Galactic Empires 2, page 23
‘Take a pair of insulated gloves and carry that tank to the lab. Run the contents through the usual air examination procedures that we use for testing planetary atmosphere. As soon as you have taken the sample evacuate the tank and fill it with our own air, then throw it out through the lock”
The analysers worked on the sample of alien air, and presumably the aliens were doing the same with their tank of ship’s atmosphere. The analysis was routine and fast, the report appearing in coded form on the panel in control ‘Unbreathable,’ Gulyas said, ‘at least for us. There seems to be enough oxygen, more than enough, but any of those sulphurated compounds would eat holes through our lungs. They must have rugged metabolisms to inhale stuff like that. One thing for certain, we’ll never be in competition for the same worlds…’
‘Look! The picture is changing,’ Tjond said, drawing their attention back to the viewing screen.
The alien had vanished and the viewpoint appeared to be in space above the planetoid’s surface. A transparent bulge on its surface filled the screen and while they watched the alien entered it from below. The scene shifted again, then they were looking at the alien from inside the clear-walled chamber. The alien came toward the pickup, but before reaching it the alien stopped and leaned against what appeared to be thin air.
‘There’s a transparent wall that divided the dome in half,’ Gulyas said. ‘I’m beginning to get the idea.’
The pickup panned away from the alien, swept around to the opposite direction where there was an entrance cut into the clear fabric of the wall. The door was open into space.
‘That’s obvious enough,’ Hautamaki said, rising to his feet. ‘That central wall must be airtight, so it can be used for a conference chamber. I’ll go. Keep a record of everything.’
‘It looks like a trap,’ Tjond said, fidgeting with her fingers while she looked at the invitingly open door on the screen. ‘It will be a risk…’
Hautamaki laughed, the first time they had ever heard him do it, as he climbed into his pressure suit. ‘A trap! Do you believe they have gone to all this to set a trap for me? Such ego is preposterous. And if it were a trap—do you think it possible to stay out of it?’
He pushed himself free of the ship. His suited figure floated away, getting smaller and smaller.
Silently, moving closer together without realizing they did so, they watched the meeting on the screen. They saw Hautamaki drawn gently in through the open doorway until his feet touched the floor. He turned to look as the door closed, while from the radio they heard a hissing, very dimly at first, then louder and louder.
‘It sounds like they are pressurizing the room,’ Gulyas said.
Hautamaki nodded. ‘Yes, I can hear it now, and there is a reading on the external pressure gauge. As soon as it reaches atmospheric normal I’m taking my helmet off.’
Tjond started to protest, but stopped when her husband raised his hand in warning. This was Hautamaki’s decision to make.
‘Smells perfectably breathable,’ Hautamaki said, ‘though it has a metallic odour.’
He laid his helmet aside and stripped his suit off. The alien was standing at the partition and Hautamaki walked over until they stood face to face, almost the same height. The alien placed his palm flat against the transparent wall and the human put his hand over the same spot. They met, as close as they could, separated only by a centimetre of substance. Their eyes joined and they stared for a long time, trying to read intent, trying to communicate. The alien turned away first, walking over to a table littered with a variety of objects. It picked up the nearest one and held it for Hautamaki to see. ‘Kilt‘ the alien said. It looked like a piece of stone.
Hautamaki for the first time took notice of the table on his side of the partition. It appeared to hold the identical objects as the other table, and the first of these was a lump of ordinary stone. He picked it up.
‘Stone,’ he said, then turned to the television pickup and the unseen viewers in the ship. ‘It appears that a language lesson is first. This is obvious. See that this is recorded separately. Then we can programme the computor for machine translation in case the aliens aren’t doing it themselves.’
The language lesson progressed slowly once the stock of simple nouns with physical referents had been exhausted.
Films were shown, obviously prepared long before, showing simple actions, and bit by bit verbs and tenses were exchanged. The alien made no attempt to learn their language, he just worked to ensure accuracy of identity in the words. They were recording too. As the language lesson progressed Gulyas’s frown deepened, and he started to make notes, then a list that he checked off. Finally he interrupted the lesson.
‘Hautamaki—this is important. Find out if they are just accumulating a vocabulary or if they are feeding a MT with this material.’
The answer came from the alien itself. It turned its head sideways, as if listening to a distant voice, then spoke into a cup-like device at the end of a wire. A moment later Hautamaki’s voice spoke out, toneless since each word had been recorded separately.
‘I talk through a machine… I talk my talk… a machine talk your talk to you… I am Liem… we need have more words in machine before talk well.’
‘This can’t wait,’ Gulyas said. Tell them that we want a sample of some of their body cells, any cells at all. It is complex, but try to get it across.’
The aliens were agreeable. They did not insist on a specimen in return, but accepted one. A sealed container brought a frozen sliver of what looked like muscle tissue over to the ship. Gulyas started towards the lab.
Take care of the recordings,’ he told his wife. ‘I don’t think this will take too long.’
V
It didn’t. Within the hour he had returned, coming up so silently that Tjond, intent on listening to the language lesson, did not notice him until he stood next to her.
‘Your face,’ she said. ‘What is wrong? What did you discover?’
He smiled dryly at her. ‘Nothing terrible, I assure you. But things are very different from what we supposed.’
What is it?’ Hautamaki asked from the screen. He had heard their voices and turned towards the pickup.
‘How has the language progressed?’ Gulyas asked. ‘Can you understand me, Liem?’
‘Yes,’ the alien said, ‘almost all of the words are clear now. But the machine has only a working force of a few thousand words so you must keep your speech simple.’
‘I understand. The things I want to say are very simple. First a question. Your people, do they come from a planet orbiting about a star near here?’
‘No. We have travelled a long way to this star, searching. My home world is there, among those stars there.’
‘Do all your people live on that world?’
‘No, we live on many worlds, but we are all children of children of children of people who lived on one world very long ago.’
‘Our people have also settled many worlds, but we all come from one world,’ Gulyas told him, then looked down at the paper in his hands. He smiled at the alien in the screen before him, but there was something terribly sad about this smile. ‘We came originally from a planet named Earth. That is where your people came from too. We are brothers, Liem.’
‘What madness is this?’ Hautamaki shouted at him, his face swollen and angry. ‘Liem is humanoid, not human! It cannot breathe our air!’
‘He cannot breath our air, or perhaps she,’ Gulyas answered quietly. ‘We do not use gene manipulation, but we know that it is possible. I’m sure we will eventually discover just how Liem’s people were altered to live under the physical conditions they do now. It might have been natural selection and normal mutation, but it seems too drastic a change to be explained that way. But that is not important. This is.’ He held up the sheets of notes and photographs. ‘You can see for yourself. This is the DNR chain from the nucleus of one of my own cells. This is Liem’s. They are identical. His people are as human as we are.
‘They can’t be!’ Tjond shook her head in bewilderment. ‘Just look at him, he is so different, and their alphabet—what about that? I cannot be wrong about that?’
There is one possibility you did not allow for, a totally independent alphabet. You yourself told me that there is not the slightest similarity between the Chinese ideographs and western letters. If Liem’s people suffered a cultural disaster that forced them to completely reinvent writing you would have your alien alphabet. As to the way they look—just consider the thousands of centuries that have passed since mankind left Earth and you will see that his physical differences are minor. Some are natural and some may have been artificially achieved, but germ plasm cannot lie. We are all the sons of man.’
‘It is possible,’ Liem said, speaking for the first time. ‘I am informed that our biologists agree with you. Our points of difference are minor when compared to the points of similarity. Where is this Earth you come from?’
Hautamaki pointed at the sky above them, at the star-filled sweep of the Milky Way, burning with massed stars. ‘There, far out there on the other side of the core, roughly half way around the lens of the galaxy.’
The galactic core explains partially what must have happened,’ Gulyas said. It is thousands of light-years in diameter and over 10,000 degrees in temperature. We have explored its fringes. No ship could penetrate it or even approach too closely because of the dust clouds that surround it. So we have expanded outwards, slowly circling the rim of the galaxy, moving away from Earth. If we stopped to think about it we should have realized that mankind was moving the other way too, in the opposite direction around the wheel.’
‘And sometime we would have to meet,’ Liem said. ‘Now I greet you, brothers. And I am sad, because I know what this means.’
‘We are alone,’ Hautamaki said, looking at the massed trillions of stars. ‘We have closed the circle and found only ourselves. The galaxy is ours, but we are alone.’ He turned about not realizing that Liem, the golden alien—the main—had turned at the same time in the same manner.
They faced outwards, looking at the infinite depth and infinite blackness of intergalactic space, empty of stars. Dimly, distantly, there were spots of light, microscopic blurs against the darkness, not stars but island universes, like the one at whose perimeter they stood.
These two beings were different in many ways: in the air they breathed, the colour of their skins, their languages, mannerisms, cultures. They were as different as the day is from the night: the flexible fabric of mankind had been warped by the countless centuries until they could no longer recognize each other. But time, distance and mutation could not change one thing; they were still men, still human.
‘It is certain then,’ Hautamaki said, ‘we are alone in the galaxy.’
‘Alone in this galaxy.’
They looked at each other, then glanced away. At that moment they measured their humanness against the same rule and were equal.
For they had turned at the same instant and looked outward into intergalactic space, towards the infinitely remote light that was another island galaxy.
‘It will be difficult to get there,’ someone said.
They had lost a battle. There was no defeat.
II Big Ancestors and Great Descendants
Poul Anderson: LORD OF A THOUSAND SUNS
F L Wallace: BIG ANCESTOR
Roger Dee: THE INTERLOPERS
EPILOGUE
* * *
It was not just starships and communication and pageantry which flashed across the galaxy from planet to planet. It was also a stream of blood. In that stream of blood was born man’s genetic inheritance, shaping him even as he shaped his heritage.
As the stream of blood carried the taste of the primaeval ocean from which life was born, it also carried the message from which future life—unimaginable and perhaps incomprehensible to us—would spring.
What is our place in the galaxy? It is a serious question, and no very serious answer is attempted in this volume. Olaf Stapledon attempted a serious answer and for those who are interested his mighty chronicle-novel, Star Maker, is strongly recommended. It is the great fictional work about the galaxy and the universe, and the destiny of mankind.
Working in a much lighter vein, Roger Dee and F L Wallace present opposed speculations on the subject. In Dee’s story, an Earthman speaks: ‘A hundred thousand races from rim to rim of the galaxy—the least of them, so far as Clowdis had seen, older and wiser and infinitely stronger that his own upstart culture—suspended opinion when the T’sai spoke.’ The T’sai are the galactic masters. Note how the cyclic pattern once more imposes itself.
At least indirectly, The Interlopers is about what we may become, and so forms a fitting conclusion to our history. In contrast, Big Ancestor looks back on what we were—and by so doing reflects on our future role in galactic terms. A nice story, and as nasty as they come.
Both these stories run on logic, lubricated by a little prejudice. Whereas Lord of a Thousand Suns is an extravagant emotional exercise in the youthful Poul Anderson’s best vein. It is crammed full of those mythopoeic archetypes to which our friendly reviewer, previously quoted, made mention. ‘I who was Daryesh of Tollogh, lord of a thousand suns and lover of Ilorna the Fair, immortalized noble of the greatest empire the universe has ever seen—I am now trapped in the half-evolved body of a hunted alien, a million years after the death of all which mattered…’
We all experience, on one level or another, similar dualities in our being. Perhaps that is what attracts us to galactic empire-building in the first place. The hope of establishing against the loneliness and majesty of the cosmos a few humble warm-blooded, human institutions appeases the two sides of our nature—the individual side which responds with affection to other individuals, and the evolutionary side which we can never properly know, since its time-scale is not ours, as it burns like a green fuse towards whatever remote destiny awaits humankind on whatever remote mountainside.
Blood’s a rover, as they say. Where it will take us is anyone’s guess.
A Man without a World, this 1,000,000 year-old-Daryesh! Once Lord of a Thousand Suns, now condemned to rove the spaceways in alien form, searching for love, for life, for the great lost Vwyrdda.
LORD OF A THOUSAND SUNS
By Poul Anderson
‘Yes, you’ll find almost anything man has ever imagined, somewhere out in the Galaxy,’ I said. There are so damned many millions of planets, and such a fantastic variety of surface conditions and of life evolving to meet them, and of intelligence and civilization appearing in that life. Why, I’ve been on worlds with fire-breathing dragons, and on worlds where dwarfs fought things that could pass for the goblins our mothers used to scare us with, and on a planet where a race of witches lived—telepathic pseudohypnosis, you know—oh, I’ll bet there’s not a tall story or fairy tale ever told which doesn’t have some kind of counterpart somewhere in the universe.’
Laird nodded. ‘Uh-huh,’ he answered, in that oddly slow and soft voice of his. ‘I once let a genie out of a bottle.’
‘Eh? What happened?’
‘It killed me.’
I opened my mouth to laugh, and then took a second glance at him and shut it again. He was just too dead-pan serious about it. Not poker-faced, the way a good actor can be when he’s slipping over a tall one—no, there was a sudden misery behind his eyes, and somehow it was mixed with the damnedest cold humor.
I didn’t know Laird very well. Nobody did. He was out most of the time on Galactic Survey, prowling a thousand eldritch planets never meant for human eyes. He came back to the Solar System more rarely and for briefer visits than anyone else in his job, and had less to say about what he had found.
A huge man, six-and-a-half feet tall, with dark aquiline features and curiously brilliant greenish-grey eyes, middle-aged now though it didn’t show except at the temples. He was courteous enough to everyone, but shortspoken and slow to laugh. Old friends, who had known him thirty years before when he was the gayest and most reckless officer in the Solar Navy, thought something during the Revolt had changed him more than any psychologist would admit was possible. But he had never said anything about it, merely resigning his commission after the war and going into Survey.
We were sitting alone in a corner of the lounge. The Lunar branch of the Explorers’ Club maintains its building outside the main dome of Selene Center, and we were sitting beside one of the great windows, drinking Centaurian sidecars and swapping the inevitable shop-talk. Even Laird indulged in that, though I suspected more because of the information he could get than for any desire of companionship.
Behind us, the long quiet room was almost empty. Before us, the window opened on the raw magnificence of moonscape, a sweep of crags and cliffs down the crater wall to the riven black plains, washed in the eerie blue of Earth’s light. Space blazed above us, utter black and a million sparks of frozen flame.
‘Come again?’ I said.
He laughed, without much humor. ‘I might as well tell you,’ he said. ‘You won’t believe it, and even if you did it’d make no difference. Sometimes I tell the story—alcohol makes me feel like it—I start remembering old times…’
He settled farther back in his chair. ‘Maybe it wasn’t a real genie,’ he went on. ‘More of a ghost, perhaps. That was a haunted planet. They were great a million years before man existed on Earth. They spanned the stars and they knew things the present civilization hasn’t even guessed at. And then they died. Their own weapons swept them away in one burst of fire, and only broken ruins were left—ruins and desert, and the ghost who lay waiting in that bottle.’
