In the Distance, and Ahead in Time

by George Zebrowski

  the On Earth the religio-philosophic system was a blend of evolutionary Chardinism and Christianity, an imposing intellectual structure that had been dominant for some two hundred years now. The political structure based its legitimacy and continuing policies on it. Compton, from what he had learned, had frightened some high authorities with the claim that the gnome creature here on Antares IV was a potential threat to the beliefs of mankind. This, combined with what was already known about the alien’s past, was seemingly enough to send this fact-finding mission. Only a few men knew about it, and Chavez remembered the fear he had sensed in them when he had been briefed. Their greatest fear was that somehow the gnome’s history would become public knowledge. Compton, despite his motives, had found a few more political friends. But Chavez suspected that Compton wanted power not for himself, but to do something about the quality of life on Earth. He was sure the man was sincere. How little of the thought in our official faith filters out into actual policy, Chavez thought. And what would the government do if an unorganized faith—a heresy in the old sense—were to result from this meeting between Compton and the alien? Then he remembered how Compton had rushed this whole visit. He wondered just how far a man like Compton would go to have his way in the world.

  Antares was huge on the horizon, a massive red disk against a deep blue sky. A slight breeze waved the trees around the landing square. The pathway, which started at the north corner, led to three bright white buildings set on a neat lawn and surrounded by flowering shrubs and fruit-bearing trees. The walk was pleasant.

  Rufus Kade, the caretaker, met them at the front entrance to the main building. He showed them into the comfortable reception room. He was a tall, thin botanist, who had taken the post because it gave him the opportunity to be near exotic plants. Some of the flora came from worlds as much as one hundred light-years away from Antares. After the introductions were over, Kade took the party to the garden where gnome spent most of his time.

  “Do you ever talk with him, Mr. Kade?” Father Chavez asked. The caretaker shook his head. “No,” he said. “And now I hope you will excuse me, I have work to do.” He left them at the entrance to the garden path.

  Compton turned to Father Chavez and said, “You are lucky, you’re the only representative of any church ever to get a chance to meet what might be the central deity of that church.” He smiled. “But I feel sorry for you—for whatever he is, he will not be what you expect, and most certainly he will not be what you want him to be.”

  “Let’s wait and see,” Chavez said. “I’m not a credulous man.”

  “You know, Chavez,” Compton said in a more serious mood, “they let me come here too easily. What I mean is they took my word for the danger involved with little or no question.”

  “Should they have not taken your word? You are an important man.”

  Sister Guinivere led the way into the garden. On either side of them the plants were luxurious, with huge green leaves and strange varicolored flowers. The air was filled with rich scents, and the Earth gave the sensation of being very moist and loosely packed. They came into the open area surrounding the pool. Sister Guinivere stood between the two men as they looked at the scene. The water was still, and the disk of Antares was high enough now in the morning sky to be reflected in it.

  The gnome stood on the far side, watching them as they approached, as if he expected them at any moment to break into some words of greeting. It would be awkward standing before a member of a race a million years older than mankind and towering over him. It would be aesthetically banal, Chavez thought.

  As they came to the other side of the pool Compton said, “Let me start the conversation, Father.”

  “If you wish,” Chavez said. Why am I afraid, and what does it matter who starts the conversation, he thought.

  Compton walked up to the gnome and sat down cross-legged in front of him. It was a diplomatic gesture. Father Chavez felt relieved and followed the example, motioning Sister Guinivere to do the same. They all looked at the small alien.

  His eyes were deep-set and large; his hair was white, thin and reached down to his shoulders. He had held his hand behind his back when they had approached, but now they were together in front of him. His shoulders were narrow and his arms were thin. He wore a one-piece coverall with short sleeves.

  Chavez hoped they would be able to talk to him easily. The gnome looked at each of them in turn. It became obvious that he expected them to start the conversation.

  “My name is Benedict Compton,” Compton said, “and this is Father Chavez and Sister Guinivere, his secretary. We came here to ask you about your past, because it concerns us.”

  Slowly the gnome nodded his head, but he did not sit with them. Compton gave Chavez a questioning look.

  “Could you tell us who you are?” Chavez asked. The gnome moved his head sharply to look at him. It’s almost as if I interrupted him at something, Chavez thought. There was a sad look on the face now, as if in that one moment he had understood everything—why they were here and the part he would have to play.

  Chavez felt his stomach grow tense. He felt as if he were being carefully examined. Compton was playing with a blade of grass. Sister Guinivere sat with her hands folded in her lap. Briefly he recalled the facts he knew about the alien—facts which only a few Earthmen had been given access to over the last century. Facts which demanded that some sort of official attitude be taken.

  The best-kept secret of the past century was the fact that this small creature had initiated the events which led to the emergence of intelligent life on Earth. In the far past he had harnessed his powers of imagination to a vast machine, which had been built for another purpose, and had used it to create much of the life on Earth. He had been caught at his experiments and exiled. Long before men had gone out to the stars he had been a wanderer in the galaxy, but in recent years he had been handed over to Earth authorities to keep at this extraterrestrial preserve. Apparently his people still feared his madness. This was all they had ever revealed to the few Earthmen who took charge of the matter.

  It was conjectured that the gnome’s race was highly isolationist; the gnome was the only member of it who had ever been seen by Earthmen. The opinion was that his culture feared contact with other intelligent life, and especially with this illegitimate creation. Of the few who knew about the case, one or two had expressed disbelief. It was after all, Chavez thought, enough to make any man uneasy. It seemed safer to ignore the matter most of the time.

  Since that one contact with Earth, the gnome’s race had never come back for him. A century ago they had simply left him in Earth orbit, in a small vessel of undeniably superior workmanship. A recorded message gave all the information they had wanted to reveal. Their home world had never been found, and the gnome had remained silent. Benedict Compton had set up this meeting, and Chavez had been briefed by his superiors and instructed to go along as an observer.

  Chavez remembered how the information had at first shaken and then puzzled him. The tension in his stomach grew worse. He wondered about Compton’s motives, but he had not dared to question them openly. On Earth many scientists prized the alien as the only contact with a truly advanced culture, and he knew that more than one young student would do anything to unlock the secrets that must surely exist in the brain of the small being now standing in front of him. He felt sure that Compton was hoping for some such thing.

  Suddenly the small figure took a step back from them. A small breeze waved his long white hair. His small, gnarly body took on a strange stature; his face was grief-stricken and his low voice was sad. It wavered as he spoke to them. “I made you to love each other, and through yourselves, me. I needed that love. No one can know how much I needed it, but it had to be freely given, so I had to permit the possibility of it being withheld. There was no other way, and there still is not.”

  Chavez looked at Compton. The big man sat very still. Siste
r Guinivere was looking down at the grass in front of her feet. Chavez felt a stirring of fear and panic in his insides. It felt as if the alien was speaking only to him—as if he could relieve the thirst that lived behind those deep-set eyes in that small head.

  He felt the other’s need. He felt the deprivation that was visible on that face, and he felt that at any moment he would feel the awesome rage that would spill out onto them. This then, he thought, is the madness that his race had spoken about. All the power had been stripped from this being, and now he was a beggar.

  Instead of rage there was sadness. It was oppressive. What was Compton trying to uncover here? How could all this benefit anyone? Chavez felt his left hand shaking, and he gripped it with the other hand.

  The gnome raised his right hand and spoke again. Dear God, help me, Chavez prayed. Help me to see this clearly. “I fled from the hive mind which my race was working toward,” the gnome said in a louder voice than before. “They have achieved it. They are one entity now. What you see in this dwarfed body are only the essentials of myself—the feelings mostly—they wait for the day when the love in my children comes to fruition and they will unite, thus recreating my former self—which is now in them. Then I will leave my prison and return to them to become the completion of myself. This body will die then. My longing for that time is without limit, and I will make another history like this one and see it through. Each time I will be the completion of a species and its moving spirit. And again they will give birth to me. Without this I am nothing.”

  There was a loud thunderclap overhead, the unmistakable sound of a shuttle coming through the atmosphere. But it was too early for the starship shuttle to be coming back for them, Chavez thought. Compton jumped up and turned to look toward the administration buildings. Chavez noticed that the gnome was looking at him. Do your people worship a supreme being? Chavez thought the question. Do they have the idea of such a being? Surely you know the meaning of such a being?

  I don’t know any such thing. The thought was clear in his head. Do you know him?

  “It’s a shuttle craft,” Compton said.

  Chavez got up. Sister Guinivere struggled to her feet. “What is it?” she asked.

  “I—I don’t know who it could be,” Compton said. Chavez noticed the lack of confidence in the other’s voice. Behind them the gnome stood perfectly still, unaffected by the interruption.

  “They’ve landed by now,” Compton said. “It could only be one thing. Father—they’ve found out my plans for the gnome.” Compton spoke in a low voice. “Father, this is the only way to get a change on Earth—yes, it’s what you think, a cult, with me as its head, but the cause is just. Join me now, Father!”

  Then it’s true, Chavez thought. He’s planning to by-pass the lawful candidacy. Then why did they let him come here?

  There was a rustling in the shrubs around the pool area. Suddenly they were surrounded by armed men. Twenty figures in full battle gear had stepped out from the trees and garden shrubs. They stood perfectly still, waiting.

  Antares was directly overhead now, a dark-red circle of light covering ten percent of the blue dome that was the sky. Noontime.

  Compton’s voice shook as he shouted, “What is this? Who the devil are you!”

  A tall man immediately on the other side of the pool from them appeared to be the commanding officer. He wore no gear and there were no weapons in his hands. Instead he held a small piece of paper which he had just taken out of a sealed envelope.

  “Stand away, Father, and you too, Sister!” the officer shouted. “This does not concern you.” Then he looked down at the paper in his hand and read: “Benedict Compton, you have been charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government of the Northern Hemisphere on Earth by unlawful means, and you have been tried and convicted by the high court of North America for this crime. The crime involves the use of an alien being as your co-conspirator to initiate a religious controversy through a personally financed campaign which would result in your becoming the leader of a subversive cult, whose aim would be to seize power through a carefully prepared hoax. You and your co-conspirator are both mortal enemies of the state.” The officer folded the paper and put it back in its envelope and placed it in his tunic.

  Chavez noticed that Sister Guinivere was at his side, and he could tell that she was afraid.

  Compton turned to Chavez. “Father, protect the gnome, whatever he is. Use what authority you have. They won’t touch you.”

  “The execution order is signed by Secretary Alcibiad herself,” the tall officer shouted.

  Chavez was silent.

  “Father, please!” Compton pleaded. “You can’t let this happen.” Chavez heard the words, but he was numb with surprise. The words had transfixed him as effectively as any spear. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t think. Sister Guinivere held his arm.

  Suddenly Compton was moving toward the gnome.

  “Shoot!”

  The lasers reached out like tongues.

  The little figure fell. And the thought went out from him in one last effort, reaching light-years into space. I loved you. You did not love me, or each other. They all heard the thought, and it stopped them momentarily. Compton was still standing, but his right arm was gone, and he was bleeding noisily onto the grass.

  “Shoot!”

  Again the lasers lashed out. Compton fell on his back, a few yards from the gnome. Sister Guinivere collapsed to her knees, sobbing. She began to wail. The soldiers began to retreat. Father Chavez sat down on the ground. He didn’t know what to do. He looked at the two bodies. There was smoke coming from Compton’s clothing. The gnome’s hair was aflame.

  The tall officer now stood alone on the other side of the pool. Chavez knew that his orders had probably been sealed, and he only now felt their full force. After a few moments the tall officer turned and went after his men.

  The alien knew this would happen, Chavez thought. He knew, and that was why he told us everything.

  When the great disk of Antares was forty-five degrees above the horizon, Rufus Kade came out to them. He put the two bodies in plastic specimen bags. Sister Guinivere was calm now and was holding Father Chavez’s hand. They both stood up when Kade finished with the bodies.

  “They had an official pass from way up,” Kade said. “I even checked back on it.”

  He walked slowly with them to the administration building.

  Father Chavez sat alone in his small cabin looking at the small monitor which showed him where he had been. Soon now the brilliance of the stars would be replaced by the dull emptiness of hyperspace. Antares was a small red disk on the screen.

  Momentarily Chavez resented the fact that he had been a mere creation to the gnome. In any case the alien had not been God. His future importance would be no greater than that of Christ—probably less. He had been only an architect, a mere shaper of materials which had existed long before even his great race had come into being. But still—was he not closer to God than any man had ever been? Or would be?

  The completion for which the gnome had made man would never take place now. The point of mankind’s existence as he had made it was gone. And the alien had not known God. If there was such a being, a greatest possible being, he now seemed hopelessly remote …

  O Lord, I pray for a sign! Chavez thought.

  But he heard only his thoughts and nothing from the being who would surely have answered in a case like this. And he had stood by while they killed the gnome there in the garden by the pool, on that planet circling the red star whose diameter was greater than the orbit of Mars. Despite all his reasoning now, Chavez knew that he had stood back while they killed that part of the small creature which had loved humanity.

  But what had he said? The rest of the gnome’s being was humanity, and it still existed; except that now it would never be reunited with him. “Do not fear,” the holy Antony had said thr
ee thousand years ago, “this goodness as a thing impossible, nor its pursuit as something alien, set a great way off: it hangeth on our own arbitrament. For the sake of the Greek learning men go overseas … but the city of God is everywhere … the kingdom of God is within. The goodness that is in us only asks the human mind.” What we can do for ourselves, Chavez thought, that’s all that is ours now.

  He took a deep breath as the starship slipped into the nothingness of hyperspace. He felt the burden of the political power, which he now carried as a witness to the alien’s murder, and he knew that Compton’s life had not been for nothing. He would have to hide his intentions carefully, but he knew what he would have to do.

  In time, he hoped anew, we may still give birth to the semblance of godhood that lives on in mankind, on that small world which circles a yellow sun.

  Wayside World

  The city sat in the hill, rising upward from deep within the mass of Earth, rock and vegetation to tower a kilometer into the night sky, its angled windows dark, reflecting only the bright stars and the faint rainbow of the ring; ten thousand windows, centuries old and unbroken, staring westward across the valley. Meteors flashed in the plastic panes, mute fireworks showing in black, sightless eyes long past celebration. The structure was an empty shell, which had once housed a million people. A few still used it because the windows caught the sunlight, warming the outer layer of dwelling spaces through trapped heat.

  At the edge of the world a morning storm flickered in the clouds, which hid the dawnlight. The city’s clear panels became blinking eyes, the sudden brightness of lightning destroying the mirrored ebony surfaces, which held the cold starlight, and dying meteor trails.