Identity Theft and Other Stories

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Oh,” said Sudeyko, as if a great mystery had been solved. “Right. Your planet is all one big land mass. So, there are no populations that were geographically isolated for millennia, correct?”

  “If I follow your meaning, yes, that is correct.”

  “So you never underwent anything like, say, what happened here when Europeans came to the Americas, or to Australia. You never had the devastation, the disease, and the decimation of populations that we experienced time and again when formerly isolated cultures came into contact, especially when one was clearly technologically more advanced than the other?”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “Well,” said Sudeyko, “the past’s the past. Let’s turn to the present. Tell me about your space program.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You know: your astronauts, your spaceships.”

  “I don’t know the words ‘astronauts’ or ‘spaceships.’”

  “So you don’t have a space program?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Why not? Judging by the material in the Reticulum, your civilization is substantially more advanced than ours, and we’ve been putting people in space for almost seventy years now.”

  “It never occurred to us that such a thing was possible.”

  “You didn’t dream from ancient times about going to other worlds?”

  Ursula twirled her inside arm in baffled negation. “No. Why would we?”

  “Well, that’s an interesting question,” said Sudeyko. “I suppose it’s possible that if we didn’t have a large moon ourselves—if we didn’t have another world hanging over our heads since the dawn of time, tantalizingly just out of reach—perhaps we wouldn’t have been inspired to venture into space, either.”

  “That’s an interesting supposition,” agreed Ursula.

  “You said earlier that an overwhelming majority of your whole population voted to send the Reticulum to planets in other star systems.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which means presumably most of you considered it a safe thing to do.”

  “Of course.”

  “Because, after all, if it never occurred to your people to travel even within your own solar system, it presumably never occurred to you that beings in other star systems might physically bridge the gulf between their world and yours.”

  “What a novel suggestion! Yes, you’re right: That never occurred to us.”

  Sudeyko moved over and began pacing back and forth in front of the jury box. It was hard to get anyone to take their eyes off Ursula in all her surrealist glory, but the historian wanted to be sure that everyone was looking at him, so his point would land with maximum force. “And so,” he said, “when your people voted, they were not considering the possibility that beings from another world, or their automated probes, might come and enslave, plunder, or destroy your world, isn’t that so?”

  “Yes,” said Ursula. “That is so.”

  “And, because of your planet’s specific circumstances, you blithely went ahead shouting your existence to neighboring stars, without the slightest thought you might be endangering your existence.”

  “Yes.”

  “But we, who have a history of disastrous first contacts even among our own people, and who have a space program and recognize that others might, too, do understand that attracting attention to ourselves on the galactic stage might in fact bring on unwanted, indeed dangerous, visitors.”

  “Objection!” said Hannah, rising to her feet. “Your honor, opposing counsel is arguing his case!”

  “Yes,” Judge Weisman said. “He certainly is—and very effectively, too, I might add. Court is recessed until nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  Emily and Hannah had gone for dinner at a sushi place near the courthouse. “You know,” Hannah said in a derisive tone, “if Sudeyko is right, it could already be over for Ursula’s people. Remember she said they sent their Reticulum to eleven other star systems besides ours? If, say, the beings at 20 Leonis Minoris—just a dozen light-years from them—were his dastardly berserkers, even if their battleships could only manage a third of the speed of light, they’d have had time to show up and annihilate Ursula’s world.”

  “You’re sure he’s wrong, aren’t you?” Emily said.

  “No,” said Hannah, “I’m not. You can’t prove a negative; you can’t prove hostile aliens don’t exist. But, thanks to you and your team, we now know for sure that peaceful ones do exist.”

  The closing arguments went pretty much as Emily expected them to. Hannah Plaxton extolled the virtues of altruistically sharing our art and culture, our science and our spiritual writings, not just with the people of 47 Ursae Majoris, who, after all, had already reached out to us, but also with as many other likely star systems as possible.

  And Piotr Sudeyko reiterated his belief that no such actions should be taken without a broad international consensus—even though, as a historian, he doubtless knew that such a thing likely would be impossible to attain.

  Judge Weisman gave instructions to the jurors and sent them off to deliberate; their verdict, whatever it might be, would further fuel debate. In that sense, by bringing the matter to wider attention, Sudeyko and the moratorium crowd had already won.

  People filed out of the courtroom, but Emily stayed behind. The staff had shut off the giant monitor standing next to the witness dock, but Emily touched the control that turned it back on and Ursula appeared on the screen. Emily regarded the avatar, and the avatar regarded her. At last, Ursula said, “May I be of assistance?”

  “Perhaps,” said Emily. “Suppose instead of us composing a reply, suppose we were to ask you to do it. If we gave you access to a powerful radio telescope or messaging laser, what message would you send back to your people about us?”

  Ursula’s limbs moved precisely as Emily’s team had programmed them to, mimicking what the neural nets had divined to be gestures of thoughtful reflection. And then the little round mouth irised opened and closed. “I’d tell them we made a mistake.”

  Emily was surprised by how sad that made her feel. “You wouldn’t have sent the Reticulum, if you had it to do over?”

  Ursula’s inside arm twirled. “No, no, no. That’s not the mistake. The mistake was not realizing that travel between worlds is possible. I would propose to my people that some of them should come here in person.”

  “And do you think they would actually do that? Come here? Come to visit humanity?”

  “I have no idea,” Ursula said. And then she raised all three arms. “But I know how I’d vote.”