Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

“Gods, Adel.” She took a step toward him. “Don’t.”

Adel muted his opposites then; he knew exactly what he needed to do. “Speedy!” he called out. “We know that you’re decelerating.”

Meri shrieked in horror. Jonman came out of his chair so quickly that his tether knocked several of the blocks off the tikra board. Kamilah staggered and slumped against a ruby sideboard.

“Why, Adel?” said Jarek. “Why?”

“Because she knows we know.” Adel picked himself up off the Berber carpet. “She can scan planets twenty light-years away and you don’t think she can see us dropping rocks on her own surface?” He straightened his cape. “You’ve trapped yourselves in this lie better than she ever could.”

“You do look, my son, as if something is bothering you.” The Godspeed’s fetch stepped from behind the statue of Levia Calla. She was in costume as Prospero.

“What did… ?”

“Speedy, we don’t…”

“You have to…”

“Where is… ?”

The Godspeed made a grand flourish that ended with her arm raised high above her head. She ignored their frantic questions, holding this pose until they fell silent. Then she nodded and smiled gaily at her audience.

“Cheer up,” she said, her voice swelling with bombast. “The party’s almost over. Our actors were all spirits and have melted into air, into thin air. There was never anything here, no soaring towers or gorgeous palaces or solemn temples. This make-believe world is about to blow away like a cloud, leaving not even a wisp behind. We are the stuff that dreams are made of, and our little lives begin and end in sleep. You must excuse me, I’m feeling rather odd just now. My old brain is troubled. But don’t worry. Tell you what, why don’t you just wait here a few more minutes? I’m going to take a turn outside to settle myself.”

The Godspeed paused expectantly as if waiting for applause. But the pilgrims were too astonished to do or say anything, and so she bowed and, without saying another word, dissolved the fetch.

“What was that?” said Robman.

“The end of Act IV, scene 1,” said Adel grimly.

“But what does it mean?” said Meri.

Jarek put his hand to her cheek but then let it fall again. “I think Adel is right. I think we’re…”

At that moment, the prazz sentry ship struck the Godspeed a mortal blow, crashing into its surface just forty meters from the backside thruster and compromising the magnetic storage rings that contained the antimatter generated by collider. The sonic blast was deafening as the entire asteroid lurched. Then came the explosion. The pilgrims flew across the Blue Salon like leaves in a storm amidst broken furniture and shattered glass. Alarms screamed and Adel heard the distant hurricane roar of escaping air. Then the lights went out and for long and hideous moment Adel Ranger Santos lay in darkness, certain that he was about to die. But the lights came up again and he found himself scratched and bruised but not seriously hurt. He heard a moan that he thought might be Kamilah. A man was crying behind an overturned desk. “Is everyone all right?” called Jarek. “Talk to me.”

The fetch reappeared in the midst of this chaos, still in costume. Adel had never seen her flicker before. “I’m afraid,” said the Godspeed to no one in particular, “that I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

The Alien is worshipped on almost all the worlds of the Continuum. While various religions offer divergent views of the Alien, they share two common themes. One is that the Alien gods are—or were once—organic intelligences whose motives are more or less comprehensible. The other is that the gods are absent. The Mission of Tsef promises adherents that they can achieve psychic unity with benign alien nuns who are meditating on their behalf somewhere in the M5 globular cluster. The Cosmic Ancestors are the most popular of the many panspermian religions; they teach that our alien parents seeded earth with life in the form of bacterial stromatolites some 3.7 billion years ago. There are many who hold that humanity’s greatest prophets, like Jesus and Ellen and Smike, were aliens come to share the gospel of a loving universe while the Uplift believes that an entire galactic civilization translated itself to a higher reality but left behind astronomical clues for us to decipher so that we can join them someday. It is true that the Glogites conceive of Glog as unknowable and indifferent to humankind, but there is very little discernable difference between them and people who worship black holes.

We find it impossible to imagine a religion that would worship the prazz, but then we know so little about them—or it. Not only is the prazz not organic, but it seems to have a deep-seated antipathy toward all life. Why this should be we can’t say: we find the prazz incomprehensible. Even the Godspeed , the only intelligence to have any extended contact with the prazz, misjudged it—them—entirely.

Here are a few of most important questions for which we have no answer:

What exactly are the prazz?

Are they one or many?

Where did they come from?

Why was a sentry posted between our Local Arm and the Sagittarius-Carina Arm of the Milky Way?

Are there more sentries?

And most important of all: what are the intentions of the prazz now that they know about us?

What we can say is this: in the one thousand and eighty-sixth year of her mission, the Godspeed detected a communication burst from a source less than a light-year away. Why the prazz sentry chose this precise moment to signal is unknown; the Godspeed had been sweeping that sector of space for years and had seen no activity. Acting in accordance with the protocols for first contact, she attempted a stealth scan, which revealed the source as a small robotic ship powered by a matter-antimatter engine. Unfortunately, the prazz sentry sensed that it was being scanned and was able to get a fix on the Godspeed . What she should have done at that point was to alert the Continuum of her discovery and continue to track the sentry without making contact. That she did otherwise reflects the unmistakable drift of her persona from threshold norms. Maybe she decided that following procedures lacked dramatic flair. Or perhaps the discovery of the prazz stirred some inexpressible longing for companionship in the Godspeed , who was herself an inorganic intelligence. In any event, she attempted to communicate with the prazz sentry and compartmentalized the resources she devoted to the effort so that she could continue to send nominal reports to the Continuum. This was a technique that she had used just once before, but to great effect; compartmentalization was how the Godspeed was able to keep her secrets. We understand now that the contact between the two ships was deeply flawed, and their misunderstandings profound. Nevertheless, they agreed to a rendezvous and the Godspeed began to decelerate to match course and velocity with the prazz sentry.

The highboy that killed Robman had crushed his chest and cut the tether that joined him to Jonman. Their blood was all over the floor. Adel had done his best for Jonman, clearing enough debris to lay him out flat, covering him with a carpet. He had tied the remaining length of tether off with wire stripped from the back of a ruined painting, but it still oozed. Adel was no medic but he was pretty sure that Jonman was dying; his face was as gray as his jacket. Kamilah didn’t look too bad but she was unconscious and breathing shallowly. Adel worried that she might have internal injuries. Meri’s arm was probably broken; when they tried to move her she moaned in agony. Jarek was kicking the slats out of a Yamucha chair back to make her a splint.