The kid left, and Marilyn turned to me, her smile thanking me for waiting. “The humanities,” she said. “Aptly named, no? At least English literature is something that we’re the foremost authorities on. It’s nice that there are a couple of areas left like that.”
“I suppose,” I said. I was always after my own son to do his homework on time; didn’t teachers know that if they weren’t firm in their deadlines they were just making a parent’s job more difficult? Ah, well. At least this kid had gone to university; I doubted my boy ever would.
“Are you Professor Marilyn Maslankowski?” I asked.
She nodded. “What can I do for you?”
I didn’t extend my hand; we weren’t allowed to make any sort of overture to physical contact anymore. “Professor Maslankowski, my name is Andrew Walker. I’m a detective with the Toronto Police.” I showed her my badge.
Her brown eyes narrowed. “Yes? What is it?”
I looked behind me to make sure we were still alone. “It’s about your husband.”
Her voice quavered slightly. “Ethan? My God, has something happened?”
There was never any easy way to do this. I took a deep breath, then: “Professor Maslankowski, your husband is dead.”
Her eyes went wide and she staggered back a half-step, bumping up against the smartboard that covered the wall behind her.
“I’m terribly sorry,” I said.
“What—what happened?” Marilyn asked at last, her voice reduced to a whisper.
I lifted my shoulders slightly. “He killed himself.”
“Killed himself?” repeated Marilyn, as if the words were ones she’d never heard before.
I nodded. “We’ll need you to positively identify the body, as next of kin, but the security guard says it’s him.”
“My God,” said Marilyn again. Her eyes were still wide. “My God …”
“I understand your husband was a physicist,” I said.
Marilyn didn’t seem to hear. “My poor Ethan…” she said softly. She looked like she might collapse. If I thought she was actually in danger of hurting herself with a fall, I could surge in and grab her; otherwise, regulations said I had to keep my distance. “My poor, poor Ethan …”
“Had your husband been showing signs of depression?” I asked.
Suddenly Marilyn’s tone was sharp. “Of course he had! Damn it, wouldn’t you?”
I didn’t say anything. I was used to this by now.
“Those aliens,” Marilyn said, closing her eyes. “Those goddamned aliens.”
* * * *
Demand-Rebound Equilibrium: Although countless economic systems have been tried by various cultures, all but one prove inadequate in the face of the essentially limitless material resources made possible through low-cost reconfiguration of subatomic particles. The only successful system, commonly known as Demand-Rebound Equilibrium, although also occasionally called [Untranslatable proper name]’s Forge, after its principal chronicler, works because it responds to market forces that operate independently from individual psychology, thus …
* * * *
By the time we returned to Ethan’s office, he’d been cut down and laid out on the floor, a sheet the coroner had brought covering his face and body. Marilyn had cried continuously as we’d made our way across the campus. It was early January, but global warming meant that the snowfalls I’d known as a boy didn’t occur much in Toronto anymore. Most of the ozone was gone, too, letting ultraviolet pound down. We weren’t even shielded against our own sun; how could we expect to be protected from stuff coming from the stars?
I knelt down and pulled back the sheet. Now that the noose was gone, we could see the severe bruising where Ethan’s neck had snapped. Marilyn made a sharp intake of breath, brought her hand to her mouth, closed her eyes tightly, and looked away.
“Is that your husband?” I asked, feeling like an ass for even having to pose the question.
She managed a small, almost imperceptible nod.
It was now well into the evening. I could come back tomorrow to ask Ethan McCharles’s colleagues the questions I needed answered for my report, but, well, Marilyn was right here, and, even though her field was literature rather than physics, she must have some sense of what her husband had been working on. I repositioned the sheet over his dead face and stood up. “Can you tell me what Ethan’s specialty was?”
Marilyn was clearly struggling to keep her composure. Her lower lip was trembling, and I could see by the rising and falling of her blouse—so sharply contrasting with the absolutely still sheet—that she was breathing rapidly. “His—he … Oh, my poor, poor Ethan …”
“Professor Maslankowski,” I said gently. “Your husband’s specialty …?”
She nodded, acknowledging that she’d heard me, but still unable to focus on answering the question. I let her take her time, and, at last, as if they were curse words, she spat out, “Loop quantum gravity.”
“Which is?”
“Which is a model of how subatomic particles are composed.” She shook her head. “Ethan spent his whole career trying to prove LQG was correct, and …”
“And?” I said gently.
“And yesterday they revealed the true nature of the fundamental structure of matter.”
“And this—what was it?—this ‘loop quantum gravity’ wasn’t right?”
Marilyn let out a heavy sigh. “Not even close. Not even in the ballpark.” She looked down at the covered form of her dead husband, then turned her gaze back to me. “Do you know what it’s like, being an academic?”
I actually did have some notion, but that wasn’t what she wanted to hear. I shook my head and let her talk.
Marilyn spread her arms. “You stake out your turf early on, and you spend your whole life defending it, trying to prove that your theory, or someone else’s theory you’re championing, is right. You take on all comers—in journals, at symposia, in the classroom—and if you’re lucky, in the end you’re vindicated. But if you’re unlucky …”
Her voice choked off, and tears welled in her eyes again as she looked down at the cold corpse lying on the floor.
* * * *
[Untranslatable proper name] Award: Award given every [roughly 18 Earth years] for the finest musical compositions produced within the Allied Worlds. Although most species begin making music even prior to developing written language, [The same untranslatable proper name] argued that no truly sophisticated composition had ever been produced by a being with a lifespan of less than [roughly 1,100 Earth years], and since such lifespans only become possible with technological maturity, nothing predating a race’s overcoming of natural death is of any artistic consequence. Certainly, the winning compositions bear out her position: the work of composers who lived for [roughly 140 Earth years] or less seem little more than atonal noise when compared to …
* * * *
It had begun just two years ago. Michael—that’s my son; he was thirteen then—and I got a call from a neighbor telling us we just had to put on the TV. We did so, and we sat side by side on the couch, watching the news conference taking place in Pasadena, and then the speeches by the U.S. President and the Canadian Prime Minister.
When it was over, I looked at Michael, and he looked at me. He was a good kid, and I loved him very much—and I wanted him to understand how special this all was. “Take note of where you are, Michael,” I said. “Take note of what you’re wearing, what I’m wearing, what the weather’s like outside. For the rest of your life, people will ask you what you were doing when you heard.”
He nodded, and I went on. “This is the kind of event that comes along only once in a great while. Each year, the anniversary of it will be marked; it’ll be in all the history books. It might even become a holiday. This is a date like …”
I looked round the living room, helplessly, trying to think of a date that this one was similar to. But I couldn’t, at least not from my lifetime, although my dad had talked about July 20, 1969, in much the sa
me way.
“Well,” I said at last, “remember when you came home that day when you were little, saying Johnny Stevens had mentioned something called 9/11 to you, and you wanted to know what it was, and I told you, and you cried. This is like that, in that it’s significant … but … but 9/11 was such a bad memory, such an awful thing. And what’s happened today—it’s … it’s joyous, that’s what it is. Today, humanity has crossed a threshold. Everybody will be talking about nothing but this in the days and weeks ahead, because, as of right now”—my voice had actually cracked as I said the words—“we are not alone.”
* * * *
Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation: a highly isotropic radiation with an almost perfect blackbody spectrum permeating the entire universe, at a temperature of approximately [2.7 degrees Kelvin]. Although some primitive cultures mistakenly cite this radiation as proof of a commonly found creation myth—specifically, a notion that the universe began as a singularity that burst forth violently—sophisticated races understand that the cosmic microwave background is actually the result of …
* * * *
It didn’t help that the same thing was happening elsewhere. It didn’t help one damned bit. I’d been called in to U of T seven times over the past two years, and each time someone had killed himself. It wasn’t always a prof; time before McCharles, it had been a Ph.D. candidate who’d been just about to defend his thesis on some abstruse aspect of evolutionary theory. Oh, evolution happens, all right—but it turns out the mechanisms are way more complex than the ones the Darwinians have been defending for a century and a half. I tried not to get cynical about all this, but I wondered if, as he slit his wrists before reproducing, that student had thought about the irony of what he was doing.
The source of all his troubles—of so many people’s troubles—was a planet orbiting a star called 54 Piscium, some thirty-six light-years away. For two years now, it had been constantly signaling Earth with flashes of intense laser light.
Well, not quite constantly: it signaled for eighteen hours then paused for twenty, and it fell silent once every hundred and twelve days for a period just shy of two weeks. From this, astronomers had worked out what they thought were the lengths of the day and the year of the planet that was signaling us, and the diameter of that planet’s sun. But they weren’t sure; nobody was sure of anything anymore.
At first, all we knew was that the signals were artificial. The early patterns of flashes were various mathematical chains: successively larger primes, then Fibonacci sequences in base eight, then a series that no one has quite worked out the significance of but that was sent repeatedly.
But then real information started flowing in, in amazing detail. Our telecommunications engineers were astonished that they’d missed a technique as simple as fractal nesting for packing huge amounts of information into a very narrow bandwidth. But that realization was just the first of countless blows to our egos.
There was a clip they kept showing on TV for ages after we’d figured out what we were receiving: an astronomer from the last century with a supercilious manner going on about how contact with aliens might plug us into the Encyclopedia Galactica, a repository of the knowledge of beings millions of years ahead of us in science and technology, in philosophy and mathematics. What wonders it would hold! What secrets it would reveal! What mysteries it would solve!
No one was arrogant like that astronomer anymore. No one could be.
Of course, various governments had tried to put the genie back into the bottle, but no nation has a monopoly on signals from the stars. Indeed, anyone with a few hundred dollars worth of equipment could detect the laser flashes. And deciphering the information wasn’t hard; the damned encyclopedia was designed to be read by anyone, after all.
And so the entries were made public—placed on the web by individuals, corporations, and those governments that still thought doing so was a public service. Of course, people tried to verify what the entries said; for some, we simply didn’t have the technology. For others, though, we could run tests, or make observations—and the entries always turned out to be correct, no matter how outlandish their claims seemed on the surface.
I thought about Ethan McCharles, swinging from his fiber-optic noose. The poor bastard.
It was rumored that one group had sent a reply to the senders, begging them to stop the transmission of the encyclopedia. Maybe that was even true—but it was no quick fix. After all, any signal sent from Earth would take thirty-six years to reach them, and even if they replied—or stopped—immediately upon receipt of our message, it would take another thirty-six years for that to have an impact here.
Until then at least, data would rain down on us, poison from the sky.
* * * *
Life After Death: A belief, frequently encountered in unenlightened races, that some self-aware aspect of a given individual survives the death of the body. Although such a belief doubtless gives superstitious primitives a measure of comfort, it is easily proven that no such thing exists. The standard proofs are drawn from (1) moral philosophy, (2) quantum information theory, (3) non-[Untranslatable proper name] hyperparallactic phase-shift phenomenology, and (4) comprehensive symbolic philosologic. We shall explore each of these proofs in turn …
* * * *
“Ethan was a good man,” said Marilyn Maslankowski. We had left her husband’s office—and his corpse—behind. It was getting late, and the campus was mostly empty. Of course, as I’d seen, it was mostly empty earlier, too—who the hell wanted to waste years getting taught things that would soon be proven wrong, or would be rendered hopelessly obsolete?
We’d found a lounge to sit in, filled with vinyl-covered chairs. I bought Marilyn a coffee from a machine; at least I could do that much for her.
“I’m sure he was,” I said. They were always good men—or good women. They’d just backed the wrong horse, and—
No. No, that wasn’t right. They’d backed a horse when there were other, much faster, totally invisible things racing as well. We knew nothing.
“His work was his life,” Marilyn continued. “He was so dedicated. Not just about his research, either, but as a teacher. His students loved him.”
“I’m sure they did,” I said. However few of them there were. “Um, how did you get to work today?”
“TTC,” she replied. Public transit.
“Where abouts do you live?”
“We have a condo near the lake, in Etobicoke.”
We. She’d probably say “we” for months to come.
She’d finished her coffee, and I drained mine in a final gulp. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll give you a lift home.”
We headed down some stairs and out to the street. It was dark, and the sky seemed a uniform black: the glare of street lamps banished the stars. If only it were so easy …
We got into my car, and I started driving. Earlier, she’d called her two adult children. One, her daughter, was rushing back to the city from a skiing trip—artificial snow, of course. The other, her son, was in Los Angeles, but was taking the red-eye, and would be here by morning.
“Why are they doing this?” she asked, as we drove along. “Why are the aliens doing this?”
I moved into the left lane and flicked on my turn signal. Blink, blink, blink.
Off in the distance we could see the tapered needle of the CN Tower, Toronto’s—and, when I was younger—the world’s tallest building, stretching over half a kilometer into the air. Lots of radio and television stations broadcast from it, and so I pointed at it. “Presumably they became aware of us through our radio and TV programs—stuff we leaked out into space.” I tried to make my tone light. “Right now, they’d be getting our shows from the 1970s—have you ever seen any of that stuff? I suppose they think they’re uplifting us. Bringing us out of the dark ages.”
Marilyn looked out the passenger window. “There’s nothing wrong with darkness,” she said. “It’s comforting.” She didn’t say anything further as we continue
d along. The city was gray and unpleasant. Christmas had come and gone, and—
Funny thing; I hadn’t thought about it until just now. Used to be at Christmas, you’d see stars everywhere: on the top of trees, on lampposts, all over the place. After all, a star had supposedly heralded Jesus’ birth. But I couldn’t recall seeing a single one this past Christmas. Signals from the heavens just didn’t have the same appeal anymore …
Marilyn’s condo tower was about twenty stories tall, and some of the windows had tinfoil covering them instead of curtains. It looked like it used to be an upscale building, but so many people had lost their jobs in the past two years. I pulled into the circular driveway. She looked at me, and her eyes were moist. I knew it was going to be very difficult for her to go into her apartment. Doubtless, there’d be countless things of her husband’s left in a state that suggested he was going to return. My heart went out to her, but there was nothing I could do, damn it all. They should let us touch them. They should let us hold them. Human contact: it’s the only kind that doesn’t hurt.
After letting her off, I drove to my house, exhausted emotionally and physically; for most of the trip, the CN Tower was visible in my rearview mirror, as though the city was giving me the finger.
My son Michael was fifteen now, but he wasn’t home, apparently. His mother and I had split up more than five years ago, so the house was empty. I sat on the living-room couch and turned on the wall monitor. As always, I wondered how I was going to manage to hold onto this place in my old age. The police pension fund was bankrupt; half the stocks it had invested in were now worthless. Who wanted to own shares in oil companies when an entry might be received showing how to make cold fusion work? Who wanted to own biotechnology stocks when an entry explaining some do-it-yourself gene-resequencing technique might be the very next one to arrive?
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 543