TOTAL ECLIPSE Read online

  Table of Contents

  EPIGRAPH

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

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  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  TOTAL ECLIPSE

  John Brunner

  O dark, dark, dark amid the blaze of noon,

  Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse

  Without all hope of day!

  —Milton, Samson Agonistes

  I

  … and there it is!

  Brilliant as a blob of quicksilver it shone on the grey-chalk oblate of the planet’s moon: a jewel amid a ruin of decay. From this distance, thousands of kilometres away, it was minuscule. No details could be made out such as were to be discerned in the pictures they had all studied at home on Earth.

  Nonetheless, to see it in real time was very different from looking at photographs. It was right to plot the course for Stellaris, between her emergence from qua-space and her approach to a landing on Sigma Draconis III, so that for these few minutes the light of the local star would glint off that incredible artefact and waken in the minds of those arriving here for the first time an echo of the shock experienced by the explorers who had chanced on it back in 2020, on what otherwise would almost certainly have been the last of man’s attempts to visit the stars in view of the disappointments of Proxima, Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti—or at any rate the last in the foreseeable future.

  But of course finding that thing…!

  A shiver crawled down Ian Macauley’s spine. A curl of his untidy red hair, bending over to touch his freckled forehead, felt like a ghostly alien caress, and he shot up his hand to brush it aside. Against his will—no, more exactly: without conscious intention—he found himself reciting dry statistics under his breath.

  Diameter thirty-six point oh five kilometres. Wall height one point one nine kilometres averaged. Thickness of the mirror—

  With an effort he cut short the recital of bare stark figures and switched to words, which he cared for a great deal more:

  They, whoever, whatever they were, came to their moon and smoothed and rounded and polished a whole vast crater and made it into the largest telescope imaginable. And they’re dead. They’ve been dead for a hundred thousand years. Yet the first trace we can find of them was only three thousand years earlier; it’s as though the weight of a thousand centuries has compressed the whole of their history—come to that, the whole of their evolution—into a layer no thicker than a little seam of coal, memorial to the sprouting, heyday and downfall of a million trees!

  In spite of which, should they so choose, these latecomers, these humans from Earth, could wipe away the meteoritic dust which had accumulated on the mirror of the telescope, and mend half a dozen breaches caused by larger-than-usual chunks of cosmic garbage, and substitute their own inanimate electronics for the—the whatevers that its builders had employed, long desiccated into incomprehensible black shreds… and the telescope would still be usable.

  “It’s unbelievable!”

  He had not meant to speak aloud, nor did he realise he had done so until a caustic voice from behind him said, “Yes, I’m sure it is. But I’d like a glimpse of it, too, please!”

  Hastily he stepped aside from the viewport, muttering apologies and a trifle relieved that his successor was no one other than plump, plain, likable Karen Vlady, the civil engineer among their party.

  She had been the first of his companions to whom he had spoken directly. On the day of his arrival at the Sigma Draconis Briefing Centre in Canberra, Australia, he had been horribly frightened; he was still scarcely able to believe either that the famous Igor Andrevski, the chief archeologist out here, had asked for him by name, or that he had had the courage to say yes.

  Though I should have realised I had no need to worry, shouldn’t I? The prospect of being cooped up in the ship like this felt dreadfully daunting, yet everything has gone very pleasantly… or almost everything. And during my stay here I may in some ways be better off than I’d have been at home: one of thirty people whom anybody would be proud to call a friend, brilliant handpicked experts among whom I can expect to feel instantly at ease. On Earth, in a city or even at a university, they’d be diluted among thousands of other people who might be boring, or annoying, or a nuisance!

  He was by temperament a solitary man, but if he had to live in close proximity with others, these were exactly the sort he would have chosen. It was that point which his first encounter with Karen had started to make plain to him.

  She had heard him muttering his name as he presented himself at the centre’s reception desk, and come up to him and said with characteristic forthrightness, “So you’re Ian Macauley, are you? What’s it like to live inside your head?”

  Taken aback by the directness of the question, he had replied, “Oh…! Think of a haunted house!”

  Which was something he had occasionally confided to intimates, but never before to a perfect stranger.

  A couple more of his then-unknown colleagues had been in earshot, and mistaken his answer for a flip joke. So the first impression he’d made on them was that he had a dry sense of humour. But Karen had not missed the crucial fact: the statement was literal. He appreciated that.

  So now he was actually here, the best part of nineteen light-years from the solar system, to take his turn at wrestling with a riddle that had defied Earth’s finest thinkers for the best part of a decade.

  It’s a crazy paradox, that we should know so much about them, and so little! We know, roughly, what they looked like—bodies like two matching crab shells one above the other, four short walking limbs, two grasping limbs, all tipped with tubular claws down which ran nerve channels, and composed of a modified version of their hidelike skin, as are human nails. We know, or think we know, that they were possessed of a sense we don’t have, though many fishes do: the ability to perceive electromagnetic fields. We suspect the many crystals we’ve found still impregnated with such fields, after the manner of a tape recording, were their counterpart of inscriptions. Which is why I’m here. Conversely, they seem to have lacked means to detect sound, barring perhaps the very loudest and coarsest. We know they had a high science, which argues a complex culture, also evidenced by their quite large city-sites—but why are there not many more of those? Certain hints suggest they had a religion, or religions; maybe, for all we can tell, they had the equivalents of poetry and music, expressed in terms of infinitely subtle electrical fields. What can it have been like to live in a world without sound, but where your whole being resonated to the ebb and flow, the very heartbeat, of the planet and all the creatures on it?

  He clenched his fists, forcing his nails deep into his palms.

  How can I make myself comprehend the utter nonhumanity of those who built that telescope? Because if I don’t succeed in that, my visit, and all the agonies of doubt I sweated through before deciding to accept the invitation, and at least three, possibly five years of my life, will be completely wasted. Oh, how I’d hate to be rotated home and leave the mystery unsolved—how I pity those who thirty days from now will face that fate! The only thing worse will be if it turns out they’ve solved the problem in the last two years!

  There were three viewports in the control cabin of the Stellaris. During most of each voyage they were irrelevant. In qua-space there was no energy propagation in any form human eyes could detect. But it was worth having them. The designers had
been put to immense trouble to compensate for the stresses they induced in the hull; extra struts and girders had had to be included which increased the vessel’s dry mass by over 4 per cent… but for the privilege of seeing, at the beginning and end of each journey, the naked universe with the naked eye instead of solely via TV relays, it was a negligible price to pay.

  That, at any rate, was the opinion of her commander, Colonel Rudolf Weil.

  The Stellaris’s crew likewise numbered three, and during most of each voyage they were as irrelevant as the viewports. No human being could hope to match the nanosecond reflexes involved in making a Big Step between the stars. Above all, it took machines to ensure that when it was time to dissipate the phenomenal energy acquired on the way to hyperphotonic velocities there was nothing in the ship’s path of emergence larger than a grain of dust. Even so, no matter what exit angle was chosen, there were always solar flares and minor perturbations in the orbits of local asteroids and comets.

  He had sometimes mentioned to close friends a dream that haunted him concerning the disappearance of the Draconians: the possibility that they had been less lucky than mankind when they made their first experiments with hyperdrive. He knew, intellectually, that if the reason for the aliens’ extinction were to be found in some unlooked-for side effect of flying a ship faster than light—as, for instance, a destabilisation of the sun—evidence to prove it would have been found by now, printed in moonrock as though in a block of photographic emulsion. And there was no evidence; there were very nearly no clues. Yet the dream recurred, over and over.

  Right from the beginning humans had been cautious about qua-space. It wasn’t only a matter of trespassing into a mode of existence which all the classic theories regarded as forbidden. Theories could be scrapped, and inevitably were, on the day when a tiny five-ton package of instruments arrived in moon orbit a detectable fraction of a second ahead of the signal saying it had been dispatched from Earth orbit.

  More to the point, beyond doubt, was the fact that it had been so damnably expensive to build the starship. The planet Earth possessed exactly one interstellar craft, and this was it, and it strained mankind’s resources to the utmost to send her out and back once every two years across what by galactic standards amounted to a tiny little distance.

  Maybe that was the sort of thing that handicapped the aliens, but it hit them sooner. I remember last time Valentine Rorschach was asking why we’ve found just one of so many things: one wrecked and sunken oceangoing ship, one large flying machine, one and only one of many thousands of types of artefact… But of course so much of their civilisation lies buried under sediment and peat and avalanches that had it not been for the telescope we’d never have suspected its existence.

  Watching the passengers as they lined up to take their turn at the viewport currently facing the moon, he felt a tremor pass through him, recalling how shaken he had been at his own first sight of that brilliant spark. Then he had been only a captain—not that rank mattered much when it came to doing something that had never been done before. In those days Stellaris had been commanded by Rear Admiral Boris Ivanov, but he had had to retire after that trip; there was too loud a murmur in his heart valves. Some people had suggested the ship be converted to crewless operation; there was no theoretical reason why it should not be launched and landed automatically. But it remained true that no machine could deal with the passengers’ problems, let alone the question of whether people wanted to be shot from star to star like dead packages. So there were still crew in charge.

  How do these passengers really regard me, the ferryman—the Charon who may have conveyed them on their last voyage? There have already been two deaths here, on this alien planet. We may be about to learn of more.

  For himself, there would certainly never be another Big Step after the homeward leg of this trip. He had grown prematurely old, thanks to the radiation of space; his round face was seamed with wrinkles like a shrunken apple, and there was more grey than brown in his hair. If the Stellaris did come back, even if only to evacuate the planet, he would not be her commander.

  By rights, his successor ought to be Captain Irene Bakongu, the older, the more experienced, the senior of his companions.

  The way things are going back on Earth, though, that may not count. A shame, because if it’s going to be done at all—which is by no means certain—it should be done properly.

  And because Irene was both female and black, the choice was more likely to fall on Lieutenant Gyorgy Somogyi.

  Who’s less well qualified and far less quick-thinking. High on the list of possible explanations for the extinction of the Draconians, so they tell me, is the idea that it was due to some fundamental flaw in their nature. All too easily some stupid irrational prejudice could get rid of us, too, couldn’t it? Thinking of which…

  It dawned on him that only nine of their ten passengers were present, and before he could stop himself he had asked aloud, turning to Irene: “What’s happened to the general?”

  At which there were visible shudders from everybody and a moment of frozen silence, broken by a hateful rasping voice from the doorway of the control cabin.

  “Were you referring to me by any chance… Colonel?”

  II

  Not wanting to obstruct anybody else waiting for a precious, perhaps never-to-be-repeated sight of the alien telescope, Ian had withdrawn from the viewport, threading his way between the three control chairs and the close-packed bodies of his companions, and taken station right beside the doorway. Now he withdrew a fraction further still: into himself.

  I guess it’s a sick comment on humanity that the thing which binds me most closely to these comparative strangers, crew included, is not shared interests but shared detestation. We all loathe this horrible bastard!

  But he did his best to maintain the formalities and gave a polite nod as the latecomer pushed past: General José Maria Ordoñez-Vico, small and neat and dapper with a tiny black moustache, a bachelor aged forty-eight, the sole person aboard or indeed ever transported by the Stellaris who had declined the plain practical clothing traditionally worn in space—a zip-fronted blouse with big pockets, loose comfortable pants, and elastic sandals over which spacegear could be drawn in emergency—and insisted on sporting his military uniform complete with rank badges, medal ribbons, and epaulettes. When Karen had relayed to Ian a rumour that the general had only with difficulty been dissuaded from bringing his ceremonial sword, he had simply chuckled, assuming it to be a happy invention. Now, after thirty days in space with him, he was prepared to believe the charge was true.

  Paradoxically, however, if this man had not been allowed to displace someone more valuable, the Stellaris would never have been launched on this trip… and the thirty people currently on Sigma Draconis III might have been abandoned to struggle on alone. And no doubt die out as completely as the natives.

  Well—we think there are thirty people here. By now there may be fewer… In an upside-down way, that may be an advantage. Ten members of the base staff, presumably, have been preparing themselves to be rotated home. There will only be space for nine after all… that is, unless he orders the closure of the base, and on her last-ever Big Step the Stellaris carries a record complement of forty-three. And leaves everything behind except their food, their water and their air.

  The reason for Ordoñez-Vico’s presence was, in Ian’s view, terrifyingly typical of just such a flaw in the nature of mankind as was now suspected of having betrayed the species which long ago had travelled from Sigma Draconis III to the local moon… and apparently no farther.

  He was the commander in chief of the Bolivian Military Intelligence Service.

  From the first moment starflight was found to be possible it had been obvious that the resources of only the very richest nations could support a faster-than-light ship. To build the first ocean liners strained the then-wealthiest countries; to operate international airlines was at first the privilege of the fortunate few… and building the plane
s to provide them remained for decades a near monopoly; to land humans on the moon was, also for decades, the unique accomplishment of the nation that could afford the computers to back up the astronauts, the precision engineering skills which reached the point where 99.99 per cent reliability would have resulted in about fifteen thousand things going wrong and the wastage inherent in training dozens of reserve personnel at enormous cost for the sake of being certain that on the day of the chosen launch-window at least one crew would be intact.

  It would just about—just barely—have been possible for one country to build and fly a small starship: perhaps with a crew of four and minimal equipment. It would also have been within the compass of a consolidated cluster like Common Europe or the leader of a loose economic alliance like Japan.

  But it would have been very, very unpopular to do that. Articulate, indeed vociferous, the citizens of less fortunate countries had long been objecting to the way a pyramid of glorious achievement was casually built on a foundation of human rubble. The eagle-keen eye of a billion-dollar satellite might look down on the corpse of a labourer who had dug ore for it on starvation wages, and was dead.

  Nonetheless, the situation had improved considerably since the last worldwide recession. The climate was right for some grand gesture. So the idea dawned with all the brilliance of the first sunrise following an Arctic winter:

  Why not a U.N. Starflight Fund, to which each country would contribute in strict proportion to its GNP?

  The suggestion was eventually approved, and the designers of the projected ship heaved a sigh of relief and stopped worrying about cutting everything to the bone. The funds voted were enough to finance a ship with three crew and well over a hundred tons of nonpermanent mass—a jargon phrase meaning cargo and/or passengers with the means to support them.

  Three years building and testing led to three years of disappointing, fruitless expeditions to barren systems that added much to the store of abstract knowledge, nothing to the rapidly dwindling resources of overpopulated, seething Earth.