“It never occurred to me.” I showed her my watch. “I use this instead.”
Cora made a face. “It’s not the same thing.”
I chuckled. “If you ever take a philosophy class in college, you’re going to make the professor cry.”
My brilliant daughter frowned. “If she gives me a C, I’ll cry.” Pause. “Or he.”
“I doubt you’ll do much crying over grades by then.” A breeze came across the water at us and I motioned for her to put on her sweater. She obeyed but left it unbuttoned.
“Tell me something,” she said; not a conversation opener but a request for information, any kind of information, as long as she’d never heard it before. This was something she had come up with on her own, although I wasn’t sure how. I had the vague notion it had grown out of watching her cousins play endless rounds of Jeopardy and Trivial Pursuit. At the time, she’d still been in diapers, not even talking, but the kids swore she was paying attention. They were all big game-players, her cousins – board games, card games, and inevitably videogames; not so my brilliant daughter, not to the same extent. I once referred to this thing we shared as the Tell-Me-Something Game and was quite pointedly corrected.
Now I said. “My Aunt Loretta told me once, when we were walking here, that the last time the galaxy had revolved to this point in space, the dinosaurs were just starting to emerge on Earth. That’s how long it takes the galaxy to make one complete revolution.”
“How about now?” Cora asked. “What was happening?”
“We haven’t moved enough since then for there to be any difference. Dinosaurs were still emerging. The times and distances involved are far beyond human experience.”
“Oh. We move with the galaxy?”
“We do.”
“I thought you meant that the galaxy passed by, like when you stand and watch a merry-go-round.”
“That couldn’t happen, honey.”
I could practically hear the little wheels and gears work as she stuck a pin in that statement for later. “Okay, so how many years is it since the dinosaurs started to appear?”
“About 225 million.” I smiled. “Have I told you something?”
She smiled back at me. “Yeah. It’s a good one, too.”
“I’m glad you like it.”
“How old were you when your Aunt Loretta told you that?”
“I’m not sure. Nine or ten, maybe.”
I could feel her satisfaction at being younger than I’d been. Not a game, my ass, I thought, amused. I expected her to ask me something else about Loretta but she surprised me. “Tell me something.”
“Again? All right. According to fossil evidence, Homo sapiens – people like us – appeared about 200,000 years ago.”
My brilliant daughter frowned. “Wait, I thought – how many years for the dinosaurs?”
“225 million. People were only 200,000.” I watched her sorting the two numbers in her mind.
“I thought people were around for millions of years.”
“Human ancestors – Homo sapiens’ ancestors. Homo erectus, Homo habilis. And before that, Australopithecus. Do you remember the program we watched about Lucy?”
She nodded but her frown intensified. “It’s not fair.”
“What isn’t?”
“That we don’t last longer. We never get to see what happens. Like, if you and I were born in the Stone Age? When we died, it would have still been the Stone Age. We’d never know about Columbus discovering America or George Washington being the first president or when the men walked on the moon. Nobody gets to see what happens next. The Big Next, I mean.” She gestured at the sky. “Like stars that are so far away, it takes the light thousands of years to reach us. The light wasn’t here when we were born and when we die, it still won’t be here. The stars’ll never look any different as long as we live. It’s just not fair.”
For a moment, I thought she was actually going to stamp her foot; I wasn’t sure whether to be laugh or cry. “The unchanging stars are what allowed people to navigate before compasses were invented,” I said. “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you how just off the top of my head but if you’re curious, we can look it up when we get home.”
My brilliant daughter wrinkled her nose. “Why are we so tiny when the universe is so big? We should be gigantic so that traveling around the galaxy would be like traveling around America.”
“You’re definitely going to reduce some poor philosophy professor to a quivering, tearful wreck,” I said.
She shrugged noncommittally. We walked all the way around the lake and then I suggested ice cream. “Friendly’s, not Dairy Queen, right?” Cora said seriously. Her cousins were all fiends for soft-serve dipped in chocolate; my brilliant daughter insisted that real ice cream was scooped from tubs, not poured out in gooey ropes (unquote), and nothing and nobody would ever change her mind about that (also unquote). While I was pleased, and occasionally even in awe of her confidence, sometimes I worried that my pride and joy might have a tendency to be too inflexible. Right now the world didn’t give her much trouble about the way she thought things should be. It wouldn’t be long before the gloves came off and there wouldn’t be any make-ups or do-overs.
But then, according to my brilliant daughter, it wouldn’t be long before it was all over. And the light from the stars still wouldn’t have arrived.
I didn’t think about it again until a few days later when I found her glued to the desktop in the living room, looking at web-pages about bristle-cone pines and other long-lived trees.
“Did you know they found the oldest tree in the world?” she said without taking her eyes from the screen as I pulled a chair up beside her. “It’s in Sweden and it’s over nine thousand years old.” A moment later, her shoulders slumped. “Actually, it isn’t the tree that’s nine thousand years old, it’s the root system.”
“A nine-thousand-year-old root system is still pretty respectable, don’t you think?” I said. “Look, it says there that the roots took hold right after the end of the last Ice Age. That’s really something.”
“It’s not a tree,” Cora insisted. “In California, there’s a bristle-cone pine – a real tree – that’s five thousand years old. That’s like three thousand years before Jesus.”
“Who only lived thirty-three years but has exerted an influence that has lasted for two thousand,” I reminded her.
My little agnostic wasn’t having any. “Jesus is like a root system. The tree is there. It was a tree five thousand years ago and it’s a tree now. If that were a person, it would have seen a whole bunch of Big Nexts.”
“How long has this been on your mind?”
“Since The Day The Earth Stood Still.”
I couldn’t help laughing. We’d watched the original movie with Michael Rennie a few weeks earlier and then had a discussion about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. I’d expected my little agnostic to be equally sceptical about aliens and was surprised when she asked me, in all seriousness, what we were doing about making contact with people from other worlds. It had been a difficult conversation, even with a child as gifted as my darling daughter. Not because it was especially hard to explain the basics of radio astronomy and Goldilocks planets in sufficiently simple terms but because Cora seemed to want me to answer for what she perceived as a failure of progress.
Now she said, “If we don’t find aliens pretty soon, then by the time they come here, they won’t even find a root system.”
“Then we’d best keep the root system and everything else as healthy as possible,” I said lightly.
She tilted her head and frowned and I could practically see the little wheels turning again. A deep yearning for my aunt swept through me; I needed her guidance so much right then but she had died the year before my brilliant daughter had come along. There’d been no help for it – a root system, even a very old one, can support only so much new growth. I’d been eleven at initiation and I know kids grow up so much faster these days but seven, even a gi
fted seven, seemed too young. Still, the instincts were obviously making themselves felt, whether I thought it was time or not, whether I liked it or not.
I put my hand on the back of my brilliant daughter’s neck; the skin shifted immediately and I could tell that the organ was fully formed. This was not even slightly premature.
Cora’s face went blank for a minute and by that I mean a full sixty seconds. Colour crept into her face; a drop a sweat trickled down from her temple, travelled along the still-babyish curve of her cheek and disappeared under her chin.
Then it was done and I withdrew my hand. There was a new line on my palm, a scar that ran from the base of my middle finger to my wrist. Cora’s neck was smooth, unchanged; our kind are marked not by what we know but by what we tell. That’s just how it is.
“You know,” Cora said in a startlingly old-sounding voice, “I kinda suspected something.”
I nodded, although this wasn’t necessarily significant. All kids, at some point in their young lives, wonder about who they really are – if they’re adopted, if they’re descended from royalty, perhaps in exile, if their parents are keeping some immense secret from them. I went through a phase where I was practically convinced that Loretta was really my mother and she had given me to her sister and brother-in-law because she felt I’d be better off in a two-parent family. Not so; Loretta had been unable to bear children. I was entirely my parent’s biological offspring, theirs in every way except one.
Cora would have a million questions, just as I had, back in the day. Judging by the expression on her little face right then, I figured she was trying to decide what to ask first. I had always been honest with her, whether it had to do with where babies came from or where her father had gone. This, however, was going to be more difficult.
Nine-thousand-year-old root systems don’t have this kind of problem with their saplings. They don’t want to know why the root system’s been dug in for all this time, why they’re growing here, now, or what’s the Big Next. But that’s what happens when you put a brain in a lighthouse. Or a buoy, or a beacon. Or hell, I don’t know, a highway marker. Mile 80,771,390,434; last food & gas for 300,549,653,212 light-years, so plan ahead!
I wonder if they really had no idea the single-celled organisms they left their markers in would evolve or if they’re so long-lived they underestimated how long evolution would take. Or if something happened to the original visitors before they had a chance to tell anyone else what they’d left behind. Or if they simply lost track of time – God knows, I often do.
And then again, it’s possible that everything is exactly as they intended it to be, that we two – my brilliant daughter and me, now – are not ladies-in-waiting, as it were, but records. That when we awaken in each new embodiment and contemplate whatever we can access of the previous lives, it’s like another ring on a five-thousand-year-old bristle-cone pine. Although we are actually much older.
The first thing my brilliant daughter will ask me, I expect, is if there are any others. And I’ll have to tell her that if there ever were, there aren’t any more and I don’t know why. Perhaps for the same reason there aren’t any more dinosaurs. Those who left us here had no idea they’d be gone in only a single turn of the galaxy – no, less than that.
Cora folded her arms the way she always did when she was about to take serious issue with the world and I had a sudden, intense surge of hope that we’d be around for the Big Next of their return in this lifetime. My brilliant daughter is going to make them answer for the last five billion years and I really, really, really want to watch.
Baedeker’s Fermi
Adam Roberts
12th April 1900; a bright sunny day. Sky so flawless a blue it looked as though it had been enamelled and polished from horizon to horizon by some celestial jeweller. From Cologne to Mayence we were travelling aboard the saloon-steamer Deutscher Kaiser. The journey upstream took us twelve hours, although the guidebook assured us the return voyage downstream takes as little as seven and a half. No man may doubt the muscular implacability of the Rhenish flow here, close as it is to the North Sea. Albert and I sat on deck all morning smoking cigars and watching the green landscape slide beautifully past, green as emerald, green the ideal ocean of the fairy tales. Albert particularly admired (he said) the view of distant hills, and behind them the spectral white of faraway mountain tops. I preferred the nearby vineyards. By seven we disembarked into Mayence.
We took adjoining rooms – with, of course, a connecting door – in the Hof Von Holland, located upon the Rheinstrasse. Both rooms had fine views of the river. It was a simple matter to obtain the services of a valet-de-place for five Marks the day – one German Mark has the monetary worth of a good English shilling, so this was not cheap. But he agreed to serve the both of us for the money, and these being the early days of our Rhine odyssey, we preferred not to haggle or pinch out pennies – our pfennigs, I should say
That evening we dined well, and strolled along the gaslit Rheinpromenade as far as the Schloss. Later, Albert joined me in my room and together we consulted the Baedeker. Mayence, in German Mainz, is a strongly fortified town with 72,300 inhab. (23,000 Prot, 4000 Jews), including a garrison of 8,000 soldiers. It is pleasantly situated on the left hand of the Rhine, opposite and below the influx of the Main.
“It says,” I observed “that the Romanic-Germanic Central Museum contains the most varied and interesting collection of ante-Christian antiquities in the whole of Germany.”
“Ante-anti,” repeated Albie, chuckling. “It is too painfully clear these guides are not written by native English speakers.”
“The Library and the Collection of Coins occupy the second and third floors of the west wing, to which is appended a remarkable assembly of typographical curiosities, manuscripts and incunabula, A complete set of coinage from the court of Charlemagne is the collection’s pride.”
“I am more interested in the two valuable coins that comprise this collection,” said Albie, slipping his hand into my breeches. There then occurred the event which, naturally, modesty prevents me from detailing. Afterwards we slept. I wanted us to share the bed in my room, which was certainly ample enough for two; but Albert, wisely I suppose, considered the possibility that a chambermaid, or hotelier, or even young Hans our valet-de-place, might chance upon us together and raise the alarm. So he returned to his room.
We rose late and broke our fast in the Weiner Café on Gymanasiumstrasse. The date was the 13th April – a Friday. Sharply drawn white clouds, perfect as puffs of white, mobbed the sky. A strong spring breeze had awoken itself, making the big trees lining the strasse move with an underwater slowness. But as I drank my wine-and-water and picked the last flakes of pasty from my plate, I bethought me how very comely was the pink and white stonework of the buildings of Mayence; how courteous and handsome the natives – even the Jews, of whom there were many in their funereal black. I reminded myself of how fortunate I was to be able to enjoy so much of the world’s beauty with Albert. I was, I told myself, happy. I insisted upon it. If I insisted strongly enough, the feeling of chewing apprehension in my stomach would recede.
After breakfast we visited the Cathedral: an imposing block-shaped edifice of rose-coloured stone, with one superbly tall slate-clad spire at the northern end. Ingress was achieved via two marvellous and mighty brazen doors that opened onto the north aisle, and in silent admiration we walked the length of the building – 122 yards long, the Baedeker informed us, and supported by fifty-six hefty pillars. Albert translated some of the funerary inscriptions for my benefit, and I sketched a few of the statues into my notebook. There is a particularly well-rendered head of Saturn on an eighteenth-century monument dedicated to a certain Canon von Breidenbach-Bürresheim. The cloisters are tranquil, built in the Gothic style, and Albert and I sat side by side and smoked for an hour, as the shadows slowly swung about the great axis of the turning world. The Baedeker recommended visiting the Crypt, but by now it was lunchtime and the verger could not be f
ound to unlock the door for us.
We strolled out into the breezy sunlight, north to the Platz Gutenberg, where a fine statue commemorates Mayence’s most famous son, John Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press. We heard the start of the commotion here. It was Albert who first saw the changes in the sky. At the far end of Ludwigsstrasse a considerable crowd of people were in motion, and their shrieks and yells of terror carried cleanly to us on the clear spring air. A tram, rolling along its grooves down the street, stopped suddenly. I saw its driver scramble from the cab and abandon it.
“Clouds!” Albert yelled, suddenly – such uncharacteristic behaviour for this reserved, immaculately-mannered individual! “Clouds!” He was pointing upwards. For a moment I saw clouds, visible masses of water droplets suspended in the air according to the logic of their relative density. But then the ghastly reality struck me, a modern-day Saul on the road to a ghastly Tarsus – for water must always be heavier than mere air, and no structure of such size and evident solidity could support itself overhead. What we had thought to be clouds were not. They were something else. They were gigantic amoeboid beings, creatures of monstrous otherness. A Venus-shell of silver mist, animated by some incomprehensible will or mechanism, swooped low over Mayence’s crenulations and spired-roofs. It was a device, a machine constructed on principles quite different to steam engines or electrical capacitors; a chariot for cleaving the high sky, a throne set about with rods and lights. Weapons? And seated in its heart, wraithed about by the very device it piloted, was a creature unlike any I have seen – resembling the meat at the centre of a cockle, but the size of a bullock; orange and quivering with life. I looked about me, my heart galloping, an hideous anticipation of perdition in my whole body. Every cloud was a chariot, and in every one monsters of various sizes were enthroned – from cattle-big to whale-big. They thronged the sky. “O strange!” I howled. “Strange strange strange!” The creatures I had first seen had brought its mist-chariot down almost to touch the ground. Now it began advancing towards me over the cobbles of the square. Its tangle of nude-muscle-fibre body jittered, and weird black tentacles, like tadpole tails, sprung up upon its torso. Thorns made of flesh. Beckoning cilia. I am not ashamed to say that I hurled myself down upon the ground – that I pressed my face against the stones, and wrapped my arms about my head, whimpering.
Paradox: Stories Inspired by the Fermi Paradox Page 5