The Star
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke
Volume III: The Star
Arthur C. Clarke
Copyright
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke
Volume III: The Star
Copyright © 2000 by Arthur C. Clarke
Cover art to the electronic edition copyright © 2012 by RosettaBooks, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or 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.
Electronic edition published 2012 by RosettaBooks, LLC, New York.
ISBN ePub edition: 9780795329074
Contents
The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch
Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting…
By 1955 Clarke was in full stride artistically; ‘The Star”, a deliberately blasphemous work rejected by every major market and daringly taken by Larry Shaw at short money for a new magazine
Infinity
, had an incendiary impact upon the then small enclosure of science fiction and won the second Hugo Award awarded at the 1956 New York World Convention for best short story. (The Hugo had originated as a half-a-joke award in 1953 and was restricted in that first year to a single category of “Best Novel”…Alfred Bester’s
The Demolished Man
won. Intended to be a one-shot and abandoned by the San Francisco World Convention the next year, the award was revived in a more systematic fashion by the 1955 Cleveland Convention and Eric Frank Russell’s
Allagamoosa
won in category.) Like “The Nine Billion Names of God”, discussed in the Introduction to Volume II, “The Star” is a landmark short story which over half a century later retains its force and it is known to most readers of science fiction.
Clarke seems in the penumbra of his late life Knighthood and acceptance by popular culture to be a very poor candidate for the wild man of his time (the British accent may have softened him a bit but J.G. Ballard had a plummy British accent which did not keep him from being regarded by many as a loathsome and dangerous figure) but Clarke was always much wilder than he seemed. If “The Star” is blasphemous, “The Nine Billion Names of God” was not less so although the temperature had been reduced several degrees. Novels like
The City and the Stars
and its later reworking
Against The Fall Of
Night
were as stunningly bleak and depicted a human future no less spare and entrapped than implied by
Childhood’s End
but it was perhaps Clarke’s mysticism (and that British reserve) which kept him off the griddle. For whatever reason, his position as a Beloved Elder, encouraged by that Hugo and set prematurely at the age of 39, served him well and was never threatened although his Hugo- and Nebula-winning novel,
Rendezvous With Rama
(1973), was essentially characterless (it devolved upon the patient, detailed exploration of a mysterious alien spaceship) and the film
2001
opens with human predecessors murdering one another and closes with the destruction through re-alteration of humanity. Of course
2001
was a late 60s film and novelization. Perhaps you truly had to be there.
By the late 50s, the Big Three of science fiction were Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein. Until Heinlein’s death in 1988 they spent the ensuing decades (in Asimov’s words) “grimly circling one another and wondering who would be the first to die.” Asimov survived Heinlein by almost exactly four years, Clarke survived Asimov by a decade and a half and his reputation was as unassailable at the end as that of the other two. Present on international television as an observer of the 1969 Moon landing and frequent commentator on later expeditions and shuttle launches, he became—with Asimov and Carl Sagan—the living public symbol not only of science fiction but of science itself.
With all credit to the famous contents of this volume—”The Songs of Distant Earth” became the opening chapters of one of his last and best novels, identically titled, and “I Remember Babylon” reminds us that Clarke invented a communications satellite before his predicted material had been made industrially available—the best story is probably “Death And The Senator”, a quiet and magnificently reasoned exploration of the false confusion of science and politics and the tragic consequences for a humanity almost inevitably trapped there. It is a painful and deeply felt work, hardly emblematic of the stereotypically icy Clarke, and finds unforced tragic outcome which I can compare without embarrassment to
King Lear
. Not by any means his best known story, it is probably his masterpiece. It represents a world-view—the hopelessness of that societal-scientific interface which in the 40s was declared our ad astra—in direct contravention of John W. Campbell’s but Campbell took it anyway.
Maybe Campbell didn’t understand the story. That happened more often in
Astounding
than the acolytes would have you think.
—May 2012: New Jersey
First published in
Infinity Science Fiction
, November 1955
Collected in
The Other Side of the Sky
Written as an entry for a short story competition run by the
Observer
newspaper, on the subject ‘2500
AD
.’, ‘The Star’ wasn’t even a runner-up. However, on magazine publication, it received a Hugo award in 1956. More recently, it was turned into a TV play for Christmas 1985. Although I thought the timing was appropriate, it could hardly be called seasonal fare. I never imagined that one day I would be lecturing in the Vatican.
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 travelled 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 MAIOREM 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
AD
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.