“Kind of bland,” I said, hoping I wasn’t giving offense.
Hollus’s eyestalks moved to their maximum separation. “It was decided by a committee.”
I smiled. Just like the name for our Discovery Gallery back at the ROM. I looked again at the starship. While my attention had been diverted, an opening had appeared in its side; I have no idea whether it had irised open or some panel had slid away. The opening was bathed in yellow-white light, and I could see three other black wedge-shaped landers positioned inside.
Our shuttle continued to grow closer.
“Where are the stars?” I asked.
Hollus looked at me.
“I expected to see stars in space.”
“Oh,” she said. “The glare from Sol and Earth washes them out.” She sang a few words in her own language, and stars appeared on the wallscreen. “The computer has now increased each star’s apparent brightness enough so that it is visible.” She pointed with her left arm. “See that zigzag there? That is Cassiopeia. Just below the central star in the pattern are Mu and Eta Cassiopeiae, two of the places I visited before coming here.” The indicated stars suddenly had computer-generated circles around them. “And see that smudge below them?” Another circle obligingly appeared. “That is the Andromeda galaxy.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
Soon, though, the Merelcas filled the entire field of view. Everything was apparently automatic; except for the occasional sung command, Hollus had done nothing since we entered the shuttle.
There was a clanging sound, conducted through the shuttle’s hull, as we connected with a docking adapter on the far wall of the open bay. Hollus kicked off the bulkhead with her six feet and sailed gently toward the door. I tried to follow, but I realized I’d drifted too far from the wall; I couldn’t reach out to kick or push off anything.
Hollus recognized my predicament, and her eyestalks moved with laughter again. She maneuvered her way back and reached out a hand to me. I took it. It was indeed the flesh-and-blood Hollus; there was no static tingle. She pushed off the bulkhead again with three of her feet, and we both sailed toward the door, which dutifully opened as we approached it.
Waiting for us were three more Forhilnors and two Wreeds. The Forhilnors would be easy to tell apart—each one had a cloth wrapped around its torso of a different color—but the Wreeds looked awfully similar to each other.
I spent three days exploring the ship. The lighting was all indirect; you couldn’t see the fixtures. The walls, and much of the equipment, were cyan. I assumed that to Wreeds and Forhilnors, this color, not too far removed from that of the sky, was considered to be neutral; they used it everywhere humans used beige. I visited the Wreed habitat once, but it had a moldy smell I found unpleasant; I spent most of my time in the common-area module. It contained two concentric centrifuges that spun to simulate gravity; the outer one matched the conditions on Beta Hydri III, and the inner one simulated Delta Pavonis II.
All four of us passengers from Earth—me; Qaiser, the schizophrenic woman; Zhu, the ancient Chinese rice farmer; and Huhn, the silverback gorilla—enjoyed watching the fabulous spectacle of the Earth, a glorious sphere of polished sodalite, receding behind us as the Merelcas began its voyage—although Huhn, of course, didn’t really understand what he was seeing.
It was less than a day later before we passed the orbit of the moon. My fellow passengers and I were now farther into space than anyone from our planet had ever gone before—and yet we’d only covered less than one ten-billionth of the total distance we were going to traverse.
I tried repeatedly to have conversations with Zhu; he was initially quite wary of me—he later told me I was the first Westerner he’d ever met—but the fact that I spoke Mandarin eventually won him over. Still, I suppose I revealed my ignorance more than a few times in our chats. It was easy for me to understand why I, a scientist, might want to go off to the vicinity of Betelgeuse; it was harder for me to understand why an old peasant farmer would wish to do the same. And Zhu was indeed old—he himself wasn’t sure what year he’d been born, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been prior to the end of the nineteenth century.
“I am going,” said Zhu, “in search of Enlightenment.” His voice was slow, whispery. “I seek prajna, pure and unqualified knowledge.” He regarded me through rheumy eyes. “Dandart”—that was the Forhilnor who had bonded with him—“says the universe has undergone a series of births and deaths. So, of course does the individual, until Enlightenment is achieved.”
“So it is religion that brings you here?” I asked.
“It is everything,” said Zhu, simply.
I smiled. “Let’s hope the trip is worth it.”
“I am certain it will be,” said Zhu, with a peaceful look on his face.
“You’re sure this is safe?” I said to Hollus, as we floated down to the room where they would put me in cryogenic freeze.
Her eyestalks rippled. “You are flying through space at what you would refer to as breakneck speed, heading toward a creature who has almost inconceivable strength—and you worry about whether the hibernation process is safe?”
I laughed. “Well, when you put it that way—”
“It is safe; do not worry.”
“Don’t forget to wake me when we reach Betelgeuse.”
Hollus could be perfectly deadpan when she felt like it. “I will write myself a little note.”
Susan Jericho, now sixty-four, sat in the den in the house on Ellerslie. It had been almost ten years since Tom had left. Of course, if he’d stayed on Earth, he’d have been dead for almost a decade. But instead he was presumably still alive, frozen, suspended, traveling aboard an alien starship, not to be revived for 430 years.
Susan understood all this. But the scale of it gave her a headache—and today was a day for celebrations, not pain. Today was Richard Blaine Jericho’s sixteenth birthday.
Susan had given him what he’d wanted most—the promise to pay for driving lessons, and, after he’d received his license, the even bigger promise to buy him a car. There had been a lot of insurance; the cost of the car was a minor concern. Great Canadian Life had tried briefly to renege on paying out; Tom Jericho wasn’t really dead, they’d said. But when the media got hold of the story, GCL had taken such a beating that the president of the company had publicly apologized and had personally hand-delivered a half-million-dollar check to Susan and her son.
A birthday was always special, but Susan and Dick—who would have thought that Ricky would grow up wanting to be called that?—would also celebrate again in a month. Dick’s birthday had never quite had the proper resonance for Susan, since she hadn’t been present when he’d been born. But a month from now, in July, would be the sixteenth anniversary of Dick’s adoption, and that was a memory Susan cherished.
When Dick got home from school—he was just finishing grade ten at Northview Heights—Susan had two more presents for him. First was a copy of his father’s journal about the time he’d spent with Hollus. And second was a copy of the tape Tom had made for his son; she’d had it converted from VHS to DVD.
“Wow,” said Dick. He was tall and muscular, and Susan was enormously proud of him. “I never knew Dad made a video.”
“He asked me to wait ten years before giving it to you,” Susan said. She shrugged a little. “I think he wanted you to be old enough to understand it.”
Dick lifted the jewel case, weighing it in his hand, as if he could thus divine its secrets. He was clearly anxious to see it. “Can we watch it now?” he said.
Susan smiled. “Sure.”
They went into the living room, and Dick slipped the disk into the player.
And the two of them sat on the couch and watched Tom’s gaunt, disease-ravaged form come to life again.
Dick had seen a few pictures of Tom from that time—they were in a scrapbook Susan had kept of the press coverage of Hollus’s visit to Earth and Tom’s subsequent departure. But he’d never seen w
hat the cancer had done to his father in quite this detail. Susan watch him recoil a bit as the images began.
But soon all that was on Dick’s face was attention, rapt attention, as he hung on every word.
At the end, they both wiped tears from their eyes, tears for the man they would always love.
* * *
34
A
bsolute darkness.
And heat, licking at me from all sides.
Was it hell? Was—
But no. No, of course not. I had a splitting headache, but my mind was beginning to focus.
A loud click, and then—
And then the lid of the cryofreeze unit sliding aside. The oblong coffin, made for a Wreed, was set flush into the floor, and Hollus was straddling it, her six feet in stirrups to keep her from floating away, her front legs tipped, and her eyestalks drooping down to look at me.
“Time” “to” “get” “up,” “my” “friend,” she said.
I knew what you were supposed to say in a situation like this; I’d seen Khan Noonien Singh do it. “How long?” I asked.
“More than four centuries,” replied Hollus. “It is now the Earth year 2432.”
Just like that, I thought. More than four hundred years gone, passing by without me being aware. Just like that.
They were wise to have installed the cryochambers outside of the centrifuges; I doubt I could have stood up under my own weight yet. Hollus reached down with her right hand, and I reached up with my left to grab it, the simple gold band on my ring finger looking unchanged by the freezing and the passing of time. Hollus helped haul me up out of the black ceramic coffin; she then slipped her feet out of the stirrups and we floated freely.
“The ship has ceased decelerating,” she said. “We are almost to what is left of Betelgeuse.”
I was naked; for some reason, I was embarrassed to have the alien see me this way. But my clothes were waiting for me; I quickly dressed a blue Tilley shirt and a pair of soft, khaki-colored pants, veterans of many digs.
My eyes were having trouble focusing, and my mouth was dry. Hollus must have anticipated this; she had a translucent bulb full of water ready to give me. The Forhilnors never chilled their water, but that was fine right now—the last thing I needed was something cold.
“Should I have a checkup?” I asked, after I’d finished squeezing the water into my mouth.
“No,” said Hollus. “It is all automatic; your health has been continuously monitored. You are—” She stopped; I’m sure she’d been about to say I was fine, but we both knew that wasn’t true. “You are as you were before the freezing.”
“My head hurts.”
Hollus moved her limbs in an odd way; after a second I realized it was the flexing that would have bobbed her torso had we not been in zero-g. “You will doubtless experience various aches for a day or so; it is natural.”
“I wonder how Earth is?” I said.
Hollus sang to the nearest wall monitor. After a few moments, a magnified image appeared: a yellow disk, looking about the size of a quarter held at arm’s length. “Your sun,” she said. She then she pointed at a duller object, about one-sixth the diameter of Sol. “And that is Jupiter, showing a gibbous face from this perspective.” She paused. “At this distance, it is difficult to resolve Earth in visible light, although if you look at a radio image, Earth outshines your sun at many frequencies.”
“Still?” I said. “We’re still broadcasting in radio, after all this time?” That would be wonderful. It would mean—
Hollus was quiet for a moment, perhaps surprised that I didn’t get it. “I do not know. Earth is 429 light-years behind us; the light reaching us now shows how your solar system looked shortly after we left it.”
I nodded sadly. Of course. My heart started pounding, and my vision blurred some more. At first I thought something had gone wrong in reviving me, but that wasn’t it.
I was staggered; I hadn’t been prepared for how I would feel.
I was still alive.
My eyes squinted at the tiny yellow disk, then tipped down to the gold ring encircling my finger. Yes, I was still alive. But my beloved Susan was not. Surely, she was not.
I wondered what kind of life she had made for herself after I’d left. I hoped it had been a happy one.
And Ricky? My son, my wonderful son?
Well, there was that doctor I’d heard interviewed on CTV, the one who had said that the first human who would live forever had likely already been born. Maybe Ricky was still alive, and was—what?—438 years old.
But the chances were slim, I supposed. More likely, Ricky had grown up to be whatever sort of man he’d been destined to become, and he had worked and loved, and now…
And now was gone.
My son. I had almost certainly outlived him. A father is not supposed to do that.
I felt tears welling in my eyes; tears that had been frozen solid not an hour ago, tears that just sort of pooled there, near their ducts, in the absence of gravity. I wiped them away.
Hollus understood what human tears signified, but she didn’t ask me why I was crying. Her own children, Pealdon and Kassold, must surely now be dead, too. She floated patiently next to me.
I wondered if Ricky had left children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren; it shocked me to think that I could easily have fifteen or more generations of descendants now. Perhaps the Jericho name echoed on still…
And I wondered whether the Royal Ontario Museum still existed, whether they’d ever reopened the planetarium, or if, in fact, cheap spaceflight for all the people had finally, properly, rendered that the institution redundant.
I wondered if Canada still existed, that great country I loved so much.
More, of course, I wondered if humanity still existed, if we had avoided the sting at the end of the Drake equation, avoided blowing ourselves up with nuclear weapons. We’d had them for fifty-odd years before I’d left; could we have resisted using them for eight times longer than that?
Or maybe…
It was what the natives of Epsilon Indi had chosen.
And those of Tau Ceti.
Of Mu Cassiopeiae A, also.
And of Eta Cassiopeiae A.
Those of Sigma Draconis, as well.
And even those amoral beings of Groombridge 1618, the arrogant bastards who had blown up Betelgeuse.
All of them, if I was right, had transcended into a machine realm, a virtual world, a computer-generated paradise.
And by now, with four centuries of additional technological advances, surely Homo sapiens had the capability of doing the same.
Perhaps they had done it. Perhaps they had.
I looked at Hollus, floating there: the real Hollus, not the simulacrum. My friend, in the flesh.
Maybe humanity had even taken a hint from the natives of Mu Cassiopeiae A, blowing up Luna, giving Earth rings to rival those of Saturn; of course, our moon is relatively smaller than the Cassiopeian one and so contributes less to the churning of our mantle. Still, perhaps now a warning landscape was spread out across some geologically stable part of Earth.
I was floating freely again, too far from any wall; I had a tendency to do that. Hollus maneuvered over to me and took my hand in hers.
I hoped we hadn’t uploaded. I hoped humanity was, well, still human—still warm and biological and real.
But there was no way to know for sure.
And was the entity still there, waiting for us, after more than four centuries?
Yes.
Oh, perhaps it hadn’t stuck around all that time; perhaps it had indeed calculated when we would arrive, and had nipped off to take care of other things in the interim. While the Merelcas was traversing the 429 light-years at a hair below the speed of light, the view ahead had blueshifted into ultraviolet invisibility; the entity could have been gone for much of that time.
And, of course, perhaps it wasn’t really God; perhaps it was just some extremely advanced lifeform, some repre
sentative of an ancient, but entirely natural, race. Or maybe it was actually a machine, a massive swarm of nanotechnological entities; there was no reason why advanced technology couldn’t look organic.
But where do you draw the line? Something—someone—set the fundamental parameters for this universe.
Someone had intervened on at least three worlds over a period of 375 million years, a span two million times longer than the couple of centuries intelligent races seem to survive in a corporeal state.
And someone had now saved Earth and Delta Pavonis II and Beta Hydri III from the explosion of a supergiant star, absorbing more energy in a matter of moments than all the other stars in the galaxy were putting out, and doing so without being destroyed in the process.
How do you define God? Must he or she be omniscient? Omnipotent? As the Wreeds say, those are mere abstractions, and possibly unattainable. Must God be defined in a way that places him or her beyond the scope of science?
I’d always believed that there was nothing beyond the scope of science.
And I still believe that.
Where do you draw the line?
Right here. For me, the answer was right here.
How do you define God?
Like this. A God I could understand, at least potentially, was infinitely more interesting and relevant than one that defied comprehension.
I floated in front of one of the wall screens, Hollus on my left, six more Forhilnors next to her, a string of Wreeds off to my right, and we looked out at him, at it, at the being. It turned out to be about 1.5 billion kilometers wide—roughly the diameter of Jupiter’s orbit. And it was so unrelentingly black that I was told that even the glow of the Merelcas’s fusion exhaust, which had been facing this way for two centuries of braking, had not reflected back from it.
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