These Cold Depths of Space

By Robert R. Shelsky

You see, when we found them, they were all dead. We knew how they had died. Telltale clues abounded, waiting for us to discover and piece them together, just as we had done twice before. Was this alien race's funeral pyre an augury for humanity? Were these signs and portents of our own doom? From that dark wellspring of dread, that potential prophecy, surged our foreboding. Like curdled milk, it rankled in the pits of our stomachs. Its bile mounted in our throats to sour our hopes and magnify our fears. Yet, we never spoke of it. We never acted as if we were even particularly aware of it. We were too afraid. Yes, we knew how it had happened, but at the time, we did not know why.

In the beginning, we were at the heights of an almost transcendental joy, making our voyage of discovery, the first of its kind. How quickly that initial euphoria evaporated. As an early misting over a meadow green, it dissolved, fading away in the cold light of reality's wintry day. From that initial zenith of hope, we made a rapid descent to the nadir of desolation.

It took such a short time. Well, that isn't quite true. Actually, decades would be more like it. Yet, it does not seem that way to us now, as we look back on it all, as we prepare to head for Earth. It all seems so compressed in our minds and memories, so terribly swift. Would that we could go back to a more happy hour, when the evening shadows of trepidation were short, and the morning glow of optimism was still bright in our hearts. We long to know nothing of any of this. Some discoveries, it seems, one should not make. For us, that realization came too late.

Our destination, an alien star system, hung there, suspended in space before us. We gazed in wonder; our eyes were alight with awe at it. After all, the three of us were the first to behold such a thing close up, to explore unknown worlds that orbited a sun other than our own. We would delve into unknown mysteries and solve ancient riddles. However, there was the task of surveying the system.

Besides a yellow sun, there were seven planets, two asteroid belts (odd), and the equivalents of an Oort Cloud, and Kuiper Belt. An analysis declared prospects for life, never mind intelligence, minimal. Still, the oddity of the two asteroid belts needed more study. This priority allowed us to overrule the protocol that demanded we leave.

It took several weeks to accomplish this task. It involved a number of relocations. The Interstitial Drive, or I-Drive, was not available within a certain perimeter of a star. Instead, our ship propelled us using the secondary drive, which was matter-antimatter. It beat the hell out of chemical rockets, but still, it did take time.

We sailed this star system's vacuous seas, exploring its atolls in space. At times, the ship raced before blasts of dangerous solar flares. Had they hit us, we would have died in hours. Those would not have been easy deaths. We threaded a course through drifting shoals of dark asteroids that filled the outer belt. We tacked around the gravity wells of churning gas giants. There was a frothy crimson one, another that was ice blue, and a huge verdant green and gold orb with tawny rings. I remember it particularly, because it made me homesick, so much like Saturn was it.

Strange places they were, and even stranger information poured in from them. Scans showed traces of artificial constructs, bare outlines, and mere memories of ruins. They lay scattered about on several of the moons of those Jovian-style worlds.

What a triumph! What a discovery! The first of its kind for humanity, and we were the ones that had made it. This system had known intelligence. A race had sprung from here and had begun colonization of its adjacent worlds. They were gone now, destroyed, and not just by time. Some catastrophic event had claimed them. It was our job, Javier's, Margaret's, and my own, to determine what it was.

As time progressed, I increasingly looked upon this place as lonely and sad. People often describe me as being of a melancholy nature. I disagree. Introspective, is the way I would explain myself.

We plied the sinister distances between those barren worlds. Ghost worlds, so empty of life, left to revolve endlessly around an aging sun. Concealed under impenetrable blankets of frozen white ammonia, or buried deep in mounds of hard yellow sulfur and orange methane ice, what evidence remained was scant, too hidden for us to learn much. Just vestiges were left, pathetic monuments to the hopes and aspirations of a people. To reach for the stars only to have it end like this. What had happened here? What agency had wrought this outrage?

We needed one more investigation before our analysis was complete. Then, we could verify our conclusions. We traversed the inner asteroid belt with its scattered irregular boulders, angular chunks of black rock, and frozen lumps of dirty-gray ice. We skirted myriad schools of tumbling ochre stones, dodged swarms of hurtling umber pebbles, and cautiously flew through tan-colored clouds of grit.

This belt had struck us as an anomaly the moment we had first scanned it, because it was in the wrong place. Earth's scientists had concluded that our asteroid belt was a direct result of the gravitational forces of Jupiter and to some degree, the other gas giants. It was an abortion--a planet never born.

Here, it was different. This endless stream of stones had once been a world. It had known water, oxygen, life, and intelligence. This planet had been no abortion. It was a suicide, a carefully planned and orchestrated self-annihilation. Margaret, red-haired Margaret of the laughing green eyes and winsome smile, was the first to reach that conclusion.

How well devised, how extensive they had been in their desire to contrive and then execute their own extinction. One could not help but admire the effort involved, if not the outcome. The motivation for this act of felo-de-se was unknown to us. That was still a mystery. The means they had used were not. Matter-antimatter, the telltale residual of such bomb types, if only in extremely attenuated amounts, was still there.

They had deployed them with what amounted to religious zealotry. Dating showed that they had first demolished all their extra-planetary bases before turning this lethal power upon themselves. Conscientiousness was the hallmark of their efforts. Overkill was the means. Extinction was the consequence.

There was little more to learn. Our protocol stated that we must leave. As the sun and worlds of this poor graveyard of a place diminished behind us, we still studied it. Javier voiced the hope that they might have sent a slow-ship as a colonizer to some other star system before they had decided on their Kamikaze goal. Divine Wind, indeed! What, I had wondered aloud, was the Japanese for divine stupidity? Why had they killed themselves?

Before cold sleep, a long stream of data, compiled and sent by me, shot toward Earth. There would be no answer. Earth could not possibly locate us, not knowing how long we would be in any location, and it taking years to receive their signal.

Rear cameras focused on the dwindling sun. Its worlds were already invisible to us. "Aeternum vale, farewell forever," Javier said. His dark face looked grim. Javier had a penchant for Latin.

Three more times we awoke, but only for mere hours. The systems we entered, despite having held promise for those back on Earth, had never known life. Notwithstanding suns that fostered such hopes, other factors obviated the possibility. It was either the severity of the planets' orbits, their degrees of tilt, chemical makeup, or other unlucky happenstances of nature, which forbade the possibility of life. Each time we discovered this, our protocol enforced our exit, and our return to mandatory "sleep." I don't know about the others, but these staccato interruptions in our existence were an anathema to me. Perhaps, it was because nothing occurred while we were in cold sleep. I missed the memories of dreams, the memories of even having dreamt them.

It was the fifth sun where we again found that life had once existed. Fourteen planets occupied this stellar system. The moon of a scarlet gas giant had once harbored intelligent life. Strange to see that leviathan, that blood-red monster of a world orbiting only a little farther out than our own Earth did around its sun. The mechanics of the formation of this solar system intrigued me, but time and resources were limited. We had to focus our attention on the world that had once held life. This we did.

To our horror, we found that we had stumbled onto yet another suicide. What were the odds of this? Margaret, intrigued by the question, ran statistical calculations. As expected, the results showed that the odds against such a thing happening were astronomically high. This being mere coincidence, was most unlikely. It was then that I first noticed Margaret's mood change. Her optimism, along with her winsome smile, dissipated, now relegated to things past. In its place came a permanent frown and a dogged necessity to work. Javier, too, seemed more driven, and although he still joked and laughed on occasion, it no longer seemed genuine.

Drake's equation for ascertaining the probability of intelligent life in the cosmos did account for something like this. He had included an adjustable value for the chance of sapience destroying itself by war or other apocalyptic means. Still, I seriously doubted if Drake had ever envisioned overt and deliberate suicide as defining that value. We had made the first two discoveries of other advanced civilizations, and both had committed purposeful self-destruction. All of us wanted to know why.

"At least this planet is still in one piece," Javier said. This was before we all knew the truth of this place. "That's about all that you can say for it, though." His handlebar mustache twitched as he spoke.

He was right. The world appeared from space as a reddish-black globe with sickly-gray patches, like cancerous lesions, spread about its surface. Its atmosphere was virtually nonexistent. Titanic explosions had ripped it away. Its seas had boiled and evaporated. Landmasses had convulsed and collapsed, spreading lava flows of dark basalt. They were thousands of square kilometers in area.

"It's matter-antimatter devices again." Margaret's tone was bitter. It had become increasingly so of late. "The planet still has a residual rotational effect from it."

"Are you sure that's the cause?" I had been hoping for another answer.

"No doubt of it. The consequences haven't dispersed yet." She brushed a red strand of hair out of her pale and tired-looking face. She regarded me with those still wonderful, but stricken green eyes. "James, it's spinning like a piñata that's been hit by a really big stick."

"You think it's another suicide?" Javier nervously chewed his lower lip, as if afraid to hear her answer. His dark eyes sought hers.

She straightened. Margaret had been bending over her console for almost an hour without a break. "I'm afraid so. If it was a war, they could have just used nukes. You don't have to capsize continents to defeat your enemy. This was deliberate." We left the system. There was no reason to stay. We climbed into our cold sleep sarcophagi. Just before his closed over him, Javier said: "'Mors ultima linea rerum est, death is everything's final limit,' even that of knowledge." I knew Latin, too. I was getting tired of hearing it from Javier.

What a waste, I thought as my own lid closed over me. Were there not enough events in these cold depths of space that could extinguish life, if just by sheer accident? Suns going nova, cosmic ray bursts, random asteroid impacts, were these not enough? Did one have to commit suicide to ensure it? "Bis interimitur qui suis armis perit, he is doubly destroyed who perishes by his own arms." Yes. I knew Latin, too.

Several times more, we awoke, but each time only to return to unconsciousness once more. It was necessary. The systems we had entered were dead things, never having known life. Despite the necessity of cold sleep, this punctuated existence was profoundly disturbing to me. Yet, what could I do? The ship's air and resources were not up to the task of sustaining even one of us in a conscious condition for so much time.

Our next awakening was different. We knew it to be our last visit to a foreign star. The protocol and our supplies made this a fact. It was one with which we had to live.

I think, by this time, we all wanted to go home. Hurtling through the cold depths of space, our hermetically sealed little ball of yellow electric warmth was no longer enough. All of us, I'm sure, wanted--no, needed to see our own sun once more. The dread we hid from each other. The overwhelming horror that was growing within our souls, we kept tightly restrained.

"Hey, this one doesn't look too bad." Javier had been studying the sun as we approached the system. "It's got a yellow G-type star, very similar to our own, if with just a trace more orange in its coloring."

"Hmm, that would mean it's slightly older." Margaret still looked stunning, only now she had more the look of a beautiful grieving widow. Old recorded images I had once seen of Jacqueline Kennedy blossomed in my mind. "And, I've located two rocky inner worlds, both with sizeable satellites. There are several gas giants, as well. One easily dwarfs Jupiter."

I, too, was studying the system's specs. "That might explain the lack of debris in the inner system," I said. "It must act like a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking up everything that comes anywhere near to it."

"Good." From where he stood by his own instruments, Javier gave me a nod.

"That increases chances for life in the inner system. Hell of a monster, though, isn't it, James?" For long moments, we three gazed at the image of the giant purple-banded planet. Finally, we returned to our work.

The innermost rocky-type world had known life. There had been complex forms at some point. Now, though, it existed only on the single-celled level. Chances for its redevelopment were slim, given the unfavorable circumstances of its parent star. Its sun had been entering late middle age for some time. Its brightness intensity had been steadily increasing. There simply was not enough time left to allow the life of this world to recreate its earlier complexity. Its sun would soon burn it away.

"It was murder," Margaret whispered. Her face was deathly white, her eyes large. Several days had passed and we had learned much more about this system--none of it good. "They did it deliberately, the bastards!"

"Matter-antimatter?" I asked. She only nodded.

Javier shook his head. "It seems to be intelligence's favorite method, doesn't it?"

"It was a cold and deliberate act." Margaret sounded disgusted. "They surgically wiped out the higher forms of life. What's left doesn't have a chance." Again, she shook her head.

We shifted our ship to a position near the next rocky planet. It was reddish-tinged. A thick surface layer of iron oxide accounted for its red color. War was not the cause of its obliteration. You see, they had botched the job. They had been in such a hurry to achieve their goals that they had been a little neglectful. Haste does make for leaving waste, it would seem.

Errant scraps of their civilization's attainments had survived. A small blasted ruin here, a scorched-black fossil vehicle there, was not much to go on, but we were now adepts at constructing scenarios from the minimal. We had even found one satellite still in orbit around the mother world. That was a small miracle. It was at a Lagrange point, which is a highly stable orbital configuration. The old pockmarked satellite was no longer functioning, of course. Too much time had passed. Examination of it told how long ago the calamity had taken place. This particular murder-suicide pact had occurred over six million years ago.

"Maybe, they didn't want to do it." Javier was gazing at the holographic image of the dead world as he spoke. "After all, they seem to have focused their attentions on sterilizing only the more developed life forms on their neighboring planet. It's as if they deliberately overlooked the more simple ones."

"Multicellular existence interdicted, but not unicellular?" I shook my head. "Why would they do that? What sense does that make?"

"Well, a lot, if you don't want to do it in the first place. Perhaps, James, it was to try to give it a second chance. They may not have been aware of the status of their aging sun; they might have thought there was still time for that planet's biosphere to recover. "Dum vita est spes est, while there is life there is hope." He regarded me with his dark eyes.

"Maybe, Javier's right." Margaret sounded hopeful. "What if they had no choice? What if some overwhelming urge, some genetic imperative forced them to such a terrible act?

"Something hidden deep in their DNA, like a doomsday gene, you mean?" I frowned. "That would mean that all the suicide races had it. Yet, we've no evidence that they had any contact with each other. So, without interbreeding, even if such a thing were possible, how could this be?"

Margaret shrugged, but did not answer. This was as close as we had ever come to voicing our suspicions. It made us uncomfortable. We dropped the matter. It came time to leave, to return to Earth. It had been a disappointing and depressing voyage. Well, at least our discoveries had answered Fermi's Paradox of why the "Great Silence" in the universe. The solution was simple, really. It seemed everyone was much too busy slitting their own throats! It is hard to shout across the interstellar void under such circumstances.

I, as I'm sure the others did, wondered what awaited us on our return to Earth. Would they still be there or would they, by now, have suffered the same self-destructive fate as these others? After all, humans had also gained a thorough knowledge of antimatter, and these other races had committed Armageddon shortly after they had attained that same level of technological sophistication. Was the discovery of antimatter the death rattle for intelligent life? Did it trigger some primal command in living beings to annihilate themselves? Knowledge of anti-matter, was it the truly forbidden fruit?

I imagined strange genetic codes secretly lurking in the DNA of all life forms. Did it forbid us climbing too high up the ladder of evolution? If this was so, who was the programmer of the codes? What kind of creator or god would place such constraints, such deadly restrictions upon life?

I did not miss the irony of it. After countless millennia, we may have found real scientific evidence, finally, for our God. If this fact is true, then it is a terrible discovery, one better not made. Because, you see, he would not be a god of love, or even hate. Rather, he must be one of jealousy; it is a cold, implacable, and supreme sort of jealousy, and it must be all pervading. There may be no place in the universe where we can hide from such a god.

I don't think any of us were sorry to be leaving behind these sad dead systems. Nevertheless, what faced us upon our arrival back at Earth? Would the same hidden genetic imperative trigger in the three of us if we found our species had already committed suicide? Truth to tell, we desperately wanted to go home, but we were also afraid of what we would find. "A fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi, a precipice in front, wolves behind." Javier's Latin quotes as he prepared for cold sleep were now a tradition. So, he had been thinking along the same lines as I.

If our unspoken theory, our fear, was correct, then everyone at home would be gone by now. If humanity were no more, then what would we do? Whether or not it triggered an urge to destroy ourselves, what would be the point in our continued existence? It would be a horribly lonely one. Death, in the form of a suicide pact, would probably be preferable. "Omnes una manet nox, the same night awaits us all." How appropriate. Well, so be it.

Our vessel was now well out from that star and its diminished worlds. As we readied for cold sleep, we all silently hoped that this terminal disease of life did not apply to humanity. There was some chance. After all, our race had survived the initial discovery of the use of antimatter. We had even gone on to discover the I-Drive, and accomplish missions to the stars, if only through the three of us.

None of the other races had lasted long enough to attain that goal. Maybe, humans were immune, or the suicide code was not universal in all life, but only some of it. Perhaps, the orbiting cemeteries we visited were just invalid markers, mere false signs on the roads through the heavens. "Absit Omen," I whispered, just before the lid lowered into place, sealing me inside the coffin-like confines of my sarcophagus. It was a very brief prayer. "May this not be an omen." It seemed appropriate.