Strangers

in a church. "They died twenty-five thousand lightyears from home. They were already dead when humankind still lived in caves and was just beginning to learn the basics of agriculture. When these… incredible journeyers died, the entire population of our world was only about five million, fewer people than now live in New York alone. During the past ten thousand years, while we've struggled out of the dirt and broken our backs to build a shaky civilization always teetering on the edge of destruction, those eight dead seekers were coming steadily toward us across the vastness of the galactic rim."
        Ginger saw Brendan touch the other corner of the coffin on which she'd rested her own hands. Tears glistened in his eyes. She knew what he was thinking. As a priest, he had taken vows of poverty and celibacy and had forsworn many of the pleasures of secular life as an offering to God. He knew the meaning of sacrifice, but none of his sacrifices compared to what these beings had given up in the name of their cause.
        Parker said, "But to have found five other intelligent species when the distances are so great and the odds so small, they must send out a great many of these ships."
        "We think they dispatch hundreds a year, maybe even thousands - and had been doing so for longer than 100,000 years before this vessel left port. As I said, it's their religion and their racial purpose combined. All the other five species they discovered were within 15,000 lightyears from their world. And remember, even when they locate an intelligence at that distance, they don't know of it until 15,000 years after the discovery, for it takes that long for the message of the contact to reach home again. Are you beginning to grasp the depth and scale of their commitment?"
        "Most ships," Ernie said, "must go out and never come back - and never meet with any success. Most of them just cruise on and on into endless space while the crew perishes, as this crew perished."
        "Yes," Bennell said.
        "And yet they keep going," Dom said.
        "And yet they keep going," Bennell said.
        "We may never meet others of them face-to-face," Ned said.
        "Give humanity a hundred years to learn to apply all the knowledge and technology they brought us," Bennell said. "Then give us another… oh, at least one thousand years more to mature to the point where we're capable of making that same commitment. Then a ship will be launched, manned by a human crew in suspended animation. And possibly we'll find a way to improve the process, so that they don't age at all or age far more slowly. None of us will be alive to watch it take off, but it will go. I know in my heart it will. Then… 32,000 years after that, our distant descendants will be there, returning the call, remaking the contact these creatures don't even know they've established."
        They stood in stunned silence, trying to grasp the immensity of what Bennell envisioned.
        Ginger felt a chill of the most delicious and indescribable nature.
        Brendan said, "It's God's scale. We're talking about… thinking, planning, and doing on God's scale rather than mankind's."
        Parker said, "Sort of makes it a whole lot less important who's going to win this year's World Series, doesn't it?"
        Dom put his hands upon the rings that were featured on the top of that particular suspended-animation chamber around which everyone was gathered. He said, "I believe only six of the crew were dead, fully dead that night in July, Dr. Bennell. I'm beginning to recall what happened when we entered this ship, and I feel as if we were called to two of these containers by something that still lived within them. Barely lived but was not yet entirely dead."
        "Yes," Brendan said, tears weaving down his cheeks now. "In fact, I remember the golden light was coming from two of these boxes and that it exerted not only an obvious but subliminal attraction. I was compelled to come and put my hands upon the rings. And when I put them here… somehow I knew that, beneath the lid, something was desperately clinging to life, not for its own sake but for the sake of passing on some gift. And by putting its own hands against the inner surface of those conductive rings… it gave me what it had come so far to give. Then it died at last. I didn't know what was in me then, exactly. I suppose it would have taken some time to understand, to learn how to use the