Gift From The Stars (26 page)

“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?”