Carter Scholz’s first contribution to Universe (“The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs,“ in #7) was nominated for both the Nebula and Hugo awards, and Scholz himself was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award as “best new writer.’’ Last year he appeared in both Universe and New Dimensions, with “The Johann Sebastian Bach Memorial Barbecue and Nervous Breakdown” and “Amadeus”—both stories, like the first in Universe, being about famous composers (though much different in plot and tone).

This new story is totally unlike those earlier ones. It tells of an exploration team visiting a planet circling a faraway star … and of humanity ‘s first contact with an alien race, raising disturbing questions about our view of life and species evolution.

Scholz is another Clarion alumnus and has also distinguished himself in the fields of art and music. His other stories have appeared in Orbit, Alternities, Clarion, and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

IN RETICULUM

Carter Scholz

1. The Burial of the Dead

They came down out of the long night and set their rocket on cool evening sands. Wind blew the smoke away in shreds, and the metal creaked under strain of weight and temperature. Dust devils played around the landing legs.

Not far off stood a fragile sandstone building. How much had been carved by hand, and how much by wind, was impossible to judge. The wind had made or enlarged windows. Walls joined around tear-shaped gaps, where the thin wind abraded endlessly, and the building had ceded with grace.

They had come across an inconceivable amount of space for reasons equally inconceivable. Each had a network of personal reasons that had driven him to the irrevocable loneliness of space flight, and these they would not, or could not, discuss. Then there were the larger reasons of government and industry which had sent them here, and those they were not privy to. The immediate, the putative, reason was the building.

After a time they emerged.

There were five in all. Bright, the sixth, was in a sling in the ship. There the gravity varied in hour-long pulses from zero to one sixth that of Earth. Two days from planetfall, after their torturous awakening, Bright had been afflicted with the commonest of spacemen’s psychoses, the Berkeleian conviction that nothing outside oneself is real. In Bright this had taken a nasty turn: he believed himself dead, and everything else illusions of torment. Therapy made it worse. Twice he had tried to swing the ship out of orbit, and finally he had broken into the reactor room. Then he had been restrained. Keitel had wanted to postpone the landing, fearing the effects of gravity on Bright: the irrefutable proof of an external force would, he feared, shatter Bright’s defenses. Koster had said that was too damned bad. They had compromised and brought the ship down with negative gravity in Bright’s cabin only.

They blinked under the strange sun. Here was a frozen twilight, for the planet was so old that the tides of its moon had slowed its rotation to twice a year. The moon itself was long gone. The sun was a bitter and brutal orange, a hands-breadth over the horizon.

Koster and the others approached the building in a rough arc. They were space-suited and they carried meter-high spindles of metal. These they arranged around the building, and then attached cables between them. The ship itself formed the sixth point on the perimeter enclosing the building. Keitel observed Jobes with the control box, waving the others away from the ring of spindles.

The field leaped, and at once a bubble of interference formed on the slope nearest Koster. Rainbows slid down the bubble, faster and faster, and within a second the field broke.

Koster’s voice came on the intercom without preamble.

—Keitel, move your spindle back ten meters.

On the second try, the field held for five seconds, until a dimple formed on the slope near Wulf and pulled it apart in a vortex. Wulf s voice came on:

—There’s a ferrous deposit here. Keitel, five meters back. Roeg, ten meters forward.

This time the field held, and after Jobes had made flux measurements, Keitel and Roeg returned to the ship to release the tinned atmosphere. During the hundred-year flight, the small hydroponics farm on board had processed their cold exhalations and stored two thousand tons of oxygen. Harvesters had plowed the uneaten crops into nutrient vats and waste sinks, whence came their monthly injections and inert gases stored against planetfall. Waste from engines and batteries was likewise stored, and the legumes were periodically stripped of nitrogen. These tanks now vented an atmosphere into the force bubble in a long polyphonic hiss; as much air again was held in reserve. The air smelled like Los Angeles on a summer day. Condensation set streams free on the invisible skin of the field.

The field was extravagant, but necessary. Men could not come out of a century’s cold sleep and be asked to function in space suits. They needed the illusion of sky, freedom, unimpeded movement.

The building had six rooms. The largest was tiled in monochrome hexagons; at the moment of entrance Roeg had taken them, impossibly, for heptagons. The floor was half obscured by a fine red dust. Jobes scooped a sample into a small plastic sack.

The strange shapes thrown into twilit relief reminded one man of reefs he had seen in the Bahamas; another recalled mesas in Arizona; another thought of Mars; another was stirred as if the figures were from his own dreams; but none spoke. After the void, and the fierce screaming hour of descent, all voice for the moment had left them.

The danger of the field breaking was greatest in its first twelve hours, so they spent their first night in the ship. Jobes punched four figures into the lock, which changed its entrance combination every twenty-four hours by a cesium clock that kept Earth time, and the outer door swung back. There was a brief aseptic pulse of hard ultraviolet which blackened their visors momentarily. After the pressure cycle, the inner door opened; they desuited and went in.

Keitel checked on Bright, who slept. Three dreams had been recorded. From a sense of responsibility rather than interest, he played them back. The interpreter had boggled at the first dream, and offered twenty-two different visuals. Keitel reflected that if it was going to be that complicated he would rather not know about the dreams. By now Earth likely had a machine that not only recorded dreams accurately, but supplied interpretation and therapy, and in extreme cases administered euthanasia on the spot. Of course that was the kind of thinking that had got him into the space services in the first place.

Jobes relaxed in his cabin after depositing his sample in the bioanalytic computer. A few microbes, perhaps. But at this end of a planet’s life-cycle there could be no surprises. He allowed himself half of his computer memory space to begin a painting on the four-foot viewscreen.

Roeg, in his cabin, worked on the fifth dimension of his chess program. Interesting problem with knight moves in the odd dimensions. He thought he had a handle on a general algorithm for n-dimensional chess. He did not play the game.

Wulf played solitaire with a deck of Bicycle playing cards, brought at great cost. The deck weighed 70.6 grams. By leaving the jokers on Earth he had saved enough energy to light New York for a day.

Of them all, only Koster worried about the purpose of the flight.

In the year 2040 there had commenced, from a point in the constellation Reticulum, a history of radio on Earth. A repeater station was amplifying and replaying every signal from Earth it could pick up. Radio astronomers at Jodrell Bank, Green Bank, Arecibo, RA-TAN-Gorki, and at the Very Large Array in New Mexico were receiving television broadcasts, navigational beacons,, and so on—all a hundred years old.

The frequencies of the original broadcasts had been raised by a factor of pi.

By the act of repetition this far point was indicating that it had seen Earth. There was no attempt to send data, hence no problems with language or coding—just the standing if ambiguous invitation: Here.

First ships had gone to nearer stars: Proxima, Sirius, Barnard’s, Wolf 359, Ross 154. Some Jupiter-class planets were found, void of life. The transmissions from Reticulum continued. By 2230 the agency was prepared to send a ship there. Only the state of microelectronics caused the delay: cosmic radiation destroyed silicon substrates over long exposures, and a flight to Reticulum would take over a hundred years each way. In 2240 this problem was solved, and the ship Janus commissioned.

The lander, heart and brain of the ship, large as it was, was one-thousandth the mass of the whole. The shell and bulk were still in orbit, comprising two remaining thrusters, immense hemispherical reaction chambers ringed by fuel tanks, in which half a million tons of deuterium and tritium would be ignited on the trip back, hundreds of bombs per second for twenty years, until the coasting velocity of .7 c was reached. The last twenty years of the flight would be a like deceleration.

What worried Koster was that he did not know the purpose of the flight.

Prepared they were, within limits. But no simulation could prepare a man for the return from cold sleep. This explained the presence of Keitel and the oneiranalytic devices. Emerging from that long suspension, where the blood was near freezing and the pulse a daily tick, the brain rebelled. After the first few waking days it began to cut corners; routinely these were dreams in which the dreamer was forced back into cold sleep. Regarding significant content, these dreams were void: they were so explicit as to suggest nothing, expressing only a deep feral terror that surpassed any psychotic response to death or sex.

The first morning on the planet only Bright was undisturbed by dreams. Keitel had a particularly bad one, in which unseen hands pushed him face first into a black door. He was crushed and finally smeared into the material of the door, which he knew was dense as a dark star. There was nothing at all on the other side.

He prescribed, against his conscience, Thorazine for the whole crew.

Jobes’s bioanalysis was negative, as expected, and after bathing the enclosed area in ultraviolet for the proscribed hour, he went out unsuited. The air under the field was warm, and fresher than yesterday. Twenty meters from the ship he dug a water hole, lined it with polystyrene, and filled it from the ship’s water. Then he stripped and jumped in, yelling.

—Rubber men! he shouted up hoarsely. —Stretch out those relativistic kinks! Come out of that god damned meat locker!

Placid Wulf emerged, yawning. Then came Keitel, still worrying over Bright, and Roeg holding a steaming coffee, and lastly sour Koster, who wandered toward the building. While the first three were still in the pool, Roeg reentered the ship and came out naked, strapped in a hopper. He soared in four-meter leaps on the negative-gravity pulses, stretched out as if to touch the sky field.

—How’s this for rubber! he shouted.

—Shut it off! yelled Koster. He ran to intercept Roeg, who turned a high somersault and came down by the edge of the pool.

Koster reached them, scowling. —It’s bad enough we have a basket case inside. Do you know how much power that uses?

—Ten thousand watts a jump, sir, said Roeg, unbuckling the device.

Wulf said ingenuously, —Sir, could we turn on the sunlamp for a spell?

Koster relented. —All right. Damn it, you could have broken a leg, Roeg. He walked into the ship.

Wulf directed Roeg a look of mock contrition. Keitel said, —That’s all very nice, but now he’ll make me take Bright out of the sling.

—Oh, all right, William. Christ’s sake, said Roeg.

—How is Jack? Wulf asked.

—I don’t know. I ought to check on him.

—Can’t you sun a bit first? asked Jobes.

Keitel looked at the plate warming red on the lander’s side against the black sky. —Better not. I, I have to … He left them without finishing.

—Narcosynthesis? said Bright as Keitel entered the cabin.

—That’s right, Jack.

—Don’t think I need it today. The drugs, I mean. I’ve been dreaming anyway. Dreaming that I’m here.

Keitel looked at his hands for a minute. —All right. We’ll see how it goes. Why did you enter the service, Jack?

—They’d been taking me a piece at a time, said Bright pleasantly. —Cancer of the testicles, of the lungs, of the larnyx, of the stomach. Never a metastasis, always piecemeal, and the doctor, an ethical son of a bitch, the last time I was in asked me seriously if I wanted to go on that way. That was for the lungs. He said, you won’t have any feeling there. The Teflon sac will work like a lung, but you won’t feel it working. Well, I wondered. You knew I had an artificial larnyx, Will. It was a chore getting used to it; I literally had to learn to talk again. So I wondered about that lung. About being cut off that way. Damned son, I said to myself, let them. Let them take liver, lights, and endocrine glands. The seat of your soul, if you have one, is surely your brain, worse luck, and that they can’t replace, not yet. So I told the doctor, just leave the brain. Take out the whole damned diaphragm and bumgut if you have to, but don’t touch the brain.

—Why did you join, Jack?

—By then of course they didn’t call it cancer, no, cancer was licked. Instead we had this, a kind of lupus, used to be called noli-metangere, this whatever the hell it is, thoroughgoing viral internal leprosy. But I called it cancer. I knew well enough what they were up to. Any cancer they couldn’t cure was lupus, you see.

—But tell me why.

—One time, I’ll tell you, one time I hiked up Half Dome in California, and at that time they hadn’t hewn the steps or sunk the railings in the last approach to the brow. You had to climb cables, and I went, nervous, I’ll tell you, right after the snows had melted, and not knowing were the cables sound or not. Well, halfway up I looked over my shoulder. Two thousand feet to a pine-and-granite floor, and I wondered, why not? Hell yes, this is what you came for, why not, sick son? And I turned cold, not from fear of death, not exactly. I feared I would die yet not be extinguished. If I could have known that all profit of experience, all laborious mental roads, would be effaced by death, I would have dropped, then and there. But I imagined a trap waiting for me, just this side of death. An anteroom. Not a spiritual state, but a state of prolonged physical torment, in which my damned brain just would not give up the ghost. I saw myself like a sack of rotten vegetables on the valley floor and the damned brain still trying to get up. You see, my instincts for self-preservation were too damned good. I didn’t trust my brain to know when it was licked.

—Yes?

—Odd thing is, it makes you immune to other diseases. The body’s very systematically burning itself and it wants no outside interference. Whole damned field crew in Venezuela caught malaria, but not me. Well, this is ideal for interstellars, you see; you don’t have to worry about your man kicking off suddenly.

Keitel decided to chance a direct statement. —You wanted a cure, and couldn’t afford cryogenics on Earth.

Said Bright, —And isn’t that where the service gets half its men? But not me. The pain of consciousness, which death does not abate, is what I want a cure for.

—Are you dead, Jack?

—I’m a memory. See, that’s how I know. I always had a dreadful memory, Will, but now everything is coming back—why, I’ve remembered a dream I had when I was five, two hundred years ago. In the dream I wake up before morning, the house is dark, and I try to put on lights. But they come on only faintly, and as I jiggle the switches it gets darker and darker. Then the shadows come alive. And I even remember that I told my brother this dream once, and he said seriously, I have a flashlight under my bed, and you can use that; it always works. And you know, it did. I never had that dream again. And I remember too when I was in school studying literature this line from a story: mirrors and copulation are abominable because they duplicate entities. Now what is that from? It was on an upper-right hand page.

—I don’t know.

—You ought to know, Will. And … I never had a woman.

—Jack, that’s not true.

—Even before, I never had a woman who wasn’t contracepted. Never a chance to, to… . Suicide missions. I feel them thrashing there in the dark.

Bright then covered his head with his arms. When he looked out he said, —What was that?

—Was what?

—What I was saying. Did I fall asleep?

—No. I think we’re done for today. Try to get some rest.

—Yes. Let the dead bury the dead.

2. A Game of Chess

—Wulf? said Koster. —This is it?

—Oh yes. Concatenation of narrow-band signals at one megawatt. No mistaking it.

—So where the hell’s the antenna? The power supply?

—Underground.

—Ridiculous. Why hide it?

—Sir, the best guess was that this is an automated station. I think that’s right. This planet is long dead.

—And it’s been transmitting for what, three hundred years? Without maintenance? Without power?

—Tides, possibly. Planet this size has a lot of kinetic energy even turning slow as it does.

The dwarf sun was now threatening the horizon. They stood at the threshold of the building.

—We go in singly. Each take a room. Keep your recorders running. Twenty minutes if you don’t find anything.

They went in.

Violet shimmer in the air. Keitel turned. A purple sphere circled him and colored through the spectrum to red, then vanished. He ceased to turn. Then in front of him a diffuse orange glow condensed into a sphere large as himself and turned milky. The milk pulled itself into galactic spirals, which commenced to swirl so rapidly they disappeared. Then the sphere was blue, brown, and green. Keitel circled it and saw it was a globe with one land mass. A faint blue halo extended nearly an inch from its surface. Broad estuaries slowly cracked the continent. He ran his hand over a brown area and felt a roughness like unfinished wood. The blue area was wet; his finger penetrated it to a depth of a millimeter and then encountered the same roughness.

Now there were four distinct continents on the globe, or perhaps five. In the slanting light, microscopic mountains cast shadows. On the night side of the globe he fancied brief red pinpricks. The continents pulled apart, making six, two of them bound by a slender isthmus, another two roughly abutted. Cold white pulsed regularly down from the pole. For hours he was rapt as a child with a kaleidoscope. Occasionally he sat on the floor with his eyes shut for a few minutes and returned to find the continents inches farther apart. When the configuration grew familiar, he commenced to scan the globe closely. He found, in a favorable light, a line no thicker than a blond hair snaking up the east of Asia. On the night side he hunted for faint yellow glows.

It seemed to him the white wisps of galaxies were becoming more distinct, and the continents now moved imperceptibly, as if the time scale of the model was slowing.

His hand was resting on Japan when he felt a stab of pain. On his palm were two charred dots, equivalent to burns from a powerful laser pulsed for a nanosecond. He backed away. Almost at once there was a constellation of white flashes across Asia and America. He covered his eyes with his burned hand.

When he looked up he saw a fading streak like a vapor trail, clearly diagrammatic and not part of the model; it circled Earth twice and extended tangentially through a wall of the room. He peered closer, his eyes weak from much seeing, but now granted it seemed a second precision from fatigue, and saw glinting motes like dust moving in blurry circles two inches above the globe. After many minutes more he saw a considerable silver speck, the size of a comma, hanging in synchronous orbit over America. As he watched, it vanished, leaving the same diagrammatic vapor trail he had seen before. With this the model came to rest. The milk coalesced into clouds and stood still. The orbiting motes stopped. Keitel knew without doubt that he had just witnessed the launch of Daedelus 7, the first mile-long, manned interstellar craft to leave Earth in 2082.

Whine overhead. Jobes hunched like a dog. The tone descended in pitch, until the entire room throbbed like an organ loft. Jobes clapped his hands to his ears, and the pitch went lower still, loosening his sphincters. When he came to himself he was kneeling in a pool of urine. His nose bled. A drop of blood struck the tile and vanished into it. Then, in a red glow over the tile, Joves saw a sudden shifting of images, resolving into a gelatinous sphere enclosing a smaller sphere of deeper hue. He studied this, and at last said: —A red corpuscle.

The image blurred and twisted itself. Jobes took a breath.

—Deoxyribonucleic acid.

The image changed again. Jobes confronted himself, naked, six inches tall.

—Oh my God.

The image waited. Jobes said: —Homo sapiens.

There was a pause. Then the image flickered rapidly. Barely able to keep up, Jobes said: —Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, pithecanthropus, australopithecus, ramapithecus, proconsul, p, propliopithecus, amphipithecus … Christ! He left off. Another minute passed in silence. At last the image rested. Said Jobes: —Chaos chaos, I believe.

In a moment the image reversed itself and, like a maturing tree, created branches, first dozens, then hundreds and thousands, filling the tiles, turning the room into a menagerie. At his feet Jobes saw his own image emerge unchanged.

—Do that again, he said.

The room complied, and this time he watched some of the beasts evolve. Each had a characteristic movement, which generally repeated a number of times and terminated in a green splash of dissolution. He observed the great lizards, and the amphibians, and was startled again when the tree shrew scampered to its feet and grew, in thirty seconds, to the image of himself. But this time the room went on, and he saw, almost before it happened, the abrupt disappearance of genus homo. Cetaceans frolicked a moment, then the room was filled with a polyphonic glissade of membranous wings; his hands flailed through the holographic swarm. Then a barrage of green flashes left the room blank.

He turned, and saw his body again, life size. A speedy and deft dissection followed. The major systems were left standing in single file, unsupported. Another image detailed the articulation of the hand. Another detailed the brain, shrinking and expanding parts in orderly fashion. The gray dome was shot through with rivers of phosphorescence. It dizzied him to watch, and so he left.

In Roeg’s room a restless hum. It had thickness, and a constantly shifting overtone structure.

—What is this? murmured Roeg.

The timbre of the sound slid slightly, as if rocks had been moved in a fast-running brook.

Roeg repeated: —I said, what is this?

The timbre of the stream shifted again and began to stutter. Suddenly Roeg recognized the sound: it was a set of vowels, changing rapidly and at random.

—You’re listening to me. Trying to learn to speak:

Again the babel of vowels changed. There began scattered stops and plosives, and Roeg could now distinguish discrete phonemes.

—How far can this go? Is it possible you can extract meaning? First you’d want a hierarchy of rules, what sounds can and can’t go together, then some assumptions about grammar, and finally a vocabulary of words that can’t be defined from context.

The stream broadened, slowed, and the sounds became more prolonged.

—Personally I don’t believe it. You may be a deft mimic, but… .

The sound abruptly stopped. In the silence Roeg stopped as well. Then he heard: —What is mimic?

—Well I’ll be damned, said Wulf.

A small table, loaded to groaning with platters, carafes, bowls, in the center of the room. He approached the buffet.

—Koster would have a fit if I ate any of this.

He lifted covers, bathing his face in steam.

—Damned if that’s not Mongolian beef. And here? Rijstaflel, carré d’agneau, artichoke and aioli, zabaglione, saumon béarnaise, calamari, and a Caesar salad. And I am very much mistaken if this is not a Château Margaux. Wulf tipped a decanter and nibbled a crouton.

—Well, it must be a hallucination, and I surely can’t die from it.

He arranged the dishes in his mind: the lighter first, the fishes, then the sauced and sautéed meats, finally the hot Indonesian and Szechwan, with breaks to clear the palate with salad and wines, and last the sweets and fruits.

—Fall to, old man.

He spent a good three hours at it, after which the table folded into itself in midair and vanished. He flipped his empty port glass at the spot, and it vanished too.

—Four-star, gentlemen. Service exemplary. I thought I detected an excessive enthusiasm for cilantro in the moussaka, but perhaps not. No bill? Well, twenty percent of nothing is nothing, I fear. Many thanks.

When Koster entered his room the temperature dropped forty degrees. He extended a hand back through the entrance. Outside the air was normal. As he stood there the temperature rapidly ascended, and he yanked his hand back inside. Once he broke a sweat the temperature plummeted. He hunched over for warmth, and after twenty seconds was roasted once more. The next time it grew cold, he passed out.

He awoke in fetal posture with two memories of awakening superimposed: when, as a boy, he had fallen from a rooftop and, coming to, found everything strange and new; and when, as a trainee, he had been taken from a sense-deprivation tank after eight hours. He imagined the sterile vaseline scent of the lab. He began to open his eyes, then clamped them shut again: he smelled wisteria. After a moment it was gone, and a heavy hydrogen sulfide funk was in the room. He coughed, and the odor was replaced by a faint perfume. Tears of longing sprang to his eyes, but the scent was gone before he could recognize it. Then, rapidly: cut grass, gasoline, rain on hot tar, rotting mulch, cold stone, distilled alcohol, deep jungle, grape must, sharp nullity of Freon, menstrual blood, sawdust, old books, musk, chlorine, the heavy sweet of yeast, and each of these carried its freight of memory, till he could not bear it, and cried out: —Stop! Stop it! and all sank in windless air. Like a man half-drowned he staggered up, coughing long strings of mucus from his nose. He wept and went from there, not seeing the others in their rooms.

That night the computer prescribed a game of dollar-ante poker. Keitel lost a year’s wages, nearly eight hundred fifty dollars.

3. The Fire Sermon

Keitel was outside when the sky turned red. There was a sound like a deep insensible bell, and his ears popped. Above him the air boiled. Rose rivers of flux wiped out the stars and bitter brick sun. Under this inverted bowl of lava he ran to the ship. He had to try three combinations before the airlock opened. The pressure outside was so lowered that the warm push from within almost knocked him backward. He went in and swallowed furiously as the lock shut and filled.

In the common room Bright was lazing in a chair. Koster stood by, dull with fury. Roeg and Jobes were sipping coffee. Wulf stared into space.

—This bastard depolarized the field.

—I was outside, said Keitel.

—Four times. Four times he’s tried to kill us.

—Koster, he doesn’t know. He thinks he’s dead. He thinks we’re all dead.

—If he does this once more, he won’t be wrong. Lock him up, Keitel! Koster worked controls to let the last of the ship’s air into the restored field.

Outside there was a faint thunder.

—Now what the hell?

A monitor showed dust from the building. A weakened wall had collapsed under the renewed air pressure.

—What is life? asked Bright. —We would never have known of them or they of us but for a certain progression of materials. Transfer of information. For them the earth was barren before radio.

—And for us? said Keitel. —Five million years of slime and blood before we had shelter and food when we needed it. That’s not life?

—Preparation. No life till after death. That’s what I learned on the way out. It almost came to me on the Sirius flight, coming out of the sleep, but they kept us doped and I lost the meaning of it. You see, we are material. Life is techtu. We stripped the planet, poisoned it, and only then did our cosmic life begin, when we had depleted all our resources, transformed them, and pushed outward. Radio was a birth cry. We are living now on the outer margin of depletion. That’s why we’re out here, seeking.

—Seeking what?

—A way of living, Will, of living past depletion. We’ve depleted physical, discursive, and spiritual resources. Life … you reach a physical age of about twenty-five, and you begin to break down, bit by bit. A glide pattern. Probably most races, by the time they achieve space flight, are too depleted to find a new perspective. But we’re lucky, Will. We found one close by. We may have a chance. But we can’t do it in the usual ways. We can’t expect to bring anything back from here.

Though Bright could not have known it, this was quite true. All recorders had come out of the building blank. The crew met at the Andrew’s-cross table in the common room, Koster at the head and the other four in the crotches. Keitel recalled that the last ship he had served on had a table formed like a stellated hexagon.

Roeg read from notes he had taken shorthand.

—Then at last God called the human embryo to the throne, and it said, “Please, God, I think you have made me in the best form possible, and it would be rude to change. If I must choose, I will stay as I am, a defenseless embryo, doing my best to make myself a few poor tools from whatever you put before me.” “Well done,” said God, smiling. “Here, all you embryos with your bills, gills, wings, and whatnot, come look upon genus homo. He is the only one to have guessed Our secret. He will look like an embryo till he dies, but the rest of you will be embryos before him. Eternally undeveloped, he will remain ever potential, and able to see some of Our own joys and sorrows. We are partly sorry for you, homo, but partly hopeful. Go and do your best to survive.” Asked homo timidly, “And if I succeed?” God ceased to smile.

Roeg said: —This is like a story I read once, but the point is that the building made it up. In less than an hour it advanced from random sounds to esthetic discourse. This violates every tenet of information theory I’ve ever heard.

—Did you bother to ask it what it was?

—I don’t think it understood me. I asked who its makers were, where they lived, I asked what its purpose was, and how long it’s been here. I asked if it was a form of life. It seemed happy to affirm any possibility I advanced.

Koster turned to Keitel. —Did you get anything?

—Blank tape. It showed me the history of Earth up to our departure. I saw the globe, and touched it. But no image recorded. Unconsciously, Keitel rubbed two fingers against his burned palm.

Said Wulf: —I think it was taking measurements. It was pushing the outer limits of our senses, each of us.

—And we have nothing for it. Just Roeg’s fairy tale. What are we supposed to do, tear the damned thing apart to get to its guts? We were scheduled to spend two weeks here. Bright has cut that in half. Gone two hundred years, and we come home empty-handed. They’ll like that.

—I was thinking, said Keitel. —Since nothing records, it must be reaching our brains directly. We could use an oneiranalysis rig, hook it to someone to get a record.

—Who? asked Koster. —It almost cooked me. I don’t want to risk anyone.

Jobes said, —Bright.

Keitel looked at him, stricken. Koster said, —Hell, yes. Bright.

Keitel said, —Look here, the man’s unbalanced. His EEG shows theta spindles the size of… . No, I won’t have it.

—That makes him ideal, doesn’t it? REM-like state, half asleep, we’ll get a good reading.

—No!

—Keitel, you just keep your damned mouth shut. You’re a psychometrist. You have the lowest rating on this vessel.

—I’ll certify you, Koster.

—You’ll do no such thing. Koster swung around the lazy Susan holding the computer console and punched a request. He then swung the unit to face Keitel.

The silver screen was dark with characters. Koster’s rating was 5.2, indicating optional retirement. Keitel’s was 0.8, indicating mandatory retirement. Next to Koster’s name were three dark stars, indicating that Keitel would be decommissioned on the moment he certified the captain.

Bright’s rating was classified.

Keitel thought a moment and swung the unit to Wulf.

—Punch in JANUS and the Earth date, said Koster.

Wulf did so and swung the unit the long way around, so that Keitel could read it before it stopped in front of Koster.

Bright’s rating was 9.9.

Koster swore, and Keitel said, —I take it we have to ask Jack’s permission.

Bright consented. Eagerly.

Around the cross table they listened to the tides of Bright’s brain. It was a placid sound, like waves breaking strictly along the tones of a harmonic series.

After a while Bright’s voice came.

—The history of humanity is a series of transformations. Your race is bilaterally symmetric, but imperfectly so. Consider the notion of past and future. Consider symmetry. Nothing in your physics points the direction of time, so you had to invent a thermodynamics to give time the meaning you wished it to bear. And then you invented a thermodynamics of information.

—What are we listening to? asked Wulf.

—Bright’s mind. The building is speaking. His vocal cords move sympathetically, so we hear his voice.

—All things suffer entropy: organisms, races, machines, messages. A linear sense of time, that is, a sense of entropy, is necessary to develop intelligence, but it is not sufficient to maintain it. This is the next indicated transformation. You must transform entropy. You yourselves are its refutation. You strive for symmetry while your bodies abhor the idea: a crystal of levophenylalanine would cause you to sicken and die, while its right-handed equivalent would not.

Then Bright’s own voice spoke, and the difference was that between a telephone and a live voice. —What is life?

—If there is a difference between life and death it cannot be found in your chemistry. Your Wohler synthesized urea five hundred years ago. You can create bacteria at will and destroy them. Yet you cannot see the reason. Life is due to an event of singular and improbable character, occurring once by accident and thus starting an avalanche by autocatalytic multiplication.

—How singular? asked Bright. —Are we alone?

—Define alone.

There was a long, liquid silence, and nothing from Bright’s mind.

—What is this? demanded Koster. —I don’t want a god damned philosophical discussion on these tapes. Why doesn’t he ask it something useful?

—You insisted on putting a sick man in there, said Keitel. —Now shut up and listen.

—You are alone, said the building. —This is what makes you you. You are self. You are dirt. All cognate with the word human.

—Where in Christ’s name did it get all this?

—Three hundred years of listening to radio, said Roeg drily.

—Why are you afraid of mirrors? asked the building.

—But you know that, said Bright.

—Duplication. Self-absorption. Ruinous self-reflection. Infinite regress. Loss of origin.

—Yes, said Bright.

—But that is the symmetry you crave.

—Yes. Symmetry of life and death, past and future. But how achieve it?

All at once there was a pulsing in the room. Complex patterns of tone skirled in the air. Keitel was on his feet at the oneiranalyzer. Two discrete patterns suddenly meshed, and a single chord of tones smote them, rapidly repeated.

—My God, said Keitel. —It’s done something to him. His two hemispheres are in unison. His right and left brain are doing the same.

The heavy pulse in major key was still proceeding when Bright entered the ship with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance.

Keitel was awakened by a distant clangor. The sharp scent of fuel was in his nostrils.

They had stopped Bright before much fuel had been dumped. The cocks shut, Bright restrained, Koster furious astride the computer as Keitel entered the common room, all successfully suppressed a dream he had had of universal destruction. Entering, his mind put away for future reference the image of a burning house, a large house in which everyone he had ever known (and he was two hundred and fifty years old) was quartered.

—One thousand kilos overweight, said Koster, with some satisfaction. —We haven’t enough fuel left to get off the ground.

—Keitel, said Roeg, give us some drugs.

—Get him out of here, said Koster, and Jobes led Bright away.

Practiced Wulf was calculating. —What can we leave behind?

—Not much. Leftover air. Personal memory boards. Spindles. Some batteries. Jumpers. Not bloody much. Cutting everything to the bone, we’re still sixty kilos over.

Wulf sadly drew his playing cards from a pocket. Everyone smiled sourly at that.

—Can we bring the big ship to a closer rendezvous?

—Not unless you want to risk crashing it.

There was a silence. Koster began to nod, looking at the others.

—What does Bright weigh?

Keitel sat down.

Roeg punched the console and said, —Sixty-five kilos.

—That’s it, then. Weight for thrust.

After much arguing, Keitel went to tell Bright. He was in the sling, though the antigravity was off. The cabin was dark.

—Jack, why?

—You know, I used to think that there were beings in mirrors. I stared and stared when I was little, and a couple of times I thought I saw something move, very far in.

Keitel foolishly pushed the stud on his recorder, then realized that no therapy could help Bright now. Nonetheless he let the machine run.

—Why are you so interested in mirrors?

—That’s all this place is.

—We came this far to find ourselves, is that it?

—In a way. Or else we’re mirrors. Have you thought that what we see and hear in there is not what the building intends? That our minds read the information according to their own biased patterns?

Bright’s language became more fevered; he rushed fragments with groping pauses between.

—Consider Parsifal, who passed by the Grail the first time he saw it and thereby did greatly sin. This, this is our Grail: like the kalpa vrishka of the Jains, wish-fulfilling trees which gave sweet fruit, leaves that sang at night, and gave forth light. But the Grail is invisible to those not pure.

He paused, and continued almost sanely: —On Earth they told me I was the most important man on this ship. Because of my instinct for self-preservation. I spent forty hours in the sense-deprivation tank, Will, and they took me out only because they couldn’t believe it; they thought I was in trauma. But I could have stayed there forever. It’s where I first learned the meaning of depletion. And farther in space. Though they meant to sacrifice me, I loved them for it. They were teaching me. And now I must return this gift, by teaching them. All systems on Earth, from the economic to the biologic, have been corrupted, by death, by fear of death. They cannot survive that way. This mission is a last hope, Will, to find a race that has survived that fear of death and transcended entropy. But we must stay here for the learning. We can’t return to Earth with our samples and tapes, where the agency will twist us and see only what they want to see, use knowledge for profit.

Keitel could not bear the strain any longer. He burst out: —-Jack we’re leaving you here.

—What?

—You drained too much fuel. We’re overweight. We have to leave you behind. It’s not my decision.

Bright sat silent for a minute, then said: —You have brought me pain as well as joy, yet more honor than I have ever received from any before.

4. Death by Water

Working alone in the hour before lift-off, Keitel placed spindles close around the building, powering them with a battery. He drained the last of the ship’s air into the small field. It would not last long, but neither would the battery. He brought Bright there.

—You’ll drown me, Will?

—Jack.

—Pearls for my eyes. An end to profit and loss.

—Jack!

—Will, it’s so simple, and you can’t see it. We were sent to bring back. And here is something we can’t bring back, can’t balance their books back home. We need to stay, Will, we really do.

—I don’t want to do this thing. Oh Christ.

—It’s not enough to leave me. We all have to stay. Will, haven’t you learned? There is no return. You leave your world, and in the course of your travels it changes. You return only to a changed world. Christ, the horror of it. We’re farther out than any have been. Drowned and gone. Those who sent us long dead. They think of us as dead, Will. We’re lost. We should stay here, lost.

—Jack, we can’t stay. We haven’t enough air or food or water.

—Don’t need. We’re dead already. We’re information.

Koster entered. —Let’s go.

—I had hoped, said Bright.

—I know what you hoped, you bastard. You hoped to strand us all here.

Bright pressed palms together before his mouth. —Give, sympathize, control. We have given ourselves to the sky. Now we must sympathize, and later we may control. Why are you afraid? We can learn all this place has to offer. When the time came our message would get through.

—Two minutes, Keitel, or we’ll leave you too.

—What message, Jack?

—One who has been made mad by the sight of a demon will be healed upon glancing in the mirror. Earth’s demon is space. Death. The long cold sleep. But you all look away.

—We think we’ll drown there, said Keitel, trying to understand. —Mirrors lead to, to loss of origin… .

—Oh, Will, said Bright, sorrowing.

—I have to go.

—When you get back, don’t hate me.

—Hate you?

—For what I’ve done.

Keitel felt tears starting. —Jack, you’ve done nothing.

—What we’ve done. He spread his arms. —You can’t carry this fear of death out here. You just can’t. And you’re all so afraid.

—What, Jack? What have you done?

Koster said, —That’s it. Dope him.

Keitel leaned forward with the hypo. He lifted Bright’s arm, but on impulse bent instead and applied the snout to Bright’s breast. Bright slumped.

*

5. What the Thunder Said

On waking he left the building, hoping to see the fusion drive of the main ship come on. There was a bright star in the sky opposite the set sun, roughly where the ship should be once under way, but he could not be sure. So he went back in. He thought of the custom of covering mirrors in a room containing a corpse. This was to prevent it looking out a comrade from among those present. But that custom would not work here.

In the main room he said a few words. The computer beneath the building reversed fields, switching from analysis to synthesis. It commenced to make projections. It told Bright how long his air would last. Then, at his request, it created Earth models, and it told Bright in great detail the future of Earth and of genus homo. There was not very much to tell.

Ten years later the transmissions from Earth ceased. Bright was long dead. The relay station spent a short time trying to regain the signals, then it marked its hypothesis verified and began scanning the sky for another radio source.

A hundred years later the decelerating Janus, still outside the orbit of Pluto, awoke its crew ahead of schedule. There was a malfunction. It could not find the beacon needed to navigate to Earth.

They found Earth with the optical telescope and navigated back by eye. But by the time they had seen that the moon was gone, and that the seas were red, and the continents ashen, and the sky utterly without clouds, there had been much violence on the ship, and there was no one left to land it.