“The usual mistakes,” said Thu. It was a moment before I realized he was quoting the voice. “And the usual consequences.”
“I was thinking about that, too,” Tashel Ban replied. “Also about what it means that they can send a program to a computer they know nothing about, and still get results like the ones we’ve seen. That shouldn’t be possible.”
“With four million years of practice?” Eleen pointed out.
“Twenty-two million years,” said Thu, “if they learned the trick from others.”
That brought another long silence. I don’t know for sure that everyone else was thinking about what that much time means, but I certainly was.
“There was a debate,” Eleen said then, “in the old world, about technology. Almost everyone back then thought that technology could just keep on progressing forever, becoming more and more powerful, until human beings could do anything they could imagine. There were a few scholars who pointed out that everything else follows what’s called the law of diminishing returns. Trey, if you’re digging for metal in a ruin, the longer you keep digging, the harder it gets to find metal, am I right?”
“True enough,” I said.
“What these scholars were saying is that knowledge works the same way, and technology works the same way. So the kind of thing that Anna—”
Her voice trailed off. After a moment I realized why. Anna was nowhere in the room, and from the blank looks on everyone’s faces, nobody had seen her go. A cold thought stirred, and I thought I knew where she would be; I turned away from the computer and headed at a run to the room where the old alien-books were.
I was wrong, but as I got there I heard something hit the floor in the kitchen. I sprinted that way, and there she was, lying in a puddle of blood with her hands on a knife and the knife in her chest. Her eyes were already staring up at nothing as the last color drained out of her.
Twenty-Six: Waiting for the Thunder
“She was almost right,” Eleen said.
We were outside, not far from where we’d taken the bodies of the ones who died at Star’s Reach before we came. There wasn’t much left of them, a few odd scraps of bone here and there in the dust, but they had company now. We did our best to save her, but Anna knew exactly what she was doing when she turned the knife on herself.
So we found an old table and hauled her outside on it, the way we hauled what was left of the people her parents knew, to send her back into the circle. Eleen said the litany for her, we stood there for a while, and then we walked a little ways off, over to one of the big angular lumps of concrete that hid the antenna elements from the wind and sand. After a while, the silence got too heavy to bear any longer, and we started talking, quietly, about what had just happened.
“When I was going through the files we’d reconstructed, I found messages among the people who ran things here, talking about the same things Anna mentioned,” Eleen said. “From the very beginning, there were always a few people who worked here who thought that aliens were already visiting Mam Gaia in flying saucers, and would come down and rescue humanity someday. As long as they did their jobs, the others didn’t concern themselves, just as they didn’t worry about the few who were Old Believers and wanted time off one day out of every seven to talk to their god.
“As the years went by, though, more and more people here came to believe in the flying saucers. The others worried about that, but the believers couldn’t be spared—Star’s Reach had mostly shut itself off from the rest of Meriga by then, because of the troubles that led up to the Third Civil War, and even if they’d gone looking for help there was nobody else in Meriga or anywhere else who knew how to do the things they needed to get done.
“So the people in charge worried but didn’t do anything, and the number of believers grew, until finally everyone at Star’s Reach either believed in the flying saucers, or shared the same hope that a more advanced civilization would contact them and help humanity if they just kept working on the project. I can’t fault them for talking themselves into that belief. They needed some reason to keep on, some way to convince themselves that what they were doing mattered to anybody but themselves. So they traded messages with the Cetans and waited for someone else to contact them. And—” She spread her hands, palm up, and let them drop.
“You didn’t say anything about this before,” I said then.
“I didn’t think it was important. There were many other documents; I could have bored you all for hours every evening, talking about everything we found. It never occurred to me that those messages would explain why they killed themselves.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Berry said. “They got the message they were waiting for.”
“Except it wasn’t what they were waiting for,” Eleen pointed out. “Like Anna, they believed, or hoped, that the aliens who contacted them would be so far ahead of us that they could come here, give us back the kind of energy sources we had in the old world, fix everything we did to Mam Gaia—all that, and more. They wanted the old world back again, and they thought the aliens would give it to them. And what they got instead was what we just heard.”
None of us said anything for a little while, and then Thu spoke. “The question that occurs to me is whether the message was telling the truth.”
“I don’t know,” Eleen admitted. “I don’t know of any way we could know.”
“One part of the message is certainly true,” said Tashel Ban. “Delta Pavonis IV is a gas giant with an atmosphere that looks green to us. Scientists discovered that before the old world ended—and as far as I know, that information isn’t in the computers here at Star’s Reach.”
Thu nodded. “But that does not tell us whether the beings who sent the message might respond to a reply with something more than a radio message.”
“Like a spacecraft?”
“Or a great many spacecraft.”
Tashel Ban shook his head. “If they could do that, they wouldn’t have had to send a message and wait for a reply. They could have sent a spacecraft as soon as they detected our signals, found out whatever they wanted to know, and followed up with a fleet, if that’s what they had in mind. But—” He held up one finger. “If they could do that, we’d have been visited a long time ago; Delta Pavonis is only twenty light years away.” He held up a second finger. “And we’ve been receiving messages from the Cetans all along. They apparently got the same message we did; I don’t know whether they answered or not—we haven’t taken the time to decode the messages from them that are stored in the main computers down below—but they’ve been trying to talk to us ever since, and waiting for a reply. If somebody came calling from Delta Pavonis IV, that didn’t disrupt the Cetans’ transmissions at all.”
“There’s one thing more,” said Eleen then. “I mentioned the debate about whether progress could go on forever. There was one argument against that theory that nobody ever managed to push aside. It’s called Fermi’s paradox, after the scholar who first thought of it.”
“I have heard of it,” said Thu.
“I haven’t,” I said.
Thu nodded, and Eleen went on. “Even when scholars still believed in the Big Bang, they knew the universe had been around for at least thirteen billion years, and there had been plenty of stars with planets long before Mam Gaia was formed. If other intelligent species evolved during those thirteen billion years, and interstellar travel is possible, then they would have been all over the galaxy long before our time, leaving traces we couldn’t miss. There are no such traces. The most likely reasons for that are either that we’re the first intelligent species to evolve in this galaxy, or that interstellar travel isn’t possible. Once we contacted the Cetans, the first reason stopped being a possibility—two intelligent species less than eleven light years apart means that intelligent species are fairly common. That leaves the other, which most scholars back then didn’t want to think about.”
“None of that is conclusive,” said Thu.
“True,
” said Tashel Ban. “If you want conclusive proof, though, it’s twenty light years away.”
“Or ten,” said Berry.
“True enough,” Tashel Ban replied. “The Cetans probably know one way or another by now. I wish we could ask them.”
“Actually,” said Berry then, “we can.” The pale tense look he’d had since we heard about his mother wasn’t exactly gone, but there was something past it, something that flickered and glowed like a flame.
“In theory, yes,” said Eleen. “But we’d have to finish working out the code—”
“Not just in theory.” He glanced from Eleen to me to Tashel Ban to Thu. “Let me show you.”
So we left Anna to the wind and the blowing sand, and went down into Star’s Reach again. Berry led the way to his room, opened the door, waved us in. The stacks of paper were still scattered all over every flat surface but the floor. He went straight to one stack on his desk, took a sheet of paper off the top, and handed it to Eleen. “I think you can read this.”
She glanced over it, then stopped, read it over again with eyes going wide. “Yes.”
“If you’re willing,” Berry said.
She nodded, considered the paper for a moment longer. “There’s a center from which movement radiates outward, linked to radio frequency and to this end of the communication—oh, of course. ‘Our radio station.’ Then there’s a reference to a previous state of flow, but the flow drops away to nothing—‘stopped transmitting to you.’ A spatial-subset indicator, and then interference patterns—‘because of local troubles.’ I think I can read the rest: ‘and was abandoned for a time. The troubles have ended, the sphere—no, the planet, our planet, is unharmed, and we have reoccupied the station. We will resume regular communication once we review past messages and finish learning how to send new ones.’”
We were all staring by the time she finished. “Berry,” I said then, “you worked that out yourself?”
“I kept wondering about the Cetans, what they must have been thinking after our transmissions stopped. It seemed only fair to let them know that our species is still here.” With a little shrug: “And I didn’t have much else to do, other than wash dishes and help with the computers when I could. So I started printing out messages and translations at night, and tried to figure out how the code worked.”
Tashel Ban had taken the paper from Eleen, and was reading over it. “The syntax is correct,” he said. “If we sent this, I’m quite sure the Cetans could read it.”
I was looking at Berry when I realized what had to happen next. “That’s not prentice work,” I said. “Give me your pry bar.”
He stared at me, then without a word went to his work belt, got the bar, and handed it to me. I hefted it, then flicked out the sharp end good and fast, catching him on the face just under the cheekbone. I heard Eleen gasp, but by then I was holding out the pry bar for Berry. “Take it, ruinman,” I told him.
He took it, and his face lit up the way mine must have, deep down in the Shanuga ruins where Gray Garman made me a mister. For a moment he looked as though he was about to say something, and then gave it up and flung his arms around me. I patted his back and looked past him at the others. As he drew away, I said, “Eleen, Thu, Tashel Ban, I’d like to introduce Sir and Mister Berry of the ruinmen’s guild of—well, of Star’s Reach, for now.”
So of course they all congratulated him. While Tashel Ban was doing that, though, Thu turned to me. “For now,” he said. “It seems to me that certain decisions need to be made.”
“I know,” I told him, and he nodded, once, as though that settled something.
I waited until the congratulations were over and Berry was dabbing something on the cut I left on his face, and then said, “Well. We know as much as we’re going to know about what’s here, and you know as well as I do how much food we’ve got left. We’ve got some choices to make—but I’m going to need a little time first, to think about everything that’s happened.”
Nobody argued.
“An hour, perhaps?” This from Thu.
Nobody argued about that, either, and so I turned and went out into the hallway.
I knew where I needed to go, though I didn’t know why, not at first. The metal stair boomed beneath my footsteps, and the door groaned open, letting in a spray of dust and sand. A moment later I was outside, underneath the empty desert sky, with the concrete antenna housings stretching away into the distance on all sides and the low dark shape that used to be Anna, lying there where we’d left her.
I thought about what little I knew about her and her life, the circle through time that brought her back here to the death her parents managed to escape. I thought about the things she’d said about the false stars and the priestesses; I thought about the alien-books we both read, and the promises that sounded so true to her and so false to me, and where the difference was; and I stared past her, back eastwards to the place where the ground pretends to meet the sky. That’s when I figured out why she died, and why the people who were here at Star’s Reach before us died, and maybe, just maybe, why all those billions of people died when the old world ended: their universe was too small.
I don’t know if that will make the least bit of sense to anyone else who reads this, if anyone ever does. After I wrote those five words, I sat at the desk here in the little bare room I share with Eleen, with the point of my pen not quite touching the paper, for something like a quarter of an hour. I must have decided half a dozen times to scratch the words out, and half a dozen more times to spend the next half dozen pages trying to explain what I meant, and changed my mind each time.
Still, it’s simple enough. The people who wrote the alien-books, and most of the stories that were in the shelves with them, had all kinds of notions about what might be waiting out there between the stars, but they never dreamed that the universe was big enough to hold distances that couldn’t be crossed or problems that couldn’t be solved. It wasn’t that people back then were just plain wicked, the way the priestesses say. They really believed the universe was small enough that they could make it behave, the way Plummer says they used to make animals behave in sirks. That’s why they ignored so many of their problems until it was too late to do anything about them, and why they told themselves stories about flying saucers and space travel and how we were all going to go to the stars someday, where we’d find lots of people like us and lots of planets like Mam Gaia, because they never imagined the universe was big enough to hold anything else.
That’s what I figured out, as I stood there looking east across the desert. I figured out something else, too, which is that we’ve learned something now that they didn’t know, back in the old world. That was when I knew what I was going to say to the others.
I left Anna’s body to the wind and the dust, then, and went back down into Star’s Reach. I wasn’t the first one in the main room, though that was only because Thu was sitting in his usual chair at the table, where he’d probably been the whole time. He nodded to me; I nodded back, walked over to the table, and stood there waiting, because I couldn’t think of anything else. Everything I’d done and tried to do during the five years since I found the dead man’s letter in the Shanuga ruins came down to one decision we were going to have to make then and there. That two of the people I liked best on Mam Gaia’s round belly might have to go into the circle with knives to settle the thing didn’t help at all.
A door opened and closed down the hall, and Berry came in next, with the kind of brittle calm on his face you see when people are ready for a fight they don’t want but know they can’t get out of. He nodded to me and Thu, took his seat at the table, folded his hands and waited. About the time he settled into place, another door opened and closed, and Eleen came in; her eyes were red, as though she’d been crying, but she greeted everybody by name, went to her place at the table across from Berry’s and sat.
A good long minute went by, and then boots sounded on the stairway down to the rest of Star’s Reach. Tashel Ban ca
me up them, his face grim. He didn’t say anything to anyone, just walked over to his chair, pulled it out, plopped down into it and sat there with his chin propped on his hands and his eyes staring at nothing in particular.
I sat down then, and looked from face to face, remembering all the roads we’d walked together in one way or another, and also remembering the others who walked part of them with us and weren’t there for one reason or another.
“The way I see it,” I said then, “we’ve got three decisions to make. The first is what to do about Star’s Reach, the second is what to do about the messages from the Cetans, and the third is what to do about this last message.”
“What to do about Star’s Reach?” This from Tashel Ban. “I don’t see much that we can do about that.”
“Turn it over to the ruinmen to break apart for scrap,” said Thu at once. “Find some way to preserve it in its current condition, so the conversation with the Cetans can continue. Abandon it, claim that we found nothing, and leave it for someone else to find.”
“More or less,” I said. “There’s also Anna’s choice, I suppose, but I don’t see much point in that.”
That got a moment of silence, then: “No,” Tashel Ban said. “I don’t see a point to the last of your three choices, either, and which of the first two we choose depends on what we decide about the Cetans and the others. That’s the real question, as I see it: do we tell the priestesses, your government, and mine what we’ve found about the Cetans and the others, or do we destroy the computer up here, erase the data from the mainframes down below, and hand the site over to the ruinmen?”
“How hard would it be to do that?” I asked.
“The second choice? Stripping the data from the mainframes would be very slow—my guess is that that’s why the people who were here before us didn’t do it. Destroying the computers up here? As long as it would take to toss each one of them down the stairwell.”
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