Learning the World

7 — Television

14 365:01:13 06:10

Have you seen the pictures have you seen the pictures have you seen the pictures???

14 365:01:13 08:12

Lights on the nightside. Nobody expected this. Nobody has any doubt what it means. Not even Grey Universal. Those sims he rattled up in minutes for volcanoes, brush fires, and — wait for it — the phosphorescence of rotting wood, are just to show he can. He just likes being contrary, and likes the attention. His Coriolis storm sims had everyone fascinated, for a while, and arguing. But he doesn’t believe his latest: I’ve asked him; he admitted it. He doesn’t even buy the other contrary hold-out minority view, that the lights are from some kind of Red Sun robot or download colonies that claim-jumped us. Nobody but nobody would be mad enough to plant colonies on a unique planet, a terrestrial with multicellular life — least of all robots. That’s what he told me. He’s as excited as everybody else.

Excited is not the word. My hands are shaking as I write this.

There are aliens down there on Destiny II.

I sat and looked at that sentence for ten minutes. I still don’t wholly believe it. I still have that particle of doubt. I still feel that I risk being very foolish. Though being as foolish as everybody else is at least not embarrassing. (No, it would be, actually, now that I come to think of it.) All right. If ever I am going to put together a team, and take the lead in setting up a habitat, I’m going to have to build a reputation for being level-headed and thoughtful, as well as of course being the wonderful personality you all know I am.

So I have given this matter some thought already, as soon as we knew about the plants and the biosphere. That was the first hole in the hull, if you’ll forgive my crudity. If there really is intelligent life down there it makes things complicated in all sorts of ways, which I’ll come to in a minute. But the fundamental shock is finding multicellular life in the first place.

Think about it. Fourteen thousand years — longer, I suppose, because even in prehistory people must have looked at the sky and seen, you know, nothing like the green haze of the Civil Worlds — of expansion into a volume hundreds of light-years across, and we’ve never found anything more advanced than bacteria or algae or slime moulds or something like lichen. Nothing but rock crust and pond scum.

OK. Now, that makes sense, makes sense in a very deep way. It’s called the principle of mediocrity. I looked it up. What it means is that multicellular life, leave alone intelligent life, is either very rare, or very nearly ubiquitous. If it were the latter, our whole sky would have been green and the galaxy would have been called the Grassy Path. And because it’s not, we know it’s almost vanishingly rare. What we have found, all the way out from the Moon, has just confirmed this, over and over and over again. The planets have spoken with one voice, and what they’ve said thousands of times over is pond scum pond scum pond scum. The silence of the sky chimes in with nobody’s home nobody’s home nobody’s home. The silence is telling us: there’s nobody else out here to talk to.

Now there is, almost certainly. But think about it. Apply the principle that there’s nothing special about us. What are the odds against the only two intelligent species in the galaxy arising independently within five hundred light-years of each other, and arriving at civilisation (city lights and electromagnetic communications) within less than twenty thousand years of each other? On the scale of the galaxy, we’re neighbours. On the scale of evolutionary time, of billions of years, we’re in the same generation, the same cohort. More: we share the same birthday, to the hour, to the minute…

This is so unlikely that something else, something quite shattering, is more probable: we aren’t the only two.

It’s not just that we’re not alone. We, the humans and the aliens, are not alone. We two are not alone.

And that means, I’m afraid, that we can’t just do the colonisation thing, at least not without thinking about it very carefully. So let’s think about it very carefully.

14 365:01:13 13:45

Look, folks, lay off the hate mail, OK? I was just saying.

Television, thought Horrocks Mathematical. Like almost everyone else on the ship, he gazed transfixed at the images of the planet’s nightside, the coastlines and some of the interior spaces of its continents pricked out by light. Unlike anyone else, he jumped to a swift conclusion as to the nature of the enigmatic signals that had been troubling him for months.

Television. That was what it was.

Not the kind of television that gave him pictures in his head, but something quite other and more primitive. But the pictures in his head gave him access to and an interface with the processing power that could reconstruct that suspected source. He plunged into its depths, brushing aside all the confuted hypotheses about codes and encryption, and insisting instead on the command to turn the signal into lines: a few hundred at the most, each at most a few hundred pixels across.

The answer came back in less than a second.

Bat-like beings flew behind his eyes. He closed his eyes, but still they were there, in fuzzy black and white. The flurry settled, dark smudges whirled like snow, and an image stabilised: of one of these beings behind a desk, reading aloud from a sheaf of paper. He heard the voice in his head. Fluctuating from a chirp to a deeper, more measured pitch, it intoned a sequence of phonemes that, even across the gulfs of space and species and speech, sounded like statistics.

It seemed fitting that the first words to be heard might be the names of numbers. That could be a meaty bone for some ravenous heuristic. Horrocks had only a vague idea of what kind of programs would be needed to begin to pick away at interpreting the language, let alone what kind of human skills would be needed. In the population of the ship and in the vaster virtual space of the ship’s intelligence repertoire, such programs and skills were certain to be found.

He released the images he’d reconstructed into the ship’s nets, with a priority attention override that few people ever cared or dared to use in all their long life-spans. It seemed that he heard a sound like an intense gust, the sound of a million indrawn breaths, but that might just have been his imagination.

He turned off most of his own input channels and continued to watch the pictures. After a few minutes the alien laid down the sheaf of paper, said something, and stood up. It came out from behind the desk. For the first time it was visible at full length. With its wings folded it looked like a human being with a furled umbrella tucked under each elbow and angled up behind each shoulder. Its gait was steady, its feet peculiar. Its eyes and ears were prominent, giving it a sharp triangular face. The sole garment it wore was a belt around the hips, laden with scabbards and boxy pouches. Fur, varied in length and shade, covered the rest of its body.

The alien stopped in front of the camera. A hand with three fingers and a thumb loomed; then one of the fingers reached forward and out of shot. The image dwindled to a dot and vanished.

Another image replaced it, not from the alien transmission. Horrocks had never seen Constantine before, but he recognised him.

“I should have you shot,” the Oldest Man said. “For endangering the ship and everyone on it.”

“How did I do that?” Horrocks asked.

“You sent images from an unknown source to the brains and screens and contacts of everyone on this ship,” said Constantine. “You released it into the ship’s intelligence. Do you have any idea how dangerous that could be?”

“No,” said Horrocks. “I’m sorry, but I don’t. It’s obviously a very primitive transmission.”

Constantine passed a hand across his eyes, rubbing his eyebrows with thumb and forefinger. “That’s exactly the problem,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

“No,” said Constantine. “You don’t.” He glared at Horrocks for a few seconds, then smiled. “Don’t do it again.”

14 365:01:13 20:19

Well, that’s it settled. Aliens.

What a day. There’s nothing to say that doesn’t sound banal. Is it always like this, on days when the world changes? Did people who wrote, assuming people did write, have this stupid gnawing feeling all the way back to the Moon Caves and before, that your words are inadequate to the events and that anything you say now will shame you in days to come with its inadequacy? What was it like to react to the first starship launch? The first extrasolar colony? The first news of a fast burn?

This changes the world more than any of these. I see from some of the comments I’ve received that some people don’t grasp this at all. They think intelligent aliens are just one more interesting thing out there, like any new biosphere, or a new stellar process, but more exciting and of more immediate import. Quote from D — :

Isn’t this cool? We’ll be able to settle the new system with help from an intelligence native to the system. Nobody’s ever done that before!

And so on. Lots more like that — check them out.

Look, dear readers: all of that is a possibility. What relations, if any, we establish with the natives of Destiny II is a very serious question and the one that’s raging through the air and airwaves as I write. All the boards and committees and juries are in permanent emergency session and everybody has suddenly got an opinion on it and it’s driving me crazy.

Because it’s not the most important question.

The most important question is this: what does the existence of other intelligent life tell us about the kind of universe we are in?

Yesterday we were in a universe that included us and lots of cool stuff: stars, galaxies, plasmas, cometary bodies, planets, and cows and giraffes and AIs and blue-green algae and lichen and microorganisms.

Today we are in a universe that contains us and lots of cool stuff and alien space bats.

That’s a different universe.

A universe with a different history, different potentialities, different future from the universe we thought we lived in. We are not living in the universe we thought we lived in yesterday.

We have to start learning the world all over again.

Awlin Halegap entertained in the grand manner. As a speculator, it was expected of him. For the occasion he’d hired a spherical space about a hundred metres in diameter. Horrocks presumed that its shape was why it was called a ballroom. He thrust in, snagged a drink-bulb from a drifting cluster, and floated a few metres away from the entrance, taking stock. The entire inner surface of the sphere was an image of the sky, with the planet Destiny II filling most of one side of it. The planetarium effect was illusory — you looked at the planet’s dayside, but if you glanced over your shoulder you found that the sun wasn’t there or had been edited out — but impressive. Horrocks guessed that it was patched together from the ship’s outside view, and the incoming data stream from the fast probe, whose arrival in planetary orbit the occasion celebrated. Almost everyone on the ship would be watching this, with outer or inner eye, but none, Horrocks guessed, would have so spectacular a view.

Hundreds of people floated and drifted in the frosty light. Crows hung, wings steady but for the occasional pinion flick, watched for food scraps and tattled amongst themselves. Hummingbirds, less sentient but more colourful, sipped from the tips of discarded drink-bulbs, and jinked about. Trays of food covered by elastic netting and propelled by tiny electric fan-jets drifted through the crowd, following simple algorithms of approach and avoidance. Clusters of drink-bulbs were plucked from and shoved away.

In the two weeks since Horrocks had cracked the television transmissions he had become famous, and the ship had become febrile. Its nets buzzed with debate. Factions had formed. In the crew areas of the forward and rearward cones, fashions: almost everyone was wearing things like wings, clever pleated contrivances that fanned out between their arms and their sides, or simpler rigid structures of cloth or paper. The big free-fall room looked like a butterfly house.

Horrocks scorned the fad. For tonight he wore a rayon replica of his utility suit, much buckled and multipocketed. He checked out the company as new arrivals drifted or hurtled past him. On the far side of the room hung a cluster of people he recognised from personal or fleeting acquaintance or from their fame: Halegap himself, in earnest conversation with the Oldest Man; around them some of the science team who had designed and launched the probes, and one or two from the science jury which had approved it; one delegate from the ship’s Board, looking — even at this distance — a little awkward and out of place.

Closer to hand, Horrocks noticed a group of people he knew better. He rolled, reached for a passing tray, and let it drag him to a drinks cluster from which he detached a handful of bulbs, and then sent the rest on their way, and himself in the opposite direction. A minute later, air resistance brought him to more or less a halt among the half-dozen people twenty metres away that he wanted to meet.

“Hi, Horrocks,” said Genome Console, catching his hand. She wore a filmy pink one-piece, cuffs draw-strung at wrist and ankle; rings on her toes and her yellow hair in a gold net. He and she circled each other; he passed her a bulb to counteract his remaining momentum.

“Hello,” said Horrocks. He looked around. The others, like Genome, were all training-habitat builders — colleagues and rivals — except for one man, naked and painted in whorls, with paired jet-packs on a belt. The stranger dipped his head as Genome introduced Horrocks.

“Grey Universal,” he said.

“Ah,” said Horrocks. “The contararian.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said the man, and laughed. Horrocks joined in to be polite. Genome let go of Horrocks’s hand and caught Grey’s, smiling at him in a determined way that Horrocks recognised and was relieved was not directed at him. The Consoles, like the Mathematicals, were an old crew family. Horrocks had played with Genome as a child and felt toward her a vague sense of siblinghood, which he’d sometimes suspected her of not sharing.

“My complaint for the occasion,” Grey Universal went on, “is that the atmosphere probe whose brave little adventure we’re all here to follow is a piece of gross irresponsibility that we’ll be lucky to live to regret.”

“Oh, come on,” said Horrocks. “This has been through a shipwide discussion, the Board, the science jury, and a crew poll. It’s settled.”

“Of course,” said Grey. “I’m still right. What if the bat people spot it?”

“This is a probe three metres long, with a wingspan of two metres, flying ten kilometres up at its lowest point,” Horrocks said. “A mere dot.”

“But a detectable dot.”

“They don’t have radar.”

“They have eyes,” said Grey. “Very acute eyes, by the looks of them.”

Horrocks shrugged. So far, he’d heard nothing that hadn’t been thrashed out already. Some arguments were like that; each side just kept repeating the same points, over and over.

“So they see an… unidentified flying object?” he said. “So what? They may have already seen our retro-flare. The orbiter’s thoroughly stealthed, but they may spot it someday. Maybe gradually building up evidence that we’re here will be a good thing for them. Better that than us descending one day out of the blue.”

“Assuming we make contact at all,” Genome pointed out.

“All right,” said Horrocks. “Assume we don’t. Assume even that we go away—”

He flinched at the chorus of disapprobation.

“I said, assume,” he persisted. “What then? An astronomical and… atmospheric anomaly enters their records. No harm done.”

“Perhaps not,” said Grey Universal. “We will have changed their history nonetheless. A minute change, you may say. True. But not therefore necessarily insignificant.”

“I’ve seen your chaos sims,” Horrocks said. “I’m unconvinced.”

Grey Universal shook his head and squirted wine into his mouth. He savoured it, pursing his lips, and swallowed. “As a contrarian, I naturally hope you are right.”

The discussion was bypassed a moment later as the cruciform atmosphere probe detached itself from the orbiter and dropped away. A cheer sounded across the room as the view switched to the probe’s camera and the planet’s atmosphere filled the view in an arc of blue and white. The event shown had happened hours earlier, Horrocks reflected, but still he had the sense that something irrevocable had just taken place.

He had the same uneasy feeling when, a couple of hours later, the probe entered the atmosphere. It went in on the dayside, where its friction flare would not be conspicuous, and within minutes it had stabilised in steady, ramjet-powered flight. Around the bulky glass lens of its ground camera the probe had been designed; that, unlike the hardware and software behind it, could not be miniaturised. But it was these that processed and enhanced the images, and that selected — according to the well-established algorithm for interestingness — which to zoom in on, and to show as though from hundreds rather than thousands of metres up.

Over the next hours Horrocks drifted about the room, occasionally joining in one of the formal three-dimensional dance acrobatics that usually ended with all or most participants recoiling off the wall or drifting helplessly and laughing. Every so often a hush would traverse the spherical room at the speed of sound, as the camera viewpoint soared over a mountain range, or panned a herd of gigantic beasts, or zoomed in on a city, or tracked a dirigible, or scanned the horizon-spanning row of volcanic islands in the hemispheric ocean opposite the continents. For much of the time, of course, there was nothing to see but cloud, or the deceptive fractal surface of the sea, or monotonous plains or snowfields.

He was already a little drunk, and more than a little dazed with wonder, when he bumped into the party’s host.

“Hello, Awlin,” he said, as they disentangled and reoriented. “Congratulations. And thanks for the stock tip.”

Awlin waved a langorous hand, incidentally shaking a ribbed cape of blue silk. “Not at all.”

They talked business for a while, drinking and observing the scene from the probe, and then the talk turned to gossip: who was in, who was out, who was up, who was down, who was with whom, who was here and who was not.

“It’s been a good party,” Awlin said. “I didn’t get everyone I wanted — some of the teams are of course hunched in their cubicles, but that’s scientists for you. Still, I’ve got a lot. From Constantine to the mouthy kid.”

“Who?”

“Atomic Discourse Gale. Something of a rising star among the ship generation. She’s been making a name for herself as a writer, with her biolog. In terms of provoking odd-angled thought she is rather snapping at the heels of Grey Universal.”

“Ah, yes,” said Horrocks. “The mouthy kid.”

She had changed a little in the six months since her microgravity training, having become taller and more mature, but she was still the same wiry young woman with a tight mass of curly black hair and a characteristic flatfooter tendency to hunch up as though inclined to curl up into a ball. When Horrocks saw her, a few minutes after leaving Awlin to another guest, she was leaning over her knees. Her fingers rippled as she wrote on a virtual keyboard, then flexed as she straightened and stretched and stared at the enclosing screen. She wore shorts and a long-sleeved top, both green. Her keyboard and eyescreen projector stuck out in front of one temple, held in her hair with a fancy jewelled clip.

She saw him and said, “Hello, Horrocks.”

He smiled at her unsmiling face. “Atomic, isn’t it? Pleased to see you. How are you doing?”

She lifted a drink-bulb almost to her lips and squeezed a few drops, looking at him all the while with suspicion, almost scorn. “I know you read my biolog,” she said. “So you know how I’m doing.”

Horrocks spread his hands and affected injured innocence. “Well, of course, but…”

“But you think I’m not telling all about myself?’

“People don’t, always.”

“People don’t, ever,” she said.

“It was just a friendly query,” said Horrocks. He could feel his face becoming hot. It was infuriating that this girl, six years his junior and still self-conscious about her breasts and hips, could make him feel awkward. “Anyway… I find what you write interesting.”

“That’s what people usually say when they disagree with it.”

Horrocks acknowledged the parry. “All right. All very interesting, but I don’t see why you make so much of it.”

“Then you haven’t—” she began, then caught herself. “I haven’t made myself clear.” She sawed her fingernails through her hair. “You remember when the transmissions were detected, you made a joke that they might be from aliens?”

“I did? I must have better foresight than I thought.”

She looked impatient. “The whole point of your joke was that there are no aliens. It wouldn’t have been funny otherwise. Just like if my caremother had said that something I’d lost in the garden had been taken by the fairies, or the hideaways. If we found fairies in the garden, or hideaways, it would tell us that the world was quite different from what we had imagined. It wouldn’t just be a world that had fairies in it, like a different kind of bird or something. It’d be a different kind of world, a world in which fairies could exist.”

“Yes,” said Horrocks. “So the world is different. So what?”

“So what happens here, around the Destiny Star, won’t just decide what happens between the human species and the bat people. I agree, that’s quite a responsibility. We’re standing in for all humanity here, we’re on our own, and we’d better get it right. But the point I’m making is that if one lot of aliens can exist, so close to us in space and time, then almost certainly other aliens do. Lots of them! Some of them may be more advanced than us by the time we reach them, with Civil Worlds of their own. But if they had that already, we’d know it — we’d see their green haze, we’d pick up their transmissions. In the next few thousand years, we may. But in the next few hundred years, it’ll be planets like this we encounter. Ones on the verge or just over the verge of spaceflight.”

Horrocks felt puzzled. “How do you know that?”

Atomic smiled for the first time, exposing a broad row of short white upper teeth. “I don’t,” she said. “Call it a hunch.”

Horrocks nodded. “It’s more than that,” he said. “It’s what we should plan for. A worst-case scenario. Aliens already exploring what they think of as their system, when we blunder in.” He laughed. “A good thing for us that the bat people don’t even have heavier-than-air flight.”