Is Anybody Out There

by Nick Gevers

  The instant I heard the word “obvious,” a razor-toothed chill coursed along my spine. I winced internally. The cook’s tacit argument was cogent, lucid, and supremely rational—and I had no riposte.

  “Poe,” I said.

  “What?” Jeremiah said.

  “The Purloined Object Effect,” I muttered feebly. “I call it Poe because he wrote a story about the phenomenon. Some secrets hide in plain sight. The tarn didn’t give rise to the cacos—they came from outer space. The parasites themselves have broken the Great Silence.”

  “I don’t read much, but that’s what I meant,” Jeremiah said.

  An interval of quietude descended upon the refectory—not as profound as the Great Silence, but palpable nevertheless.

  “We have nothing to lose by proceeding as if Jeremiah is wrong,” Articulis said at last. “Ergo, I shall brew myself a pot of coffee and spend the night pondering the Fermi Paradox. If the cacos are aliens, the problem will hold no interest for them, since they are its resolution. Otherwise, God willing, our visitors will come after me, determined to draw sustenance from a particularly erotic conundrum.”

  “God willing,” Jeremiah echoed.

  “God willing,” I said.

  “If you resolve the dispute to my advantage, Euathlus still owes me ten drachmas, since that is the content of your decision,” Sister Ruth said.

  “If there are fifty-nine grapes in a bunch,” Brother Thomas said, “does that mean fifty-eight also constitute a bunch?”

  “All Cretans are liars, the Cretan insisted,” Brother Jonathan said.

  Sobered by the Purloined Object Effect, I sought to become intoxicated with Château Pelagius. The first glass failed to meet my criteria for drunkenness, as did the second, but by the third measure Achilles overtook the tortoise, Euathlus received free tuition, the barber got his shave, and nobody gave a damn when a heap stopped being a heap. I was now so rickety that my journey to the dormitory required Jeremiah to stand behind me, grasp my arms, and gingerly walk me up the stairs and along the corridor. I collapsed on the straw pallet, my brain reeling with wine and paradox. A moment later I was dreaming of The Day the Earth Stood Still, that ingenious allegory of solipsistic contact, humankind invading itself with its own crippled conscience, the iridescent angel of our better nature emerging from the gleaming vulva and imploring the world’s leaders to heed his warning, for otherwise humanity will be chastised by the afterbirth, whose destructive power is without limit.

  I awoke shortly after dawn and set about extricating myself from a nightmare, my Michael Rennie reverie having been supplanted by a dream in which, per Jeremiah’s intuition, the cacodaemons had revealed themselves as tourists from the Oort cloud. Scrambling into my street clothes, I dashed down the hall to Brother Jonathan’s cell. Still asleep, the monk lay sprawled across his pallet, snoring and smiling, dressed only in a nightshirt. His cranium was free of hair and—mirabile dictu—shorn of the Liar Paradox caco. Could it be? Was it possible? Had Enrico Fermi inadvertently saved the world?

  Overflowing with love for the nonexistent occupants of our sterile galaxy, I descended to the library and, approaching the reading table, sat down across from Sister Margaret. She glanced up from her devotions, offered me a nod, then returned to cathecting the Ruby Paradox. Her bare head held wisps of hair as ethereal as corn silk. Her shorn wimple lay beside the jewel boxes, marred now by a gaping hole rimmed with bits of torn thread. I rose and, circling the nun, inspected her occipital. Having broken free of Margaret’s cloth, her caco was now gone, called to a higher paradox.

  I lurched out of the library and charged down the basement stairs, praying that Brother Francis’s parasite had also found satisfaction in the Great Silence. The monk sat before his blackboard, eyes fixed on a negation absurdly synonymous with the proposition it negated. Breathlessly I snuck up behind Francis, then gently slid back his hood to reveal a naked left temple where once the Nonsense Paradox caco had feasted.

  Upon returning to the main floor, I realized that my respect for Tertullian now rivaled my appreciation for Bertrand Russell. That clever theologian had gotten everything right. Not only had he accurately prophesied the coming of the parasites, he’d intuited their terrestrial provenance. I rushed outside. A soft moan filled the morning air, the mellifluous correlative of cacodaemonic bliss. I followed the sound to its predictable source, Bartholomew Articulis. He sat on the wrought-iron bench in the center of the vineyard, a caco clamped to his left temple, a second to his crown, a third to his occipital. Constantine stood behind the bench, hovering protectively over his employer.

  “Not a single von Neumann probe,” Articulis muttered. “No Bracewell probes or Dyson spheres.”

  Catching sight of me, the dwarf raised a finger to his lips—a superfluous gesture, for I already knew it would be disastrous to distract the abbot.

  “Vorg,” sang the caco trio. “Vorg . . . Vorg . . . Vorg . . .”

  “Success,” Constantine whispered.

  “No colonizations, visitations, or plausible abductions,” Articulis hissed.

  Even as the abbot sustained the Fermi Paradox, the two remaining cacos appeared in the clearing, wriggling across the grass like primeval slugs, thickening the dew with glistening slime. I recognized Brother Thomas’s caco from the grape stains on its dorsal side, Sister Ruth’s from its pallor. Reaching Articulis’s feet, the cacos began their ascent, slithering up his legs and across his torso.

  “No radio contact,” said the unflinching abbot.

  At last the Sorites Paradox caco came to rest on Articulis’s left parietal, then set about nourishing itself. Seconds later the Lawyer Paradox caco reached the abbot’s right temple.

  “How long will it be, I wonder, before he goes mad?” I asked, sotto voce.

  “This is a monastery,” Constantine replied. “Providence is on our side. I know in my heart that Abbot Articulis will remain healthy until the rift is healed. God didn’t bring the Order this far only to abandon it on the shores of the tarn.”

  “Vorg,” trilled the happy cacos. “Vorg . . . Vorg . . . Vorg . . .”

  “Perhaps I should stay here today,” I said. “Shall I cancel my three o’clock class?”

  Constantine shook his head and said, “If I need you, I’ll send for you, but right now I’m abrim with hope. I must thank you for helping us defeat these malicious imps.”

  At a loss for words, I merely said, “This sentence is not about itself, but about whether it is about itself.”

  “I must admit, I’ve never cared for you Tillichean ground-of-being types,” the dwarf said. “It all seems to me like atheism by another name. But God works in mysterious ways. He may even work through assistant professors. Tonight I shall remember you in my prayers.”

  As you might imagine, after my stay with the Tertullianists I had considerable difficulty adjusting to life back at the Bertrand Russell Institute of Paradox Studies. For all its gritty vistas and gnarly particulars, its noises, odors, tastes, and textures, the East Village now struck me as an unreal place, absurd in a way that made the Monastery of Tertullian seem merely implausible. Throughout the rest of July, my poor blameless Philosophy 412 students endured the nadir of higher education, their professor having become an erratic tyrant who assaulted them with incoherent tirades, arbitrarily canceled office hours, and every day upped the page count for their final paper.

  I even tortured the class with the notorious Examination Paradox, claiming that I would give them a surprise multiple-choice test sometime the following week. The catch, I sadistically insisted, is that any teacher who wields such a threat cannot possibly make good on it. Friday will not bring the alleged surprise, for if the previous four days have been examination- free, then the test will inevitably fill the one remaining slot. The same reasoning applies to Thursday. Since the previous three days have been examination-free, and because Friday has already been ruled out, springing the test on day four would hardly qualify as unexpected. Through this chain of
logic we can likewise assert that neither Wednesday nor Tuesday nor Monday allows the teacher to fulfill his desire.

  Given my irrational condition, I was actually relieved when Constantine phoned and begged me to return to the monastery. Alas, the Fermi Paradox had proven less robust than Articulis had hoped, but he had no intention of surrendering to the cacos. If I could possibly manage it, I must come to Rhinebeck immediately and furnish the Tertullianists with a superior antinomy. I promised the dwarf I would leave posthaste.

  At three o’clock I marched into my Philosophy 412 class and announced that the unexpected examination had been canceled, the course itself terminated, then cheerily informed them they were all getting As. Returning to my office, I told Mrs. Graham that I planned to spend the rest of the summer in the Adirondacks, healing a crack in the lithosphere.

  “An academic conference?” she asked.

  “Something like the opposite,” I replied, wondering what I meant. “I am the thought you are thinking now.”

  “The day you stop talking crazy,” Mrs. Graham said, “I’ll know you’ve gone insane.”

  Two hours later I stood on the shores of the tarn, inhaling the miasmic vapors. It might have been a trick of the dying light—a visual paradox, if you will—but it seemed that the pestilential fluid had receded by several inches. Unless I was deluding myself, the battle had swung in favor of the Tertullianists, even though the Fermi Paradox was now evidently on the ropes.

  I passed through the gates and entered the vineyard, soon reaching the center. Brother Thomas sat on the bench, considering his heaps, oblivious to everything save the problem of ill-defined boundaries. Absently he rolled back his hood, no doubt with the unconscious intention of savoring the evening breeze. For me the gesture proved impossibly distressing. The monk’s grape-stained caco had returned, once again drawing sustenance through his right temple.

  I broke free of the maze, then dashed toward the cloister, drawn by a glimpse of Sister Ruth. She negotiated the quadrangle with measured strides, all the while cultivating the Lawyer Paradox. “If you find in favor of Euathlus, he owes me ten drachmas, as this is his first case,” she muttered. A malign bulge protruded from the left parietal area of her wimple, testament to a recrudescent caco.

  Constantine came hobbling across the grounds, his pointed hat and lederhosen giving him the appearance of a garden gnome. Fighting tears, suppressing sobs, he guided me into the abbey and up the stairs to the dormitory floor. An instant later I found myself in Articulis’s cell, his recumbent form stretched out along his pallet. The abbot’s head was free of cacos, but his face betrayed a pervasive anguish. Sweat speckled his forehead like condensation on a glass of iced tea.

  “Did you bring another paradox?” he inquired through clenched teeth.

  “Yes,” I said, lying.

  “A good one?”

  “Tremendous.”

  “Thank God.” Articulis released a rasping cough, the sort of wheezing hack that was less its own event than the symptom of a dire condition. “Last night a sixth parasite came among us. Tertullian neglected to foretell its advent, but I cannot deny the evidence of my senses. By cacodaemonic standards this new creature is apparently a great sage—though its appetites are not exotic. Even as we speak, it feeds contentedly on the Liar Paradox.”

  “Before attaching itself to Brother Jonathan, our Übercaco made a presentation to its fellows,” Constantine said, wiping Articulis’s fevered brow with a cold damp cloth. “In honor of Tertullian, the sage spoke in Latin. There is no Vorg, it revealed. The creator-god, like all creator-gods, is a fiction. Our galaxy is bereft of transcendent beings, but it does contain billions of spacefaring vagabonds, the category to which every caco belongs.”

  “Evidently they believed their sage,” I said.

  “Every word,” Articulis said.

  “And so the Fermi Paradox has collapsed.”

  “Never to rise again.”

  Closing his eyes, Articulis rolled onto his chest and pressed his moist face into the naked pillow. The shaft of a goose feather poked through the ticking. The abbot groaned, abducted from the moment by fever, pain, and weariness, his torments now bearing him to some muzzy borderland between sentience and sleep.

  Constantine took me aside and explained that, on learning the truth of their origins, the cacos became furious with Articulis, convinced that he’d deliberately deluded them. Before abandoning the abbot and wriggling away to their accustomed hosts, the invaders had avenged themselves, planting their stingers in his flesh and filling his veins with venom.

  Articulis, awakening, cried out for water. I filled his glass from a clay pitcher and placed it to his lips. “Tell me, Bartholomew, do you believe the sage’s argument? Is every creator-god a fiction?”

  Articulis took a protracted swallow. “For me, God the Father will always be real. I know my Redeemer liveth. The Omega Point beckons.” His sentences came slowly, each syllable purchased at the price of a spasm. “But until humanity attains that celestial apex, our Order must continue its great commission.” A seismic shudder possessed the abbot, a fleshquake rolling from his cranium to his knees. “My monks and nuns are all still at their posts, fighting the good fight, and as soon as I’m rid of this poison, I’ll tutor myself in your new paradox, then proceed to ponder—”

  Ponder. An appropriate last word for so thoughtful a man. We applied the usual tests, feeling for his pulse, pricking his heel, holding a mirror to his nostrils. Constantine drew a sheet over the abbot’s imposing frame, whereupon the two of us, Tertullianist and Tillichean, prayed for the soul of our departed friend.

  Shortly after sunrise, I helped the dwarf bury Articulis in the monastery graveyard, home to the hundreds of fault fighters who’d gone before him. The soft July ground yielded readily to our spades. At noon I visited the library. My search proved fruitful, providing me with a paradox such as Tertullian would never have anticipated in his wildest dreams.

  For the next four hours I sat in the refectory, cultivating the conundrum in the garden of my brain. Sister Margaret was the first to arrive. No sooner had she taken her place before a steaming bowl of venison stew than the caco detached itself from her occipital and started in the direction of its new Omega Point, myself, inching along the dining table like some ghastly casserole come horribly to life, leaving lambent threads of slime behind. Slithering up my abdomen, chest, cheek, brow, the parasite at last came to rest atop my head. The alien was predictably cold-blooded, assuming it had a circulatory system, but this sensation was easily offset by the hot flush of conquest I now experienced. I’d lured the beast, by God. I’d seduced it with my genius for absurdity.

  Brother Thomas appeared next, followed by Brother Francis, then Sister Ruth. In a matter of minutes my occipital region, right parietal, and left temple had each received a caco. Now Brother Jonathan entered the refectory, bearing his customary parasite on his crown. Sucking on the Liar Paradox, the Übercaco sprouted from his right temple, a lewd glistening invader, fatter than its fellows. I was not surprised when the lesser alien abandoned its host, twisting and flopping toward me until at last it found a home on my left parietal. The Übercaco remained in place, drawing affirmation from that vast set of antinomies by which a dissembler may dissemble to obscure his dissemblance. But my brain harbored a paradox more pleasing still—or so I hoped.

  Imagine a box, large enough to contain a cat plus an outlandish contraption consisting of a hammer, a flask of deadly gas, a nugget of radium, and a Geiger counter. For this particular radium sample it happens that, over the span of one hour, there is a fifty- fifty chance that the nucleus of a single atom will decay. Detected by the Geiger counter, this event will trip the hammer, which will in turn break the flask, thus releasing the poison gas and killing the cat. Note that our Gedanken demonstration perversely couples the macroworld of discernible reality to the microworld of quantum mechanics, that probabilistic plane on which, under certain circumstances, we may legitimately claim that the
collapse of the wave function occurs in consequence of the observer’s consciousness. We are thus forced to the unacceptable conclusion that, until the instant the experimenter opens the box and peers inside, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead, trapped in an absurd superposition of eigenstates.

  Concentrating ferociously, breathing as deliberately as a mother giving birth, I fixed Schrödinger’s Paradox in my mind, its paraphernalia growing more delicious with each passing second. The radium sample glowed. The flask coruscated. The Geiger counter acquired a silver aura. The hammer became a Platonic archetype. The cat’s pelt transmuted into a sleek numinous rainbow.

  After an excruciating interval the Übercaco abandoned Brother Thomas and undertook the journey to my brow, in time coming to rest on my right temple. Jeremiah entered and began to serve everyone Château Pelagius from a one- liter bottle. As he filled my goblet, I decided that my powers of concentration would not suffer in consequence of a few swallows. Thus it came to pass that, as the Tertullianists savored their wine, ate their stew, and battled the crack, I drank a toast to Schrödinger’s impossible cat.

  It has been plausibly asserted that losing always feels worse than winning feels good. But allow me to suggest that nothing could possibly feel as terrible as saving the world feels terrific. Of course, I couldn’t have done it without the help of three monks and two nuns, all of whom, to the degree that their vocations permit triumphalist emotions, doubtless share my pride and participate in my joy.

  The victory turned on our willingness to nurture the six absurdities or die in the attempt. We persisted, and we won. After a mere three weeks of contemplation, we beheld the tarn evaporate completely and the parent rift seal itself. The cacos hung around for another ten days, then finally took leave of my cranium, bound for some brighter star with better puzzles. And so it happens that, held to a standard of tangible evidence, the strange events related herein might as well never have occurred—a judgment that, the more you think about it, the faster it flips its facets: a verbal Necker cube.