PROLOGUE 1436, Rimway Calendar
There is no quality, no essence, no effect so distressing as the silence that pours out of the stars.
—Edmund Barringer, Lifeboat, 8788, C.E.
I never thought the day would come when I’d settle in to write an Alex Benedict memoir in which Alex and I are the bad guys. It started when Quaid McCann took the Columbia on a routine mission for the Visitation Project. McCann was on the board of directors of the project, which was about to close down. Again. Officially, they were compiling a list of habitable worlds for eventual colonization. But, as everyone connected with the organization knew, they were really looking for someone to talk with. The first interstellar vehicles had been activated in ancient times, nine thousand years ago. They’d gone out into local planetary systems, and gradually moved on to distant stars, where they found nothing other than a few archeological sites, only a few of which had shown any sign of an advanced civilization. But they were all long gone. The evidence indicated that while life was not rare, intelligence was almost nonexistent. And when advanced civilizations developed, they inevitably destroyed themselves. Humans had come close to doing that, but we’d been lucky. The right people had shown up at the right times.
Human colonies were established around neighboring stars while we came gradually to accept the unrelenting silence that seemed as much a part of the natural order as starlight. Eventually we discovered the Ashiyyur, the only intelligent beings with whom we’d been able to sit down. But they did not have a speech capability. The Ashiyyur communicated by telepathy. They were the Mutes. And they read our minds as well as their own, so we were never comfortable in their presence.
Missions like this one seemed pointless. The scientific world supported the efforts of people like McCann, although they showed no confidence that he would ever find anyone. His wife, Edna, had given up hope that he would ever recognize it as a colossal waste of time. But she understood why he persisted. Though not enough to accompany him after his first effort.
The Columbia had been in deep space almost seven months, had visited nineteen planetary systems along the far edge of the Orion Nebula, examined twenty-six terrestrial worlds, and found absolutely nothing of interest. A few had jungles and whales, trees and grasslands, herds of creatures thundering across broad landscapes. Most were simply arid and windswept and, as far as they could see, lifeless. There might have been microorganisms down there somewhere, but they wouldn’t be of any consequence for millions of years. The systems certainly hadn’t seen anything that might have an inclination to say hello.
McCann’s pilot, Robbi Jo Renfroe, had been a friend of mine since our early school days. She understood that even McCann had given up finally and was ready to quit. Just as well: they were running low on supplies. He surprised her as they approached the final system. “I’m ready,” he said, “to find a more rational way to waste my life.” He’d spent years on these missions. And he’d noticed that few of those who accompanied him ever returned for an additional flight. But she suspected that eventually he’d be out there again. He would stay with the project as long as he was breathing. The consolation was that the general emptiness would make success, if it could ever be achieved, even more compelling. He would become part of history. Though it wasn’t the acquisition of fame that drove him. It was the Milky Way. It was just too big to be empty. There had to be others out there, and he was determined to find them.
Their last visit was to be in the system of a K-class dwarf star. They’d named it Korella, after one of McCann’s uncles. They’d detected five planets in the system. There might have been more, but if so, they were too far out to be of interest. For that matter, only three of the five were orbiting in the Goldilocks Zone. One of those was a gas giant, and another was a barren world of rocks, methane, and ice. But the third one was a terrestrial. It had oceans and continents, always a good sign. And there was a green landscape. White clouds drifted through the sky.
McCann was on the bridge with Robbi Jo, leaning forward as if it would provide a better look. “Let’s hope,” he’d said.
Robbi Jo had grown to hate long, lonely voyages, but if they ever found anything, she wanted to be there. So she’d rolled the dice on this one. But she’d also given up and decided never again. So this was her last chance. But maybe there would be a payoff. That possibility occurred to her not because the world was green. That was not uncommon, but there was something about the appearance and the color that suggested they’d struck gold. Or maybe it was just McCann’s desperation and a sense that something would happen to prevent his going home empty again.
They came in on the sunlit side. They were still too far out to see whether anything was moving on the ground or fluttering through the sky. McCann wasn’t talking about radio signals, but that was what he was really looking for. Unfortunately, though, the receiver remained silent. He would have preferred to be on the night side, watching somebody down there turn on the lights.
They saw no sign of any kind of structure. As usual, it looked as if there was nobody there.
We understand why intelligent species are not likely to appear even on worlds where conditions are perfect. The complexity of the molecular combinations required simply to produce life on a world with the right chemicals and conditions reduced the chances substantially. Add the nearly impossible requirements needed to generate brain evolution and the odds become extreme. “I wonder,” McCann had asked a couple of times, “why we care so much? If the universe is really empty, except for us and the Mutes, it’s a much safer place.”
He was right, of course. With earthquakes and tidal waves, crashing asteroids, black holes and exploding stars, the Milky Way is already sufficiently hostile to its life-forms, its children, as the poet Tess Harmon had once described us. When finally we met the Mutes, we ended up in a war with them. Maybe that was the reason for the emptiness: there really might be a God behind everything, one who understood that intelligent beings are stupid, inevitably inclined to fight. So he keeps the numbers down. It makes sense.
It was just after midnight on board the Columbia when McCann went back to get some sleep. He left Robbi Jo alone on the bridge. The sky was filled with stars. After McCann left, she went back into the passenger cabin. Vince Reddington and Jason Albright were the only ones there. Vince was the backup pilot. Jason was tall and blond, a physicist who’d won a couple of major awards, though he looked too young to have managed anything like that. They were listening to a performance from their library by a late-night comedian. It was strictly audio. The view from the ship’s telescope was on the monitor. She sat down where she could watch the screen. After a while she fell asleep. She was out for about an hour before the guys woke her. They could see movement on the ground. When they got closer, they were able to make out a few animals running across a prairie under a full moon. Robbi Jo moved the scope and saw mountains, rivers, and a forest. Birds or something flew through the night sky. A herd of four-legged creatures were making their way casually across a sloping plain near the base of one of the mountains, while a solitary beast that might have been a leopard watched. A pair of gator-sized lizards climbed out of a river. And something with multiple legs dashed across open space before disappearing into a cluster of trees. And then she saw a light.
Of course we all know what happened next.
The village.
It was the discovery of a lifetime. Vince and Jason erupted with enthusiasm. The door to McCann’s cabin opened and he joined them, yelling about not believing it and at last. They were still a substantial distance out, but the telescope locked on it. McCann was laughing and pounding Vince’s back. He hugged Jason and Robbi Jo, who later described it as the wildest moment in her life.
It was a lot more than a village. The architecture was glossy in the moonlight, elegant, and somehow amicable. A place that welcomed visitors. There were log cabins and châteaus and villas. The light they’d seen came from a couple of lampposts and one of the houses. Otherwise everything was dark. The village was set along the edge of a lake. It looked like the sort of place that McCann’s wealthier colleagues frequently built halfway up a mountain or along a shoreline. A place to which people could retreat and leave their mundane lives behind.
They saw movement. Someone was walking on one of the roadways. They weren’t close enough to be able to make out anything other than that it was a biped and it wore clothes. It entered one of the houses. Not the one with the light.
The center of the village was occupied by a pair of large connected structures, possibly a school, or a church, or a town hall. Who knew? We’ve all seen the pictures.
The buildings had shafts, balconies, cupolas, arches, and domes. Most of the architecture was curved. It consisted of polished structures with balustrades and round-arched windows, cornices, circular entrance steps, parapets, and spires. They had pitched rooftops supported by rounded columns. The houses ranged from one to three stories. Everything gave the illusion of a rising symmetry, as if the design of the individual structures was somehow unified, more than simply a set of buildings separated by dirt roads.
They had almost an hour to watch, during which other bipeds wandered through the streets, before the planetary rotation took them out of view. When they were gone, McCann and his team went through another period of backslapping and exchanging congratulations. At last. It was hard to believe.
For Robbi Jo, though, and maybe for all of them, the sheer joy contained an element of disappointment. They weren’t permitted to make contact. They were required by the Spaulding Mandate to do what they could to avoid allowing the aliens even to notice their presence. And they had complied accordingly.
They knew where the village was, so they had no trouble finding it. It was back in daylight again when they passed overhead. And they got their first good look at the aliens. They had bright green skin with a silver tint, faces with standard features. They couldn’t determine how big they were. Ears and nose were elongated, and their eyes appeared to be set wide apart. They wore trousers and shorts and colorful shirts. And there was no sign of hair. They appeared to move with grace.
They were everywhere in the town. No vehicles, though.
“It makes no sense,” McCann said. “Where’s everybody else?”
They left the area and expanded their search across sections they hadn’t seen previously. Nothing changed. Forests and plains and mountains and occasional deserts were all they could find. The village seemed to be the only occupied location on the planet. They came back when night had fallen. Lights were on in most of the houses. The lampposts were also lit up.
Still nothing on the radio.
“They probably wouldn’t have any use for a radio,” said Vince. “Nobody’s more than a few blocks away.”
“So what do we do?” asked Jason.
“I guess,” said McCann, “we go home and report it.”
Vince didn’t like the idea. “Why don’t we take the lander down and say hello? They don’t look dangerous.”
McCann closed his eyes and shook his head. “Break the mandate and we’ll all be in trouble.”
“Mac,” said Jason, “we can’t just walk away from this.”
McCann’s eyes hardened. “Yes, we can. Suppose you go down and we scare them and they attack us? What do we do?”
“We have weapons.”
“You really want to go home and explain that you killed a couple of these people?”
“Mac.” Vince obviously thought they had no choice. “We can’t just ignore what we’ve found. Look, we can go down in the lander, stay well away from the town, and keep out of sight. It shouldn’t be all that hard.”
“No.” McCann wasn’t going to budge.
The lights in one of the houses went out. They were outside lights, on the porch. And a post light. They all shut off together, so that removed any possibility that the aliens were using candles or gaslights.
In the end, as we all know, the Columbia just packed up and came home.