Existence

by David Brin

  MARTIN RAMER (FOR THE BBC): We’re here with Jonamine Bat Amittai, compiler of Pandora’s Cornucopia—the epibook that’s been scaring and depressing so many of us ever since Awfulday, conveying all the myriad ways that the universe might have it in for us, bringing an end to human existence. Or perhaps only our dreams.

  Either way, it’s been a heady ride through the valley of potential failure and plausible death. Jonamine, how do you explain the popularity of your series?

  JONAMINE BAT AMITTAI: Men and women have always been attracted to stories about ultimate doom, from the Books of Daniel and Revelation to Ragnarok, from Mayan cycles to Nostradamus, from Dr. Strangelove to Life After People. Perhaps there is an element of schadenfreude, or deriving abstract pleasure from the troubles of others—even if those others will be your own descendants. Or else, some may feel stimulated to relish what they have, in the precious here-and-now, especially if our lives and comforts appear to be on temporary loan from a capricious universe. For billions of people, nostalgia fascinates with the notion that the past is always better and preferable over the future.

  I like to think that much of our fascination with this topic arises from our heritage as practical problem-solvers. The curiosity that drew our ancestors toward danger, in order to begin puzzling ways around it.

  MARTIN RAMER: But your list is so lengthy, so extensive, so depressingly thorough. Even supposing that we do manage to discover some pitfalls in time, and act prudently to avoid them—

  JONAMINE BAT AMITTAI: And we have already. Some of them.

  MARTIN RAMER: But dodging one bullet seems always to put us in front of another.

  JONAMINE BAT AMITTAI: Is there a question, Mr. Ramer? Or were you merely stating the obvious?

  50.

  DIVINATION

  The art that I practice is the only true form of magic.

  It had taken Hamish years to realize this consciously, though he must have suspected it as a child, while devouring fantasy novels and playing whatever interactive game had the best narrative storyline. Later, at university and grad school, even while diligently studying the ornate laws and incantations of science, something had always struck him as wrong about the whole endeavor.

  No, wrong wasn’t the word. Sterile. Or dry, or pallid … that is, compared to worlds of fiction and belief.

  Then, while playing hooky one day from biomedical research, escaping into the vast realm of a little novel, he found a clue to his dilemma, in a passage written by the author, Tom Robbins.

  Science gives man what he needs.

  But magic gives him what he wants.

  A gross oversimplification? Sure. Yet, Hamish instantly recognized the important distinction he’d been floundering toward.

  For all its beauty, honesty, and effectiveness at improving the human condition, science demands a terrible price—that we accept what experiments tell us about the universe, whether we like it or not. It’s about consensus and teamwork and respectful critical argument, working with, and through, natural law. It requires that we utter, frequently, those hateful words—“I might be wrong.”

  On the other hand, magic is what happens when we convince ourselves something is, even when it isn’t. Subjective Truth, winning over mere objective fact. The will, triumphing over all else. No wonder, even after the cornucopia of wealth and knowledge engendered by science, magic remains more popular, more embedded in the human heart.

  Whether you labeled it faith, or self-delusion, or fantasy, or outright lying—Hamish recognized the species’ greatest talent, a calling that spanned all cultures and times, appearing far more often, in far more tribes, than dispassionate reason! Combine it with enough ardent wanting, and the brew might succor you through the harshest times, even periods of utter despair.

  That was what Hamish got from the best yarns, spun by master storytellers. A temporary, willing belief that he could inhabit another world, bound by different rules. Better rules than the dry clockwork rhythms of this one.

  * * *

  The cephalopod emerged from her habitat-cage slowly, cautiously, soon after her handlers opened the gate. Two of her eight tentacles probed the rim as Tarsus brought her bulbous head forward, allowing one big eye—gleaming with feral intelligence—to peer around the rest of the pool. A few rocks and fronds dotted the sandy bottom. Briefly, she tracked some of the fish, darting overhead. But they were too quick and high to try for. She had eaten the slow or unwary, long ago.

  With no other danger or opportunity in sight, Tarsus gave a pulse with her siphon, propelling herself toward the only thing of interest. A man-made box with two lids on top.

  Whenever they let her out, it meant she had a task to do—one that Tarsus had performed many times before.

  * * *

  Oh, for sure, science wasn’t worthless. Hamish knew there was plenty of good work still to be done in the great laboratories, poking Nature, prying loose more secrets. Research was often a noble endeavor—he still viewed it that way—though one easily led astray.

  Only, each night, even back in grad school, Hamish would feel the call of his old-fashioned laptop, and the characters who dwelled within. Dramatic premises kept popping into his head, during each day’s series of tedious meetings and meticulous lab rounds. And most of the stories that poured out through his fingertips revolved around a single, anxious worry.

  Yes, the experiment is awesome. The new device seems cool. It may advance progress and make many lives better.

  But what if things go horribly, catastrophically wrong?

  Suppose, this time, we’ve gone too far?

  He would picture slime molds, escaping their petri dish prisons, bursting forth to engulf screaming co-workers, then swarming outside to swallow a city. Some promising new drug might develop awful, delayed side effects, turning your loved ones into terrifying strangers. He envisioned robots escaping all their programmed safeguards, in order to go on killing sprees, then using their former human masters for spare parts. The next tomb unearthed by a naive archaeologist could spew forth poison spores, or hauntings. A new birth control pill instead unleashes Children of the Damned, assisted by aborted fetuses on a rampage! Or do-gooder environmentalists might cripple the nation’s industry and bring on a new stone age. He imagined SETI sky-searches attracting predatory computer viruses that then hypnotize humanity into slavery. Sure, the scenarios were lurid, but that just made them easier, and more fun to write!

  Always, of course, there would be a lead character who—with Hamish’s own voice—started each book by wagging his finger, issuing dire warnings against the coming Big Mistake. A protagonist who later (as the dead piled higher) got to say, “I told you so!”

  * * *

  Tarsus used puffs of siphoned water to hover over the box, before bringing all eight of her tentacle arms into play, fondling the polished wooden surface. Bringing one eye close, and then the other, she examined new decorations that adorned each of the two latched covers.

  She knew that she would only be allowed to open one of the compartments. As soon as she chose a lid to pry back, the other would lock. Not that it mattered. She always got a prize—a juicy crab—whichever door she selected. And yet, she never picked randomly.

  Faces crowded close, human faces, pressing against the other side of a nearby observation pane. Their eyes—the only feature that seemed octopuslike—followed her every movement. Tarsus had a sense that her choice mattered to them. And so, obligingly, she examined the illustrations atop each lid, both visually and with a probing tendril tip.

  * * *

  When his career took off—with books and films and then vivid immersives—jealous complainers gathered round, yapping at Hamish. His stories played loose with scientific fact, they griped. His research consisted of gathering enough vocabulary and jargon to make the outlandish sound plausible.

  Even worse (claimed his critics), Hamish Brookeman ignored all the modern safeguards and layers of accountability that earnest men and women had erected, in
order to prevent exactly the mistakes that drove his tales. One reviewer even claimed to find a deeper pattern—that every calamity plot Hamish ever wrote arose because his arrogant villain-scientists compulsively insisted upon secrecy. Without that one ingredient, most of the disaster scenarios in his tales would get corrected by wiser heads. So, wasn’t his real complaint about doing bold things in the dark? The older, more magical way?

  Wouldn’t most of his warnings become moot, in a world with more openness, rather than less?

  Such talk used to hurt, at first. But in time, Hamish learned to ignore the critics, even those who called him a “traitor to science.” He accomplished it quite simply, by writing them into his next tale—with thinly disguised name changes—to get eviscerated on cue. That was satisfaction enough. Ironically, it allowed him to stay genially mild and pleasant to almost everybody out here, in the merely real world.

  * * *

  Tarsus found no meaning in either of the symbols.

  On rare occasions, she had recognized one or both, when the figures were shaped like things she knew. A fish or a simple octopus, or the spindly motif of a man. Far more often, they were just square-cornered emblems—combinations of the pure, flat, static colors that humans seemed to prefer … so different from the subtle hues and shades that rippled across the photo-active skin of any cephalopod, quicker than thought, letting an octopus like Tarsus blend into almost any background.

  These emblems just lay there, as always, dull and uninspiring. Only, this time at least the shapes were unusual. They had the stretched outlines of air-breathing creatures, with limbs to carry them about, on land.

  But they weren’t human.

  * * *

  And so, for a while, especially during the years with Carolyn, Hamish found some happiness, playing in one cosmos after another of his own devising—wherein he could be God, decreeing harsh punishments for ambitious vanity, meting out justice for the sin of hubris and technological pride.

  Anyway, didn’t civilization obviously value him far more as a spinner of scary tales than it ever had before, as a researcher?

  And who am I, to argue with civilization?

  Yet, as the years passed and his voice grew stronger—becoming a leader in the rising Renunciation Movement—there came strange pangs that tasted like regret.

  Which brought him around, full circle, to the very topic he had tried pushing from his ever busy thoughts. The message of the artilens—the aliens dwelling inside the virtual space of the Havana Artifact.

  Nobody survives, they assured.

  Not as organic beings, dwelling on the fragile, filmy surface of planets, exposed to innumerable dangers from above, below, and on every side. Plus countless hazards of their own making. That type of life is just too fragile, prone to countless missteps and mistakes. Nursery worlds like your Earth are fine for spawning new intelligent races. But then you must move on to higher states of being, before time runs out.

  It left Hamish in a quandary. One small part of him felt vindicated by the aliens’ desolate story. The portion that had always viewed civilization—and its pompous, self-important fury—to be futile. A side of him that knew, all along, how inadequate human beings were. A species inherently doomed, whether by God, fate, or ornery nature, from very the start.

  Now? Upon learning that most, or all, other intelligent races fell for the same long list of lethal mistakes? That only seemed to reinforce the point. In fact, no event ever gave as much energy as this one had, to the Renunciation Movement. New recruits and donors were flocking to the Prophet and his cause. Drawn by his latest, brilliant sales pitch.

  “The aliens never said that all species die…,” Tenskwatawa had gone on air to preach. “All they are saying is that such species stop being detectable as ambitious, high-tech civilizations.

  “That means there is an out!” the Prophet continued. “A way to avoid the many pitfalls and extinction modes described by the aliens. And that way is to opt out of the game!

  “Others out there—perhaps many others—may have chosen to step back from the hi-tech precipice. They chose to avoid the minefields, quicksand pits, and self-destruction modes, by the simplest means possible.

  “By settling back into older, wiser ways.

  “By ceasing to move forward.”

  * * *

  Tarsus contemplated the patterns of colors. One of them was jagged and symmetrical, kind of like a starfish. The color and texture were strange, however, offering a tangy synesthesia, an inferred taste that was not unlike a clam with flecks of manganese nodule in its shell.

  The other emblem was visually more rotund—it resembled (to her eye) something akin to a jellyfish. But under her stroking tentacle, there was a bumpy roughness to the imprinted image that smelled like time … vast amounts of it, congealed and stale.

  She didn’t care for either of the patterns, but Tarsus knew that she must contemplate them for an allotted interval, and then select one as preferable over the other, or else the hatch covers would not loosen. So she fondled the paper coverings, peered at them, even used her beak to take samples, stroking with her tongue and musing on whatever subtleties lay beyond mere wood pulp and waterproof paste …

  … at which point she chose.

  * * *

  A murmur of excitement yanked Hamish out of his reverie and back to the present. Most of the onlookers in the Cephalo-Delphi Center were leaning toward an observation window, separating them from the large aquarium tank, where a famous prognosticating octopus had finally made her choice, opening one of two hatches representing alternate possible futures.

  Having gained access, Tarsus was now dismembering a crab, with relish, ignoring the creature’s bitter resistance with snapping claws. Her caretaker, Dr. Nolan, announced the augury results with evident satisfaction.

  “Tarsus has spoken. On the basis of her choice, our investor co-op has purchased ten thousand wager-shares on the Chicago Predictions Exchange, betting that the International Contact Commission will continue to be deadlocked in stalemate for at least another week, delaying their recommendations for what to do about the alien artifact.

  “Given that Tarsus has accurately forecast outcomes on nine of her last twelve tries—well above statistical significance—we expect that other investors will follow suit. And now, if you will follow me to the reception area, there will be refreshments while I answer any questions.”

  Hamish hung back, feeling miffed as the crowd followed Dr. Nolan. This was supposed to be his morning with Tarsus. But that appointment for a private audience with the eight-armed soothsayer had been put off, preempted, so that the keepers might ask their octopus-seer another silly, useless question about the Havana Artifact.

  There was a time when they would not treat the famous Hamish Brookeman that way. As recently as a few weeks ago.

  After all, what did it matter if that raucous pack of scientists, scholars, and politicians in Virginia dithered over their report? With the world spiraling into disorder, frenzy, or despair, was any public statement likely to make a difference?

  In fact, Hamish had made his appointment to consult Tarsus several months ago, before anyone knew about crystals filled with ersatz aliens. Back when his top concern had been the hunt for the Basque Chimera, the infant son of Agurne Arrixaka Bidarte. A search that now seemed secondary, even inconsequential.

  In fact, he had been contemplating a completely different question to ask Tarsus, today. Something much more timely, even personal.

  And if that made Tenskwatawa angry?

  So what. Let him hunt for the Neanderthal boy without my help!

  Hamish still nursed hurt feelings over the snub, back at that elite gathering in Switzerland, when the leader of the Renunciation Movement kept him away from the main event, a private viewing of Rupert Glaucus-Worthington’s greatest treasure—a crystal skull that must have once been an emissary from space. Hamish would have missed it all, but for intervention by mysterious third parties. Ever since that eve
ning, he had felt loyalties slipping. Not his belief in Renunciation; that was still firm. But his willingness to leave all decisions to one leader.

  A leader who was now firming up an alliance with trillionaire lords.

  Well? argued part of his mind—the devil’s advocate. Is there any other group that can make renunciation work? It won’t happen in a democracy. At least the trillies have experience managing great enterprises and making decisions from the shadows. History shows that only an oligarchy can suppress technology’s breakneck race ahead. And that conference in Switzerland showed one encouraging aspect. All those boffin papers, on how an elite can rule with noblesse oblige—at least they seem to be taking their new responsibilities seriously.

  Anyway, what choice will we have?

  Humanity could only survive by rejecting the aliens’ path. By returning to its roots. To the social pattern that ruled every other civilization but this one.

  And yet—

  —yet his own role and importance in these unfolding events seemed to be diminishing, day by day. Even when the Prophet asked his advice, it seemed off-hand, even perfunctory. And Hamish was coming to realize something bitter, but true.

  He did not want to become just another boffin-lackey for the new oligarchy.

  Hamish fondled a small, sealed container, no bigger than his knuckle, in his jacket pocket. It contained a single contaict lens. If he slipped it on, it might put him back in touch with the mysterious strangers who once guided him through the halls of Rupert Glaucus-Worthington’s expansive mansion, leading him by secret passages to witness the New Lords in action. To see, with his own eyes, how Rupert and his peers confronted the unexpected. And that moment had changed him.

  In their expressions of dull surprise, he had not seen the visage of wise leaders. Not Plato’s philosopher kings, but stunned and ignorant men, clinging to preconceptions, as likely to make grand errors as anybody else.