From the Ocean from teh Stars (54 page)

swing around us in silent, endless arcs beyond the flawlessly clear plastic
of the observation port.

It was, I think, the apparent incongruity of my position that caused
most amusement to the crew. In vain I would point to my three papers in the
Astrophysical Journal,
my five in the
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
I would remind them that my order has long been
famous for its scientific works. We may be few now, but ever since the
eighteenth century we have made contributions to astronomy and geo
physics out of all proportion to our numbers. Will my report on the
Phoenix Nebula end our thousand years of history? It will end, I fear,
much more than that.

I do not know who gave the nebula its name, which seems to me a very bad one. If it contains a prophecy, it is one that cannot be verified
for several billion years. Even the word nebula is misleading: this is a
far smaller object than those stupendous clouds of mist—the stuff of un
born stars—that are scattered throughout the length of the Milky Way. On
the cosmic scale, indeed, the Phoenix Nebula is a tiny thing—a tenuous
shell of gas surrounding a single star.

Or what is left of a star . . .

The Rubens engraving of Loyola seems to mock me as it hangs there
above the spectrophotometer tracings. What would
you,
Father, have
made of this knowledge that has come into my keeping, so far from the little world that was all the universe you knew? Would your faith have
risen to the challenge, as mine has failed to do?

You gaze into the distance, Father, but I have traveled a distance beyond any that you could have imagined when you founded our order
a thousand years ago. No other survey ship has been so far from Earth:
we are at the very frontiers of the explored universe. We set out to reach
the Phoenix Nebula, we succeeded, and we are homeward bound with
our burden of knowledge. I wish I could lift that burden from my shoul
ders, but I call to you in vain across the centuries and the light-years that
lie between us.

On the book you are holding the words are plain to read,
ad
maiorem dei gloriam,
the message runs, but it is a message I can no
longer believe. Would you still believe it, if you could see what we have
found?

We knew, of course, what the Phoenix Nebula was. Every year, in
our galaxy alone, more than a hundred stars explode, blazing for a few
hours or days with thousands of times their normal brilliance before they
sink back into death and obscurity. Such are the ordinary novae—the
commonplace disasters of the universe. I have recorded the spectrograms

and light curves of dozens since I started working at the Lunar Observa
tory.

But three or four times in every thousand years occurs something
beside which even a nova pales into total insignificance.

When a star becomes a
supernova,
it may for a little while outshine
all the massed suns of the galaxy. The Chinese astronomers watched this
happen in
a.d.
1054, not knowing what it was they saw. Five centuries later, in 1572, a supernova blazed in Cassiopeia so brilliantly that it was visible in the daylight sky. There have been three more in the thousand
years that have passed since then.

Our mission was to visit the remnants of such a catastrophe, to recon
struct the events that led up to it, and, if possible, to learn its cause. We
came slowly in through the concentric shells of gas that had been blasted
out six thousand years before, yet were expanding still. They were im
mensely hot, radiating even now with a fierce violet light, but were far too tenuous to do us any damage. When the star had exploded, its outer
layers had been driven upward with such speed that they had escaped
completely from its gravitational field. Now they formed a hollow shell large enough to engulf a thousand solar systems, and at its center burned
the tiny, fantastic object which the star had now become—a White Dwarf, smaller than the Earth, yet weighing a million times as much.

The glowing gas shells were all around us, banishing the normal night of interstellar space. We were flying into the center of a cosmic bomb that had detonated millennia ago and whose incandescent fragments were still
hurtling apart. The immense scale of the explosion, and the fact that the
debris already covered a volume of space many billions of miles across,
robbed the scene of any visible movement. It would take decades before
the unaided eye could detect any motion in these tortured wisps and
eddies of gas, yet the sense of turbulent expansion was overwhelming.

We had checked our primary drive hours before, and were drifting
slowly toward the fierce little star ahead. Once it had been a sun like our
own, but it had squandered in a few hours the energy that should have
kept it shining for a million years. Now it was a shrunken miser, hoarding its resources as if trying to make amends for its prodigal youth.

No one seriously expected to find planets. If there had been any be
fore the explosion, they would have been boiled into puffs of vapor, and
their substance lost in the greater wreckage of the star itself. But we
made the automatic search, as we always do when approaching an un
known sun, and presently we found a single small world circling the star
at an immense distance. It must have been the Pluto of this vanished solar system, orbiting on the frontiers of the night. Too far from the central sun

ever to have known life, its remoteness had saved it from the fate of all
its lost companions.

The passing fires had seared its rocks and burned away the mantle
of frozen gas that must have covered it in the days before the disaster.
We landed, and we found the Vault.

Its builders had made sure that we should. The monolithic marker
that stood above the entrance was now a fused stump, but even the first
long-range photographs told us that here was the work of intelligence. A
little later we detected the continent-wide pattern of radioactivity that
had been buried in the rock. Even if the pylon above the Vault had been destroyed, this would have remained, an immovable and all but eternal
beacon calling to the stars. Our ship fell toward this gigantic bull's-eye
like an arrow into its target.

The pylon must have been a mile high when it was built, but now it
looked like a candle that had melted down into a puddle of wax. It took
us a week to drill through the fused rock, since we did not have the
proper tools for a task like this. We were astronomers, not archaeologists, but we could improvise. Our original purpose was forgotten: this lonely
monument, reared with such labor at the greatest possible distance from
the doomed sun, could have only one meaning. A civilization that knew
it was about to die had made its last bid for immortality.

It will take us generations to examine all the treasures that were
placed in the Vault. They had plenty of time to prepare, for their sun
must have given its first warnings many years before the final detonation.
Everything that they wished to preserve, all the fruit of their genius, they
brought here to this distant world in the days before the end, hoping that
some other race would find it and that they would not be utterly forgotten.
Would we have done as well, or would we have been too lost in our own
misery to give thought to a future we could never see or share?

If only they had had a little more time! They could travel freely
enough between the planets of their own sun, but they had not yet learned
to cross the interstellar gulfs, and the nearest solar system was a hundred
light-years away. Yet even had they possessed the secret of the Transfinite Drive, no more than a few millions could have been saved. Perhaps it was
better thus.

Even if they had not been so disturbingly human as their sculpture
shows, we could not have helped admiring them and grieving for their
fate. They left thousands of visual records and the machines for projecting
them, together with elaborate pictorial instructions from which it will not
be difficult to learn their written language. We have examined many of
these records, and brought to life for the first time in six thousand years

the warmth and beauty of a civilization that in many ways must have been
superior to our own. Perhaps they only showed us the best, and one can
hardly blame them. But their worlds were very lovely, and their cities
were built with a grace that matches anything of man's. We have watched
them at work and play, and listened to their musical speech sounding
across the centuries. One scene is still before my eyes—a group of chil
dren on a beach of strange blue sand, playing in the waves as children
play on Earth. Curious whiplike trees line the shore, and some very large
animal is wading in the shallows yet attracting no attention at all.

And sinking into the sea, still warm and friendly and life-giving, is
the sun that will soon turn traitor and obliterate all this innocent happi
ness.

Perhaps if we had not been so far from home and so vulnerable to
loneliness, we should not have been so deeply moved. Many of us had
seen the ruins of ancient civilizations on other worlds, but they had never
affected us so profoundly. This tragedy was unique. It is one thing for a
race to fail and die, as nations and cultures have done on Earth. But to
be destroyed so completely in the full flower of its achievement, leaving
no survivors—how could that be reconciled with the mercy of God?

My colleagues have asked me that, and I have given what answers
I can. Perhaps you could have done better, Father Loyola, but I have
found nothing in the
Exercitia Spiritualia
that helps me here. They were
not an evil people: I do not know what gods they worshiped, if indeed
they worshiped any. But I have looked back at them across the centuries,
and have watched while the loveliness they used their last strength to
preserve was brought forth again into the light of their shrunken sun.
They could have taught us much: why were they destroyed?

I know the answers that my colleagues will give when they get back
to Earth. They will say that the universe has no purpose and no plan, that
since a hundred suns explode every year in our galaxy, at this very mo
ment some race is dying in the depths of space. Whether that race has
done good or evil during its lifetime will make no difference in the end:
there is no divine justice, for there is no God.

Yet, of course, what we have seen proves nothing of the sort. Anyone
who argues thus is being swayed by emotion, not logic. God has no need
to justify His actions to man. He who built the universe can destroy it
when He chooses. It is arrogance—it is perilously near blasphemy—for
us to say what He may or may not do.

This I could have accepted, hard though it is to look upon whole
worlds and peoples thrown into the furnace. But there comes a point

when even the deepest faith must falter, and now, as I look at the calcula
tions lying before me, I know I have reached that point at last.

We could not tell, before we reached the nebula, how long ago the
explosion took place. Now, from the astronomical evidence and the
record in the rocks of that one surviving planet, I have been able to
date it very exactly. I know in what year the light of this colossal con
flagration reached our Earth. I know how brilliantly the supernova whose
corpse now dwindles behind our speeding ship once shone in terrestrial
skies. I know how it must have blazed low in the east before sunrise,
like a beacon in that oriental dawn.

There can be no reasonable doubt: the ancient mystery is solved at
last. Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What
was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their
passing might shine above Bethlehem?