Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 54

by John Joseph Adams

  Then they removed the philosophers, all save a few whom they hobbled to their will, by means cruder, but no less efficacious. Alien peoples like yourself, modified across aeons by mere random struggle, cannot know the intense compulsion of ancestral pain.

  Contemplating their own glory, the priest kings felt entitled to have the last philosophers embellish it. The burdens of rank had to entail some privileges, particularly now that it meant becoming effectively a different species from the common people.

  • • • •

  On her deathbed, or rather floating two millimeters above it on relaxing constant jets of air, Helena kept herself alive with the momentary expectation of success; while she, or something closely resembling her, would survive actual shutdown, it would be a last indulgence to her glands to experience death from joy.

  Philip, and people like him, had made the whole decoding process more difficult than eventually proved to be necessary. They had insisted that what had proved to be an elaborate and self-replicating programme for translating a simple message into any imaginable language had to be run on a virtual computer inside another virtual computer on a computer infested with a virus that would instantly shut down anything that looked suspicious inside a sealed environment on an island isolated from all power sources save the computer’s own batteries, and from the Net.

  There was no point, she supposed, in not being careful.

  Philip was dead, and waiting for her; this much she knew with a certainty that no earlier generation had had.

  They brought the translation to her with a ceremonious hush.

  She only managed to glance at it a second before expiring, not so much in joy as in giggles. Who would have expected, of all things, a treasure map?

  • • • •

  The people prospered, after their kind; the priest kings became ever more isolated from them. Amputation of technological interest made the people chary of those still in receipt of benefits the people were no longer able to understand; their sense of caste superiority made the priest kings ever more ingrown and, progressively, inbred.

  Their undoing derived from the fact they had hobbled the last philosophers to obedience, and not to loyalty. The priest kings decided that they had not pushed far enough the attempt to become as gods. Specifically, they bred themselves for size and for intelligence; they failed, in their sense of mastery, to ask the philosophers compelled to execute this whether it was a good idea.

  The philosophers’ delicate revenge was that the mutations for intelligence bred true sufficiently after the mutations for size that the priest kings were able to realise, too late to undo it, their own folly and sin. They had doomed their descendants to progressively earlier and more humiliating deaths by slow crumbling and sclerosis.

  Most of the philosophers perished, as they had wished, in that moment of revelation and vengeance; some latter priest kings transcended their history in moments of grace—the last, the very last philosophers, plucked from their own temple—smash, scattered across the foam to dilute inherited agony with genes more common but more tranquil.

  • • • •

  A copy of Helena and a copy of Philip awakened in the memory banks of a small, toughened planetoid of metal headed towards the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. They were, an operating system brusquely told them, merely being woken for a test run, in case her intelligence, and his caution, were needed at their destination; this was, it conveyed, unlikely.

  It was, thought Helena, whose last personal memory was of death, quite absurd that they should be here.

  Philip agreed—this whole enterprise must have cost several decades worth of the entire global product and precipitated a massive recession on its completion.

  Not at all, came the smug instruction of the operating system, how do you think humanity could have been so stupid? It took a mere year’s product of the whole solar system, Oort habitats and all; the recession would have been a mere blip of a decade or two, even had the spinoff technologies not created new industries and an ethic of hard work towards shared goals which has transformed consciousness.

  How, thought Helena, are we going to get back afterwards?

  You know, said the operating system, that the message promised a variety of space drives along with everything else; we can trust that our transport home will be provided. You led the translation team in the first place, Dr. Jones; you know this.

  I fear the Greeks, thought Philip, and the gifts they offer.

  We need not fear, the operating system responded, barbarian behaviour patterns from a race civilised enough to send us the message.

  Such twenycen vulgarity as paranoid suspicion is something you might usefully keep under wraps when dealing with the human crew. Learn to suppress such instincts and you may not be useless baggage, after all, it continued, in the last instant of their awareness, before returning them to its memory.

  • • • •

  One of the very last of the giant priest kings staggered out of one of the very last of their refuges among the foam-dunes, giving birth as it went to a young and already moribund copy of itself. It scooped the dying child up and went its way, passing a young creature of the people who was musing, replete with foam, in what one might call the shade had it not been hotter than that which surrounded it, of what one might call a tree except that it moved slowly among the dunes.

  When the youth, heir to generations of secret philosophies, saw the dying tyrant with its dying child, it contemplated the burdens of the flesh and the vanity of aspiration. It moved further into speculation on whether, just as the priest kings were eventually dying out, so too would the gods in their season. All was vanity save kindness, it thought, pulling itself across to the dying pair and trying to force foam into their orifices.

  At the touch of its limbs, at the touch even of the foam, parts of parent and child sheared away in necrosis, so utter was their sickness. Soon they were nothing but flakes in the currents that bore the foam.

  Even kindness, it thought, is perhaps an expenditure of effort, which, however well intentioned, merely defers the abandonment of self. Were these real creatures to begin with—it had supposed priest kings mythological—or some temptation of the soul? Pondering thus, ever more aware of the need to abandon all effort, all pretension, all consciousness of that self which could be tempted—thinking thus, it became Instructed. This was the first Instruction.

  • • • •

  There was something to be said, Helena thought to Philip, for old twenycen bloody-mindedness, and, she thought to the operating system, for saying I told you so.

  Most of the crew of the Earth expedition had petulantly downloaded and archived themselves the moment they woke at their destination; their last instruction to the operating system had been to awaken the barbarians to cope.

  Weak moral fibre, thought Philip.

  Helena was impressed that he could still, even downloaded, manage the equivalent of that stupid insensitive officer class that she had always loved in him.

  They found themselves near a pulsating chunk of plasma surrounded by a variety of what one did not have to be humanocentric to describe as ships, as vessels of passage, as religious offerings containing pilgrims themselves offered. Save for the operating system, and mental archives they felt disinclined to waste energy in decoding merely so that the crew could suicide all over again, their minds were alone in the ship.

  The plasma beacon, needless to say, was entirely innocent of the promised treasures; it was possible some earlier visitor had collared the lot, but Helena could not see where they would have been.

  If I may make so bold, sir and madam, said the operating system.

  Philip had produced a bootleg servant attitude module from somewhere in his private files.

  Helena thought askance at him.

  I am merely ensuring that it does not put us back in its pocket, he thought.

  Helena did what she was best at. She listened, and then she set up programmes to listen for her. They
detailed the operating system to keep the hull swept clean of the scouring diamond dust of deep space and put themselves on hold.

  Presumably, somewhere in this Sargasso, other people had had the same idea; they just had to get themselves in phase was all. One hoax does not, after all, invalidate the principle of listening, and they had nothing worth using at present except time.

  • • • •

  The habits of deference with which the priest kings had commissioned in the people and latterly in the last philosophers had little to do with the triumph of the Young Philosopher’s insights. It was, it often said, descended from both, and thus the servant of all servants.

  How, one of the Young Philosopher’s paradoxes stated, can we be truly free to reject technology until we are free of the bonds technology has put on our minds to make itself alien to us?

  Some of its disciples merely treated this as subject for meditation; others did not.

  The genes of the last philosophers scattered throughout the people and incapacity for technology ceased to be a universal trait; in some of their descendants, even god-memory returned.

  The inferiority of technology to true philosophy, the scripture went on, lies in the fact that technology can be reduced to formulae, and still work if applied by those who follow the formulae faithfully but without comprehension. Philosophy, on the other hand, can only be understood by a free being experiencing its truth for itself.

  Some in subsequent generations argued that memories of the god-moment contradicted this insight, an experience not universally shared; nor comprehended, but merely apprehended.

  Other schools argued that the fact that this memory could have been engineered into the priest kings by some putative earlier caste, rather than removed by them from the common people demonstrated the absolute unreliability of all knowledge save that derived from philosophy, which honestly taught its own uselessness.

  Yet others argued that the existence of the gods was something which could, if necessary, be proved, whether by waiting or by going off to look for them. There was a difference, they argued, between the absolute knowledge of the god-moment and the knowledge of informed surmise, such as that knowledge which dealt with the existence of other worlds, yet both were susceptible of falsification.

  Tension and harsh words resulted from all this.

  One section of the ever growing body of disciples of the Young Philosopher remembered his dicta about the uselessness of kindness, and further exploration of the fragility of those with minority views might have ensued, but for the compromise instituted by the Young Philosopher’s third heir in succession.

  Since all action is useless, the Third Successor opined, let us demonstrate our contempt for it by an action of exquisitely profound uselessness. Let these atavistic heretics be encouraged, nay, aided, in their search for the gods; what could be more useless than to journey into space, and what better demonstration of our contempt for all worlds save this than to commit the supremely useless act of going there?

  Those heretics not actually persuaded by the actual argument could see the case for surfing in its wake. Indeed, they suggested further, to guarantee the lives of themselves and their descendants, that the supremely useless and exotic science of metallurgy, of which only rumours remained, be explored and recreated, so as to make the useless task particularly onerous, and lengthy.

  • • • •

  It was, by any reckoning, several thousand years before the process of lining up in simultaneous awareness various groups of aliens, present in their ships as downloaded consciousnesses on hold or in suspended animation or other technologies broadly analogous but related to entirely alien ways of living and thinking.

  For Helena and Philip, it was the blinking of an eye; Helena had done a competent job, as had at least three of her alien equivalents—a cloud of purple gas from the rings of a giant planet of Tau Ceti, a hive mind of giant otters obsessed with their race’s cognate of chess, and something which, in its natural state, resembled a continuously rebounding streak of lightning.

  Once firm contact had been made, and translation protocols established, using the Hoaxer’s memory as omnilingual, and principles of fair exchange of information set up, the operating system threw off Philip’s module and awoke, then re-uploaded, the archived sleepers.

  One of these, a tall blonde who had paid vulgarly too much attention to body-sculptors in her youth, came to turn Helena and Philip off.

  Plugging herself in, she explained that, of course, they had relied on Helena to do an adequate job; listening and translation was, after all, what she was famous, or rather, notorious, for. You got us into this, she thought, so you may as well do some of the boring bits.

  This came as no particular surprise, since one of the first subjects on which the duty watches of the fifteen hundred space ships from as many civilisations had been able to hold an extended communication had been the intolerable snobbery of later generations towards the pre-message, pre-spaceflight generation that in each and every case seemed to end up doing the dirty work for them.

  Rather than let herself be brushed off into inaction, Helena suggested that the Duty Watch be generally deputed, while the grownups swapped hightech notes and generally made the best of their already radically improved situation, to consider an interesting side light on it, the question of the identity of the Hoaxers.

  This they were allowed to do, on condition that they operated at a level slower than real-time. Children get so under foot otherwise, the more sophisticated generations moaned to each other.

  • • • •

  The memories of the Young Philosopher were, by systematic outbreeding, spread throughout the whole of the people in a few generations. Perforce, this spreading of the memory of his Instruction mated with it the hereditary convictions of the various schools, producing, by the time of his seventeenth successor in direct line, an altogether wanton eclecticism.

  That wily, pragmatic, and spontaneously benevolent being, the Third Successor, had privately reasoned, keeping his bloodline separate for as long as possible to keep the reasoning secret, that a people bred to believe all possible things at once was likely to avoid destructive intolerance. Kindness, his legacy stated, was as useless as everything else; it was, however, generally convenient. This was the Second Instruction, the Consensus.

  In the process of all of this process of dialectical synthesis through eugenics, probably without the direct connivance of the Third Successor, odd bits of racial memory already knocked thoroughly loose by previous tinkering degenerated into mere junk genetic information. Principal among these were the last memories of the beacon project.

  The urge to persuade or bludgeon others into agreement survived, perhaps in the genotype, perhaps in the culture merely, any possible further argument. The decision to go to the stars, itself now a universal characteristic, found itself reinforced by this imperative; other beings must be brought into the consensus.

  • • • •

  Helena thought to Philip, and to the otters, who were culturally capable of having the reference translated to them, please don’t throw me in the briar bush.

  The advantage of slow-time was that you could keep some sort of track of what was going on and not have to wait to be woken up; you could, for example, watch the awakened hightechs get thoroughly and effetely bored with the hard job of creating a multi-species civilisation in almost entirely empty intergalactic space and decide, after a bit, to go back to sleep until something interesting came along. An ethic of collective effort towards a shared goal has little place for obstinate persistence in make-work.

  When the last hightechs turned back in, the blonde with the cheekbones, already suicided and downloaded, speeded Helena back up to real-time.

  You won’t remember me, she thought.

  On the contrary, Helena thought, I know myself well enough after several thousand years to know that I am part of the template from which you or your cognate built your mind.

  You w
ere fashionable, that year, the semi-Helena thought, and I never got round to trading in that module.

  And now, Helena thought, you want us poor twenycen trash to take over while you lot doze off.

  We want, thought the semi-Helena, to give you a chance to do the sort of useless tinkering you seem to find reassuring as a way of whistling in the dark; it seemed a kindness.

  It’s a million-to-one chance, thought Helena, but it might just work.

  Sarcasm ill becomes you, thought the semi-Helena, archiving herself.

  I am never sarcastic, thought Helena.

  Philip had constructed a subroutine for ironic laughter, and used it; while Helena went about her business, he set himself to the construction and decanting of improved young copies of their original bodies.

  Let’s slip into something a little more comfortable, he thought, lewdly.

  • • • •

  The people eventually built their ships and wandered out into the galaxy; we endured the fearful privation of artificial foam and cramped crystals in ships built of a rickety mixture of metal and plasma and sloughed off body parts of the large beings that had lived harmless beneath the foam.

  We learned, over the centuries, the places where life might be found and usually was—third planets from yellow suns, the moons of gas giants on the brink of ignition, cometary clouds torn and reformed by distant, dark companions.

  We had great difficulty, at times, in preserving quite the impassivity and equanimity that doctrine taught us in the face of epic and exhilarating privations, but the Young Philosopher’s Instruction and the Third Successor’s Consensus drove us on and kept us from excitement or unbecoming self-importance.

  The various hyper-civilised races we encountered, each of them inhabiting their original system to the full, but little besides, were entirely charmed by our message. All of them had come to the same conclusion many centuries before; all of them had sent out an expedition in search of vast promise, never fulfilled or even disappointed; all of them had gone through a cargo-cult period, a period of high-spending predicated on the postal-order that was, that must be, in the intergalactic post; all had learned world-weary cynicism from the experience.