by David Brin
THE LONELY SKY
Lurker Challenge Number Two
If you’ve monitored our TV, radio, and Internet—and the reason you haven’t answered is that you see us as competitors, please reconsider.
* * *
In our long, slow struggle toward decent civilization, humans have slowly learned that competition and cooperation aren’t inherent opposites, but twins, both in nature and advanced societies.
Under terms that are fair, and with goodwill, even those who begin suspicious of each other can discover ways to interact toward mutual benefit. Use the Web to look up the “positive-sum game” where “win-win” solutions bring success to all sides.
Surely there are ways that humanity—and other Earth species—can join the cosmos without injuring your legitimate aims. Remember, most stable species and cultures seem to benefit from a little competition, now and then! So please answer. Let’s talk about it.
72.
FOUR SPECIES OF HUMAN
Evolution is a bitch. Nearly all the time.
Only … on rare occasions … evolution gets to change her mind.
A reminder of that fact nearly plowed into Gerald, darting from a side corridor. Barely avoiding collision, the small figure windmilled, legs flying in the weird way that one “fell” in a centrifugal gravity wheel, tumbling toward the floor at a slant. Gerald’s hand shot out, grabbing a fistful of wildly braided hair, eliciting a shriek.
“Hey now, Ika. What’s your hurry?”
The girl was short—barely into adolescence—but hardly petite. Stocky and strong, when her hand clenched Gerald’s arm he had a sense that she could snap it. Ika made that point by squeezing, in a playful way that hurt just a bit.
“Cap’n Gerry!” Her pale legs whirled around red-striped shorts, twisting to meet the floor on agile tiptoes. Gerald released her braid, though the child kept her vicelike grip on his arm for a second longer, as her face passed his—somehow looking cute and pixielike, despite almost masculine ridges over hooded eyes. Her voice was deeper than one expected, with an echoing resonance that seemed not quite human.
“Be gentle, oh kind sir,” she said, playfully. “Don’t you know I’m a whole lot older ’n you?”
It was a running joke, and not just between the two of them. Members of the revived species Homo neanderthalensis insisted on being called the “Old Race,” for reasons that had little support in biology or fact.
Well, just so long as they don’t start demanding reparations for a genocide that happened 27,000 years ago. I wasn’t around, so I’m not paying.
“And where’re you rushing in such an all-fired hurry, child?” he asked, phrasing it deliberately as an elderly person (which he was) addressing a mere ten-year-old (though Neanders aged differently).
“We’re on a cobbly hunt!” Ika announced, proudly defiant, taking a step backward and planting both fists on her hips.
“On a … did you say we?”
She nodded toward the nearby side corridor where Gerald now spotted another figure, hanging back in shadows. Lanky and a bit stooped, with close-shaven hair and a nervous expression.
“Oh. Hello, Hiram. How are you today?”
Every autie was unique. Still, you followed some general rules when one of them grew agitated, as Hiram appeared to be right now. Eyes wide and darting, the gangly young man edged slowly outward, flashing quick looks near but never quite upon Ika’s face, or Gerald’s.
“So, Hiram. Why aren’t you two watching the new telescope unfold? It’s half the reason this ship came out here, all this way past Mars.”
Keep the conversation concrete but impersonal. Radiate calm friendliness. And thank the Great Spirit that our ship quotas are still small. Just two Neanders, two autistics, and five metal-people for this voyage.
What next? Will they demand we start taking along dolphins and apes? Gene-mod people with wings and foot-hands? It’s not a sapient civilization—it’s a menagerie!
Or else … another metaphor occurred to Gerald … an ark.
Unlike some auties, Hiram’s goggle-eyed, painfully thin face bore no resemblance to the Neanderthal girl, nearby.
“Were you and Ika … fighting?”
Ika laughed, a rich, bell-like sound that always made Gerald think of snowy forest canyons.
“We was just playing, Hiram!”
“But you—”
“Tell you what. If you promise to believe me, an’ relax, I’ll pay a bribe in our next imVRsive game.”
The wide eyes narrowed. “What bribe?”
“Three mastodon tusks.”
The young autie smirked, calculatingly.
“Three green ones. Four meters and twelve centimeters long. Starting almost straight at the base with a gradually shortening curvature culminating with a radius of one meter at the tip and with an inward thirty degree per meter corkscrew. One of them left-handed and two of them right-handed.”
“What? No deal!” Ika cried out. “Who cares if you relax or not, you space-traveling oddball. Just hold yer breath for all I care and go into a hissy fit!”
No. No, please don’t. Gerald almost stepped forward to intervene. Hiram was a useful member of the crew—no one else had his startling knack at quick-decrypting the holocrystal fragments that ibn Battuta kept scooping up from nearby space. Only at a price. He retained much of the old-style emotional frailty that had thwarted his branch of humanity for thousands of years. Experts on Earth were still figuring out how to get the best of both worlds, unleashing savant skills without the accompanying baggage of disabilities.
But Gerald shouldn’t have worried. Ika’s folk had a talent for relating to auties—who must have appeared more often in tribes of Ice Age Europe. Instead of quailing back from Ika’s outburst, Hiram grinned.
“Okay. Orange ones, then. Want to show the cap’n what’s not a cobbly?”
Gerald blinked at the sudden topic change.
Not … a … cobbly. Then he recalled. Oh, yeah. The mythological nonentities that both Neanders and auties claim to believe in.
“I dunno. Homosaps can be awfully close-minded.” Ika tilted her head, looking archly at Gerald—then brightened suddenly. “On the other hand, he is Cap’n Gerry.…”
It seemed in character, even expected of him, to emit a sigh over childish time-wasting. Though, in all honesty, he could spare a few minutes.
“Will you two please get on with it?”
“Okay then.” Ika held out her right hand, palm up. “Give me your attention.”
Gerald used an almost-spoken command to change reality augmentation. Within his percept-view, a narrow cylinder took form, appearing to coalesce above Ika’s hand, then contracting into a convenient symbol of control, shaped like the sort of white baton that an orchestra conductor might wield.
As the girl reached for the animated vrobject, Gerald realized. It also resembles a magic wand.
Uh-oh.
Her percept meshed seamlessly with his, and he sensed Hiram’s presence sliding in alongside. Their generation took this sort of thing for granted, starting at age three or younger. But it would always seem newfangled and creepy to Gerald.
Ika deftly appeared to grip the wand, by sight alone, without feedback gloves to provide sense of touch. Waving realistically, she gave it a flourish, then swiveled suddenly, aiming down the hall as she yelled.
“Expecto simakus cliffordiam!”
Gerald tried not to roll his eyes, or otherwise interfere with Ika’s incantation. Though it always struck him as ironic. Wizards in the past were charlatans. All of them. We spent centuries fighting superstition, applying science, democracy, and reason, coming to terms with objective reality … and subjectivity gets to win, after all! Mystics and fantasy fans only had their arrow of time turned around. Now is the era when charms and mojo-invocations work, wielding servant devices hidden in the walls.
As if responding to Ika’s shouted spell, the hallway seemed to dim around Gerald. The gentle curve of the gravity wheel tr
ansformed into a hilly slope, as smooth metal assumed the textures of rough-hewn stone. Plastifoam doorways seemed more like recessed hollows in the trunks of giant trees.
All very nice, Gerald admitted. Evocative. Even artistic. It helped one to imagine how the Pleistocene environment must have felt rich in mystery, wonder, and terror to his own ancestors, and those of Ika. Only with a crucial difference, Homo sapiens tended to respond in a way that was unique in all of nature—by trying to understand and manipulate the world. Well … some humans did that.
Neanderthals, apparently, had a different approach.
But what am I supposed to be looking at?
He felt a twinge. A sense of chiding that came from Ika without words.
No, not looking-at. The whole idea was not-looking. And not-at.
With another sigh, Gerald called up his blind-spot program. It had been all the rage a decade or so ago, when Neanders first appeared in real numbers, enriching the diversity of Earth civilization. All mammalian eyes had a flaw—a small patch where nerve bundles pass through the back of the retina, leaving an off-center area of blankness where images couldn’t register. People generally ignored their blind spots, which lay some distance from the fovea, where the lens sent images you really cared about. And the eye kept jittering, glancing to and fro, giving the brain enough data to splice over the blind spot, so most people never even noticed it. One had to practice—or use computerized assistance—to find it, in fact.
Gerald closed one eye. And with ai-help, he relaxed the other one into looking away from the part of the hallway where Ika hurled her spell. The whole region dimmed further …
… and at last he was able to not-see the region … off below and to the side of the direction his eye was aimed. It took some effort not to look that way. The merest flick-glance of his eye would do that and his every instinct wanted to. But Gerald managed to relax.
And not-look.
Cobblies. It was tempting to dismiss them as purely mythical, since cobblies had no real effects—nothing that a prim Homo sapiens could measure—in the real world. Yet, the deepest auties and many Neanders swore that they were worth not-noticing!
Another word for them was antigonites, after a poem by Hughes Mearns:
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away …
Gerald sensed something. Vaguely like a shadow. Only more so. And less.
He also knew how easily the imagination could be teased. All four species of humanity—even the silicon variety—tended to fret over the unseen or barely seen, filling in the blanks, envisaging danger, dread mysteries, or hints of great consequence.
Hard-won scientific habits pushed back, urging him to dismiss dark, unsupported suspicions.
Both science and eastern mystics preach that the observer should dispense with ego, in order to eff the ineffable. Funny, I never thought of that before—a Buddhist and a physicist differ over so many things, but they share that core prescription. Resist your sense of self-importance. Only then … why did shamans and magicians and hucksters in every culture praise the power of personal will?
Why the extremes? Is humanity hopelessly bipolar?
Gerald abruptly realized what seemed familiar. The sensation felt like long ago times, when he used to shave, scraping a sharp metal blade across his throat. You did it absently, not-thinking about your reflection, almost as if the mirror itself were a blind spot.
What are you saying? He questioned his unconscious. That this nonthing is like a mirror? That it’s all about me, yet again?
The blankness-shadow quivered. And now, Gerald felt reminded of that fateful day in the teleoperation bubble, near the old space station, with only a little monkey for company, when he whirled his twenty-kilometer lariat to capture a little piece of destiny. It had also felt a bit like this, when he piloted the grabber-camera closer to the crystal that would become known as the Havana Artifact, and then the First Artifact, and finally just Fomite Number One. An object whose boundaries were uncertain. Its inner depths as cold and dark as interstellar space.
Of course, everything he was experiencing right now could just be his imagination. The perpetual problem with magic. Still … to be polite … he posed a question in his mind.
I’m not done?
There is more expected of me?
THE LONELY SKY
Lurker Challenge Number Three
If you’ve monitored our TV, radio—and now our Internet—and the reason you haven’t answered is that you are waiting for us to pass some milestone of development … well then, how about a hint?
Pretty please?
* * *
If that milestone is for us to assertively ask for membership in some society of advanced sapient beings, please take this paragraph as that asserted step, taken by one subgroup of humanity, hoping to serve the interests of all our planet.
We are asking. Right now.
Please give us the application forms … and all information (including costs, benefits, and dissenting opinions) that we may need in order to make a well-informed decision.
73.
LURKERS
How much does she realize yet, our little biological wonder?
I can eavesdrop on the conversations with her cybernetic partner. I tap into the data she sends back to her toy ship and listen to her taunting broadcasts. But I cannot probe her mind.
I wonder how much of the picture she sees.
She has only a fraction of the brainpower of Greeter or Awaiter, let alone myself, and a minuscule portion of our knowledge. How weird that sophisticated thought can take place in a tiny container of nearly randomly firing lipid cells, at temperatures that melt water, within a salty adenine soup. Yet, there is the mystique of a Maker in her.
Even I—two thousand generations removed from the touch of organic hands and insulated by my Purposed Resolve—even I feel it.
* * *
These little challenges that she is rebroadcasting are irksome. As they were when they were first posted on Earth’s data network, ten orbits ago, or eighty of their years.
I recall, we relic-survivors had a crisis, back then. Several of our remnant-members saw Challenge Number Three as satisfying their programmed contact criteria! They wanted to respond right away. Messenger and Inviter had to be purged, to prevent them from shouting “welcome!”
Even so, there was further argument over what to do about some other challenges. Humans were affecting us, before they ventured beyond their moon.
Then came—as I knew it would—their crisis with the crystals. Perhaps the disease would consume them, as happened to so many other promising races, ever since this plague first spread across the galaxy.
Indeed, when the crystals started showing up, didn’t they also drive insanity among us, the older, mechanical probes? Especially when some of us decided to team up with certain varieties of newly arrived crystal viruses—our ability to move and use weapons was perverted to help and protect some types …
… which helped to trigger our final war. The last of many.
Now Tor Povlov is stirring those old ashes. Rousing sparks of ancient flame as she and her partner uncover the remnants of a Seeder probe.
THE LONELY SKY
Lurker Challenge Number Three and a Half
This one is a variant on number three. What if you are talking at us and we don’t understand?
Looking at other species in our own backyard—we see a lot of communication taking place, and none of it via electromagnetic waves or TCP/IP packets. The ants, bees, cephalopods, dolphins, dogs … they use things like scent trails and dances, body gestures and sonar, antenna waggings and changes in body color. And most living things, from bacteria to fungi to termites to bamboo—all the way to cells in our bodies—compete or collaborate with neighbors via chemicals.
Is it simplistic to think some distant consciousness would arise able to
watch I Love Lucy? Even if they use encoded electromagnetics, will they decrypt coherent signals encoded in binary? What would your son or daughter make of an analog video tape encoded in PAL or SECAM?
What if we’re being bombarded now by bent-quantum messages? Shouted at by civilizations saying “What’s wrong with you guys, are you deaf? Watch out for that Comet/Bomb/Virus/whatever!” Trying so hard to get our attention, putting spots on our sun, sending up giant flares. Or etched the Moon’s surface and gone to the trouble of keeping one face toward us, but we’re too dumb to grasp the simple language of craters.
Oh, but then, isn’t it the job of the more advanced culture to solve communications goofs? Anyway, if this is the right scenario, you can’t read or understand what I say now. So never mind.
74.
A CAUSE LONG LOST
Tor always felt a sneaking sympathy for despised underdogs. Like grave robbers—an underappreciated profession, not unrelated to journalism. Both involved bringing the hidden to light.
Those olden-time thieves who pillaged kingly tombs were recyclers who put wealth back into circulation. Gold and silver had better uses—like stimulating commerce—than lying buried in some musty superstition vault. Or take archaeologists, unveiling the work of ancient artisans—craftsmen who were far more admirable examples of humanity than the monarchs who employed them.
Tor hadn’t come to the asteroid belt in search of precious metals or museum specimens. But I’m still part of that grand tradition, she thought while supervising a swarm of drones, cutting, dismantling, and prying up the remains of prehistoric baby starships, extracting the brain and drive units for shipment in-system, there to be studied by human civilization.
Rest in pieces, you never got to launch across the heavens. But maybe you’ll teach us how to leave the cradle.
Us? Perhaps metal-humans like Gavin would someday venture forth to discover what befell the early builder races. Unless we give in to temptation … take one of the easy paths. Like renunciation. Or turning inward. Or transforming ourselves into crystal viruses.