Good News from Antares, Is Anybody Out There?

The El makes the same racket it always did, a tortured shriek as it slowly rounds the corner of the track between Van Buren and Quincy stations. Alone in his room, Gerrard feels the sound pulling him backward in time, like a wondrous device from one of his own stories, back to a year when all of space-time had lain wide open, for himself as well as the whole of humanity. In that year he attained the zenith of his career, at the ripe age of twenty-five. It might even have been in this very hotel; he doesn’t remember which one it was, but of course people would know. Long ago he tore up all the zines he had accumulated and threw them into the trash without regret, but in the hoards of collectors some must survive. Certainly there are many who would consider it a privilege to let him look at a copy of Second City Fandom. They’d treat him to dinner in the bargain, and spend the entire night drunk on nostalgia, trying to evoke a world lost forever. He’d rather get mugged.

Downstairs, in the reception room that may or may not be the very one where he came close to the ultimate glory, his daughter is waiting for him. She is wearing the eggplant dress he loathes; her husband Walter will be hovering at her elbow, simpering and nattering, drinking too much. People must be crowding Alice, trying to let her success wash over them, just as Walter is doing. Many will be waving copies of Dark Nocturne brazenly in her face. Some may even be asking about her father, who was a writer too, wasn’t he, isn’t it marvelous how talent runs in the family. Gerrard wishes he could go down now and tell them all what he really thinks of his daughter’s writing, how mocked he feels that all she can offer the world is adolescent feel-good fantasy, dripping with just the right amount of simulated blood and fake angst. This, this is all that the world really wants: sparkly tales of blissful undeath, a retreat into its own navel.

Gerrard feels himself settling down into the armchair, growing heavier by the second. He will not rise; maybe he will stay here the whole night, let himself fall asleep with the drapes drawn and the lights on. He isn’t asleep yet, but his eyes have closed. He dreams, aware that he dreams, able to nudge the dream along but no longer to control it.

In Gerrard’s dream he leaves his room, walks along the corridor to the elevator. It strikes him how the art deco ornamentation on its doors gleams in the neon light. This is not the illumination the gilding was conceived for, yet the electrum glow is soothing to his eyes. There is no one about; the silence fills his ears like cotton. When the bell signaling the elevator’s arrival rings, it feels like a weapon cutting into him.

The doors open and he steps inside the cabin. Next to the doors, the twin columns of buttons extend further down than he had noticed previously. After the numbers come M, L, LL; symbols he is familiar with. But there are further buttons: G, G1, G2 he can guess at, but what of that last one, square where all the others are round, stamped with a glyph that Gerrard cannot recognize as a letter? He pushes it, the doors slide shut and the elevator descends so swiftly that his stomach rises against his throat. He feels a touch of fear, but then he recalls he is dreaming.

When the doors open (this time without a bell), a strange and dark vista is revealed. The elevator has reached into tunnels dug into the rock beneath Chicago, below the level of the subway. Gerrard can hear the roar of a train passing; it comes from far above rather than in front of him. Slowly, he steps out of the elevator cabin. Behind him the doors remain open, promising a safe haven; he does not look back, but walks forward into the dim, steam-wreathed region. Lights shine somewhere in the distance, and shed just enough illumination for him to move about. He holds his arms forward, groping for obstacles, clutching nothing but moist air.

After a time comes the awareness that he is no longer alone; looking to his left, he glimpses a half- familiar shape in the dimness. He moves forward, and the shape follows silently. Soon lights from ahead kindle a blue gleam on the figure’s swollen forehead, and he recognizes Exben the Antarean. Gerrard’s heart leaps painfully; he does not know if he is glad or horrified. Exben turns its head towards him, and Gerrard heaves a strangled sigh. Even now, even in his dream, he sees Exben as it was portrayed on the screen for twenty-five embarrassing episodes of Mission: Universe. Beneath the caked blue makeup, the pasty features of a character actor well past his prime, whose name always escapes Gerrard’s memory, twist in a leering smile.

“Stars bring greetings, my friend,” says Exben, and Gerrard answers with the trite response heard on every episode: “And the Universe is one.” Long, long ago, he opened a story in this way. He was so young then that the words seemed fresh and full of wisdom to him. He thought he was spelling out a view of a glorious future, and thousands of others thought so too. They were even younger than he was, barely out of childhood; they, at least, had the excuse of innocence.

For a minute Gerrard remains mute and motionless; Exben matches him. There is a faint hiss from the prosthetic nose’s thin nostrils as the actor breathes in and out. Finally Gerrard gives in; it’s his dream, after all. “It’s good to see you, Exben,” he says finally, and is surprised to realize he means it. “How . . . how are you?”

“I am fully aware that you are not Major Vance,” says Exben, taking Gerrard’s hand. Exben has three digits only, long and many-jointed. In the television series he was given human hands, though he always wore gloves with odd markings, as a cheap token of alienness. These hands are not gloved. “As I am aware of your status. You grieve, friend Gerrard, so terribly.”

Exben pulls him forward now, until they come to a better-lit area; a trio of parallel tubes hanging from the distant ceiling casts a bubble of radiance within the fog. Here Exben pauses and turns to face Gerrard fully. Gerrard can see, distinctly, the line where the rubber prosthetic skull meets the actor’s skin; here, on the jaw, a cluster of acne scars blotted with concealer still reveal themselves under the layers of makeup. Yet the fingers that grip his hand wrap themselves all the way up his wrist; the alien skin is cool, finely textured like chamois cloth.

Of course Gerrard remembers. It was in his second story of Exben and Vance that he came up with the idea: an alien given an all-important mission that, for once, wasn’t about war, about conquest or enslavement. The mission had been to understand humanity, because—how had he put it?—nothing could be more meaningful in the universe than to understand one another. Something like that. He should remember the sentence better, since it almost won him the Gernsback. That is what people vote for, he later came to understand: slogans, catchphrases, expressions of neat ideas that respond to their own prejudices. That year, it had been in fashion to seek fellow-feeling and understanding, because America was terrified of the Soviets and friendship seemed like an easy solution. But decades later, by the time the Caucasus oil-fields had collapsed and Andropov had been overthrown, the country felt invincible. No one cared for Exben’s mission anymore; not even Gerrard himself, truth be told. And soon after that had come the Clarke theorem and its implications, and the old universe had died.

Ten stories. This is his legacy to the defunct world of scientifiction, according to Chalmers in his Encyclopedia; the rest of Gerrard’s work dismissed in one word as “forgettable.” But the Exben sequence, that warrants a whole paragraph. Ten stories about an alien, and a human astronaut who endeavors to show him what it means to be human. Collected together in the late-seventies by an amateur press as Exben from the Stars, provided with appalling cover art and poorly distributed. Written over a span of twenty- five years, the stories improve greatly from first to last, says Chalmers. And Gerrard is forced to agree. The first one he can no longer stand to even glance at; only the last three, for him, hold any value anymore. Yet their popularity went steadily downhill after the second one. By the time of the last story, Gabriel Enders at the Magazine of Scientifiction was doing an old hack a favor, and made sure Gerrard knew it. And yet, and yet! That last story was far more ambitious, far more subtle and wise than any of Gerrard’s previous work. He has reread it, more than once, always after a long interval, and been surprised that he was the one to write it. It is something any writer of scientifiction could be satisfied with.

Exben is speaking. Atop its skull, its antennae are curling and extending, no longer waving haphazardly like the painted twin rubber whips they are. “According to you, my mission was finished long ago, my friend. You claimed that I had fulfilled it, that I could go home.”

“Maybe that was why the story failed,” says Gerrard. “You can’t win hearts by telling stories that end. You have to open doors and stop as your character passes through. No one liked ‘End of the Mission’ because no one wants things to end. All the hard work I put in to become a better writer; what did they care about that? They didn’t want to see things as they are, they wanted magic and fun. They didn’t want people to grow old and die, they wanted spaceships and explosions. They didn’t want the universe to end.”

With its left hand, Exben reaches into its clothing and pulls out an intricate device from an inner pocket. “Look,” it whispers, and at the touch of one of its spider-leg fingers, a three-dimensional image appears above the projector. It is a small cluster of brilliant points, a few hundred at most. “The universe,” says Exben.

“The shape of space as well as the basic properties of matter are bound up with the structure of Galois symmetry groups,” says Exben. “Light rays emitted from stars do not move only in straight lines, but simultaneously along multidimensional geodesics . . .”

Above the 3D projector the cluster of stars is reflected and distorted, again and again, in a dizzying progression. Mathematicians claim it all makes perfect sense, that nothing about the process is arbitrary. To Gerrard, it looks as if someone is madly placing mirrors by the hundreds all about the small cluster, some straight, most of them curved. And on and on the process goes, the initial bubble of points swelling until stars by the millions merge into folds and whorls of light, which are themselves repeated and reflected. At the end of it all there is a colossal mass of lights spinning slowly above the projector: the universe as it appears to the telescope, the great cosmic lie, the artifact of higher mathematics.

There are no spiral arms, no galaxies, no superclusters. There are only a few, a very few stars; all the rest are illusions, artifacts of the structure of space. Ghosts from the distant past, a thousand thousand images of the same few stars endlessly repeated and distorted, reddened by the light’s passage along exotic geodesics, swollen by gravitational lensing . . . Sometimes Gerrard tells himself he understands it, but he’s lying to himself. All he knows is what everyone knows, the truly important result: that there is no great infinite universe awaiting them out there. That there is, really, almost nowhere to go.

Antares is probably a real star; that is, the image of it that impinges upon the telescopes of Earth is probably the most authentic one. And for this single authentic image, there are thousands and millions of others, ghosts of Antares that appear much farther away, far beyond the actual bounds of space as it exists. Gerrard isn’t sure if he has understood that part of it correctly, but he thinks to remember that at least one of the distant galaxies Edwin Hubble thought he saw is in fact nothing more than a hundred billion distorted copies of Antares.

Scientifiction was bound up with the dream of space. Once mankind awoke from that dream, it was all over. Not everyone understood it at first, and for maybe ten years some authors struggled on. But the invisible hand of the market is too strong to resist, especially when it makes a fist and smashes your editor into the dust.

“This is the great discovery of your age,” says Exben. “Clarke’s theorem has elucidated the basic structure of the cosmos. Humankind has come to a better understanding of its place among the universe. The understanding of this reality has provided an answer to some of your most pressing questions. And yet, my friend Gerrard, instead of reveling in triumph, you grieve. How can that be? You must help me understand.”

Its voice has a buzzing tone it lacked before; lifting his gaze from the mockup of the universe, Gerrard is surprised to see sideways mandibles about Exben’s mouth, astonished when he notices the faceted eyes. Exben is now as he imagined it at first in the early stories, no longer the feeble copy prescribed by the constraints of television, but the insectoid alien he conceptualized, the strange and coherent form that dwelled within his mind, beyond his ability to ever fully describe.

“I cannot fathom why you are not happy. You wanted answers. How many times did Major Vance say this? Humans want answers. They want to know the truth; it is this insatiable curiosity that makes your race so great. But you grieve; you grieve because you know. How can that be?”

“Shit; shit! I was wrong, Exben, that’s all. I was young and stupid. We don’t want to know and we certainly don’t want the truth. We want the lies, we want the mystery. We want infinite fields, we want things that make us feel important. Not this! Not this sad joke. We can’t deal with the truth.”

“How the hell should I know? When I was young I thought humanity wanted to learn the truth, because I wanted to learn the truth. Later I thought humanity was defined by religion, because I had lost my faith and I wanted to feel superior to those who still had theirs. Now I don’t have anything anymore. No faith, no knowledge.”

“You yourself brought me into being as the emissary of truth. Every time you read the article about yourself in the Encyclopedia, you sneer at Chalmers because he describes me as a religious figure; whereas you no longer believe. Yet I am a religious figure—among other things. How could I not be? And in this capacity I now offer redemption.”

“You desire infinity. I shall grant it. I can prove the Clarke theorem is flawed. A simpler lemma does hold, but the overall conclusion is too restrictive, and it just so happens that this makes it inapplicable to the universe as a whole. The demonstration does not involve any transcendent insight; there is in fact a fairly simple counterexample any serious mathematician can understand. Once this counterexample is discovered, the current cosmological model will fall. Space-time will be revealed as stranger and more complex than was realized and far, far bigger. You will have a vast cosmos once more. Future historians of science will marvel at the mass insanity that led the whole community to believe in the current model for so long, when the evidence was almost staring them in the face.”

“Such a little thing!” comments Gerrard. “And what do you want in return? Do I have to die? Is that it? This is how stories are written, you know. When a character is offered a great wish, there’s always a terrible price to pay. Every beginner comes up with this idea that you have to die to make the wish come true, so you never get to enjoy it. And then the little bastards write it, send it in, and get rejected, and they don’t know why.”

“I am far more than a beginner’s dream, my friend Gerrard. You do not have to die to receive this. There is no payment to be made. This is not a bargain, it is a gift. And if endless space is not what you want, I can offer you endless time. Your mortality weighs on you; would you rather have endless life? That also lies within my power.”

“Endless life!” Gerrard snorts in derision. “You’ve got the wrong person, Exben. It’s my daughter you want for that. She’s the one writing about bloodsucking immortals and raking in the cash. I’m sure she would be happy to take you up on the offer.”

He feels his throat tighten as he says this, and falls silent for a moment. Then he says, in a low voice: “I don’t want any great and wonderful gifts. Chalmers is full of crap; you’re not a religious figure, you’re not God or Jesus, you’re just a grownup’s version of an imaginary friend. I made you up because I didn’t want to be alone.”

“Nor were you ever,” says the alien before him, its voice charged with potency, and Gerrard knows a flash of an emotion he could not name, like a pang of love mixed with bowel-churning terror. Breaking the grip of the three-fingered hand on his, he steps backwards, faster and faster, until Exben’s blue form is lost in the mist. Then he turns around and runs for the still- open elevator. Once the doors close on him, once he has pushed the button for his floor, he begins to calm down. The doors open, he stumbles out into the corridor, reaches his room, collapses at the foot of the armchair where he fell asleep, raises his head, unsure for an endless moment whether he has awakened.

He goes to the sink in the bathroom and splashes water on his face, roughly towels it dry. On the countertop next to the sink, he finds the copy of Dark Nocturne his daughter gave him, inscribed to him in her hand; he wipes a few drops of water from the dust jacket with a corner of the hand towel. He picks up the book and exits his room. He will go down and join the well-wishers and sycophants, he will join his daughter and her husband and the rest of humanity, huddled together in the bright reception room to keep the cold and empty universe at bay.