Alien archives, p.1
Alien Archives, page 1
Alien
Archives
Eighteen Stories of
Extraterrestrial Encounters
BY
Robert Silverberg
THREE ROOMS PRESS
New York, NY
ALIEN ARCHIVES
EIGHTEEN STORIES OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL ENCOUNTERS
BY Robert Silverberg
© 2019 by Agberg, Ltd.
Individual Stories: Copyright ©1954, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1971, 1974, 1981, 1983, 1992, 1996, 1997, 2020 by Agberg, Ltd.
ISBN 978-1-941110-80-5 (trade paperback)
ISBN 978-1-941110-81-2 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019938484
Pub Date: October 29, 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. For permissions, please write to address below or email editor@threeroomspress.com. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy or electronically reproduce part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Three Rooms Press, 561 Hudson Street, #33, New York, NY 10014.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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For Peter and Kat,
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: A PLURALITY OF WORLDS
by Robert Silverberg
THE SILENT COLONY
EN ROUTE TO EARTH
THE WAY TO SPOOK CITY
AMANDA AND THE ALIEN
ONE-WAY JOURNEY
GORGON PLANET
THE SHADOW OF WINGS
FLIES
SUNDANCE
BRIDE 91
SOMETHING WILD IS LOOSE
SCHWARTZ BETWEEN THE GALAXIES
DIANA OF THE HUNDRED BREASTS
SUNRISE ON MERCURY
ALAREE
THE SOUL-PAINTER AND THE SHAPESHIFTER
TO THE DARK STAR
BEAUTY IN THE NIGHT
INTRODUCTION: A PLURALITY OF WORLDS
BY ROBERT SILVERBERG
HERE IS AN ASSORTMENT OF stories about human interactions with alien beings, some of them in far corners of the universe, some right here on Earth. (One of them, in fact, takes place in a California suburb a fifteen-minute drive from where I live.) I wrote these stories, the oldest one in 1954 and the most recent almost half a century later, with two beliefs held firmly in mind:
1)We are not alone. The universe is full of non-human life-forms.
2)We are never going to encounter any of these alien beings.
It may seem irrational of me to have written a whole book of stories about things that I don’t believe are going to happen, but I remind you that these are science fiction stories, and the essence of science fiction is what if—which is why some people like to call science fiction “speculative fiction” instead. I do indeed doubt that any of the events depicted in this book, or anything remotely like them, will ever take place. But what if—what if—
***
BACK IN FAR-OFF 2004 I wrote an essay for one of the science fiction magazines titled “Neque Illorum Ad Nos Pervenire Potest,” which is Latin for “None of us can go to them, and none of them come to us.” The phrase was that of the twelfth-century philosopher Guillaume de Conches, writing about the supposed inhabitants of the Antipodes, the lands that lay beyond the fiery sea that was thought to cut Europe off from the as yet unexplored Southern Hemisphere. I used it to express my belief that we are never going to have any close encounters with the inhabitants of other solar systems. They’re just too far away. Despite the best efforts of such people as my friends, the brothers Jim and Greg Benford, who even now are working to drum up interest in an interstellar voyage, the distance even to the nearest star is so great that only by magical means (a faster-than-light drive, for instance) are we likely to get to an extrasolar planet and return.
“It’s disheartening,” I wrote, back then. “I’ve spent five decades [six, now] writing stories about other worlds and other intelligent lifeforms, and I don’t like the idea that I’ve simply been peddling pipe dreams all this time. I do believe . . . that the universe is full of populated worlds. I do want to know what those alien races look like, how they think, what kind of cities they live in. I’d love to read alien poetry and look at alien sculptures. I might even want to risk dinner at a five-star alien restaurant. But none of that is going to happen . . . The speed of light is going to remain the limiting velocity not just for us, but for all those lively and interesting people out there in the adjacent galaxies, and that puts the kibosh on the whole concept of a galaxy-spanning civilization.”
That there are worlds out there for the finding, plenty of them, if only we could find a way of getting to them, and that those worlds are inhabited, is something I have never doubted. The comic books I read as a small boy, seventy-plus years ago, were full of gaudy tales of “Martians” and “Venusians”. Then, in 1948, when I discovered such pioneering collections of science fiction as the great Healy-McComas anthology Adventures in Time and Space and Groff Conklin’s splendid A Treasury of Science Fiction, such stories as Eric Frank Russell’s “Symbiotica,” A.E. van Vogt’s “Black Destroyer,” and Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rescue Party” lit up my adolescent mind with visions of galaxy upon galaxy filled with an infinite number of intelligent non-human beings. The thought of those infinities still stirs me, so many decades and so many stories later, whenever I look toward the night sky.
In my 2004 essay I calculated just how many inhabited worlds were likely to be out there. I figured there were twelve billion stars in our local galaxy alone that were neither too big nor too small to provide the energy that life-forms of our sort require.
“If half of these have planets,” I wrote, “and half of those planets lie at the correct distance to maintain water in its liquid state, and half of those are large enough to retain an atmosphere, that leaves us with a billion and a half potentially habitable worlds in our immediate galactic vicinity. Say that a billion of these must be rejected because they’re so large that gravity would be a problem, or because they have no water, or because they’re in some other way unsuitable. That still leaves 500 million possible Earths in the Milky Way galaxy. And there are millions of galaxies.”
Half a billion possible Earths in our little galaxy alone? That isn’t just a hopeful hypothesis any more, and it may be a very conservative one. In January 2013, scientists at Caltech in Pasadena who had been studying the results sent back by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope offered an estimate of at least 100 billion habitable extrasolar planets just in the Milky Way galaxy—and our galaxy is only one of a nearly infinite number in the universe. They based their findings on a view of a five-planet system called Kepler-32, all of them similar in size to Earth and orbiting their star (M-type, smaller and cooler than our own) closely enough to ensure sufficient warmth. Since there are 100 billion M-type stars in the galaxy and the Kepler findings show planets around many of them, the Caltech people believe it’s reasonable to think that they average one habitable world apiece—100 billion more or less Earth-type planets, and that’s billion with a b. A billion, remember, is 1,000 million. Somewhere in all those billions and billions, surely, dwell the alien beings I was reading about in the s-f anthologies of the 1940s.
In fact, the whole idea of an inhabited cosmos was anticipated as early as 300 B.C. by the Greek philosopher Metrodoros the Epicurean: “To consider the Earth the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field sown with millet only one grain will grow.” And it was developed most entertainingly in a lively little book A Plurality of Worlds (1686) by the French poet and philosopher Bernard de Fontenelle, which I’ve been reading in the elegant English translation that John Glanville produced the following year.
Fontenelle’s book is one of the earliest attempts to make current scientific knowledge accessible to the lay reader, and it achieves that triumphantly. It is cast in the form of dialogs set at a French country estate, one per night for five nights, in which a philosopher who was probably very much like Fontenelle discusses astronomy and the nature of the universe with his hostess, a witty and somewhat flirtatious countess who is eager to understand the motions of the planets and stars.
What he sets forth is essentially a picture of the universe as we understand it today—the Sun at the center of the solar system, the planets in orbit around it, their various moons in orbit around them, and the stars an immense distance away, each one a sun in its own right and very likely having planets of its own. In all this, Fontenelle risked flying in the face of the traditional Christian belief that the creation of life has taken place only once, in the Garden of Eden, on Earth, and that Earth was the center of the universe. For some fifteen hundred years it was deemed heretical, and downright dangerous, to disagree with that position, until the work of the great astronomers Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo showed the Earth is merely one of many worlds surrounding the Sun. As recently as 1633 Galileo had been called before the Inquisition and forced to declare that Copernicus’s “opinion” that the Earth moved around the Sun was false. (There is a story, probably apocryphal that Galileo, after swearing to his denial, turned aside and muttered under his breath, “Eppur si muove”—”Even so, it does move!”)
In the years immediately following, the Church reluctantly began to accept the notion that Copernicus might have been right and that the Earth was not the center of all creation. Serious speculation about the possibility of life on other worlds became a wide-spread philosophical pastime. But Fontenelle remained cautious. In his preface he apologized in advance for any offense he might give the religious, and asserted that if the Moon were inhabited, as he supposed, its inhabitants must be products of a separate creation, for “none of Adam’s progeny ever traveled so far as the Moon, nor were any colonies ever sent thither; the men then that are in the Moon are not the sons of Adam.” The same, he said, was true of the inhabitants of Mars, Venus, and other nearby worlds, all of whom he described in a playful and inventive manner while taking care to say that he was merely speculating, not claiming any special revelation of truth. (“The people of Mercury are so full of fire that they are absolutely mad; I fancy they have no memory at all . . . and what they do is by sudden starts, and perfectly haphazard . . . As for Saturn, it is so cold that a Saturnian brought to Earth would perish from the heat, even at the North Pole.”)
In his discussion of the stars, which Fontenelle, like most people of his time, believed were fixed in the heavens and fastened to the sky “like so many nails,” he recognized that they were vastly farther away than the familiar planets: “The fixed stars cannot be less distant from the Earth than fifty millions of leagues; nay, if you anger an astronomer, he will set them further. The distance from the Sun to the farthest planet is nothing in comparison of the distance from the Sun, or from the Earth, to the fixed stars; it is almost beyond arithmetic.”
And the stars were suns, he said, shining by virtue of their own fires, not by reflection of our Sun’s light. “I will not swear that this is true,” he said cautiously, “but I hold it for true, because it gives me pleasure to believe it.” And around those distant suns were a multitude of other worlds, each held to its own sun by what he called a “vortex,” which in an approximate way equates to what we call a gravitational field. Those planets, he thinks, are inhabited, not by humans but by beings of some other creation. In one of his most delightful flights of fancy he says that in some parts of the universe—the Milky Way, for instance—the stars are so close together “that the people in one world may talk, and shake hands, with those of another; at least I believe, the birds of one world may easily fly into another; and that pigeons may be trained up to carry letters, as they do in the Levant.”
All this is set forth lightly, as a mere outpouring of the imagination, but Fontenelle leaves no doubt that he is serious. “When the Heavens were a little blue arch, stuck with stars, methought the universe was too strait and close,” he wrote. “I was almost stifled for want of air; but now it is enlarged in height and breadth, and a thousand and a thousand vortexes taken in; I begin to breathe with more freedom, and think the Universe to be incomparably more magnificent than it was before.”
***
AND NOW WE HAVE PROOF, thanks to NASA and the Kepler telescope, that that multitude of worlds that Fontenelle imagined more than three hundred years ago is really out there. The trouble is that we can’t reach them, because the speed of light is likely always to be the limiting velocity not just for us, but for all the inhabitants of those other galaxies, and, barring the development of some quasi-magical means of faster-than-light travel, that makes the idea of intergalactic contact improbable.
So, as I said a decade ago and am forced still to believe, there won’t be any Galactic Federation; there’ll be no Bureau of Interstellar Trade; no alien wines or artifacts will turn up for sale in our boutiques. Nor will we meet the real-life equivalents of George Lucas’s Wookiees, Doc Smith’s Arisians, Fred Pohl’s Heechees, Larry Niven’s Kzinti, or—just as well, perhaps—A.E. van Vogt’s terrifying Coeurl. The aliens exist, I’m sure, but the sea that separates us from them, and them from us, is just too wide. And as Guillaume de Conches said in a different context, long ago, Nullus nostrum ad illos, neque illorum ad nos pervenire potest. None of us can go to them, and none of them come to us. Except, let me quickly add, by way of the tales that science fiction writers tell.
—Robert Silverberg
THE SILENT COLONY
It’s not unusual or particularly disgraceful for a young writer to imitate the work of the writers he admires. That’s one way to discover, from the inside, how those writers achieve the effects that the young writer finds so admirable. I’m not talking now of the various reworkings of the themes of Joseph Conrad that I’ve done over a period of years, or my deliberate pastiche of C.L. Moore, In Another Country. Those were the stunts of a mature writer having a little fun. I mean a novice’s flat-out imitation of his betters purely for the sake of mastering their stylistic or structural techniques.
When I began my career in the early 1950s there was a group of about a dozen science fiction writers whose work held special meaning for me—Henry Kuttner, Cyril Kornbluth, James Blish, Alfred Bester, etc. (In 1987 I brought my favorite stories by those writers together in the autobiographical anthology, Robert Silverberg’s Worlds of Wonder, more recently issued under the title, Science Fiction 101, which I recommend to any beginning writer who is as hungry to see print as I was sixty-plus years ago.) There was a particular cluster within my group of favorites whose work I paid special attention to: Robert Sheckley, Philip K. Dick, Jack Vance. Their stories seemed to me the epitome of what I wanted my science fiction to be like; and from time to time during the first five or six years of my career I would—consciously and unabashedly—do something in the model of one of those three, so that I could see, word by word, how they went about constructing such splendid stories.
“The Silent Colony” is one of my Sheckley imitations: an attempt at mimicking his cool, lucid style and his ingenious plotting. I wrote it late in the autumn of 1953, while I was a sophomore at Columbia writing science fiction stories in whatever spare time I could steal from my studies. Sheckley, who was then about 25 years old, had begun selling only a year or two earlier. Already his fiction was appearing in leading slick magazines like Colliers and Esquire as well as in every sci-fi publication: from the top-ranked Astounding and Galaxy to the wildest and wooliest of pulps. He even had a collection of his stories published in book form by a major publisher. It was a dazzling beginning to a career: I, seven years younger, envied him frantically. If I couldn’t be Robert Sheckley, I could at least learn to write like him. “The Silent Colony,” it seems to me now, is a creditable try at a Sheckley story, given the difference in our ages and technical skills. The three doomed alien visitors to Earth were, I think, reasonably original creations. It didn’t sell to Esquire, or even Galaxy, but it did sell. On the strength of my contract for my novel Revolt on Alpha C my new agent—I had acquired an agent by then, Scott Meredith, who represented such top figures in the field as Vance, Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, and Poul Anderson—had, after nine tries, sold it (for $15) to Robert W. Lowndes, editor of Future Science Fiction in June of 1954. Lowndes needed a very short story to fill his October 1954 issue, published in August, and so, most unusually, “The Silent Colony” was in print just a couple of months after it was accepted.
I spent the summer of 1954 editing a mimeographed newspaper in a children’s camp a hundred miles north of New York City; and great was my pride when the October Future arrived up there and I displayed my story to my fellow campers—three pages tucked away at the end of the issue, with stories by Philip K. Dick, Algis Budrys, and Marion Zimmer Bradley more prominently displayed. I didn’t mind its inconspicuous placement. One didn’t expect a little snippet of a story like that to be featured prominently. And Dick, Budrys, and Bradley all were older than me. Each of them had been writing professionally for two or three years already, so I didn’t begrudge them their names on the cover. What mattered was that I was in the issue too—my first short story to be published in a widely distributed American magazine. Only three pages: but bigger and better things were to come. I was sure of it.
