What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
-WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
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 started 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.”
“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 through 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.
“The shadow creatures were trying to alter the direction in which the Enigma system was moving by ejecting mass,” Adrian said.
As he spoke, another gas giant detached itself from orbit and was thrown aside, and then a third, and then, one by one the smaller worlds followed until only Enigma remained.
“These views must have been taken over a period of years,” Adrian said.
“Actually more than a thousand years,” Peter said.
The raging cataclysm in the background began to move slowly off center. “Another five thousand years passed, and the Enigmatics realized that their direction had been altered. The difference was only a fraction of a degree, but it was enough over the long millennia that yet remained to raise the hope that they would skirt the galactic center rather than plunge into the heart of it.”
On the screen the central fury increased in size and frightening intensity until Enigma’s sun faded by contrast. Slowly the maelstrom slid to the side. A sound like a discordant symphony emerged from the speakers and grew slowly until, when the galactic fury was at its closest, it screamed like creation itself. They had to cover their ears while they watched, on the screen, the Enigma world change appearance from blue to yellow and then to dull gray. The Enigma sun grew brighter and then slowly faded into orange, prematurely aged but not destroyed. The discordant symphony ebbed, and the viewers could once more speak.
“What was that?” Frances gasped.
“Chaos given voice,” Peter said.
“You’re trying to intimidate us!” Jessica said. It was more of Peter’s sleight of hand.
“What he’s trying to do,” Adrian said, “is to make us feel what the Enigmatics endured.”
“That’s right,” Peter said, “although it’s all there in the Enigmatic records.”
“I can’t believe the center of the galaxy made that kind of noise,” Frances said.
“Noise, yes,” Peter said. “That kind of noise? Who can say? There are no ears to hear or minds to interpret, and no medium to transmit sound. And if there had been ears to hear, they would not have lasted long enough to register any sound. But there were instruments in space and on the surface as the sleet of radiation blew away the atmosphere, and not long after that the oceans and everything on the surface except rock. The noise you heard was the sound of radiation and of planetary catastrophe.”
“Peter has become a poet,” Jessica said.
“Epic events can bring out the poet even in a computer program,” Peter said. “Compared with this, Paradise Lost was a family dispute.”
“We didn’t detect any radiation at Enigma’s surface,” Frances said.
“That was more than a billion years ago,” Peter said. “In a billion years all but the longest-lived radioactives decay.”
“And since then the Enigmatics have huddled in their tunnels?”
“And tried to survive,” Peter said. “And tried to reconcile their experience with their faith in the Shadows. They had been saved, but they had also been nearly destroyed by the same hand. And they had lost almost everything. But finally they found peace in the realization that all this had been for a purpose.”
“Like any other believer,” Frances said.
“And what was the purpose?” Jessica asked.
“They had to pass through the fire, so to speak, so that they could continue their mission,” Peter said. “They had seeded with life one spiral arm of the galaxy, and their next task was to seed another.”
Frances, who had been staring down at her hands, looked up at the screen, which now showed a view of a jet-black sky loaded with stars.
“Our solar system is in this arm, right?” Adrian said.
“That’s right,” Peter said. “The reason for the Enigmatics’ ordeal was so that they could foster us—and some tens of thousands of other creatures on thousands of other worlds.”
——
“I don’t know how much more of this I can stand,” Frances said.
“There’s only a little more,” Peter said.
“Only another billion years or so,” Jessica said.
“It is difficult to believe that one sapient species could endure for two billion years,” Peter said, “but they had the Shadows and, for the first billion years, the threat of the approaching galactic center to focus their thoughts, and then they had their manifest destiny.”
“That isn’t the only thing that’s difficult to believe,” Jessica said, but Adrian placed a hand on her arm and stilled her angry motion.
“Surely they didn’t use the phrase ‘manifest destiny’?” Adrian said.
“Like everything else I have told you, it is a translation, and a shaky one at that,” Peter said. “John O’Sullivan used the phrase in the middle of the nineteenth century to rationalize the American expansion to settle the continent. The Enigmatics used something like it to describe their obligation to spread life throughout the galaxy.”
The view on the screen receded to reveal a spiral galaxy, its hub burning with massed stars, its bright, spiral arms turning majestically. It could not have been the Local Galaxy, Jessica thought, but the Local Galaxy might have looked like that if there had been a camera in some other galaxy aimed this way.
“The Shadows,” Peter said, “instructed them how to create wormholes and how to harness dark energy to keep them from collapsing, so they didn’t have to wait for ships to traverse the light years between the stars.”
“Dark energy?” Frances said.
“Something is pushing space apart,” Adrian said.
“Einstein called it ‘the cosmological constant,’” Peter said. “He used it to explain a stable universe, and then abandoned it when astronomers discovered that the universe was expanding. Recent cosmologists have discovered that the rate of expansion is increasing and speculated about a ‘dark energy’ that makes up maybe seventy percent of the cosmos and repels matter rather than attracting it.”
“Sounds like more of the supernatural,” Jessica said.
“The more we learn about the universe,” Adrian said, “the more supernatural it seems.”
“Without dark energy the wormholes would not have lasted,” Peter said. “With the wormholes, contact with almost every star capable of nurturing life became possible, and they seeded them and watched them develop, each in a different way. It was a demonstration of the power of the animate.”
“As opposed to the power of the inanimate?” Frances said.
“Those are the two great powers in the universe, not the natural and the supernatural but the animate and the inanimate,” Peter said. “The inanimate seems to dominate, to proceed down its inexorable, predestined path between primal birth and final extinction. The inanimate doesn’t care whether stars explode and new elements are created, whether planets are formed, whether they are large or small, poisonous or nurturing. All that was laid down in the laws that prevailed when the universe was budded from the great potential for creation. But the animate has the power to intervene, to change the essential nature of the planets and the atmospheres that surround them, even the stars themselves. Always and forever it is the struggle of the animate’s will against the inertia of the inanimate.”
“That’s all very pretty,” Frances said, “but what does it mean?”
“And why are we here?” Jessica said.
“Why are we all here?” Adrian said, sweeping his arm to indicate the other ships surrounding Enigma. “Why did the Enigmatics send spaceship plans to us, and, presumably, to all the others?”
“Indeed,” Peter said. “That is the question that drove my programmer into a mental institution and kept him from seeking the answer that he needed so desperately. And the answer is simple: the Enigmatics were asked to bring us here—those of us who were sufficiently advanced to intercept and decipher the message—for one last meeting, to share the data that each has accumulated in the long struggle between animate and inanimate matter, each in its own way.”
“A gigantic information booth,” Frances said. “A vast encyclopedia.”
“But why do you say it is the last meeting?” Adrian asked.
“The Shadows can do much,” Peter said, “but they cannot alter the path this system must pursue, and it is headed out of the galaxy into the emptiness of intergalactic space. The ability of the Enigmatics to maintain the wormholes is diminishing.”
The view on the screen showed a darkness unrelieved by stars.
“What does that mean?” Jessica demanded. “That we can’t get back?”
“It hasn’t happened yet, and it won’t happen tomorrow, or maybe next year,” Peter said, “but within a few years they certainly will begin to fail, and perhaps sooner.”
“And that’s why one of the alien ships left?” Frances said.
“And why others will leave,” Peter said, “but not all.”
“Why not all?” Adrian asked.
“Those who continue into intergalactic space will inherit the full encyclopedia, and maybe the relationship with the Shadows when the last Enigmatic dies,” Peter said.
“And when will that be?” Jessica asked.
“Those who remain are very old,” Peter said. “And they are not well. The storm of radiation from the galactic center did not leave them untouched. Their ability to reproduce suffered, and those that were born were damaged. That is one reason you never met them.”
“How many?” Frances said.
“Only a handful.”
“How horrible!”
“Sharing data is not enough,” Adrian said. “The Encyclopedia of all knowledge in the galaxy is a noble enterprise and a powerful tool, but—”
“You are right, as usual,” Peter said. “There is a Purpose: to the conflict between the animate and the inanimate has been added the struggle between intelligence and the universe. The universe began in violence when no life was possible and will end in eternal darkness when no life is possible; between these two extremes, life emerges and develops intelligence. Intelligence has the power to contemplate, to understand, to imagine, to plan, and to act, and to frustrate the inexorable processes of matter. The Shadows created us as an alternative to chaos.”
——
Adrian was silent. Frances was silent. Jessica was silent. Even Peter was silent. The end of their long journey had arrived and the answers to their questions, and they could not look at one another.
“So,” Jessica said, “we finally have answers. If they are answers.” They were not answers she could appreciate.
“This is our choice, then?” Adrian said. “To stay and continue to gather information? Maybe the critical piece around which everything else pivots? The secret of life? The secret of the universe? Maybe how to manipulate dark energy, how to create and maintain our own wormholes and become masters of the universe? Or to return home while we can, with what we have?”
“Or to continue with the Enigmatics on into the Great Dark,” Frances said, “learning how to talk with the Shadows, learning their vast secrets in ways the superstitious Enigmatics could not?”
“If we can believe any of this fantastic story,” Jessica said. Incredibly, the others were acting as if Peter’s incredible tale was true.
“It is fantastic,” Frances said, “but maybe believable because it is fantastic. Could Peter have invented something like this?”
“Maybe the Enigmatics invented it,” Jessica said. “Oh, it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing to validate any of this. It’s all airy nothing.”
“That’s my line,” Frances said. “‘…imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.’”
“We do have validation: the scenes from parts of the galaxy that could only be viewed by something passing through them—” Adrian said.
“Easily faked,” Jessica said. “Especially by someone as clever as Peter or the Enigmatics.”
“The spaceship plans weren’t faked, nor the wormhole, nor this world, nor the alien ships in orbit around it, nor the ruins and the caverns we explored, or the pictures we saw there,” Adrian said.
“And yet there is no proof of the Shadows,” Jessica said. “And no proof possible. Even if we determined the existence here of dark matter, or shadow matter, we can never prove that it harbored living creatures and that they communicated with the Enigmatics. We have to take the word of an unreliable narrator.”
“Just like any kind of scientific hypothesis,” Adrian said. “The explanation may be fanciful but it answers all the questions. As scientists, we place our faith in things unseen as long as they explain the data and predict the future without refutation.”
“There is this great mystery,” Frances mused, “and maybe we can hang around and solve it. Wouldn’t that be something?”
“And maybe we hang around and spend the rest of our lives pursuing shadows,” Jessica said.
“I understand that you want to go home, Jessie,” Adrian said. “You have Bobby, and you and all the other mothers want a place to bring up children. That’s natural, and I understand it.”
“No you don’t,” Jessica said. “Being a mother doesn’t mean you’re any less a scientist or an explorer.” She was a mother, yes, and she would protect her child against any threat, and struggle to make it a home, but that didn’t mean that she would reject adventure.
“Yes it does,” Frances said.
“Well, neither of you are mothers,” Jessica said.
“But those feelings have to be part of our calculations,” Adrian said.
“You, Frances, want to solve the mystery of the Shadows—”
“No I don’t,” Frances said. “I just don’t want to go home. If we went home we’d have to cope with all those people who didn’t want us to go in the first place, and the people who aren’t going to believe what we bring to them. And the people who called me fat and ugly all my life.”
“You’re not fat and ugly,” Jessica said, putting her arm around Frances.
“I was,” Frances said, “until I acquired character. But there’s a third way. We could keep exploring on our own, maybe find a habitable planet and settle down to build our own world.”
“That’s true,” Jessica said. “Going home has all sorts of drawbacks. Do you realize what kinds of people are waiting back there, the dolts, the stick-in-the-muds, the stay-at-homes, the let’s-not-change-anythings, the Makepeaces.”
The view on the screen changed to one of a blue planet fringed with white clouds, and nearby an oversized satellite.
“That’s Earth,” Frances said. “Are you trying to influence us, Peter?”
“Presenting the alternatives,” Peter said.
“And what about you, Peter?” Adrian asked.
“I’m staying, of course,” Peter said. “This is what I came here to find, the puzzle, the greatness. I wouldn’t miss this for anything. I’m going to download myself to the memory of the Enigmatics and share in the mystery of the ages, maybe even inherit the intermediary role.”
“So, whether we stay or go, we’ll miss you,” Adrian said.
“Not at all,” Peter said. “The advantage I have over you material creatures is that I can go and remain behind. I’ll leave a perfect copy of myself.”
“You’re right,” Adrian said. “We can’t both stay and go. But, Peter, it may surprise you to learn that we are glad you will be with us, wherever we are.”
“If I were capable of being glad, I would be,” Peter said.
“If we leave,” Adrian said, “we’ll never know the truth of anything we’ve been told.”
Frances looked hopeful. Jessica felt upset and defiant.
“But if we stay, the chances are we won’t know either,” Adrian continued. “It is a mystery that took a billion years for the Enigmatics to accept, and even then it may have been a creation myth propagated by isolation, impending peril, and priests.”
Frances looked quizzical. Jessica felt relieved.
“Our downloaded data is incomplete,” Adrian continued, “but it contains marvels such as the data on the galactic center—”
“And longevity and inexhaustible power sources and insights into the condition of existence from a thousand perspectives,” Peter added. “The wisdom not just of the ages but of a thousand ages.”
“Do we have the right to deprive humanity of that?” Adrian asked.
“What has humanity done for us?” Frances asked.
“We are part of it,” Adrian said. “And although it may be only a pretty story, the concept of intelligence struggling against blind matter captures my imagination. We must offer humanity a chance to be part of it, to make a difference.”
“It’s only a story,” Frances said.
“It’s by stories we define ourselves,” Adrian said. “Humanity is a story, science is a story, all of us are stories, and we write new ones for ourselves every day. How will this story end?”
Jessica looked from Adrian to Frances and back again. Frances, she thought, whatever she said, wanted to return, and Adrian, whatever he said, wanted to stay. She loved him, and loved Frances, too; he was capable of drifting away into silent space, pursuing his own thoughts, but they were generous thoughts, great thoughts maybe, and capable, also, of being with her more than any man she had ever known, only occasionally, but they were special occasions. “Maybe there will be celebration when we return,” she said.
“And resentment and hatred and disbelief in anything we say,” Frances added.
“All of that,” Adrian agreed. “If we return, we will have to proceed cautiously, releasing our information slowly as humanity is capable of receiving it.”
“That might take millennia,” Frances said.
“If Peter is right and we can apply the Enigmatics’ longevity processes to ourselves, we may have that long,” Adrian said. “The struggle may be endless, true, but maybe we can prevail. Maybe intelligence can reshape the universe, can stop its long slide into oblivion. Or if not us, then maybe our descendants will succeed. Or if not our descendants, then the intelligences they might create.”
“Then you are determined to return?” Frances said.
“I’m only one,” Adrian said. “We will have to ask the rest of the crew.”
“They’re like me,” Jessica said. “They’ll want to return.”
“And if they didn’t,” Frances said, “Adrian would convince them. You’re a persuasive man, Adrian. You have persuaded me. I hate humanity, but I will learn to love it again for your sake.”
So, Jessica thought, they would return with their story, a sequel to Peter’s credulous account of alien contact, and the kind of story would depend upon the way they told it—a contemporary novel of existential despair, an epic that defines a people, a revelation that becomes sacred text, a fantasy that feeds ancient yearnings, an encyclopedia to implement almost every human aspiration, or a how-to volume for reshaping the universe. Or maybe all of them.
Six months later the Ad Astra broke loose from orbit and headed back toward the star-strewn galaxy to begin its long journey home.