The Star
©Arthur C. Clarke
From The Nine Billion Names of God: The Best Short Stories of Arthur C. Clarke(1967: rpt. NY: Signet/NAL, 1974: 235-240)
All rights reserved; not to be reprinted without permission of the author
It is three thousand light-years to the Vatican. Once, I believed that space could
have no power over faith, just as I believed the heavens declared the glory of God’s
handwork. Now I have seen that handiwork, and my faith is sorely troubled. I stare at thecrucifix that hangs on the cabin wall above the Mark VI Computer, and for the first timein my life I wonder if it is no more than an empty symbol.
I have told no one yet, but the truth cannot be concealed. The facts are there forall to read, recorded on the countless miles of magnetic tape and the thousands ofphotographs we are carrying back to Earth. Other scientists can interpret them as easily as
I can, and I am not one who would condone that tampering with the truth which often
gave my order a bad name in the olden days.
The crew were already sufficiently depressed: I wonder how they will take thisultimate irony. Few of them have any religious faith, yet they will not relish using thisfinal weapon in their campaign against me—that private, good-natured, but
fundamentally serious war which lasted all the way from Earth. It amused them to have aJesuit as chief astrophysicist: Dr. Chandler, for instance, could never get over it. (Whyare medical men such notorious atheists?) Sometimes he would meet me on theobservation deck, where the lights are always low so that the stars shine withundiminished glory. He would come up to me in the gloom and stand staring out of thegreat oval port, while the heavens crawled slowly around us as the ship turned over andover with the residual spin we had never bothered to correct.
“Well, Father,” he would say at last, “it goes on forever and forever, and perhaps
Something made it. But how you can believe that Something has a special interest in us
and our miserable little world—that just beats me.” Then the argument would start, while
the stars and nebulae would swing around us in silent, endless arcs beyond the flawlessly
clear plastic of the observation port.
It was, I think, the apparent incongruity of my position that cause mostamusement among the crew. In vain I pointed to my three papers in the AstrophysicalJournal, my five in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. I would
remind them that my order has long been famous for its scientific works. We may be few
now, but ever since the eighteenth century we have made contributions to astronomy andgeophysics out of all proportion to our numbers. Will my report on the Phoenix Nebula
end our thousand years of history? It will end, I fear, much more than that.
I do not know who gave the nebula its name, which seems to me a very bad one.
If it contains a prophecy, it is one that cannot be verified for several billion years. Eventhe word “nebula” is misleading; this is a far smaller object than those stupendous cloudsof mist—the stuff of unborn stars—that are scattered throughout the length of the MilkyWay. On the cosmic scale, indeed, the Phoenix Nebula is a tiny thing—a tenuous shell ofgas surrounding a single star.
Or what is left of a star. . .

The Rubens engraving of Loyola seems to mock me as it hangs there above thespectrophotometer tracings. What would you, Father, have made of this knowledge thathas come into my keeping, so far from the little world that was all the Universe youknew? Would your faith have risen to the challenge, as mine has failed to do?
You gaze into the distance, Father, but I have traveled a distance beyond any thatyou could have imagined when you founded our order a thousand years ago. No othersurvey ship has been so far from Earth: we are at the very frontiers of the explored
Universe. We set out to reach the Phoenix Nebula, we succeeded, and we are homeward
bound with our burden of knowledge. I wish I could lift that burden from my shoulders,but I call to you in vain across the centuries and the light-years that lie between us.
On the book you are holding the words are plain to read. AD MAIOREM DEI
GLORIAM, the message runs, but it is a message I can no longer believe. Would you still
believe it, if you could see what we have found?
We knew, of course, what the Phoenix Nebula was. Every year, in our Galaxy
alone, more than a hundred stars explode, blazing for a few hours or days with hundredsof times their normal brilliance until they sink back into death and obscurity. Such are theordinary novas—the commonplace disasters of the Universe. I have recorded thespectrograms and light curves of dozens since I started working at the Lunar Observatory.
But three or four times in every thousand years occurs something beside whicheven a nova pales into total insignificance.
When a star becomes a supernova, it may for a little while outshine all the massed
suns of the Galaxy. The Chinese astronomers watched this happen in A.D. 1054, notknowing what it was they saw. Five centuries later, in 1572, a supernova blazed in
Cassiopeia so brilliantly that it was visible in the daylight sky. There have been three
more in the thousand years that have passed since then.
Our mission was to visit the remnants of such a catastrophe, to reconstruct theevents that led up to it, and, if possible, to learn its cause. We came slowly in through theconcentric shells of gas that had been blasted out six thousand years before, yet wereexpanding still. They were immensely hot, radiating even now with a fierce violet light,
but were far too tenuous to do us any damage. When the star had exploded, its outerlayers had been driven upward with such speed that they had escaped completely from its
gravitational field. Now they formed a hollow shell large enough to engulf a thousandsolar systems, and at its center burned the tiny, fantastic object which the star had now
become—a White Dwarf, smaller than earth, yet weighing a million times as much.
The glowing gas shells were all around us, banishing the normal night ofinterstellar space. We were flying into the center of the cosmic bomb that had detonatedmillennia ago and whose incandescent fragments were still hurtling apart. The immense
scale of the explosion, and the fact that the debris already covered a volume of space
many millions of miles across, robbed the scene of any visible movement. It would takedecades before the unaided eye could detect any motion in these tortured wisps andeddies of gas, yet the sense of turbulent expansion was overwhelming.
We had checked our primary drive hours before, and were drifting slowly toward
the fierce little star ahead. Once it had been a sun like our own, but it had squandered in a
few hours the energy that should have kept it shining for a million years. Now it was a
shrunken miser, hoarding its resources as if trying to make amends for its prodigal youth.

No one seriously expected to find planets. If there had been any before theexplosion, they would have been boiled into puffs of vapor, and their substance lost in thegreater wreckage of the star itself. But we made the automatic search, as we always dowhen approaching an unknown sun, and presently we found a single small world circling
the star at an immense distance. It must have been the Pluto of this vanished Solar
System, orbiting on the frontiers of the night. Too far from the central sun ever to have
known life, its remoteness had saved it from the fate of all its lost companions.
The passing fires had seared its rocks and burned away the mantle of frozen gas
that must have covered it in the days before the disaster. We landed, and we found theVault.
Its builders had made sure that we should. The monolithic marker that stood
above the entrance was now a fused stump, but even the first long-range photographs told
us that here was the work of intelligence. A little later we detected the continent-wide
pattern of radioactivity that had been buried in the rock. Even if the pylon above theVault had been destroyed, this would have remained, an immovable and all-but eternalbeacon calling to the stars. Our ship fell toward this gigantic bull’s eye like an arrow into
its target.
The pylon must have been a mile high when it was built, but now it looked like acandle that had melted down into a puddle of wax. It took us a week to drill through thefused rock, since we did not have the proper tools for a task like this. We wereastronomers, not archaeologists, but we could improvise. Our original purpose wasforgotten: this lonely monument, reared with such labor at the greatest possible distancefrom the doomed sun, could have only one meaning. A civilization that knew it was
about to die had made its last bid for immortality.
It will take us generations to examine all the treasures that were placed in theVault. They had plenty of time to prepare, for their sun must have given its first warnings
many years before the final detonation. Everything that they wished to preserve, all thefruits of their genius, they brought here to this distant world in the days before the end,
hoping that some other race would find it and that they would not be utterly forgotten.
Would we have done as well, or would we have been too lost in our own misery to givethought to a future we could never see or share?
If only they had had a little more time! They could travel freely enough between
the planets of their own sun, but they had not yet learned to cross the interstellar gulfs,
and the nearest Solar System was a hundred light-years away. Yet even had they
possessed the secret of the Transfinite Drive, no more than a few millions could havebeen saved. Perhaps it was better thus.
Even if they had not been so disturbingly human as their sculpture shows, we
could not have helped admiring them and grieving for their fate. They left thousands ofvisual records and the machines for projecting them, together with elaborate pictorial
instructions from which it will not be difficult to learn their written language. We haveexamined many of these records, and brought to life for the first time in six thousand
years the warmth and beauty of a civilization that in many ways must have been superior
to our own. Perhaps they only showed us the best, and one can hardly blame them. But
their worlds were very lovely, and their cities were built with a grace that matches
anything of man’s. We have watched them at work and play, and listened to their musicalspeech sounding across the centuries. One scene is still before my eyes—a group of

children on a beach of strange blue sand, playing in the waves as children play on Earth.
Curious whiplike trees line the shore, and some very large animal is wading in theshallows, yet attracting no attention at all.
And sinking into the sea, still warm and friendly and life-giving, is the sun thatwill soon turn traitor and obliterate all this innocent happiness.
Perhaps if we had not been so far from home and so vulnerable to loneliness, weshould not have been so deeply moved. Many of us had seen the ruins of ancientcivilizations on other worlds, but they had never affected us so profoundly. This tragedy
was unique. It is one thing for a race to fail and die, as nations and cultures have done onEarth. But to be destroyed so completely in the full flower of its achievement, leaving nosurvivors—how could that be reconciled with the mercy of God?
My colleagues have asked me that, and I have given what answers I can. Perhaps
you could have done better, Father Loyola, but I have found nothing in the Exercitia
Spiritualia that helps me here. They were not an evil people: I do not know what gods
they worshiped, if indeed they worshiped any. But I have looked back at them across thecenturies, and have watched while the loveliness they used their last strength to preserve
was brought forth again into the light of their shrunken sun. They could have taught us
much: why were they destroyed?
I know the answers that my colleagues will give when they get back to Earth.
They will say that the Universe has no purpose and no plan, that since a hundred suns
explode every year in our Galaxy, at this very moment some race is dying in the depths ofspace. Whether that race has done good or evil during its lifetime will make no differencein the end: there is no divine justice, for there is no God.
Yet, of course, what we have seen proves nothing of the sort. Anyone who argues
thus is being swayed by emotion, not logic. God has no need to justify His actions toman. He who built the Universe can destroy it when He chooses. It is arrogance—it isperilously near blasphemy—for us to say what He may or may not do.
This I could have accepted, hard though it is to look upon whole worlds andpeoples thrown into the furnace. But there comes a point when even the deepest faithmust falter, and now, as I look at the calculations lying before me, I have reached thatpoint at last.
We could not tell, before we reached the nebula, how long ago the explosion took
place. Now, from the astronomical evidence and the record in the rocks of that one
surviving planet, I have been able to date it very exactly. I know in what year the light ofthis colossal conflagration reached the Earth. I know how brilliantly the supernova whose
corpse now dwindles behind our speeding ship once shone in terrestrial skies. I know
how it must have blazed low in the east before sunrise, like a beacon in that oriental
dawn.
There can be no reasonable doubt: the ancient mystery is solved at last. Yet, ohGod, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give thesepeople to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?
London, October 1954