I did some quick mental calculations. 'I suppose that's theoretically possible, depending on the number of other parties.'
'On the other hand,' she pressed on, 'a party could have forty-nine percent of the vote, but if there are only two parties, and their votes are exactly evenly spread across all constituencies, the one with the slightly smaller number wouldn't get any seats at all?'
'Well, yes, that's also theoretically possible. Those extremes wouldn't happen in practice, though.'
'Of course not. Why, I believe that a recent British government managed to win a substantial overall majority in Parliament with as much as thirty-five percent of the vote – which, given the poor turnout of only just over sixty percent, meant that they obtained absolute control of your government with the support of less than twenty-two percent of the electorate. Is that right?'
'Err, yes, that does sound about right.'
'Don't you think it's possible that these anomalies account for the lack of interest in politics which leads to so few people voting?'
'Among other things, quite possibly.'
'Other things?'
'Well, politicians are not exactly the most highly regarded people in our society. They have a well-earned reputation for untrustworthiness. Still, the advent of mind-linking – and especially remote linking by radio – is likely to have a major impact on their behaviour and therefore, in time, the way they are perceived.'
'Hmm. So tell me about the alternatives to "first past the post". I understand "proportional representation" and "alternative votes", but would like to gain a better understanding of "single transferable votes."'
It transpired that her understanding of the arcane complexities of STV systems was far better than my own, so I turned the conversation to other matters.
'I'm intrigued by the differences which caused saurians to develop on some versions of Earth and humans on others. Have you been able to track down the point of departure, when the worlds diverged?'
'Oh yes, that was the subject of a major research effort as soon as we discovered the first human world. We managed to track it back to a natural disaster about a hundred million years ago. It was an asteroid strike – which in your world narrowly missed Earth, probably as a result of some almost infinitesimal orbital perturbation far away. It wasn't as big as some that have struck both our Earths, but it was at a critical time and place to affect evolution. It changed conditions in such a way that our distant ancestors were driven close to extinction. A predator species developed, not unlike ourselves and almost as intelligent, but bigger, faster and fiercer, and we were their favourite prey. We were under constant pressure to improvise, innovate and cooperate to make up for our physical disadvantages, and that drove us towards developing ever higher intelligence and speech. It also accounts for the evolution of our marsupial characteristics – no huge movement-limiting pregnancies like humans, no eggs in a fixed place to defend, and a safe place to stuff young kids while sprinting for safety. And our homes have lots of exits – we have a racial urge to be able to leave, fast, if an enemy comes into a building. In fact, we didn't establish any permanent settlements for a long time because we had no means of defending them. Eventually we used technology to obtain an edge over our predators, and then we constructed some fortress homes in more mountainous areas. We don't use those any more, though – they are too inconvenient.'
'Are any of your predators left?'
'No, we exterminated them long ago. Nowadays we would let some of them live, of course, but at that time we were more concerned about our survival.'
'So mammals didn't stand a chance in your world?'
'Oh, there are some, but they never had the opportunity to develop much intelligence. We have a wildlife park not far from here, we can take you to see them if you wish.'
I did indeed wish: it would be intriguing to see how they had developed in a saurian world. However, I left that for now in order to explore other issues.
'Among humans, the virus has resulted in mind-linking abilities of different levels – is that same among saurians?'
'To a much lesser degree. In humans, the effect of the virus depends on the complexity of the neural networks already developed: put simply, the more intelligent you are, the stronger will be your mind-linking abilities. But our control of our genetics means that all saurians are born with the potential for developing a high level of neural complexity, and we ensure that our small numbers of offspring are carefully brought up to maximise this potential. However, there are still some individual differences.'
'How many children do you have, exactly?'
'We decided long ago that we felt most comfortable with a total population of about one hundred million. Our genetically programmed life expectancy is about eight hundred years, although many choose to end their lives sooner, so the average is between six and seven hundred years. We could of course extend our lives indefinitely, barring accidents, but there is no interest in that at all. Each female has only two children in her life, so you will appreciate that our children are very rare and precious to us. Both parents stop work as soon as they have a child in order to devote themselves entirely to its upbringing, and the whole community provides support.'
I thought about the teeming masses of human children, the inadequate parenting and education even in wealthy societies, and the appalling death-rates in the poorest, and winced. The Convenor was too polite to make it obvious, but I received the clear impression that the way humans indiscriminately produced and haphazardly treated their children was one of the aspects of humanity that the saurians found most incomprehensible and disagreeable. I quickly changed the subject.
'So, if you don't mind me asking, how old are you?'
'That is not a matter of sensitivity for us, but it is not something we take any notice of, so we would have to check our records to confirm our exact ages. However, I am about five hundred and forty, give or take a few years.'
'Three hundred and seventy, or thereabouts.' From Primo.
'About four hundred and twenty.' Secundo.
'I'm just a baby,' Tertia, with a flash of humour, 'only just over two hundred.'
I decided that another change of topic might be advisable.
'So how long does your education last?'
'All of our lives. Learning and doing are two sides of the same coin for us – we cannot separate them. As you will have gathered, I am currently studying human democratic systems in order to evaluate how they might change with the advent of mind-linking. I might have some suggestions for new forms of democracy in due course; whether they will interest your politicians is another matter, of course.'
'I can guarantee some furious debates!'
Tertia chimed in. 'We have been observing with some concern the effect on human society of mind-linking. There are many positives, of course, but also some negatives that we didn't anticipate.'
'I can't say that anything has caused me much surprise so far. The main difficulty is the loss of privacy. How do you cope with that? I notice that you are able to restrict the degree of mind-linking, depending on the circumstances.'
'Yes, full mind-linking is generally reserved for family or close friends. We have different levels of contact for other circumstances, although we cannot close our minds completely – we can always detect the mental presence of other people, and the emotional states they are in, so any kind of deception is impossible. We learn what is appropriate, and how to apply the necessary restrictions, from an early age – it's a matter of etiquette, more than anything. We have already taught some of these skills to you and Freya, of course. We think it might be helpful to start courses for humans, perhaps training some teachers via head-nets so they can teach others.'
I thought about the social havoc being caused by the inability of most people to conceal any secrets from anyone else, and agreed that that might be a very good idea. A separate thought occurred to me. 'What's your written language like? And do you still use a spoken language?'
I looked at it curiously. Some of the marks appeared to be clustered into groups, a little like pictograms. I relayed this thought to the saurians.
'There's an element of that in it. The language has been steadily simplified and codified over many millennia to make it as efficient to use as possible, particularly with computer systems. Many common concepts can be more briefly expressed in symbol combinations which are in effect pictograms, although they are still assembled from basic symbol elements. As for our spoken language, we have a surprise for you!'
We all got up at his suggestion and went outside. It was dark, the night sky vivid with stars in a way only seen in remote places on my Earth, but a dim glow of light illuminated a small group of saurians standing a short distance away. When we were ready, they began to sing.
Nothing about the saurian world seemed so strange to me as this. The combination of the alien voices and their clanging, hissing language, singing to a very different concept of music, sent a shiver down my spine at the sheer weirdness of it. After a while, and helped by the mind-links of the other listeners, I began to appreciate the bizarre, ethereal, beauty of the music. When they stopped I was left feeling simultaneously transported and bereft.
So ended my first night on the saurian Earth.
12
The Planetary Assembly met in a circular room in the centre of the Assembly building. There was no furniture, just a spiral ramp winding down to a space in the centre. The saurians ambled in, apparently in a random order, filling up the ramp from the bottom. There was no obvious focal point, no "chair" for the Convenor. I realised that with the communication being essentially mental, physical location was unimportant to them. The Convenor had explained that the layout in the surprisingly small room was due to the fact that they still liked to see each other when communicating, since body patterns were often used to emphasise points in debate. I had a good view of all of them, since they had placed me in a swivel chair, right in the centre of the open space in the middle of the room.
When they were all ready (and mostly trying not to stare at me too obviously), the Convenor sent out a calling-to-order signal and the mental and visual hubbub died down. I was formally greeted as the first visitor from a human Earth, a sentiment mentally echoed by the Assembly; I made some suitable response which was translated by the Convenor. She then kicked off the debate by raising the issue of how to make best use of the opportunities presented by the slider machine.
What followed was frankly bewildering. The subtle and ever-shifting pattern of mind-links formed a metal weave throughout the room, with the flickering kaleidoscope of their skins forming a further level of complexity. They were not thinking in English, of course, so I was limited to picking up moods plus those thoughts which were visual or conceptual. Rather like the pictograms, they often used images for certain concepts – sometimes the meaning was clear, sometimes not; they had obviously developed a kind of mental shorthand of their own which was almost impossible for me to follow. A quick flash of a human figure superimposed against a mushroom cloud was clear enough, and not very promising, but what was I to make of an image of a number of saurians swimming together in formation? It was presumably a reference to some event in their collective memory which had meaning for them. So while I understood a few odd snatches I was generally lost in the roar of communication between these powerful, alien minds. I had thought them slow and deliberate, but when a hundred of the best minds of the planet – who had known each other very well for a long time – bent their attention to debate a subject, the speed of the interchanges left me floundering. I realised that in all of communications with saurians they must have slowed down and clarified their meanings for me, as if I were a very young child.
After a while they stopped for refreshment and I went outside to collapse on the turf, my head aching. One of the grazers wandered over and stared at me curiously, then retreated when the Convenor appeared.
'I'm sorry for that, I realise it can have meant little to you, but it was important for them to see you. Why don't you sit out the rest of the session and I'll brief you this evening. Tertia has something she wants to show you.'
She went back into the Assembly building and Tertia appeared on cue. Who needs mobile phones, I thought.
'Tough going, was it?' She radiated sympathy. 'I have an inkling of what you feel. I observed a session once, and I had trouble following it. Never mind, I have a trip I think you'll enjoy.'
The wildlife park was only a short hop away, but I enjoyed the jog alongside Tertia. There was no entrance as such, or even any visible enclosures; Tertia explained that the animals were kept in defined areas by an electrical field which reacted with tags implanted under the skin and wired into their nervous systems. This sent a warning signal to them as they approached the boundary, which grew in intensity until they were rendered unconscious if they tried to cross it. Visitors wore headnets to tell them when they were approaching the boundary and to provide information about the animals in that enclosure. I therefore had the strange experience of walking among wild animals – some of them quite dangerous – with no physical boundary between us.
'I hope the power doesn't go down!'
'You should know us better than that by now – we have triple-redundancy on all of our power systems.'
'What if lightning knocked out the system?'
'We don't allow lightning to strike at random – we drain off the electrical charge before a storm can reach any sensitive areas.'
'Ah…I should have guessed.'
The animals were indeed fascinating. No giant dinosaurs, sadly – it appeared that gigantism had ceased to provide any evolutionary advantage millions of years before, so there was nothing bigger than the size of a rhino. None of them bore any close resemblance to the fossil dinosaurs that I knew from the human Earth. Then we approached the mammalian areas. Most were small and furry, vaguely similar to the rodents I was familiar with. Some were larger, clearly members of the horse or antelope families, but still much smaller than the ones I knew. A copse provided a home for a family of monkeys; then, on the far side, what I first though was a large monkey got up and walked slowly towards me.
I stopped in shock, my pulse accelerating. It was little more than a metre tall, of slender build, and covered with fine hair. Its arms were long in proportion, with strong hands which looked suited to climbing. But it stood and walked on two legs as easily as a human, and it came close and stared at me curiously. The face was a little flatter than a monkey's, and its mental signature was noticeably more complex. This was no monkey or ape, I realised with a sense of dizziness – it was a hominin, similar to the precursors of mankind. The names slipped through my mind, labels tentatively attached by a humanity struggling to make sense of its origins from fragmentary and ambiguous remains; australopithecus, or an early member of the homo genus such as habilis or erectus; my knowledge was not specialised enough to determine the closest match. I looked down into its dark eyes, and as it looked back I felt a deep but unformed sadness, an aching gulf stretching across aeons of lost opportunity. I turned and walked away, my vision blurring. There but for fortune, I thought, a minute aberration in an asteroid's orbit.
Tertia sensed my mood, of course, and left me in peace as we went back to Laketown.
That evening the Convenor came to dinner again and summarised what had happened in the Assembly. 'I have to say that over the last couple of years humanity has provided us with the most intense and interesting debates we have enjoyed for many millennia, since we decided to modify ourselves to achieve universal mind-linking. However, to the facts first of all. It is now clear that we cannot manufacture slider machines capable of generating holes significantly larger than the one
you used. The power requirements increase as the cube of the area of the hole; or to put it another way, to increase the diameter from two to four metres would require three hundred and sixty times the power. And while we could provide that easily enough, the machinery is subtle and delicate and could not withstand any more power than we are currently pouring into it – it would be destroyed. So we cannot send through large items of machinery or other items which might speed up the process of reducing your carbon emissions and other pollutants. However, we will build many more machines which will be able to help in transporting food to famine-stricken areas.'
'That should certainly help. Although it would only be a short-term expedient, of course. The long-term priority has to be to make communities self-sustaining.'
'Agreed. We don't see the benefit of any large–scale movement of people between our worlds, but some exchanges may be useful. They could help our scientists work more closely together, and no doubt there will be real interest among some saurians and humans to see at first hand how the other world works.' (Enthusiastic endorsement from my trio of friends.) 'We are not set up for tourism, though. We don't have the facilities or the supplies humans would need, so we are only thinking of a small number of accredited observers. The other interesting topic was what to do about the other worlds.'
'Other worlds?'
'Yes. You are not the only human world we know of; there are three others which have developed radio, but they are not as advanced as you are. Incidentally, we refer to your world as "H17", as yours is the seventeenth human civilisation which we have found. We have lost contact with nearly all of the other sixteen, of course, for reasons that you know about. We still have links to H16, where the attempt to contact you never happened, so life goes on as it did before your accident.'
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