“Not so fast,” I said. “We need to edit it first.”
“For what?”
“Anything that might help them find the location of Earth. That’s in our orders, under Eventuality of Contact with Extraterrestrials. Remember, I have Nakamura and Nagy-Szabo breathing down my neck, telling me that there’s a ship full of boogiemen out there and we mustn’t have anything to do with them. I don’t believe that myself. But right now we don’t know how friendly these Spargs are and we aren’t supposed to bring strangers home with us.”
“But how could a dictionary entry—”
“Suppose the sun—our sun—is defined as a yellow G2 type star,” I said. “That gives them a pretty good beginning. Or something about the constellations as seen from Earth. I don’t know, Cal. I just want to make sure we don’t accidentally hand these beings a road-map to our home planet before we find out what sort of critters they are.”
Three of us spent half a day screening the dictionary, and we put Brain Central to work on it too. In the end we pulled seven words—you’d laugh if you knew which they were, but we wanted to be careful—and sent the rest across to the Spargs. They were silent for nine or ten hours. When they came back on the air their command of English was immensely more fluent. Frighteningly more fluent. Yesterday First had sounded like a tourist using a Fifty Handy Phrases program. A day later, First’s command of English was as good as that of an intelligent Japanese who has been living in the United States for ten or fifteen years.
It was a tense, wary conversation. Or so it seemed to me, the way it began to seem that First was male and that his way of speaking was brusque and bluntly probing. I may have been wrong on every count.
First wanted to know who we were and why we were here. Jumping right in, getting down to the heart of the matter. I felt a little like a butterfly collector who has wandered onto the grounds of a fusion plant and is being interrogated by a security guard. But I kept my tone and phrasing as neutral as I could, and told him that our planet was called Earth and that we had come on a mission of exploration and investigation.
So had they, he told me. Where is Earth?
Pretty straightforward of him, I thought. I answered that I lacked at this point a means of explaining galactic positions to him in terms that he would understand. I did volunteer the information that Earth was not anywhere close at hand.
He was willing to drop that line of inquiry for the time being. He shifted to the other obvious one:
What were we investigating?
Certain properties of collapsed stars, I said, after a bit of hesitation.
And which properties were those?
I told him that we didn’t have enough vocabulary in common for me to try to explain that either.
The Nine Sparg captain seemed to accept that evasion too. And provided me with a pause that indicated that it was my turn. Fair enough.
When I asked him what he was doing here, he replied without any apparent trace of evasiveness that he had come on a mission of historical inquiry. I pressed for details. It has to do with the ancestry of our race, he said. We used to live in this part of the galaxy, before the great explosion. No hesitation at all about telling me that. It struck me that First was being less reticent about dealing with my queries than I was with his; but of course I had no way of judging whether I was hearing the truth from him.
“I’d like to know more,” I said, as much as a test as anything else. “How long ago did your people flee this great explosion? And how far from here is your present home world?”
A long silence: several minutes. I wondered uncomfortably if I had overplayed my hand. If they were as edgy about our finding their home world as I was about their finding ours, I had to be careful not to push them into an overreaction. They might just think that the safest thing to do would be to blow us out of the sky as soon as they had learned all they could from us.
But when First spoke again it was only to say, “Are you willing to establish contact in the visual band?”
“Is such a thing possible?”
“We think so,” he said.
I thought about it. Would letting them see what we looked like give them any sort of clue to the location of Earth? Perhaps, but it seemed far-fetched. Maybe they’d be able to guess that we were carbon-based oxygen-breathers, but the risk of allowing them to know that seemed relatively small. And in any case we’d find out what they looked like. An even trade, right?
I had my doubts that their video transmission system could be made compatible with our receiving equipment. But I gave First the go-ahead and turned the microphone over to the communications staff. Who struggled with the problem for a day and a half. Sending the signal back and forth was no big deal, but breaking it down into information that would paint a picture on a cathode-ray tube was a different matter. The communications people at both ends talked and talked and talked, while I fretted about how much technical information about us we were revealing to the Spargs. The tinkering went on and on and nothing appeared on screen except occasional strings of horizontal lines. We sent them more data about how our television system worked. They made further adjustments in their transmission devices. This time we got spots instead of lines. We sent even more data. Were they leading us on? And were we telling them too much? I came finally to the position that trying to make the video link work had been a bad idea, and started to tell Communications that. But then the haze of drifting spots on my screen abruptly cleared and I found myself looking into the face of an alien being.
An alien face, yes. Extremely alien. Suddenly this whole interchange was kicked up to a new level of reality.
A hairless wedge-shaped head, flat and broad on top, tapering to a sharp point below. Corrugated skin that looked as thick as heavy rubber. Two chilly eyes in the center of that wide forehead and two more at its extreme edges. Three mouths, vertical slits, side by side: one for speaking and the other two, maybe for separate intake of fluids and solids. The whole business supported by three long columnar necks as thick as a man’s wrist, separated by open spaces two or three centimeters wide. What was below the neck we never got to see. But the head alone was plenty.
They probably thought we were just as strange.
* * * *
With video established, First and I picked up our conversation right where we had broken it off the day before. Once more he was not in the least shy about telling me things.
He had been able to calculate in our units of time the date of the great explosion that had driven his people far from home world: it had taken place 387 years ago. He didn’t use the word “supernova,” because it hadn’t been included in the 30,000-word vocabulary we had sent them, but that was obviously what he meant by “the great explosion.” The 387-year figure squared pretty well with our own calculations, which were based on an analysis of the surface temperature and rate of rotation of the neutron star.
The Nine Sparg people had had plenty of warning that their sun was behaving oddly—the first signs of instability had become apparent more than a century before the blow-up—and they had devoted all their energy for several generations to the job of packing up and clearing out. It had taken many years, it seemed, for them to accomplish their migration to the distant new world they had chosen for their new home. Did that mean, I asked myself, that their method of interstellar travel was much slower than ours, and that they had needed decades or even a century to cover fifty or a hundred light-years? Earth had less to worry about, then. Even if they wanted to make trouble for us, they wouldn’t be able easily to reach us, a thousand light-years from here. Or was First saying that their new world was really distant—all the way across the galaxy, perhaps, seventy or eighty thousand light-years away, or even in some other galaxy altogether? If that was the case, we were up against truly superior beings. But there was no easy way for me to question him about su
ch things without telling him things about our own hyperdrive and our distance from this system that I didn’t care to have him know.
After a long and evidently difficult period of settling in on the new world, First went on, the Nine Sparg folk finally were well enough established to launch an inquiry into the condition of their former home planet. Thus his mission to the supernova site.
“But we are in great mystery,” First admitted, and it seemed to me that a note of sadness and bewilderment had crept into his mechanical-sounding voice. “We have come to what certainly is the right location. Yet nothing seems to be correct here. We find only this little iron star. And of our former planet there is no trace.”
I stared at that peculiar and unfathomable four-eyed face, that three-columned neck, those tight vertical mouths, and to my surprise something close to compassion awoke in me. I had been dealing with this creature as though he were a potential enemy capable of leading armadas of war to my world and conquering it. But in fact he might be merely a scholarly explorer who was making a nostalgic pilgrimage, and running into problems with it. I decided to relax my guard just a little.
“Have you considered,” I said, “that you might not be in the right location after all?”
“What do you mean?”
“As we were completing our journey towards what you call the iron star,” I said, “we discovered a planet forty light-years from here that beyond much doubt had had a great civilization, and which evidently was close enough to the exploding star system here to have been devastated by it. We have pictures of it that we could show you. Perhaps that was your home world.”
Even as I was saying it the idea started to seem foolish to me. The skeletons we had photographed on the dead world had had broad tapering heads that might perhaps have been similar to those of First, but they hadn’t shown any evidence of this unique triple-neck arrangement. Besides, First had said that his people had had several generations to prepare for evacuation. Would they have left so many millions of their people behind to die? It looked obvious from the way those skeletons were scattered around that the inhabitants of that planet hadn’t had the slightest clue that doom was due to overtake them that day. And finally, I realized that First had plainly said that it was his own world’s sun that had exploded, not some neighboring star. The supernova had happened here. The dead world’s sun was still intact.
“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 excuse 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 red 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 disagree
ment. 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.”