Learning the World

21 — But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky!

14 376:10:21 12:17

Is this thing live?

14 376:10:21 12:18

I see it is. How embarrassing. But I suppose it does none of us any harm to be reminded of our adolescent stumblings and fumblings. And I have to add, the person I was ten years ago got some things right. For the rest, well, my plea to the reader is to remember: people change. We grow up.

I don’t think, though, that I’ll add more entries to this long-neglected biolog. It seems fair to sum up, and to close it. I don’t flatter myself that everybody who reads this will know what has become of me and the people I mentioned, or even, perhaps — for not everything is recorded, and not all who remember are willing to recount — the early history of our settlement around the Destiny Star. If you, dear reader, are looking at this across some great gulf of time and increase of knowledge, spare me your condescension. You too were young once, and ignorant once, and from a future standpoint — perhaps your own — you are young and ignorant still.

A case in point. Two years ago, the first installment of a continuing stream of advice arrived from the Red Sun system. The burden of their frantic admonition was to avoid all contact with the indigenes, to stealth all our activities, to — as it were — act natural, in the hope that observers on the planet would mistake our arrival for some unusual but nonsentient phenomenon. The reason given, with frantic insistence, was that awareness of a vastly superior intelligence might cause the aliens’ culture to collapse from a sheer sense of futility.

Ha ha ha. A few days before Red Sun’s advice arrived, a clunky robot probe from Destiny II came snooping by.

The bat people want nothing from us. After they found that they had discovered two more radio sources, from hundreds of light-years away, that we had not so much as thought to look for, they held us not in awe. In their eyes we became, I suspect, merely the closest of the aliens that they had discovered. Our standing with them dropped even further when our own conflicts with each other became impossible to conceal. We assure them that the really violent episodes are few, and that only machines and resources are harmed and consumed in them, but they’re understandably not impressed.

I still blame Synchronic, frankly. It was her idea to steal a march on us while we were preoccupied with the contact. The resentments from that will take a long time to cool. Writs, claims, and counterclaims fly across the system to this day, and every so often some more tangible exchanges take place. It’s all very embarrassing, like a fight in front of the children.

But then — who are the children here? We were so certain that the aliens were about to plunge into conflict, between their powers and with the trudges. Our arguments were over whether and how to step in and sort it out. Yet as soon as they became aware of us and thought we were a threat to them all, they united — grudgingly and with mutual suspicion, it’s true — and as soon as they found rational beings emerging among the trudges, they treated them as equals. Well, perhaps not quite equals, but at least as rational beings like themselves.

In a sense, it’s we who are learning from them. The genetic machinery for transmitters still functions along with that for speech, and we can enter the virtualities at any time. I used to do that a lot, though not for some time now. As the translation software came to have more and more to work on, as the emancipated trudges began to take a full part in society, so the translation became more colloquial and precise. It created a sense of familiarity with the bat people’s institutions and ways that may be in part illusory. Are these teetering towers of logs and branches, mats and screens, within which alembics and astrolabes are plied, and little beasts cut up, and curious devices of glass and wire devised, really universities? Are these vast caverns of chirping, fluttering, sometimes brawling crowds really parliaments and councils of the realm? Or is that just another kind of translation, in which some subtlety — and indeed crudity — is lost? I know that when the verbal translation is off, I see things differently — what I’d seen as a nod or a smile becomes a twitch or a grimace; what had seemed a comfortable and well-appointed dwelling becomes a reeking hut on stilts; what had looked like an appetising meal a revolting carcass and a heap of rotting fruit.

But for all that, as I say, I hope we can learn from them. They are a more rational and kinder species. I have two theories to explain this. One is immediate and, as it were, specific. The other is more general, and one I must approach less directly, by way of some recent events.

The specific theory is this, and it’s very simple: they never bore the yoke. Because they had the trudges, they never enslaved each other. Because they had vast herds of wild prey and forests of fruit trees, they never toiled in fields. They fought, yes, they had their lords and kingdoms, but the discontented always had the possibility of flight. To cripple a human like a trudge was unthinkable, for all but the worst crimes. Compared with us, they had in every sense an easier ascent.

I turn now to the recent events, and my provisional final theory, which is at the same time my solution to the problem that bothered me from the first discovery of the aliens: a problem now increased, at the latest discovery of an alien radio source, thirteen times over. A Galaxy we had thought was empty is lighting up with intelligence, and all at once. What is strangest in that baffling simultaneity is the singularity of our precedence; and this I think I have at last understood.

The ship, with the old cones now joined to a new and almost full cylinder, began not many days ago the long burn of its acceleration out this system, and on to the next. In times past, Constantine once told me, it used to be hundreds of years after a ship arrived in a new system that it departed for another. Today the interval is down to a decade: turnaround time, no more or less. Every new departure selects, yet again, for the footloose.

People change. Some you wouldn’t expect have left with the ship. I’d never have figured Grant for someone who wanted to be a founder, and to spend the next three hundred and seventy-two years turning that full tank into a spacious habitat. But there you go — he sold up his waterworld orbital resort business and bought his stake. Personally I put it down to the novel — after researching it he wanted to live the story, not write it.

Horrocks was a more painful loss in a way. As you might guess from my teenage rattlings, he and I did eventually hit it off, at a crew party shortly after the contact. So that distasteful little genetic bet that (I soon learned) had been made by Synchronic and Constantine paid off. Probably enough to buy them both a drink, anyway. Grant, Genome, Horrocks, and I formed a complex mutual orbit for years.

And then Horrocks went off to the founder-controlled asteroids and shacked up with Synchronic. I still shake my head over that. It’s not unheard of, but it seems almost indecent.

But it’s Constantine, strangely enough, that I’ll miss the most. He was never more than a genefather when I was a child, except for that one wondrous incident when he took me to see the engine. But in the years since the contact I’ve seen more of him, and he’s always been understanding and kind, if a little distant.

I called him up just as the ship was leaving. He wasn’t as busy as I’d feared. We talked a little about what are, to me, old times, and new ideas.

“And what do you think now?” he asked me.

“I have a theory,” I said.

“You always do,” he said. “Grant was right about you, back in the day. Your thinking is metaphysical.”

I laughed. “You read that?”

“Oh yes.”

“Well,” I said, “here’s my latest metaphysical theory. You remember when you took me to see the engine?”

He nodded after a moment. The light-speed lag was only just becoming noticeable.

“You said then that you had named it. You never told me why, but that I would know someday. I once thought I knew, but now I’m not so sure. Anyway, this is my theory. The engine generates new universes all the time. These universes are similar but not identical to the one we live in, yes?”

“To the best of our knowledge, yes,” he said. “Information is conserved.”

“Well then,” I said, “what that means is that in some of these universes, there will be starships with cosmogonic engines of their own.”

His expression was inscrutable. “That would seem to follow, yes.”

“So,” I went on, “just as the birth of universes from black holes selects over cosmic time for universes with laws of physics such that black holes can be formed, hence universes with stars and galaxies, so the birth of universes from starship engines selects for more universes in which starships can exist. And what more likely universes to have many starships in, than ones in which intelligence emerges all over the place at almost the same time?”

This time the pause was longer than the light-speed lag could account for.

“There may be something in what you say,” he said. “What inference do you draw from it?”

I swallowed. “That we’re not the first,” I said. “Not the original universe, by a long, long way. We’re a long way down the line from the first universe in which somebody looked at a high-energy physics experiment and saw that it could fly to the stars.”

“That’s a good inference,” said Constantine. “It’s one I once made myself, and—”

The screen went fuzzy. I adjusted the gain. The image came back.

“I’m losing you,” he said. “It’s time we said goodbye, just in case, and then we can carry on until we’re too far apart.”

“Goodbye, Constantine,” I said. “I just wanted to ask. You said information is conserved. How much information?”

“More than you might think,” said the Oldest Man.

The picture and sound became hopelessly indistinct. He may have said more after that, but I didn’t catch it and could never retrieve it. The transmitters the bat people build back there on Destiny II are good, but not good enough to reach us now as we accelerate away.

But as I go about my work with the rest of the crew I’m haunted by two thoughts. One is of a man in the Moon Caves, looking at a high-energy physics experiment and looking up and saying, “But the sky, my lady! The sky!”

For when I imagine that man, I see Constantine.

The other is more troubling. If cosmic evolution works on the scale that I outlined to Constantine, and that he seemed to find plausible, and if as he said information is conserved — then perhaps those like us who come first are changed the least, and are thus doomed always to find themselves in a universe in which they are in every sense primitive, and to encounter species wiser and kinder than they.

Long before the starships and the Moon Caves, these words were written: