Humans np-2

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Vietnamese.”

  “As you say. If they had chosen the Communist system by vote, then the American ideal of democracy would have been served. Surely you cannot hold democracy dear only when the vote goes the way you wish it would.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” said Mary. “A great many people thought the American involvement in Vietnam was wrong. They called it a profane war.”

  “Profane?”

  “Umm, an insult to God.”

  Ponter rolled his eyebrow up his browridge. “From what I have seen, this God of yours must have a thick skin.”

  Mary tilted her head, conceding the point.

  “You have told me,” said Ponter, “that the majority of people in this country are Christians, like you, is that not so?”

  “Yes.”

  “How big a majority?”

  “Big,” said Mary. “I was actually reading up on this when I moved down here. The U.S. has a population of about 270 million.” Ponter had heard this figure before, so its vastness didn’t startle him this time. “About a million are atheists—they don’t believe in God at all. Another twenty-five million are non-religious; that is, they don’t adhere to any particular faith. All the other faith groups combined—Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus—add up to about 15 million. Everyone else—almost 240 million—say they are Christians.”

  “So this is a Christian country,” said Ponter.

  “Welllll, like my home country of Canada,” said Mary, “the U.S. prides itself on its tolerance of a variety of beliefs.”

  Ponter waved a hand dismissively. “Two hundred and forty million out of two hundred and seventy million is almost ninety percent; it is a Christian country. And you and others have told me the core beliefs of Christians. What did Christ say about those who would attack you?”

  “The Sermon on the Mount,” said Mary. She closed her eyes, presumably to aid her remembering. “‘Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’”

  “So revenge has no place in the policies of a Christian nation,” said Ponter. “And yet you say that is a reason it fights wars. Likewise, impeding the free choice of a foreign country should have had no place in the policies of a democratic nation, and yet it fought this war in Vietnam.”

  Mary said nothing.

  “Do you not see?” said Ponter. “That is what this memorial, this Vietnam veterans’ wall, should serve as a reminder of: the pointlessness of death, the error—the grave error, if I may attempt my own play on words in your language—of declaring a war in contravention of your most dearly held principles.”

  Mary was still silent.

  “That is the reason why future American wars should be declared here—right here. Only if the cause stands the test of supporting the most dearly held fundamental principles, then perhaps it is a war that should be fought.” Ponter let his eyes run over the wall again, over the black reflection.

  Mary said nothing.

  “Still,” said Ponter, “let me make a simpler proposition. Those letters you read—they are, I presume, typical?”

  Mary nodded. “Ones like them are left here every day.”

  “But do you not see the problem? There is an underlying belief in those letters that the dead are not really dead. ‘God is taking care of you.’ ‘We will all be together again.’ ‘I know you are watching over me.’ ‘Someday I will see you again.’”

  “We’ve been down this road before,” said Mary. “My kind of humanity—not just Christians, but most Homo sapiens, no matter what their particular religion—believe that the essence of a person does not end with the death of the body. The soul lives on.”

  “And that belief,” said Ponter firmly, “is the problem. I have thought this since you first told me of it, but it is—what do you say?—it is driven home for me here, at this memorial, this wall of names.”

  “Yes?” said Mary.

  “They are dead. They are eliminated. They no longer exist.” He reached forward and touched a name he could not read. “The person who was named this.” He touched another. “And the person who was named this.” And he touched a third. “And the person who had this name. They are no more. Surely facing that is the real lesson of this wall. One cannot come here to speak with the dead, for the dead are dead. One cannot come here to beg forgiveness from the dead, for the dead are dead. One cannot come here to be touched by the dead, for the dead are dead. These names, these characters carved in stone—that is all that is left of them. Surely that is the message of this wall, the lesson to be learned. As long as your people keep thinking that this life is a prologue, that more is to come after it, that those wronged here will be rewarded in some there yet to come, you will continue to undervalue life, and you will continue to send young people off to die.”

  Mary took a deep breath and let it out slowly, apparently composing herself. She gestured with a movement of her head. Ponter turned to look. Another person—a gray-haired man—was placing a letter of his own in front of the wall. “Could you tell him?” asked Mary, speaking sharply. “Tell him that he’s wasting his time? Or that woman, over there—the one on her knees, praying? Could you tell her? Disabuse her of her delusion? The belief that somewhere their loved ones still exist gives them comfort.”

  Ponter shook his head. “That belief is what caused this to happen. The only way to honor the dead is by ensuring that no more enter that state prematurely.”

  Mary sounded angry. “All right, then. Go tell them.”

  Ponter turned and looked at the Gliksins and their ebony reflections in the wall. His people almost never took human lives, and Mary’s people did it on such large scales, with such frequency. Surely this belief in God and an afterlife had to be linked to their readiness to kill.

  He took a step forward, but…

  But, right now, these people did not look vicious, did not look bloodthirsty, did not look ready to kill. Right now, they looked sad, so incredibly sad.

  Mary was still upset with him. “Go on,” she said, gesturing with a hand. “What’s the holdup? Go tell them.”

  Ponter thought about how sad he himself had been when Klast had died. And yet…

  And yet, these people—these strange, strange Gliksins—were taking some comfort from their beliefs. He stared at the individuals by the wall, kept away from him by armed agents. No, no, he would not tell these mourners that their loved ones were truly gone. After all, it wasn’t these sad people who had sent them off to die.

  Ponter turned toward Mary. “I understand the belief provides comfort, but…” He shook his head. “But how do you break out of the cycle? God making killing palatable, God providing comfort after the killing is done. How do you keep from repeating it over and over again?”

  “I have no idea,” said Mary.

  “You must do something,” Ponter said.

  “I do,” said Mary. “I pray.”

  Ponter looked at her, looked back at the mourners, then turned once more to Mary, and he let his head hang, staring down at the ground in front of him, unable to face her or the thousands of names. “If I thought there was the slightest possibility it would work,” he said softly, “I would join you.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “Fascinating,” said Jurard Selgan. “Fascinating.”

  “What?” Ponter’s voice was tinged with irritation.

  “Your behavior, while at the memorial wall commemorating those Gliksins who had died in southeast Galasoy.”

  “What about it?” said Ponter. His voice was sharp, like that of someone trying to talk while a scab was being picked off.

  “Well, this was not the first time your beliefs—our beliefs, as Barasts—had been in conflict with those of the Gliksins, was it?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Indeed,” said Selgan, “such conflicts must have come up on your first visit there, n
o?”

  “I guess.”

  “Can you give me an example?” asked Selgan.

  Ponter folded his arms in front of his chest. “All right,” he said, in a smug, I’ll-show-you tone. “I mentioned this to you right at the beginning: the Gliksins have this silly notion that the universe has only existed for a finite time. They’ve completely misconstrued the redshift evidence, thinking it indicates an expanding universe; they don’t understand that mass varies over time. Further, they think the cosmic microwave background radiation is the lingering echo of what they call ‘the big bang’—a vast explosion they believe started the universe.”

  “They seem to like things blowing up,” said Selgan.

  “They certainly do. But, of course, the uniformity of the background radiation is really caused by repeated absorption and emission of electrons trapped in plasma-pinching magnetic-vortex filaments.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” said Selgan, conceding that this wasn’t his territory of expertise.

  “I am right,” replied Ponter. “But I didn’t fight with them over that issue. During my first visit, Mare said to me, ‘I don’t think you’re going to convince many people that the big bang didn’t happen.’ And I told her that was fine; I said: ‘Feeling a need to convince others that you’re right is something that comes from religion; I’m simply content to know that I am right, even if others don’t know it.’”

  “Ah,” said Selgan. “And do you really feel that way?”

  “Yes. To the Gliksins, knowledge is a battle! A territorial war! Why, to have their equivalent of the title ‘Scholar’ conferred upon you, you have to defend a thesis. That’s the word they use: defend! But science isn’t about defending one’s position against all comers; it’s about flexibility and open-mindedness and valuing the truth, no matter who finds it.”

  “I concur,” said Selgan. He paused for a moment, then: “But you didn’t spend much time looking for any evidence as to whether the Gliksins might have been right in their belief in an afterlife.”

  “That’s not true. I gave Mary every opportunity to demonstrate the validity of that claim.”

  “Before this encounter at the memorial wall, you mean?”

  “Yes. But she had nothing!”

  “And so, as in the case of their finite cosmology, you let the matter go, content to know that you were right?”

  “Yes. Well, I mean…”

  Selgan raised his eyebrow. “Yes?”

  “I mean, all right, sure, I argued with her about this belief in an afterlife. But that was different.”

  “Different from the cosmological question? Why?”

  “Because so much more was at stake.”

  “Doesn’t the cosmological question deal with the ultimate fate of the entire universe?”

  “I mean, it wasn’t just an abstract issue. It was—it is—the heart of everything.”

  “Why?”

  “Because…because—gristle, I don’t know why. It just seems terribly important. It’s what lets them fight all those wars, after all.”

  “I understand. But I also understand that it is fundamental to their beliefs; it was something that surely you must have realized they weren’t going to give up easily.”

  “I suppose.”

  “And yet, you continued to press the point.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Why?”

  Ponter shrugged.

  “Would you like to hear my guess?” asked Selgan.

  Ponter shrugged again.

  “You were pushing this issue because you wanted to see if there was some proof of this afterlife. Perhaps Mare, and the other Gliksins, had been holding out on you. Perhaps there was evidence that she would reveal if you kept pushing.”

  “There cannot be evidence for that which does not exist,” said Ponter.

  “Granted,” said Selgan. “But either you were trying to convince them that you were right—or you were trying to force them to convince you that they were right.”

  Ponter shook his head. “It was pointless,” he said. “It is a ridiculous belief, this notion of souls.”

  “Souls?” said Selgan.

  “The immaterial part of one’s essence that they believe is immortal.”

  “Ah. And you say this is a ridiculous belief?”

  “Of course.”

  “But surely they are entitled to hold it, no?”

  “I guess.”

  “Just as they are entitled to their bizarre cosmological model, no?”

  “I suppose.”

  “And yet, you couldn’t let this question of an afterlife go, could you? Even once you’d left the memorial wall, you still tried to push this point, didn’t you?”

  Ponter looked away.

  With the crisis over the closing of the portal at least temporarily averted—there was no way the Neanderthals would shut it down now with a dozen of their most valuable citizens on this side—Jock Krieger decided to return to the research he’d been doing earlier.

  He left Seabreeze, driving his black BMW to the River Campus of the University of Rochester; the river in question was the Genesee. When he’d been setting up Synergy, a couple of phone calls from the right people was all it had taken to get his entire staff full priority access to the UR Library holdings. Jock parked his car in the Wilmot Lot, and headed into the brown brick Carlson Science & Engineering Library—named for Chester F. Carlson, the inventor of xerography. Journals, Jock knew, were on the first floor. He showed his university VIP ID to the librarian, a pudgy black woman with her hair in a red kerchief. He told her what he needed, and she waddled off into the back. Jock, never one to waste time, pulled out his PDA and scanned articles from that day’s New York Times and Washington Post.

  After about five minutes, the librarian returned, presenting Jock with the three back issues he’d requested—one of Earth and Planetary Science Letters, and two of Nature—which his Web-searching had shown contained follow-ups to the rapid-magnetic-reversal research by Coe, et al.

  Jock found an unoccupied study carrel and sat down. The first thing he did was remove his HP CapShare from his briefcase—a battery-powered hand-held document scanner. He ran the device over the pages of the articles he was interested in, capturing them at 200 dpi, adequate for OCRing later. Jock smiled at the portrait of Chester Carlson mounted near where he was sitting—he’d have loved this little unit.

  Jock then started reading the actual articles. What was most interesting about the original piece, the one in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, was that the authors freely acknowledged that the results they’d found were at odds with conventional wisdom, which held that magnetic collapses would take thousands of years to occur. That belief though, was apparently based not so much on established facts but rather just a general feeling that the Earth’s magnetic field was a ponderous thing that couldn’t rapidly stand on its head.

  But Coe and Prévot had found evidence of extremely rapid collapses. Their studies were based on lava flows at Steens Mountain in southern Oregon, where a volcano had erupted fifty-six separate times during a magnetic-field reversal, providing time-lapse snapshots of the action. Although they couldn’t determine the intervals between the eruptions, they did know how long the lava in each one must have taken to cool to the Curie Point, where the magnetization of the newly formed rocks would be locked in, matching the current orientation and strength of Earth’s magnetic field. The study suggested the field had collapsed in as little as a few weeks, rather than over a period of millennia.

  Jock read the follow-up article by Coe and company in Nature, as well as a critique of it by a man named Ronald T. Merrill, which seemed to amount to nothing more than what Merrill himself referred to as “the principle of least astonishment:” a dogmatic statement that it was simpler to believe that Coe and Prévot were flat-out wrong, rather than to have to accept such a remarkable finding, despite being unable to show any flaw in their work.

  Jock Krieger leaned back in the study
carrel’s chair. It seemed what Ponter had told that Canadian-government geologist, Arnold Moore, was likely correct.

  And that, Jock realized, meant there might be no time to waste.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The Paleoanthropology Society met each year, alternately in conjunction with the Association of American Archeology and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. This year, it happened to be the former, and the venue was the Crowne Plaza at Franklin Square.

  The format was simple: a single track of programming, consisting of fifteen-minute presentations. There was only occasionally time for questions; John Yellen, the chair of the society, kept things on schedule with Phileas Fogg precision.

  After the first day of papers, many of the paleoanthropologists adjourned to the hotel bar. “I’m sure people would love a chance to get to talk to you informally,” said Mary to Ponter, as they stood in the corridor leading to the bar. “Shall we go in?”

  Standing solemnly near them was an FBI agent, one of their shadows throughout this trip.

  Ponter flared his nostrils. “There are people smoking in that room.”

  Mary nodded. “In a lot of jurisdictions, thank God, bars are the only place people can still smoke—and Ottawa and some other places have even outlawed it in bars.”

  Ponter frowned. “It is too bad this meeting could not be in Ottawa.”

  “I know. If you can’t stand it, we don’t have to go in.”

  Ponter considered. “I have had many little ideas for inventions while I have been here, mostly adapting Gliksin technology. But I suspect the one that would make the biggest contribution would be developing nasal filters so that my people will not be constantly assaulted by smells here.”

  Mary nodded. “I don’t like the smell of tobacco smoke, either. Still…”

  “We can go in,” said Ponter.