If The Stars Are Gods

Praise for IF THE STARS ARE GODS

The kind of read that gets a tentacular grip on your mind. The Times of London

Excellent . . . finely written and handles the notion of alien life forms on various scales with imagination and something close to old-fashioned awe. The Spectator

Incorporating the Nebula Award winning story of the same name, If the Stars Are Gods tells the epic tale of Bradley Reynolds, the legendary Man Who Knew the Stars, and his lifelong quest to discover the secrets of alien intelligence. From the time-scoured deserts of Mars to the raging cloud storms of Jupiter, from the radio winds of Titan to the true center of the universe where Beings are collected like songs, Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund spin a major work of speculative science fiction in the tradition of Childhood’s End and 2001: A Space Odyssey, a story as timeless as the stars themselves.

Contents

Start Reading

Introduction

Preview: Cosmic Fusion

Table of Contents

About the Authors

A Lucky Bat Book

If the Stars Are Gods

Copyright © 2017 by Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund

All rights reserved,

which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law.

Cover Design by Brandon Swann

Cover Photo Courtesy of NASA

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with other people, please purchase additional copies. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Publication History

This book was first published by Berkley Publishing Corporation in 1977

Copyright © 1977 by Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund

Lines from Sailing to Byzantium from the Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats (copyright 1928 by MacMillian Publishing Co., Inc., renewed 1956 by Georgie Yeats) were reprinted by permission of MacMillian Publishing Co., Inc., New York, and M.B. Yeats, Miss Anne Yeats and the MacMillian Company of London & Basingstoke.

Illustration by Rick Sternbach

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To: Boyd Raeburn, Norm and Gina Clarke, F. M. and Elinor Busby, Bob Tucker, Dean Grennell, Dick and Patricia Lupoff, Carol Carr, Sidney Coleman, Bob and Barbara Silverberg, William Rotsler, Jim and Hilary Benford, Dick and Pat Ellington, and, most especially, to Terry Carr.

STARS AND GODS

Some Reflections 40 years later

1

It was July 1970 when Gordon Eklund moved to Berkeley from San Francisco, where he’d been living since his 1967 discharge from the Air Force. He was twenty-five, married with a baby son not yet two, and had grown weary of the big city and its noisy, tumultuous, overpriced ways. In addition, after two foggy years of living less than a mile from the Pacific Ocean he wanted to experience some of the fabled California sunshine and over in Berkeley, friends assured him, the sun often came out several days in succession.

So Gordon and family rode a trans-Bay F bus across to Berkeley one typically gray summer San Francisco day, quickly found a furnished two-bedroom unit on Dwight Way five blocks south of the University of California campus at a reduced summer rate, and shortly afterward moved in. Gordon was then wrapping up the writing of his first science fiction novel, The Eclipse of Dawn, under contract to Ace Books in editor Terry Carr’s Science Fiction Specials line. He’d received an initial $1000 advance on contract signing with a second $1000 due when he turned in the finished manuscript, enough along with what he was making regularly selling stories to the major science fiction magazines of the time—F&SF, Galaxy, If, Amazing, Fantastic—to squeak by on.

One afternoon a few days after moving in as Gordon was heading down to Telegraph Avenue after his regular morning stint at the typewriter to poke through the second hand bookshops a pale young man with stringy hair and a patchy beard went rushing past, waving his hands and crying out: Don’t go up there! Stay inside! Don’t breathe! Reagan’s gassing the campus!

And so, it turned out, he was. Ronald Reagan, California’s governor at the time, had ordered state police helicopters to spray tear gas on a noisy clutch of campus demonstrators, effectively dispersing them in what turned out to be the last major campus demonstration against the Vietnam War, marking the End of an Era, tear gas and otherwise.

By then the Berkeley business district nearest the campus bore the look and feel of a bombed-out war zone. Most of the storefronts—especially those like the Bank of America that were particular targets—had long since given up replacing their shattered window glass. Thick slabs of graffiti-embossed plywood stood nailed up instead. Around the corner from where Gordon lived the self-styled Red Army Commune headed by Tom Hayden occupied a big gray-shingled Victorian house. There rarely seemed to be anyone home and it later turned out the residents were spending much of their time in the surrounding hills practicing their marksmanship for the expected coming revolutionary battles.

It often struck Gordon this was a fertile time in which to be writing books about the future. And the finished The Eclipse of Dawn reflected this.

2

If the Stars Are Gods, a more traditional science fiction work, got its start that same summer. It was then Gordon and Gregory Benford fell into the habit of meeting for lunch every few weeks whenever Greg happened to be in Berkeley. Greg was a physicist at the Lawrence Radiation Lab in Livermore and also had an office at UC Berkeley, where he came in once a week. The two had first met as teenagers through science fiction fandom and its active social scene and now both were writing science fiction themselves. They would usually grab something at the one Indian restaurant already open for business on Telegraph Avenue and talk about their writing careers, the stories and books they’d written, the many more they hadn’t yet got around to. Both were in similar places as writers with a number of stories already in print, early books out or soon to appear, some well received, others less so, lots of stuff being said about their considerable promise. Out of these lunches came the Nebula-winning collaborative story If the Stars Are Gods and the various other connected pieces that eventually formed a novel under the same title.

Like many young writers both Gordon and Greg were drawn to hardboiled fiction. Hemingway, James M. Cain, early John O’Hara, above all Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Gordon preferred Hammett; Greg leaned more toward Chandler. Greg felt Hammett lacked depth and polish; Gordon found Chandler a bit on the self-consciously airy side. Gordon had recently uncovered a rare out-of-print copy of Jim Thompson’s then obscure The Killer Inside Me and for a time carried a copy around with him everywhere he went. Both were particularly drawn to Donald Westlake’s series about the emotionless master thief Parker written under the penname Richard Stark and traded copies of the books back and forth whenever they found a new one.

This was likely where their second collaborative novel Find the Changeling got its initial inspiration. At one of their lunches either Greg or Gordon turned to the other and said, You know, why don’t we write something like a Parker story except, you know, set in the future—hard science fiction.

This became Find the Changeling, a book still in print twenty-five years later.

Greg also floated some early ideas of his about a hard sf novel that intersected philosophical/religious issues. He worked in plasma physics because the nuclear fusion energy program at Livermore, where he had first been a postdoc with Edward Teller, focused on how to confine hot plasmas in magnetic bottles. We know that magnetic fields can confine very energetic plasmas, because on our own sun there are huge arches built of twisted fields. When these blow open they give us solar storms. The knotted magnetic fields that flare out from our sun can shape into loops that reproduce by snaking and cutting off into new, smaller loops.

Around the late 1960s a physicist published a paper on the possibility that such magnetic entities on the sun could reproduce and become intelligent. Decades later Benford eventually wrote a novel about this idea, The Sunborn (2005) He called these lifeforms the Magnetics. If the Magnetics took over the sun eventually, they might form a super-intelligence. They live through the adroit weaving of electrical currents. They feed on the electrical potentials that trickle through the fuming sun. Their interiors are highly ionized plasmas that carry information in waves and muscle their environment with electrodynamic forces.

These colossal Beings tell strange tales of the little rocky worlds that have been lately rotting into life. A low obscene hot life—solids! Not powered by the clean transformations of electromotive force, but by the clumsy building up and tearing down of molecules. Such are the Beings who manage our sun.

Fun speculations, they both realized at the time, but where was the story? It’s hard to depict entities of ionized gas.

So they started plotting a novel with this vague background. Eventually they settled on depicting more manageable aliens, and showed them resembling giraffes, a poke at customary ideas of what evolutionary paths lead to intelligence. They’re not hugely tech types; their starship is a big version of the Orion craft, that drops nuclear explosives out the back and rides the blast wave with a huge pusher plate to absorb the momentum. The aliens seem to have knowledge the humans can’t quite grasp. They know our sun, somehow. The lead human character’s rather obsessive efforts generate the story.

So they talked it over during lunch and on the phone and as they did the story developed and matured, various characters sprouted into existence, a future history coalesced, an alien society developed. The actual writing went smoothly, quickly.

By then Greg had moved to UC Irvine in Orange County to teach and research at the UC Irvine campus. Their working manuscript passed back and forth by mail, each adding new scenes as they went along, lightly revising what the other had done before, the whole collaborative bit. They wrote slowly through the 1971-73 period because Benford was working hard as an assistant professor at UC Irvine. He wrote a dozen scientific papers a year for several years and gathered in a million dollar grant to build a plasma physics lab at UCI. His reward was getting tenure after two years, which for a while made him the youngest tenured professor in the UC system. His physics career continues still. Still, in 1973 he wanted to get back to fiction (excluding the more fantastic parts of grant applications).

After the original novelette, a series of additional stories followed, enough to make up an eventual novel detailing the life of its protagonist, Bradley Reynolds, seen as a spiritual journey against the role of life in the universe.

The original story was quite well received when it appeared in the spring of 1974 in the hardcover Random House anthology Universe Four, though a few critics found the central protagonist, Bradley Reynolds, to be a bit over the top. But then, who among us would invite Captain Ahab over for dinner, drinks and a video afterward? Successful fiction often delves into the character of people who are strange, peculiar, unique. In this respect good science fiction is no different.

3

The original novelette If The Stars Are Gods went on to win a Nebula Award in 1975 and afterward both Gordon and Greg were able to sell pretty much anything they wrote. In addition, they found a ready market waiting for the expanded novel length version which appeared in 1976. The book did well in hardcover and paperback and has had many foreign editions. Following on the novelette, the rest of the life of Bradley Reynolds fell into place—meeting strange aliens, forging out into the realms of the solar system, always questing.

For Greg these stories marked his continuing explorations of aliens and big ideas. He wrote a six novel series on humanity’s future, stretching out tens of thousands of years—the Galactic Center Series, six volumes, started around the time this novel got written. He paralleled this strain with novels about scientists, starting with Timescape (1980), which won several awards. He has kept up the pace of nearly a book a year for over forty years now, in 2017. Gordon went on to publish another dozen SF novels through the 1970s and early ’80s as he continued to pursue the rarely halcyon life of the freelance writer. Later, after his 1981 move to Seattle, the pace slackened considerably. More recently there have been growing signs of a resurgence. New stories have begun to appear—tighter, darker, often mordant and more mature. The future for both writers continues to unfurl.

The Mars opening of this novel now resonates today. Both rovers and satellites have now found bursts of methane in the Martian atmosphere. The plausible explanation is occasional venting of methane as a waste product from subsurface microbial life, just as we observe on Earth. So maybe there is life on Mars, not carried by our probes. This seems the outstanding prospect for finding life beyond Earth in our solar system, the quest we envisioned for Bradley Reynolds decades ago.

4

So . . . is there anything to the idea that stars might have consciousness? Or be godlike?

Interestingly, some ideas about this came trickling out in the 2010s, based on earlier science. Parenago’s Discontinuity, a stellar observation, is named after Soviet astrophysicist Pavel Parenago. In the 1940s and ’50s, Parenago started to work on ideas about stellar astrophysics that ran counter to the predominant perspectives in astronomy. He knew he was doing something that was heresy to the extreme materialistic viewpoints of the Soviet authorities and he had to protect himself. So he dedicated his book to the most highly evolved human being of all time, a guy named Joseph Stalin.

He needed to be politically correct, because his ideas weren’t. Parenago found that cooler stars, including the sun, move somewhat faster around the center of the galaxy than hotter ones. (Parenago’s discovery relates to plane-of-sky velocity—ie, relative to the Local Standard of Rest—and not orbital velocity.) This phenomenon isn’t just in a specific region of the galaxy; it happens all over the disc—redder, cooler stars move generally faster around the center of the galaxy than other, brighter stars. Why? To consider the issue, see https://www.amazon.com/Starlight-Starbright-Are-Stars-Conscious/dp/0993400213

If such stars indeed have a form of consciousness, making them behave differently, how do they get around? How can a star physically change its direction and speed in space? This idea raises the possibility that an advanced alien civilization may have created a megastructure that could allow a star to push itself around sort of as a very large, slow starship. This idea too has some small history. Benford took this notion along, to write a three-novel sequence with friend Larry Niven, of Ringworld fame, Bowl of Heaven, Shipstar, and the forthcoming Glory. There, the megaengineering is explored in detail, with aliens galore.

But to explain Parenago’s Discontinuity, it’s unlikely so many stars would have hyper-intelligent extraterrestrials orbiting them, to focus their light and plasma into a thrustor. Maybe stellar jets, emitted from the star’s poles, could do it?

Observations with the Hubble Space Telescope and other modern telescopes reveal that young stars go through a stage where they emit intense bipolar jets, sometimes asymmetrically. Consider a T Tauri star that ejects a 100-kilometer per second velocity unipolar jet for two million years at a mass-ejection rate one-million times that of the Sun. Parenago noted a discontinuity in the motion of near stars as they move around the galactic center on orbits of about 200-million-year duration. When he plotted star motion versus spectral class, he noted that cooler, redder, longer-lived stars are a bit faster than their hotter, bluer, shorter-lived sisters. This discontinuity in stellar kinematics occurs at around the same star masses where molecules are beginning to appear in the spectral signatures of stellar upper layers.

So: This star therefore ejects about 10-7 (one ten-millionth) of its mass per year, or about 20% of its total mass at 100 kilometers per second, during the early, two-million-year duration T Tauri phase of its existence. Then the star can alter its galactic revolution velocity by about 20 kilometers per second.

The numbers check, roughly. Unipolar or asymmetric jets from young stars are a leading candidate for how a conscious star could alter its galactic velocity. Another possibility is electromagnetic-radiation pressure.

Stars normally radiate spherically. But not if managed by engineering. So . . . could some intelligence arise in stars? Become godlike? Could the aliens who come to visit our star be onto something . . . ?

One of the themes in that story is how hard it is to talk to aliens. We don’t know how. We have not developed in-depth communication with the most intelligent organic species that we share this planet with—dolphins and other cetaceans. Our attempts to speak with chimpanzees—our closest living relatives—are primitive at best. Other creatures reaching for intelligence—cats, dogs, elephants and parrots—serve as domestic animal companions rather than being treated as near equals. And the cephalopods (octopi and squids) typically are served as delicious meals!

Sentient stars would be very alien. First, they exist in relative isolation from one another. Many human lifetimes would elapse during a conversation between two relatively close stellar neighbors, even at light speed.

The vast difference in lifetime between humans and stars would provide another difficulty. A typical human lifetime is equivalent in duration to one second or so in the main sequence life of a Sun-like star. To the stars, our lives are those of mayflies! The difficulty in establishing communication with humans (from a star’s point of view) is analogous of that of the human explorers who contact short-lived intelligent beings on the surface of a neutron star in Robert Forward’s excellent novel Dragon’s Egg (Ballantine, NY, 1980). We’re mayflies.

In Stapledon’s Star Maker, communication between stellar and advanced planetary intelligence is of paramount importance to the evolution of the galaxy. In that novel, stars do not like being shrouded by constructions such as Dyson Shells. See Larry Niven’s Ringworld (Ballantine, NY, 1970) for a fictional treatment of such a construction. Stars also react violently in Stapledon’s novel when their trajectories are altered by organic beings.

If it can be shown that stars possess a form of consciousness, what about larger structures within the universe? In Star Maker, Stapledon speculates that the galaxies themselves are conscious in a sense. He develops this idea further in his unfinished Nebula Maker (published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Co., NY, in 1983).

Gregory Matloff, an old physicist friend of mine, has taken this issue forward. A veteran physicist at New York City College of Technology, he recently published a paper arguing that humans may be like the rest of the universe in substance and in spirit. A proto-consciousness field could extend through all of space, he argues. Stars may be thinking entities that deliberately control their paths. Put more bluntly, the entire cosmos may be self-aware—panpsychism, it’s called. That view defines consciousness by the ability of a system to be influenced by its previous state and to influence its next state. So maybe far simpler systems than humans and animals could be conscious?

Still, in Benford’s opinion, sentient stars that like to go fast ranks as among the all-time least likely explanations for any stellar phenomenon.

So maybe stars can be godlike, but it’s a far stretch. But visiting aliens don’t have to be scientifically right—they just have to believe. Dealing with such strange creatures was fun. Making them resemble giraffes was an added oddity. That was just the beginning of Bradley Reynolds’ quest, pursuing the alien, in the stories that drew we authors into a journey we much enjoyed.

We’ve left dates the same, which makes this a bit of alternate history—a future where we ventured far and fast into the solar system. Would that we could do so, now . . .

Lastly, of those our novel was dedicated to, only a few remain—Gina Clarke, Elinor Busby, Dick and Patricia Lupoff, Carol Carr, Bob and Barbara Silverberg, Jim and Hilary Benford. Regards to them!

ONE

1992

MARS

I

IT WAS A fact, Major Paul Smith reasoned as he gazed at the cratered terrain now sweeping past, that life existed on the planet Mars.

No, not just the present landing party—Kastor, Mclntyre, Reynolds, and Morgan—who were surveying the northern reaches of