The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction

by Damien Broderick

  ‘Am ha’aretz,’ he groaned in Hebrew. Ignoramus. He sought the words of the Psalmist. Lord, who shall sojourn in Thy tabernacle? Who shall dwell upon Thy holy mountain? He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh truth in his heart.

  ~ * ~

  Consider the particular sin of some one person who for one mortal sin has gone to Hell; and many others without number have been condemned for fewer sins than I have committed.

  ~ * ~

  The gravity and malice of a single man’s sin. Abruptly, all the opaque walls of abstraction segmenting Raphael’s spirit collapsed into dust. An image plunged into his mind and gibbered there: the caricatured hook nose, the grasping outstretched hand, the treacherous kiss . . .

  ‘No!’ he cried, involuntarily, aloud. With a sharp look the Director warned him to control himself. An equally involuntary snigger came from one of the other novices, strained to breaking point by his own fearsome efforts. Raphael hardly noticed them. The image was vile, poisonous, unjust, and frozen into his brain.

  Raphael looked at the traitor Judas, the Jew, and saw Reb Silverman, his father.

  ~ * ~

  VII

  We are driven to conclude that the greatest mistake in human history was the discovery of truth. It has not made us free, except from delusions that comforted us, and restraints that preserved us; it has not made us happy, for truth is not beautiful, and did not deserve to be so passionately chased. As we look upon it now we wonder why we hurried so to find it. For it appears to have taken from us every reason for existing ...

  Will Durant

  ~ * ~

  It is as if his life’s aspiration has been befouled for the final time, as if now the dream toward which he has striven so long has been plucked away by cruel daylight.

  God has departed from the shrine of the City. The veil of the Temple is rent. Silverman is left vacant and drained. That secret core of a man, the emotional nexus half a billion years more ancient than the cortex, tells him that in an instant the universe has changed. No, worse than that: once again, he finds its chimera shattered.

  Slumped in his padded seat, he looks at the desecrated shrine and sees a lie.

  ‘Well,’ Silverman says at last, as if another man speaks through his lips, ‘we might as well go out and take a look at it. Even if it isn’t there.’

  They conspire in a compact of shocked silence. Kohler quickly slaps a button, shoves the polarizer with its load of delicate instruments through the opening hatch, steps out after it. Onto the springy grass after him go Chan and Walson. Before he follows, Silverman reaches to the panel and sets the refraction field, a habit of caution inlaid on planets more strenuous with hostile life than this one. As the lock hatch hisses shut behind him the field effectuates: the boat vanishes. How comforting, Silverman thinks ironically, testing his bitterness. The real things are invisible and what we are shown does not exist.

  But which is it that does not exist? The diabolical statuary, or the numinous City? There is no faintest doubt of the answer.

  Without speaking they trudge across the grass, and even in his despair Silverman cannot deny the physical invigoration of the cool fresh breath of morning, sweet through his filter-skin. It is an exquisite world. If and when High Earth repeals its in-turned prohibition on starflight, it is a world which will fill quickly with the voices of men and women and their fearless children.

  Behind the Jesuits, a dark swath extends as the pure droplets of dew are brushed away by their protective clothing.

  Above them is the City, majestic, buoyant as helium. Gravity drags at their limbs, more forceful than the Monastery’s, and their breathing begins to rasp. No doubt remains that this place has been a dwelling for men, or beings like men. The tiers of aching light had their purpose, and their function was their beauty. It is a more clarified purpose than any human technology has ever contrived, outside the intoxicated fantasies of light-drunk moviemakers at the close of the last century’s Big Spree.

  And in the depths and salt reaches of Silverman’s emotional sources, the City’s sham is toxin to the very spirit it purports to nourish.

  He halts the party near the outskirts of the nearest section. Despite its complexity, the entire edifice seems an integral entity. Silverman turns, indecision in his face.

  To Horst Kohler he suggests: ‘Perhaps you might set up your instruments here. Let’s see what we can salvage from this.’ His indiscretion makes him grit his teeth. He turns to Walson. ‘Try a few holograms from here and we’ll figure out exactly where those disgusting things are.’ Chan he ignores.

  The Chinese priest has been staring with unemotional curiosity at the towers. As though addressed, he swings back and shakes his head.

  ‘Raphael, you’re off centre.’ Universal thinkers are blunt and faltering by turn; they have no instinct for the amenities. He cocks his head to one side in a quick, nervous gesture. ‘This is all alien. We have no grounds for projecting our own values on it. Those statues might have no greater significance than, oh, the hygiene systems in the Loyola. Maybe that’s what they are—a kind of psychic purgative. The worm in the heart of the rose. Unless,’ he adds with the faintest touch of sarcasm, ‘you think it’s all a cosmic practical joke.’

  Silverman shakes his head. That is exactly how he reads it. The City is a napalm grenade wrought by the naked hand of that dark angel in whose literal existence he can no longer believe. It is a lie uttered from the foul mouth of the Father of Lies.

  The xenologist makes a series of swift forays through the drying grass to calculated stations, fetching back holograms from each position. He hands Silverman a bundle of windows. In varying perspective they show the same three horrifying objects.

  Silverman twists the windows from side to side. They afford only a limited parallax, but he discerns that the statues are set at the vertices of an equilateral triangle. The nearest is perhaps six hundred metres from where they stand; it coexists with a lofty tower soaring above the opalescent curve of the greater portion of the City. He passes back the windows.

  ‘Ride the polarizer up a few hundred metres and develop a full perspective. No instruments.’

  Father Walson nods keenly. At forty he is culpably boyish, for all the brilliance of his accomplishments. It is evident that to him the City is already merely one more enigma he means to crack.

  The gravity cart lifts into the sky, and in its wake a zephyr blows cool past Silverman’s cheek.

  Kohler is grumbling almost inaudibly at his machines. He glances up, mouth taut with frustration. ‘It’s crazy.’

  Silverman studies the offending instruments. Kohler points to a bank of log-scaled readouts. ‘It says here the power output is only marginally higher than background. There isn’t enough kick in there to lift a grasshopper off the dirt, and no neutrino flux.’ He flicks on the integrating display of the field detector. ‘There’s your city.’ Against the dull red screen, in white depth histograms, the City is as real and measurable as the geophysical reference points. ‘And here,’ growls the lay brother, heavy shoulders thrust forward, left hand menacing a third set of meters, ‘we’re informed that there’s no mass in the vicinity except us and whatever’s at those major loci. Even if the city’s nothing but a vast preon field—and how you’d sculpt a thing like that I can’t imagine—it should still activate the detectors as mass equivalence.’

  ‘Heads it’s there,’ Silverman ventures. ‘Tails it’s not.’

  ‘Right.’ In disgust, the German glowers at his treacherous, fallible instruments.

  Silverman shoves both hands into the side pockets of his filterskin, staring upward in impotent rage at the heedless godlings who have left this thing for men to impale themselves on.

  The gravity cart drops like a stone, to hover centimetres above the tufted grass. Father Walson, grinning, clambers off it, presses half a dozen crisp line drawings into Silverman’s hand. If the Rule did not forbid bodily contact, undoubt
edly he would clutch his superior by the arm.

  ‘Father, this is marvelous.’ The younger priest is flushed, overwhelmed by the elegance of his discovery. ‘It reminds me of the tropic mounds we found on Rho Ophiuchi II. Those were insects, of course, but I’ll show you what I mean. Start here, or right over here, say, and independent hodological vectors torque you to there.’ He points to a projection on one of his drawings. ‘When that’s gridded against the windows, it’s right at the centroid of the triangle formed by the three statues.’

  Silverman glances at the drawings in silence, hands them back. Walson cannot disguise his disappointment and hurt at the lack of enthusiasm.

  ‘Go and show this to Father Chan,’ Silverman grunts. The man’s thoughtless ebullience dismays him. ‘An Eclectic can probably do more with it than I can.’ He strains for some bone of kindness to throw. ‘Thank you, Henry. I’m most impressed.’

  Profoundly troubled, Silverman turns his back on the City and walks away into the rustling grass. At a distance from his companions, he crouches on his haunches and peers through slit lids across the meadow to the long bluff where he’d stood shaken by joy twenty-four hours earlier. The sky above the scarp is a cloudless blue transparency, the cirrus gone, unpolluted, unpeopled by shrieking aircraft.

  Slowly he regains his feet. Pain twinges in swollen veins. It is not only the unaccustomed gravity. I’m getting old, he tells himself, and does not smile. I’d thought the time was past for making decisions about the ontology of the universe.

  So the City is designed to lead an unwary sophont into its throat. For what purpose? To complete the destruction it began when a man first discovered the blasphemy it embodies? The Jesuit glances toward the others. They are busy about their work. Is he, then, the only one genuinely afflicted by the City’s message of annihilation? He puts a cold hand to his face, to the puckered flesh sagging at his jaw. It comes to him that Chan might be correct after all, that he is reading into an alien technology some phantasm conceivable only in a mortally diseased mind.

  Calm in the despondency of that thought, he walks back to them.

  ‘It’s time someone went in,’ he announces, ‘It’d be best if I go in alone. If I’m away more than three hours, I don’t want anyone following me. Take the boat out beyond the screen and report to Loyola. They’ll probably want to send down an extra boat.’

  Some part of his chill is communicated to them. In silence they nod, though Kohler’s eye is sour at the idea of a man going unprotected into the enigma which has baffled his instruments. The synthesist opens his mouth. At once his brash nerve fails. He drops his eyes and lets his mouth close again.

  Tell me, Tsung-Dao.’

  ‘Uh, well, Father Silverman, I have a first approximation. But it’s a radical analysis, and I’ll have to run it four ways through the full cybersystem before I could say with any precision—’

  ‘Let’s hear it.’

  ‘Okay.’ Chan gives him a grateful glance. It means nothing to Silverman. Habit makes him listen, makes him act when action is called for. The City’s jaws are waiting for him, waiting to devour him. ‘Briefly, the culture which constructed this complex was quite similar to us. I didn’t think so at first, but that was an emotional reaction to those repulsive things in there. Even if the statues are completely realistic— portraiture, say, instead of gargoyles of the Hindu variety—the City’s builders were orthogenetically not unlike human beings. But their culture was different, in one key technical respect.’ Chan hesitates. ‘That one difference has spectacular implications. You see, they developed their field theory along a branching path from ours prior to the invention of tensors.’

  Kohler makes a vulgar sound. ‘Speculative poppycock!’

  ‘Please, Horst!’ Silverman chides. ‘What are those implications, Father?’

  ‘Naturally,’ Chan says, ‘I can’t possibly extrapolate the full range of technical advances their Weltanschauung might have made feasible ... but that structure over there is one of them. On this first approximation, though, I can tell you one technology they could not have developed, any more than Aristotelean physics could have done so—and that’s faster-than-light preonics. So where are they?’

  ‘Like Southern Cross,’ Silverman whispers.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Satan,’ he murmurs, ‘has no need of that.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘No matter,’ Silverman says, unutterably weary.

  He looks at the three Jesuits for a moment, and then turns abruptly and walks toward the waiting City.

  ~ * ~

  VIII

  The radical remedy lies in the mortification of the four great natural passions: joy, hope, fear and grief. You must seek to deprive these of every satisfaction and leave them as it were in darkness and the void.

  St John of the Cross

  ~ * ~

  In darkness and the void, Father Raphael Silverman drifted weightless on his preonic sled toward the moribund hulk of humanity’s first starship.

  At his back glared the distant lights of the Loyola, but by now they added scarcely more illumination than the massively ‘star-barrelled’ firmament. The universe, to his eyes, was shrunken to half size. Two terrible chunks had gone from it. Ahead, he seemed to be moving into a perfectly lightless void sixty degrees in expanse. He took care now, after one appalling moment of vertigo, not to glance behind. There, the cone of pure blackness was a ghastly one hundred and twenty degrees in extent.

  Relative to the galaxy, both immense craft hurtled at the constellation Centaurus with a velocity nearly half that of light, time slowed by rather more than ten per cent, the spectrum of those stars which were still visible shifted blue-white forward and reddened aft.

  Detector relays from the Monastery shimmered on Silverman’s console, still reporting what he had known for days. The fusion power system on Southern Cross was functioning, though at a greatly reduced level. Vented gas fractions affirmed a large biomass aboard, easily the equivalent of crew and colonists asleep and awake. The vast magnets, which once constrained a hundred thousand tonnes of frozen hydrogen fuel, both matter and anti-matter, were slagged into ruin. And that single male voice, with its hair-stirring, melancholy, unintelligible lament, remained all that the starship beamcast on its Earth-aimed maser.

  Despite every rational foreboding, joy glowed in Silverman’s heart. A presence bold and kingly remained with the defunct craft, a presence which was quite simply the force of human heroism. He had not yet been ordained a priest when Southern Cross flared at the moon’s orbit like a new star, taking the rekindled hopes of a reprieved world into the oceans of eternity. She had begun as an industrial habitat in a 2:1 resonant Earth orbit, a way station for the manufacture of power satellites during the Oil Wars. With the coming of preon physics, her role was obsoleted. Bursting quarks into preons was suddenly inexpensive, and segregating their recombined products into magnetic repositories of matter and anti-matter reasonably uncomplicated as a problem in engineering.

  Something had to be done with the billion-dollar habitat. So she became a starship, driven by the absolute annihilation of mass into radiant energy.

  Commissioning the Southern Cross had been a conspicuous act of faith by the United Nations, a stunning gesture of optimism aimed at the hearts of the whole world. These are our emissaries: they bear with them all the best the human species has attained, the finest that is in us in our prospects of renewed destiny. Silverman had cheered as full-throatedly as any when that brilliant point of light seared the sky, dropping toward the horizon and the spangled glory of the southern heavens.

  ‘Main core lock is opening,’ a voice from the Monastery told him. ‘Nine hundred and eighty metres to docking.’

  The lock had refused to respond to their initial robot probes. Someone is watching me, Silverman told himself, feeling cool sweat prickled beneath his EVA suitskin. There was an absence somewhere—

  ‘The man has stopped
beamcasting, Father.’

  ‘Yes. I still can’t see . . . Lights have come on in the lock. It’s still cycling open.’ Either the craft’s processors had been specifically reprogrammed to deal with an approaching and identifiable human figure or an operator on board had adopted manual control. Silverman peered ahead, every instinct and faculty primed. His sled’s own guidance systems, of course, were autonomous, informing its passenger of its trajectory and intentions without distracting him with any need for routine executive intervention.

  Deepest gray on black, the enormous arc of Southern Cross moved steadily to blot out the more dreadful blot of the dopplered cosmos. The priest felt his sinews relax, and smiled. In whatever attitude, the Cross didn’t look like a cross. Nothing could have been topographically more remote from the cruciform than the squat, lumpy cask whose structure remained that of an O’Neill ‘Crystal Palace’ habitat. With her redundant orbital shielding stripped away, and with it several million tons of inertial mass, and her monstrous acceleration bracing, her designer might not have recognized his twentieth century brainchild. To the literal-minded, Silverman thought, it might be more fitting if the two starships had their names transposed. On the other hand, it might escape the pedantic that Southern Cross resembled a bust of the Founder wrought by, say, the sardonic hand of a Marcel Duchamp. His smile broadened.