THE STAR by Arthur C. Clarke

THE STAR
by Arthur C. Clarke

It is three thousand light years to the Vatican. Once, I believed that space
could have no power over faith, just as I believed that the heavens declared the
glory of God's handiwork. Now I have seen that handiwork, and my faith is sorely
troubled. I stare at the crucifix that hangs on the cabin wall above the Mark VI
Computer, and for the first time in my life I wonder if it is no more than an
empty symbol.
I have told no one yet, but the truth cannot be concealed. The facts are there
for all to read, recorded on the countless miles of magnetic tape and the
thousands of photographs we are carrying back to Earth. Other scientists can
interpret them as easily as I can, and I am not one who would condone that
tampering with the truth which often gave my order a bad name in the olden days.

The crew are already sufficiently depressed: I wonder how they will take this
ultimate irony. Few of them have any religious faith, yet they will not relish
using this final weapon in their campaign against me--that private,
good-natured, but fundamentally serious, war which lasted all the way from
Earth. It amused them to have a Jesuit as chief astrophysicist: Dr. Chandler,
for instance, could never get over it. (Why are medical men such notorious
atheists?). Sometimes he would meet me on the observation deck, where the lights
are always low so that the stars shine with undiminished glory. He would come up
to me in the gloom and stand staring out of the great oval port, while the
heavens crawled slowly around us as the ship turned end over end with the
residual spin we had never bothered to correct.
"Well, Father," he would say at last, "it goes on forever and forever, and
perhaps Something made it. But how you can believe that Something has a special
interest in us and our miserable little world--that just beats me." Then the
argument would start, while the stars and nebulae would 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 geophysics 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 unborn 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 shoulders, 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 MAJOREM 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 Observatory.
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 reconstruct 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 immensely 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 before 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 unknown 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 would. 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 words 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 children 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 shadows 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 happiness.
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 moment 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 calculations 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 conflagration 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?