What's Expected of Us and Others

by Ted Chiang

  His words gave me pause. “Had you planned to open a shop in Baghdad before today?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I had been marveling at the coincidence that we met in Baghdad just in time for me to make my journey here, use the Gate, and travel back. But now I wonder if it is perhaps not a coincidence at all. Is my arrival here today the reason that you will move to Baghdad twenty years from now?”

  Bashaarat smiled. “Coincidence and intention are two sides of a tapestry, my lord. You may find one more agreeable to look at, but you cannot say one is true and the other is false.”

  “Now as ever, you have given me much to think about,” I said.

  I thanked him and bid farewell. As I was leaving his shop, I passed a woman entering with some haste. I heard Bashaarat greet her as Raniya, and stopped in surprise.

  From just outside the door, I could hear the woman say, “I have the necklace. I hope my older self has not lost it.”

  “I am sure you will have kept it safe, in anticipation of your visit,” said Bashaarat.

  I realized that this was Raniya from the story Bashaarat had told me. She was on her way to collect her older self so that they might return to the days of their youth, confound some thieves with a doubled necklace, and save their husband. For a moment I was unsure if I were dreaming or awake, because I felt as if I had stepped into a tale, and the thought that I might talk to its players and partake of its events was dizzying. I was tempted to speak, and see if I might play a hidden role in that tale, but then I remembered that my goal was to play a hidden role in my own tale. So I left without a word, and went to arrange passage with a caravan.

  It is said, Your Majesty, that Fate laughs at men’s schemes. At first it appeared as if I were the most fortunate of men, for a caravan headed for Baghdad was departing within the month, and I was able to join it. In the weeks that followed I began to curse my luck, because the caravan’s journey was plagued by delays. The wells at a town not far from Cairo were dry, and an expedition had to be sent back for water. At another village, the soldiers protecting the caravan contracted dysentery, and we had to wait for weeks for their recovery. With each delay, I revised my estimate of when we’d reach Baghdad, and grew increasingly anxious.

  Then there were the sandstorms, which seemed like a warning from Allah, and truly caused me to doubt the wisdom of my actions. We had the good fortune to be resting at a caravanserai west of Kufa when the sandstorms first struck, but our stay was prolonged from days to weeks as, time and again, the skies became clear, only to darken again as soon as the camels were reloaded. The day of Najya’s accident was fast approaching, and I grew desperate.

  I solicited each of the camel drivers in turn, trying to hire one to take me ahead alone, but could not persuade any of them. Eventually I found one willing to sell me a camel at what would have been an exorbitant price under ordinary circumstances, but which I was all too willing to pay. I then struck out on my own.

  It will come as no surprise that I made little progress in the storm, but when the winds subsided, I immediately adopted a rapid pace. Without the soldiers that accompanied the caravan, however, I was an easy target for bandits, and sure enough, I was stopped after two days’ ride. They took my money and the camel I had purchased, but spared my life, whether out of pity or because they could not be bothered to kill me I do not know. I began walking back to rejoin the caravan, but now the skies tormented me with their cloudlessness, and I suffered from the heat. By the time the caravan found me, my tongue was swollen and my lips were as cracked as mud baked by the sun. After that I had no choice but to accompany the caravan at its usual pace.

  Like a fading rose that drops its petals one by one, my hopes dwindled with each passing day. By the time the caravan reached the City of Peace, I knew it was too late, but the moment we rode through the city gates, I asked the guardsmen if they had heard of a mosque collapsing. The first guardsman I spoke to had not, and for a heartbeat I dared to hope that I had misremembered the date of the accident, and that I had in fact arrived in time.

  Then another guardsman told me that a mosque had indeed collapsed just yesterday in the Karkh quarter. His words struck me with the force of the executioner’s axe. I had traveled so far, only to receive the worst news of my life a second time.

  I walked to the mosque, and saw the piles of bricks where there had once been a wall. It was a scene that had haunted my dreams for twenty years, but now the image remained even after I opened my eyes, and with a clarity sharper than I could endure. I turned away and walked without aim, blind to what was around me, until I found myself before my old house, the one where Najya and I had lived. I stood in the street in front of it, filled with memory and anguish.

  I do not know how much time had passed when I became aware that a young woman had walked up to me. “My lord,” she said, “I’m looking for the house of Fuwaad ibn Abbas.”

  “You have found it,” I said.

  “Are you Fuwaad ibn Abbas, my lord?”

  “I am, and I ask you, please leave me be.”

  “My lord, I beg your forgiveness. My name is Maimuna, and I assist the physicians at the bimaristan. I tended to your wife before she died.”

  I turned to look at her. “You tended to Najya?”

  “I did, my lord. I am sworn to deliver a message to you from her.”

  “What message?”

  “She wished me to tell you that her last thoughts were of you. She wished me to tell you that while her life was short, it was made happy by the time she spent with you.”

  She saw the tears streaming down my cheeks, and said, “Forgive me if my words cause you pain, my lord.”

  “There is nothing to forgive, child. Would that I had the means to pay you as much as this message is worth to me, because a lifetime of thanks would still leave me in your debt.”

  “Grief owes no debt,” she said. “Peace be upon you, my lord.”

  “Peace be upon you,” I said.

  She left, and I wandered the streets for hours, crying tears of release. All the while I thought on the truth of Bashaarat’s words: past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.

  Night fell, and it was then that the city’s guardsmen found me, wandering the streets after curfew in my dusty clothes, and asked who I was. I told them my name and where I lived, and the guardsmen brought me to my neighbors to see if they knew me, but they did not recognize me, and I was taken to jail.

  I told the guard captain my story, and he found it entertaining, but did not credit it, for who would? Then I remembered some news from my time of grief twenty years before, and told him that Your Majesty’s grandson would be born an albino. Some days later, word of the infant’s condition reached the captain, and he brought me to the governor of the quarter. When the governor heard my story, he brought me here to the palace, and when your lord chamberlain heard my story, he in turn brought me here to the throne room, so that I might have the infinite privilege of recounting it to Your Majesty.

  Now my tale has caught up to my life, coiled as they both are, and the direction they take next is for Your Majesty to decide. I know many things that will happen here in Baghdad over the next twenty years, but nothing about what awaits me now. I have no money for the journey back to Cairo and the Gate of Years there, yet I count myself fortunate beyond measure, for I was given the opportunity to revisit my past mistakes, and I have learned what remedies Allah allows. I would be honored to relate everything I know of the future, if Your Majesty sees fit to ask, but for myself, the most precious knowledge I possess is this:

  Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is
forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.

  The Great Silence

  The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe.

  But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices?

  We’re a non-human species capable of communicating with them. Aren’t we exactly what humans are looking for?

  • • •

  The universe is so vast that intelligent life must surely have arisen many times. The universe is also so old that even one technological species would have had time to expand and fill the galaxy. Yet there is no sign of life anywhere except on Earth. Humans call this the Fermi paradox.

  One proposed solution to the Fermi paradox is that intelligent species actively try to conceal their presence, to avoid being targeted by hostile invaders.

  Speaking as a member of a species that has been driven nearly to extinction by humans, I can attest that this is a wise strategy.

  It makes sense to remain quiet and avoid attracting attention.

  • • •

  The Fermi paradox is sometimes known as the Great Silence. The universe ought to be a cacophony of voices, but instead it’s disconcertingly quiet.

  Some humans theorize that intelligent species go extinct before they can expand into outer space. If they’re correct, then the hush of the night sky is the silence of a graveyard.

  Hundreds of years ago, my kind was so plentiful that the Rio Abajo forest resounded with our voices. Now we’re almost gone. Soon this rainforest may be as silent as the rest of the universe.

  • • •

  There was an African Grey Parrot named Alex. He was famous for his cognitive abilities. Famous among humans, that is.

  A human researcher named Irene Pepperberg spent thirty years studying Alex. She found that not only did Alex know the words for shapes and colors, he actually understood the concepts of shape and color.

  Many scientists were skeptical that a bird could grasp abstract concepts. Humans like to think they’re unique. But eventually Pepperberg convinced them that Alex wasn’t just repeating words, that he understood what he was saying.

  Out of all my cousins, Alex was the one who came closest to being taken seriously as a communication partner by humans.

  Alex died suddenly, when he was still relatively young. The evening before he died, Alex said to Pepperberg, “You be good. I love you.”

  If humans are looking for a connection with a non-human intelligence, what more can they ask for than that?

  • • •

  Every parrot has a unique call that it uses to identify itself; biologists refer to this as the parrot’s “contact call.”

  In 1974, astronomers used Arecibo to broadcast a message into outer space intended to to demonstrate human intelligence. That was humanity’s contact call.

  In the wild, parrots address each other by name. One bird imitates another’s contact call to get the other bird’s attention.

  If humans ever detect the Arecibo message being sent back to Earth, they will know someone is trying to get their attention.

  • • •

  Parrots are vocal learners: we can learn to make new sounds after we’ve heard them. It’s an ability that few animals possess. A dog may understand dozens of commands, but it will never do anything but bark.

  Humans are vocal learners, too. We have that in common. So humans and parrots share a special relationship with sound. We don’t simply cry out. We pronounce. We enunciate.

  Perhaps that’s why humans built Arecibo the way they did. A receiver doesn’t have to be a transmitter, but Arecibo is both. It’s an ear for listening, and a mouth for speaking.

  • • •

  Humans have lived alongside parrots for thousands of years, and only recently have they considered the possibility that we might be intelligent.

  I suppose I can’t blame them. We parrots used to think humans weren’t very bright. It’s hard to make sense of behavior that’s so different from your own.

  But parrots are more similar to humans than any extraterrestrial species will be, and humans can observe us up close; they can look us in the eye. How do they expect to recognize an alien intelligence if all they can do is eavesdrop from a hundred light years away?

  • • •

  It’s no coincidence that “aspiration” means both hope and the act of breathing.

  When we speak, we use the breath in our lungs to give our thoughts a physical form. The sounds we make are simultaneously our intentions and our life force.

  I speak, therefore I am. Vocal learners, like parrots and humans, are perhaps the only ones who fully comprehend the truth of this.

  • • •

  There’s a pleasure that comes with shaping sounds with your mouth. It’s so primal and visceral that throughout their history, humans have considered the activity a pathway to the divine.

  Pythagorean mystics believed that vowels represented the music of the spheres, and chanted to draw power from them.

  Pentecostal Christians believe that when they speak in tongues, they’re speaking the language used by angels in Heaven.

  Brahmin Hindus believe that by reciting mantras, they’re strengthening the building blocks of reality.

  Only a species of vocal learners would ascribe such importance to sound in their mythologies. We parrots can appreciate that.

  • • •

  According to Hindu mythology, the universe was created with a sound: “Om.” It’s a syllable that contains within it everything that ever was and everything that will be.

  When the Arecibo telescope is pointed at the space between stars, it hears a faint hum.

  Astronomers call that the “cosmic microwave background.” It’s the residual radiation of the Big Bang, the explosion that created the universe fourteen billion years ago.

  But you can also think of it as a barely audible reverberation of that original “Om.” That syllable was so resonant that the night sky will keep vibrating for as long as the universe exists.

  When Arecibo is not listening to anything else, it hears the voice of creation.

  • • •

  We Puerto Rican Parrots have our own myths. They’re simpler than human mythology, but I think humans would take pleasure from them.

  Alas, our myths are being lost as my species dies out. I doubt the humans will have deciphered our language before we’re gone.

  So the extinction of my species doesn’t just mean the loss of a group of birds. It’s also the disappearance of our language, our rituals, our traditions. It’s the silencing of our voice.

  • • •

  Human activity has brought my kind to the brink of extinction, but I don’t blame them for it. They didn’t do it maliciously. They just weren’t paying attention.

  And humans create such beautiful myths; what imaginations they have. Perhaps that’s why their aspirations are so immense. Look at Arecibo. Any species who can build such a thing must have greatness within it.

  My species probably won’t be here for much longer; it’s likely that we’ll die before our time and join the Great Silence. But before we go, we are sending a message to humanity. We just hope the telescope at Arecibo will enable them to hear it.

  The message is this:

  You be good. I love you.

  About the Author

  Ted Chiang is the author of Stories of Your Life and Others. He was born and raised in Port Jefferson, New York, and attended Brown University, where he received a degree in computer science. His debut story “Tower of Babylon” won the Nebula in 1990. Since then, he has won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1992, a Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for “Story of Your Life” (1998), a Sidewise Award for “Seventy-Two Letters” (2000), a Nebula Award, a Locus Award, and a Hugo Award
for his novelette “Hell Is the Absence of God” (2002), a Nebula Award and a Hugo Award for his novelette “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” (2007), a Hugo Award and a Locus Award for his short story “Exhalation” (2008), and most recently, a Hugo Award and a Locus Award for his novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2010). He lives outside of Seattle, Washington.