“Can you show me your pictures?” he said.
It seemed pointless. But I felt odd about retracting my offer. And in the new rapport that had sprung up between us I could see no harm in it.
I told Lina Sorabji to feed her sonar transparencies into the relay pickup. It was easy enough for Cal Bjornsen to shunt them into our video transmission to the alien ship.
The Nine Sparg captain withheld his comment until we had shown him the batch.
Then he said, “Oh, that was not our world. That was the world of the Garvalekkinon people.”
“The Garvalekkinon?”
“We knew them. A neighboring race, not related to us. Sometimes, on rare occasions, we traded with them. Yes, they must all have died when the star exploded. It is too bad.”
“They look as though they had no warning,” I said. “Look: Can you see them there, waiting in the train stations?”
The triple mouths fluttered in what might have been the Nine Sparg equivalent of a nod. “I suppose they did not know the explosion was coming.”
“You suppose? You mean you didn’t tell them?”
All four eyes blinked at once. Expression of puzzlement.
“Tell them? Why should we have told them? We were busy with our preparations. We had no time for them. Of course the radiation would have been harmful to them, but why was that our concern? They were not related to us. They were nothing to us.”
I had trouble believing I had heard him correctly. A neighboring people. Occasional trading partners. Your sun is about to blow up, and it’s reasonable to assume that nearby solar systems will be affected. You have fifty or a hundred years of advance notice yourselves, and you can’t even take the trouble to let these other people know what’s going to happen?
I said, “You felt no need at all to warn them? That isn’t easy for me to understand.”
Again the four-eyed shrug.
“I have explained it to you already,” said First. “They were not of our kind. They were nothing to us.”
I excused myself on some flimsy pretext and broke contact. And sat and thought a long long while. Listening to the words of the Nine Sparg captain echoing in my mind. And thinking of the millions of skeletons scattered like straws in the tunnels of that dead world that the supernova had baked. A whole people left to die because it was inconvenient to take five minutes to send them a message. Or perhaps because it simply never had occurred to anybody to bother.
The families, huddling together. The children reaching out. The husbands and wives with hands interlocked.
A world of busy, happy, intelligent, people. Boulevards and temples. Parks and gardens. Paintings, sculpture, poetry, music. History, philosophy, science. And a sudden star in the sky, and everything gone in a moment.
Why should we have told them? They were nothing to us.
I knew something of the history of my own people. We had experienced casual extermination too. But at least when the white settlers had done it to us it was because they had wanted our land.
For the first time I understood the meaning of alien.
I turned on the external screen and stared out at the unfamiliar sky of this place. The neutron star was barely visible, a dull blue dot, far down in the lower left quadrant; and the black hole was high.
Once they had both been stars. What havoc must have attended their destruction! It must have been the Sparg sun that blew first, the one that had become the neutron star. And then, fifty or a hundred years later, perhaps, the other, larger star had gone the same route. Another titanic supernova, a great flare of killing light. But of course everything for hundreds of light-years around had perished already in the first blast.
The second sun had been too big to leave a neutron star behind. So great was its mass that the process of collapse had continued on beyond the neutron-star stage, matter crushing in upon itself until it broke through the normal barriers of space and took on a bizarre and almost unthinkable form, creating an object of infinitely small volume that was nevertheless of infinite density: a black hole, a pocket of incomprehensibility where once a star had been.
I stared now at the black hole before me.
I couldn’t see it, of course. So powerful was the surface gravity of that grotesque thing that nothing could escape from it, not even electromagnetic radiation, not the merest particle of light. The ultimate in invisibility cloaked that infinitely deep hole in space.
But though the black hole itself was invisible, the effects that its presence caused were not. That terrible gravitational pull would rip apart and swallow any solid object that came too close; and so the hole was surrounded by a bright ring of dust and gas several hundred kilometers across. These shimmering particles constantly tumbled towards that insatiable mouth, colliding as they spiraled in, releasing flaring fountains of radiation, red-shifted into the visual spectrum by the enormous gravity: the bright green of helium, the majestic purple of hydrogen, the crimson of oxygen. That outpouring of energy was the death-cry of doomed matter. That rainbow whirlpool of blazing light was the beacon marking the maw of the black hole.
I found it oddly comforting to stare at that thing. To contemplate that zone of eternal quietude from which there was no escape. Pondering so inexorable and unanswerable an infinity was more soothing than thinking of a world of busy people destroyed by the indifference of their neighbors. Black holes offer no choices, no complexities, no shades of disagreement. They are absolute.
Why should we have told them? They were nothing to us.
After a time I restored contact with the Nine Sparg ship. First came to the screen at once, ready to continue our conversation.
“There is no question that our world once was located here,” he said at once. “We have checked and rechecked the coordinates. But the changes have been extraordinary.”
“Have they?”
“Once there were two stars here, our own and the brilliant blue one that was nearby. Our history is very specific on that point: a brilliant blue star that lit the entire sky. Now we have only the iron star. Apparently it has taken the place of our Sun. But where has the blue one gone? Could the explosion have destroyed it too?”
I frowned. Did they really not know? Could a race be capable of attaining an interstellar spacedrive and an interspecies translating device, and nevertheless not have arrived at any understanding of the neutron star/black hole cosmogony?
Why not? They were aliens. They had come by all their understanding of the universe via a route different from ours. They might well have overlooked this feature or that of the universe about them.
“The blue star—” I began.
But First spoke right over me, saying, “It is a mystery that we must devote all our energies to solving, or our mission will be fruitless. But let us talk of other things. You have said little of your own mission. And of your home world. I am filled with great curiosity, Captain, about those subjects.”
I’m sure you are, I thought.
“We have only begun our return to space travel,” said First. “Thus far we have encountered no other intelligent races. And so we regard this meeting as fortunate. It is our wish to initiate contact with you. Quite likely some aspects of your technology would be valuable to us. And there will be much that you wish to purchase from us. Therefore we would be glad to establish trade relations with you.”
As you did with the Garvalekkinon people, I said to myself.
I said, “We can speak of that tomorrow, Captain. I grow tired now. But before we break contact for the day, allow me to offer you the beginning of a solution to the mystery of the disappearance of the blue sun.”
The four eyes widened. The slitted mouths parted in what seemed surely to be excitement.
“Can you do that?”
I took a deep breath.
“We have some preliminary knowledge. Do you see the place opposite the iron star, where energies boil and circle in the sky? As we entered this system, we found certain evidence there that may explai
n the fate of your former blue sun. You would do well to center your investigations on that spot.”
“We are most grateful,” said First.
“And now, Captain, I must bid you good night. Until tomorrow, Captain.”
“Until tomorrow,” said the alien.
I was awakened in the middle of my sleep period by Lina Sorabji and Bryce-Williamson, both of them looking flushed and sweaty. I sat up, blinking and shaking my head.
“It’s the alien ship,” Bryce-Williamson blurted, “It’s approaching the black hole.”
“Is it, now?”
“Dangerously close,” said Lina. “What do they think they’re doing? Don’t they know?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I suggested that they go exploring there. Evidently they don’t regard it as a bad idea.”
“You sent them there?” she said incredulously.
With a shrug I said, “I told them that if they went over there they might find the answer to the question of where one of their missing suns went. I guess they’ve decided to see if I was right.”
“We have to warn them,” said Bryce-Williamson. “Before it’s too late. Especially if we’re responsible for sending them there. They’ll be furious with us once they realize that we failed to warn them of the danger.”
“By the time they realize it,” I replied calmly, “it will be too late. And then their fury won’t matter, will it? They won’t be able to tell us how annoyed they are with us. Or to report to their home world, for that matter, that they had an encounter with intelligent aliens who might be worth exploiting.”
He gave me an odd look. The truth was starting to sink in.
I turned on the external screens and punched up a close look at the black hole region. Yes, there was the alien ship, the little metallic sphere, the six odd outthrust legs. It was in the zone of criticality now. It seemed hardly to be moving at all. And it was growing dimmer and dimmer as it slowed. The gravitational field had it, and it was being drawn in. Blacking out, becoming motionless. Soon it would have gone beyond the point where outside observers could perceive it. Already it was beyond the point of turning back.
I heard Lina sobbing behind me. Bryce-Williamson was muttering to himself: praying, perhaps.
I said, “Who can say what they would have done to us—in their casual, indifferent way—once they came to Earth? We know now that Spargs worry only about Spargs. Anybody else is just so much furniture.” I shook my head. “To hell with them. They’re gone, and in a universe this big we’ll probably never come across any of them again, or they us. Which is just fine. We’ll be a lot better off having nothing at all to do with them.”
“But to die that way,” Lina murmured. “To sail blindly into a black hole…”
“It is a great tragedy,” said Bryce-Williamson.
“A tragedy for them,” I said. “For us, a reprieve, I think. And tomorrow we can get moving on the neutronium-scoop project.” I tuned up the screen to the next level. The boiling cloud of matter around the mouth of the black hole blazed fiercely. But of the alien ship there was nothing to be seen.
Yes, a great tragedy, yes, I thought. The valiant exploratory mission that had sought the remains of the Nine Sparg home world has been lost with all hands. No hope of rescue. A pity that they hadn’t known how unpleasant black holes can be.
But why should we have told them? They were nothing to us.
THE SECRET SHARER
I make no secret of my admiration for the work of Joseph Conrad. (Or for Conrad himself, the tough, stubborn little man who, although English was only his third language, after Polish and French, not only was able to pass the difficult oral qualifying exam to become a captain in the British merchant marine, but then, a decade or so later, to transform himself into one of the greatest figures in twentieth-century English literature.) Most of what I owe to Conrad as a writer is buried deep in the substructure of my stories—a way of looking at narrative, a way of understanding character. But occasionally I’ve made the homage more visible. My novel Downward to the Earth of 1969 is a kind of free transposition of his novella “Heart of Darkness” to science fiction, a borrowing that I signaled overtly by labeling my most tormented character with the name of Kurtz. “Heart of Darkness,” when I first encountered it as a reader almost fifty years ago, had been packaged as half of a two-novella paperback collection, the other story being Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer.” And some time late in 1986, I felt the urge, I know not why—a love of symmetry? A compulsion toward completion?—to finish what I had begun in Downward to the Earth by writing a story adapted from the other great novella of that paperback of long ago.
This time I was less subtle than before, announcing my intentions not by using one of Conrad’s character names but by appropriating his story’s actual title. (This produced a pleasantly absurd result when my story was published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and a reader wrote to the editor, somewhat indignantly, to ask whether I knew that the title had already been used by Joseph Conrad!) I swiped not only the title but Conrad’s basic story situation, that of the ship captain who finds a stowaway on board and eventually is drawn into a strange alliance with him. (Her, in my story.) But otherwise I translated the Conrad into purely science-fictional terms and produced something that I think represents completely original work, however much it may owe to the structure of a classic earlier story.
“Translate” is perhaps not the appropriate term for what I did. A “translation,” in the uncompromising critical vocabulary set forth by Damon Knight and James Blish in the 1950’s upon which I based much of my own fiction-writing esthetic, is defined as an adaptation of a stock format of mundane fiction into s-f by the simple one-for-one substitution of science-fictiony noises for the artifacts of the mundane genre. That is, change “Colt .44” to “laser pistol” and “horse” to “greeznak” and “Comanche” to “Sloogl” and you can easily generate a sort of science fiction out of a standard western story, complete with cattle rustlers, scalpings, and cavalry rescues. But you don’t get real science fiction; you don’t get anything new and intellectually stimulating, just a western story that has greeznaks and Sloogls in it. Change “Los Angeles Police Department” to “Drylands Patrol” and “crack dealer” to “canal-dust dealer” and you’ve got a crime story set on Mars, but so what? Change “the canals of Venice” to “the marshy streets of Venusburg” and the sinister agents of S.M.E.R.S.H. to the sinister agents of A.A.A.A.R.G.H. and you’ve got a James Bond story set on the second planet, but it’s still a James Bond story.
I don’t think that that’s what I’ve done here. The particular way in which Vox stows away aboard the Sword of Orion is nothing that Joseph Conrad could have understood, and arises, I think, purely out of the science-fictional inventions at the heart of the story. The way she leaves the ship is very different from anything depicted in Conrad’s maritime fiction. The starwalk scene provides visionary possibilities quite unlike those afforded by a long stare into the vastness of the trackless Pacific. And so on. “The Secret Sharer” by Robert Silverberg is, or so I believe, a new and unique science-fiction story set, for reasons of the author’s private amusement, within the framework of a well-known century-old masterpiece of the sea by Joseph Conrad.
“The Secret Sharer”—mine, not Conrad’s—appeared in the September, 1987 issue of Asimov’s and was a Nebula and Hugo nominee in 1988 as best novella of the year, but didn’t get the trophies. It did win the third of the major s-f honors, the Locus award. Usually most of the Locus winners go on to get Hugos as well, but that year it didn’t happen. I regretted that. But Joseph Conrad’s original version of the story didn’t win a Hugo or a Nebula either, and people still read it admiringly to this day. You take your lumps in this business, and you go bravely onward: it’s the only way. Conrad would have understood that philosophy.
——————
1.
It was my first time to heaven and I was no one at all, no one at
all, and this was the voyage that was supposed to make me someone.
But though I was no one at all I dared to look upon the million worlds and I felt a great sorrow for them. There they were all about me, humming along on their courses through the night, each of them believing it was actually going somewhere. And each one wrong, of course, for worlds go nowhere, except around and around and around, pathetic monkeys on a string, forever tethered in place. They seem to move, yes. But really they stand still. And I—I who stared at the worlds of heaven and was swept with compassion for them—I knew that though I seemed to be standing still, I was in fact moving. For I was aboard a ship of heaven, a ship of the Service, that was spanning the light-years at a speed so incomprehensibly great that it might as well have been no speed at all.
I was very young. My ship, then as now, was the Sword of Orion, on a journey out of Kansas Four bound for Cul-de-Sac and Strappado and Mangan’s Bitch and several other worlds, via the usual spinarounds. It was my first voyage and I was in command. I thought for a long time that I would lose my soul on that voyage; but now I know that what was happening aboard that ship was not the losing of a soul but the gaining of one. And perhaps of more than one.
2.
Roacher thought I was sweet. I could have killed him for that; but of course he was dead already.
You have to give up your life when you go to heaven. What you get in return is for me to know and you, if you care, to find out; but the inescapable thing is that you leave behind anything that ever linked you to life on shore, and you become something else. We say that you give up the body and you get your soul. Certainly you can keep your body too, if you want it. Most do. But it isn’t any good to you any more, not in the ways that you think a body is good to you. I mean to tell you how it was for me on my first voyage aboard the Sword of Orion, so many years ago.