The Listeners

by James Gunn

  “Now the time has come to turn the occasion over to the computer. Its presentation will consist of vocal communication and holographic displays. It will begin with a short history of the Project. When or if a signal is received either on our own antennae or on those of the Big Net orbiting Earth, with which it is in continual communication, the presentation will be interrupted....”

  An estimated two billion persons were gathered around their holovision sets today or tonight— since they circled the earth it is impossible to be specific—to watch the opening ceremonies of the day of the reply being broadcast from arecibo. Another two billion were trying to get to a holovision set....

  O be prepared, my soul!

  To read the inconceivable, to scan

  The million forms of God those stars unroll

  When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

  Alice Meynell, 1913 ...

  half the entering class at stanford medical school chose the new, abbreviated ten-year curriculum.

  the bureau of population today announced a two per cent increase in the world birthrate over the same period last year.

  the office of environment said today that five cases of industrial and three cases of individual pollution had been reported by citizens in the past week. only ten cases in all were reported during all of last year....

  Oh Capella, oh Capella,

  We have heard your voices tell us,

  Over spaces interstellar

  That we are not alone.

  Brotherhood—this you have for us;

  We would like to join the chorus,

  But we must sing alone.

  For you the words, for us the song,

  But distances are much too long.

  A cappella, a cappella....

  If both races could be warned, though, and each knew that the other did not want to fight, and if they could communicate with each other but not locate each other until some grounds for mutual trust could be reached—

  "Swap ships!” roared the skipper, “Swap ships and go on home! ..."

  Murray Leinster, 1945...

  In its recounting of the Project's history, with pictures, still and moving, within the holographic square that formed itself beside MacDonald, the computer had reached the dramatic moment when the radio telescope in orbit around the Earth, called the Big Net, had recorded a tape which, with others, had routinely been sent to the Project and a man named Saunders had begun the long process of deciphering that revealed the Voices, when the computer paused briefly and then said in the same matter-of-fact voice, “I am receiving new signals from Capella.”

  The audience stirred and sat up; all over the world men and women and children drew closer to their sets. In the audience a man fainted and a woman began to weep.

  “The signals I am receiving from Capella,” the computer said, “are similar to those I have been receiving continuously over the past ninety years, but there is a significant difference. The signal is being repeated now for possible interference or signal loss. Now other signals are coming in one after the other.”

  The audience leaned forward.

  “I now can display the new message,” the computer said.

  In black and white spaces within the holographic square, the message took shape:

  “Messages are being received too rapidly,” the computer said, “for all to be displayed at this time. I will select a few for your consideration.”

  The first message was replaced by others flashed in the square at intervals of about ten seconds each.

  “These messages seemed to be building a vocabulary of words and numbers and operators,” the computer said. And a few seconds later it said, “Yes. I now can state within acceptable limits of accuracy that the messages are transmitting a vocabulary. At the present rate of reception, a reasonably complete dictionary and perhaps a grammar as well will be available within twenty-four hours. Yes,” the computer continued, “symbols are being substituted for pictures which no longer are adequate for the complex messages to come. As soon as the dictionary is complete, I anticipate that the pictures will cease and the messages will arrive entirely in symbols and other abstractions which will raise the level of communication to that of history, novel, and mathematical equation.

  “Yes,” the computer said, “I now am receiving certain simple messages in symbol alone.”

  In the part of the audience around the Siberian premier, people were turning to each other, discussing something in loud whispers, and in a circle around the group others were frowning at the disturbance. The Siberian premier stood up again, although some of his scientific delegation were pulling at his robe. The Siberian group was more cohesive than most, since Siberia had come late to nationalism.

  “Mr. MacDonald,” the premier said, “some concern has been expressed near me that the input of information is proceeding at such a rapid rate that the computer will not be able to handle it.”

  “No danger,” MacDonald said.

  “What I am saying, Mr. MacDonald,” the premier said, pulling his robe hem impatiently out of the hands that sought to consult with him, “is that there may be unsuspected dangers involved in letting this reception continue.”

  “I assure you,” MacDonald said, “there are no dangers.”

  “Your assurance is not enough,” the premier said. “Since our words are being overheard and recorded by this computer, I had not wished to speak frankly, hoping that as men of diplomacy we might understand each other without telling everything, but now I must speak without tact. The Capellans are technologically advanced and desperate; that combination may threaten a takeover of your computer and all the power that it controls. A race like this must be the master of the computer, and who know what other capabilities of communication and transportation those creatures may have. I ask you to take the precautions of a reasonable man and turn off your machine now while we evaluate the situation.”

  A Siberian scientist stood up beside his premier and said, “I apologize for our leader. It is clear that he understands neither the nature of the computer nor that of the messages that have been received.”

  The level of background noise in the auditorium had climbed to the point where it was difficult to hear. MacDonald held up his hand. “Nevertheless, his apprehensions are natural and may be shared by others in the audience. We cannot entirely eliminate the possibility of an alien program superseding our instructions—but from forty-five light-years away without any prior knowledge of our computer, how it operates, how it is programmed, without the possibility of feedback?—the probabilities are infinitesimally small. And to what purpose?”

  “Moreover,” MacDonald said, “we have nothing to fear from the Capellans. That is obvious from the Reply we have just received. Put the Reply on again!”

  The Reply again was displayed within the holographic square.

  “And the original Message from Capella,” MacDonald said, “—the one we received ninety years ago—place that beside the Reply.”

  The two were displayed side by side:

  a world is waiting for an explanation of the reply received from capella only a few minutes ago. director macdonald is expected to reveal at any moment the significance of the two messages. premonitions have swept the circumference of the earth. some

  analysts already are pointing out the curiously empty appearance of the reply.

  the worldwide audience is estimated to have reached three billion....

  Somewhere in the sands of the desert

  A shape with a lion body and the head of a man,

  A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

  Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

  Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

  The darkness drops again; but now I know

  That twenty centuries of stony sleep

  Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

  Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
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  William Butler Yeats, 1921

  I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. ...

  Isaac Newton, early eighteenth century...

  One evening as darkness grew, and the things that sometimes howled at the Moon were howling again, Fander offered his tentacle-tip for the hundredth time. Always the gesture had been unmistakable even if its motive was not clear, yet always it had been rebuked. But now, now, five fingers curled around it in shy desire to please.

  With a fervent prayer that human nerves would function just like Martian ones, Fander poured his thoughts, swiftly, lest the warm grip be loosened too soon.

  "Do not fear me. I cannot help my shape any more than you can help yours. I am your friend, your father, your mother. I need you as much as you need me." ...

  Eric Frank Russell, 1950...

  “You will note,” MacDonald said, “that some parts of the messages are identical and some are different. The most important difference is that the central figure is missing in the Reply. Next most important is the altered symbol for the sun in the upper right-hand corner; it now is the same as the one in the lower left-hand corner, and the symbols that describe them now are identical—”

  A black astronomer stood up in the front row. “But that is impossible,” he said quietly. “The suns could not have gone nova. We would have had visual evidence by now, and the appearances of Capella have remained unchanged.”

  “It means,” MacDonald said, “that we made an incorrect assumption ninety years ago when we thought the Message said that the suns were going nova. It has troubled us all for a long time, and some of us have even speculated about the possibility that seems confirmed now: what the Message said about the suns referred to the moment in time when the large Capella suns consumed almost all of the hydrogen in their cores and moved off the main sequence. Their cores began to contract; their surface layers expanded; and they became red giants with greatly increased temperature and luminosity. That is the change in the size and heat release of their suns that the original Message described.”

  “And when did this happen?” the Siberian premier demanded.

  “Sometime between the recent and the distant past,” MacDonald said. “It could have been a thousand years ago—or some millions of years.”

  The audience rippled with the implications of MacDonald's statements, but the Siberian premier stood unmoved. “And what of the Capellans?”

  “Please look again at the messages,” MacDonald said. “Notice that the Reply has eliminated all the so-called words or symbols along the left-hand side—all except one, and that one is the word for Capellan, and it is preceded by what I now judge to be the Capellan symbol for negation.”

  “Negation?” the premier asked.

  “The Capellans,” MacDonald said wearily, “are dead, gone, cremated. Even the symbols for their planets bear testimony to their fate. The superjovian is somewhat reduced in size from the expansion and heat of the near sun, which now is perhaps ten times its former size and the smaller satellites of the superjovian all have been consumed except for one Earth-size planet—which we have taken in the past to be the home planet of the Capellans—and it apparently has lost considerable mass, perhaps by the boiling away of its oceans and atmosphere and perhaps by internal explosions.”

  “We have been communicating with a race long dead,” the premier said.

  “Apparently,” MacDonald said, “they set up automated self-repairing equipment to pick up evidence of possible future civilizations and send a message to them. If the equipment received any response, indicating that a technological civilization was listening for messages from other worlds, they would begin sending—”

  “What?” the premier asked. “What is the point of all this if they are dead?”

  “I have a message,” the computer said. “It has been sent in the simple vocabulary developed so far, and there are some uncertainties in the exact meaning of certain words and phrases, but the message, with alternative readings, follows. I will present it visually for greater comprehensibility.”

  People/

  civilized beings/

  intelligent creatures/

  brothers/

  to whom it may concern

  Greetings from the people of Capella/

  the first satellite of God

  Who are dead/

  gone/

  destroyed

  We lived

  We worked

  We built

  And we are gone. Accept this, our legacy/

  remains

  And our good wishes/

  kinship/

  admiration/

  brotherhood/

  love.

  “The Capellans are dead,” MacDonald said.

  “And the Project?” the premier said. “Your job is done.”

  “In a sense,” MacDonald said. “Now the work of the world begins. The messages the computer is receiving, storing, analyzing, interpreting contain the entire record of a civilization alien to almost everything we know except intelligence and emotion, a civilization considerably advanced beyond ours—not only its history but, if my assumptions are correct, its philosophies, culture, art, science, technology, theology, literature.

  “We have received a legacy more valuable than the physical possession of another world, with all its natural treasures, and the world's scientists and scholars and everyone else who wishes to explore it may spend their lifetimes studying it, interpreting it, and adding bits and pieces of it to our civilization, enriching us by a whole new world and everything it was.

  “As for the Project itself, our search has lasted for less than a century and a half, and we have come up with one major find. Who knows what civilizations, what strange and wonderful people, we may discover somewhere between here and the edges of the universe?”

  The room was silent. The world paused and then resumed what it was doing.

  And somewhere, among the magnetic spots and fluxes, among the miniature relays, among the fugitive flows of electrons, a connection occurred, a memory stirred:

  “...and the silence surged softly backward...."

  It was like the vagrant thought of the shadow that may have been sitting in either corner or of the thousands of men and women who had passed through the Project or lingered in its corridors and rooms for years, who remained in some form within the computer itself....

  The transmission from Capella would continue for days or weeks or months, but eventually the last of the inheritance from another star would be handed over, the messages would cease, and the silence would surge softly backward....

  And the radio telescope shaped like an ear of Earth held up on an arm to listen to the secrets of the universe, and the radio telescope shaped like a bowl to catch the stardust, would come alive and begin a new search of the heavens for a message from the stars.

  By that time the computer would be least half Capellan. No one but the computer would realize this for half a century and by then the Project would pick up a message from the Crab Nebula....

  Translations

  Chapter 1

  Pues no es posible...

  The bow cannot always stand bent, nor can human frailty subsist without some lawful recreation.

  Cervantes, Don Quixote

  Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,...

  Now I have studied philosophy,

  Medicine and the law,

  And, unfortunately, theology,

  Wearily sweating, yet I stand now,

  Poor fool, no wiser than I was before;

  I am called Master, even Doctor,

  And for these last ten years have drawn

  My students, by the nose, up, down,

  Crosswise and crooked. Now I see

  That we can know nothing finally.

 
Goethe, Faust, opening lines

  Men che dramma...

  Less than a drop

  Of blood remains in me that does not tremble;

  I recognize the signals of the ancient flame.

  Dante, The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio

  C'est de quoy j'ay le plus de peur que la peur.

  The thing of which I have most fear is fear.

  Montaigne, Essays

  A la trés-bonne, à la très-belle, qui fait ma joie et ma santé.

  To the best, to the most beautiful, who is my joy and my well-being.

  Baudelaire, Les Epaves

  Rast ich, so rost ich.

  When I rest, I rust.

  German proverb

  Nunc est bibendum!

  Now's the time for drinking!

  Horace, Odes, Book I

  Wer immer strebens sich bemüht,...

  Who strives always to the utmost,

  Him can we save.

  Goethe, Faust, Part I

  Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint.

  I am the spirit that always denies.

  Goethe, Faust, Part I

  Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita...

  In the middle of the journey of our life

  I came to myself in a dark wood,

  Where the straight way was lost.

  Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, opening lines

  E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.