all the energy it could ever need, for whatever purposes it chose to pursue.”

  “So what happened to them?” Juan asked as the ship's acceleration began to redden the star's bright disk.

  They were silent for a few moments.

  Lena said, “If we stimulated the ship's departure, however unconsciously, then maybe in time we could coax the ship to teach us some of what it knows.”

  Malachi said, “Maybe the starcrossers learned everything there is to know about our universe, completing all their sciences, and decided there was no point in going on. I'd like to know everything, if only for a few moments, merely to satisfy my curiosity. I rather think I would give anything for that. But, of course, I would wish to forget, since nothing would be interesting in an existence where discovery was impossible.”

  Lena said, “A state like that might have satisfactions we cannot imagine.”

  “Perhaps that is what happened to the builders,” Magnus's dark shape said. “The explosion of their knowledge catapulted them into a nearly divine, immaterial state. They may now exist as a form of sentient, patterned energy—and all this, their ships, their web of suns, is a shell they no longer need.”

  Hand-me-downs, Juan thought. Discards that we can only inherit, never equal.

  “Ghosts,” Lena said. “They may be all around us, watching.”

  10. THE AWAKENING

  Magnus lay awake. Sleep was a distant shore. Overhead, the universe was darkening. He imagined the smooth mesh of the ship's systems, maintaining the vessel's inner states while pushing it toward jumpspeed. He saw a fleet of ships drawing nourishment from the web. He dived into galactic cores, flashed to the quasars, outpaced the expansion of space-time. These ships could go anywhere in the cosmos, and perhaps beyond.

  He sympathized with Juan. Physicists might work for a century and fail to understand, much less duplicate, the technology that grew out of the alien science. Juan had searched for alien civilizations, and was now trapped by the one he had found. Perhaps living in the ship for a while might purge them all of old habits, enabling them to see beyond the pride of species. The ship was a puzzle box of knowledge, waiting for a ready mind. . .

  He had nothing to go back to; his son was an industrial spy somewhere, unable or unwilling to keep in touch. His more ambitious professional friends had avoided him in recent years, pitying his lack of success, skeptical of his renunciation of the big prizes. They didn't feel his disappointment in people, and with the ways of civilization. Like Juan, Magnus weighed human potential against accomplishment and found it inadequate, or much too slow. He saw the same old darkness in the younger man's eyes. Pascal's infinite spaces did not terrify him, but the inner abyss had frozen his heart. Perhaps Lena would give Juan the warm island he needed.

  Trying to understand the ship had irritated old wounds and disturbed old ambitions. Magnus suspected that if he could only look at the ship in specific, new ways, its mysteries would bare themselves. Deep within him, his younger self was laughing at his vain hope of seducing the data.

  Where was Eliane? Did she ever think of him or their son? He pushed her memory away, hoping to drown it in the bog of desires, fears, and prejudices at the back of his mind. The loves and ambitions of a lifetime had been dissolved by the acids that still bubbled up from that cesspool.

  The way ahead was black now. The view flashed blue as the ship jumped; but no nearby star appeared; only distant suns waited as the ship accelerated again.

  * * *

  “How old can the web be?” Lena asked, sipping her copied coffee as they sat in the alien cafeteria.

  Juan shifted his weight on the hard floor and put his elbows on the table. “If the universe is twenty billion years old, then it might have been built as long ago as five.”

  “That's enough time,” Magnus said, “for stars in the system to be exhausted.”

  “Or for a hundred civilizations to perish,” Malachi added.

  “I wonder where we're going,” Lena said.

  “The ship is clearly making a series of jumps,” Magnus answered. Juan noticed a growing tension in the engineer, as if he were making some great internal effort to keep himself together and alert. I like him better than I did at first, he thought. “No way to even guess direction,” Magnus said, scratching his head. “The web may be limited to our galaxy, or it may reach across a whole cluster.”

  “Could they have unified t
he universe?” Malachi asked.

  Lena's eyes widened. “Can the web be that large?”

  Magnus frowned. “They obviously unified some major portion of it.”

  Malachi asked, “Why abandon such a system? Maybe they developed an even better one. The builders may still be around somewhere.”

  Juan shook his head. “We talk, we speculate, we make assumptions—soon we'll believe anything!”

  Magnus gave him an irritated look. “Juan, we are being shown clues, however vague they may seem.”

  “It doesn't help us take control of the ship.”

  “That's because we're thinking in a hands-on way, but there are no buttons to push or levers to pull.”

  Lena asked, “Do you think the ship is a conscious thing?”

  They looked at her in silence.

  “What did I say?” she demanded.

  “She's right,” Malachi said. “We have to say hello to the ship. British folk say hello to anything—chairs, tables, vases, whatever.”

  Magnus sighed. “However general and empty of content such a prescription seems, that's what we will have to do—communicate what we want to whatever system runs this ship, in a way it will understand.”

  Hopeless, Juan thought, surprised at how the censorship of common sense and ordinary experience lived on in his mind. His life had been devoted to counterintuitive theorizing, to abstract mathematical reasoning about matters far removed from everyday life, and still the voice of the simple beast whispered in the back of his mind, denying everything that could not be seen or touched. To an Amazonian aborigine Juan Obrion would seem a silly figure—a man without wife and family, who had gone to an icebound land for reasons having nothing to do with food, shelter, or raw materials, and for his faults had been snatched up by a sleeping god and carried into the heavens.

  “Even if we could learn the ship's language,” Juan said, “it might be the syntax of a purely automatic design, or one that has fallen back into pure routine.”

  “We have to adapt,” Magnus said.

  “How?” Juan demanded. “By wishing?”

  “Everything I've seen,” Lena said, “seems to imitate a biological fluidity.”