The Crystal Spheres Page 3

  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!

  To wait for that day, the races who came before us sleep at the edge of their timestretched black hole. Within, they abide to welcome us; and we shall sit out, together, the barren early years of the galaxies.

  I felt the last shreds of the old greatdepression dissipate as I contemplated the elegant solution of the Nataral. For so long we had feared that the Universe was a practical joker, and that our place in it was to be victims—patsies. But now, at last, my darkthoughts shattered like an eggshell… like the walls of a crystalcage.

  I held my woman close. She sighed something said in dreamthought. As sleep finally came, I felt better than I had in a thousand years. I felt so very, very young.

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  Sometimes the borderlines between science and fiction seem fuzzy. This has never been more true than in the topic of exobiology or SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

  To most students of the subject it now appears that we are alone, that the Earth has never been visited by beings from other stars. (Erich Von Daniken’s fables, and those of UFO enthusiasts, describe beings who ore said to behave in ways that could hardly be called “intelligent.”)

  The new hypothesis, called the Uniqueness View, contends that aliens cannot exist, for if they did, they would have filled the galaxy long ago. A leader of the Uniqueness View, Frank Tipler, of Tulane University, claims that people who still dream of contact suffer from an innate human fear of loneliness, a fear that the courageous rise above in order to contemplate a universe that our descendants will fill.

  Carl Sagan, a Contact defender, counters that Tipler and his kind suffer from an innate human fear of the alien, which the courageous rise above… you see how it goes.

  I have participated in this debate in the astronomical journals. Earning no love from either side, my papers have said, “Stop! You both may be right!” For now, we gain more by careful thought and data collection than by yelling at each other.

  Some hypotheses, however, are too weird even to be included in speculative scientific papers. The theme behind “The Crystal Spheres” is one such idea. I dared not insert it in my upcoming non-fiction book on SETI, but I did think it might make a nice story.

  A final note on the short story as a sub-genre. About half of the professionally published short fiction in the English language is science fiction, because of the thriving SF magazines. For a novice, such markets as Atlantic or The New Yorker are nearly inaccessible. Not so Analog, or Asimov’s Magazine, or F&SF. These publications are where much of the exciting short fiction of our time is being presented.

  Science fiction is friendly to beginners, I’m very glad to say. “The Crystal Spheres” was awarded the 1985 Hugo Award for the short story category.

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