David Brin: The Crystal Spheres

Cardenas motioned me over to a holistank he had set up at the base of the Obelisk. As we put our hands into the blackness, a light appeared on the face of the monolith. Where the light traveled, we would touch, and feel the passion of those final days of the Nataral.

I stroked the finetuned, softresonant surface. Cardenas led me, and I felt the Endingtime as the Nataral meant it to be felt.

Like us, the Nataral had passed through a long period of bitterness, even longer than we had endured until now. To them, indeed, it seemed as if the universe was a great, sick joke.

Life was found everywhere among the stars. But intelligence arose only slowly and rarely, with many false starts. Where it did occur, it was often in a form that did not happen to covet space or other planets.

But if the crystalspheres had not existed, the rare sites where starfaring developed would spread outward. Species like us would expand, and eventually make contact with one another, instead of searching forever among sandgrains. An elder race might arrive where another was just getting started, and help it over some of its crises.

If the crystalspheres had not existed…

But that was not to be. Starfarers could not spread, because crystalspheres could only be broken from the inside! What a cruel universe it was!

Or so the Nataral had thought.

But they persevered. And after ages spent hunting for the miraculous goodstar, their farprobes found five water-worlds unprotected by deathbarriers.

My touchhand trembled as I stroked the coordinates of these accessible planets. My throat caught at the magnitude of the gift that had been given us on this obelisk. No wonder Cardenas had made me wait! I, too, would linger when I showed it to Alice.

But then, I wondered, where had the Nataral gone? And why? With six worlds, surely their morale would have lifted!

There was a confusing place on the Obelisk… talk of black holes and of time . I touched the spot again and again, while Cardenas watched my reaction. Finally, I understood.

“Great Egg!” I cried. The revelation of what had happened made the discovery of the five goodworlds pale into insignificance.

“Is that what the crystalspheres are for?”

I couldn’t believe it.

Cardenas smiled. “Watch out for teleology, Joshua. It is true that the barriers would seem to show the hand of the creator at work. But it might be simply circumstance, rather than some grand design.

“All that we do know is this. Without the crystalspheres, we ourselves would not exist. Intelligence would be more rare than it already is. And the stars would be almost barren of life.

“We have cursed the crystalspheres for ten thousand years,” Cardenas sighed. “The Nataral did so for far longer—until they at last understood.”

If the crystalspheres had not existed…

I thought about it that night, as I stared up at the shimmering, pale light from the drifting Shards, through which the brighter stars still shone.

If the crystalspheres had not existed, then there would come to each galaxy a first race of star-treaders. Even if most intelligences were stay-at-homes, the coming of an aggressive, colonizing species was inevitable, sooner or later.

If the crystalspheres had not existed, the first such star-treaders would have gone out and taken all the worlds they found. They would have settled all the waterworlds, and civilized the smallbodies around every single goodstar.

Two centuries before we discovered our crystalsphere, we humans had already started wondering why this had never happened to Earth. Why, during the three billion years that Earth was “choice real estate,” had no race like us come along and colonized it?

We found out it was because of the deathbarrier surrounding Sol, which kept our crude little ancestors safe from interference from the outside… which let our nursery world nurture us in peace and isolation.

If the crystalspheres had not been, then the first star-treaders would have filled the galaxy, perhaps the universe. It is what we would have done, had the barriers not been there. The histories of those worlds would be forever changed. And there is no way to imagine the death-of-possibility that would have resulted.

So, the barriers protected worlds until they developed life capable of cracking the shells from within.

But what was the point? What benefit was there in protecting some young thing, only for it to grow up into bitter, cramped loneliness in adulthood?

Imagine what it must have been like for the very first race of star-treaders. Never, were they patient as Job, would they find another goodstar to possess. Not until the next egg cracked would they have neighbors to talk to.

No doubt they despaired long before that.

Now we, humanity, had been gifted of six beautiful worlds. And if we could not meet the Nataral, we could, at least, read their books and come to know them. And from their careful records we could learn about the still earlier races which had emerged from each of the other five goodworlds, each into a lonely universe.

Perhaps in another billion years the universe will more closely resemble the sciencefictional schemes of my grandfather’s day. Maybe then commerce will plow the starlanes between busy, talky worlds.

But we, like the Nataral, came too early for that. We are cursed, if we hang around until that day, to be an Elder Race.

I looked one more time toward the constellation we named Phoenix, whither the Nataral had departed millions of our years ago. I could not see the dark star where they had gone. But I knew exactly where it lay. They had left explicit instructions.

Then I turned and entered the tent that I shared with Alice and our child, leaving the stars and shards behind me.

Tomorrow would be a busy day. I had promised Alice that we might begin building a house on a hillside not far from Oldcity.

She muttered some dreamtalk and cuddled close as I slipped into bed beside her. The baby slept quietly in her cradle a few feet away. I held Alice, and breathed slowly.

But sleep came only gradually. I kept thinking about what the Nataral had given us.

Correction… what they had lent us.

We could use their six worlds, on the condition we were kind to them. Those were the same conditions they had accepted when they took the four worlds long abandoned by the Lap-Klenno, their predecessors on the lonely starlanes… and that the Lap-Klenno had agreed to on inheriting the three Thwoozoon suns…

So long as the urge to spreadsettle was primary in us, the worlds were ours, and any others we happened upon.

But someday our priorities would change. Elbowroom would no longer be our chief fixation. More and more, the Nataral had understood, we would begin to think instead about loneliness.

I knew they were right. Someday my great-to-the-nth descendants would find that they could no longer bear a universe without other voices in it. They would tire of these beautiful worlds, and pack up the entire tribe to head for a darkstar.

There, within the event horizon of a great black hole, they would find the Nataral, and the Lap-Klenno, and the Thwoozoon, waiting in a cup of suspended time.

I listened to the wind gentleflapping the tent, and envied my great-nth grandchildren. I, at least, would like to meet the other star-treaders, so very much like us.

Oh, we could wait around for a few billion years, till that distant time when most of the shells have cracked, and the universe bustles with activity. But by then we would have changed. By necessity we would indeed have become an ElderRace…

But what species in its right mind would choose such a fate? Better, by far, to stay young until the universe finally becomes a fun place to enjoy!