Space Stations

“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.

I cannot be what you are, you the larger.

Not that we are not somehow also the same—wedded to our memories of the centuries we have grown together.