N = R * fg * nchz * fl * fi * ft * L
where N = number of technical civilizations, R = rate of star formation, fg = fraction of stars with planets, nchz = number of planets that are habitable, fl = fraction of these developing life, fi = fraction of these developing intelligent life, ft = fraction of these with communications technology, and L = length of attempted communication. Of course, the equation says nothing about the values of the terms. Guesses for these are hotly debated, resulting in estimates for the number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy ranging as high as 100,000 and as low as zero. After a quarter century of listening for messages from unknown galactic neighbors, all scientists have yet heard is a very imposing silence. Finding an intelligent signal would immediately present the enormous problem of how to respond. A two-line dialogue between sentient planets could take centuries; our great-great-great-grandchildren would have to remember what we said in order to make sense of the reply, assuming they could make human sense of nonhuman words. It is hard to say which would be more sobering: to hear someone answer our “Are you there?” with “Yes,” or to learn that the whole experiment lies entirely in our hands.
Of course, the real question was not whether intelligent life existed elsewhere in the universe but whether there was intelligent life on Earth. Still, I delighted in my answer, knowing who was asking. He meant to let me know that I could hear from deep space if I wanted to. The two of them would enter and reenter my life, persistent, transposed, inverted, retrograde, spread through different voicings, announcing themselves in all contexts for every reason, sounding the capricious, cantabile motive as often as I let them.
Three answers in one day was a good haul by any standard; most people don’t arrive at three definitive answers in a lifetime. And I had accomplished all three in the interstices, between the other duties demanded by one of the NYPL’s sixty Brooklyn franchises. True, I had also fielded the routine phone calls: armchair investors too lazy to get off their A-ratings and read their own Value Lines, high school kids asking for a definition of S-O-D-O-M-Y (tape machine audible in the background), the bewildered citizens who’d crawled out of their paneled dens to request the names of senators. Those, plus the archiving, inventorying, and maintenance work, the box-piling tasks that monopolize existence. But three for the fait accompli file: in that I took considerable fisherman’s pride.
Back home, I found my POSSLQ—Person of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters—hard at work on a campaign alerting the public to a major dental development that would, like the Great Wall of China, provide the long-sought security of Tartar Control. As I fell into the front room, Keithy asked cheerily, “So what’d she do all day?” For the first time all day, I was stumped. Coming at the end of the stack, this seemed less question than request for intimacy. And intimacy was no longer mine to give. I flopped on the couch, undid some buttons, and capitulated. The candy dish stood in for dinner. I listened to Keithy insult mankind for my amusement. “Looky here. You hate this photo? How about this text? Totally humiliating? Good. I think we’ve got a wiener, here.”
Lying slack, I thought of something my mother said, the first and only time she ever came out from Indiana to visit me. “This is not a city,” she sneered in utter distaste for the place I’d chosen as home. “This is a country. A world.” I was new here myself then, and thought she was right. Precisely the reason I had come here to live. A country, a world, large enough to lose oneself in. Now I roused myself enough to look out of the front picture window onto the East River, a stunning view that cost Keith and me half our income. On the far side, the fanfare of lights, the community that was slowly killing us. From where I lay I could see my mother’s error. Nothing stood between me and the insane compression of midtown. No moat, no ad-campaign misanthropy could shut out the runaway numbers, the gang rape of the place.
Keith watched with me as the lights came on—Japanese-lantern bridges, street pearls, block skyscrapers that flared as if half the executives in the world worked late. He burlesqued the view, the most overwhelming display of scale that the race has yet assembled, dropping into his smarmy announcer’s voice. “Experience the charm of Halogen.” He did it to relax me, but I hated him for it all the same. I picked a block on this side of the river and populated it: two souls of unfortunately high intelligence sitting alone among precision machinery, watching over the magnetic data by night, arguing, as if it mattered, over whether we were the only going show in the universe. Clear-faced Todd, obvious closet romantic, held out for other intelligent life, while his night-shift companion, a generation older, told the boy to stop kidding himself. Imagining this insignificant dialogue in this uncounted corner of a sprawl too dense to map adequately, I reversed my mother’s terrified conviction about the city. This was not a world. It was an abandoned colonial outpost, a private conversation. Only the buildings were big.
Fear of scale came over me: if I lay there any longer, every uncountable block in these awful islands would become inhabited. Clicking heels and chanting “There’s no place like Elkhart” was no longer an option. I had to do something quickly—leave some entry on this July 15—or lose myself in the cycle of torn-off days. I lifted myself like a wet foal. Without explaining, I left Tuckwell still talking to himself, in lone possession of the front room. Shutting the door with a furtive thump that echoed badly down the months ahead, I locked myself in our bedroom. I picked up the receiver and dialed the number Todd had given me. A number I’d filed for easy retrieval.
The half of the night shift I could claim some knowledge of answered. Franklin professed to be glad I’d called. “You’ll never guess what has happened. I confronted Dr. Ressler with your evidence. He was greatly impressed.” I waited for him to go on. Ten seconds, an epoch over the phone. How do messages travel simultaneously over phone wires without colliding? It occurred to me that while wires did not technically carry any information when both parties were mute, passed silence nevertheless required a phone.
I looked for anything to fill the gap. “I’ve contacted your extraterrestrials. If you come by the branch …”.
“Maybe it’s time you visited us here.” He gave me the address, one that took my breath away. A dozen buildings from the branch. I knew the exact place, a brick turn-of-the-century warehouse that gave away nothing of its contents. The city, big, uncountably massive, had a way of turning viciously small, like Nauru, digging itself into disappearance. A range of adjoining neighborhoods that refuse to collect. Ten million neighborhoods of one. It is not skyscrapers; it is the bottoms of deep troughs, deeper than the carved canyons out west, cut from harder stone.
Familiar forward motion, bandying between the two of us: the tone of our first social phone conversation stated that it was all right to feel all right, even in mid-July, even with a bad conscience. Bad conscience has no survival value. Todd’s confidence cascade gave me a go-ahead to go ahead and do what I wanted to, to indulge in whatever worked. But a slight condition, an extra saddle, was tucked away in the injunction. I could not beat this conversation in one. To give in to the rush, the thrill of voices piling up against voices, colliding over the phone wires, I had to count the thing in three. In my mind, I already stood on a July evening outside their warehouse. Keith, at last coming in to bed, found his POSSLQ lying motionless but wide-awake. He asked if anything was wrong. I answered no, hearing the word leave me, too late to retrieve. The first time I ever lied to him.
V
THE QUOTE BOARD
For all knowledge and wonder (which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself.
—Francis Bacon
“I only ask for information.”
—Rosa Dartle, in David Copperfield
TRANSCRIPTION AND TRANSLATION
In those weeks when we were happiest, and well into that nightmare period when he learned what was coming, Dr. Ressler’s theme was always the same: the world was awash in messages, every living thing a unique signal. We were all cub interpreters a
t a babble-built UN, obligated to convert the covert metaphor, tweak the tuner, read the mechanism by actively attacking its surface. The catch to this elaborate Wissenschaft was the active obligation to extract cache from courier. I managed to avoid that imperative, ignore the mess in his message, until Frank left, Ressler died. Now time forces the issue. Time, as the Bacon entry says, just below the quote linking knowledge to pleasure, is the author of authors. Time to start my cub translation, to learn the place, as I’m likely to be here a little longer.
The whole day free, hours without end. How hard to make anything of unbudgeted time. In my remaining free days, I’ve decided to learn something, become expert, exchange fact for feeling, reverse what I’ve done with my life to date. A needy soul once asked me, through the anonymous three-by-five, what old film had an important state secret transported across Europe via musical code. Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, 1938: a banner year for secret European messages. I remembered the question this morning, listening to that other musical code whose message our circle carried through a similar plague year. I could whistle that melody in the dark, its pleasure returned permanently to school by grief. The tune of my new career.
My chief problem is what to study. Something empirical, something hard. My prospect of success depends on where in the hierarchy I attach myself. I start with top magnification, fix my lens on cosmology. If that level remains abstract, I could drop to the step below, stop down an order of magnitude, make due with astronomy. A working knowledge of galaxies must be of some use in naming the place where I’m left.
But the light-year is too long for me to get my bearing. I must reduce the magnification another exponent, start my study with the earth under my lens. A geologist I suppose, or oceanographer. But the explanations of this critical niche are still too large. I am after not earth science but its underwriting specific. Down another order. The search for a starting point begins to resemble that painful process of elimination from freshman year, spent in the university clinic, a knot across my abdomen from having to choose which million disciplines I would exclude myself from forever.
This time I narrow ruthlessly. I sharpen my focus to the raw component populations inhabiting this planet. Zoologist, anthropologist? Neither would yet clamp down on the why I’m after. I go a finer gauge, assuming that understanding can be best arrived at by isolating terms. That means downshifting again to the vocabulary of political science. The first limb of the hierarchy that speaks human dialect: what do we need, and how best to get it? The question is powerful, but as I zoom in on the increasingly precise concern, explanations recede, grow fuzzy and qualified. A faction of me secedes, insists that political science can be understood only in terms of constituent economics. But the study of goods, services, and distribution produces more problems than prescriptions.
Herds, it seems, are hundreds of individuals. Feeling no edge, I scale myself down into psychology. Here my lens reaches that cusp magnification: one-to-one. But a complete explanation of behavior requires somatic cause. Focal ratio flips, increases again, now in the microscopic direction. Psych shades over the bio threshold. The gradients, the gauges are continuous. Fields of study, like spectral bands, differ only in wavelength. No discrete moment when red ends and orange begins. Yet every constituent bent from white has its precise and particular name.
The final gloss hovers always one frame beneath. Physiology. Biophysics. Biochemistry. More light. Molecular biology, the transitional rung where Dr. Ressler hung. Downwards toward delineation, I consider studying chemistry. Unsatisfied, I pass another strangeness barrier, into quantum physics, beyond conceptual modeling. A push for terminal detail takes me into the statistics of perhaps. Here, in the domain of sub-subatomics, where I expect to butt up at last against fundamental phenomena, I find, instead, a field veering startlingly philosophical: eleven dimensions, superstrings, the eightfold way. Like a Klein bottle, insides twisting seamlessly onto out, small-scale physics drops off the edge of formal knowledge back into cosmology.
The whole hierarchical range up and down the slide rule of science shares one aim: to write the universe’s User’s Manual, to bring moonlight into a chamber. But what scale to choose? I’m thrown back on Lewis Carroll’s information theory fable, the map paradox. A kingdom undertakes a marvelous cartographic project. They know that an inch to a thousand miles is too gross, giving only rough orientation of the largest places. The royal cartographers improve steadily over the years: at a hundred miles to the inch, true roads take shape. At ten per, the map navigates from village to village. At a mile to a map inch, individual structures become visible. The more exact the scale, the more useful the map. The kingdom’s surveyors launch the supremely ambitious project of mapping the region at an inch to an inch—a map every bit as detailed as the represented terrain. The apotheosis of encapsulation, the supermap has only one drawback: the user can’t unroll it without covering the landscape in question.
This is my problem in choosing a field to fill the ten months my savings leave me. The whole hierarchy spreads in front of me in imbedded frames. But each rung, cross-referenced, reads, “For more information, see below.” Hinduism says the world rests on the back of a tortoise standing on the back of tortoise, etc. One of those terrapins must reach bottom. Where can I break in? What discipline will put me closest to knowing him? A year ago, when Dr. Ressler received the verdict of his cells (but not yet the sentence), the three of us met for a last evening before pulling the switch. Franklin asked if he felt any regrets about straying from his training, losing his career. “What would I be if I could start over?” Todd nodded furiously at his succinct rephrasing, so much more accurate than what he’d asked. Dr. Ressler thought in the white waterfall hum of the computer installation. At last he said, “There are really only two careers that might be of any help. One can either be a surgeon or a musician.”
I set my magnification, choose my lens. Since surgery arrives too late, I’ll be a musician. I’ll spend what remains of my life savings studying music. First, I must tackle theory. And for a good grounding in tonal fundamentals, I must first learn everything I can about the genetic code.
On the strength of that late-afternoon decision, I rode the D over to the main reading room. There I drew up a preliminary reading list. This evening, back home, I sit armed with a stack of texts on two-week loan. I toy with this pointless bookwork as if training for a genuine career change, a way of making a living after my bank account runs out. It wouldn’t be too late for such an overhaul. The field is rife with refugees, immigrants from sister disciplines and distant relations. I come across a man who began in physics and earned an undergraduate degree at the ripe age of twenty-two. Global war sidetracked his studies, stripping him of seven years in military science. After the war, he again postponed an already alarmingly delayed career to spend two years retraining in another discipline. Only at the ancient age of thirty-three did he finally enroll in a Ph.D. program in his new field. Four years later, luxuriously older than I am now, he at last filed his dissertation. But a few months before, Francis Crick had also cowritten the Nobel Prize-winning paper revealing the structure of DNA.
I set off, late, to make myself expert, with no pretense of adding to the dizzy swell, simply wanting to swim it myself. I need to know exactly what happened to Stuart Ressler between 1957 and 1983. And only a sense of the tonal variations hidden in self-replicating molecules will lead me there. Having spent my life distributing fact, it was odd to sit this evening in front of reference books, see them take on a different complexion. In my years at the branch, these works were the final destination. Now their pages seem more like customs clearance prior to departure, the last port before incognita. With Bacon still open in the quote book, I go to the well again: if a woman will be content to begin in uncertainty, she might end by drawing provocative maps indeed.
The scope of the stuff I have set myself is utterly draining. But I feel a certain excitement at the volume and novelty of material I must get throug
h before any of it starts to cohere. A thrill at wondering whether coherence will come in the ten months left to my cash stockpile. I set my scale at the only gauge I have ever had firsthand experience of. For my attack on the life molecule, I fall back on that fine old obsolete mode of sightsinging: historiography. Tonight—the overviews, the outlines. Tomorrow, next week, a month from now—the big leap, that evolutionary giant step dear to saltationists. The jump from information to knowledge.
THE LAW OF SEGREGATION
Dr. Ressler and Cyfer were no spontaneous generation. The more I read of the first twentieth-century science, the clearer the chain of ideas about heredity stretches continuously back through speculation to the start of thought. The scenic overview leaves me nursing a metaphor: the idea of chemical heredity is itself an evolving organism, subject to the laws it is after. Or better: the field grows as a living population, a varying pool of proposals constantly weeded, altered by selection. Theories duplicate or die by feasibility. Every article floating in the journal-sea on the day Dr. Ressler began life’s work was an inheritable idea-gene vying for survival.
I sift the birth records of consecutive generations. Pleasant, to disassemble this random assortment and rebuild it into a body of thought. The principal names return from college biology, supplemented by professional searches from my last ten years. I see for the first time what an undertaking the thing is, how stunning the setbacks and solutions. I begin to view it from the air. Dr. Ressler assisted in the final push to join three islands. Mendel on one, observing that characteristics in intricate organisms were preserved in patterns. Mendeleyev, with his atomic construction set on another. On the third remote tip, Darwin, whose species-mad pageant was a continuous thread, a diversifying alluvial fan. Heredity, chemistry, and evolution, about to be spanned by a simple, magnificent triple-suspension more remarkable than anyone imagined.
The Gold Bug Variations Page 10
