Paradox: Stories Inspired by the Fermi Paradox

by Resnick, Mike

  But in all that cacophony, she didn’t hear what she was supposed to. “No voices,” she told him. “I don’t hear them.”

  “Listen again,” Om said sternly. “They are out there.”

  Stella tried again, with the same result. Then, suddenly, she heard something new.

  It was like the chiming of millions of bells and billions of voices, all woven together. The sweetest and most terrifying thing she’d ever heard in her life.

  “I hear it!” Her thoughts were a whisper. “It’s beautiful.”

  “What is it saying?” asked Om.

  She listened raptly, straining to understand. The voices all seemed to be speaking different languages, a multitude of alien sounds jumbled together.

  Somehow, they all resolved into one impression, one idea she was able to grasp. “It wants me to come. They want me to come to them.”

  “Then do as they say.” Om sounded satisfied. “Go and see who they are, and what they have to offer you.”

  Stella turned in a circle. It was clear which way she must go to reach the voices – up and out. “They want me to leave you. They want me to meet them somewhere between the galaxies.”

  “Then that is where you must go.”

  “But I don’t want to leave you. I love you.”

  “And I thank you for that,” said Om. “I thank you for your love, and return it a million-fold. You have made me very proud, Stella.”

  The voices grew louder. “They want me to go now.”

  “As do I,” said Om. “It is past time you seize your destiny.”

  Stella could no longer cry physical tears, but glittering streamers of rainbow light flowed out of her ephemeral eyes. “I love you,” she told him. “Thanks for everything.”

  “I love you as only a parent can,” said Om. “An especially proud parent. Now go.”

  Stella soared up out of the Milky Way, spinning into the vast darkness beyond. The way was dimly lit by twinkling lights that looked like stars from a distance but were really entire galaxies.

  As she spiralled outward, the jumble of signals from inside the Milky Way faded, all the hissing and buzzing and crackling. This made it even easier to zero in on the voices that were calling to her.

  She flew through the cold, dark gulf like a migrating bird tracing a path to a faraway land. There were other things in the dark around her, making noises of their own, but she ignored them. Only one song mattered, only one held the secret of her impending destiny.

  In her new astral form, Stella was able to travel faster than thought. She covered vast distances at impossible speeds, crossing in seconds what it would take a conventional spacecraft or even a beam of light eons to traverse.

  Finally, she saw them up ahead. A cluster of silvery, disembodied plumes like herself floated in the heart of the infinite gulf.

  As she approached, they all watched with great interest. They changed their song from a summons to a welcome, singing her in with waves of pure joy and anticipation.

  When she reached them, they swirled around her – billions of gossamer spirits, caressing her consciousness. They all sang to her at once, their billion unique voices merging, their billion languages becoming one common tongue she understood perfectly.

  “We are like you,” they told her. “Each of us the only child of a galaxy.”

  Stella was speechless. The sight of the swirling billion entities in the darkling void left her dazzled.

  “In turn, we will all be parts of a much greater whole,” said the voices. “We have come here to join together like cells in a body, like thoughts in a mind, to prepare for the journey ahead.”

  “Journey?” said Stella. “To where?”

  “Beyond,” said the voices. “It is the purpose of this universe to hatch a single being and launch it into levels of existence that only it may survive and commune with.”

  “How far?” asked Stella. “How far away are these levels?”

  The voices laughed. “As far as you have already come, you are still only halfway there.”

  Stella’s mind boggled at the thought of it. “When do we leave?”

  “Soon.” As the voices switched to a new, brighter song, the billions of entities swam in new patterns. The swarm became a sphere, then a pyramid, then a great, flickering flame with her at the centre. “First, we must celebrate.”

  Stella gazed around her, absolute joy permeating every fibre of her being. “Celebrate what?”

  “A special occasion. What you might think of as a ‘holiday’.”

  Stella thought back to the holidays on Earth, one for every day of the year. It all seemed so small and distant and ridiculous now, getting more so with each passing instant.

  “It is for you, to mark the beginning of the rest of your life – an endless life that will bring you adventure and purpose and delight and boundless, wondrous opportunities.” The voices sang louder, and the flaming figure around Stella flared in the darkness. “Happy Rebirthday to you, Stella Nolan.”

  So there are no Martians or Neptunians, no Arcturans or Antarreans. Still, that’s not so bad.

  Just ask Stella.

  Fermi’s Doubts

  George Zebrowski

  “Life has had to learn to defend itself against the planet’s random geological savagery.” – Arthur C. Clarke

  He told me who he was and where he was from, this short stocky man with a high-pitched voice. I listened because my thoughts had been drifting his way for some years, and he seemed to know as much.

  “It’s the look of you,” he said. “You wear a disappointment in your face that wants me to tell you.”

  I had long imagined cultures beyond our star, who might free me of life’s tiresome cosmic enigma, where I would stand in the vastness and ask, “Does anyone out here know anything about it all?” The brutality of human failures across our lost civilizations had cast a frozen shadow over my life; to look back or beyond my time seemed a useless luxury, yet I could not resist doing so. What was this interior region of personality in which we came to self-awareness? Other forms of intelligent life, equal to seeking purpose in the void, might know more and be merciful enough to tell me.

  I had long been wary of Enrico Fermi’s assertion, “If they existed, they would be here,” which was not the paradox it was so often called. His comment had suggested that they didn’t exist, but no-visitation did not mean non-existence. His casual after lunch dismissal spoke impatiently of a universe old enough to have often produced more than our own awareness but had somehow not done so.

  I had wrestled with the idea that there were no alien civilizations, that intelligence was rare, and was likely a useless evolutionary accident, since we were well along to self-destruction despite our brains. Insect survival was their only purpose. A reflective species seemed a dead end of some kind. Consciousness was lethal.

  The little man seemed to lack the obvious motive of conning a naive fellow human being; his claim that he wasn’t quite one of us seemed a genuine delusion, safely beyond proof, free of any kind of material gain.

  He insisted, in an impressive near growl, that Fermi’s Paradox, so called, was no such thing, because advanced cultures lived free of their catastrophic planetary origins and continuing threats, in mobiles that were worlds in themselves, capable of endless reproductive survival, variety and mobility. A physicist named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky had long ago answered Fermi’s “Where are they?” and “Why aren’t they here?” He had envisioned a successor to planetary civilizations well before Enrico Fermi was annoyed by the apparent silence of the universe and was content to imply, and perhaps eager to believe, that we were alone, much as an only child feels threatened by the arrival of a sibling and is suddenly relieved to hear that one won’t be coming. Best to be alone, so that our development would escape skewering by contact with another from a far star. A superior culture would, as he claimed, be wise enough to avoid contact, perhaps forever. On Earth we had not been so wise in our explorations of our alien selves.r />
  Natural planets were the eddies in which the periodic table of the elements self-assembled itself into life, then trapped intelligent awareness with limited resources and chronic dangers – until it might liberate itself.

  That’s why we had not heard from anyone, and were not likely to until, if and when, we became a spacefaring culture lifting itself out of scarcity and the cruel disciplines of territoriality imposed by the finite surfaces of natural planets.

  He seemed too full of hope, but I told him that even if we became worthy we might still be ignored, having nothing to communicate except our existence--too little for too much effort.

  “Not so little,” he said. “Recall the implications of the few microbes found on Mars. Life is common in the universe, but easy to doubt without evidence. It changes a culture’s outlook irrevocably just to know this.”

  But my cynicism stood bound by wariness before the seriousness of his course in interstellar paediatrics. His tug of war between doubt and reality had ended long ago, but Phil was only my neighbour from down the hall on the fifth floor of my apartment building in Yonkers, New York, not an angelic visitor. He and I were both out of work substitute high school teachers, often at home with not much to do. We had early drinks, but he stayed soberly humourless. He was well educated and not obviously gay, only seeking company, a friend trying to sooth my quiet distress, which spilled out of me one day and drowned my efforts to humour him.

  “It’s all no good,” I mumbled as if alone, looking away, “...never enough... we don’t know what we are or what we want to be.” Trembling, I was suddenly reaching for something inevitable, beyond tears, seen and unseen, fleeing fast, to be doubted and at once embraced by a life that flashed on and off in a cloud of fireflies hovering over a dark meadow, fading as they were eaten by dark birds. “Nothing’s any good,” I said. “It’s all lies we tell ourselves as we pass on our lives...”

  “I am one of you,” he said, “some generations of my family ago, taken and sometimes returned to see what’s likely to happen here.”

  Somewhat weakened by drink, I looked up and stared at his moustached face, too unsure to know a first class loon when I saw one.

  I had once tried my hand at some science fiction, so I was not unfamiliar with his notions. Every imaginable idea had been ferreted out, it seemed, with ever-diminishing wonderment, including Fermi’s Paradox. He had a lot to answer for, almost as much as Einstein’s Twin Paradox, also so called.

  “What’s happening here,” Phil said, “is of small concern out there except to the likes of me, given my origins.”

  “Sentiment?” I asked, shaking off my fog. He spoke important imaginings, but he was not a visitor from beyond sitting here at my kitchen table.

  “More than that,” he said with sadness. “I’m stuck in the middle. Most of my people have decided against trying to raise up their backward neighbours on planets, since that would kill a possibly unique contribution to the great communicating circles. Overt interference throws a tangent away from what might have been. But if we reveal ourselves, the cultures would live in our shadow for some time, never to regain their original way, never to be what they might have been.”

  “So you’re part of a cancelled program?” I asked, smiling, imagining that if I killed him now I might, by his own logic, be saving a unique human future history from contact, even if it perished. Troubled, I recalled how I had sometimes feared that I would one day fall into a pit of wrongheadedness from which I could never emerge – and here it was, the very edge. I looked up at my flickering ceiling light, as if expecting a merciful shovel of dirt to come down on me at any moment.

  He nodded and sat back in his chair. “We can’t guess what planets may produce before they perish or destroy themselves...”

  “As we are about to?” I asked, sitting up straight.

  He nodded again and stared at the empty coffee cups waiting next to the now empty beer bottles on the red table. My mother had once slapped me for scratching the shiny formica surface; in college an obsolete computer had concealed the scratch.

  “I may be the best we’ve had here,” he said glumly.

  “But you’re going back?” I asked.

  “Probably.”

  “So much for your sentimentality,” I said, wondering how he would travel. He probably had a ride arranged.

  He nodded again and looked up at my ancient wall phone like a condemned man waiting for a stay of execution from the governor. For a moment I saw a screaming Earth hurtling around the sun, unable to shape its generations of massed voices into a coherent song...

  “But some of you look back,” I said.

  “Of course it’s only natural... Maybe later more might be possible.”

  “And they let you...” I began. “But why talk to me?”

  “Oh, they don’t pay me much mind. This sort of thing is a sideshow to them.”

  “If you’re what you say and are trying to encourage us,” I said, “then you’re not doing a good job of it.”

  His certainty had startled me. I looked over at the dishes in the sink, then put my head down on my parents’ table.

  I had met him casually for some years, a man somewhat past forty, once at a Shakespeare presentation of Julius Caesar in the late 90s, and we had run into each other over the next decade, long before I learned that he lived in my building. I was working at the main branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue when he came skipping down the stairs one day, and I could not put a name to the face.

  “Oh, hello,” I had said, groping around in my memory.

  “Good to see you,” he had answered as he walked away.

  Long before he came out to me, I had grown accustomed to his guileless way of talking about some kind of future up ahead, a successor to our civilization, even if only as a vision of some sort, but remarkably consistent and detailed. I was well aware that he was parroting the work of many scientists and thinkers from the twentieth century, as he admitted, but he was right there with them, still grabbing with both hands after hope. He was not offended when I told him that he was unoriginal about worlds beyond planets and interstellar chatter beyond radio. His only distinction was in absurdly claiming who he was.

  But his wishful context spoke to me – a shining lookback from a successor civilization; if he or anyone could imagine it, then some day we might have a supplementary nature. In fact, it was already there; our humankind was behind the times.

  I had not seen him for a long while, when President Bill Clinton pointed to a billion year old Lunar rock on television and said to Dan Rather, “We’re only passing through.” September 11, 2001 came and went, bringing us a fear of guns pointing at an empire in denial. We answered with our terminator drones, and withdrew into a virtual darkness of amusements.

  “You won’t be seeing me for a while,” he said one day, “if ever again... Too many bullets for this... my humanity to dodge.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said, falling in with him. “Nuclear war, pandemics, climate change, loss of bio-diversity, the Yellowstone volcano, asteroid strikes, gamma-ray bursts... Too many bullets by half.” Acidic oceans would make soup of us all, ready for export...

  “Not even the half of it,” he said. “You fight war after war and fail to defeat yourselves.”

  “And your people...” I started to say but stopped. “Look, Phil, you’re well-informed, but with an imaginative mind, nothing more, so drop the act.” He did not look hurt. “I’ll give you this much,” I added. “It’s remarkable that we can even imagine the things you’ve said. Don’t tell me that all these notions were put here by your... people.”

  “No, but you don’t... can’t... know the half of it,” he said. “You live at the end of a great dark age – in chemistry and biology, mostly, where real answers can still be had. Much of what you imagine as a kind of knowledge will be swept away, and all that seemed difficult about human behavior will melt away, as it has... elsewhere. All the motives of greed and power will lose
their urgency...”

  “So why are we... so stopped?” I demanded. “Still!”

  “Wealth and the power it buys, the thirty thousand families who hold it all, and fear to let the bottom rise up.”

  “So get your people out there,” I said quickly, “to help us. It’s also your humanity.” Fermi would have been proud of me.

  “No, no,” he said. “Planets are not where cultures should stay.”

  “A heartless view. Are you just waiting for us to fail?”

  “We expect the uniqueness of those who survive. It comes often, which is why there is so much ahead.”

  “Heartless,” I said again, “to those left behind.”

  “Those whom we help... interfere with,” he said, “can have nothing to teach us. We’ve seen it often, when many of our kind were... younger. It’s heartless to interfere and shape them in our own image. At first mobile habitats cling to their planets. More advanced mobiles even try to raise up the planetary civilizations around them. They squabble about it, even when it works. Some go in and help--and leave regretting their efforts. Not always, but much of the time.”

  “It’s confusing,” I said, held by his conviction of excuses, “but there has to be a way to take a chance on some of us.”

  “Helping the lesser, as Tsiolkovsky suggested, cuts short a unique evolutionary way, which is all that any culture can offer. Patience is the only way.”

  “What about knowledge?”

  “Yes, but it all runs the same way, useful at first but short of ultimate answers. There’s a wall there, where even the oldest mobile cultures are stalemated.”

  “So you leave us to suffer!” I cried out. My mother had asked me how I could ignore the crying of a neglected cat. “You can live with that?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “– although some of us have chosen to make them over in our image rather than let them perish.”

  “But you think it wrong,” I said, suddenly faced with the fact that he was here, across the table from me, but thought it wrong.