Visions of the Future

by Brin, David

  Wer immer strebens sich bemüht,

  Den können wir erlösen.

  Lily sighed. “Okay, boss.”

  “And enjoy yourself!”

  “Okay, boss, okay.”

  “Find a man, Lily,” MacDonald muttered. And then he, too, turned toward the living room, for Lily had been the last who might come.

  He listened for a moment at the doorway, sipping slowly from the warming can.

  “—work more on gamma rays—”

  “Who’s got the money to build a generator? Since nobody’s built one yet, we don’t even know what it might cost.”

  “—gamma-ray sources should be a million times more rare than radio sources at twenty-one centimeters—”

  “That’s what Cocconi said nearly fifty years ago. The same arguments. Always the same arguments.”

  “If they’re right, they’re right.”

  “But the hydrogen-emission line is so uniquely logical. As Morrison said to Cocconi—and Cocconi, if you remember, agreed—it represents a logical, prearranged rendezvous point. ‘A unique, objective standard of frequency, which must be known to every observer of the universe,’ was the way they put it.”

  “—but the noise level—”

  MacDonald smiled and moved on to the kitchen for a cold can of beer.

  “—Bracewell’s ‘automated messengers’?” a voice asked querulously.

  “What about them?”

  “Why aren’t we looking for them?”

  “The point of Bracewell’s messengers is that they make themselves known to us!”

  “Maybe there’s something wrong with ours. After a few million years in orbit—”

  “—laser beams make more sense.”

  “And get lost in all that star shine?”

  “As Schwartz and Townes pointed out, all you have to do is select a wavelength of light that is absorbed by stellar atmospheres. Put a narrow laser beam in the center of one of the calcium absorption lines—”

  In the study they were talking about quantum noise.

  “Quantum noise favors low frequencies.”

  “But the noise itself sets a lower limit on those frequencies.”

  “Drake calculated the most favorable frequencies, considering the noise level, lie between 3.2 and 8.1 centimeters.”

  “Drake! Drake! What did he know? We’ve had nearly fifty years experience on him. Fifty years of technological advance. Fifty years ago we could send radio messages one thousand light-years and laser signals ten light-years. Today those figures are ten thousand and five hundred at least.”

  “What if nobody’s there?” Adams said gloomily.

  Ich bin der Geist der stets vernient.

  “Short-pulse it, like Oliver suggested. One hundred million billion watts in a ten billionth of a second would smear across the entire radio spectrum. Here, Mac, fill this, will you?”

  And MacDonald wandered away through the clustering guests toward the bar.

  “And I told Charley,” said a woman to two other women in the corner, “if I had a dime for every dirty diaper I’ve changed, I sure wouldn’t be sitting here in Puerto Rico—”

  “—neutrinos,” said somebody.

  “Nuts,” said somebody else, as MacDonald poured grain alcohol carefully into the glass and filled it with orange juice, “the only really logical medium is Q waves.”

  “I know—the waves we haven’t discovered yet but are going to discover about ten years from now. Only here it is nearly fifty years after Morrison suggested it, and we still haven’t discovered them.”

  MacDonald wended his way back across the room.

  “It’s the night work that gets me,” said someone’s wife. “The kids up all day, and then he wants me there to greet him when he gets home at dawn. Brother!”

  “Or what if everybody’s listening?” Adams said gloomily. “Maybe everybody’s sitting there, listening, just the way we are, because it’s so much cheaper than sending.”

  “Here you are,” MacDonald said.

  “But don’t you suppose somebody would have thought of that by this time and begun to send?”

  “Double-think it all the way through and figure what just occurred to you would have occurred to everybody else, so you might as well listen. Think about it—everybody sitting around, listening. If there is anybody. Either way it makes the skin creep.”

  “All right, then, we ought to send something.”

  “What would you send?”

  “I’d have to think about it. Prime numbers, maybe.”

  “Think some more. What if a civilization weren’t mathematical?”

  “Idiot! How would they build an antenna?”

  “Maybe they’d rule-of-thumb it, like a ham. Or maybe they have built-in antennae.”

  “And maybe you have built-in antennae and don’t know it.”

  MacDonald’s can of beer was empty. He wandered back toward the kitchen again.

  “—insist on equal time with the Big Ear. Even if nobody’s sending we could pick up the normal electronic commerce of a civilization tens of light-years away. The problem would be deciphering, not hearing.”

  “They’re picking it up now, when they’re studying the relatively close systems. Ask for a tape and work out your program.”

  “All right, I will. Just give me a chance to work up a request—”

  MacDonald found himself beside Maria. He put his arm around her waist and pulled her close. “All right?” he said.

  “All right.”

  Her face was tired, though, MacDonald thought. He dreaded the notion that she might be growing older, that she was entering middle age. He could face it for himself.

  He could feel the years piling up inside his bones. He still thought of himself, inside, as twenty, but he knew that he was forty-seven, and mostly he was glad that he had found happiness and love and peace and serenity. He even was willing to pay the price in youthful exuberance and belief in his personal immortality. But not Maria!

  Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,

  Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

  Ché la diritta via era smarrita.

  “Sure?”

  She nodded.

  He leaned close to her ear. “I wish it was just the two of us, as usual.”

  “I, too.”

  “I’m going to leave in a little while—”

  “Must you?”

  “I must relieve Saunders. He’s on duty. Give him an opportunity to celebrate a little with the others.”

  “Can’t you send somebody else?”

  “Who?” MacDonald gestured with good-humored futility at all the clusters of people held together by bonds of ordered sounds shared consecutively. “It’s a good party. No one will miss me.”

  “I will.”

  “Of course, querida.”

  “You are their mother, father, priest, all in one,” Maria said. “You worry about them too much.”

  “I must keep them together. What else am I good for?”

  “For much more.”

  MacDonald hugged her with one arm.

  “Look at Mac and Maria, will you?” said someone who was having trouble with his consonants. “What goddamned devotion!”

  MacDonald smiled and suffered himself to be pounded on the back while he protected Maria in front of him. “I’ll see you later,” he said.

  As he passed the living room someone was saying, “Like Edie said, we ought to look at the long-chain molecules in carbonaceous chondrites. No telling how far they’ve traveled—or been sent—or what messages might be coded in the molecules.”

  He closed the front door behind him, and the noise dropped to a roar and then a mutter. He stopped for a moment at the door of the car and looked up at the sky.

  E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

  The noise from the hacienda reminded him of something—the speakers in the control room. All those voices talking, talking, talking, and from here he could not understand a thing.

&n
bsp; Somewhere there was an idea if he could only concentrate on it hard enough. But he had drunk one beer too many—or perhaps one too few.

  After the long hours of listening to the voices, MacDonald always felt a little crazy, but tonight it was worse than usual. Perhaps it was all the conversation before, or the beers, or something else—some deeper concern that would not surface.

  But then the listeners had to be crazy to begin with—to get committed to a project that might go for centuries without results.

  Tico-tico, tico-tico…

  Even if they could pick up a message, they still would likely be dead and gone before any exchange could take place even with the nearest likely star. What kind of mad dedication could sustain such perseverance?

  They’re listening in Puerto Rico.

  Religion could. At least once it did, during the era of cathedral building in Europe, the cathedrals that took centuries to build.

  “What are you doing, fellow?”

  “I’m working for ten francs a day.”

  “And what are you doing?”

  “I’m laying stone.”

  “And you—what are you doing?”

  “I am building a cathedral.”

  They were building cathedrals, most of them. Most of them had that religious mania about their mission that would sustain them through a lifetime of labors in which no progress could be seen.

  Listening for words that never come…

  The mere layers of stone and those who worked for pay alone eliminated themselves in time and left only those who kept alive in themselves the concept, the dream.

  But they had to be a little mad to begin with.

  Can it be the stars are stricken dumb?

  Tonight he had heard the voices nearly all night long. They kept trying to tell him something, something urgent, something he should do, but he could not quite make out the words. There was only the babble of distant voices, urgent and unintelligible.

  Tico-tico, tico-tic…

  He had wanted to shout “Shut up!” to the universe. “One at a time!” “You first!” But of course there was no way to do that. Or had he tried? Had he shouted?

  They’re listening with ears this big!

  Had he dozed at the console with the voices mumbling in his ears, or had he only thought he dozed? Or had he only dreamed he waked? Or dreamed he dreamed?

  Listening for thoughts just like their own.

  There was madness to it all, but perhaps it was a divine madness, a creative madness. And is not that madness that which sustains man in his terrible self-knowledge, the driving madness which demands reason of a casual universe, the awful aloneness which seeks among the stars for companionship?

  Can it be that we are all alone?

  The ringing of the telephone half penetrated through the mists of mesmerization. He picked up the handset, half expecting it would be the universe calling, perhaps with a clipped British accent, “Hello there, Man. Hello. Hello. I say, we seem to have a bad connection, what? Just wanted you to know that we’re here. Are you there? Are you listening? Message on the way. May not get there for a couple of centuries. Do be around to answer, will you? That’s a good being. Righto.…”

  Only it wasn’t. It was the familiar American voice of Charley Saunders saying, “Mac, there’s been an accident. Olsen is on his way to relieve you, but I think you’d better leave now. It’s Maria.”

  Leave it. Leave it all. What does it matter? But leave the controls on automatic; the computer can take care of it all. Maria! Get in the car. Start it. Don’t fumble! That’s it. Go. Go. Car passing. Must be Olsen. No matter.

  What kind of accident? Why didn’t I ask? What does it matter what kind of accident? Maria. Nothing could have happened. Nothing serious. Not with all those people around. Nil desperandum. And yet—why did Charley call if it was not serious? Must be serious. I must be prepared for something bad, something that will shake the world, that will tear my insides.

  I must not break up in front of them. Why not? Why must I appear infallible? Why must I always be cheerful, imperturbable, my faith unshaken? Why me? If there is something bad, if something impossibly bad has happened to Maria, what will matter? Ever? Why didn’t I ask Charley what it was? Why? The bad can wait; it will get no worse for being unknown.

  What does the universe care for my agony? I am nothing. My feelings are nothing to anyone but me. My only possible meaning to the universe is the Project. Only this slim potential links me with eternity. My love and my agony are me, but the significance of my life or death are the Project.

  hic.sitvs.est.phaethon.cvrrvs.avriga.paterni qvem.si.non.tenvit.magnis.tamen.excidit.avsis

  By the time he reached the hacienda, MacDonald was breathing evenly. His emotions were under control. Dawn had grayed the eastern sky. It was a customary hour for Project personnel to be returning home.

  Saunders met him at the door. “Dr. Lessenden is here. He’s with Maria.”

  The odor of stale smoke and the memory of babble still lingered in the air, but someone had been busy. The party remains had been cleaned up. No doubt they all had pitched in. They were good people.

  “Betty found her in the bathroom off your bedroom. She wouldn’t have been there except the others were occupied. I blame myself. I shouldn’t have let you relieve me. Maybe if you had been here— But I knew you wanted it that way.”

  “No one’s to blame. She was alone a great deal,” MacDonald said. “What happened?”

  “Didn’t I tell you? Her wrists. Slashed with a razor. Both of them. Betty found her in the bathtub. Like pink lemonade, she said.”

  Percé jusques au fond du coeur.

  D’une atteinte imprévue aussi bien que mortelle.

  A fist tightened inside MacDonald’s gut and then slowly relaxed. Yes, it had been that. He had known it, hadn’t he? He had known it would happen ever since the sleeping pills, even though he had kept telling himself, as she had told him, that the overdose had been an accident.

  Or had he known? He knew only that Saunders’ news had been no surprise.

  Then they were at the bedroom door, and Maria was lying under a blanket on the bed, scarcely making it mound over her body, and her arms were on top of the blankets, palms up, bandages like white paint across the olive perfection of her arms, now, MacDonald reminded himself, no longer perfection but marred with ugly red lips that spoke to him of hidden misery and untold sorrow and a life that was a lie.…

  Dr. Lessenden looked up, sweat trickling down from his hairline. “The bleeding is stopped, but she’s lost a good deal of blood. I’ve got to take her to the hospital for a transfusion. The ambulance should be here any minute.” MacDonald looked at Maria’s face. It was paler than he had ever seen it. It looked almost waxen, as if it were already arranged for all time on a satin pillow. “Her chances are fifty-fifty,” Lessenden said in answer to his unspoken question.

  And then the attendants brushed their way past him with their litter.

  “Betty found this on her dressing table,” Saunders said. He handed MacDonald a slip of paper folded once.

  MacDonald unfolded it: Je m’en vay chercher un grand Peut-être.

  Everyone was surprised to see MacDonald at the office. They did not say anything, and he did not volunteer the information that he could not bear to sit at home, among the remembrances, and wait for word to come. But they asked him about Maria, and he said, “Dr. Lessenden is hopeful. She’s still unconscious. Apparently will be for some time. The doctor said I might as well wait here as at the hospital. I think I made them nervous. They’re hopeful. Maria’s still unconscious.…”

  O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!

  The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike…

  Finally MacDonald was alone. He pulled out paper and pencil and worked for a long time on the statement, and then he balled it up and threw it into the wastebasket, scribbled a single sentence on another sheet of paper, and called Lily.

  “Send this!”<
br />
  She glanced at it. “No, Mac.”

  “Send it!”

  “But—”

  “It’s not an impulse. I’ve thought it over carefully. Send it.”

  Slowly she left, holding the piece of paper gingerly in her fingertips. MacDonald pushed the papers around on his desk, waiting for the telephone to ring. But without knocking, unannounced, Saunders came through the door first.

  “You can’t do this, Mac,” Saunders said.

  MacDonald sighed. “Lily told you. I would fire that girl if she weren’t so loyal.”

  “Of course she told me. This isn’t just you. It affects the whole Project.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking about.”

  “I think I know what you’re going through, Mac—” Saunders stopped. “No, of course I don’t know what you’re going through. It must be hell. But don’t desert us. Think of the Project!”

  “That’s what I’m thinking about. I’m a failure, Charley. Everything I touch—ashes.”

  “You’re the best of us.”

  “A poor linguist? An indifferent engineer? I have no qualifications for this job, Charley. You need someone with ideas to head the Project, someone dynamic, someone who can lead, someone with—charisma.”

  A few minutes later he went over it all again with Olsen. When he came to the qualifications part, all Olsen could say was, “You give a good party, Mac.”

  It was Adams, the skeptic, who affected him most. “Mac, you’re what I believe in instead of God.”

  Sonnenborn said, “You are the Project. If you go, it all falls apart. It’s over.”

  “It seems like it, always, but it never happens to those things that have life in them. The Project was here before I came. It will be here after I leave. It must be longer lived than any of us, because we are for the years and it is for the centuries.”

  After Sonnenborn, MacDonald told Lily wearily, “No more, Lily.”

  None of them had had the courage to mention Maria, but MacDonald considered that failure, too. She had tried to communicate with him a month ago when she took the pills, and he had been unable to understand. How could he riddle the stars when he couldn’t even understand those closest to him? Now he had to pay.