Existence

by David Brin

  Oldest member? Do they mean that this was the first race of their commonwealth? The founders who emerged upon the starlanes before anybody else? Perhaps those who contacted and taught all the others how to live together in interstellar peace?

  But wait. Gerald suddenly recalled. Did they say “oldest surviving”? That doesn’t necessarily mean anything ominous … still …

  Gerald knew his mind was racing way ahead of any rational basis for speculation. He tried to emulate the patience that he thought he saw in those eyes.

  The head-top vents rippled and symbols emerged. Strange and unfamiliar, they rapidly mutated, transforming into letters of the Roman alphabet that rushed forward, arraying themselves into words which transducers interpreted into sound—conveyed by a voice that seemed both low and strong, if a bit breathy.

  You have proved capable and worthy. Join us!

  Gerald heard a number of outright sighs, as tension released, even though this only repeated the one cogent message already received so far. That earlier, hopeful statement had emerged out of chaos and confusion. Now, coming from a clearly chosen consensus leader, representing the entire alien community, it felt even more firm, clear, and reassuring.

  He glanced at Akana, who nodded back at Gerald. They had worked out what he should say.

  “We are honored.

  “There’s much to discuss. About your great and ancient society, and our reasons for both caution and joy.

  “But let’s begin by welcoming you to Planet Earth. On behalf of humanity, in goodwill and friendship.”

  Gerald felt a knot unwind in his stomach. He had managed to get through it all without a cough or “um” or twitch. The Notable-Quotable Words were finished, perhaps a bit more long-winded than famous, dramatic pronouncements by Caesar and Armstrong … certainly not eloquent. But still acceptable to go on the wall of Things Spoken Largely for History.

  His words penetrated the Artifact via a device at the knobby end, and quickly manifested as a flurry of tiny symbols—varied and ranging from blocky letters to complex ideograms—that diverged and separated into several dozen separate streams, each aimed at a different alien, not just the ambassador standing a little ahead. The creatures, lined up in their neat rows, reacted with the wide range of behaviors you might expect—shivers and nods and tentacle ripples and shudders—but an overall impression seemed plain to Gerald. They were pleased.

  The oldest one turned for brief consultation with the others, then more letters flowed from the top of the Buddha-like visitor’s head, fluttering and transforming before plastering themselves against the glassy interface.

  Your friendship is our greatest treasure. We will repay it with the finest gift possible.

  “I told you so!” Ben Flannery murmured. To which Emily Tang merely offered a we’ll see grunt.

  But first, we must ask—have there been others?

  Gerald blinked. Others?

  He glanced at Akana, who shrugged back at him, mystified. In fact, none of the team members had anything to offer.

  Then a shimmery virt floated down the table, settling in front of Gerald. He turned and saw that the sender was Hermes, holvatar representative of the Advisory Panel—delegates from many nations, guilds, and estates, who sat beyond the quarantine glass. Displayed for Gerald in vivid three-dimensionality by the contaict lenses he wore in both eyes, the virt glittered a simple insight.

  “Others” may refer to previous encounters with alien probes.

  Ah. Good guess. Someone in the peanut gallery was proving useful after all. Of course, it could also mean anything from UFOs to SETI signals to Jesus. But he decided to go with the suggestion, taking a deep breath.

  “Your crystalline capsule was the first of its kind we’ve encountered, that spoke to our civilization with a clear message from afar.”

  He quashed a sudden impulse to add—“That I know of.”

  Another virtual message seemed to flutter in front of Gerald, this one sent by Genady.

  Remember how we speculated about earlier artifacts falling to Earth, the way this one would have, if you hadn’t snagged it? Picture many of them plummeting in, across vast stretches of time … mostly to shatter or sink in the sea. Perhaps some of them merely damaged …

  Gerald grunt-clicked for Genady’s virtual note to move aside … but to stay available. During those few seconds, the jolly-looking alien received and pondered Gerald’s reply. It seemed pleased by this news, its eyes squinting even more amiably than before.

  How fortunate! Then you will receive clean information. Be warned, however, that other emissaries may desperately seek attention. Some carry defective or misleading, or even dangerous, entreaties.

  Gerald swallowed, hard. Things had veered, abruptly, in a new direction. Suddenly, a veritable storm of virts swirled about, sent by almost every member of the contact team, as well as the animated “god” Hermes, who frantically scribbled one note after another, conveying ideas from the folks beyond the glass.

  These Artifact visitors have rivals! Maybe even enemies …

  So much for a peaceful universal cosmic federation …

  Could “join us” mean enlisting in their squabbles against some unknown foes? Suddenly, the offer is looking a lot less tempting …

  This fat envoy seems relieved, maybe even surprised that we’ve not met “others.”

  Gerald blink-prioritized, giving most of the virts just a cursory gist-glance. But he called forward Genady’s follow-up message.

  Kakashkiya! Do you think all those rumors we’ve heard recently … about bits of stone, suddenly lighting up … that those might be fragments and relics of older probes “desperately seeking attention”?

  Akana caught Gerald’s eye with an unspoken query. Given this sudden turn of events, should she call a recess?

  No. He shook his head. It would do no harm to follow up with some direct questions.

  “Thank you for the warning. We’ll be careful and wary,” he told the Oldest Surviving Member. “Nevertheless, please explain. Are you worried about other messenger probes because they were dispatched by … unfriendly forces?”

  Gerald knew he could have expressed that better. But this conversation was already drifting way off any script the team had prepared.

  The response came as members of the alien delegation seemed to shift and jostle, nervously. Several tried to move up next to the chosen representative, but were restrained by others. The humanoid seemed to grow a bit grim.

  Some emissaries are problematic because of their point or species of origin. And yes, some senders were disagreeable. Other probe-heralds might be part of this same lineage you see before you. Yet, they may be less trustworthy, because of temporal factors.

  Emily muttered, this time aloud.

  “Criminy! He’s talking about document version control! He doesn’t want us contaminated by an obsolete variant.”

  “Well…,” Ben Flannery muttered, looking a bit dazed. “These people … these particular visitors … they just arrived … drifting close to Earth, where Gerald managed to recover their capsule. Doesn’t that suggest they’d be more recent than…” The anthropologist stumbled, looking for vocabulary. “… than any that might have fallen to Earth earlier? And hence more reliable…”

  The blond Hawaiian stopped, unable to continue.

  Gerald watched the Artifact. The words that had been spoken by other team members did not seem to be penetrating the speech input device, so oral discussion was probably okay, especially amid the storm of virts. Still, this line of thought was close to getting out of hand.

  He faced the Artifact and spoke directly, perhaps a bit louder than necessary.

  “Clarify, please. Is there a potential for danger from contact with the Others that you spoke of? Is there war, among rival interstellar races and civilizations out there?”

  The pudgy humanoid grimaced in a way that Gerald found hard to interpret, or even guess at. Perhaps later correlation-analysis would make it easier to tr
anslate facial expressions.

  War? As in devastating struggle? Reciprocal causation of organic death and physical destruction? One species or people competing or directly harming another across interstellar space? No. There is no war. There cannot be war across the stars. It has never happened. It will never happen.

  There was a general sigh at this reassurance. And sure, the news had to be seen as important, even epochal.

  Yet Gerald was starting to feel a bit miffed. Good tidings seemed always to come accompanied by something else that turned out to be jarring, even disturbing. He was left with the ongoing and ever-present suspicion that things weren’t quite as they seemed.

  Emily Tang offered a worried virt.

  So … there’s no heavy conflict. That’s a relief. Still, there appears to be urgent rivalry at some level. Alien civs apparently send out emissary probes pretty often … and covetously hope that those probes will get to be the ones that actually make contact with New Guys like us.

  Akana passed along a gisted security briefing. Even now, investigation teams from EU, AU, UN, U.S., Great China, the Caliphate, and countless consortia were converging on every credible account of strange glowing stones. Hypotheses flurried, but a mesh consensus was converging that these objects—(well, some of them, the ones that weren’t hoaxes)—might also be artifacts from space, perhaps broken or crippled remnants that had been scattered around the Earth across many years.

  Harkening back to the words of the Oldest Surviving Member, he realized; these “others” were, indeed, attracting notice.

  Dr. Tshombe complained.

  But why suddenly now? The other probes never summoned attention so garishly, across all the millennia. Not until this very moment! It is an incredible coincidence.

  Gerald glanced at Emily, then Akana. Clearly, they both knew the answer to that question … and it started showing up in virts from the Advisers’ Panel.

  Somehow, all those “other” sky stones—damaged or lost for ages—somehow they must know that the Artifact is here. And that it is getting the full regard of humankind.

  And they ardently want to be heard …

  … too?

  … or instead?

  Gerald was tempted to follow that thought-line. To wonder why alien crystals would show such blatant evidence of a crude human emotion …

  … jealousy …

  Except that he also had a job to do. To keep up his end of a conversation with the Oldest Surviving Member, and not to get distracted by secondary matters.

  Focus on what’s important.

  First, verify the stuff that’s vital. We can psychoanalyze alien motivations later.

  They were watching him—the visitors in the stone. So was the world. He took a sip of tea from the hotbulb in front of him, cleared his throat, and asked in a crisp, clear voice:

  “So, then … can we take it that you are all part of a commonwealth of coexistence and peace?”

  The Buddha smile broadened.

  Yes. We have our disputes, of course. But our coexistence is timeless and ever hopeful. We strive, perpetually, for the common advantage of all. You, too, can benefit, as we have, by joining us!

  Instead of relishing the friendliness, Gerald continued probing, this time without a pause.

  “But those Others that you spoke of—do they come from different species and civilizations that view the people of your planet as competitors?”

  After his words floated in to the aliens, the smile of the Oldest Member thinned slightly.

  I have already explained, there is no competition among species and planets and civilizations.

  Gerald frowned, suddenly skeptical.

  “What? No competition at all? But you just said that some probe-makers were ‘problematic’ and that you have disputes. Please explain the contradiction.”

  There is no contradiction. Individual entities may argue, contest, or compete, in certain contexts. Species and civilizations do not.

  Ben Flannery spoke up.

  “He must be referring to the relativity limitation. The stars are so far apart that advanced beings don’t even bother to try interstellar travel, except with these cheap, fast, crystalline probes. So much for all those grand delusions people wallowed in, back during the Twentieth Century. Fantasies about super-Kardashev societies, exploring and colonizing the cosmos with ramships or generation arks, or self-replicating explorer robots, or even warp drive. Or building megastructures to control the fate of galaxies! Those were just god-fantasies that our fathers daydreamed, on their way to mythical Singularity Heaven.”

  Gerald glanced up at the Advisers’ Gallery, where a hundred of humanity’s brightest, or most influential, had taken seats to observe this historic occasion. In the plush VIP area, one individual seemed to react quite heatedly to Ben’s interpretation. A dark fellow with a waving ’do of cyber-activated hair. Gerald’s contaicts supplied a caption-nametag—Professor Noozone. Ah, yes, the famous scientific razzle artist. He was shouting and shaking a fist toward Flannery—

  —who continued on, blithely indifferent to a storm of virts that tried to crowd in around him.

  “The key point that we’ve been told just now is that there is absolutely never direct physical contact between sapient species, who simply live too far apart. All they have to exchange is information. Hence, there’s nothing to argue or compete over!”

  It sounded logical. But Gerald found the assertion doubtful. In fact, patently absurd.

  Even people who are calm, reasonable, and satiated—who have no physical dissension with others, or conflicting needs—can and will quarrel. So they exchange only information and trade only ideas? Natural beings will bicker over those!

  Anyway, who could possibly claim that these aliens were “above” altercation or too mature to argue! To be frank, he had never seen such an inherently testy bunch. And that was before the recent news about rivalry between interstellar envoy-probes!

  Could it all be a matter of misunderstood definitions? “Competition,” for example, might be translating wrong. Gerald decided to seek clarification.

  “Please explain,” he asked. Took a deep breath. Then plunged on. “If you often wrangle as individuals, how is it that your home species and civilizations and planets never compete or quarrel with each other?”

  The Buddha-being contemplated this, then answered slowly, with a mien that made Gerald think of a wise-old teacher, patiently answering the simpleminded query of a dimwitted child.

  Our home species and civilizations and planets could not ever compete with one another. Because they never met.

  TORALYZER

  Okay, so now we’ve got a good prelimalysis of those recent worldwide microquakes. After sift-removing the background of natural tectonic activity and known sources of human-generated noise, what we’re left with is a dispersion of mysterious, compact detonations, nearly all of them occurring in a very narrow energy range.

  Furthermore, although they at first seemed to be scattered all over the globe, we can now tell that these micro-quake events are limited mostly to certain types of geology! Mudflats, sedimentary layers, alluvial plains, glacial moraines, the Antarctic plateau … and of course, the ocean basins. Almost nothing is happening in the great continental cratons, or granitic mountain ranges, or anywhere near regions of fresh volcanism, like sea floor spreading centers.

  Yes, the coincidence is getting hard to refute. These events occur in exactly the sorts of terrain where an object that fell from the sky might stand a chance of landing with less than vaporizing impact. Mostly either under water or in places that used to be oceans, long ago. Zones where any surviving remnants might have accumulated, or been embedded, across thousands or millions of years.

  For those of you just checking in, this is Tor “Zep-girl” Povlov, serving as cogenter for a smartposse investigating whether these quakes might be related to another mystery phenomenon—eyewitness reports of sudden emissions of strange light, given off by stony or glassy objects in
the last day or so.

  Yes, I know we’re all trying hard to keep up with real-time developments, even as the whole world follows the conversation between astronaut Gerald Livingstone and the entities dwelling within the Havana Artifact. This could be the greatest test ever of our ability to usefully divide attention … to keep doing effective investigation work while transfixed by a fast-breaking news story!

  From the conversation in Washington, one thing has just become clear. The Artifact emissaries do not want humanity talking to “others.”

  And, just as clearly, every word they’ve said makes us eager to hunt down and learn more about these different shining stones!

  So we come to an obvious question. Might the glitters and glimmers that have been reported in Mecca, Hyderabad, and Stonehenge, in Taipei, La Paz, Goma, and Toulouse … might these be just the tip of the iceberg, indicating a truly vast number of “other” contact probes?

  Might the recent spate of mysterious micro-tremors, deep underground and out of sight, be connected to all this? Could these outbursts be attempts by “other” artifacts to draw attention to themselves?

  And why now, if they sat under mud or silt for millennia or eons?

  Duh. Because they sense—somehow—that the Havana Artifact is hogging all the fun!

  Why not earlier? Because till now it seemed better to wait! In performing these detonations or screaming glows, they may be expending whatever reserves they had been hoarding to get them across the ages! Using it up now, in order to have one last chance to—

  * * *

  Just a minute … just a minute. Did you see that? Did that fat alien representative just say what I think he said?

  Zoom into the Artifact Conference. See the words of the Oldest Member on the big screen.

  Our home species and civilizations and planets could not ever compete with one another. Because they never met.