The Star - Arthur C. Clarke

first published in prospect, january 2000, issue 48


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 data are there for anyone 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 -- more easily, in all probability. 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 is already sufficiently depressed, I wonder how they will rake 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 a 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 round 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 which . . . yes, amused... .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 our 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 proportions 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 which cannot be verified for several thousand million years. Even the word nebula is misleading: this is a far smaller object than those stupendous clouds of mist -- the stuff of unborn stars -- which 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 lightyears that lie between us.

On the book you are holding the words are plain to read. AD MAIOREM DEL 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 1054 a.d., 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 still with a fierce violet light, but far too tenuous to do us any damage. When the star had exploded, its outer Layers had been driven upwards 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 this 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 those 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 towards 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 always when approaching an unknown sun, and presently we found a single small world circling the star at 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 tires had seared its rocks, and burnt 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 should. The monolite 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's 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 towards 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 program was forgotten: this lonely monument, reared at such labor at the greatest possible distance from the doomed sun, could have only one meaning. A civilization which 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 fruits of their genius, they brought here to this distant world in the days before the end, hoping that some other race would find them and that they would not be utterly forgotten.

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.

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. The 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 which in many ways must have been superior to out own. Perhaps they only showed us the best, and one can hardly blame them. But their worlds were very lovely, and their cities were built with a grace that matches anything of ours. 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.

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 was 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 worshipped, if indeed they worshipped 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.

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 had 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 my calculations, 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 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 -- O 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?

---
three links that convince me this story is merely 2,213 words long:

Prof. Don Callen, Department of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University
la grenouille qui reve
prof. rick davis, Brigham Young University–Idaho

The Transparent Sun - Linda Ty-Casper

Scenes from the short story "The Transparent Sun" by Linda Ty-Casper
from The Transparent Sun and Other Stories
from an email sent by playwright Alberto Florentino

"That woman is back," Zenaida said, her voice at the near edge of contempt. She swung away from the window that looked across to the governor's office at the provincial capitol. Before the full-length mirror on the wall, she stopped to check her teased hair. Her knees were white and smooth beneath the tight pink jersey. Then she entered her room, pulling the door severely.

A plaster crucifix near the entry trembled with the closing. Her cat, a ball of petulant sun, jumped up onto the piano stool and with pink eyes peered timidly about the long hall adorned with old portraits so faded they looked like sun stains on the shellacked walls of narra.

Don Julio glanced up from the morning papers which had just arrived from Manila, and looked after the closing of the door, trying to decide what his wife had said. The precise click of the door lock alerted him. He had married each of his three wives when they were barely twenty but now at seventy, he could no longer understand youth or Zenaida, a white skinned mestiza who had been cashier at his theatre, the only moviehouse in the capital.

"What is it?" he asked, leaning forward in the rattan chair against the wide restarms of narra, the newspaper creased between his belly and knees, his fingers marking the obituary page which he consulted first and last to follow the demise of friends long scattered about the islands.

"That woman," Zenaida shouted from her room, her voice clear and as sharp as claws.

Don Julio lifted himself above the window sill, peered through the vines of pink and white cadena de amor that hung over the window grilles like the scattering hair of the woman who stood at the gate, in plain brown skirt, faded overskirt and loose white camisa. Her feet, encased in brown plastic slippers, were trying to find balance over the gravel driveway.

"Open the gate," Don Julio called to a servant and placed the newspaper on the sidetable, carefully folded on the obituaries. A quick eye disclosed the death of Don Esteban…fallecio en Manila…se ruega no envien flores…Because he believed a debt of honor binds a man more strictly, being a measure of his manhood and life, Esteban had repaid a wartime debt that, unwritten, could have been annulled in court. ...

Don Julio walked over to his wife's room and stood outside. "It's my cousin. Don't call her 'that woman.'" He waited for her answer. When none came he took the courage to try her lock. ...

The smell of stale perfume crumbled about his face as entered. ... the yellow drapes, sunstreaked and brittle, salvaged from past housekeepings, shut the room from malicious eyes at the capitol. He avoided the dresser mirror; no longer relishing any sight of himself…Zenaida was brushing her fingernails, her back against an impressive collection of jerseys printed in the colors and foliage of some overripe garden.

"Don't call her that woman," he said in the same voice he coaxed her to bed.

She looked up at him, around him to their huge wedding portrait: Don Julio secure on a red cushioned chair and she, the young succulent wife, looking to the side, distracted.

"She's your cousin, not mine," she finally said, blowing at her cuticles, and dangling a leg over the newspaper spread with pictures of society ladies, a pink satin slipper caught deliriously over her toes, an amused smile playing on her face.

"Return the necklace," Don Julio said, approaching his wife slowly so as not to startle her, a hand extended to touch the hair brittle with applications of hairspray, a special concoction of beer and essences from Jolo.

She flounced her eyes at him.

"Return them, hija and I will make it up to you…The necklace is old anyway. Old and tarnished…It does not become you. ..."

"What necklace?" Zenaida sprung away from the intended touch, leaving Don Julio poised to caress the vacated air. She laughed at his discomfiture, a tiny kitty laugh that disclosed her fine teeth and exquisite darting tongue. "She must have told you lies, I know of no necklace…that belongs to her you say, to an old woman?". ...

Don Julio restored his hands to his sides, groped the pockets of his purple dressing gown…the waist sash, tied indifferently, sagged over his hips.

"Give it to her, hija; you do what I tell you and you will receive something several times in value... something young and precious, something new…you can choose it yourself."

"I still don't know what necklace." Zenaida paused before the dresser to pat her hair and spray her ears with Gloria de Paris. The spray hit her eyes. She grimaced and rubbed them hard, like a child waking up from an afternoon sleep. She peered at herself. No lines on the forehead, none around the eyes. She was barely twenty, barely beginning to live. She smiled at herself, her eyes glinting as though to coax a secret lover who provoked her in the presence of the old man. ...

Suddenly the mirror wings of her dresser disclosed Don Julio struggling across the distance between them. She moved away from their reflection on the mirror and watched him, amused at the way his wrinkled feet slid in and out of his purple slippers when he walked. ...

"What do you want then? Anything. ..." Don Julio hunched his shoulders o restrain his lungs, leaning onto the back of the chair on which Zenaida had sat, unable to lift his feet farther.

"This," Zanaida said, opening the wardrobe with the dragon lock, her fragile fingers long and white against the mahogany.

Don Julio looked up, his eyes consumed by the gold filigree necklace, by the glass pendant that contained a relic, by the cross inlaid with green bits of glass.

Zenaida held it up, swung it before him' watched him follow with frayed eyes the flaring trace of sun it left in the air. * "It's an old necklace," Don Julio said, looking at his cousin Sepa who sat at the edge of her chair in the living room, her old face more faded than the portraits on the walls. He could no longer recall her young face. He had not seen her in years, not since his firs wife, Gloria died in childbirth.

Sepa did not speak, as though to hold intact the pieces of her face. Head inclined to one side she stared at the cup of chocolate before her, not following the flight over it of a large green fly, not interested in anything that fell outside the fixed arc of her sight. Her hands on her lap, she rubbed the fingers slowly as if trying to feel the texture of her own skin. She sighed and inclined her head to the other side and closed her eyes to the glint of sunlight on the waxed floor.

Sepa came prepared to redeem the necklace she had come to the house the month before to pawn. She could have gone to one of the agencias but she did not trust them. She told her granddaughter, Antonia, "Julio will give me more and will let me buy the necklace back as soon as I am able." She had sold various pieces of her inheritance, but the necklace, the only piece left, the one she had coveted from childhood, she could only pawn. She had pledged it once to Gloria, the first wife. They had all grown up together…Julio was not in the house when she came to pledge it again, for a small loan for Antonia's tuition. Zenaida in his stead, had generously offered the money…Sepa watched her try it on, negligently viewing herself in the full-length mirror…the long white fingers enclosed the gold filigree necklace that hung wantonly from the young neck, the way Sepa had often dreamed of it hanging upon herself; though she never dared to put it on…"Take your time repaying, Sepa. We trust you. And come anytime you need us. If you have any more old pieces…jewels in your family for years. ... I would like to see them."

"Is there anything you need?" Julio asked. "Antonia. ... I can support her through school. My son, Gloria's first born and mine…you remember Federico…he is now a school superintendent and he will hire Antonia at my slightest word. So let her have the necklace. ..."

"I have come to redeem the necklace," Sepa said, her voice quiet and apologetic…She pulled out a handkerchief secured to the inside of her camisa with a large safety pin. She looked at it for sometime before untying the knotted ends. Carefully she unrolled it, pressing it onto her lap. Tight as little dried worms the rolled money emerged. One by one she placed them on the palm of one hand, balanced them there tentatively before extending them to him…the shades of brown and orange and white becoming blurs in her eyes. Then she brought the handkerchief to her face, rubbed her eyes with it. Sobbing quietly, not knowing how to make him accept the money, she sobbed quietly, rocking herself at the edge of her chair.

"Stop, Sepa, you're too old for that," Don Julio said, glancing about the hall, eyes darting to Zenaida's room. The door was closed. He reached over to pat Sepa on the hand. "Don't cry. Let us talk this over. ..."

"I remember your father," he told Sepa. ..." Don Macario used to take me in his quelis the horses golden in their bronze harnesses…He looked up to the portrait of Sepa's mother on the wall. When Don Macario's house burned down, Gloria borrowed those portraits…claimed Don Julio's non-existent ancestry through them in order to impress friends. Don Julio himself never disclosed that he was brought to Don Macario's house as a servant, a distant relative whom Don Macario raised as a companion to his own son. ...

"Remember, Julio, when Mother died and her jewels were being distributed among us?" Sepa asked, her fingers tight around the rolled money in her palm. "I asked only for that necklace, but Ate, being older, acquired it. Remember you promised to get it back for me?"

Though he was barely thirteen then, the pride of growing manhood demanded that gesture of gallantry.

"Remember, Julio, you bought the necklace from Ate with the first big money you made? It was your wedding and you laughed as you handed it to me, and said, instead of my giving you a gift, you were giving me one. That's why I pawned it you, first when Gloria was still alive… then now."

Don Julio saw the warped fingers extending the tightly rolled bills and looked away quickly. Sternly, a man bent in repaying a debt of honor, he walked over to Zenaida's room. The lock would not turn.

"Zenaida" he shouted. "Bring that necklace. Now."

Zenaida remained in her room.

Don Julio's hands clutched the knob, tried to force it. It sounded like his bones rattling. He released the knob, started to turn away but unable to look at Sepa, he knocked softly, with his head bowed against the door.

"Zenaida," he said, his voice crumbling against the wood. "Someone is here to see you."

Then he walked to his own room across the hall and waited for Zenaida's clear voice, like sharp claws tearing the long hall's silence.

---
election night, march 22 2006, 1:12 a.m.

after colonization

An excerpt from Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
by Aimé Césaire
Translated by Annette Smith and Clayton Eshleman


    At the end of daybreak. . .

    Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it,

I detest the flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope.

Beat it, evil grigri, you bedbug of a petty monk. Then I turned

toward paradises lost for him and his kin, calmer than the face

of a woman telling lies, and there, rocked by the flux of a

never exhausted thought I nourished the wind, I unlaced the

monsters and heard rise, from the other side of disaster, a

river of turtledoves and savanna clover which I carry forever

in my depths height-deep as the twentieth floor of the most

arrogant houses and as a guard against the putrefying force

of crepuscular surroundings, surveyed night and day by a cursed

venereal sun.


    At the end of daybreak burgeoning with frail coves, the hungry

Antilles, the Antilles pitted with smallpox, the Antilles dyn-

amited by alcohol, stranded in the mud of this bay, in the dust

of this town sinisterly stranded.


    At the end of daybreak, the extreme, deceptive desolate eschar

on the wound of the waters; the martyrs who do not bear witness;

the flowers of blood that fade and scatter in the empty wind

like the screeches of babbling parrots; an aged life mendacious-

ly smiling, its lips opened by vacated agonies; an aged poverty

rotting under the sun, silently; an aged silence bursting with

tepid pustules,

    the awful futility of our raison d'être.


    At the end of daybreak, on this very fragile earth thickness

exceeded in a humiliating way by its grandiose future--the vol-

canoes will explode, the naked water will bear away the ripe

sun stains and nothing will be left but a tepid bubbling pecked

at by sea birds--the beach of dreams and the insane awakening.


    At the end of daybreak, this town sprawled-flat, toppled from

its common sense, inert, winded under its geometric weight of

an eternally renewed cross, indocile to its fate, mute, vexed

no matter what, incapable of growing with the juice of this

earth, self-conscious, clipped, reduced, in breach of fauna

and flora.

the fourth finale

project runway is one of my favorite TV reality shows. ;-)

like austin in season 1, a fourth PR designer had to make his or her line because of time constraints. kara janx is season 2's secret finalist. hehehe.

i also looooooove her designs... *sigh*! britain is just rockin' coolio, baby. ahahaha. they have things that the u.s. will never have coz u.s. designers are just too embarrassed that they never came up with those things first. ahahahahaha -


you can NEVER go wrong with chocolate and blue. yum!


you are required a flair for the dramatic... but i wish i knew where to wear these numbers, ahaha. but hmm... maybe in certain weddings. (as a guest, of course! hahaha. goodness)


i love that this dress alludes to the kimono... and purple and blue are just uber yummy. *sigh!*