Infinity One by Robert Hoskins (Ed.) Read Free Book Online Page A

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 words 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?

We live in a big universe; Katherine McLean, u'ho writes far too little these days, examines one small comer of it
    now ...

ECHO
Katherine MacLean

    They began to know he was landing.
    For uncounted seasons there had been only plants, and the sameness, the susurrus of wind, the drumming pressures of rain, the cold of snow, and the deep baking sunshine of the hot season, always no sound except the rumble of summer thunder in the ground, and the silver shimmering vibration of running streams.
    Then suddenly they were somewhere strange and new, a different being, looking with its eyes, surrounded by metal echoing walls, moving in a heavy unfamiliar body, looking out of odd uncave openings.
    There was no way to understand. Then the thoughts were gone, and they did not understand what it had been. Wind blew quietly across the grass, across the planet. They bent, and straightened, unfolded leaves, pushed roots a little further through the damp earth.
    Suddenly again, the Thing, its feelings louder. The heavy self-body that could move by wishing, looking out through a hole at something. The hole not a hole, something else, understood by the being and understood in the flash, the understanding incomprehensible and forgotten when the connection ended.
    It had ended; they were aware only of themselves
    again. What to do-Nothing: the hole memory was
    confused, forgotten, for it answered no questions. Remembering became: the belt of warmth drifting (as it always had) across the world—days longer and hotter where it drifted, snow melting from hillsides, ground-water rising to thirsty roots, brown floodwater rising along streams and rivers, a different flavor of water . . .
    Suddenly again not themselves, not aware of water, but feeling only as the Being, moving