The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (49 page)

In short, I felt an attraction for her, and she returned it with passion. From that time, I resolved to marry her. I gained my end readily, thanks to the good will of my friends.

This union has been a happy one. My wife’s health was re-established, although she remained extremely sensitive and frail. I tasted the joy of being like other men in the essential part of
life. But my happiness was crowned six months ago: a child was born to us, and in this child are combined all the faculties of my constitution. Color, vision, hearing, extreme rapidity of movement,
diet – he promises to be an exact copy of my physiology.

The doctor watches him grow with delight. A wonderful hope has come to us – that the study of the
Moedig
World, of the Kingdom parallel to our own, this study which demands so much
time and patience, will not end when I cease to be. My son will pursue it, undoubtedly, in his turn. Why may he not find collaborators of genius, able to raise it to a new power? Why may he also
not give life to seers of the invisible world?

As for myself, may I not look forward to other children, may I not hope that my dear wife may give birth to other sons of my flesh, like unto their father? As I think of it, my heart trembles, I
am filled with an infinite beatitude; and I know myself blessed among men.

Gregory Benford (1941– ) and Gordon Eklund (1945– ) were sometime collaborators in the 1970s. At the start, Eklund was “the writer,”
producing many other stories and novels on his own, and Benford was “the scientist,” a full-time physicist who occasionally published science fiction. But by the end of the decade,
Benford had become one of the leading younger writers, producing two significant works,
In the Ocean of Night
(1977) and
The Stars in Shroud
(1978) and then the classic
Timescape
(1980), and Eklund, who had published many short stories and nine novels by 1976 –
If the Stars Are Gods
(1977) was his tenth – stopped writing for long periods
of time after 1979. Of all their works, this one (1975), later developed into the novel of the same title, is the best. It was to a large extent written by Eklund and revised by Benford.

Benford in his later works is the first among the hard SF writers to have mastered and integrated Modernist techniques of characterization and use of metaphor, and some of
this may have been assimilated through his early collaboration with Eklund. The tension between the daily work of science and the avocation of writing in Benford’s life has led him to write
some of the finest science fiction of recent decades. Brian W. Aldiss says:

“If he takes the close and narrow view of his characters – an all-too-human view, of illness, work and marital problems – his vision of the universe in which
such frail beings exist is one of vast perspectives, rather in the tradition of Stapledon and Clarke.”

“If the Stars Are Gods” is an intrusion of the metaphysical into the ordinary world of science fiction. It is very much in the tradition of Clarke, in the mode of
2001: A Space Odyssey
.

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 was an odd thick odor, and something about it upset his careful equilibrium. 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 São 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 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
off-setting 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 of a
squashed apple. Once more, Reynolds jumped. Then, standing calmly, he kicked the broken bits of glass and metal toward an unoccupied corner 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.