“Observe what? How can we pledge anything about something we know nothing about?”
“I do not find your attitude reassuring.”
“I beg your pardon,” Blackfriar said.
“In a moment you will understand why I am being circumspect.”
“I think I know,” Wheeler whispered. The assembly was perfectly still.
Melcia Chin spoke next. “You must remain bystanders,” she said in a low voice, “to a meeting that will take place shortly with an alien emissary. In fact, we almost mistook you for that emissary.”
“Your presence is already a risk,” Reger Huw said, “since this culture restricts its contacts to a circle of eligible civilizations. Your arrival may have changed our status.”
“How do you mean?” Blackfriar asked.
“They may not come,” Drisa Haldane said. “You might have sent a message instead of behaving as if solar space was still yours.”
“But we are the same people,” Blackfriar said. “You cannot deny it.”
“Matters of origin are trivial differences,” she said.
“I can see that you were not planning to tell us, were you?”
Drisa Haldane rose abruptly. “I am not aware of any obligation to have done so. This is our project, one for which we have spent many years preparing. Doubtless, you have also considered the problem of alien civilizations. If you believe with us that intelligence is the most precious aspect of reality, then you must see the implications of contacting alternate humanities. Intelligences vaster than our own, or simply different, may help us see ourselves with an increased objectivity, help us check the validity of our systems of knowledge…. I don’t have to go on.”
Blackfriar nodded. “Of course. “We will be bystanders.”
Drisa Haldane sat down.
“But can I ask that if you see fit, you may share your findings?” Blackfriar asked in a softer voice.
“If the situation permits, in the long run.”
“I’m convinced that you are probably better able to handle such a contact, given all your preparation,” Blackfriar said.
“Is she telling the truth?” John whispered to Wheeler.
Rob shrugged, but did not answer.
“Could you tell us what happened after the anomaly receded?” Blackfriar asked.
“Certainly. A century after Asterome’s departure, the disturbance fell back to the confines of earth and disappeared within the next half century. In the second century, we came sunward from Mars and the Jovian system. We found the earth a desert, but growing back. Some of us resettled the earth. Others live in the habitats you see around the planet.”
“Have there been other departures from the solar system?”
“Once every few decades, but we never hear from them. You were the first to leave and the first to return.”
“I take it that you do not approve of mobiles?”
“Many of us do not, though we see that it must be permitted. I feel that interstellar communication has the greatest potential.”
“You consider information to be superior to firsthand experience,” Blackfriar said.
“What is experience without the proper background of information and theory against which to view it? In any case, mobility, like the old idea of colonizing earthlike planets, is immature and uncreative. While it may be necessary to escape a sun or local disaster, colonization ignores the fact that a habitable planet belongs to the life that exists there or will develop on it. Mobile macroforms go in search of what they already possess—the environment of their own consciousness and culture.”
“But you don’t know what we have seen and learned,” Blackfriar said.
“We probably know as much,” she said. “As to what you have seen, that’s an aesthetic matter, for adventurous types. To be useful, wide experience must be interpreted properly, not simply savored. Intensive development and creativity is superior to looking for what may lie over the next hill.” John found himself liking Drisa Haldane.
“How can one help not interpreting?” Blackfriar asked.
“Mobility is not an absolute necessity.”
“The aliens—why are they coming physically?”
“It’s their choice, as it has been ours, to release those among them who wish to travel.”
“Do you have a fix on their home system?”
“No, just the mobile,” she said.
“Don’t you mistrust them?”
“They have nothing to gain by deceiving us.”
“Are you certain?”
“As certain as we are of your peaceful intentions.”
“Do you know what they are like?”
“Physiologically, they stem from birdlike forms rather than from apes. We’ve exchanged DNA information and built up a common language. That took two centuries. In some ways, they seem more familiar to us than you do.”
“Earth has grown up,” Wheeler said softly. “She makes me feel like a roving wild man.”
“She doesn’t miss a chance to dig at us,” John acknowledged.
“How much time do we have?” Blackfriar asked.
“They can arrive at any time. That is why we were anxious for an understanding as soon as possible.”
“You will have our interested cooperation,” Blackfriar said.
“We have an agreement, then?”
“We have an agreement.”
“What do you think, Rob?” John asked.
“It’s earth’s project, not ours. Whatever happens will be their responsibility. It’s certainly not worth taking weapons out of mothballs over. I suppose we’ll stand by and see what these alien geese are like.”
“Geese?”
“An old earth bird. I suppose it’s no more ridiculous than apes.”
“Rob, do you think we can arrange for me to go down to earth?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“I want to visit the place where the Bulero name came from.”
“Want some company?”
“I don’t mind,” John said as he stood up to leave. Most of the others were still seated, watching the concluding formalities of the first session between Blackfriar and the delegation from earth. Wheeler rose and walked out with him.
At the entrance, Wheeler punched his opinion of the meeting into the Humanity II terminal.
“How do you think the opinion will run?” John asked.
“They’ll go along with Frank’s, I think. What would you vote?”
“There’s not much to do except wait and see.”
24. The Alien
There’s no one here, John thought as he stood on the mountainside. Earthquakes had enlarged the Andes valley, and only the character of the peaks was unchanged. The receding anomaly had left a nearly barren soil, but everywhere a green moss was struggling to clothe the rocks. He had almost expected a house, or the remains of one; a thousand years was not so long as to have left nothing. He looked around, hoping for a glimpse of some object, a scrap of worked stone or metal, anything to suggest more than a past of natural forces, but there was nothing. He was as much a stranger here as he had been on Lea.
He turned and looked up at the sun hovering over the stony masses behind him, setting in a dark blue sky that was readying itself for the transparency of night. Snow glistened on the peaks, blood red from the sunlight, almost purple in the lower shadows. A slight wind carried the mountain cold to his face.
Human settlements still existed on the planet, fed by the occasional return of small groups. For this portion of humanity, he had learned, significant change was a fearful thing. The prevailing trends in the suncup worlds toward modifications of the human body, artificial intelligence links, increased mental capacity, and indefinite life span, were uncertain innovations that were preparing humankind for some further struggle, as yet unnamed, and the results might still be catastrophic and irreversible. The returnees wanted no part of such uncertainties; for them the earth still breathed and would be reclaimed by those who
still wanted it, loved it with an intensity that was at least as strong as the desire to turn away from natural worlds completely. “It’s superstition mixed with old instincts,” Margaret had commented. “The returnees have no desire to become anything more than their biological past. These few will return to the womb of earth, but unless they shackle their children’s minds with custom and law, the next generation will explode outward again, looking to the suncup habitats, as rural sons and daughters once looked to the cities. The stubborn minority on earth may remain for a long time. Perhaps the old tropism will never die away.”
John walked up toward his flitter, stepping carefully among the small rocks. The quiet of the peaks was complete; silent before the agony of time, they would never be roused into speech.
He was drawn to the local macroworlders as he learned more about them. By denying themselves mobility, they had retained a better hold on the past, a sense of identity which contributed greatly to the pragmatic courage and personal energy he had seen among them. Earth, their place of origin, was a daily reality for them, to be treasured even though they did not live on it; sunspace was home, to be filled up with human communities as once the floating continents of earth had been built up with towns and cities linked by a planetary system of roads and communications.
The difference between the returnees and the space dwellers was that the local macroworlders were collectively up to something, while the returnees had no desire to be up to anything. The earth would support them; it was a good place for small communities of people who had made their peace with the universe. Sunspace and beyond was the perfect environment for the open-ended city-state. On earth such states had once emerged only to war with one another as soon as they had impinged on one another’s territory; for the surface of earth was finite, its riches limited, its support of life a passing gift. Such conditions ¦were intolerable for a civilization which saw itself as an ongoing project, that set its goals to be a growth of knowledge and ability; any claims to perfection and completeness, claims that meant a small, static existence of changeless outlook and custom, were seen as death. “Dogma always goes hand in hand with a lack of growth, both in knowledge and in technical ability, while growth must always accompany democratic ideals of improvement and innovations,” Rob had said before John’s departure for earth. “You will see that earth is a dead end. Their greatest crime will be their effort to stifle the minds of their children with an aesthetic certainty, denying them the right to explore and come of age as you have done.”
He climbed inside the flitter and leaned back in the seat, closing his eyes. “John, this is Yevetha Li-Alin,” Margaret said. “Yevetha, this is John Bulero, your new examplar.” She’s skeptical, John thought, looking into her golden brown eyes. Her short hair was sandy blonde. She was willowy and long-legged. “You’ll have to work hard to convince me you’re worth listening to,” she said. “What does being a little more than twice my age give you? Margaret, can’t you find me someone older?” She might have been one of the children from the village on Lea, grown now and climbing from one new awareness to another, if he had thought to save even one. He thought of their small broken bodies.
He opened his eyes and sat up. The shadow of the peaks swept across the valley in front of him, signaling that the sun had slipped down behind the mountains at his back.
He looked up through the canopy, wondering what it would be like when he got his full link—not the detachable trainer he had been given recently, but the permanent implant that would be under the direct control of his will. He might now be opening his mind to feel the life of his world in the sky as it looked down on the earth, think as Rob thought, with all the hoarded knowledge of macrolife as support, see what all the best who had ever lived had seen. This would give him what he hoped for—self-knowledge joined to human will, carried forward by the pressure of the past; this would be for him, as it had been for countless others, the end of forgetfulness, the end of the amnesia of generations, the discontinuity of knowledge and experience that had toppled civilization so many times, throwing up again and again the old, wearisome problems. All his dissatisfaction lay in his isolation from this vast stream of human effort; all hope for him lay in his now following that flow of creativity, wherever it might lead. It didn’t matter now, he thought, because he had taken the right road, and once understanding takes hold of knowledge, all roads become the same road.
Yet something of him still held back, bidding him to return to earth, remake it, turn his back on the stars, the intruding stars that were now beginning to pierce the veil of day above him. There seemed to be no remedy for the emptiness between them. He felt again the hunger to see all creation from outside, as he had seen the dying embers of a night fire on Lea, with the darkness pressing in around him. There is an insufficiency to life that is unconquerable.
He noticed a light moving high above the valley. The flier descended and set down a hundred meters below him on the hillside.
John climbed out and started down the hill. A figure appeared as he neared the object. He heard a few words. The emerging passenger was speaking to someone inside.
John waited in the twilight. The figure noticed him and came up the hill.
“You’re Drisa Haldane,” he said in surprise. She wore a gray tunic, gray pants, and dark boots.
“You’re from the mobile,” she said. “What are you doing here?” She looked past him to the flitter. “You’re alone?”
“Yes.”
“Why have you come to this barren place?”
“Why have you followed me?” John asked. “I’m not anyone important.”
“Are you looking for something?”
“I have permission to be here.” He took a step toward her and looked directly into her eyes.
“I know that.”
He noted how delicate her features were—a small nose, pale skin, hollow cheeks, and narrow lips. Her eyes seemed larger than he remembered. Her gaze did not break as she looked back at him.
“I was born here,’ he said.
“You’re a millennium old?” she asked, tilting her head.
“No, my…family was born here.” The thought seemed strange, as if he were lying. “I’m a clone of Samuel Bulero.”
“You’ve come here out of sentiment.”
“You seem relieved,” he said. “You expected something devious?”
“I did from a Bulero.”
He wondered if she had come to look him over out of personal curiosity or official suspicion.
“I’m sorry,” she added quickly. “That was a rude thing to say.”
He took a few cautious steps toward her, until they were standing face to face. She did not seem to mind.
“You see,” he said, “we’re not just strangers from the stars. We both come from the same place, originally.”
“Of course. I was born in the Ceres hollow, grew up on Mars, then came sunward to the ring,” she said more expansively, then, abruptly, “I’ll leave you to your sightseeing.”
“Drisa Haldane,” he said as she started toward her flitter.
She turned suddenly. “Yes?”
“I would like to meet you again.”
She smiled, turned again, and went quickly to her flitter. In a moment she was a faint star fleeing from the earth, and he wondered whether he had actually spoken to her.
He approached his flitter, knowing that it would be very hard to see her again. As he climbed inside, he tried to recall the color of her eyes.
A call lit up the touch plate. Instead of opening the audio, he picked up the trainer and pressed the clinging chip to his temple.
“This is Rob, John,” a voice said within him.
“Yes?” he answered silently, feeling the multitude of listeners.
“The alien has entered the solar system. It’s coming fast, John, a matter of hours. What’s surprising is the thing’s size. Take a look.”
Some of the brighter stars were already blazing in the darkening sky. As J
ohn looked up through the canopy, another picture superimposed itself on the sky, a dark shape moving through space, obscuring stars, growing larger.
“It’s at least twice the size of Mars,” Rob said. “Next to it our two worlds and the sun cities will be specks. Their control of gravity and inertia must be very fluid to permit the movement of such a large body.”
“I wonder why they need to move around at all,” John said, feeling uneasy.
“They’re up to something more than a simple meeting,” Rob said. “I’m guessing, of course, but like any advanced culture, I think they must have projects that draw the abilities of their people. Apparently they think humanity worth contacting.”
“Let’s hope we can understand them, or they us.”
“Drisa says she does.”
“Do you feel uneasy, Rob?”
“Yes, I do.”
There was a short silence. “I’m coming home now,” John said. Half rising from his seat, he looked around at the now darkened valley of his ancestors, sat back again and commanded the craft to lift.
“Forward cradle 233.”
The flitter pulled itself to a hundred kilometers above the earth, revealing a planet of broken gray-brown desert marked with patches of greenery. Large rocky islands sat in the sparkling Atlantic. The sunlight danced like diamonds on the polar caps. The flitter gained speed, shrinking the earth behind him.
Ahead were the twin home worlds. Behind him the space habitats glittered, cupping the earth and catching the sunlight. Somewhere in the night, something from beyond was moving toward the home fire. Anxieties like his own were probably rare; but then he reminded himself of the distrust shown his two worlds upon their return, and he resented the fact that so much less inhospitality was being shown toward the alien.
The two macroworlds were now visible ovals. The flitter turned left to approach home from the forwards.
“They’re here” the link whispered.
He looked around through the canopy and saw the dark shape, larger than Luna, obscuring the stars behind the egg shapes of home. The object was not reflecting any light.
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