Clarke, Arthur C - SSC 04 (22 page)

It is three thousand light-years to the
Vatican. Once, I believed that space could have no power over faith, just as I
believed that the heavens declared the glory of God’s handiwork. Now I have
seen that handiwork, and my faith is sorely troubled. I stare at the crucifix
that hangs on the cabin wall above the Mark VI Computer, and for the first time
in my life I wonder if it is no more than an empty symbol.

I have told no one yet, but the truth cannot
be concealed. The facts are there for all to read, recorded on the countless
miles of magnetic tape and the thousands of photographs we are carrying back to
Earth. Other scientists can interpret them as easily as I can, and I am not one
who would condone that tampering with the truth which often gave my order a bad
name in the olden days.

The crew are already sufficiently depressed:
I wonder how they will take this ultimate irony. Few of them have any religious
faith, yet they will not relish using this final weapon in their campaign
against me – that private, good-natured, but fundamentally serious, war which
lasted all the way from Earth. It amused them to have a Jesuit as chief
astrophysicist: Dr Chandler, for instance, could never get over it (why are
medical men such notorious atheists?). Sometimes he would meet me on the
observation deck, where the lights are always low so that the stars shine with
undiminished glory. He would come up to me in the gloom and stand staring out
of the great oval port, while the heavens crawled slowly around us as the ship
turned end over end with the residual spin we had never bothered to correct.

‘Well, Father,’ he would say at last, ‘it
goes on forever and forever, and perhaps
Something
made it. But how you
can believe that something has a special interest in us and our miserable
little world – that just beats me.’ Then the argument would start, while the
stars and nebulae would swing around us in silent, endless arcs beyond the
flawlessly clear plastic of the observation port.

It was, I think, the apparent incongruity of
my position that caused most amusement to the crew. In vain I would point to my
three papers in the
Astrophysical Journal
, my five in the
Monthly
Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
. I would remind them that my
order has long been famous for its scientific works. We may be few now, but
ever since the eighteenth century we have made contributions to astronomy and
geophysics out of all proportion to our numbers. Will my report on the Phoenix
Nebula end our thousand years of history? It will end, I fear, much more than
that.

I do not know who gave the nebula its name,
which seems to me a very bad one. If it contains a prophecy, it is one that
cannot be verified for several billion years. Even the word nebula is
misleading: this is a far smaller object than those stupendous clouds of mist –
the stuff of unborn stars – that are scattered throughout the length of the
Milky Way. On the cosmic scale, indeed, the Phoenix Nebula is a tiny thing – a
tenuous shell of gas surrounding a single star.

Or what is left of a star …

The Rubens engraving of Loyola seems to mock
me as it hangs there above the spectrophotometer tracings. What would
you
,
Father, have made of this knowledge that has come into my keeping, so far from
the little world that was all the universe you knew? Would your faith have
risen to the challenge, as mine has failed to do?

You gaze into the distance, Father, but I
have travelled a distance beyond any that you could have imagined when you
founded our order a thousand years ago. No other survey ship has been so far
from Earth: we are at the very frontiers of the explored universe. We set out
to reach the Phoenix Nebula, we succeeded, and we are homeward bound with our
burden of knowledge. I wish I could lift that burden from my shoulders, but I
call to you in vain across the centuries and the light-years that lie between
us.

On the book you are holding the words are
plain to read. AD MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM, the message runs, but it is a message I
can no longer believe. Would you still believe it, if you could see what we
have found?

We knew, of course, what the Phoenix Nebula
was. Every year, in our galaxy alone, more than a hundred stars explode,
blazing for a few hours or days with thousands of times their normal brilliance
before they sink back into death and obscurity. Such are the ordinary novae –
the commonplace disasters of the universe. I have recorded the spectrograms and
light curves of dozens since I started working at the Lunar Observatory.

But three or four times in every thousand
years occurs something beside which even a nova pales into total
insignificance.

When a star becomes a
supernova
, it
may for a little while outshine all the massed suns of the galaxy. The Chinese
astronomers watched this happen in AD 1054, not knowing what it was they saw.
Five centuries later, in 1572, a supernova blazed in Cassiopeia so brilliantly
that it was visible in the daylight sky. There have been three more in the
thousand years that have passed since then.

Our mission was to visit the remnants of
such a catastrophe, to reconstruct the events that led up to it, and, if
possible, to learn its cause. We came slowly in through the concentric shells
of gas that had been blasted out six thousand years before, yet were expanding
still. They were immensely hot, radiating even now with a fierce violet light,
but were far too tenuous to do us any damage. When the star had exploded, its
outer layers had been driven upward with such speed that they had escaped
completely from its gravitational field. Now they formed a hollow shell large
enough to engulf a thousand solar systems, and at its centre burned the tiny,
fantastic object which the star had now become – a White Dwarf, smaller than
the Earth, yet weighing a million times as much.

The glowing gas shells were all around us,
banishing the normal night of interstellar space. We were flying into the
centre of a cosmic bomb that had detonated millennia ago and whose incandescent
fragments were still hurtling apart. The immense scale of the explosion, and
the fact that the debris already covered a volume of space many billions of
miles across, robbed the scene of any visible movement. It would take decades
before the unaided eye could detect any motion of these tortured wisps and
eddies of gas, yet the sense of turbulent expansion was overwhelming.

We had checked our primary drive hours
before, and were drifting slowly toward the fierce little star ahead. Once it
had been a sun like our own, but it had squandered in a few hours the energy
that should have kept it shining for a million years. Now it was a shrunken
miser, hoarding its resources as if trying to make amends for its prodigal
youth.

No one seriously expected to find planets.
If there had been any before the explosion, they would have been boiled into
puffs of vapour, and their substance lost in the greater wreckage of the star
itself. But we made the automatic search, as we always do when approaching an
unknown sun, and presently we found a single small world circling the star at
an immense distance. It must have been the Pluto of this vanished solar system,
orbiting on the frontiers of the night. Too far from the central sun ever to
have known life, its remoteness had saved it from the fate of all its lost
companions.

The passing fires had seared its rocks and
burned away the mantel of frozen gas that must have covered it in the days
before the disaster. We landed, and we found the Vault.

Its builders had made sure that we should.
The monolithic marker that stood above the entrance was now a fused stump, but
even the first long-range photographs told us that here was the work of
intelligence. A little later we detected the continent-wide pattern of
radio-activity that had been buried in the rock. Even if the pylon above the
Vault had been destroyed, this would have remained, an immovable and all but
eternal beacon calling to the stars. Our ship fell toward this gigantic bull’s-eye
like an arrow into its target.

The pylon must have been a mile high when it
was built, but now it looked like a candle that had melted down into a puddle
of wax. It took us a week to drill through the fused rock, since we did not
have the proper tools for a task like this. We were astronomers, not
archaeologists, but we could improvise. Our original purpose was forgotten:
this lonely monument, reared with such labour at the greatest possible distance
from the doomed sun, could have only one meaning. A civilisation that knew it
was about to die had made its last bid for immortality.

It will take us generations to examine all
the treasures that were placed in the Vault. They had plenty of time to
prepare, for their sun must have given its first warnings many years before the
final detonation. Everything that they wished to preserve, all the fruit of
their genius, they brought here to this distant world in the days before the
end, hoping that some other race would find it and that they would not be
utterly forgotten. Would we have done as well, or would we have been too lost
in our own misery to give thought to a future we could never see or share?

If only they had had a little more time!
They could travel freely enough between the planets of their own sun, but they
had not yet learned to cross the interstellar gulfs, and the nearest solar
system was a hundred light-years away. Yet even had they possessed the secret
of the Transfinite Drive, no more than a few millions could have been saved.
Perhaps it was better thus.

Even if they had not been so disturbingly
human as their sculpture shows, we could not have helped admiring them and
grieving for their fate. They left thousands of visual records and the machines
for projecting them, together with elaborate pictorial instructions from which
it will not be difficult to learn their written language. We have examined many
of these records, and brought to life for the first time in six thousand years
the warmth and beauty of a civilisation that in many ways must have been
superior to our own. Perhaps they only showed us the best, and one can hardly
blame them. But their worlds were very lovely, and their cities were built with
a grace that matches anything of man’s. We have watched them at work and play,
and listened to their musical speech sounding across the centuries. One scene
is still before my eyes – a group of children on a beach of strange blue sand,
playing in the waves as children play on Earth. Curious whiplike trees line the
shore, and some very large animal is wading in the shallows yet attracting no
attention at all.

And sinking into the sea, still warm and
friendly and life-giving, is the sun that will soon turn traitor and obliterate
all this innocent happiness.

Perhaps if we had not been so far from home
and so vulnerable to loneliness, we should not have been so deeply moved. Many
of us had seen the ruins of ancient civilisations on other worlds, but they had
never affected us so profoundly. This tragedy was unique. It is one thing for a
race to fail and die, as nations and cultures have done on Earth. But to be
destroyed so completely in the full flower of its achievement, leaving no
survivors – how could that be reconciled with the mercy of God?

My colleagues have asked me that, and I have
given what answers I can. Perhaps you could have done better, Father Loyola,
but I have found nothing in the
Exercitia Spiritualia
that helps me
here. They were not an evil people: I do not know what gods they worshipped, if
indeed they worshipped any. But I have looked back at them across the
centuries, and have watched while the loveliness they used their last strength
to preserve was brought forth again into the light of their shrunken sun. They
could have taught us much: why were they destroyed?

I know the answers that my colleagues will
give when they get back to Earth. They will say that the universe has no
purpose and no plan, that since a hundred suns explode every year in our
galaxy, at this very moment some race is dying in the depths of space. Whether
that race has done good or evil during its lifetime will make no difference in
the end: there is no divine justice, for there is no God.

Yet, of course, what we have seen proves
nothing of the sort. Anyone who argues thus is being swayed by emotion, not
logic. God has no need to justify His actions to man. He who built the universe
can destroy it when He chooses. It is arrogance – it is perilously near
blasphemy – for us to say what He may or may not do.

This I could have accepted, hard though it
is to look upon whole worlds and peoples thrown into the furnace. But there
comes a point when even the deepest faith must falter, and now, as I look at
the calculations lying before me, I know I have reached that point at last.

We could not tell, before we reached the nebula,
how long ago the explosion took place. Now, from the astronomical evidence and
the record in the rocks of that one surviving planet, I have been able to date
it very exactly. I know in what year the light of this colossal conflagration
reached our Earth. I know how brilliantly the supernova whose corpse now
dwindles behind our speeding ship once shone in terrestrial skies. I know how
it must have blazed low in the east before sunrise, like a beacon in that
oriental dawn.

There can be no reasonable doubt: the
ancient mystery is solved at last. Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you
could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the
symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?