“My God!” Margot laughed abruptly. “I think that’s the first time I’ve heard a Das swear. I didn’t even know you could. I would guess that swearing is against your rules. That’s almost a likeable trait.”
“Our rules are few, for the most part, Margot. It is likely that our success in the universe is because of this.”
“Success meaning population? Like, how many ants are alive, I mean on earth, and is that success?”
“Yes, in their sense it is.”
“Now what in hell kind of rules can an ant have?”
“Oh, to tell you the truth, not much different than our own rules. And with a stretch, it’s not too far away from the rules that were in most of your positive religions.”
“Positive religions? Help me.”
“That’s the best I can term it. Religions based on tolerance and respect for each other. Let me find an example. Wall?”
“Biblical Ten Commandments,” the Wall responded.
“There, as in those commandments, basic rules or norms of behavior.”
“Don’t talk to me about behavior, bug. Behavior would not let a whole planet die with all of the people on it.”
“And if the Das were to save dying populations of, excuse the term, sentient beings? How would this affect the natural selection that occurs in the universe?”
“Natural selection. Natural selection.” Margot rolled her eyes up into the back of her head. “Freud, no, um, I mean Darwin. Are you giving me some Darwinian bullshit about survival of the fittest?”
“Of course, Margot, why do you think a natural law of a planet would be any different in the larger scope of space, galaxies, or the universe?”
“Are you saying that because humans are, I mean were, in some way inferior, this is why we all died?”
“No, not really, not for your planet. That which happened on your planet was a slightly unusual catastrophe. It eliminates four percent or so of populations at your stage of development. I don’t know, if this had not happened, your race may have made it through its next fifty or hundred years of advanced science, but I doubt it. I seriously doubt it. The Wall could give you estimates about survivability, but they are infinitesimally small.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Margot, have you learned anything from your Viewing room? What have you watched?”
“Got me. I just ask the Wall to show me neat, unusual stuff, and it does. What does it matter?”
“You have a lot of time now, Margot. Go back and ask to see the history of the civilizations we have catalogued. Millions of them in the time of the Das, the last two billion years, and millions upon millions prior to that we believe. Of all those species, races, sentient beings, whatever you choose to call them, do you know how few ever made it out of their own solar systems, and ultimately out of their own galaxies?”
“Not sure what you mean, but why should that matter?”
“Four, Margot. I know you know that. Four who’ve gone intergalactic, at least that we are aware. However, we have only mapped a small portion, less than ten percent, of that which we consider the accessible, known universe. There are many unexplored planets among even that ten percent, as well as continual birth and degradation of planets. But when you see twenty, one hundred thousand, two million civilizations that meet their end so similarly, so consistently, so predictably, it doesn’t give you much hope for any singular race.”
“Bullshit, bug. I haven’t seen them all from the Viewing room and don’t think I’ll ever get close to seeing them, but I can’t believe that there are so many other races out there and they all die. I think it’s your own little lie you like to tell yourselves.”
“Ask the Wall, Margot, and remember that it was Rovada who first told you that Das don’t lie. That is the truth.”
Margot felt queasy. All this time she had been standing, uncomfortably situated close to the door, ready to bolt out if the need arose. Her head was swimming, and she fell back as the floor reached up to cushion her fall. The Wall laid her gently towards the ground, with her bare feet elevated.
Margot looked up from her makeshift chair. This was the first time since being suspended that she felt truly cold. Her lip was moist with sweat and she felt the clammy coldness on her hands and feet. The hair on her neck stood straight up. Isda looked like a large, brown monster above her. “Don’t come close to me,” she shouted in a whisper.
Isda drew back and let her sit for a minute. “I didn’t know,” he said, “that this would shock you. It’s good that it did.”
“Good. Why good?”
“Because it displays a sensitivity. A sensitivity to what happens. A need to resist the reality, to resist that which appears real and inevitable.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It is very difficult to explain in its simplicity. It seems so obvious, once you know, once you understand. But aside from natural catastrophe, or a calamity like your planet, do you know what the other ninety-six percent of races die from?”
Margot wiped the sweat from her mouth. She felt better, as the floor provided her with some warmth.
“Six percent? Of what? Oh, ninety-six, versus the four. What about it?”
“Over-adaptation. I guess that’s the best English language word for it.”
“What? How could all these races die from over-adaptation? What do you mean?”
“I think it’s too much to hit you with at this point.”
“What?” Margot sat up from her recline. “Why would you say that?”
“Look, Margot, we’re deviating from the point. I’ve allowed myself some space here to talk with another being, perhaps even to lecture. But this moves us away from the issue with the Wall.”
“Bullshit about your Wall! What do you mean by over-adaptation?”
Margot saw Isda lift his wing up to his head, where he appeared to rub the damaged part.
“This universe is insidious, isn’t it? It is so easy to get accustomed to the known, to find comfort and solace in it, to revel in it. The sameness. Did you know that, for the most part, your planet and the scientists on it had discovered ninety-five percent of all there was to know about the laws of the universe, about how all things work?”
“I know that, but what does that matter?”
“With ninety-five percent, Margot, the other five percent is pretty nominal. You see, some of the fun runs out when you get that close. Oh, you can go and discover new connections of things, new particles and principles, matter, antimatter, dark matter, space folding. When it all comes down to it, at ninety five percent, all things are possible. Really, all things.”
“Like what? It sure as hell wasn’t possible to save the planet.”
“No, you’re wrong, it was possible, quite possible, to save it. Or should I say to prevent it, because what affected your earth was created by humans, as far as we know. And what was created by humans could have been prevented.”
Margot slumped back again, dumbfounded. “Could have been prevented?” she stammered, “Could have been prevented? Damn it, bug, damn it! What are you talking about?”
Isda moved slowly towards his console chair. He was hoping to elicit a reaction not unlike her first reaction to him, where she subsequently left, and when moments later the Wall’s program instruction broke down. But he also had another motive, beyond the obvious task.
Margot glared at Isda, her eyes bulging out of their sockets. “So damn it, what do you mean? I asked the Wall, and the Wall said natural phenomena, like that was the final answer. I think Rovada told me about it being human-created, but we humans were creating our own viruses with pigs and birds and muck and mud for a long time. I don’t get it. A virus is a virus.”
“No, a virus, in this case, was most likely caused by humans.”
“How could humans create a virus of such virulence?”
“Your biotechnology. Look, this is not uncommon among sentient beings. No. Wrong way to say it. This is so very common among be
ings at an early stage in their scientific development. Many hundreds of thousands of species have reached this stage, only to be annihilated by their own creations. They never get past that early stage. This is a surprise to you, I see, but what has the Wall said when you have viewed these other species? Don’t you see that many die just like this?”
“No,” said Margot, tears beginning to stream down her face, “no, I don’t see. Damn it, I don’t see, and I don’t care, I don’t want to know if they died. I don’t want to know how they died. That’s not why I view them. And I don’t want to know if they’re still alive. I mean, until now, it never really occurred to me to even ask. I just assumed most of them were still alive. You know, bug, I don’t ask the Wall for their whole history. Why should I?”
“It’s too bad you don’t, because you should, at least initially. You can amuse yourself during the first few hundred examples by guessing the cause of their massive deaths, but after that first few hundred, I’m certain you’ll be bored.”
“Amuse myself? That’s disgusting. I’m never amused by anyone’s death. But we did it? We did it to ourselves?”
“It’s so common. Do you remember the bell curve? The distribution of events, the linkages between them, where commonality falls?”
“Bell curve,” she repeated, wiping her face and runny nose. The Wall reached up to towel-off her wet arm.
“Why do you think that humans would be any different, really? Your race or species was so much like the others. You fell right into the fiftieth percentile in terms of your ways, your desires, your needs, your treatment of each other, your focus on over-adaptation, of incremental tolerance.”
“Tolerance? Tolerance is good. What’s the matter with tolerance? You just said . . ..”
“Tolerance is the terminal trait of all species – but my view of tolerance and your view are likely very different. It even got to us at one point in the early, early Das history, the first few thousand years of our modern existence. But thankfully, it didn’t eliminate us.”
“Why would anyone die from tolerance? Why would we, humans? Tolerance was a good thing. Look, you say we’re nothing special, like our race falls right in line with millions of others who died before us, but I would think that it’s the tolerance that would have set us apart and made us survive.”
“Margot, in this universe there is so little that is set apart. Now you are indeed ‘set apart.’”
“Because I’m the last of the humans?”
“No, no I didn’t mean in that way. That may make you unique in that small respect. You are set apart because of the Wall event.”
Margot sighed. “Why the hell is this Wall thing so important to you bugs? You’d put this as more important that humans, than the whole damn planet?”
“I’m sorry, Margot, it’s so hard to talk with someone who has so little understanding for the commonality found in nature. Look, relatively few civilizations and advanced species go extinct from natural catastrophes.”
“Natural? How can you use that term, if it was man-made?”
“We suspect that to be so, Margot, just suspect. We’ve catalogued it as natural, but, as the Wall will tell you, thousands of experiences would put the odds that it was a man-made virus. We had to leave so fast, however, that we could not investigate the true cause, so we have catalogued it as a natural catastrophe.”
“Well, who the hell would make a virus to kill all the people on the earth? I mean, who the hell would want to do that, especially if they killed themselves in the process?”
“But you jump to a conclusion, perhaps inappropriately.”
“What conclusion?”
“That any human would have done this maliciously. Wall,” Isda commanded, “can you please tell me the odds that the virus was maliciously created?”
“Seventeen percent chance,” the Wall responded.
“And the other eighty-three?” he requested.
“An accident.”
“What the hell kind of accident could have caused something as terrible as that?” she asked.
“Look, Margot, when beings begin playing with, manipulating genetics, the atomic structures, of living or, for that matter, nonliving things, they tremendously increase the odds that they will soon all die.”
“But why?”
“How many people and teams of researchers do you think were on earth performing various technological amendments to viruses in the last few years?”
“Got me.”
“Many thousands. Your gene editing technology had progressed so far, so very far, so very fast, that children in your schools could easily create new organisms. Kits were available to ship to schools – and other places not so friendly. You all were playing baseball on the busy freeway. Your technology had run away from you. Or maybe your competitive nature had finally outdone your cooperative nature. That is not unusual in species. Can you ever be assured that one or all beings will treat these genetically-altered viruses, bacteria, whatever, with complete care and attention, that all experiments will stay within the perimeter of the lab, or that all experiments will go as expected if they do?”
Margot thought back to her college genetics class, her biology class. She saw the palm tree-lined walkways, her biology building, the classes upon classes that occurred there, the hundreds, no, thousands of schools, the multiple years.
“Now you’re seeing it, Margot. There were too many doing it. Too few controls. Even with the best controls, the odds will get to you eventually. And they indeed did in your earth’s case, just as technology risks like this have been doing for countless millennia, with the few exceptions we know of.”
“Jesus, it’s not that effing trivial. Don’t you know there were lives down there? Beautiful people, good-hearted people.”
“And some junk. Horrible people. That’s what you were thinking. And a whole lot in between.”
“Quit reading my mind!”
“Okay, I can’t help it. Well, I am not practiced at it yet as Rovada is. It all doesn’t really matter much how we categorize the final demise. Ultimately, it is all a part of over-adaptation and tolerance for the intolerable, which is true.”
“Damn it, bug! Would you please tell me what the hell you mean by that?”
“There are so many examples that they all get in the way in my memory. I could ask the Wall, but let me think of one. Let’s get back to tolerance for a second.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“No bounds. Tolerance with no bounds. Maybe a better word is a combination of incrementalism and tolerance for the incremental. That which made you great eventually was carried too far.”
“And?”
“I will talk in generalities. I will try not to be specific about your planet. The facts get confused with too many other instances to get too deep into specifics without the Wall’s help, but this is generally how it goes.”
Isda continued. “Populations of a species on a planet will grow and thrive at some point. Most will have vision, as you do, to see the stars. Ways to see the macro and micro in the universe and its piece parts, to analyze and react to it, to see the inherent connectivity in all things. Different levels of seeing, of course, but your five senses are not much different than the senses that others have. Different places for those senses, yes, carried differently on the bodies, but there is a great deal of sameness in living beings, and humans are quite like other beings in that respect. Minds grow. Science evolves, tolerance becomes the death of growth, the death of the species.”
“You’re droning,” Margot said.
Isda moved slowly around the room as he spoke. “Think about it, Margot, think about it. As the mass of a species grows, there is always a focus and emphasis on tolerance, like tolerance for differences, such as religions, colors of skin in your species’ case, it’s an extension of that which caused you to group as a society, together, drawing strength from your grouping."
“You sound like a priest or racist, I’m not sure.”
“But as you drew strength from that, so it was carried too far. Tolerance by its definition includes the all. The all becomes okay. Time passes, and as it creeps, tolerance branches out in many dimensions and pushes the extremes. Or even one extreme branches out in many directions and pushes the extremes, defines new levels of comfort. It is generally that which circles back and smothers or encloses itself upon society.”
“I’m lost, way lost. Tolerance was a good thing. I was totally into other people and leaving them to their own desires, as were many of my friends. So how does this conversation apply to earth?”
“Let me see if I can provide an example. Your earth died after a few thousand years of its modern history. Now, let’s assume you had lived five centuries before. Would you have even considered the possibility that someone should change your genetics?”
“Of course not. At that time, nobody really knew of genetics, so it wouldn’t have mattered.”
“Correct. Not a factor because technology was not there, at that stage, as yet. How about by the nineteen-thirties?”
“Nineteen-thirty. Hum, I think the Germans were doing something weird then, but it was a Nazi deal.”
“People’s reactions?”
“I don’t know. I mean, it was the Nazis. Bad, bad people. Genetics or experiments were some of the bad things they did.”
“And the thought of genetic manipulation, was it a bad, intolerable thing then?”
“Yeah, I guess so, but it was because of their goal.”
“Are you sure? Was it the thought that someone would create a new race or breed of human for some evil deeds, or the thought that it would be considered for anything, any purpose at all?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it was probably both back then.”
“Now here’s the subtlety. Here’s the dividing point. Let’s assume that it was both things. First, the evil intent they had, and second the fact that they would do it at all.”
“Maybe. People in the thirties weren’t exactly educated as well. I mean, at least not in the U.S. I don’t think they even had television then.”
“If it was both of these things, what made the people less resistant to the fact that scientists were ‘doing it at all’ by the year 2015?”
The Space Between Her Thoughts (The Space in Time Book 1) Page 19
