Watching as he listened, I saw him frown and shake his head, frown and listen again. At last he passed the headphones to me.
“We’re expected,” he said. “A Director Ivor Cheung wants to talk to you.”
I heard a snatch of strange music and then a woman’s voice.
“Sir, will you hold for just a moment?”
In only a moment I heard a hearty boom.
“Sandor Fenway! I speak for the Arkwood-Fenway Foundation.” Accents had changed, and I begged him to slow his speech. “Your father told us to expect you.”
“My father? How? When?”
“After his return from NBH, two hundred years ago.”
I felt dazed. “With no ship?”
“With Arkwood science, he required no ship.” I heard a genial chuckle at my confusion.
“We’re here to welcome you home. A briefing has been prepared. It will cover Dr.
Fenway’s return and its historic aftermath. A pilot craft is now on the way to guide you in.”
The pilot craft was a little silver globe that spoke in a crisp robotic voice. It guided us down, but not to the shabby old brick-and-mortar building my father had leased for it on the outskirts of Atlantica. We landed on a flying island like the one my father had shown me on his easel. It floated over the Gulf Stream, a hundred miles off Sandy Hook. A final skip brought us low above it.
McKane held us there, staring. Its sleek white hull was a full mile long. Green parkways edged its decks. It had no funnels, but a gold-hued spiral dome towered out of its superstructure. Tiny silver globes whirled like birds around it. Our pilot craft brought us through them, down to an open platform.
McKane opened the lock. Rousing music greeted us, tantalizingly half familiar. A little group of men and women stood waiting. All wore neat white jackets with red-black patches on the breasts. Smiling, a tall, dark man advanced to greet us.
“Mr. Sandor Fenway? Captain McKane?” He paused to see which was which. “I am Director Cheung.” He turned to gesture at those behind him. “These are fellow foundation officials, all members of the Black Light Society.”
McKane muttered a question.
“You’ll be learning,” he said. “The society is devoted to the study and teaching of what Dr. Fenway knew of Ark-wood science and culture. Their mastery of space and time may surprise you. They were even conquering gravity, but too late to save themselves.”
He turned to me.
“We’ll be briefing you on the historic consequences of his return. Before we go in, however, we have a gift left for you.”
He stepped aside. A slender young woman came forward, holding a white plastic box.
She lifted it toward me, checked herself, and stepped back, flushing pink.
“Mr. Sandor—” She stopped to take a breath, and I had time to note how well the white jacket became her. “Your father left this message with his gift.” She read it from a strip of yellow plastic.
“‘Dear Sandy,
“‘I understood your doubts. Don’t brood about them. You’ll learn to like Mr. Other. You’ll find him a great science teacher and a master at the game.’”
She held the box for me to open. The lid snapped back at my touch, and I saw the jade-and-jet chessmen I had last seen on my father’s desk at Black Hole Station.
“Shall we take care of them for you?” she asked. “The update is ready for you now.”
Director Cheung took us through a little park where he showed me a statue of my mother, and on to the Lily Arkwood Hall. He spoke to us there, from a stage where the whole wall behind him became an enormous window that could look out on another city, a ship in space, another planet, even Black Hole Station.
Through the first centuries since we left, the skipships had carried colonists out to terraform new planets while Earth itself was in decline. With resources depleted and opportunities rare, it had been almost abandoned. Back from NBH, my father had been its savior.
“The Arkwood legacy.” Cheung turned to gesture at a strange-shaped spacecraft dropping out of an orange-red sky. “Arkwood science has reshaped human history. The science of truly instant flight has bypassed the relativity limit and unified the scattered and isolated planets into our great galactic civilization.”
He paused to let us watch the spacecraft landing in a city of golden spiral towers.
“The richest gift, however, has been the Arkwood philosophy. Our own evolution had left us driven by herd instincts, forever fighting for survival. We strove to be leaders, but most of us had to follow the winners. Chiefs and priests and prophets. Patriarchs, pharaohs, presidents. Captains of industry and heads of the house. When men were not enough; we invented autocratic gods.”
He bowed toward me.
“We honor your father, Mr. Fenway, most of all because he declined to become a god. Instead he helped us grow up. We had aspired to conquer nature and rule the universe. With NBH, he showed us the folly of such infantile illusions.
“The omnipotent destroyer! Itself a dark god, it has taught us our true place in the universal process. The cosmos has neither master nor slaves. It is simply a river of energy where we are droplets of life, or better the climbers of an infinite stair that can take us up forever.”
He touched the black circle on his jacket.
“That’s the Arkwood way, the gospel of the Black Light Society. We are not a religion, though our message may reflect ancient faiths. We follow no doctrine and enforce no commandments. All we preach is understanding as your father gave it to us, truth instead of illusion, altruism instead of aggression, love instead of hate, peace instead of terror.”
The Arkwood way has made sense to me. Though this altered Earth often seems as alien to me as our old one must have been to my father four centuries ago, I’ve found contentment here. Loving friends have asked me to join the Black Light Society. At the foundation academy, I have begun to learn Arkwood science and Arkwood culture.
I want to discover more. The foundation has restored Black Hole Station. When my studies here on Earth are finished, I plan to go back there and try to reach my father’s Mr. Other. NBH has no sun in its ravenous grasp, and that old dread of high places has left me. Looking down from the skyship’s rail at the Atlantic whitecaps a mile below, I can hardly recall my terror of falling toward that baleful red star at the bottom of its dark pit.
STATION SPACES
by Gregory Benford
Gregory Benford is a working scientist who has written some twenty-three critically-acclaimed novels. He has received two Nebula Awards, first in 1981 for Timescape, a novel which sold over a million copies and won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Australian Ditmar Award, and the British Science Fiction Award. In 1992, Dr. Benford received the United Nations Medal in Literature. He is also a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine since 1971. He specializes in astrophysics and plasma physics theory and was presented with the Lord Prize in 1995 for achievements in the sciences. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and Phi Beta Kappa. He has been an adviser to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the United States Department of Energy, and the White House Council on Space Policy, and has served as a visiting fellow at Cambridge University. His first book-length work of non-fiction, Deep Time (1999), examines his work in long duration messages from a broad humanistic and scientific perspective.
YOU KNOW many things, but what he knows is both less and more than what I tell to us.
Or especially, what we all tell to all those others—those simple humans, who are like him in their limits.