For who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
These thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallow’d up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night,
Devoid of sense and motion?
-JOHN MILTON, PARADISE LOST
THE IMAGE IN THE VISION SCREENS frightened Frances in ways she could not identify.
The small K-type star hung against the backdrop of empty space like a lantern set out for the weary traveler. Beyond loomed the impenetrable night of the intergalactic void. Behind glowed the remote swarm of what Adrian thought was the Milky Way galaxy. In front of the spaceship from Earth waited the goal of their long journey, this odd single planet, a bit larger than Mars but smaller than Earth, in an eccentric orbit around an old sun, here at stars’ end.
The battered spaceship had been making its way toward the strange system for six months at one-gravity acceleration and six months more at one-gravity deceleration. A year of travel after their emergence from the wormhole that had spit them out on the far edge of what might be still the local galaxy. “But it could be any galaxy, couldn’t it?” Frances asked. “What’s distance to a wormhole? If it’s like jumping across a folded sheet of paper, one place is as close as any other.”
Frances stood behind Adrian and Jessica. They were seated in the control room of the ship they had decided to call Ad Astra but Frances insisted on referring to as Aspera—since she had suffered from space sickness and other problems during the trip. The control room provided evidence of long occupation: the air was thick with humidity and the odors of imperfect human bodies and not-quite-perfect machines, paint was worn down to bare metal in places, panels were dented, gauges flickered or were dark. But the vision screens were clear, and what they revealed was disturbing.
“True,” Adrian said, “but it’s difficult enough to keep track of intelligent life in one galaxy. Why cross intergalactic space? What could be the purpose of that?”
“What could be the purpose of sending spaceship plans across the galaxy and building a wormhole to bring us here?” Jessica asked.
That question had propelled them and their crew across measureless space and across twenty-five years from its obscure beginning. And a disorienting few hours—or many subjective years—in the wormhole had brought them to the place where they could see their journey’s destination. But they still had no answers to the question of why the aliens had sent them the plans, what the aliens wanted from humanity—or any other creature who might receive those cosmic rays and have the scientific understanding to record them and the wit to decipher them and the technology to turn them into a vessel capable of traversing space. Did they want to help humanity, or themselves? Were they benefactors or predators, or simply disinterested observers? These were the questions that had toppled the original genius, Peter Cavendish, over the precipice edge of sanity into the chasm of madness.
And now they were close to their destination and maybe to their answers. The little world they were approaching seemed to be studded with objects like cloves in a Christmas orange. When they got near enough they realized the studs were spaceships like their own. Or maybe not quite like their own, and maybe only the starting point for new questions. Like: what were all those other strange ships doing in orbit around the little planet? It was like a Sargasso of space. They had thought the message was a summons just to them, but maybe the invitation had been broadcast to the universe and they were only the last to respond…
——
Within a few hundred kilometers from the world—if that was what it was—Adrian and his fellow travelers could make out finer detail on the vision screens of the control cabin. The ships were of many sizes and shapes and colors, as if the only thing they had in common was that they could traverse space. Some of the colors were so strange that the viewers could scarcely perceive them—or the vision screens could scarcely record them.
“Maybe,” Adrian said, “they come from places that radiate mainly in the infrared or ultraviolet.” He was seated in front of the main forward vision screen, at a control panel whose purpose was mostly psychological; the computers handled everything except intentions.
Some of the shapes seemed to twist into another dimension and disappear, or the human eye was not trained to follow their pathways.
When they were close enough they saw that the ships were arranged symmetrically around the world, like the outdated concept of electrons around a nucleus. “Must be hundreds of them,” Jessica said, standing behind Adrian, on her hip a three-month-old baby clad only in a diaper.
“None of them human,” Frances added grimly. She was standing beside Jessica as if ready to catch the baby if it fell from its perch, even though, in weightlessness, it would fall gently if at all.
“No prejudice,” Adrian said. “We’re aliens among aliens, and we’re likely to suffer as much from discrimination as they are.”
They guided the Ad Astra around the little world, studying the ships and looking at the world they orbited with emotions ranging from concern to dismay. The planet was not much larger than Mars. It had a surface that was rocky in most places and in others softened, perhaps, by areas of sand. There was no sign of water and no perceptible atmosphere. It was a rocky asteroid blown up to planet size.
The motley collection of ships around it offered no evidence of life, no light, no exhalations of rocket or waste exhaust. The ships orbited in silence. The Ad Astra found an empty place in the shell—there weren’t many—and eased itself into it. And waited. And waited.
“Nobody seems in any hurry to welcome us,” Jessica said. She was slender and athletic and seemed as comfortable in weightlessness as under deceleration, but Frances was swallowing and the baby seemed as happy as if it were still floating in the womb.
“What is one more guest among so many?” Adrian said.
“You think they’re all in the same situation?” Frances asked. She held out her arms for the baby and Jessica surrendered him without hesitation.
“I think they all got the same message, or a similar one,” Adrian said. “Some a lot sooner than us, or they were prepared to receive it sooner, or they deciphered it sooner.”
Some of the ships looked far older than the Ad Astra, as if they had been in space—bombarded by space dust—for centuries, maybe even millennia.
“If they got the same plans,” Jessica said, “why are they so different?”
“Maybe they got plans suited to their own technologies and cultures,” Adrian said.
“Or maybe they got the same plans,” Frances said, making faces at the baby, distracted from her zero-gravity unease, “and read them differently, like people reading the same novel or watching the same movie.”
“If that’s the case,” Jessica said, “we may spend a long time waiting for the welcome wagon. Whoever the others are, and whoever brought us here, probably doesn’t have the same concept of hospitality, or of courtesy.” She took the baby back from Frances. “It’s time for Bobby’s nap,” she said. The baby didn’t complain, as if it were accustomed to being parented by many different adults.
“I don’t know why you call him ‘Bobby,’” Frances said.
“We have enough Adrians,” Jessica said.
“Only four,” Frances said.
“And at least one on the way,” Jessica said. She moved out of the control room toward the ship’s living quarters.
“They could have longer lives than we do,” Adrian mused, “and thus time doesn’t have the same urgency. Particularly if they’ve been in this business for thousands of years.”
“What business is that?” Frances asked.
Adrian waved his hand at the display of ships on the vision screens. “The contact business. The summons business. Bringing sentient species here. We thought it was just us, but it wasn’t. The message seems to have been intended for any technological species. But if that is the case, why are they still here?”
Frances clenched her hands around the armrests of her chair. “I didn’t want to mention it in front of Jessie, but this is like a Sargasso of space. Ships are stuck, unable to move, unable to leave.”
“You’ve been reading too much romantic fiction again,” Adrian said.
“All this may be the realization of poor Peter’s worst fears. The aliens’ purpose in sending the plans was to collect specimens, or to restock their larder.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Adrian said. “There are easier and cheaper ways to get food.”
“But not specimens,” Frances said. “The zookeeper doesn’t even have to send out an expedition; the specimens come to him and deliver themselves up.”
“Now you’re into the horror genre,” Adrian said.
“Or maybe sick comedy.”
“So what do you recommend?” Adrian asked. “That we turn around and go back? It’s going to take a while to replenish our antimatter supply, particularly from this old sun. And even if we had the fuel, how are we going to face traveling all this way and going back without any answers?”
“Maybe we should knock on a few doors,” Frances said.
“That sounds like human impatience,” Adrian said. “And, as Jessie pointed out, we’re not sure how the aliens welcome newcomers, if at all. Maybe we have to prove our good intentions by waiting; maybe a decent interval is an essential element in civilized relationships.”
“Maybe it’s hazing,” Frances said.
“Let’s give it a better name: an initiation ceremony. We’ll wait a reasonable time, and in the meanwhile, we’ll send out our antimatter collectors to replenish our fuel supply, just in case we need to leave in a hurry.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Frances said. “Are there any other antimatter collectors in orbit around that weak nuclear furnace they have for a sun?”
“Not that we can detect,” Adrian said. “But our instruments may not be sensitive enough, or the other collectors may not be the same design, any more than the spaceships that brought them.”
So they sent their antimatter collectors to orbit the K-type sun and waited. And waited.
——
After thirty-five days—they still counted days and weeks and even months—human impatience being what it is, they decided to do something. Frances had said a week was long enough and Jessica, a month, but Adrian wanted to give the aliens more time. Finally he decided that five weeks was sufficient delay, for the human crew if not for the aliens. “It may be unwise to investigate the other ships,” Adrian said. “Even if we knew how to enter one; even if we knew they were empty. And they probably aren’t. They’re probably filled with aliens doing their alien things.”
“You mean, it would be like us going around to the other guests at the party, asking impertinent questions, like why they got invited, what they know about the hosts?” Frances said.
“That leaves the planet itself,” Jessica said.
“But what is there to look at?” Frances asked.
“There must be something there,” Jessica said. “Clearly the other ships think it’s the focus of something, and clearly it is what drew us—and them—here.”
Adrian’s fingers moved over the buttons of the control panel. “I’ve been using our ground-penetrating radar. There seem to be cavities.” He motioned toward the screen.
“Caves?” Jessica asked.
“Or tunnels. And scattered across that landscape”—Adrian motioned once more toward a scene that now showed, close-up, the surface of the planet—“are hot-spots. They look like ordinary rocks but they are hotter than their neighbors by one hundred degrees or more.”
“If the aliens live inside, they would need to get rid of waste heat,” Jessica said. “Particularly if they use a lot of machinery.”
Frances looked back and forth between them, as if she were a spectator at a tennis match.
“And they would have to use a lot of machinery to live inside,” Adrian said, “and those might well be radiators. They can recycle air and water and whatever else they find essential, but they can’t recycle heat.”
“So,” Frances said, “they live inside. With a world like that, it makes sense. But how do we get in to let them know we’re here?”
“That’s a good question,” Jessica said. “If they have camouflaged their radiators, it may mean they don’t want to be found.”
“But they brought us here—all this way!” Frances said.
“Maybe,” Adrian said, “they want to be found but not too easily.” They looked at each other. It was another question whose answer could only be discovered by pursuing it to the end. “We’ll never know,” Adrian said finally, “until we make the effort. Radar suggests several places where the tunnels—if that is what they are—approach the surface. We can’t just sit here; it’s not just us—the rest of the crew is getting restless. I am, too. I suggest we go down and see.”
Frances insisted on being a member of the exploration team. It would give her a chance, she said, to feel real gravity again. Jessica, however, was placed in command of the expedition to the surface because of her greater athleticism and quicker reflexes, and both Frances and Jessica insisted that Adrian was too essential to the Ad Astra and its crew to risk on this kind of mission. Since he was a reasonable man, he agreed, but he grumbled about not being among those who would experience the culmination of their long labors.
“If you’re comparing yourself to Moses,” Frances said, “remember that he died before he saw the Promised Land. At least you’re still alive.”
“And, unless we run into real trouble, there will be other opportunities to get our questions answered,” Jessica said.
“And if we do run into real trouble,” Frances added, “you’ll still be here to try something else.”
So, in a small craft powered by chemical rockets, they went down to the surface, Frances and Jessica, a pilot, and two sturdy engineers. They landed gently enough for a pilot who hadn’t had much experience in small craft and none in landings on airless planets of this size. “We’re here,” Jessica said shakily. Frances noticed that she had been holding her breath. She had been doing that a lot lately.
They were dressed for vacuum, complete with helmets, and the voices came by way of intercoms. The surface of the planet was airless, and even if they found a way inside the likelihood of the air there being breathable, or, if breathable, not poisonous to humans, was close to zero.
They stood upon this ancient world, feet planted firmly in dust and rock, and looked around at the unpromising landscape: rocks, rocks, and more rocks illuminated by the feeble orange rays of the sun. Frances looked up at where the Ad Astra had orbited and saw scattered glints of orange where sunlight touched ships, probably not the Ad Astra, which had moved on since they had left it.
“Well,” came a voice close to her ear, “what’s going on?”
Frances started. “Nothing yet,” she said, and she heard Jessica giving Adrian technical information about their landing and their surroundings.
Frances looked around. The landing was intended to be close to a tunnel that approached the surface, but she couldn’t see anything that looked like an entrance. But then she didn’t know what an alien would build for an entrance, even if it wanted one. Of course the aliens might have no reason to come out. Without the need for an exit, the entrance might have been permanently sealed.
“Maybe,” she said impulsively, “the aliens bring other beings here to act as their eyes and ears. They sealed themselves up and don’t want to come out, but they’re curious and they have to find out about what’s going on.”
“Maybe,” Adrian said.
“Or maybe,” Frances went on, “they’re agoraphobes who can’t go out, and they need somebody to do the exploring for them.”
“Maybe,” Adrian said.
“And maybe we’ll find some answers if we can find a way to get this thing open,” Jessica said.
She was standing in front of a larger rock that stood like an obelisk in a field of smaller stones. She pointed to places where the rock had been chipped away, and other places where the face of the rock revealed a straight-line crack. “That isn’t natural,” she said tinnily.
“On the other hand,” Frances said, “it may not have been done by the tunnelers but by visitors like us, trying to find our hosts. Why would they enter through a pillar?”
“Over there, then,” Jessica said. “There’s a cliff. That would be a good place.”
She bounded over to stand in front of it. Frances and the two engineers followed more sedately. It was a good place. The rock face had been smoothed in spots, although this could have been the result of fault line splits from heating and cooling cycles. Some kinds of tools had been at work there, as well; some cutting edges, some drills, some evidences of rock melting. Someone else had been eager to enter—when the tunnels were built or after they were completed and the builders sealed inside.
Most of all, however, there were incisions of some kind that looked as if they might have meaning—like writing, if something even more cryptic than hieroglyphs could be considered writing. They fiddled around with it, the engineers muttering engineering talk to each other and Frances and Jessica taking turns informing Adrian.
They took pictures. They renewed their air supplies at the landing craft, and eventually they gave up.
——
Frances, Jessica, and Adrian studied the alien inscriptions on the computer screen. Adrian fiddled with the keyboard, bringing the photographic images up so close that their imperfections were exaggerated like the pores of Gulliver’s Brobdingnagians. Here was a place that a micro-meteorite might have struck, there, that a flake of rock-face might have scaled away from the effects of alternating baking and freezing. On the other hand, they might have been the intention of the carvers. Clearly they had been created, and equally clearly they were indecipherable.
Hoping for a Rosetta Stone, Adrian had asked the computer for a comparison with its vast storehouse of images, including Peter Cavendish’s spaceship designs and whatever else he had inserted into the database about the aliens and never revealed, but after thirty-six hours the computer had come up with nothing. How could human minds find a solution that this computer, with its virtually inexhaustible memory capacity and its micro-swift data processors, could not? Frances wondered.
“One advantage we have,” Adrian said, as if answering Frances’ unspoken question, “is imagination. This could be instructions for opening the entrance.”
“Sort of an ‘open sesame,’” Jessica said.
“Or it could be a threat,” Frances said, “like the inscription on Shakespeare’s headstone: ‘Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear/ To dig the dust enclosed here/ Blest be the man that spares these stones/ And curst be he that moves my bones.’”
“You think they might be dead?” Jessica asked. Her eyes widened at the thought that they might have come all this long way at the invitation of creatures long deceased.
“Maybe it’s something as simple as the inscription on a cornerstone: on this date, this entrance was sealed,” Adrian said.
“Or: no tradesmen; deliveries in the rear,” Jessica added, getting into the spirit of the discussion. “Or: emergency exit only—warning will sound.”
“That’s an idea,” Adrian said. “It doesn’t make any sense to provide instructions that nobody is going to be able to read. So, maybe it tells aliens who come outside, for whatever reason, where to find the right entrance.”
“We’re assuming that the inscription was made by the aliens who carved out a habitat for themselves inside this world when their air failed,” Frances said. “But maybe it’s just graffiti, like the names and initials carved into famous places all over Earth. This world has had all kinds of alien visitors; maybe the inscriptions are the alien equivalent of ‘Kilroy was here.’”
Adrian put his hands together and pressed his lips with the triangle formed by his index fingers. “One sample isn’t enough,” he said finally. “We can’t expect to come upon the proper spot in our first attempt. Let’s try some other likely locations.”
“In stories explorers always find alien artifacts or aliens themselves on their first attempt,” Frances said, “and that is a good reason not to expect it to happen in real life. It’s just a convention—a way to get on with the action.”
“Not much action around here,” Jessica said.
“Action is usually a sign that people have made bad decisions,” Adrian said. “Frances is right: it’s a convention, like the assumption that alien worlds have a single topography and climate.”
“Unless,” Jessica said, “like the moon and this world, they have no atmosphere to create climate and no water to change the topography.”
So Frances and Jessica, the two engineers, and the pilot went down again to another site and another and another. Some places they found deserts of sand instead of jagged rocky terrain, some places, deep ravines and canyons cut by ancient waterways, some places, the charred remains of what once might have passed on this alien world for forests, some places dead sea bottoms full of sediment and what might once have been bones that might have told them paleontological marvels had they the time and the paleontologists to spare. On the edge of ancient canyons they came upon what might have been the ruins of buildings, but none were substantial enough to tell them anything about what kind of creatures might have constructed them or lived in them; and beside the dead sea bottoms they found piles of blackened rubble that once might have been alien cities. Like the bones, they might have had xenological stories to tell and mysteries to solve, but all Frances and Jessica had time to do was to take pictures and move on. This was a world with all of the history of Earth—maybe more, since it seemed far older—but they had their own history that impelled them forward. They weren’t explorers; they had been sent for, and they didn’t know why.
Once they were caught too far from the landing craft when the sunset. The change between day and night was sudden, and they were wrapped in darkness. The planet was on the far side of its sun, and the sky, once the sunlight had stopped glinting from spaceships above, was totally dark. In the blackness of normal space, even interstellar space, stars shone; if they were cold and remote, at least there was light and the promise somewhere of warmth and life. Frances remembered the night sky on Earth and its seductive promise of other suns, other worlds, and the challenge of getting there. Here there was nothing but empty nothing, Milton’s “uncreated night,” Frances thought, and shivered. The darkness was like a premonition, a reminder of onrushing death, which even rejuvenation could not permanently disable; telomeres could be repaired but not restored. She looked down quickly and clicked on her helmet lights.
In the midst of the jumbled variety of this alien world that they had decided to call “Enigma,” where underground cavities approached the surface, they came upon sealed entrances—or what might have been entrances. Near a few of them they found inscriptions; some of them looked like the first inscriptions they had seen, others, totally different, which seemed to support the theory, Frances said, that they had been made by other aliens summoned like them and expressing their frustration at a lack of welcome or not finding anybody home. But they took pictures of everything and brought them back to the Ad Astra.
“The Enigma remains an enigma,” Frances said. Weeks since they had arrived had stretched into months, and they were no closer to the basic answers they had sought. Each answer only seemed to precipitate a new cascade of questions.
“We’re bombarding the place with every frequency we have,” Adrian said, “and we’d do it with Peter’s energetic cosmic rays if we knew how to create and manipulate them. And we’re listening to every frequency we can think of.”
“Nothing?” Jessica said.
“Too much,” Adrian said. “There are enough radio waves out there to fry a bird, if there was anything like that around. But we can’t decipher any of it. The computer is chugging away like mad, but nothing happens.”
“We could try to force our way in,” Frances said. “With lasers or thermite wands or high explosives.”
“Others seemed to have tried that and failed,” Jessica said.
“And it doesn’t seem like a rewarding strategy,” Adrian said. “Even if our summoners aren’t being good hosts and welcoming us to the party, breaking in isn’t likely to win us any friends. And this far from home, everybody needs friends.”
“Like Blanche Dubois,” Frances said, “we must depend upon the kindness of strangers.”
“I think we’re finished,” Jessica said. “We’re faced with puzzles we aren’t smart enough to solve. I think we should start back home.”
“That’s the mother talking,” Frances said.
“I’m going down there myself,” Adrian said. “I’ve let you two talk me into protecting myself and the ship, but I’m going to see that place with my own eyes.”
Jessica protested and so did Frances, but not as vehemently when Adrian announced that Jessica would remain on the ship, in charge, while he and Frances descended toward the site of their first exploration.
When they arrived, the entrance was open.
——
Where a solid rock face had displayed only a few hairline cracks and the inscrutable incisions, a black hole had appeared, and Frances could see that the slab of rock that had blocked the entrance had slipped into a slender pit at the bottom. She laughed shakily. The sound reverberated inside her helmet. “Apparently you’re Aladdin,” she said to Adrian. “It was waiting for you.”
“Unlikely,” Adrian said. “It makes more sense that it was waiting for the team to return.”
“Don’t go in!” Jessica said over the static on their receivers. “It’s too dangerous!”
Frances shrugged and then, realizing that Adrian couldn’t see the gesture, said, “Are we going to enter?”
“I don’t know about you,” Adrian said, “but I didn’t come all this way to stand in the doorway first on one foot and then the other. Jessica, I know Frances and I are risking our lives and everything else in what may be folly, but that’s what this whole enterprise has been—risk and maybe folly, so one more foolish risk won’t make any difference this close to finding out what it’s all about. If we’re not back in three hours, don’t try to break in. This is not the time or the place for melodrama. And if we don’t get back, you’re in charge. If contact doesn’t occur in another month or so—you’ll have to be the judge of the proper time to wait and what constitutes contact—refuel and return with what we have.” And he turned toward the opening in the cliff before Jessica could reply.
Frances shrugged again. “‘Come into my parlor,’ said the spider to the fly,” she muttered and followed Adrian through the black doorway into what seemed, in the illumination from the lights built into their helmets, like a space carved out of rock and then faced with a dark metal or plastic.
Behind them the door rose silently and terminally. “Maybe Peter’s worst fears are going to be realized,” Frances said. “No wonder he stayed home.”
“Peter’s fears never did make sense,” Adrian said. But he didn’t sound convinced. “Let’s look around. With vacuum outside and an atmosphere inside, we presume, this must be an airlock.”
The walls were smooth without protuberances and the corners were rounded, like a culvert. The far wall was flat, but no amount of feeling around for knobs or switches or levers by awkward gloved hands produced any reaction. “Maybe,” Frances said, “the opening of the outer door was an accident, and the inner door failed a long time ago. There’s nothing to say that the creatures that did all this are still alive. It could all be an automated process that is breaking down, bit by bit. That would explain a great deal. We don’t know how long those other spaceships have been in orbit…” She realized she was babbling and stopped abruptly. Too abruptly, she thought.
Adrian turned his helmet toward hers, and she realized that the same thoughts had been running through his head. “About this time,” she went on, “the explorers would lift their helmets and sniff the air and say, ‘It’s breathable.’”
Adrian laughed. It echoed tinnily in Frances’ helmet. “That never made any sense either. I’m afraid we’ll have to leave our helmets on until we’re back aboard ship, and hope our air supply holds out.”
Light spilling over them told Frances that the inner door had opened. Behind it was a long, featureless tunnel, apparently burned out of the rock so that it fused into a smooth, shiny gray surface as it cooled, and perhaps with some luminescent material added so that it glowed. Frances felt as if she were in an artery of some gigantic beast.
“Apparently,” Adrian said, “it took some time for the atmospheric pressure to equalize.” He stepped forward into the tunnel, Frances close behind. Adrian knelt to get a better view of the floor. “No grooves, no apparent wear. But whoever built this must have moved a hell of a lot of people—well, creatures—and equipment this way.”
Frances looked as far as she could down the featureless tunnel. It seemed to curve gently downward until, in the distance, the top seemed to meet the floor. “We’ve got—what?—a bit less than four hours’ air supply? We can explore for a little less than two hours and then get back with a small margin of safety, and hope that the doors operate in the other direction.”
Adrian looked at the doorway through which they had entered. It, too, had no apparent controls. “It would seem to register motion or maybe heat.”
“If that’s the case,” Frances said, “it should be opening now.”
“Good engineering would require some built-in delays to prevent cycling,” Adrian said absently. “But the others know we’re here. We should allow an hour-and-a-half for exploration in case we have any delays getting back.”
He started off down the unrevealing tunnel and Frances trudged after him. It looked as if it would be another long day. “Shouldn’t we leave a trail, or unwind a ball of twine or something,” she asked, “in case this corridor branches?”
“We have something even better,” Adrian said, “a built-in mapper.”
“Gee,” Frances said, “the Cretans should have had one of those.” They walked through the gray luminescent tunnel, steadily trending downward, with occasional branches right and left. They stayed with the main tunnel.
“Nothing,” Frances muttered. “Nothing.”
“Were you expecting something?” Adrian responded, but he, too, sounded disappointed.
“Did I ever tell you that in addition to space sickness,” Frances said, “I have a touch of claustrophobia?”
“Now is hardly the time,” Adrian said, but he stopped. “We’re getting nowhere. We need a vehicle of some kind and a longer air supply and maybe a bigger exploring party. I think we’ve done everything we can.”
And he turned around and led the way back through the enigmatic tunnel to the entrance that now, Frances hoped, had become an exit.
Miraculously, it seemed, the wall slid down in front of them and up in back of them when they entered, and, after a suitable pause, the other doorway opened and they walked, free and unenlightened, back onto the planet’s surface.
——
Four days later, the engineers had put together a small vehicle like a golf cart with a battery drive, a seat for two, and a space behind the seat for two canisters of oxygen. The outer entrance now was oddly responsive, admitting anyone who moved in front of it, including the cart when it was occupied but not when it was empty.
“Clever,” Adrian said. “It can discriminate between living creatures and objects that merely move. That avoids random openings and closings—for falling rocks, say.”
“Or it knows who we are,” Frances said. “That would explain why it didn’t open the first time Jessie and I were here. It took time to identify us.”
“I prefer a simpler explanation,” Adrian said, but refused to offer one.
The two of them explored the tunnels as far as the cart would carry them, sometimes exploring side tunnels. In the side tunnels, which were slightly smaller than the main one, something like doorways opened into something like rooms carved out of the rock by a process similar to that which had formed the tunnels. Sometimes the rooms were interconnected like apartments or sets of offices. But all were empty and unmarked even by dust or litter or scratches.
“They’ve got a great cleaning service,” Frances said.
“I think they did it in stages,” Adrian said. “When the climate began to change, through a change in orbit or a decline in solar output, and the air began to thin, they moved inside, first into the outer layers, then gradually deeper and deeper, abandoning the first habitations as they went.”
“Or maybe,” Frances said, “these were living quarters for the workers.”
“Or as the central fires cooled, they moved closer to what was left.”
“Or they’re dying off slowly and clustering together in the depths for comfort and companionship.”
Adrian kept up his hope of finding something meaningful even as each journey turned up nothing. Adrian and Frances took the first few trips, and then, when it seemed safe enough, Adrian and Jessica, and then Frances and Jessica once more. Once Frances thought she saw movement at the end of a long side tunnel, but when the cart got there she and Jessica found no sign of an alien or any evidence that anything had been there.
“What did it look like?” Jessica asked.
“Like something misshapen,” Frances said. “Maybe with tentacles. Or viscous, like protoplasm.”
“Have you been reading those speculative books again?” Jessica asked.
“I’ve learned a lot from books,” Frances said. “Things I never would have learned if I had to experience it all myself.”
“You also learned a lot that isn’t so,” Jessica said. “Me, too. People who read have active imaginations, and sometimes reading over-stimulates them.”
“Too bad we don’t have one of those Star Trek gadgets that detect life signs,” Frances said. “And individual signatures.”
“And transporters and magic wands,” Jessica said.
“‘A truly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,’” Frances quoted.
“So are wishes, and wishful thinking,” Jessica said.
Eventually the explorations slowed down and then ceased altogether, not so much from decision as from lack of incentive. They had another meeting in the control room of the Ad Astra.
“We could go through this exploration business for a lifetime and never get anywhere,” Jessica said. “Explorers on Earth fanned out across the world and still left depths untouched, and that took thousands of years.”
“That’s true,” Frances said. “And there’s only a couple of us who can go on any expedition, and an entire planet to search. If they don’t want to be found, we aren’t going to find them.”
“Maybe it’s a test,” Adrian said. He was seated in front of the control panel, as he had been so many times before, but turned to face them.
“What kind of test?” Jessica asked.
“To see if we have the determination to persist in the face of discouragement.”
“If that’s the test,” Frances said, “I think we’ve failed, and we might as well pack up and go home.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Jessica said, putting her hand on Frances’ shoulder in a gesture of support. “We’ve made it out this far after years of effort that for you two began nearly twenty years ago, and through uncounted parsecs. What purpose would one more test serve?”
“That’s true,” Adrian mused. “On the other hand, we may be trying to judge alien motivations by human standards, and the fundamental nature of the alien is that it isn’t human.”
“But that’s all we have,” Jessica said.
“Anyway,” Frances said, “there has to be a common denominator, a basic level of rational discourse, or all these other alien ships wouldn’t be here, too.”
“Yes,” Jessica said. “There is a basic message, isn’t there, in sending plans from afar to people who have the capability of understanding them? And of building the ship? There can’t be an alien interpretation to that; it means: here’s your invitation—come visit.”
“Maybe it isn’t a test,” Adrian said. “Maybe it’s a lesson.”
“What kind of lesson?” Jessica asked.
“Well, they could have been here to greet us and tell us everything we wanted to know.”
“Or,” Frances said, “if they had been reading our novels or watching our TV, they would have got all mixed up with romantic entanglements, or differences between political factions, or confusion between philosophies.”
“But it’s not a TV show or a novel,” Adrian said, shaking his head, “and we have to believe that their not greeting us was part of the message.”
“Sort of a negative message,” Jessica said skeptically.
“Not necessarily,” Adrian said. “Maybe not greeting us was a way of telling us that there are no answers at the end of the journey.”
“And the empty tunnels,” Frances said, “that life is a quest, not an arrival.”
“Exactly,” Adrian said.
Jessica looked back and forth between them. “I find that depressing. We didn’t have to come all this way to get a homily about existence.”
“Would we have believed it if we had stayed home?” Adrian said. “I mean—I agree with the lesson in principle—life is a search for answers, not a finding of them—but believing and experiencing are different states of mind.”
“But it’s so—so—much of a letdown,” Jessica wailed.
“If it is,” Adrian said somberly, “then we will have to get used to it, and if we are able, rejoice in it.”
“I think we should make one final effort,” Frances said.
“What kind of effort?” Jessica asked.
“Attach a wagon to the back of the cart, fill it with batteries and oxygen canisters, and head down as far as it will take us into that labyrinth below.”
A day later Frances and Adrian passed through the gates of Enigma and headed into the bowels of what had once been a living world.
——
They moved slowly but steadily through the main tunnel leading downward, ignoring branches, descending steadily. They had supplies of oxygen, food, and power sufficient for two days’ journey into the depths and two days’ getting back, unless something broke down. Of course eating and sleeping would be a problem, but they could survive, Frances knew, on brackish water regenerated within their suits, and occasional snacks of food paste from a helmet dispenser, and they could take shifts, one driving while the other napped, as best he or she could within an iron maiden.
But there was nothing to reward their venture as they drove deeper and deeper into the hollowed planet, and near the end of the first day Adrian’s despair was only exceeded by hers. “There’s an irony here, isn’t there?” Frances said.
“What do you mean?”
“We launched ourselves into the infinite expanse of space, and now we’re heading down into areas increasingly confined.” She shuddered and hoped Adrian didn’t notice.
“Maybe that’s what’s intended,” Adrian said. “The science of our times: the galaxies and the universe on one end, sub-atomic particles on the other—answers to the riddle of humanity lie at either extreme, or both. I know you’re uncomfortable. Maybe we should turn back.”
“Never,” Frances said, but she shuddered again inside her suit.
And they plunged deeper. The temperature rose as they descended, as if the fires of this ancient world had not yet been extinguished. They did not notice the change themselves, but the sensors on the cart registered the information and their suits’ heat-exchangers worked a little harder.
At the end of the next half-day, the main tunnel ended in a blank wall; side tunnels extended on either side. When Adrian reported to Jessica, her reply was faint. “Your transmission is fading,” she said. “It’s having a hard time penetrating all those levels of rock. Call it off.”
“Never,” Frances said, but her voice was breathless.
“We’re going right,” Adrian said.
They took the right branch. After an hour and several more side tunnels to choose from, they emerged into a large room that was different from anything else they had seen. Something like dark windows broke the monotony of the luminescent walls.
“This is more like it,” Frances said, but she knew it sounded as if she were not prepared for revelation.
“If it still works,” Adrian said, and as he spoke the windows became illuminated. Scenes of a green world appeared behind the windows, slowly at first and then changing more rapidly as the world itself evolved through what appeared to be millennial transformations, flickering from window to window, with increasing speed until they whirled around Adrian and Frances like a fantastic kaleidoscope. The movement was too swift to detect individual creatures, only the vast movements of geologic—or xenologic—time. Gradually the procession of images slowed and the light faded from white to yellow to orange, and the landscape that had been green changed to lifeless gray.
“At last,” Frances said. “They’re communicating.”
“Maybe not,” Adrian said. “I think we’ve stumbled into a classroom. Alien youngsters probably could slow this thing down, inspect individual eras, find out what drove them underground.”
“Then we still haven’t contacted the aliens—or been contacted by them.”
“This may be as close as we get.”
Then the windows faded into darkness again.
“Jessica,” Adrian said. “Can you hear us?
No answer came to their receivers. Frances felt a shiver of alarm. The windows lighted up once more, one at a time. Behind each one was a creature out of Frances’ worst nightmare. Some were spidery with long legs; some, winged with segmented eyes like flies; some with great mouths like sharks seemed to be swimming in water; some had many arms like octopi; some looked like ravening animals with four legs and big teeth; some looked relatively herbivorean, almost sheeplike; but most had no earthly counterparts at all, and the mind rebelled at trying to classify them according to human experience.
“I wonder which one is the Minotaur,” Frances said, hoping that Adrian didn’t notice that her voice was shaking.
“Perhaps more important,” Adrian replied, “where’s Daedalus?”
“Or Theseus. Unless that’s you—Aladdin and Theseus. At least,” Frances said, “the aliens are showing us something relevant.”
“This may be part of the schooling process, too,” Adrian said. “Getting the alien youngsters accustomed to the idea that life comes in many forms, teaching them not to be repelled by appearance; or simply a catalog of creatures. No doubt there are ways to stop this display, and to explore the backgrounds and taxonomies of each of these creatures in as much depth as the individual student desires.”
“Then they’re still not talking to us,” Frances wailed, not sure she could endure much more of this claustrophobic environment.
“No,” Adrian said, “and I think we need to think about getting back. We’ve nearly reached our limit. We may never get any direct communication.”
The final window, however, revealed a familiar face: it was a human face. It was Adrian himself.
“At last!” Frances breathed.
“Now I understand,” Adrian said. “It’s not a catalog of all the creatures who live, or once lived, on this world. It’s a catalog of visitors—”
“Maybe that’s why they never revealed themselves to us,” Frances said. “They knew if we saw what they looked like we’d never listen to what they had to say.”
“We’re still primitive creatures,” Adrian said. “We still judge a book by its cover.”
“That reminds me,” Frances said, “ever since we saw the alien ships orbiting this hunk of rock, I’ve been trying to think what it reminded me of: a school of predatory fish around a victim, vultures around a carcass, pigs at a trough. But I’ve finally come up with something more appropriate: those ships are like patrons of a library, and they’re all gathered around the information desk.”
“Then why are we the only ones not getting any information?” Adrian asked.
“That isn’t quite true,” said a voice they hadn’t heard for more than two years.
They looked at the final screen. The image of Adrian had been replaced by another. Looking back at them was Peter Cavendish.
——
Frances was the first to speak. “Peter, what are you doing here?” She started breathing again, and hoped Adrian hadn’t noticed the break in the pattern of sounds reaching his intercom.
“Strictly speaking,” Adrian said, “he isn’t here. Right, Peter?” Adrian didn’t seem surprised.
“Adrian is correct,” the image said.
“You’re what?” Adrian asked. “A computer program?”
“A bit more than that,” the image said.
“A person?” Frances said.
“A bit less than that.”
Frances fidgeted inside her suit, wishing Jessica were there, wishing she were not, aware of Adrian beside her, conscious of the impossible image in front of them. The image in the window looked at them with a calm that was uncharacteristic of the Peter Cavendish she knew. He was the man who had deciphered the first messages from space and published them as diagrams for the construction of a spaceship. He was also the man whose paranoia about the message had driven him over the edge of sanity, who had regained enough self-control to build a secret association of space enthusiasts, who had helped construct the spaceship and programmed its computer, possibly in response to alien instructions he had never revealed, to take the ship to the white hole that had led them—here. He was also the Peter Cavendish who had stayed behind when the ship left.
“Less than a person but more than a program,” Adrian said calmly. “Whatever you are, it’s good to see you again. We need some help.”
“As for what I am,” the image said, “I am a heuristic program modeled after your colleague Peter Cavendish, capable of learning, responding, and a limited amount of independent decision-making.”
“Limited in what way?” Frances asked.
“Limited to fulfilling the objectives of this mission,” the image said. “Defined by whom?” Adrian asked.
“By Peter originally,” the image said, “but modified by the inputs from each of you during the past two years, with a slight preference for those from Adrian, as the chosen captain.”
“So we’re really talking to the computer,” Frances said. “If you prefer,” the image said.
“I’d rather talk to Peter,” Adrian said.
“If you prefer,” the image said.
“Maybe you can answer some questions first.”
“Anything you wish.”
“Like the genie from the bottle,” Frances said.
“Why did you keep from us the instructions you programmed into the computer that brought us here?”
“I have an answer,” the image said, smiling as Peter seldom had, “but you have to understand that answers about motivation are always conditional.”
“The best you can do,” Adrian said.
“It was my—or my programmer’s—belief that the instructions the aliens sent for reaching them would delay the construction of the ship, and after the ship was completed, you—or more accurately, the crew—would be unlikely to start the engines if you knew that the computer was programmed to assume control of the ship and take you to the white hole.”
“You never understood normal people,” Frances said.
“That was one of my failings,” the image said.
“We would have gone no matter what,” Adrian said.
“I see that now. I am capable of learning, as I said.”
“We could have chosen to override the computer,” Adrian said.
“But you did not. Clearly I misread the situation, but then I was a paranoid schizophrenic, and I saw the world through glasses distorted by fear.”
“But you aren’t now,” Frances said.
“A paranoid schizophrenic?” the image said. “No. Peter programmed me to be the person he never was—as intelligent as he but with a mind unfettered by apprehensions.”
“Maybe you can tell me,” Frances said, “why he stayed behind. He was the most driven of us all.”
“Driven, yes,” the image said. “But by fear of everything—of not finding what the aliens wanted, of finding what they wanted, of never being able to find a resting place between the two extremes. I was the perfect solution.”
“I can see that,” Adrian said.
“I don’t see it,” Frances said.
“He can stay at home, where he feels safe, and yet send out his alter ego to discover the answers to his questions,” Adrian said.
“But he’ll never know!” Frances protested.
“Always the literal mind,” Peter said.
“Unless we return,” Adrian said. “But, of course, he’s just doing what humans do: we have children to carry on our lives, to realize the dreams that we never manage to achieve, to answer the eternal questions of life and death and meaning.”
“And the computer-Peter is Peter’s child!” Frances said.
“Yes,” Adrian said, “and Peter himself, in a sense—his mind sent out to explore the universe, to fulfill his destiny.” He put his hand on Frances’ suited arm.
“We understand all that,” Adrian said, turning back to the image. “But why haven’t you revealed yourself before? Why now?”
“I wasn’t needed until now,” the image said. “But you seem to have reached an impasse. You’re discouraged, your oxygen is almost used up, and your mapper isn’t working.”
Adrian looked down at his gauges. “He’s right.”
“Should we get out of here?” Frances asked. On top of her claustrophobia, the thought of being lost in this maze of tunnels was almost unbearable.
“As soon as we hear Peter out,” Adrian said.
“I have communicated with the aliens,” the image said calmly.
——
Frances put an arm around Adrian’s unyielding waist, as if protecting them both against the terrors of the night.
“Why haven’t they spoken before now?” Adrian asked. “It took a while for them to learn our language.”
“That’s both too easy and too difficult,” Adrian said.
“I don’t understand that,” Frances said.
“Adrian means that if they could send us messages, they should know our language,” Cavendish’s image said, “and if they don’t, they shouldn’t be able to learn it in a couple of months. But they didn’t send us messages, they sent us images and mathematical formulations, which have few cultural relevancies.”
“And they sent them everywhere,” Adrian said.
“Everywhere there was a possibility of a technological civilization capable of receiving and understanding such a message,” the image said.
“And how did they know that?” Frances asked.
“They had these listening posts, you see,” Cavendish said. “All those white holes established near places likely to nourish intelligent life. And those who received the message and deciphered it and built their ships and came—each, in turn, has been exchanging information with the aliens as soon as the aliens could learn their language.”
“But why are they still here?” Adrian asked.
“There is so much to tell, and to learn,” Cavendish said. “All these creatures have histories and cultures and ideas and ambitions and art, you see, and all of these can be exchanged rapidly, but there is so much. So much experience. So much variety. So much art and science and philosophy…. The process could take several lifetimes. With newcomers always arriving, maybe forever.”
“I can see that,” Adrian said, “but still—”
“It’s like a vast library,” Frances said. “That’s what I said when we first saw the place, didn’t I? It’s every bookworm’s dream of paradise.” Fear battled with expectation for possession of her face.
“Here I have to make a confession.”
“Ah-ha!” Frances said. Throughout her experience with Cavendish, she had wavered between blind trust and utter mistrust.
“The message wasn’t received in energetic cosmic rays, as I—or rather my prototype—always said,” Cavendish said. “It was gravity waves.”
“Why lie?” Adrian asked.
“I didn’t think anyone would believe gravity waves,” the image said. “And they were so new and so unreliable. I was afraid people would think I was making it up.”
“They thought so anyway,” Frances said.
“Not you and Adrian,” Cavendish said, “and you were the ones who mattered.”
“Gravity waves,” Adrian repeated. “Does that have some significance?”
“It will later,” Cavendish said. “But to answer the other question—about it being too difficult: the aliens are consummate linguists. They had to be, since they have had to communicate with a thousand other species, and, what’s more, their evolutionary development produced a species for whom understanding others was a survival characteristic.”
“I can see that,” Adrian said.
“Well, I can’t,” Frances said. “Sure, you need to understand others, but even more you have to understand the universe in which we live and work. Communication is okay, as far as it goes, but total communication can frustrate the need to get something done.”
“These aliens don’t understand that,” Peter said.
“Frances means that accomplishment emerges from the frustration of incomplete communication,” Adrian said. “Like art. Or science, for that matter.”
“Then that’s the point,” Cavendish said.
“There’s a point?” Frances said.
“Yes,” Cavendish said. “The aliens want you to know that they are not the aliens you seek.”
The image in the window flickered and disappeared, but Peter’s voice in their earphones guided them back to the main tunnel and up its long incline until, at last, they emerged into the black sky and the ambiguity of uncreated night.