Gift From The Stars

by Gunn, James

  “And how did they know that?” Frances asked.

  “They had these listening posts, you see,” Cavendish said. “All those white holes established near places likely to nourish intelligent life. And those who received the message and deciphered it and built their ships and came—each, in turn, has been exchanging information with the aliens as soon as the aliens could learn their language.”

  “But why are they still here?” Adrian asked.

  “There is so much to tell, and to learn,” Cavendish said. “All these creatures have histories and cultures and ideas and ambitions and art, you see, and all of these can be exchanged rapidly, but there is so much. So much experience. So much variety. So much art and science and philosophy. . . . The process could take several lifetimes. With newcomers always arriving, maybe forever.”

  “I can see that,” Adrian said, “but still—”

  “It’s like a vast library,” Frances said. “That’s what I said when we first saw the place, didn’t I? It’s every bookworm’s dream of paradise.” Fear battled with expectation for possession of her face.

  “Here I have to make a confession.”

  “Ah-ha!” Frances said. Throughout her experience with Cavendish, she had wavered between blind trust and utter mistrust.

  “The message wasn’t received in energetic cosmic rays, as I—or rather my prototype—always said,” Cavendish said. “It was gravity waves.”

  “Why lie?” Adrian asked.

  “I didn’t think anyone would believe gravity waves,” the image said. “And they were so new and so unreliable. I was afraid people would think I was making it up.”

  “They thought so anyway,” Frances said.

  “Not you and Adrian,” Cavendish said, “and you were the ones who mattered.”

  “Gravity waves,” Adrian repeated. “Does that have some significance?”

  “It will later,” Cavendish said. “But to answer the other question—about it being too difficult: the aliens are consummate linguists. They had to be, since they have had to communicate with a thousand other species, and, what’s more, their evolutionary development produced a species for whom understanding others was a survival characteristic.”

  “I can see that,” Adrian said.

  “Well, I can’t,” Frances said. “Sure, you need to understand others, but even more you have to understand the universe in which we live and work. Communication is okay, as far as it goes, but total communication can frustrate the need to get something done.”

  “These aliens don’t understand that,” Peter said.

  “Frances means that accomplishment emerges from the frustration of incomplete communication,” Adrian said. “Like art. Or science, for that matter.”

  “Then that’s the point,” Cavendish said.

  “There’s a point?” Frances said.

  “Yes,” Cavendish said. “The aliens want you to know that they are not the aliens you seek.”

  The image in the window flickered and disappeared, but Peter’s voice in their earphones guided them back to the main tunnel and up its long incline until, at last, they emerged into the black sky and the ambiguity of uncreated night.

  What is your substance, whereof are you made,

  That millions of strange shadows on you tend?

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  Part Six

  STRANGE SHADOWS

  THE SPACESHIP ORBITED THE AIRLESS PLANET in the company of hundreds of other spaceships, each alien to the others. Inside one of those ships, Jessica Buehler felt isolated while a man whose body was thousands of light years away told his audience a story that was more incredible than the spaceship’s journey to this far edge of the galaxy.

  “The aliens want you to know,” Peter Cavendish said from the computer screen, “that they are not the aliens you seek.”

  The screen had been set up in the largest dormitory so that the entire crew could participate in what might be the culmination of their long travels and the decades of effort that had made it possible. The space was long and narrow and cluttered with bunks and hammocks on either wall, but almost two hundred people had crowded in to see the recording.

  “That’s what Peter told us when Frances and I were in the alien labyrinth below,” Adrian Mast said. He stood in front and to one side of the screen, his foot in a strap anchored to the floor. If it had not been for his serious demeanor, he would have looked like a sideshow barker, Jessica thought. Well, Peter was freaky enough.

  She floated effortlessly on the other side of the room from Adrian, her arms folded across her chest, Frances in a chair on Adrian’s side of the screen, with a seatbelt offering a gesture at security.

  Why was it always Frances and Adrian? Jessica thought, and chided herself for jealousy.

  “How can it be Peter?” asked one of the bearded crewmembers.

  “I know, George,” Adrian said. “Peter stayed behind. This is a heuristic program Peter modeled after himself, with most of his abilities and none of his hang-ups, and it has accomplished what we, with all our expeditions to the alien planet below, could not: it—or he—is in communication with the aliens.”

  “How do we know he is telling the truth?” Jessica said. The Peter she knew was capable of infinite deception.

  “We don’t,” Adrian said. “But then we can’t be sure about the truth of anything.” “Including the testimony of our own senses,” Frances said.

  “Then what can we believe?” a woman asked. Jessica recognized her as Janice Kenna. She was pregnant and had a baby in her arms.

  “What makes sense in terms of our situation and the explanations that enable us to survive,” Adrian said. “And maybe to understand and to manipulate our reality.”

  “But Peter could say the same thing,” Janice continued stubbornly, thrusting out her baby toward Adrian as if daring him to deny its reality, “and he saw things that weren’t there.”

  “And made other people see things, too,” Jessica muttered.

  “Peter’s problem was his fears,” Adrian said, “and they finally ate him up. Sure, he had his own reality, but we have a consensus reality—not identical for all of us but matching in enough places that we can coexist and even, sometimes, interact.”

  Laughter rippled through the rest of the crew; there had been considerable interaction in the past year, once they were free of the wormhole that had released them a year’s journey from this spot. Being so far removed from home—Earth and the rest of humanity—had induced an odd urge to reproduce.

  Some of the crewmembers were standing, anchored in place by an arm or a leg or a strap, like Adrian; others, like Jessica, were adrift in the zero gravity, wafted a little this way and that by air currents from the ducts. By now they had all grown accustomed to the sensations of zero gravity again, and the smell of each other and of the ship itself, worn by three years of constant living by several hundred men and women—and now children—thrown into close contact with one another.

  “Data must be trusted until it is proven false,” Adrian said.

  “Or falsified,” Jessica said. Her suspicions of Peter could survive almost any validation.

  “Peter,” Adrian continued, “or the program that calls itself ‘Peter,’ may be lying, although it gains nothing from lying—”

  “Except an audience,” Jessica said, “and maybe some recognition.”

  “That’s true of us all,” Adrian said. “But we shouldn’t project our human motivations onto an electronic simulation. This is a computer program that lacks, or ought to lack, the feedback of audience or social response. Computer programs are capable of incredible feats of calculation but require precise and errorless instructions. Everything for them is on or off, true or false. But let us grant that this program may have developed the unusual ability to receive input and change it, or not receive input and say it did and invent a narrative that will satisfy the requirements of our situation; and let us grant that even if it is telling the truth the aliens it is reporting
to us are lying—which may be more likely—I don’t think we have any choice at this point except to listen.”

  “And evaluate,” Frances added.

  “And judge,” Jessica said.

  “All of those,” Adrian said, “and then make up our minds what we should do with information that may be true, or provisionally true, or provisionally false, or clearly false. Because this may be what we have come so far to discover: why we have been summoned and what, if anything, we should do now.

  “So,” he continued, motioning toward the big screen, “Peter is with us now, as he has been with us from the beginning even though we didn’t know it, a part of the programs that work for us and, although we didn’t know that either, observe us. I think Peter has been observing our discussion and incorporating it into his reality. So, Peter, what have you learned from the aliens?”

  A moment’s delay stretched into minutes and Adrian began to shift uneasily in front of the assembled crewmembers.

  “Maybe it wasn’t Peter after all,” Jessica said. “Maybe the aliens read our data bank and recreated Peter for their own purposes. Maybe he isn’t in the computer—”

  “That’s an ingenious theory,” Peter said, his familiar features flashing into existence on the giant screen. “But then you always were ingenious—and, next to me, the readiest believer in conspiracy theory, maybe because you were part of it.”

  Several crewmembers exclaimed at the apparition that they had not really accepted as reality until they saw it in real time. Even more shifted positions like Adrian.

  “You all have doubts,” Peter said, “and with good reason. I have doubts even in my present, paranoia-free condition. We are here in the presence of the unknown, maybe even the unknowable. I have only the communications of the aliens upon which to depend, and you have only my word that I am receiving those communications and passing them on reliably.”

  “We’ve already discussed all that stuff,” Frances said.

  “I know you have,” Peter said, “and I want you to know that I am aware of all your concerns and that I would ease them if I could, but all I can do is to tell you what I have learned.”

  “We’re waiting,” Adrian said.

  “I have received and stored a great deal of information,” Peter said. “It is stored in the normal fashion, catalogued according to standard procedures, and indexed with appropriate words and phrases. The information covers not only the archives of the aliens, but also some of the archives of all the other creatures in the ships around you. Getting all of that information from all of the creatures and storing it properly will take time—more than the lifetime, extended though it may be, of any of you—and possibly technology that has not yet been developed, although my new substantiation has allowed me to perfect quantum procedures that may solve this problem.

  “Most important, however, is that even based on the limited data that I have received, the information being accumulated is staggering, revolutionary, magnificent. It will transform human existence beyond anything ever imagined. The question that you will have to answer is whether human existence should be transformed, whether humanity can endure transformation without destroying itself.”

  Jessica’s doubts shifted into overdrive, but Adrian anticipated her with “How do you know all that?”

  “You always were quick to get to the heart of the matter, Adrian,” Peter said. “And as usual you are right: I am generalizing from the massive quantities of information I am receiving, even as we speak, and its alien origins. It is an easy jump to the conclusion that this data will work the kinds of changes that I describe.”

  “But you haven’t evaluated them yourself.”

  “Clearly not,” Peter said, “and clearly I would not be a good judge of their impact on human minds and bodies, even though I can construct hypothetical paradigms to emulate human responses. But if the information is of the same level of technological advancement as the spaceship design and the antimatter collectors—whose influence on human existence we all know—then the additional information promises to—”

  “Okay, okay,” Frances said. “Get on with it.”

  “The aliens who are communicating with me say that their planet once was part of a solar system not unlike ours, as ours has been communicated to them,” Peter said. “But it was located on the other side of the galactic center from where we find it now and about as far out on a spiral arm as our system is.”

  “If we’re going to have to go back to the beginnings of the galaxy,” Jessica muttered, “we’ll be here for days.” “This was, to be sure, a couple of billion years ago,” Peter went on, unperturbed.

  “Good lord!” Frances said. Jessica thought that Frances was startled not so much by the scope of the narrative but, like Jessica, by its apparent duration.

  “Then our galaxy crossed paths with another galaxy—a small one, fortunately, since one the size of the Milky Way would have caused much more, maybe fatal damage. This one created a few more supernovas and precipitated a few more black holes and disrupted a few systems, but otherwise did little except to prepare this galaxy for a new surge of evolutionary development, of stars and planets and, eventually, of life itself. The aliens did not know then and do not know now whether this outcome was by design or accident, but it seemed to some of them, in their state of scientific naturalism emerging out of earlier supernatural beliefs, that some unseen hand had flung the smaller galaxy into their way across the vast emptiness of space.”

  Jessica saw Adrian shifting position as if he, too, were getting restless.

  “But that, in itself, was not the strangest part. That unseen hand, if an unseen hand it was, cupped itself around the aliens’ solar system and propelled it toward the center of the galaxy.”

  “Impossible!” Adrian said.

  “So they thought,” Peter continued, “but the evidence, though slow in arriving over centuries and even millennia, was irrefutable. Their entire system was moving in relationship to other star systems and getting closer, bit by bit, to the galactic center. Where, of course, total destruction awaited.”

  “Of course,” Adrian said impatiently. “So, how did they escape?”

  “It’s like a cliff-hanger serial,” Frances said.

  “The events took many millions of years, and their many nationalities and contending factions began to come together under the pressure of their inexplicable galactic journey,” Peter said. “At the beginning they were fragmented even more than we are on Earth, which helps explain their skill in languages. And it was their skill in languages, as well as developments in science, that led to their staggering discovery.”

  “And what was that, Peter?” Adrian asked.

  “They discovered the existence of a kind of matter that we cannot see or feel except as gravitational influences, a variety of dark matter. It was a large body of this sort, perhaps a part of the invading galaxy, that had captured the aliens’ system and propelled it across the galaxy toward what seemed like certain doom.”

  “I can see,” Adrian said, “that this account is going to take considerable time.”

  At last, Jessica thought, he was seeing what she had recognized some time before. She wished it were all over, and they could do something— anything.

  “We can’t keep everybody here for hours,” Adrian said. “Go back to your tasks, and we’ll record Peter’s message for later viewing by anyone interested. Frances, Jessica, and I will remain here to interrogate Peter.”

  One by one the others drifted away, some looking back with concern or disbelief or apathy toward the image of Peter Cavendish on the large screen and their three leaders in front of it.

  Jessica thrust out her arms in a gesture of helplessness; the gesture spun her around until she stopped herself with a hand on the wall next to her and drifted across the space until she stopped near Frances. “What do you think? It all seems so strange and irrelevant.”

  “Like a creation myth,” Frances said. “If Peter is to be believed, it star
ted two billion years ago. Two billion years is a long time. We weren’t even primitive slime.”

  “Long enough,” Jessica said, “to dream up a story to explain how they find themselves on the edge of the galaxy.”

  “Scientists have speculated about the existence of such matter as Peter describes,” Adrian said. “Shadow matter is what they call it, or, sometimes, mirror matter.”

  “I like ‘mirror matter,’” Peter said conversationally. “Like Alice’s ‘looking glass.’ You can’t touch it or smell it or hear it—you can only see the evidence of it reflecting a world where everything works backwards.”

  “Only ten to twenty percent of the matter in the universe is visible,” Adrian said. “And only three percent is luminous.”

  “How did they come up with a figure like that?” Jessica asked skeptically.

  “There isn’t enough visible matter,” Peter said, “to explain how stars move in our galaxy, the rate at which galaxies rotate, how much hot gas is found in elliptical galaxies and clusters of galaxies, the way galaxies and clusters of galaxies and the Local Supercluster move, or the formation of galaxies, clusters, superclusters, and the voids between. All those things require far more matter than we can see.”

  “It’s all getting crazy,” Frances said. “How are ordinary humans supposed to understand concepts like that?”

  “If you want crazy,” Peter said, “consider string theory, which imagines a form of energy with a diameter smaller than a quark and a length thousands or even millions of light-years long. Our universe may be only the three-dimensional shadow of ten-dimensional realities.”

  “That’s as far-out as the supernatural and of about as much use,” Jessica said.

  “Maybe we should let Peter continue,” Adrian said.

  “That’s okay,” Peter said cheerfully. “Computer software has no sense of urgency. Besides, while you three have been talking I have been recording the history and literature of another alien species.”