Gift From The Stars (24 page)

“Less than a person but more than a program,” Adrian said calmly. “Whatever you are, it’s good to see you again. We need some help.”

“As for what I am,” the image said, “I am a heuristic program modeled after your colleague Peter Cavendish, capable of learning, responding, and a limited amount of independent decision-making.”

“Limited in what way?” Frances asked.

“Limited to fulfilling the objectives of this mission,” the image said.

“Defined by whom?” Adrian asked.

“By Peter originally,” the image said, “but modified by the inputs from each of you during the past two years, with a slight preference for those from Adrian, as the chosen captain.”

“So we’re really talking to the computer,” Frances said.

“If you prefer,” the image said.

“I’d rather talk to Peter,” Adrian said.

“If you prefer,” the image said.

“Maybe you can answer some questions first.”

“Anything you wish.”

“Like the genie from the bottle,” Frances said.

“Why did you keep from us the instructions you programmed into the computer that brought us here?”

“I have an answer,” the image said, smiling as Peter seldom had, “but you have to understand that answers about motivation are always conditional.”

“The best you can do,” Adrian said.

“It was my—or my programmer’s—belief that the instructions the aliens sent for reaching them would delay the construction of the ship, and after the ship was completed, you—or more accurately, the crew—would be unlikely to start the engines if you knew that the computer was programmed to assume control of the ship and take you to the white hole.”

“You never understood normal people,” Frances said.

“That was one of my failings,” the image said.

“We would have gone no matter what,” Adrian said.

“I see that now. I am capable of learning, as I said.”

“We could have chosen to override the computer,” Adrian said.

“But you did not. Clearly I misread the situation, but then I was a paranoid schizophrenic, and I saw the world through glasses distorted by fear.”

“But you aren’t now,” Frances said.

“A paranoid schizophrenic?” the image said. “No. Peter programmed me to be the person he never was—as intelligent as he but with a mind unfettered by apprehensions.”

“Maybe you can tell me,” Frances said, “why he stayed behind. He was the most driven of us all.”

“Driven, yes,” the image said. “But by fear of everything—of not finding what the aliens wanted, of finding what they wanted, of never being able to find a resting place between the two extremes. I was the perfect solution.”

“I can see that,” Adrian said.

“I don’t see it,” Frances said.

“He can stay at home, where he feels safe, and yet send out his alter-ego to discover the answers to his questions,” Adrian said.

“But he’ll never know!” Frances protested.

“Always the literal mind,” Peter said.

“Unless we return,” Adrian said. “But, of course, he’s just doing what humans do: we have children to carry on our lives, to realize the dreams that we never manage to achieve, to answer the eternal questions of life and death and meaning.”

“And the computer-Peter is Peter’s child!” Frances said.

“Yes,” Adrian said, “and Peter himself, in a sense—his mind sent out to explore the universe, to fulfill his destiny.” He put his hand on Frances’ suited arm.

“We understand all that,” Adrian said, turning back to the image. “But why haven’t you revealed yourself before? Why now?”

“I wasn’t needed until now,” the image said. “But you seem to have reached an impasse. You’re discouraged, your oxygen is almost used up, and your mapper isn’t working.”

Adrian looked down at his gauges. “He’s right.”

“Should we get out of here?” Frances asked. On top of her claustrophobia, the thought of being lost in this maze of tunnels was almost unbearable.

“As soon as we hear Peter out,” Adrian said.

“I have communicated with the aliens,” the image said calmly.

Frances put an arm around Adrian’s unyielding waist, as if protecting them both against the terrors of the night.

“Why haven’t they spoken before now?” Adrian asked.

“It took a while for them to learn our language.”

“That’s both too easy and too difficult,” Adrian said.

“I don’t understand that,” Frances said.

“Adrian means that if they could send us messages, they should know our language,” Cavendish’s image said, “and if they don’t, they shouldn’t be able to learn it in a couple of months. But they didn’t send us messages, they sent us images and mathematical formulations, which have few cultural relevancies.”

“And they sent them everywhere,” Adrian said.

“Everywhere there was a possibility of a technological civilization capable of receiving and understanding such a message,” the image said.

“And how did they know that?” Frances asked.

“They had these listening posts, you see,” Cavendish said. “All those white holes established near places likely to nourish intelligent life. And those who received the message and deciphered it and built their ships and came—each, in turn, has been exchanging information with the aliens as soon as the aliens could learn their language.”

“But why are they still here?” Adrian asked.

“There is so much to tell, and to learn,” Cavendish said. “All these creatures have histories and cultures and ideas and ambitions and art, you see, and all of these can be exchanged rapidly, but there is so much. So much experience. So much variety. So much art and science and philosophy. . . . The process could take several lifetimes. With newcomers always arriving, maybe forever.”

“I can see that,” Adrian said, “but still—”

“It’s like a vast library,” Frances said. “That’s what I said when we first saw the place, didn’t I? It’s every bookworm’s dream of paradise.” Fear battled with expectation for possession of her face.

“Here I have to make a confession.”

“Ah-ha!” Frances said. Throughout her experience with Cavendish, she had wavered between blind trust and utter mistrust.

“The message wasn’t received in energetic cosmic rays, as I—or rather my prototype—always said,” Cavendish said. “It was gravity waves.”

“Why lie?” Adrian asked.

“I didn’t think anyone would believe gravity waves,” the image said. “And they were so new and so unreliable. I was afraid people would think I was making it up.”

“They thought so anyway,” Frances said.

“Not you and Adrian,” Cavendish said, “and you were the ones who mattered.”

“Gravity waves,” Adrian repeated. “Does that have some significance?”

“It will later,” Cavendish said. “But to answer the other question—about it being too difficult: the aliens are consummate linguists. They had to be, since they have had to communicate with a thousand other species, and, what’s more, their evolutionary development produced a species for whom understanding others was a survival characteristic.”

“I can see that,” Adrian said.

“Well, I can’t,” Frances said. “Sure, you need to understand others, but even more you have to understand the universe in which we live and work. Communication is okay, as far as it goes, but total communication can frustrate the need to get something done.”

“These aliens don’t understand that,” Peter said.

“Frances means that accomplishment emerges from the frustration of incomplete communication,” Adrian said. “Like art. Or science, for that matter.”

“Then that’s the point,” Cavendish said.

“There’s a point?” Frances said.

“Yes,” Cavendish said. “The aliens want you to know that they are not the aliens you seek.”

The image in the window flickered and disappeared, but Peter’s voice in their earphones guided them back to the main tunnel and up its long incline until, at last, they emerged into the black sky and the ambiguity of uncreated night.

What is your substance, whereof are you made,

That millions of strange shadows on you tend?

W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE

Part Six

STRANGE SHADOWS

THE SPACESHIP ORBITED THE AIRLESS PLANET in the company of hundreds of other spaceships, each alien to the others. Inside one of those ships, Jessica Buehler felt isolated while a man whose body was thousands of light years away told his audience a story that was more incredible than the spaceship’s journey to this far edge of the galaxy.

“The aliens want you to know,” Peter Cavendish said from the computer screen, “that they are not the aliens you seek.”

The screen had been set up in the largest dormitory so that the entire crew could participate in what might be the culmination of their long travels and the decades of effort that had made it possible. The space was long and narrow and cluttered with bunks and hammocks on either wall, but almost two hundred people had crowded in to see the recording.

“That’s what Peter told us when Frances and I were in the alien labyrinth below,” Adrian Mast said. He stood in front and to one side of the screen, his foot in a strap anchored to the floor. If it had not been for his serious demeanor, he would have looked like a sideshow barker, Jessica thought. Well, Peter was freaky enough.

She floated effortlessly on the other side of the room from Adrian, her arms folded across her chest, Frances in a chair on Adrian’s side of the screen, with a seatbelt offering a gesture at security.

Why was it always Frances and Adrian?
Jessica thought, and chided herself for jealousy.

“How can it be Peter?” asked one of the bearded crewmembers.

“I know, George,” Adrian said. “Peter stayed behind. This is a heuristic program Peter modeled after himself, with most of his abilities and none of his hang-ups, and it has accomplished what we, with all our expeditions to the alien planet below, could not: it—or he—is in communication with the aliens.”

“How do we know he is telling the truth?” Jessica said. The Peter she knew was capable of infinite deception.

“We don’t,” Adrian said. “But then we can’t be sure about the truth of anything.” “Including the testimony of our own senses,” Frances said.

“Then what can we believe?” a woman asked. Jessica recognized her as Janice Kenna. She was pregnant and had a baby in her arms.

“What makes sense in terms of our situation and the explanations that enable us to survive,” Adrian said. “And maybe to understand and to manipulate our reality.”

“But Peter could say the same thing,” Janice continued stubbornly, thrusting out her baby toward Adrian as if daring him to deny its reality, “and he saw things that weren’t there.”

“And made other people see things, too,” Jessica muttered.

“Peter’s problem was his fears,” Adrian said, “and they finally ate him up. Sure, he had his own reality, but we have a consensus reality—not identical for all of us but matching in enough places that we can coexist and even, sometimes, interact.”

Laughter rippled through the rest of the crew; there had been considerable interaction in the past year, once they were free of the wormhole that had released them a year’s journey from this spot. Being so far removed from home—Earth and the rest of humanity—had induced an odd urge to reproduce.

Some of the crewmembers were standing, anchored in place by an arm or a leg or a strap, like Adrian; others, like Jessica, were adrift in the zero gravity, wafted a little this way and that by air currents from the ducts. By now they had all grown accustomed to the sensations of zero gravity again, and the smell of each other and of the ship itself, worn by three years of constant living by several hundred men and women—and now children—thrown into close contact with one another.

“Data must be trusted until it is proven false,” Adrian said.

“Or falsified,” Jessica said. Her suspicions of Peter could survive almost any validation.

“Peter,” Adrian continued, “or the program that calls itself ‘Peter,’ may be lying, although it gains nothing from lying—”

“Except an audience,” Jessica said, “and maybe some recognition.”