Gift From The Stars

by Gunn, James

  GIFT FROM THE

  STARS

  James Gunn

  PRAISE FOR

  GIFT FROM THE STARS

  “A novel with spirited characters who inspire a renewed love of one’s own kind. Highly recommended as adventure and therapy for pessimists.”

  GEORGE ZEBROWSKI

  Campbell Prize-winning author of Brute Orbits

  “Gift from the Stars is an imaginative story of First Contact, told from a very human point of view. It begins in an unassuming used bookstore and expands relentlessly outward to encompass some of the most exciting speculations in cosmology.”

  ROBERT J. SCHERRER

  Chair, Department of Physics and Astronomy,

  Vanderbilt University

  ALSO BY JAMES GUNN

  The Listeners

  The Joy Makers

  The Dreamers

  The Immortals

  Reputation Books. www.reputationbooksonline.com

  GIFT FROM THE STARS. Kindle Edition. Copyright © 2005 by James Gunn. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Reputation Books, ReputationBooks@gmail.com.

  Cover Design: Mary C. Moore.

  This novel is dedicated to my indispensable advisors on matters scientific and speculative:

  Adrian Melott, Philip Baringer and Robert Sherrer

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “The Giftie” was published in Analog, September 1999

  “Pow’r” was published in Analog, January 2000

  “The Abyss” was published in Analog, July/August 2000

  “The Rabbit Hole” was published in Analog, December 2001

  “Uncreated Night and Strange Shadows” was published, in somewhat different form, in Analog, January/February 2005.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Part One

  Giftie

  Part Two

  P’wer

  Part Three

  The Abyss

  Part Four

  The Rabbit Hole

  Part Five

  Uncreated Night

  Part Six

  Strange Shadows

  PREFACE

  IN 1972 SCRIBNERS PUBLISHED A NOVEL of mine called The Listeners. Scribners’ promotion director sent out galleys to a number of authors and scientists, and, among others, Carl Sagan was kind enough to read them and offer a quote: “One of the very best fictional portrayals of contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence ever written.” It was used as an above-the-title blurb on every edition published after Sagan became even better known when he created his popular-astronomy television show Cosmos in 1980.

  The following year Sagan signed a contract with Simon & Schuster to write a science-fiction novel called Contact. It was finally published in 1985.

  When the film version of Contact finally was released in 1997 (delayed even more than the writing of the novel), my reaction was mixed: I enjoyed the film and yet I felt that it was romantic rather than realistic. The novel Contact had portrayed working scientists realistically and the film perhaps a bit less so, but the plans transmitted were fantastic and the method and purpose of the space journey, not only fantastic but a letdown (a common fault of sf novels). And the question of why aliens would send the plans was never adequately explored.

  That isn’t the way it would happen, I told myself, and I was “inspired” to write Gift from the Stars, a response not only to Contact but to every novel of humans encountering the unknown. I wrote it as a series of novelettes, just as I had written The Listeners, and published them over a period of half-a-dozen years in Analog, beginning with “The Giftie,” which won the Analog readers’ poll for best novelette of the year. I have kept that pattern in the book, even though I planned it from the beginning as a novel exploring “the way it would really be.” It is a novel in six parts instead of a dozen or so chapters.

  If aliens sent us plans for a spaceship, the novel suggests, they would arrive without fanfare and their arrival would be greeted not with surprise or joy or gratitude, but with suspicion and resistance. A few space enthusiasts would want to implement them to reach the stars, but the great masses of humanity—and the bureaucrats who make decisions for them—would ignore the plans or want to suppress them. Most of all, why would aliens send us spaceship plans? Are their intentions beneficent or inimical? Damon Knight raised the question in a classic short-short story entitled “To Serve Man,” but Gift from the Stars pursues the question in detail and arrives at an answer, like the spaceship the humans construct and name, Ad Astra “Per Aspera.” “To the stars through difficulty.”

  Gift from the Stars is a more light-hearted look at the issues of alien contact—the plans, for instance, are discovered as an appendix in a book on a UFO remainder table—and I enjoyed writing them and living with the characters: Adrian Mast, Frances Farmstead, Jessica Buehler, and the troubled genius Peter Cavendish. I liked Frances so much I couldn’t bear to let her die from old age before the novel was over, so I invented a rejuvenation process. I hope you enjoy them as much.

  JAMES GUNN

  Lawrence, Kansas

  O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us

  To see oursels as others see us!

  ROBERT BURNS

  Part One

  THE GIFTIE

  IT ALL STARTED AT THE LITTLE BOOKSTORE where Adrian liked to browse when he had the time. Browsing in the chain superstores wasn’t the same. In the superstores you could find almost any kind of book you wanted, and anything you couldn’t find could be located by computer and made available a day or so later. That was assuming you knew what you wanted, or could find it in the current maze of instant literature. But there were so many books that you couldn’t browse in an eclectic jumble of old and new. Anyway, the superstores didn’t smell right. They smelled like, well, like department stores with air recirculated every thirty seconds. Bookstores should smell like old leather and good paper and printer’s ink and maybe a little dust.

  The book was on a table labeled “Remainders—Cults, New Age, UFOs.” The books had once been stacked neatly—the proprietor of the Book Nook, a Mrs. Frances Farmstead of elderly years, but with a youthful devotion to books nourished by some sixty years of reading and handling, liked them arranged so that all the bindings could be read at a glance—but now they were jumbled in a heap as if someone else had already rummaged through them.

  That honed Adrian’s edge of irritation over his inability to get any closer to the goal he had been pursuing since childhood, ever since he had looked up at the stars and, like John Carter, had wished himself among them. The feeling of irritation had been growing in recent months. His ambition to be an astronaut had been grounded by the inarguable fact that he was physically unimposing, and his poor hand-eye coordination had always made him last to be chosen at pick-up games. But he had a nimble and inquiring mind, and he had settled for the next best thing: aerospace engineering.

  He had worked his way through university, joined a major aerospace firm after graduation, and resigned after a dozen years of routine assignments that got him no closer to his goal of reaching the stars, through surrogates if not in person. He had set up a consulting business, and was able to pick and choose assignments that appealed to him and seemed to get humanity closer to freedom from Earth’s gravity. But even second-hand space adventuring was hung up on chemical propulsion and obsolete vehicles. His own ambition, like the space program itself, was drifting. Humanity needed something totally new. The irritation had brought him into the Book Nook time and again; browsing had proved, over the years, a treatment if not a cure. But now someone else might h
ave found the one text the book gods had intended for him, for which their mysterious hands had guided him into the store. These remainders were all one of a kind, and once one was removed it was gone forever. Ordinarily he would not have chosen this particular table—he had a skeptic’s fondness for books whose naive pretensions or paranoid conspiracies he could ridicule to his friends or even to himself—but he was not in the mood for such cynical amusements. The jumble attracted him, however, and he worked his way through the pile, restacking them neatly on the table, binding up, in the way Mrs. Farmstead would have done herself. The UFO Conspiracy, UFOs: The Final Answer, UFO: The Complete Sightings, and Cosmic Voyage, along with The Secret Doctrine of the Rosicrucians, The Truth in the Light, Psychic Animals, and other annals of magic and the occult. Adrian could feel Mrs. Farmstead’s approving gaze from the antique wooden desk at the front of the store.

  He held a book in his hand, turning it this way and that. The book had lost its dust jacket, if it ever had one, but it had a pleasant feel to it, and the title was catchy: Gift from the Stars. Perhaps it was a Von Daniken clone; he always enjoyed their innocent credulity. He opened it. The book had a frontispiece, unusual in a cheap text like this. It showed the vast metal bowl of the radio telescope at Arecibo, with the focusing mechanism held aloft by cables strung from three pylons. The title page listed a publisher he had never heard of, but that wasn’t unusual: fringe publishers were common in the cult field. The copyright page said that the book had been published half a dozen years earlier. Adrian glanced at the first page. It was the usual stuff: have we been visited? Are there aliens among us?

  He leafed through the book, half decided to put it down, when he came across an appendix filled with diagrams. Not diagrams of cryptic incisions on arid plateaus in Peru or carved around the entrances to ancient tombs. These seemed to be designs for some kind of ship. Not “some kind of ship,” he decided with the gathering excitement he recognized as the eureka feeling, but a spaceship, and not the sketchy drawings of some putative crashed UFO concealed in a hangar in New Mexico or Dayton, but engineering drawings such as Adrian worked with almost every day. He took it to the desk.

  “Found something you like, Mr. Mast?” Mrs. Farmstead asked. She was old but cheerful about it, with a plump, grandmotherly face and gray hair braided and wound into a knot pinned on top of her head with an oversized barrette.

  “Enough to pay good money for it,” Adrian said. Mrs. Farmstead didn’t accept charge cards, but she had been known to run an account for someone short on cash who had fallen in love with a book. “Any idea where it came from?”

  “Of course I do,” Mrs. Farmstead said. She maintained careful records that kept her in the shop, Adrian suspected, long after the time of its official closing. “But you don’t expect me to look them up for a three-fifty remaindered title, do you, Mr. Mast?” Her sharp glance over plastic-rimmed glasses dared him to ask for special service.

  “Not this time, Mrs. Farmstead,” he said, paid his money, and took his hand-written receipt and his newfound treasure and walked out of the store, feeling no longer irritated but elated, almost trembling, as if what he had found there would change his life forever.

  Nobody was dependent on him except those space travelers not yet liberated from the surly bonds of the Solar System, perhaps not yet born; for a dream he had sacrificed hopes for wife and family. Who was he kidding? His problem was that the women he was interested in weren’t interested in him, and the ones who were interested in him he found less exciting than his work. Ordinarily, then, there was nothing to draw him back to his one-bedroom apartment, but now a curious anticipation hastened his step.

  He delayed gratification by changing into comfortable sweat pants, getting a cold can of beer from the refrigerator and a bottle of peanuts from the pantry, and settled into his easy chair in the living room opposite the television set he turned on only for the news, the science channels and the sci-fi series. Only then did he open his Gift from the Stars.

  The first chapter was titled “Where Are They?” Although it seemed to be a discussion of aliens and the possibility that they might have visited the earth in ages past and even might be keeping track of us now, Adrian recognized a subtext the ordinary reader would never have noticed. A conclusion seemed to say that evidence of alien visitation may have been deliberately concealed by nameless government agencies, but that other alien contacts had occurred, or were yet to happen, that anyone with an eye to the sky or a mind to understand could be aware of. Read with greater sophistication, however, the chapter suggested that the evidence for alien visitation was not only thin but probably nothing more than the connecting of random dots; that aliens were the modern equivalent of angels and demons; and that belief in alien visitation and abduction was a substitute for antiquated religions, whose answers no longer seemed appropriate to contemporary questions.

  Between the lines, however, Adrian detected an argument for the existence of aliens. Logic said that with all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, a good number of them would nourish life and a good number of those would develop technological civilizations capable of interstellar travel. Good scientists had agreed on all that. Surely there must be aliens older, wiser, and more advanced than humanity. But, as Fermi asked, where are they? Why aren’t they here by now?

  The UFO believers, of course, thought they were here, observing us, maybe abducting people for their experiments, maybe having accidents that left their spaceship wreckage and alien bodies strewn across remote areas of the world to be hidden by government agencies concerned about popular panic or paranoid about alien takeovers, or committed to their own research and fearful of the release of dangerous information.... But Gift from the Stars suggested, subtly, that aliens had their own reasons for not visiting Earth, reasons that we could never know, unless, perhaps, we should go visit them.

  The question Adrian had to answer was more immediate: why should the book he held in his hands be titled and written in such a way that it was virtually indistinguishable from a hundred, maybe a thousand, other books on UFOs and aliens? The only reason he could think of was that the author wanted to hide a message that would be found only by someone capable of noticing and understanding it. Like concealing a diamond in a heap of glass imitations. What better hiding place for obscure revelations than among the books that the only people who would take seriously were the people that nobody took seriously?

  Unable to restrain his impatience any longer, he turned to the appendix. Here were the drawings he remembered. They could be for any kind of vehicle, a submarine, say, or an airplane without wings, but the design had non-aerodynamic extensions as if intended for use where fluid resistance was non-existent. The drawings were curiously uneven as if they had been prepared by some gross process different from the customary draftsman lines. Gaps in the drawings seemed to indicate details yet to be added or filled in according to individual preferences. But Adrian identified what was clearly a propulsion system based upon the reaction mass being expelled through nozzles at the rear of the vessel. The storage space for fuel seemed too small, however, and the reaction chamber itself seemed oddly shaped and also curiously small.

  Adrian turned more pages. The book had a second appendix in which he discovered the design for an engine in which two substances would be combined and the energy obtained used to accelerate another substance through oddly shaped nozzles and past some kind of magnetic fields until it was released. A final sketch made sense of the limited storage space and the engine. It was a design for a container in which the substance within would never touch the sides. The substance was a plasma contained by magnetic fields maintained by some kind of permanent magnets built into the vessel, or perhaps the vessel itself was magnetic. A companion design showed how solar energy could be transformed into—what else could it be?—antimatter. Its combination with matter—perhaps hydrogen encountering anti-hydrogen—would convert the mass of both entirely into energy and provide the means by which humanity co
uld reach the stars.

  Would it work? Somehow he doubted it. It was all too pat, like a science-fiction gadget. But maybe that’s what all advanced technology looked like—not magic but obvious. And, like a cultist’s scenario, it all made sense, granted the premise, and was not that much different from imaginative concepts discussed in aerospace engineering circles. The difference was that these looked as if they were working designs, not concepts, and even, somehow, as if they were antiquated, like museum pieces or redesigns of historic airships such as the Wright brothers’ first craft. It would work, all right, probably better than the original, but it hinted at the existence of methods far more effective. Were those beyond the understanding or the technological capabilities of less-advanced species?

  Adrian shook his head. He was allowing his imagination to take him into theories as weird as those of any UFO true believer. But that was what the book had done to him: he had picked it up as a minor contribution to a neurotic belief system and it had evolved into a document addressing his deepest needs. And, although the text did not say so, the title suggested that somehow these designs had come from somewhere else, perhaps from aliens. Perhaps they were, indeed, a gift from the stars.

  Adrian showed the book to Mrs. Farmstead. “You said you could tell me where this came from.”

  “Yes,” she said, peering up at him owlishly over her glasses, her plump face framed in coils of gray. “But surely one of these is enough.” She looked at his face as if reading his need. “Oh, all right, since it’s you, Mr. Mast.” She ran a hand-held optical scanner across the ISBN number on the title page and then punched a couple of keys on her computer. “It arrived six months ago in a box of remainders from a jobber. Cheap.”