Fiasco Read online

  The teaching machine itself was not visible. Not that anyone was hiding it; but, being a subsystem of Aesculapius, disengaged for these sessions, in the cabin it wore no form that could clash with the student's frame of mind. So that the survivor would not have to address empty space—or a microphone, or a wall—he had before him, as he paced this study, a bust of Socrates, from the pages of Greek mythology. Or philosophy. The bust, shaggy-headed, seemed made of marble; sometimes, however, it participated—mimicking life—in the discussions. For the student this was unpleasant: in poor taste, somehow. Unable to come up with an alternative, and not wanting to bother Gerbert for nothing, he accustomed himself to the face. But whenever he had something painful to reveal, pacing before his mentor, he would speak without looking.

  Now the fake Socrates seemed to hesitate, as if presented with a problem too difficult.

  "My answer to you will be unsatisfying. It is not good for a man to be too cognizant of his physical and spiritual mechanisms. Complete knowledge reveals limits to human possibilities, and the less a man is by nature limited in his purposes, the less he can tolerate limits. That is in the first place. In the second place, names are stored differently from other concepts embedded in speech. Why? Because names do not form any coherent system. They are, after all, purely a matter of convention. Every person has a name, but could have an altogether different name and be the same person. One's name is decided by accident—in the form of one's parents. First and last names thus lack logical and physical necessity.

  "If you will permit a small philosophical digression… Only things exist, and their relations. To be a man is to be a particular thing, it does not matter that it is a living thing. To be a brother or a son—that is a relation. Examining a newborn infant with every method, you will learn everything about it, you will reach its genetic code, but its name you will not reach. One discovers the world; to names, however, one may only become accustomed. This distinction is not felt in an ordinary life. But a person who has come into the world twice experiences it. It is not out of the question that you will remember your name. That could happen at any moment. Or it could never happen. This is why I advised you to take a temporary name. There is no dishonesty or falsehood in that. You will be in the situation of your parents when they stood over your cradle. They, too, did not know, before they chose it, the name that they would give you. But, once they chose it, after many years, they would have been unable to imagine that you had another, inborn, truer name, and that they had not given that one to you."

  "You sound more like Pythia," he replied, trying to hide his agitation over the allusion to his death. He did not understand why he should react in this way. Facts were facts. If anything, he ought to feel the tremendous satisfaction of one risen from the dead. "I don't care about my name. I know it begins with 'P.' Four to seven letters. Parvis or Pirx. I know that the others couldn't be saved. It would have been better if I hadn't been shown that list."

  "They hoped that you would recognize yourself."

  "I can't choose blindly. I told you that."

  "I know and understand your motives. You are the type of person who pays little attention to himself. You were always that way. So you do not wish to choose?"

  "No."

  "Or assume a name?"

  "No."

  "What, then, do you intend to do?"

  "I don't know."

  Possibly there would have been more arguments enlisted to persuade him, but for the first time since he had come to this cabin he exercised his right to erase the machine. All his conversations. And, as if that was insufficient, with the next touch of his finger he consigned the bust of the Greek sage to nothingness. He felt a grim satisfaction then, a senseless though keen pleasure, as if he had murdered—without murdering—one before whom he had bared his soul too much, and who (or, rather, which) had so sensibly and authoritatively taken charge of his helplessness. A poor excuse for a reason, this, and he regretted his action, which parted him from the blameless machine. But since the thing had been right in saying that more than to be in the world he wanted to have the world in him, he swallowed his anger, his shame—pointless—and put them out of his mind for good, turning to matters more important than his personal past. There was plenty to learn.

  The biggest and most recent effort to find extraterrestrial civilizations, named Cyclops, had come to nothing after almost twenty years. In the opinion of those who had listened to the stars, hoping to receive intelligent signals, it proved a miserable failure. The Mystery of the Silent Universe had become a challenge to Earth's science.

  The extreme optimism of a handful of astrophysicists at the end of the twentieth century, infecting thousands of other specialists as well as laymen, turned into its opposite. The billions invested in the radiotelescopes that filtered the emissions from millions of stars and galaxies did indeed give results in the form of new discoveries, but no radio wave brought news of Other Intelligence. However, the telescopes, placed on orbiters in space, were hit several times by streams of radiation singular enough to rekindle extinguished hopes. If these were signals, their reception was of brief duration; they broke off and did not return. Perhaps the circumsolar region was being pierced by needle messages addressed to other stars. Attempts to decipher the recordings of them in countless different ways failed. Even the signal nature of these concentrated impulses could not be determined with any certainty. Thus, tradition and caution obliged the experts to conclude that the phenomenon was the product of stellar material, an emission of very hard radiation by chance focused through so-called gravitational lenses into narrow pencils. The primary rule in observation said that whatever did not clearly show an artificial source had to be considered a natural phenomenon. Astrophysics, besides, had advanced to the point where it possessed sufficient hypotheses to "explain" every kind of observed emission without resorting to the existence of other beings as the senders.

  A paradox arose: the greater the number of theories astrophysics had at its disposal, the more difficult it became to prove the authenticity of an intentional signal. By the end of the twentieth century, the spokesmen for Project Cyclops had drawn up a catalogue of criteria: to distinguish what Nature could produce, with the wealth of its forces, from that which was beyond its power and therefore would appear as a "cosmic miracle." An analogy on Earth might be leaves falling from trees to form the letters of a meaningful sentence. Or pebbles thrown on a river sandbar assuming the shape of circles, tangents, or Euclidean triangles. Thus the scientists put together a list of requirements—rules—that would have to be met by any sender of extraterrestrial signals. Almost half of this list was crossed off in the first years of the next century. It was not only the pulsars, not only the gravitational lenses, not only the microwave radiation from the nebulas, not only the giant masses at the galactic center that fooled the observers by their regularity, repetition, the peculiar order of their various impulses. In place of the discarded "rules for broadcasters" new ones were soon put in, and these were discarded, too, in short order.

  Hence the pessimistic conclusion that Earth was unique not only in the local arm of the Milky Way but in a myriad other spiral galaxies. Subsequent increases in knowledge—in astrophysics, particularly—brought this pessimism into question. The great number of cosmic properties of energy and matter which suggested the notion of an "anthropic principle"—of the close connection between the Universe as it was and Life as it was—presented a compelling argument. In a Cosmos that contained people one had to expect the birth of life outside the Earth as well. A succession of surmises followed, to reconcile the fertility of the Universe with its silence.

  Life arose on innumerable planets, but produced intelligent beings only through the rarest concatenation of unlikely accidents.

  No—it arose frequently enough, but generally developed along non-protein lines. Silicon displayed an abundance of compounds equal to that of carbon bonding, the atomic cornerstone of proteins; but an evolution begun in silicon
was permanently nonconvergent with intelligence, or else produced forms of intelligence that had no kinship whatever with human mentality.

  No—the spark of intelligence occurred in various shapes but was of short duration. The development of life took billions of years only in its pre-sentient stage. Primate Creatures, once formed, within two hundred thousand years automatically began a technological explosion. This explosion—and, by the cosmic clock, it was a true explosion—not only carried them, at ever-increasing speed, to higher and higher levels of control of the forces of Nature. It also carried civilizations apart, in directions too different for them to understand one another through any commonality of thought. There was no such commonality. That was an anthropocentric fallacy that people had inherited from the ancient faiths and myths. There could in fact be many different intelligences, and it was precisely because there were so many that the sky was silent.

  Not at all, said other hypotheses. The solution to the mystery was much simpler. The evolution of life, if it produced Intelligence, did so through a series of isolated events. This Intelligence could be nipped in the bud by any stellar incursion in the vicinity of the parent planet. Intervention from space was always blind and random. Had not paleontology, with the help of galactography (the archeology of the Milky Way), shown that the mammals owed their primacy to cataclysms that had left mountains of reptilian remains in the Mesozoic? And that it was a chain of happenstances—ice ages, pluvials, the formation of the steppes, the changes in Earth's magnetic poles, rates of mutation—that created the family tree of man?

  This notwithstanding, Intelligence could mature under trillions of suns. It could take the path of the terrestrial variety, in which case that winning ticket in the stellar lottery, after one or two thousand years, might turn into catastrophe, for technology was a domain of fatal traps and whoever entered there could easily come to a bad end.

  Intelligent Beings were able to see this threat, but only when it was too late. Having cast off religious faiths, and recognizing that religion's modern, degenerated forms were ideologies that offered the fulfillment of material and only material needs, the civilizations tried to stop their own momentum, but that was now impossible. Impossible even if they were not torn by internal antagonisms.

  The survivor from Titan had ample time to put questions and digest answers.

  From reflections on themselves and the world—termed, on Earth, "philosophy"—the Intelligent Beings proceeded to activities that made it increasingly clear to them that whatever had called them into existence gave them only one sure thing: their mortality. Indeed, they owed their very existence to mortality, for without it the billion-year alternations of emerging and dying species never would have taken place. They were spawned by the pit, by the deaths of the Archeozoic, the Paleozoic, the successive geological periods, and along with their Intelligence received the guarantee of their own demise. Soon, some twenty centuries after this diagnosis, they came to know the parental ways of Nature: the treacherous and wasteful technology of self-realizing processes used by Her to permit future forms of life to appear.

  This technology inspired admiration only as long as it remained inaccessible to its discoverers. But that did not last, either. Robbing the plants, the animals, their own bodies of their secrets, they changed the biosphere and themselves, and this increase in dominion was insatiable.

  They went out into space—only to find how alien it was to them and how the mark of their animal origin had been stamped inexorably on their bodies. This alienness, too, they overcame. Then, before very long, they found that they were—within the newly constructed technosphere—the last relict of the ancient heritage of biology. And that they were able to abandon—along with the poverty of the past, the hunger, the epidemics, the countless infirmities of old age—their mortal bodies. At first the possibility loomed like a fantastic, distant, terrifying crossroads.

  These generalizations, full of pathos and savoring of an engineer's grim eschatology, the survivor read with distaste. He wanted to know the purpose of the expedition, inasmuch as he had become an involuntary participant in it. A more up-to-date volume, now the authoritative text on exobiology, brought him closer to its mission. The book contained a diagram by Ortega and Nilssen showing the development of psychozoics in the Universe, their main road and branchings.

  The commencement of the main road was the early technological age, which was short-lived, allowing no offshoots for the thousand years between the rise of mechanical tools and the advent of the informational. In the next millennium, information science was crossed with biology to produce a swell of biotic acceleration.

  At this juncture the diagnostic quality of the chart, becoming prognostic, weakened. The outline of the main road had been drawn by facts and theories; but its divergences were the resultants now of theories only, albeit theories supported by others that were reliable to a high degree.

  The turning point in the main road was the moment when the engineering ability of the Intelligent Beings matched the life-creating potential of Nature. It was not possible to predict the further career of any individual civilization; this followed from the very nature of the crossroads. A certain percentage of the civilizations would stay on the main road—by putting the lid on an attainable but unrealized auto-evolution. An extreme case of such bioconservatism would be the creation of legislation (statutes, treaties, prohibitions, sanctions) to which all instrumentalities infringing on Nature would be subject. Technologies would arise to save the environment: committed to adapting the technosphere, without trauma, to the biosphere. This task could be but would not have to be accomplished—in which latter case a civilization, in a series of costly crises, would fluctuate demographically. It could decline and regenerate itself many times, paying for this self-destructive inertia with billions of lives. The establishing of interstellar contact would not rank high on its list of priorities.

  The conservatives on the main road would be silent: that was obvious.

  For the biotically nonconservative there were many solutions. Decisions to autoevolve, once made, were generally irreversible. Hence the great divergence among the older psychozoics. Ortega, Nilssen, and Tomic introduced the concept of a "window of contact." This was the interval of time in which Intelligent Beings had already reached a high level of applied science but had not yet undertaken to change the natural Intelligence given them—what would correspond to the human brain. The "window of contact" was, cosmically, a moment. From the resinous torch to the oil lamp, 16,000 years passed; from that lamp to the laser, it was a hundred years. The information needed to make the torch-to-laser step was on the order of the information needed to go from the discovery of the genetic code to the code's implementation in a post-atomic industry. Increases in knowledge were, in the "window of contact" phase, exponential—and, toward the phase's end, hyperbolic. The interval of any meaningful contact was minimally a thousand Earth years; optimally, from 1800 to 2500 years. Outside the window, for civilizations either immature or too mature, silence reigned. The immature lacked the power to communicate, while those too mature closed themselves off—or else formed groups that communicated with one another by means faster than light.

  On the subject of faster-than-light communication there was disagreement. No kind of matter or energy could be made to exceed the speed of light. But that barrier, some said, could be circumvented. Let a pulsar with a magnetic field fixed by a neutron star rotate at a speed approaching c. The beam of the emission would go in circles around the pulsar's axis and at a sufficient distance sweep across a sector of space at a speed greater than c. If in the subsequent sectors of the beam's rotation there were observers, those observers could synchronize their watches beyond the limit discovered by Einstein. They would only need to know the distances of the sides of the triangle (pulsar—observer A—observer B) and the speed of rotation of the "lighthouse" pulsar.

  This is as much as the one resurrected on the Eurydice learned, in the year of her constant acc
eleration, about cosmic civilizations. He came to a barrier that he could not pass. The machine-instructor did not chide the human pupil who was unable to grasp the mysteries of sidereal energetics and its relation to engineering and gravitational ballistics. These recent discoveries made possible the present expedition to the stars of the Harpy, which had been hidden from the astronomers of previous centuries by a cloud called the Coalsack. The Eurydice was to pass the Coalsack, enter the "temporal harbor" of a collapsar christened Hades, dispatch one of her segments to the planet named Quinta L-Harpyiae, wait for the return of that scout ship, and perform—for her own return—an incomprehensible maneuver called "passage through a retrochronal toroid," thanks to which she would reappear in the neighborhood of the Sun barely eight years after takeoff. Without that passage she would return two thousand years later, which would be no return at all.

  The scout ship of the Eurydice was to travel on its own an entire parsec with its crew in a state of embryonization. The vitrifaction of people had been abandoned, as it gave only a 98-percent certainty of reviving the frozen. The pilot of ancient rockets felt, at these lectures, like a child being initiated into the operation of a synchrophasotron. He also realized that he had become a hermit, that he should no longer play Robinson Crusoe at the side of an electronic Friday. He rode to the observatory in the forward section of the Eurydice, to see the stars. A great hall gleamed with strange equipment. In vain he looked for the cannonlike cylinder of a reflector or of any other type of telescope—or simply a shuttered dome for viewing the heavens directly. The high hall seemed unoccupied, though lit all around with storied rows of lights. Along these ran narrow galleries that were joined by columns of machines. Returning to his cabin after this unsuccessful excursion, he noticed on the table an old, dog-eared book with a card from Gerbert. Gerbert was loaning it to him: something to read in bed. The physician was known to have brought on board with him a number of science-fiction books, which he preferred to the dazzling holovision shows.