Benford, Gregory - If the stars are Gods

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GORDON EKLUND and GREGORY BENFORD

If the Stars Are Gods

Gordon Eklund was born in Seattle, served four years in the Air Force, and now lives in the San

Francisco Bay area. His first published story was a Nebula Award finalist in 1971. Since then he

has published some four dozen stories and five novels, including The Eclipse of Dawn, Beyond the

Resurrection, and All Times Possible. He is a full-time writer.

Gregory Benford is a part-time writer and a full-time associate professor of physics at the

University of California, Irvine, currently working in the areas of plasma turbulence and the

dynamics of relativistic electron beams. He has published numerous articles on science and two

science-fiction novels, Deeper than the Darkness and Jupiter Project.

They have collaborated on a Nebula Award-winning story about strange aliens and their even

stranger beliefs.

A dog cannot be a hypocrite, but neither can he be sincere.

-LUDWIG Wittgenstein

It was deceptively huge and massive, this alien starship, and somehow seemed as if it belonged

almost anywhere else in the universe but here.

Reynolds stepped carefully down the narrow corridor of the ship, still replaying in his mind's eye

the approach to the air lock, the act of being swallowed. The ceilings were high, the light poor,

the walls made of some dull, burnished metal.

These aspects and others flitted through his mind as he walked. Reynolds. was a man who

appreciated the fine interlacing pleasures of careful thought, but more than that, thinking so

closely of these things kept his mind occupied and drove away the smell. It clung to him like

Pacific fog. Vintage manure, Reynolds had decided the moment he passed through the air lock.

Turning, he had glared at Kelly firmly encased inside her suit. He told her about the smell.

"Everybody stinks," she had said, evenly, perhaps joking, perhaps not, and pushed him away in the

light centrifugal gravity. Away, into a maze of tight passages that would lead him eventually to

look the first certified intelligent alien beings straight in the eye. If they happened to have

eyes, that is.

It amused him that this privilege should be his. More rightly,

the honor should have gone to another, someone younger whose tiny paragraph in the future

histories of the human race had not already been enacted. At fifty-eight, Reynolds had long since

lived a full and intricate lifetime. Too full, he sometimes thought, for any one man. So then,

what about this day now? What about today? It did nothing really, only succeeded in forcing the

fullness of his lifetime past the point of all reasonableness into a realm of positive absurdity.

The corridor branched again. He wondered precisely where he was inside the sculpted and twisted

skin of the ship. He had tried to memorize everything he saw but there was nothing, absolutely

nothing but metal with thin seams, places where he had to stoop or crawl, and the same awful

smell. He realized now what it was about the ship that had bothered him the first time he had seen

it, through a telescope from the moon. It reminded him, both in size and shape, of a building

where he had once lived not so many years ago, during the brief term of his most recent

retirement, 1987 and '88, in Sao Paulo, Brazil: a huge ultramodern lifting apartment complex of a

distinctly radical design. There was nothing like it on Earth, the advertising posters had

proclaimed; and seeing it, hating it instantly, he had agreed. Now here was something else truly

like it, but not on Earth.

The building had certainly not resembled a starship, but then, neither did this thing. At one end

was an intricately designed portion, a cylinder with interesting modifications. Then came a long,

plain tube and at the end of that something truly absurd: a cone, opening outward away from the

rest of the ship and absolutely empty. Absurd, until you realized what it was.

The starship's propulsion source was, literally, hydrogen bombs. The central tube evidently held a

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vast number of fusion devices. One by one the bombs were released, drifted to the mouth of the

cone and were detonated. The cone was a huge shock absorber; the kick from the bomb pushed the

ship forward. A Rube Goldberg star drive

Directly ahead of him, the corridor neatly stopped and split, like the twin prongs of a roasting

fork. It jogged his memory: roasting fork, yes, from the days when he still ate meat. Turning

left, he followed the proper prong. His directions had been quite clear.

He still felt very ill at ease. Maybe it was the way he was dressed that made everything seem so

totally wrong. It didn't

seem quite right, walking through an alien maze in his shirtsleeves and plain trousers.

Pedestrian.

But the air was breathable, as promised. Did they breathe this particular oxygen-nitrogen

balance, too? And like the smell?

Ahead, the corridor parted, branching once more. The odor was horribly powerful at this

spot, and he ducked his head low, almost choking, and dashed through a round opening.

This was a big room. Like the corridor, the ceiling was a good seven meters above the

floor, but the walls were subdued pastel shades of red, orange and yellow. The colors were mixed

on all the walls in random, patternless designs. It was very pretty, Reynolds thought, and not at

all strange. Also, standing neatly balanced near the back wall, there were two aliens.

When he saw the creatures, Reynolds stopped and stood tall. Raising his eyes, he stretched

to reach the level of their eyes. While he did this, he also reacted. His first reaction was

shock. This gave way to the tickling sensation of surprise. Then pleasure and relief. He liked the

looks of these two creatures. They were certainly far kinder toward the eyes than what he had

expected to find.

Stepping forward, Reynolds stood before both aliens, shifting his gaze from one to the

other. Which was the leader? Or were both leaders? Or neither? He decided to wait. But neither

alien made a sound or a move. So Reynolds kept waiting.

What had he expected to find? Men? Something like a man, that is, with two arms and two

legs and a properly positioned head, with a nose, two eyes and a pair of floppy ears? This was

what Kelly had expected him to find-she would be disappointed now-but Reynolds had never believed

it for a moment. Kelly thought anything that spoke English had to be a man, but Reynolds was more

imaginative. He knew better; he had not expected to find a man, not even a man with four arms and

three legs and fourteen fingers or five ears. What he had expected to find was something truly

alien. A blob, if worst came to worst, but at best something more like a shark or snake or wolf

than a man. As soon as Kelly had told him that the aliens wanted to meet him-"Your man who best

knows your star"-he had known this.

Now he said, "I am the man you wished to see. The one who knows the stars."

As he spoke, he carefully shared his gaze with both aliens, still searching for a leader,

favoring neither over the other. One-the smaller one-twitched a nostril when Reynolds said, ". . .

the stars"; the other remained motionless.

There was one Earth animal that did resemble these creatures, and this was why Reynolds

felt happy and relieved. The aliens were sufficiently alien, yes. And they were surely not men.

But neither did they resemble blobs or wolves or sharks or snakes They were giraffes. Nice, kind,

friendly, pleasant, smiling, silent giraffes. There were some differences; of course. The aliens'

skin was a rainbow collage of pastel purples, greens, reds and yellows, similar in its random

design to the colorfully painted walls. Their trunks stood higher off the ground, their necks were

stouter than that of a normal giraffe. They did not have tails. Nor hooves. Instead, at the bottom

of each of their four legs, they had five blunt short fingers and a single wide thick offsetting

thumb.

"My name is Bradley Reynolds," he said. "I know the stars." Despite himself, their

continued silence made him nervous. "Is something wrong?" he asked.

The shorter alien bowed its neck toward him. Then, in a shrill high-pitched voice that

reminded him of a child, it said, "No. " An excited nervous child. "That is no," it said.

"This?" Reynolds lifted his hand, having almost forgotten what was in it. Kelly had

ordered him to carry the tape recorder, but now he could truthfully say, "I haven't activated it

yet."

"Break it, please," the alien said.

Reynolds did not protest or argue. He let the machine fall to the floor. Then he jumped,

landing on the tape recorder with both feet. The light aluminum case split wide open like the hide

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of a squashed apple. Once more, Reynolds jumped. Then, standing calmly, he kicked the broken bits

of glass and metal toward an unoccupied comer of the room. "All right?" he asked.

Now for the first time the second alien moved. Its nostrils twitched daintily, then its

legs shifted, lifting and falling. "Welcome," it said, abruptly, stopping all motion. "My name is

Jonathon. "

"Your name?" asked Reynolds.

"And this is Richard."

"Oh," said Reynolds, not contradicting. He understood now. Having learned the language of man,

these creatures had learned his names as well.

"We wish to know your star," Jonathon said respectfully. His voice was a duplicate of the other's.

Did the fact that he had not spoken until after the destruction of the tape recorder indicate that

he was the leader of the two? Reynolds almost laughed, listening to the words of his own thoughts.

Not he, he reminded himself: it.

"I am willing to tell you whatever you wish to know," Reynolds said.

"You are a . . . priest . . . a reverend of the sun?"

"An astronomer," Reynolds corrected.

"We would like to know everything you know. And then we would like to visit and converse with your

star. "

"Of course. I will gladly help you in any way I can." Kelly had cautioned him in advance that the

aliens were interested in the sun, so none of this came as any surprise to him. But nobody knew

what it was in particular that they wanted to know, or why, and Kelly hoped that he might be able

to find out. At the moment he could think of only two possible conversational avenues to take;

both were questions. He tried the first. "What is it you wish to know? Is our star greatly

different from others of its type? If it is, we are unaware of this fact."

"No two stars are the same," the alien said. This was Jonathon again. Its voice began to rise in

excitement. "What is it? Do you not wish to speak here? Is our craft an unsatisfactory place?"

"No, this is fine," Reynolds said, wondering if it was wise to continue concealing his puzzlement.

"I will tell you what I know. Later, I can bring books."

"No!" The alien did not shout, but from the way its legs quivered and nostrils trembled, Reynolds

gathered he had said something very improper indeed.

"I will tell you," he said. "In my own words."

Jonathon stood quietly rigid. "Fine."

Now it was time for Reynolds to ask his second question. He let it fall within the long silence

which had followed Jonathon's last statement. "Why do you wish to know about our star?"

"It is the reason why we have come here. On our travels, we have visited many stars. But it is

yours we have sought the

longest. It is so powerful. And benevolent. A rare combination, as you must know."

"Very rare," Reynolds said, thinking that this wasn't making. any sense. But then, why should it?

At least he had learned something of the nature of the aliens' mission, and that alone was more

than anyone else had managed to learn during the months the aliens had slowly approached the moon,

exploding their hydrogen bombs to decelerate.

A sudden burst of confidence surprised Reynolds. He had not felt this sure of himself in years,

and just like before, there was no logical reason for his certainty. "Would you be willing to

answer some questions for me? About your star?"

"Certainly, Bradley Reynolds."

"Can you tell me our name for your star? Its coordinates?".

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