Existence

by David Brin

  On the other hand, her caste—her peers in the top aristocracy—foresaw little good coming out of this. Even if the alien device represented a benign and advanced federation that was both generous and wise, the psychological disruption could spur fresh waves of anxiety, paranoia, or covetous wrath. With interstellar trade relations might come wave after wave of wondrous new technologies. Some hazardous? Even the most benign might shake an already tenuous economy, throwing whole sectors into obsolescence, putting hundreds of millions out of work, not to mention spoiling many investment portfolios.

  No wonder this spurred a climax to long negotiations between the clade and Tenskwatawa’s renunciation movement. Few cultures ever managed to transition after contact with superior outsiders, without generations of intimidation and victimhood. Meiji-era Japan did it. And their method was not democracy.

  But Lacey pulled her thoughts back to the present. The science-showman on her payroll was continuing his rapid-fire explication, never slacking momentum.

  “… even that still leaves us awash in puzzles! We can only hope the Artifact Commission overcomes all linguistic barriers. Especially now that dem lagga heads will finally allow me … and you, of course, madam … close enough to ask questions!”

  “So, what should we ask first, Professor?”

  “Oh, there are so many things. For example, the mere existence of the Artifact, here on Earth, proves—irie—that interstellar travel is possible!”

  Assuming, again, that it’s not a hoax, Lacey pondered, while noting that Profnoo still had not mentioned an actual question.

  “True, we haven’t yet learned how the object crossed the vast gulf between the stars. But from the fact that it exists in a purely crystalline-solid state—tallowah an’ sturdy—I be wagering a whole-heap that the propulsion methodology wasn’t gentle! Perhaps a truly prodigious accelerator-cannongun fired it to near relativistic speeds. Or else, maybe its compact dimensions allowed slick passage through an obeah-generated wormhole, requiring the energy of a superdupernova! I-mon have done some rudimentary calculations—”

  “Professor. Please. Can you stick to the point?”

  “Ah, yes. The Invitation.” He nodded. “Do bear with me, Madam Donaldson-Sander, I-and-I will get to it! For, you see, even the possibility of interstellar travel was denied for eighty years by the cult of SETI. When their program of sky worship found nothing out there at all, they trotted out the same excuse. Just a little more time. Patience—and ever-more sophisticated-bashy gear—would eventually find the needle in the haystack … that wise, elder race they hoped for!”

  Huh. Lacey couldn’t help getting caught up in the spell he wove. Noozone had amassed his own fortune out of millions of micropayments, as people zigged-in to view and tactail his leaping, explanatory extravaganzas. Though some just liked his snakelike draidlocks, wafting and stirring clouds of ambiguous, colored smoke.

  “Alas, interstellar travel changes everything. If advanced star-mon can deepvoyage an’ colonize, then needles make copies of themselves. Colonies send out their own expeditions, spreading an’ filling the haystack!

  “But we saw no fabulous Others. Nor any huge engineering projects that we may someday build, if we become a truly bold and successful civilization. Antimatter-spaceships, vaast solar collectors, Dyson spheres, and Kardashev worksheds that lace multiple star systems, all of them detectable.…” Profnoo had to gasp and catch his breath.

  “And it gets worse! Earth itself would show signs, if visitors ever flushed a toilet here, or tossed a Coke bottle into our Paleozoic sea. My oh, geologists and paleobiologists would see in our rocks, the very moment when extraterrestrial bacteria arrived! Nuh true?

  “No. Something was wrong with the old SETI logic. Till this marvel-stoosh Galactic Artifact turned up. Only now…” He lifted a finger—and one of his mentally activated draidlocks wafted also.

  “Now, it seems that life is fairly common—and—

  “—sapient life, capable of technology, is not rare—and—

  “—some form of interstellar travel appears to be possible—and—

  “—a peaceful community already exists that…”

  Lacey raised a hand of her own, cutting him off with four braids and four fingers lifted in the air. Glancing out the window, she had noticed that the yacht bearing them from Charleston to Washington was cruising rapidly up the Potomac. Soon, they’d pass the zeppelin port and the Awfulday Memorial, before finally docking at the Naval Research Lab. Not that she minded traveling this way. Shipboard facilities let her stay in constant linkup with the rescue effort, searching for her son. But it was time to start winding this up.

  “All right, then. Suppose there is a Galactic Federation we’re invited to join. Doesn’t that conflict with everything you just described? Especially the sparse cosmos that we observed, till now?”

  “It would seem so, madam.” Profnoo’s earlobe rings and beaded locks clattered as he nodded. “So, where’s the overlap in conceptual space? Between the previous, downpressing appearance of meager sapience, and what we now know to be its high, upfull frequency?”

  The man’s unquenchable zeal to speculate did not bother her. Vivid and aromatic, Profnoo made his intellectual frenzy into something unabashedly masculine. Frankly, his flirtatious attention—laced with rousing scientific jargon—filled some of the void in Lacey that used to be occupied by sex.

  “Apparently, dem use crystal capsules instead of radio! I suppose interstellar pellets are easy, cheap, and relatively fast.” He chuckled, though Lacey found the jest rather lame. “They also allow aliens to travel as surrogates—as complete downloaded personalities. Indeed, this may prove my conjecture about networks of connection-wormholes!”

  Or else, they may avoid radio because they know something that we don’t, Lacey pondered. Perhaps they deem it unwise to draw attention to their home worlds. Because something out there makes it dangerous. The thought gave her a shiver, especially since Planet Earth had been anything but quiet, for the last hundred years or so.

  “But, madam, just picture the long odds that this particular crystal—this Artifact—had to beat, when dem just happened to drift within reach of that astronaut’s garbage collecting bola-tether. Without any visible means to maneuver! A fluke? Or might there be others out there?”

  Lacey nodded. That may explain why Great China, India, the U.S., the E-Union and A-Union have all announced new space endeavors. I should assign some agents—real and spyware—to learn more about these missions.

  Something about the notion of “other artifacts” tickled the edge of her imagination.

  Why only out there? Indeed …

  But the thought eluded her, skittering away as the yachtmaster’s amplified voice reverberated. It was time to stop for inspection at the security cordon near the Naval Research Center. Captain Kohl-Fennel had already made arrangements, of course. The pause would be brief. Lacey shrugged.

  “You were talking about contradictions, Professor. How to explain why we saw no traces of intelligence before, in a universe that now turns out to be filled with sapient life.”

  “Yes … it be a puzzlement.” His dense, expressive lips pursed. “The use of something other than radio for communications may solve part of the conundrum. Another contributor may be some kind of Zoo Hypothesis.”

  This one she knew well. “The idea that young races like ours are held in quarantine. Deliberately kept in the dark.”

  “Yes, madam. Many possible motives have been offered, for why elder races might do such a dread thing. Fear of ‘human aggression’ is one old-but-implausible theory. Or a ‘noninterference directive’ leaves new races alone, even if it deprives them of answers they need, to survive.” Profnoo shook his head, clearly disliking that explanation.

  “Or aliens may stay silent to sift our broadcasts an’ surf our networks, gathering our culture—art, music, and originalities—without paying anything in return! I call it the Cheapskate Thief Hypothesis. And it does vex me,
truly, to think they may be such blackheart mon! First thing I plan to ask these beings? What intellectual property laws they have! Interstellar peace and friendship be fine … but kill-mi-dead if I don’ want my royalties!”

  Lacey chuckled politely, since he seemed to expect it. In fact, Profnoo’s eyes had a glint as he hurriedly waggled notes in the air, caching this idea for his show.

  Inwardly, she wondered, Would it have been better, if this all took place out of public view?

  The professor assumes that citizenship in some galactic federation will involve expanded rights and privileges. But what if aliens exact a price for admission? Changes in our social structure or government? Or beliefs? Might they demand something tangible, in exchange for knowledge and trade? Like precious substances?

  Lacey had once seen a humor magazine cynically explain why the U.S. government would both suppress medical advances and quash the truth about ET visitors—because officials were selling fuel for the aliens’ “cancer drive engines.”

  But no. UFO scenarios were mental slumming.

  More likely, they want access to cheap Earthling labor, outsourcing work to our teeming masses. Grunt toil their own citizens and robots are too spoiled to perform? Software can travel between the stars, so will Earth become the new coding sweatshop? Or intergalactic call center?

  Lacey realized, If this contact episode had taken place behind closed doors … our elite talking to theirs … then we’d have had an option. The possibility of saying—“No thanks. No deal. Not now.

  “Not yet.

  “Maybe not ever.”

  It frankly shocked Lacey, the path her thoughts had taken. Where was the zealot who spent her adult life pursuing this very thing—First Contact? When push came to shove, was she as conservative and reluctant as all the rest?

  Why do I have the creepy feeling there’s going to be a catch?

  She was still in that dour mood when Professor Noozone helped guide her down a ramp leading from the yacht to where several fresh-faced young men and women in starched uniforms waited to salute and greet her. It was a clear day. Beyond the zep port—with flying cranes bustling among the giant, bobbing freighters—she could make out the remade Washington Monument and the pennants of New Smithsonian Castle. But even those sights didn’t lift her spirit.

  While servants brought the luggage and Profnoo’s scientific supplies, Lacey made sure to shake hands with her hosts, one by one. She tried to quash a bitter—and irrational—feeling of anger that sailors should be standing here, instead of helping right now in the search for her son, missing at sea. Of course, only fatigue could provoke such an awful resentment.

  I can’t help it though. Underneath all the turmoil about rocks from space, beyond the scientific puzzles and philosophical quandaries I am, after all, a mother.

  “The reception for our distinguished Advisory Panel will start soon, madam,” said Lacey’s assigned guide, a bright-looking ensign, who seemed a little like Hacker. “I’ll take you first to your guest quarters, so you can freshen—”

  The young officer abruptly gasped as his face took an orange cast, flinching backward from some surprise that he saw, beyond Lacey’s shoulder. Others reacted, too, cringing or raising hands before their eyes.

  “Bumboclot!” Professor Noozone cursed.

  Lacey turned to find out what caused the flaring glow, when sound caught up with light—a low, rumbling boom accompanied a palpable push of displaced air. Thoughts of Awfulday raced through her mind—as they must have through everyone else.

  But then, why am I still on my feet? she wondered until, turning, Lacey saw a globular gout of flame roiling in the sky beyond the Pentagon, some distance upriver, maybe in Virginia. The setting sun made it hard to see clearly, but the fireball faded quickly and she realized with some relief—it couldn’t be anything as terrible as a nuke. Not even a small one.

  That comfort was tempered though, when there followed another detonation. And then another. And she knew that, when it came to explosions, size wasn’t everything.

  RENUNCIATORS

  What about the notion of “inevitable progress”?

  Decades ago, author Charles Stross urged that—even if you think a marvelous Singularity Era is coming, you shouldn’t let it affect your behavior, or alter your sober urgency to solve current problems.

  “The rapture of the nerds, like space colonization, is likely to be a nonparticipatory event for 99.999 percent of humanity—unless we’re very unlucky,” Stross wrote. “If it happens and it’s interested in us, all our plans go out the window. If it doesn’t happen, sitting around waiting for the ais to save us from the rising sea level/oil shortage/intelligent bioengineered termites looks like a Real Bad Idea.

  “The best approach to the singularity is to apply Pascal’s Wager—in reverse—and plan on the assumption it won’t save us from ourselves.”

  —from The Movement Revealed by Thormace Anubis-Fejel

  28.

  THE SMART-MOB

  Washington was like a geezer—overweight and sagging—but with attitude. Most of its gutty heft lay below the Beltway, in waistlands that had been downwind on Awfulday.

  Downwind, but not out.

  When droves of upper-class child-bearers fled the invisible plumes enveloping Fairfax and Alexandria, those briefly empty ghost towns quickly refilled with immigrants—the latest mass of teemers, yearning to be free and willing to endure a little radiation, in exchange for a pleasant five-bedroom that could be subdivided into nearly as many apartments. Spacious living rooms began a second life as storefronts. Workshops took over four-car garages and lawns turned into produce gardens. Swimming pools made excellent refuse bins—until government recovered enough to start cracking down.

  Passing overhead, Tor could track signs of suburban renewal from her first-class seat aboard the Spirit of Chula Vista. Take those swimming pools. A majority of the kidney-shaped cement ponds now gleamed with clear liquid—mostly water (as testified by the spectral scanning feature of her tru-vu spectacles)—welcoming throngs of children who splashed under summertime heat, sufficiently dark-skinned to unflinchingly bear the bare sun.

  So much for the notion that dirty bombs automatically make a place unfit for breeders, she thought. Let yuppies abandon perfectly good mansions because of a little strontium dust. People from Congo and Celebes were happy to insource.

  Wasn’t this America? Call it resolution—or obstinacy—but after three rebuilds, the Statue of Liberty still beckoned.

  The latest immigrants, those who filled Washington’s waistland vacuum, weren’t ignorant. They could read warning labels and health stats, posted on every lamppost and VR level. So? More people died in Jakarta from traffic or stray bullets. Anyway, mutation rates dropped quickly, a few years after Awfulday, to levels no worse than Kiev. And Washington had more civic amenities.

  Waistlanders also griped a lot less about minor matters like zoning. That made it easier to acquire rights of way, repioneering new paths back into unlucky cities that had been dusted. Innovations soon turned those transportation hubs into boomtowns. An ironic twist to emerge from terror/sabotage. Especially when sky trains began crisscrossing North America.

  Through her broad window, traveling east aboard the Spirit of Chula Vista, Tor gazed across a ten-mile separation to the Westbound Corridor, where long columns of cargo zeppelins lumbered in the opposite direction, ponderous as whales and a hundred times larger. Chained single-file and heavily laden, the dirigibles floated barely three hundred meters above the ground, obediently trailing teams of heavyduty draft-locomotives. Each towing cable looked impossibly slender for hauling fifty behemoths across a continent. But while sky trains weren’t fast, or suited for bulk materials, they beat any other method for transporting medium-value goods.

  And passengers. Those willing to trade a little time for inexpensive luxury.

  Tor moved her attention much closer, watching the Spirit’s majestic shadow flow like an eclipse over rolling suburban
countryside, so long and dark that flowers would start to close and birds might be fooled to roost, pondering nightfall. Free from any need for engines of her own, the skyliner glided almost silently over hill and dale. Not as quick as a jet, but more scenic—free of carbon levies or ozone tax—and far cheaper. Setting her tru-vus to magnify, she followed the Spirit’s tow cable along the Eastbound Express Rail, pulled relentlessly by twelve thousand horses, courtesy of the deluxe maglev tug, Umberto Nobile.

  What was it about a lighter-than-air craft that drew the eye? Oh, certainly most of them now had pixelated, tunable skins that could be programmed for any kind of spectacle. Passing near a population center—even a village in the middle of nowhere—the convoy of cargo zeps might flicker from one gaudy advertisement to the next, for anything from a local gift shop to the mail-order wares of some Brazilian bloat-corp. At times, when no one bid for the display space, a chain of dirigibles might tune their surfaces to resemble clouds … or flying pigs. Whim, after all, was another modern currency. Everyone did it on the VR levels.

  Only with zeppelins, you could paint whimsical images across a whole stretch of the real sky.

  Tor shook her head.

  But no. That wasn’t it. Even bare and gray, they could not be ignored. Silent, gigantic, utterly calm, a zep seemed to stand for a kind of grace that human beings might build, but never know in their own frenetic lives.

  * * *

  She was nibbling at one of her active-element fingernails—thinking about Wesley, waiting at the skydock for her arrival, and trying to picture his face—when a voice intruded from above.

  “Will you be wanting anything else before we arrive in the Federal District, madam?”

  She glanced up at a servitor—little more than a boxy delivery receptacle—that clung to its own slim rail on a nearby bulkhead, leaving the walkway free for passengers.

  “No, thanks,” Tor murmured automatically, a polite habit of her generation. Younger folk had already learned to snub machinery slaves, except when making clipped demands. A trend that she found odd, since the ais were getting smarter all the time.