Gift From The Stars (27 page)

“Even if it were DNA,” Peter said, “environment and chance play an inevitable part in shaping the final result.”

“Chemistry, asteroids and other cosmic collisions, eruptions, climate changes, crust movements, disease—” Adrian said.

“Even the development of intelligence and its combination with aggressiveness aren’t foreordained,” Peter said. “There must have been many failures, many blind alleys as in the evolution of humans, and many instances in which intelligence got embodied in some other form.”

“Evolution favored the primates on Earth,” Adrian said. “Maybe the equivalent of the dinosaurs or the whales or the dogs got touched by the magic wand elsewhere. Big, convoluted brains and opposable thumbs—that may be all that’s necessary.”

The screen changed to a blinding view of massive suns crowding the perspective. Then the glare diminished, as if a filter had been placed in front of the lens, and they could see some of the individual suns. Some were exploding, some were shrinking into nothingness, and some had their essence sucked away, in long, colorful streamers, into a halo feeding into a blackness beyond black.

It was like gazing into the mouth of hell.

Jessica stared at the images on the screen, trying to comprehend the titanic energies exploding in front of her, epic catastrophes, primal violence. Adrian’s voice shook her out of her trance.

“That, then, is the center of the galaxy,” he said. “One hears about it, one tries to imagine it, but the reality is beyond imagination.”

“And this is what the Enigmatics saw as their fate,” Peter said, “broadcast back from probes that recorded events here for some millions of years—a gigantic black hole surrounded by thousands of stars being torn apart by tidal forces and feeding their substance into the gravitational well.”

“What did they do?” Frances demanded.

“Nothing,” Peter said. “They could do nothing. Or almost nothing. They had used up their two satellites making spaceships for the Shadows and tunneled out their own planet for metals. They retreated inside the planet and waited for the end.”

“And yet they survived,” Adrian said.

The view on the screen shifted to the Enigmatics’ solar system in the foreground, the violence of the galactic center in the background, small but growing larger. “Their hope, their almost religious faith, was in the shadow creatures, but as powerful as they were, the Enigmatics could not imagine how the Shadows could move an entire system. Maybe, some speculated, a single world, but what would a planet be without a sun?”

“And yet—?” Adrian prompted.

As the violence in the background increased, one of the three gas-giant planets loomed larger and then seemed to recede, first slowly, then more rapidly. The view drew back. The gas giant was moving out of orbit and hurtling away.

“The shadow creatures were trying to alter the direction in which the Enigma system was moving by ejecting mass,” Adrian said.

As he spoke, another gas giant detached itself from orbit and was thrown aside, and then a third, and then, one by one the smaller worlds followed until only Enigma remained.

“These views must have been taken over a period of years,” Adrian said.

“Actually more than a thousand years,” Peter said.

The raging cataclysm in the background began to move slowly off center. “Another five thousand years passed, and the Enigmatics realized that their direction had been altered. The difference was only a fraction of a degree, but it was enough over the long millennia that yet remained to raise the hope that they would skirt the galactic center rather than plunge into the heart of it.”

On the screen the central fury increased in size and frightening intensity until Enigma’s sun faded by contrast. Slowly the maelstrom slid to the side. A sound like a discordant symphony emerged from the speakers and grew slowly until, when the galactic fury was at its closest, it screamed like creation itself. They had to cover their ears while they watched, on the screen, the Enigma world change appearance from blue to yellow and then to dull gray. The Enigma sun grew brighter and then slowly faded into orange, prematurely aged but not destroyed. The discordant symphony ebbed, and the viewers could once more speak.

“What was that?” Frances gasped.

“Chaos given voice,” Peter said.

“You’re trying to intimidate us!” Jessica said. It was more of Peter’s sleight of hand.

“What he’s trying to do,” Adrian said, “is to make us feel what the Enigmatics endured.”

“That’s right,” Peter said, “although it’s all there in the Enigmatic records.”

“I can’t believe the center of the galaxy made that kind of noise,” Frances said.

“Noise, yes,” Peter said. “That kind of noise? Who can say? There are no ears to hear or minds to interpret, and no medium to transmit sound. And if there had been ears to hear, they would not have lasted long enough to register any sound. But there were instruments in space and on the surface as the sleet of radiation blew away the atmosphere, and not long after that the oceans and everything on the surface except rock. The noise you heard was the sound of radiation and of planetary catastrophe.”

“Peter has become a poet,” Jessica said.

“Epic events can bring out the poet even in a computer program,” Peter said. “Compared with this,
Paradise Lost
was a family dispute.”

“We didn’t detect any radiation at Enigma’s surface,” Frances said.

“That was more than a billion years ago,” Peter said. “In a billion years all but the longest-lived radioactives decay.”

“And since then the Enigmatics have huddled in their tunnels?”

“And tried to survive,” Peter said. “And tried to reconcile their experience with their faith in the Shadows. They had been saved, but they had also been nearly destroyed by the same hand. And they had lost almost everything. But finally they found peace in the realization that all this had been for a purpose.”

“Like any other believer,” Frances said.

“And what was the purpose?” Jessica asked.

“They had to pass through the fire, so to speak, so that they could continue their mission,” Peter said. “They had seeded with life one spiral arm of the galaxy, and their next task was to seed another.”

Frances, who had been staring down at her hands, looked up at the screen, which now showed a view of a jet-black sky loaded with stars.

“Our solar system is in this arm, right?” Adrian said.

“That’s right,” Peter said. “The reason for the Enigmatics’ ordeal was so that they could foster us—and some tens of thousands of other creatures on thousands of other worlds.”

“I don’t know how much more of this I can stand,” Frances said.

“There’s only a little more,” Peter said.

“Only another billion years or so,” Jessica said.

“It is difficult to believe that one sapient species could endure for two billion years,” Peter said, “but they had the Shadows and, for the first billion years, the threat of the approaching galactic center to focus their thoughts, and then they had their manifest destiny.”

“That isn’t the only thing that’s difficult to believe,” Jessica said, but Adrian placed a hand on her arm and stilled her angry motion.

“Surely they didn’t use the phrase ‘manifest destiny’?” Adrian said.

“Like everything else I have told you, it is a translation, and a shaky one at that,” Peter said. “John O’Sullivan used the phrase in the middle of the nineteenth century to rationalize the American expansion to settle the continent. The Enigmatics used something like it to describe their obligation to spread life throughout the galaxy.”

The view on the screen receded to reveal a spiral galaxy, its hub burning with massed stars, its bright, spiral arms turning majestically. It could not have been the Local Galaxy, Jessica thought, but the Local Galaxy might have looked like that if there had been a camera in some other galaxy aimed this way.

“The Shadows,” Peter said, “instructed them how to create wormholes and how to harness dark energy to keep them from collapsing, so
they didn’t have to wait for ships to traverse the light years between the stars.”

“Dark energy?” Frances said.

“Something is pushing space apart,” Adrian said.

“Einstein called it ‘the cosmological constant,’” Peter said. “He used it to explain a stable universe, and then abandoned it when astronomers discovered that the universe was expanding. Recent cosmologists have discovered that the rate of expansion is increasing and speculated about a ‘dark energy’ that makes up maybe seventy percent of the cosmos and repels matter rather than attracting it.”

“Sounds like more of the supernatural,” Jessica said.

“The more we learn about the universe,” Adrian said, “the more supernatural it seems.”

“Without dark energy the wormholes would not have lasted,” Peter said. “With the wormholes, contact with almost every star capable of nurturing life became possible, and they seeded them and watched them develop, each in a different way. It was a demonstration of the power of the animate.”

“As opposed to the power of the inanimate?” Frances said.

“Those are the two great powers in the universe, not the natural and the supernatural but the animate and the inanimate,” Peter said. “The inanimate seems to dominate, to proceed down its inexorable, predestined path between primal birth and final extinction. The inanimate doesn’t care whether stars explode and new elements are created, whether planets are formed, whether they are large or small, poisonous or nurturing. All that was laid down in the laws that prevailed when the universe was budded from the great potential for creation. But the animate has the power to intervene, to change the essential nature of the planets and the atmospheres that surround them, even the stars themselves. Always and forever it is the struggle of the animate’s will against the inertia of the inanimate.”

“That’s all very pretty,” Frances said, “but what does it mean?”

“And why are we here?” Jessica said.

“Why are we all here?” Adrian said, sweeping his arm to indicate the other ships surrounding Enigma. “Why did the Enigmatics send spaceship plans to us, and, presumably, to all the others?”

“Indeed,” Peter said. “That is the question that drove my programmer into a mental institution and kept him from seeking the answer that he needed so desperately. And the answer is simple: the Enigmatics were asked to bring us here—those of us who were sufficiently advanced to intercept and decipher the message—for one last meeting, to share the
data that each has accumulated in the long struggle between animate and inanimate matter, each in its own way.”

“A gigantic information booth,” Frances said. “A vast encyclopedia.”

“But why do you say it is the last meeting?” Adrian asked.

“The Shadows can do much,” Peter said, “but they cannot alter the path this system must pursue, and it is headed out of the galaxy into the emptiness of intergalactic space. The ability of the Enigmatics to maintain the wormholes is diminishing.”

The view on the screen showed a darkness unrelieved by stars.

“What does that mean?” Jessica demanded. “That we can’t get back?”

“It hasn’t happened yet, and it won’t happen tomorrow, or maybe next year,” Peter said, “but within a few years they certainly will begin to fail, and perhaps sooner.”

“And that’s why one of the alien ships left?” Frances said.

“And why others will leave,” Peter said, “but not all.”

“Why not all?” Adrian asked.

“Those who continue into intergalactic space will inherit the full encyclopedia, and maybe the relationship with the Shadows when the last Enigmatic dies,” Peter said.

“And when will that be?” Jessica asked.

“Those who remain are very old,” Peter said. “And they are not well. The storm of radiation from the galactic center did not leave them untouched. Their ability to reproduce suffered, and those that were born were damaged. That is one reason you never met them.”

“How many?” Frances said.

“Only a handful.”

“How horrible!”

“Sharing data is not enough,” Adrian said. “The Encyclopedia of all knowledge in the galaxy is a noble enterprise and a powerful tool, but—”