Mirror to the Sky

by Mark S. Geston

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Secretive, enigmatic beings, they came to Earth to live among humanity in quiet, aristocratic isolation. But now, after years of silence, the "gods" have decided to share their art. Across the vast galactic void come great ships bearing the fruits of an incomprehensible alien culture - paintings and sculpture of such raw, visceral power that their unveiling plunges the Earth into violent chaos, and sends the visitors fleeing from their adopted planet. But some remain behind - to face death at the hands of rampaging mobs, to witness the outcome of the grand cosmic game, and to assist in the creation of one last, potentially universe-shattering masterpiece that will illuminate the awesome, final destinies of god and man.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 234

Sample

THEY ANNOUNCED THEMSELVES SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE ships were resolved as physical entities, the mannered, apologetic voice transmissions reassuring the world that there was no reason for concern. They would, they said in absurdly stilted English, do everything possible to minimize the shock of their arrival and, afterward, their presence among mankind. There would only be a few hundred of them, anyway.

The largest ships remained in orbit. Those that descended were up to a kilometer long and fashioned with a cunning that prevented visual appreciation of their shapes. Their outlines flowed and bent at the edges when closely observed, and this uncertainty persisted in memory such that there was no surety that a given ship had even been present a day after it was seen departing from a landing field.

They never cast shadows unless actually resting on the ground. Localized gravitational fields warped sunlight around their hulls. That was presumed to have been the reason for the seeming fluidity of their shapes.

The newcomers’ language was similarly elusive. It was largely sung, demanding at least two full octaves to complete a sentence. Paragraphs sounded like ballads and speeches like arias. It was enchanting but physiologically and psychologically beyond human duplication. The aliens graciously recognized this and went out of their way to learn the Earthly languages.

They appeared physically human, but idealized according to a strict artistic standard. None were over six feet tall or under five feet eight. None were obviously young or old; not one of those that landed on earth was fat or notably thin. All the males had the strong, world-weary features of late Hellenistic sculptures, while the females suggested a softer Classical model.

Once they acquired fluency in the terrestrial languages, they displayed an earnest, labored sense of humor that was not without irony. They were invariably polite, solicitous and deferential, as if self-conscious about their power and achievements.

The Times declared them to be “the new Englishmen of the universe.” L’Express judged them Gallic in nature, and, stepping back only slightly from the level of British presumption, declared that the French must be their spiritual descendants on Earth. The Americans were disturbed by their sameness and, as usual, hid it poorly. Germany loudly, wearisomely admired it.

The aliens bore all this with the same graceful reserve they had shown when thousands of cultists in West Africa murdered each other before their ships, pleading with them to open the ports and allow the souls of the dying to enter and thus fly up into heaven with them. The rationale of those tedious episodes had been that only the sheer weight of spiritual suffering could force its way into the ships; the scale of self-massacre that was required to disprove it briefly sickened the world. But as the mobs butchered themselves, the news cameras often caught the aliens on the bridge of a hovering ship, expressing such precise compassion and bewilderment that the television watchers became more absorbed with them than with the spectacle on the ground.

In saner parts of the world, the aliens performed the expected tricks and wonders which almost, but never quite, entered decisively into the realm of miracles. Some dying humans, the victims of either disease, misfortune or their own lunatic efforts to win the gods’ favor, were rescued, but the dead were always left to their own decay. Earthquakes were occasionally predicted but never stopped. Mathematics and physics were refined and extended under their guidance, but they never hinted that they might uncover new conceptions of reality for mankind. They would not talk at all about their ships or if these vessels routinely violated special or general relativity.

Resentment began to form beneath the gratitude for their favors and astonishment at their existence. It was fed by the conviction that the price for all of this could not possibly be the trivial concessions of privacy and cooperation in the establishment of the diplomatic and scientific stations they requested. Their very aristocratic isolation in these establishments and in the mansions and country estates their human agents discreetly acquired for them aroused inarticulate suspicions in people who should have known better.

The same people surmised that, because they could come so near to reversing death, manipulating the Earth and travelling across stellar distances, immensely greater abilities were concealed behind their humility. People were drawn to the conclusion that they did partake of different realities but archly hid them from mankind like a magician at a children’s party.

They came to be referred to as “the gods.” They said they were embarrassed by that, professing unworthiness and explaining their wonders as if these were things they had accidently stumbled upon instead of fashioned themselves. When this did not end the term’s use, they became impatient and made it clear that it could be considered an insult if it persisted.

“We have no wish to place ourselves above you. Nor will we allow you to do this yourselves,” they said in a memorandum delivered to the State Department in June, four years after their first landing. “We only wish to maintain our limited presence on your world for our mutual enlightenment and protection.”

The last word naturally caught the eye of governments and other paranoids. “Protection from what?” was the essence of State’s answering note. “Protection” had never been mentioned before; until then everything had been toys and experiments, comic misunderstandings and the indefatigably polite requests to be left alone to pursue their observations.

“Protection from what?” Timothy Cavan’s mother repeated the question to his father at the dinner table.

Andrew Cavan’s mouth was full of pot roast, so he waved his fork in the air until he could answer. “A figure of speech. Means nothing. Same kind of hot air we use on them and each other all the time. You, of all people, should recognize that, Linda.”

“But have they ever deliberately used the word before?”

“Beats me. No one can speak their language. Even NSA’s dictionary’s stalled at twenty or thirty words. Wentworth told me it’s worse than Cretan Linear-B.” His son looked at him carefully to see where the lies began; the father returned the glance briefly enough to show that he knew what Timothy was thinking and wasn’t going to make it easy for him. “Anyway, just because they’ve become fluent in English doesn’t mean that what they intend by that particular word—and I don’t think it’s worth dwelling on—is what we’d normally read into it. I mean, Christ, dear, the arrival of these creatures has been the greatest thing in history. Ever. They’ve ennobled our generation just by landing when they did. And now, after years of offering us nothing but enrichment…”

“You can’t call what happened in Sierra Leone ‘enrichment.’”

“Don’t be silly. The locals did that to themselves. The gods had nothing to do with it.” Timothy saw his father flinch at his own unintended use of the name. He had made a point of how he disapproved of its use. “So now, after all the years that they’ve been here, what we’re mainly seeing is jealousy and hurt feelings. And a lot of hysteria over one badly chosen word in one minor note to State.”

He resumed eating, but his wife kept glaring at him. “But your people are looking into it? They’re looking into the exact use of that exact word, aren’t they?” she persisted.

“We’d be foolish not to,” Andrew Cavan answered dispiritedly. Then, after a while, “But you’ve got to believe that they can only be good for us. If they had conquest on their minds—and Christ knows how that chestnut’s been worked over from the moment they hit the atmosphere—they could have pulled it off a hundred times by now.” This was obvious patch-up; all three of them knew it.

“Probably,” she said after a while, smiling softly toward him now that she had won the exchange.

Her father was an Under Secretary of State and had warned her about the intrinsic allure of exotic societies, how easy it was to be corrupted by sympathy for foreign perspectives and how constantly one had to guard against it if the nation was to be served professionally. She had decided some time ago that her husband was succumbing in such a way and resented him thoroughly for his weakness.

THE GODS STROVE ENDLESSLY TO LESSEN THE CONSTANT shock of their presence on earth. Their stations were located in remote regions or designed to appear as ordinary as their sensory arrays allowed. Diplomatic missions and residences that were unavoidably located in cities were scrupulously ordinary. They joined the correct clubs, contributed to the correct causes, and never once sought to be chairpersons of anything at all. Numbers were never discussed, but it was assumed that there were never more than a thousand of them on Earth at once.

They exhibited an ambivalent compulsion to conceal themselves but still permit some insight beyond the requirements of strict diplomacy. Stores and cultural missions were often attached to their embassies, but the books available there were invariably opaque and never dealt with anything more intriguing than their home worlds’ geologies and fauna; there was never even a star chart to locate them in the constellations. Lectures, devoted to obscure dynastic histories that may have been myths or to other alien cultures, had the dusty smell of racial extinction about them. Readings of their lyric poetry were given during the two months following their arrival, but ceased before too much of their language was exposed to human analysis.

The gods were most willing, however, to share their visual arts. They were naturally proud of their works, no matter what the New York critics said about its “archaic representationalism,” and strangely acted as if it should pose an even greater mystery to mankind than their science or language. They appeared unconcerned over the negligible possibility of human understanding.

For this reason, Andrew Cavan examined the pictures on their missions’ walls and the sculptures in their foyers as closely as he did the readouts from the surveillance nets around each of their known Earth stations. He came to believe that the gods were flaunting something of great significance, almost against their will, as if they derived a contradictory thrill from the remote chance that one of their works might be understood by human beings.

He sometimes took Timothy to look at the gods’ art when it was convenient to his normal business. He had brought Linda along too at first, but she refused to go any more once she detected how he slipped away from her in the presence of their paintings.

In the fifth year after their arrival, Andrew Cavan brought home a small fractured bust, consisting only of the left quadrant of a head, from mid-forehead, down around the eye and below the cheek bone. It was obviously of a god, fashioned by them. This was surprising, both because it was against the law and the Department’s own protocols for individuals to keep anything the gods created and because they almost never let anything out of their possession.

He placed it on a bookcase in the living room, between two shelves of history books, where he could look at it while pretending to read on the sofa. The object produced enough unease for his wife to avoid the room, just as she had refused to accompany her husband anywhere he might encounter gods or their larger works.

Timothy was initially disappointed, but as he continued to look he discerned creases and folds which implied that the subject’s mouth had been drawn back in a feral grin, an expression impossible to conceive on any living god he had seen. After more examination, he thought he could sense the tension of the muscles sculpted below the fired surface. Intimations of a particular time, a finite number of years embedded in conflict, radiated from the bust along with profounder emotions from which his youth and inexperience protected him.

HIS FATHER CAME HOME ONE EVENING IN EARLY SPRING, flushed with booze and success. He had, he announced to his wife and son, pretty much wrapped up the first formal exhibition of godly art. His wife said deliberately that this was very good and left them.

Timothy watched his father make the conscious decision that this reception should not diminish the moment; he had been foolish to expect admiration from her at all. So he reconstructed his smile and unloaded his triumph on his son. Timothy tried to understand in the hope it would make up for the unidentifiable thing which had walked out of the room with his mother.

His father said that State and Commerce had just cleared the project. CIA and Defense Intelligence had disclaimed any interest in something so ephemeral. The gods themselves had been reluctant, but he had imposed upon a particularly ambitious and receptive fellow named Slate, and they had finally committed themselves to produce not only a representative group of fifty pieces but some of the artists as well. Most of the works and artists, his father said, his voice regaining its excitement, must be coming from their home worlds, so, even while they were speaking, the very paintings and statues they would see that autumn were doubtlessly being packed in strange excelsiors and loaded into the holds of starships. Perhaps they were even moving through the constellations now, necessarily at superluminal speeds if they were to arrive in time.

But, he continued, that assumed the exhibition had not really been planned and the works dispatched centuries ago, and the gods’ agreement was merely a charade designed to subtly reinforce the erroneous belief of gullible humans that they had mastered faster-than-light travel.

“So which do you believe?” Timothy asked carefully.

“Ah,” his father delayed, looking toward the study where his wife had retired. “That really doesn’t matter right now, does it, Tim? If they can’t outrun light, then we can’t. And if they can—as seems to be the case—we couldn’t grasp the technology for another five hundred years. We’d burn ourselves up trying. The important thing is that they might show us something we can understand, even if they don’t mean to or can’t stop themselves from doing it. I think we’ll be able to look at one or two of the pictures, all alone.” Then he whistled to himself as if only now struck by the implications of his thoughts and lurched off to the kitchen.

Timothy waited all that night for the shouting to start, but nothing erupted. His father sat in the living room with the television on, sipping his most expensive wines and staring at the bust. His mother stayed with him and actually seemed to be making some kind of effort to reach him. She sat at the opposite end of the couch with her own glass of gin, filled higher than usual, occasionally touching him and smiling indulgently, but then drawing back when he went for another drink.

Timothy asked her about that the next day, before he went to school. She shrugged in her reassuring, educated way to show that, despite last night’s difficulties, she was still making a favorable daily choice. “He’s his own person. We’re all on our own when we think about it. And we could be back in Zurich, before you were born …”

“Before the gods landed?”

“Before they ever came here. Now that was difficult. Exciting. But still difficult.”

PEOPLE STILL EXPECTED THE LEAVES TO CHANGE IN OCTOBER, even though that had not happened for twenty years before the gods arrived. Changes were being made in the geochemical carbon cycle to hasten the return of normal seasons. There was now substantial involvement of the gods’ technology in these stupendous efforts, but even they said that the process would take decades and was full of uncertainty. Their hints that the present climate reminded them of their home worlds both reassured and unsettled those who still wished for snow and crops in Iowa.

The leaves were down by the beginning of December. The prediction for the next year moved the date for this back to Thanksgiving, if everything went as planned; a small but gratifying improvement if it happened.

Timothy’s mother had declined the invitation for the opening reception, even though it was signed jointly by the State Department, UNESCO’s General Secretary and the gods’ Chief of Mission in Washington. His father had argued with her only briefly over this. They compromised when she agreed to accompany him to a reception given by the Kampuchean Embassy the following week, a function they would both detest.

Andrew Cavan went to the National Gallery alone and came home early. Timothy listened anxiously against the wall between their bedrooms but heard only strained pleasantries. His father’s voice had none of the slurred extravagance that had been there on the night he announced the project.

Timothy positioned himself at breakfast Sunday so that his father could ask him to go to the Gallery, but not his mother. Everyone cooperated in the conspiracy, even to the extent that it was his mother who suggested he and his father take in the show without all the distractions of diplomatic community socializing.

A wing had been set aside at the National Gallery. The National Air and Space Museum was directly across the Mall and Timothy, who had been there often, could not help but place his mind’s eye in the cockpit of the X-15 hanging from one side of the entry hall celling or in the Spirit of St. Louis, suspended on the other side, and look through Lindbergh’s periscope at the alien blue sculpture on the Gallery steps.

The gods translated the sculpture’s title as Promise and regretted that the sculptor, identified in English as Jess, had been too ill to attend. It seemed fairly standard abstract stuff, hugely graceful in the manner of a Calder. But it possessed the singular power to invoke, specifically and literally for some few people, the day before the gods landed. To the evident dismay of some of the gods present, this had been mentioned during the previous night’s diplomatic reception.

The exhibition was opened to the public the next day. The crowds did not seem very large to Timothy, despite the show’s overwhelming importance to his father and the mildness of the weather. The Hudson School exhibition in the wing across the entrance hall seemed to be drawing nearly as many people.

His father remarked that perhaps the necessary security measures were keeping things subdued. Everyone entering the Gallery had to pass through standard metal detectors and neutron activation sniffers. Signs in the entrance hall reiterated the government’s right to conduct random strip searches. Half the cops posted outside the Gallery and in the cavernous entrance hall had attack dogs and the other half were carrying machine pistols.

Salutes and other signs of deference were offered to his father by the senior officers on duty. They walked into the exhibition and saw nothing immediately remarkable. Three large pictures, rendered in the same style and arranged as a triptych, occupied the far wall. Timothy felt chilled when he first saw them, but that could have been a breeze or the obligatory reaction to his father’s buildup about the exhibition’s significance.

The walls on either side of the hall were lined with framed paintings; the angle prevented him from seeing them clearly.

A row of freestanding sculptures, including an enlargement of the half-bust his father had brought home, occupied the center space. Timothy naturally walked toward this first. He stood in front of it, expecting the half-imagined emotions the piece at home evoked would be vastly magnified and hurled toward him all at once.

The craftsmanship was even more obsessive than that which had been lavished on the smaller version. He first made out individual pores when he bent close to the surface and then, within them, the vaguely implied presence of individual cells. The lines of the facial muscles were detectable, also, and after a minute’s concentration he thought that he could perceive the fragmented section of skull underneath.

He jerked himself away, realizing the impossibility of such perceptions. “Nice trick,” he mumbled and was embarrassed that his father heard.

“I should say. They say it’s just an extrapolation of our own techniques of perspective. We can manage the illusion of three dimensions on two-dimensional surfaces: height, width and depth on a flat canvas. We always know it’s an illusion, although if the artist’s using holographic enhancements, the illusion can be pretty convincing. Remember the Ivanov show here last year, Tim?”

His son nodded. The man’s renderings of the “Stalin” myth-cycle had been a source of nightmares for weeks afterward. They still interfered at school with his ability to grasp the history of that particular era in academic terms.

“But where we can just do the illusion of depth, their best artists are supposed to be able to convey all kinds of non-visible …” Andrew Cavan’s speech slowed as he sensed the irrationality of what he was saying. “… ah, invisible knowledge like time and the identity of the subjects, mood, emotion. Anything at all, if you want to believe what I was told at the reception last night. And, of course, they have access to things we don’t, times and places that are completely foreign to us. Things we don’t have any frame of reference for.”

“That’s what Mother…”

“I know. I know,” he continued, his enthusiasm only briefly waning. “But you can see that, in a way, they are starting to share such things with us.”

“On purpose?”

Andrew Cavan looked at his son approvingly, as he did when the boy achieved a worthy insight. “Their intentions are unclear. They always are,” he sighed. “But the risk is being taken. I think they’re going to be surprised at how accessible some of this is to us. Like the sculpture outside.”

“And how they’ll arrive ‘tomorrow’? Right?”

The piece next to the bust was distinctly reminiscent of the blue metal stabile in front of the Gallery’s steps, but there was no invocation of memory hovering around it. Timothy strained toward some kind of insight, but then relaxed when he realized how ridiculous such a conscious effort was.

Timothy gave the sculpture a last chance at astonishment and then began a slow circuit of the room, heading toward the far end where his father was now talking to a god. He would be embarrassed to appear at his side without any flattering observations about the art.

He passed a row of landscapes distinguished by the polychrome flora the gods spoke of so lovingly when they described their homes. Most were uninhabited. The execution was often hyper-realisti. . .