Fiasco

by Stanisław Lem

  Under this far-reaching blade of fire the ten-kilometer layer of ocean water would be parted to the bottom. The pressure from all sides on that great pit of rushing steam would have no effect on the sword of light. Through the shock-wave clouds of the boiling ocean (compared with which the mushroom cloud of a thermonuclear explosion was a speck) the solaser could bore into the suboceanic plate, pierce the lithosphere, and penetrate Quinta to a quarter of its radius.

  No one intended to cause such a catastrophe. The solaser was supposed to graze the ice ring and the thermosphere of the planet. When this idea, too, was put aside, it turned out that to transform the light-cannon into a signaler was not difficult at all. El Salam and Nakamura wanted, with the least rebuilding possible, to solve two problems at the same time.

  It was necessary to reach all the possible addresses simultaneously and "legibly." Such contact, though one-sided, went on the assumption that the planet was inhabited by beings endowed with the sense of sight as well as with enough intelligence to grasp the gist of the transmission.

  The first condition the senders had no control over: they could not give eyes to beings that had none. The second required of the senders no little inventiveness, particularly as the rulers of the Quintans clearly did not want any direct communication between the cosmic intruders and the population. Therefore, the signaling was to fall as a rain of light on all the continents of the planet, piercing its thick cloud cover. An overcast sky, in fact, was advantageous, since no one with a grain of intelligence could then mistake the needles of light piercing it for rays of sun.

  The hardest nut to crack was the form of the message. To teach an alphabet, to send certain numbers as signs, the universal constants of matter, would be nonsense. The solaser lay in the hall at the stern, ready for takeoff, but it did not move. The physicists, informationists, exobiologists found themselves in a quandary. They had everything they needed except a program. Self-explanatory codes did not exist. There was even talk of the semantics of the colors of the rainbow: the violet range would be gloomy, the middle band of visible light more cheerful, green would stand for plants or lush growth, red suggested aggression—yes, but only for people. A code that was a sequence of semiotic units indicating specific things could not be made of spectral lines. Then the second pilot put in his two cents: to tell the Quintans a story. Using the cloudy sky as a screen. Projecting on it a series of pictures. Over each continent. As Arago, who was present, laughed later, "Obstupuerunt omnes." Indeed, the experts' mouths dropped open.

  "Is it technically possible?" asked Tempe.

  "Technically, yes. But what would be the point? A show in the sky? Of what?"

  "A story," the pilot repeated.

  "Ridiculous," snorted Kirsting. He had devoted twenty years to the study of cosmolinguistics. "You might be able to convey something to Pygmies with cartoons, or to Australian aborigines. All races and cultures of humanity have things in common. But there are no humans there."

  "Doesn't matter. They have a technological civilization and are already warring in space. That means that once they had a stone-age civilization. Then, too, they warred. And there were ice ages on the planet. Back before they built houses or wigwams, they must have sat in caves. And painted on the walls—fertility signs, the animals they hunted—to bring success. It was magic. They found out that the magic was only cartoons a couple of thousand years later—from their wise ones, like Professor Kirsting. Professor, would you care to bet with me that they don't know what stories are?"

  Nakamura was laughing now. The others laughed, too, except Kirsting. The exobiologist-cosmolinguist, however, was not the type that defended his position at any cost.

  "Well, I don't know…" he wavered. "If the idea isn't imbecilic, it's brilliant. Suppose, then, we show them a cartoon. What about?"

  "Ah, that's not my field. I'm no paleoethnologist. And as far as the idea goes, it's not completely mine. Dr. Gerbert gave me, back on the Eurydice, a book of science-fiction short stories. I dip into it now and then. That's probably where…"

  "Paleoethnology?" Kirsting thought out loud. "I'm not up on that. The rest of you?"

  There was no such specialist on board.

  "Perhaps in DEUS's memory," offered the Japanese. "It can't hurt to look. But a story, no. It should be a myth. Or, rather, a common element, a theme that appears in the earliest myths."

  "Before the time of writing?"

  "Of course."

  "Yes. From the very beginnings of their protoculture," said Kirsting, surrendering. He was even warming to the idea—but then a doubt assailed him:

  "Wait. Are we to appear to them as gods?"

  Arago shook his head. "It will be difficult, precisely because we should not manifest our superiority. Nor ourselves. It should be happy news. Good tidings. At least, I see this in our pilot's proposal, because stories tend to have happy endings."

  Thus began the deliberations, which had a double purpose: to consider what features Earth and Quinta might have in common—features of the environment, and of the plants and animals that arose in it—and at the same time to sift the collection of legends, myths, fables, rituals, and customs for those that were the most enduring, for the messages that thousands of years of history had not effaced.

  In the first group of probable constants were: the division of the species into two sexes, most certain for vertebrates; food for animals, therefore also for intelligent beings on dry land; the alternation of day and night, of the sun and the moon, of hot and cold seasons of the year; the emergence of herbivores and carnivores, of preys and predators, the killing of animals by animals, since a universal vegetarianism seemed highly unlikely. And therefore the protoculture had hunting. Cannibalism, the hunting and consuming of beings of one's own species, was a possible phenomenon in the Eolithic or Paleolithic, though not absolutely certain. In any case, hunting was a universal, since according to the theory of evolution it promoted the growth of intelligence.

  The incubation of the ape-men, the primates, in the bloody phase of predation, which accelerated the development of the brain—this idea once met with violent opposition. It was seen as an insult to humanity, a misanthropic invention of the evolutionists more slanderous even than their proclaiming of the consanguinity of man and ape.

  But archeology confirmed the thesis, accumulating irrefutable evidence in support of it. Carnivorousness, of course, did not lead all predators to intelligence; many conditions had to be met for that. The reptile predators of the Mesozoic were far from intelligent, and there was nothing to indicate that, if they had not been exterminated by a catastrophe between the Cretaceous and Jurassic (a giant meteorite disrupting the food chain through the global cooling of the climate), the dominant reptiles of the time would have acquired humanlike brains.

  The presence of intelligent beings on Quinta, however, could not be denied. Whether they evolved from reptiles or from a species unknown to Earth was not the crucial question. What was crucial was the form of their reproduction. But even if the Quintans were not placental mammals or marsupials, genetics argued for their division into two sexes, the form of multiplication favored by biological evolution. But that which a purely biological transmission gave to progeny, contained in the reproductive cells, did not help in the formation of culture, because such transmission produced changes in the species at a rate marked by millennia.

  The acceleration of brain growth required a reduction of the instincts inherited biologically, in favor of learning received from parents. A creature that came into the world knowing—thanks to genetically built-in programming—"everything or practically everything" needed for survival might manage perfectly well but would not be able to change radically its tactics of living. Whatever could not do this was not intelligent.

  So, to begin with, one had the division into sexes, and definitely hunting. Around these first elements—its binary seed—grew a protoculture.

  But how did that seed manifest, express itself in the protoculture? By
directing attention to what furthered sex and what furthered hunting. Before there was writing, before the invention of non-animal ways to use the body, the skill that hunting demanded transferred its reality into images: not yet symbols, but a magical coaxing of Nature to give what was desired. The images were pictures that could be painted, or likenesses that could be cut in rock.

  And so on. DEUS, from these premises, performed the task assigned it: to adapt to the endeavors of sex and hunting a myth portrayed in a series of images. A tale, a show, a spectacle with actors. The sun, a dance before rainbows, the bowing of heads—but this would be the epilogue. In the beginning there was battle. Who battled? Creatures indistinct, but who walked upright. Attacks, struggles, concluding with a collective dance.

  The solaser repeated this "planetary broadcast" in several variations for three days, with short intermissions that signified the end and the beginning. The broadcast was focused and collimated to appear in the cloudy sky of the planet, where it would be in view (confined to the central surface of the cloud-screens) over each continent, day and night. Harrach and Polassar remained skeptical. Suppose, they said, the Quintans saw and even understood. What of that? Hadn't we smashed their Moon? A less cheerful presentation, perhaps, but more dramatic. Suppose they nevertheless recognized this as a gesture of peace. But who? The population? But of what possible importance was public opinion in the middle of a hundred-year space war? Did the pacifists on Earth ever have the upper hand? What could the Quintan people do to make their voices heard—not to us, merely to their own governments? You might convince children that war was naughty, but what good would that do?

  Meanwhile Tempe felt, instead of pride in the adoption of his idea, an overwhelming uneasiness. To shake this off, he set out on an excursion. The Hermes was really an unoccupied giant; the living quarters, with the control rooms and laboratories, constituted a core no larger than a six-story building. Besides the power rooms, this core included an unused hospital section, a small conference room, a mess hall beneath that—with an automatic kitchen—then recreational facilities, a simulation trainer, a pool that was filled only when the ship allowed it (under sufficient thrust so that the water would not fly up into the air in drops the size of balloons), and a half-oval amphitheater that also served for entertainment and movies and which never had a living soul in it. These comforts, thoughtfully provided for the crew by the builders, turned out to be totally superfluous. It entered no one's head to go view some ingenious holographic performance. It was as if that part of the middle deck did not exist for the crew—going to the movies seemed silly in the light of the events of the past few months. The theater, pool, and gym had been designed—with snack bars and pavilions, as at a small-town carnival—to help create the illusion of Earth. But the architects, Gerbert said, had forgotten to consult the psychologists. The illusion, not maintainable, was received as a lie. This was not where Tempe headed for his excursion.

  Between the living quarters and the ship's outer hull stretched a space in all directions, crisscrossed with girders, beams, bulkheads, and containing a legion of robots at rest or at work. One entered this space through hermetically sealed hatches at either end of the deck: at the stern, behind the sanitation area, and from the bow, in a corridor off the upper control room. Entry at the stern was blocked by a gate double-locked and cross-bolted, with a warning sign in glowing red that was never turned off. There, in chambers off limits to personnel, lay sidereal converters, seemingly inert colossi suspended in vacuum, like the legendary tomb of Mohammed, on invisible magnetic cushions. But it was possible to pass the forward barrier—and that was where the pilot directed his escape.

  He had to go through the control room, and there he found Harrach in an activity that in other circumstances would have made him laugh. Harrach, on duty, wanting something to drink, had opened the container too forcefully and was now chasing a yellow sphere of orange juice. He darted at an angle toward the ceiling as the sphere bobbed gently, like a large soap bubble—with a straw in his mouth, to catch it and suck it up before it got all over his face. Opening the door, Tempe stopped lest a puff of air break the liquid ball into a thousand droplets. He waited until Harrach's hunt was successful, then kicked off vigorously in the chosen direction.

  Ordinary coordination wasn't worth a damn in weightlessness, but the old training had by now come back to him. He did not need to stop and think how to push out with his legs like a mountain climber in a rock chimney, while turning both wheel locks of the hatch. Someone uninitiated would in his place have gone head over heels trying to unscrew the spoked wheels that were like the ones used in bank vaults. Quickly he closed the hatch behind him, because although the bow section was filled with air, the air was stale, acrid with the fumes of chemicals, as in a factory. Before him was a space that narrowed into the distance, dimly lit by long rows of tubes and having double-lattice struts on the port and starboard walls. Unhurriedly, he launched himself.

  He passed—becoming accustomed to the bitterness in his mouth and throat—the oxidized hulks of turbines, compressors, thermogravistors, with their galleries, platforms, and ladders, and skillfully swam around giant, thick-walled pipes that arched between tanks of water, helium, oxygen, having wide flanges encircled with bolts. He alighted on one of these, like a fly. He was indeed a fly, in the bowels of a steel whale. Every tank loomed higher than a church steeple. One of the fluorescent tubes, half-burned, flickered steadily, and in that changing light the oxidized shapes of the tanks now darkened, now shone as if sprinkled with silver. He got his bearings. From the area of the reserve tanks he drifted forward to where, in the massive insulation of the central level, nucleospin units gleamed under their own lights. The units were attached to bridge gantries, their mouths plugged. Then a sharp cold reached him, and he saw the frost-covered helium pipes of the cryotron systems. The chill was such that he prudently used the nearest handgrip to keep from touching the pipes, because he would have frozen fast to them in an instant, like a fly caught in a web.

  There was nothing for him to do here, and he had come precisely for that reason, as if on vacation. He could not explain the satisfaction he derived from these shadowy, deserted regions of the ship, which testified to its power. In the bottom loading bays, automatic excavators were anchored, plus heavier and lighter landers, and farther on, in rows, were green containers, white, blue—tool kits for repair automata—and at the prow lay two striders with enormous swivel hoods in place of heads. By chance—or, perhaps, intentionally—he moved into a strong draft that rushed from a ventilation register and was borne toward the port ribs of the inner hull, which were the size of bridge arches, but deftly took advantage of the motion to push off. Like a jumper on a trampoline he went headfirst, turning slowly at an angle, toward the handrails of the prow gallery. A favorite spot.

  With both hands he pulled himself onto a railing and had before him a million cubic meters of loading bays. High in the distance shone the three green lights above the hatch that he had entered. Beneath him—that is, beyond his legs (which, as always in weightlessness, became inconvenient, superfluous things)—were robot hovercraft on platforms fastened to ramps that were folded for the present, and the tunnel of a rocket launcher gaping in the giant shield of a side wall: the mouth of a cannon of awesome caliber. But no sooner did he come to a stop than the same uneasiness fell upon him again, an incomprehensible emptiness within, like a feeling—for no reason—of what? Futility? Indecision? Fear? But what could it be that he feared? Today, at this moment, even here, it seemed, he could not rid himself of his mysterious malaise.

  Farther on, he saw the mighty engine that carried him—with a small fraction of its power—through the eternal abyss. Full of force that throbbed in the reactors with greater-than-solar heat, the thing meant Earth to him, the Earth that had sent him to the stars. The Earth was here, its intelligence contained in the energy drawn from the stars—and not in those parlorlike quarters with their stupid coziness and comforts arrange
d as if for frightened boys. At his back he felt the fourfold sheathed armor plate that had interstitial cells, energy-absorbing, filled with a substance hard as diamond when struck but fusible in a special way, since it possessed self-sealing properties. The ship, like an organism living yet nonliving, had been given the capacity for regeneration. Then suddenly, as in an illumination, he found the word for what was taking place within him: despair.

  About an hour later he dropped in on Gerbert. Gerbert's cabin, separated from the others, was located at the end of the second deck of the middle section. The physician had probably chosen it because it was spacious and had a whole wall of window overlooking a greenhouse. In the greenhouse grew only mosses, grass, a privet hedge; on both sides of the hydroponic pool stood the hairy gray-green spheres of cacti; there were no trees, only hazel shrubs, whose flexible branches could withstand tremendous weight during flight. Gerbert valued this vegetation in the window and called it his "garden." One could also enter it from the corridor and walk on paths among flower beds—if, of course, there was gravitation. But the recent blow, brought on by the night attack, had produced no little havoc there. Gerbert, Tempe, and Harrach had later salvaged what they could from the broken bushes.

  In accordance with the decision made by the experts of SETI in the course of preparing for the expedition, DEUS watched the behavior of all the people on the Hermes, assessing their psychiatric condition. This was no secret to anyone.

  Under the kind of long-term stress to which those who had to rely entirely on themselves would be subjected, deviations from the mental norm might occur, taking forms typical of the psychodynamics of groups cut off for years from ordinary social and familial ties. In such isolation even a personality in perfect balance and resistant to psychic trauma could suffer derangement. Frustration could become depression or aggression without the individual's ever realizing what was happening to him.