But the starship’s telescopes showed more.
Much more.
Incredibly more.
Through them, one could see another explosion rocking the star—it actually shifted slightly in the telescopes’ fields of view—and more plasma spewing into space.
And then what appeared to be a small vertical rip—jagged-edged, its sides limned with piercing blue-white energy—opened up a short distance to the right of the star. The rip grew longer, more jagged, and then—
—and then a substance darker than space itself started to pour through the rip, flowing out of it. It was viscous, almost as if tar were oozing through from the other side, but…
But, of course, there was no “other side”—no way a hole could appear in the wall of the universe, my fantasy about grabbing hold of space itself and peeling it aside like a tent flap notwithstanding. The universe, by definition, was self-contained. If the blackness wasn’t coming from outside, then the rip must be a tunnel, a wormhole, a join, a warp, a stargate, a shortcut—something connecting two points in the cosmos.
The black mass continued to flow out. It had definite edges; stars winked into invisibility as its perimeter passed over them. Assuming it really was near Betelgeuse, it must have been huge; the rip would have been more than a hundred million kilometers in length, and the object pouring out of it several times that in diameter. Of course, since the thing was utterly, overwhelmingly black, neither radiating nor reflecting any light, it had no spectrum to analyze for Doppler shifts, and there would be no easy way to do a parallactic study to determine the object’s distance.
Shortly, the entire mass had passed out of the rip. It had a palmate structure—a central blob with six distinct appendages. No sooner was it free than the rift in space closed up and disappeared.
Dying Betelgeuse was contracting again, falling in upon itself. What had happened so far, said Donald Chen, was just the preamble. When the infalling gas hit the iron core for a second time, the star would really blow up, flaring so brightly that even we—four hundred light-years distant shouldn’t look directly at it.
The black object was moving through the firmament by rolling like a spiked wheel, as if—it couldn’t be; no, it couldn’t—as if its six extensions were somehow gaining purchase on the very fabric of space. The object was moving toward the contracting disk of Betelgeuse. The perspective was tricky to work out—it wasn’t until one of the limbs of the blackness touched, then covered, the edge of the disk that it became clear that the object was at least slightly closer to Earth than Betelgeuse was.
As the star continued to collapse behind it, the blackness further interposed itself between here and there, until in short order it had completely eclipsed Betelgeuse. From the ground, all we could see was that the superbright star had disappeared; Sol no longer had a rival in the daytime sky. Through the Merelcas’s telescopes, though, the black form was clearly visible, a multiarmed inkblot against the background dusting of stars. And then—
And then Betelgeuse must have done as Chen said it would, exploding behind the blackness, with more energy than a hundred million suns. As seen from worlds on the opposite side, the great star must have flared enormously, an eruption of blinding light and searing heat, accompanied by screams of radio noise. But from Earth’s perspective—
From Earth’s perspective, all that was hidden. Still, the inkblot seemed to surge forward, toward the telescopes’ eyes, as if it had been punched from behind, its central blob expanding to fill more of the field of view as it was hurtled closer. The six arms, meanwhile, were blown backward, like the tentacles of a jet-propelled squid seen head on.
Whatever this object was, it bore the brunt of the explosion, shielding Earth—and presumably the Forhilnor and Wreed homeworlds, too—from the onslaught that otherwise would have destroyed each world’s ozone layer.
Standing outside the ROM, we didn’t know what had happened—not yet, not then. But slowly realization dawned, even if the supernova didn’t. The three homeworlds were going to be spared, somehow.
Life would go on. Incredibly, thankfully, miraculously, life would go on.
At least for some.
* * *
31
I
did finally make it home that night; word filtered down to those in the subways that, somehow, the disaster had been averted. By eight in the evening I was able to get a packed train heading south to Union station; I took it, even though I had to stand all the way home. I wanted to see Susan, to see Ricky.
Susan hugged me so hard it hurt, and Ricky hugged me, too, and we all moved to the couch and Ricky sat in my lap, and we hugged some more, a family.
Eventually Susan and I put Ricky to bed, and I kissed him good night, my boy, my son, whom I loved with all my heart. As with so much that was impinging on his life lately, he was too young to understand what had happened today.
Susan and I settled back onto the couch, and at 10:00 P.M., we watched the images taken by the Merelcas’s telescopes, broadcast as the lead story on The National. Peter Mansbridge looked more dour than usual as he went on about the close call Earth had had today. After showing the footage, the ROM’s Donald Chen joined him in the studio—the CBC Broadcasting Centre was more or less due south of the museum—to explain in detail what had happened, and to confirm that the black anomaly (that was the word Don used) was still interposed between Earth and Betelgeuse, shielding us.
Mansbridge concluded the interview by saying, “Sometimes we get lucky, I guess.” He turned to the camera. “In other news today—”
But there was no other news—none that mattered in the slightest, none that could compare with what had happened this afternoon.
“Sometimes we get lucky,” Mansbridge had said. I put an arm around Susan, pulled her close to me, felt the warmth of her body, smelled the fragrance of her shampoo. I thought of her, and, for once, not of how little time we had left together, but of all the wonderful times we’d had in the past.
Mansbridge was right. Sometimes we do indeed get lucky.
It came to me the next day, on the subway on the way down to the Museum; full-blown, a revelation, it came to me.
It was more than an hour after I got to my office before the Hollus avatar appeared. I fidgeted the entire time, waiting for her.
“Good morning, Tom,” she said. “I wish to apologize for the harshness of my words yesterday. They were—”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We all go a little nuts when we first realize we might be dying.” I didn’t pause, didn’t allow her to take back control of the conversation. “Forget that. But look, something hit me this morning, while I was riding the subway, packed up there with all those other people. What about the ark? What about that ship sent from Groombridge 1618 to Betelgeuse?”
“Surely the ark was incinerated,” said Hollus. She sounded sad. “The first spasm of the dying star would have accomplished that.”
“No,” I said. “No, that’s not what happened.” I shook my head, still stunned by the enormity of it. “Damn it, I should have realized that earlier—and he should have, too.”
“Who?” said Hollus.
I didn’t answer her—not yet. “The natives of Groombridge didn’t abandon their planet,” I said. “They transcended into a virtual realm, just like all the others.”
“We found no warning landscape on the surface of their world,” said Hollus. “And why, then, would they send a ship to Betelgeuse? Do you propose that it contained a splinter group who did not wish to transcend?”
“No one would go to Betelgeuse to live there; as you said, it’s just not suitable. And four hundred light-years is an awfully long way to travel just to get a gravitational boost. No, I’m sure the craft you detected had no crew or passengers; all of the Groombridge natives are still back on their home planet, uploaded into a virtual-reality world. What the Groombridge natives sent to Betelgeuse was an unmanned ship containing a catalyst of some sort—something to trigger the sup
ernova explosion.”
Hollus’s eyestalks stopped moving. “Trigger? Why?”
My head was swimming; the thought was almost too much. I looked at the Forhilnor. “To sterilize all the worlds in this part of the galaxy,” I said. “To wipe them clean of life. If you were going to bury some computers and then transfer your consciousness into those computers, what would your greatest fear be? Why, that someone would come along and dig up the computers, damaging them or vandalizing them. On many of the worlds your starship visited, warning landscapes were created to scare people away from unearthing what was buried beneath. But on Groombridge, they decided to go one better. They tried to make sure that no one, not even anyone from another nearby star, could possibly come along and interfere with them. They knew Betelgeuse—the biggest star in local space—was eventually going to go supernova. And so they hurried things up by a few millennia, sending a catalyst, a bomb, a device that caused the supernova explosion to happen as soon as it arrived.” I paused. “In fact—in fact, that’s why you could still see the ship’s fusion exhaust, even though it was almost all the way to Betelgeuse. Of course, it had never turned around to brake—because it never intended to slow down. Instead, it rammed itself right into the star’s heart, setting off the supernova explosion.”
“That is—that is monstrous,” said Hollus. “It is entirely on one side.”
“Damn right it is,” I said. “Of course, the Groombridge natives might not have known for sure that any lifeforms existed elsewhere. After all, they reached intelligence in isolation—you said that the ark had been traveling for five thousand years. It might have just seemed a prudent precaution; they weren’t certain that they were wiping out any other civilizations.” I paused. “Or maybe they just didn’t give a damn. Maybe they thought they were God’s chosen people and that he had put Betelgeuse right there for them to use in just the way they did.”
“They may have indeed believed that,” said Hollus, “but you know it is not true.”
She was right. I did know it. I had seen the smoking gun. I had seen proof good enough even for me. I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself, trying to reign in all the thoughts running through my mind. Of course, it could have been something made by an advanced race; it could have been an artificial nova deflector; it could have been…
But at some point, the simplest theory—the theory that proposes the fewest elements—has to be adopted. At some point, you have to stop demanding of this question—this one question out of all the others—a higher degree of proof than required for any other theory. At some point—maybe very near the end of one’s life—you have to deal with this. At some point, the walls have to come tumbling down.
“You want me to say it?” I said. I found myself shrugging slightly, as though the idea were a sweater that needed to be shifted in order to fit comfortably. “Yes, that was God; that was the creator.”
I paused, letting the words float freely for a time, considering whether I wanted to try to recant them.
But I didn’t. “You said a while ago, Hollus, that you thought God was a being who had somehow survived the previous big crunch, had somehow managed to continue to exist from an earlier cycle of creation. If that’s true, he would indeed be a part of the cosmos. Or, if he wasn’t until now, maybe he has the ability to become—what’s the word the theologians use?—to become incarnate. God took on physical form and interposed himself between the exploding star and our three worlds.”
And suddenly another thought occurred to me: “In fact, it wasn’t the first time he’d done that!” I said. “Remember the Vela supernova from 1320 A.D.—a supernova almost as close as Betelgeuse, a supernova whose remnant is now detectable but nobody saw when it happened, nobody recorded, not the Chinese here on Earth, not anybody else here, not anyone on your planet, not anyone on the Wreed homeworld. This entity intervened then, as well, shielding us from that supernova’s radiation. You said it yourself, the first time we talked about God: the rate of supernova formation has to be carefully balanced. Well, if you can’t actually prevent supernovas, this is the next best thing.”
Hollus’s eyestalks moved closer together. She seemed to slump a bit, as if her six legs were having trouble supporting her weight. No doubt the idea that the entity was God had occurred to her before it had to me, but she clearly had not previously thought about what that meant in relation to the Vela supernova. “God does not just cause mass extinctions,” said the Forhilnor. “He routinely prevents them, too, when it suits his purpose.”
“Incredible, isn’t it?” I said, feeling as unsteady as Hollus looked.
“Maybe we should go see,” Hollus said. “If we now know where God is, maybe we should go see him.”
The idea was staggering, huge. I felt my heart jackhammering again. “But—but what we saw actually happened near Betelgeuse over 400 years ago,” I said. “And it would take at least 400 more years for your ship to get there. Why would God hang around for a total of a thousand years?”
“A typical human or Forhilnor lifespan is about a century, which is roughly fifty million minutes,” said Hollus. “God is presumably at least as old as the universe, which has existed for 13.9 billion years so far; even if he were near the end of his span, a thousand years for him would be comparable to four minutes for one of us.”
“Still, surely he won’t waste time waiting for us.”
“Perhaps not. Or perhaps he knew his actions would be observed, attracting our attention. Perhaps he will arrange to be present there again—the only location we have ever been able to identify for him—for a rendezvous at the appropriate time. He may leave to take care of other business in the interim, then return. He seems rather mobile; presumably had he known that the Groombridge ark was going to detonate Betelgeuse, he would have simply destroyed the ark before it got there. But once the explosion began, he arrived very quickly—and he could return just as quickly, by the time we get there.”
“If he wants to meet us. It’s a long shot, Hollus.”
“Doubtless so. But my crew embarked on this journey to find God; this is the closest we have come, and therefore we must pursue this lead.” Her eyestalks regarded me. “You are welcomed to join us on this voyage.”
My pulse was racing again, even faster than before. But it could not be for me. “I don’t have that much time left,” I said softly.
“The Merelcas can accelerate to very close to the speed of light in less than one year,” said Hollus. “And once at such a speed, most of the distance would be covered in what would seem to be very little time; of course we would need a second year for decelerating, but in a little over two subjective years, we could be at Betelgeuse.”
“I don’t have two years.”
“Well, no,” said Hollus. “Not if you stay awake for the trip. But I believe I told you that the Wreeds travel in suspended animation; we could do the same thing for you, and not take you out of cryofreeze until we had reached our destination.”
My vision blurred. The offer was incredibly tempting, an amazing proposition, an unimaginable gift.
In fact—
In fact, maybe Hollus could freeze me until—“Could you freeze me indefinitely?” I asked. “Eventually, surely there will be a cure for cancer, and—”
“Sorry, no,” said Hollus. “There is degradation with the process; although the technique is as safe as a general anesthetic over periods of up to four years, we have never successfully revived anyone after more than ten years in cryofreeze. It is a convenience for traveling, not a way of moving into the future.”
Ah, well; I never quite saw myself following in Walt Disney’s frosty footsteps, anyway. But, still, to get to take this journey with Hollus, to fly aboard the Merelcas out to see what might really, actually be God…it was an incredible notion, an astounding thought.
And, I suddenly realized, it might even be the best thing for Susan and Ricky, sparing them the agony of the last few months of my life.
I told Hollus I’d ha
ve to think about it, have to discuss it with my family. Such a tantalizing possibility, such an enticing offer…but there were many factors to consider.
I’d said that Cooter had gone to meet his maker—but I didn’t really believe that. He had simply died.
But perhaps I would meet my maker…and while I was still alive.
* * *
32
H
ollus has offered me a chance to go with her to her next destination,” I said to Susan when I got home that night. We were sitting on the living-room couch.
“To Alpha Centauri?” she replied. That had indeed been the next, and last, planned stop on the Merelcas’s grand tour before it headed back home to Delta Pavonis and then Beta Hydri.
“No, they’ve changed their minds. They’re going to go to Betelgeuse instead. They’re going to go see whatever it is that’s out there.”
Susan was quiet for a time. “Didn’t I read in the Globe that Betelgeuse is 400 light-years away?”
I nodded.
“So you couldn’t be back for over a thousand years?”
“From Earth’s point of view, yes.”
She was silent some more. After a time, I decided to fill the void. “See, their ship will have to turn around at the halfpoint and face its fusion exhaust toward Betelgeuse. So in just 250 years, the—the entity will see that bright light, and will know that someone is coming. Hollus hopes that he—that it—will wait for us to arrive, or else will come back to meet us.”
“The entity?”
I couldn’t bring myself to use the other word with her. “The being that interposed itself between us and Betelgeuse.”
“You think it’s God,” said Susan simply. She was the one who went to church. She was the one who knew the Bible. And she’d been listening to me for weeks now, talking over dinner about ultimate origins, first causes, fundamental constants, intelligent design. I hadn’t often said the G-word—not around her, at any rate. It had always meant so much more to her than it had to me, and so I’d kept some distance from it, some scientific detachment. But she knew. She knew.