by Gunn, James
“What we’re concerned with at the moment is the life story of the aliens who summoned us,” Adrian said, “and when the story left off, they were heading toward certain doom at the heart of the galaxy.”
“You can imagine,” Peter said, “that the unseen hand that had plucked them from their troubled but normal existence in a remote spiral arm of the galaxy focused their concerns on gravity. In their place, we would have done the same, but for us gravity was a constant that we incorporated in our sense of the world, but never thought much about until Newton.”
“And, of course, it wasn’t until we progressed beyond recourse to the supernatural that we had any need for natural explanations,” Adrian said.
“And so,” Peter continued, “these aliens discovered gravity waves a couple of billion years before we did.” “Gravity waves?” Jessica asked.
“The mechanism by which gravity propagates,” Peter said. “Newton assumed that gravity was a property of matter that existed without needing a medium, but more recently scientists have come to believe that gravity waves actually alter the nature of space itself, though minutely, and have developed instruments for measuring them.
“These aliens developed those instruments early in their civilization, and improved them until they were capable of measuring the smallest fluctuations,” Peter said. “And finally they identified what they took to be signals.”
“Signals?” Frances said. “You’re pulling our leg. Or they’re pulling yours, if you had one.”
Peter’s expression of earnest recounting changed to one of alert attention. “One of the other ships has begun to shift position,” he said. His face disappeared and was replaced by a schematic of the alien ships orbiting Enigma, and then by a view of one of the absurdly shaped ships moving against the backdrop of space, at first imperceptibly and then more swiftly.
“What’s going on?” Adrian asked.
The actions clearly were not in real time. At least the early stages of the ship’s movement had been recorded over some hours until movement was discernible, but then it went faster until the ship began to dwindle into the distance.
“What’s happening?” Frances asked.
The screen was silent for several moments until Peter’s face appeared again. “One of the alien ships decided to depart,” he said.
“Is that bad?” Jessica asked. Peter had always been good at sleight of hand.
“Do they know something we don’t know?” Frances said. “Is something happening, or going to happen? What if all the other ships start to leave? Should we get ready to depart?”
“Ships come, ships go,” Peter said. “They have to make a decision, the aliens tell me. Whether to complete the transfer of information or to take what they have and go home. It is a decision that you will have to make as well.”
“Not until we know more than we know now,” Adrian said.
“And you shall,” Peter said. “The aliens had reached the point where they perceived that the gravity waves were signals. Deciphering the signals took more generations than we can imagine, even with their skills in communication, while their system was getting closer to the galactic center every passing millennium. And then one Enigma genius stumbled upon the key.”
“The Peter Cavendish of his time,” Jessica said. She could not stop herself from getting in a dig at Peter, even if this was an electronic simulacrum.
“Thank you,” Peter said, “in spite of the sarcasm. Someone or something was trying to communicate with them. Eventually, after many more generations, translators began to decipher a message, or series of messages, and they finally understood that it was coming from that unseen hand, from the mirror matter that had entered our galaxy and had captured their world, and that the mirror matter world consisted of a different kind of existence, created at the time of the Big Bang, and that it consisted of at least one sun and one planet and intelligent creatures.”
As if in response to their unspoken incredulity, the view on the screen changed to the solar system as they had approached it—the solitary planet orbiting the small, old orange sun. But now Jessica saw beside it another world with its own sun and its own strange inhabitants, shadows who lived and thought and acted as people did though only dark silhouettes. The vision lasted only a moment before it faded and she turned toward Adrian and Frances.
“Unseen hands! Invisible creatures!” she said, though she knew she was annoyed at her own susceptibility. “Why are we wasting our time on this kind of nonsense?”
“It is fantastic,” Adrian said, “but much of modern cosmology presumes conditions remote from everyday reality. In time and if we had the right kind of instruments we could check the gravitational influences on this system. The mirror world may be invisible to ordinary measurements but not to its influence on orbits.”
“But we don’t have time or instruments,” Frances said.
“Observation would be enough if we had time,” Adrian said.
“I have been recording such matters as a matter of routine since we came out of the wormhole,” Peter said from the screen, although his face did not reappear, “and my observations are available for analysis.”
“What other records do you have?” Jessica said. Everything Peter said rose in her throat like acid. Adrian was responding with his customary, infuriating equanimity, and Frances kept trying to fit Peter’s narrative into one of her neat literary pigeonholes, but none of them was the right shape.
The screen filled with a field of stars. There were tens of thousands of them like fireflies on a summer night, many more than could be seen from the Enigma planet, here on the edge of the galaxy, many more even than could be seen from Earth. And there was something subtly wrong with the stars: they were bigger, brighter, bluer.
“At a point in their history, the Enigma aliens—let us call them ‘Enigmatics’—began to record their experience,” Peter said, “but some of the earliest records have been lost or degraded. They were slow to develop spaceflight, but eventually they produced computer-controlled spacecraft that could observe the changes that were occurring in their celestial neighborhood and these files were created. It happened about a million years after their galactic odyssey began.”
“Why computer-controlled?” Adrian asked.
“They are profoundly agoraphobic,” Peter said.
“Though fortunately not claustrophobic,” Jessica said.
“Whether they were agoraphobic from their beginnings is uncertain,” Peter said, “but the experience of being removed from their original location and hurtled toward the center of the galaxy left them clinging to the familiar.”
The view changed. Now it revealed a sun that seemed about the size of Earth’s but a bit brighter. Gradually, as if a camera were moving in, planets came into view, a small planet, three gas giants, and then some smaller planets. One of the smaller ones had a familiar blue color, but it had two medium-sized satellites instead of one large moon. From the planet bright flares arose. One resolved itself into a small spaceship that went into orbit around the planet. The other flares also shut off; if they were ships, as well, they too might have gone into orbit. Then the ship that was visible began to move again, although without apparent means of propulsion, picked up speed, and dwindled into nothing.
“I don’t understand,” Frances said. “That’s not the Enigma planet.”
“That’s how it looked nearly two billion years ago,” Peter said.
“But there are other planets and two moons,” Jessica objected. “Now there is only one world and no moons.”
“Sacrificed to the greater purpose.”
“My god!” Adrian said.
“Adrian is beginning to understand,” Peter said.
“What greater purpose?” Jessica asked. “Why are all those ships taking off? How are they propelled? Where are they going?” She felt a little nauseated, as if she had morning sickness.
“They are going to explore other solar systems,” Adrian said. “As Enigma moved thro
ugh this arm of the galaxy, it was gathering information about what lay ahead in the center of the galaxy.”
“That makes sense,” Frances said.
“And probably information about nearby stars,” Adrian said.
“Particularly those that were likely to have planets,” Peter said.
“How did they know?” Jessica asked.
“They were obsessed with the stars, you understand,” Peter said, “and had millions of years to try to cope with their situation. They developed orbital telescopes that provided a great deal of information, as well as these records, and then they had the guidance of their masters in the shadow world.”
“How could the shadow world creatures get information?” Jessica objected. “They didn’t have any connection with our reality!”
“Except gravity,” Adrian said.
“Exactly,” Peter said. “Gravity was their ears and eyes and noses and fingers. They not only made themselves felt by gravity waves, they perceived things in our universe in the same way, and perhaps with greater clarity, since gravity waves are everywhere.”
“I don’t know the wavelength of gravity waves,” Adrian said, “but surely it isn’t small enough to pick up much detail.”
“It may if that is your only sensory input,” Peter said, “and if you set up triangulations or interference patterns. But then fine detail may not be necessary if you are dealing with matter on the planetary scale.”
“What I don’t understand,” Jessica said, “is what was providing the propulsion for the ships that moved off the planet by what I take to be chemical rockets?”
“I’d guess it was the Shadows,” Adrian said.
“So did the Enigmatics,” Peter said. “Their job was to put them into orbit. They didn’t know what happened to them afterwards. But they noticed that some of the distant planets they were observing seemed to undergo subtle changes.”
“Surely the ships they were sending couldn’t alter star systems!” Frances objected.
“No,” Adrian said, “but the Shadows could when they saw that changes were necessary.”
“Necessary?” Jessica said. “What kind of changes?”
“To make those systems more congenial to life,” Adrian said.
“Why would they want to do that?” Frances said.
“So that they would be receptive to the next wave of ships,” Adrian said.
“And what would they carry?” Jessica asked.
“Something that would encourage the existence of living creatures,” Adrian said. “Right, Peter?”
“The seeds of life,” Peter said.
Suddenly the pictures on the screen assumed a different appearance to Jessica. Now they looked like spermatozoa spurting out to fertilize a sea of ova. “The seeds of life?” she said. “That is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s pretty wild,” Adrian admitted.
“And the implications are even wilder,” Frances added.
“What in heaven’s name are the seeds of life?” Jessica said.
“In some situations, it meant preparing planets to nurture existence,” Peter said. “Altering orbits, encouraging planetary wobbles, adjusting chemistries. But where planets were ready, the ships scattered the seeds of life.”
“You said it again,” Jessica said.
“It isn’t clear whether by ‘the seeds of life’ the Enigmatics mean carbon compounds, spores, or actual RNA or DNA sequences,” Peter said.
“What it means,” Adrian said, “is that the Enigmatics may have been responsible for life in our galaxy.”
“That’s a staggering thought,” Frances said.
“If true,” Jessica said.
“The question is,” Adrian said, “how did the Enigmatics come up with the knowledge and the means to do this sort of seeding?”
“They were simply following instructions from the shadow creatures,” Peter said.
“All encoded in gravity waves?” Adrian said skeptically.
“They had many thousands of years to receive those instructions and to decipher them.”
“That would make the shadow creatures some kind of gods,” Jessica said.
“The supernatural but with a natural explanation,” Adrian said.
“That, of course, is how the Enigmatics thought of them,” Peter said. “And there wasn’t much difference between the commandments of the Shadows and the injunctions of our own pantheons, except that the Shadows’ were more practical. The Enigmatics had proof of the power of their gods: their entire system had been yanked out of place and was being hurtled toward what looked like certain doom, even if it was a million years in the future.”
“There was that,” Jessica said, “if that can be believed.” She wasn’t believing much of it.
“The Enigmatics believed it, and that was important,” Peter said. “Moreover, they believed that the shadow creatures had the power to save them, or their remote descendants, if they interpreted their messages properly and obeyed their commands. There must have been many failures before something worked. And, of course, they had proof.”
“So did all the religions we know about,” Frances said. “It all depends on what you consider proof.”
“They could measure the effects of shadow matter on their system,” Peter said, “and they could record the gravity-wave messages and when they interpreted the messages properly, the ships they built worked, and they were propelled toward their remote destinations by unseen forces.”
“All of which sounds like superstition to me,” Jessica said. “That’s the way superstitions grow, attributing natural processes of trial and error and eventual success to proper interpretation of a divine message. Who is to say that it wouldn’t have worked if scientists and engineers hadn’t simply built those things on their own?”
“And who is to say,” Frances added, “that the Enigmatics in charge of the translation—surely there were only a few of them, like priests or sibyls—”
“Or Cavendishes,” Jessica interjected.
“—weren’t in cahoots with scientists and engineers who wanted to get their work funded by appealing to supernatural beliefs?”
“You’re getting as paranoid as Jessica,” Peter said.
“And who is to say,” Adrian said, “that the original Peter Cavendish didn’t create the plans for the spaceship we built and the antimatter collectors—?”
Frances shrugged. Even though she was strapped to a chair, the movement brought a look of unease to her face.
“All right,” Jessica said.
“And who is to say,” Adrian said, “that all of these alien ships didn’t get built in the same way and find their own wormholes and end up here?”
“Okay,” Jessica said. “I admit that I’m a skeptic, and I admit that there is some evidence for part of what Peter has been telling us. But I hope you also will admit that there are alternative explanations, and that nothing Peter has said in the past has been without subterfuge or double-meaning.”
“I’ll admit all that,” Peter said. “The person who programmed me was a troubled man, and I can’t be sure I am free of his paranoia, but I feel and believe that I am reporting everything accurately.”
“One question I’ve been puzzled about,” Frances said, “is if the Enigmatics scattered the seeds of life across the galaxy, why did the creatures turn out so different?”
“Even if it were DNA,” Peter said, “environment and chance play an inevitable part in shaping the final result.”
“Chemistry, asteroids and other cosmic collisions, eruptions, climate changes, crust movements, disease—” Adrian said.
“Even the development of intelligence and its combination with aggressiveness aren’t foreordained,” Peter said. “There must have been many failures, many blind alleys as in the evolution of humans, and many instances in which intelligence got embodied in some other form.”
“Evolution favored the primates on Earth,” Adrian said. “Maybe the equivalent of the
dinosaurs or the whales or the dogs got touched by the magic wand elsewhere. Big, convoluted brains and opposable thumbs—that may be all that’s necessary.”
The screen changed to a blinding view of massive suns crowding the perspective. Then the glare diminished, as if a filter had been placed in front of the lens, and they could see some of the individual suns. Some were exploding, some were shrinking into nothingness, and some had their essence sucked away, in long, colorful streamers, into a halo feeding into a blackness beyond black.
It was like gazing into the mouth of hell.
Jessica stared at the images on the screen, trying to comprehend the titanic energies exploding in front of her, epic catastrophes, primal violence. Adrian’s voice shook her out of her trance.
“That, then, is the center of the galaxy,” he said. “One hears about it, one tries to imagine it, but the reality is beyond imagination.”
“And this is what the Enigmatics saw as their fate,” Peter said, “broadcast back from probes that recorded events here for some millions of years—a gigantic black hole surrounded by thousands of stars being torn apart by tidal forces and feeding their substance into the gravitational well.”
“What did they do?” Frances demanded.
“Nothing,” Peter said. “They could do nothing. Or almost nothing. They had used up their two satellites making spaceships for the Shadows and tunneled out their own planet for metals. They retreated inside the planet and waited for the end.”
“And yet they survived,” Adrian said.
The view on the screen shifted to the Enigmatics’ solar system in the foreground, the violence of the galactic center in the background, small but growing larger. “Their hope, their almost religious faith, was in the shadow creatures, but as powerful as they were, the Enigmatics could not imagine how the Shadows could move an entire system. Maybe, some speculated, a single world, but what would a planet be without a sun?”
“And yet—?” Adrian prompted.
As the violence in the background increased, one of the three gas-giant planets loomed larger and then seemed to recede, first slowly, then more rapidly. The view drew back. The gas giant was moving out of orbit and hurtling away.