Relativity

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “So that second string of DNA represents a distant relative—if it’s a relative at all,” said King. “Would that be right?”

  “It’s as good a guess as any,” said Darren.

  “And the third possible answer?” asked King.

  “That’s the puzzler,” said Darren. “The third answer box is empty; blank. There’s nothing in it except three pixels in the upper right, which just indicate that it is the third possible answer.”

  “Have we ever seen an empty box like that before in one of the Tailiens’ messages?” asked King.

  “Yes,” said Darren. “It was in message four-dash-twelve, one of the math problems. They asked us what the correct answer to six divided by zero is. The possible answers they gave us were six, one, and a blank box.”

  “And—wait a second, wait a second—you can’t divide by zero, can you?”

  “That’s right; it’s a meaningless concept: how many times does nothing go into something? So, in that case, we chose the empty box as our answer.”

  “And what’s the correct answer this time?” asked King.

  Darren spread his arms, just as he’d seen dozens of other people—including many working scientists, rather than hobbyists like him—do today on other talk shows when asked the same question. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

  Everybody had hoped that other messages would continue to come from the Tailiens. Just as they had gone on to send the math problems after receiving no reply to the anatomy diagrams, humanity hoped that they would continue sending questions or information before a reply was sent.

  But the Tailiens didn’t. They seemed to be intent on waiting for a response to the DNA puzzle.

  And, finally, the United Nations decided that one should indeed be sent. By this point, Darren was pretty much out of the spotlight—and glad of it. The United Nations secretary-general himself was coming to Las Vegas to initiate the blinking of the city’s lights. That was fine with Darren; he wasn’t sure that the UN scientists had come up with the right answer, and he didn’t want sending an incorrect reply to be on his head.

  The answer the UN had decided to go with was number one: the DNA that was similar, but not identical, to the sample string. There were various rationales offered for supposing that it was the correct response. Some said it was obvious: the aliens were moving us beyond questions of absolute truth, the kind of clear right or wrong that went with mathematical expressions; this new message was designed to test our ability to think in terms of similarity, of soft relationships. Although none of the three choices matched the sample string, the first one was the most similar.

  Another interpretation was that it was a test of our knowledge of evolution. Did new species (the blank space to the right of the sample string) emerge by gradual changes (answer one, with its single nucleotide difference); by complete genetic redesign (answer two, with its totally dissimilar DNA); or out of nothing—that is, through creationist processes?

  Some of the fundamentalists at the UN argued that the third answer was therefore the proper one: the aliens were testing our righteousness before deciding whether to admit us to the galactic club. But others argued that everything the aliens had presented so far was scientific—mathematics, anatomical charts, DNA—and that the scientific answer was the only one to give: new species arose by incremental changes from old ones.

  Regardless of whether it was a question about inexact relationships or about the principles of evolution, answer one would be the correct response. And so the lights of Las Vegas were turned off one last time in a single, knowing wink at the heavens.

  Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed happened to be in the communications room when the response was received from the third planet. Of course, regardless of what answer they’d chosen, it would begin with one stretch of darkness, so Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed waited…and waited…and waited for a second and third.

  But more darkness never came. Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed’s tail twitched.

  He had to tell Captain Curling-Sixth-Finger, of course; indeed, the computer had probably already informed her that a response was being received, and she was presumably even now making her way down the spoke from her command module, and—

  And there she was now: twice Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed’s size, and capable of the kind of fierceness only a female could muster.

  “What is the response?” demanded Curling-Sixth-Finger as she floated into the room.

  “One,” signed Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed with restrained, sad movements. “They chose answer one.”

  Curling-Sixth-Finger’s feeding slit momentarily opened, exposing slick pink tissue within. “So be it,” she signed with her left hand, and “So be it” she repeated with her right.

  Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed whipped his tail back and forth in frustration. It was such a straightforward question: when seeking other life forms to associate with, do you choose (1) the being most closely related to you genetically; (2) the being least related to you genetically; or (3) is it impossible to answer this question based on genetics?

  Answer three, of course, was the morally right answer; any advanced being must know that. Oh, it was true that primitive animals sought to protect and favor those with whom they shared many genes, but the very definition of civilization was recognizing that nepotism was not the engine that should drive relationships.

  Perhaps, reflected Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed, such enlightenment had come more easily to his people, for with partners changing every mating season, genetic relationships were complex and diffuse. The race inhabiting the second planet of the star they had last visited had chosen the wrong answer, too; they’d also picked the first choice.

  And they’d paid the price for that.

  If nepotism drives you as a species, if protecting those who are most closely related to you is paramount, if forming allegiances based on familial lines is at the core of your society, then how can you ever be trusted in relationships with beings that are alien to you? Yes, it seemed all life, at least in this neighborhood of the galaxy, was based on DNA, and therefore was quite possibly related in its distant, distant past. But, then again, all creatures on any given world also share a common ancestor. And yet—

  And yet these benighted souls of the third planet still chose genetic favoritism; indeed, they were so convinced of its righteousness, convinced that it was the proper order of things, that they didn’t even attempt to disguise it by giving a false answer. Those poor creatures, prisoners of their own biology…

  Curling-Sixth-Finger was already on the intercom, calling down to the propulsion room, telling Fist-Held-Sideways to engage the fusion motors. Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed felt an invisible hand pressing down upon him, driving him to the floor, as the great engines came to life. As he and Curling-Sixth-Finger settled to deck plates, Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed looked up at her.

  “I’ve got no choice,” she signed. “A species driven by selfish genes is too dangerous to be allowed to live.”

  Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed slowly, sadly spread his fingers in agreement. The Ineluctable would dive down into the plane of the solar system, into the cometary belt just past the orbit of the eighth planet, and it would launch a series of comets on trajectories that would send them sailing in for eventual rendezvous with the third planet.

  Oh, it would take time—thousands of years—before the impacts. But eventually they would strike, and two skyswoopers would be felled with a single rock: the galaxy would have one less selfish species to worry about, and, with most of its native life wiped out, there would be room—a whole new world!—to move billions and billions of members of to.

  Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed was glad that Fist-Held-Sideways and the other females were no longer in estrus. He didn’t feel like making love, didn’t feel like making babies.

  Not now. Not right now.

  But, of course, he would want to do that again the next time the females ca
me into heat. He, too, he reflected, was a prisoner of biology—and for one brief moment, that shared reality made him feel a bond with the aliens that now, sadly, he would never meet.

  Speeches

  The 2003 Hugo Awards Ceremony

  The best thing that ever happened to me professionally occurred on Saturday, August 30, 2003, at about 10:00 p.m. At Torcon 3, the sixty-first World Science Fiction Convention, I won the Hugo Award for Best Novel of the Year for my novel Hominids, first volume of the “Neanderthal Parallax” trilogy. The other nominees were Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick, Kiln People by David Brin, The Scar by China Miéville, and The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson.

  This had been my sixth Hugo nomination; I’d most recently lost the award in 2001, when J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire beat my Calculating God. Here’s what I said when I won…

  First off, I’d like to thank J. K. Rowling for being late delivering the manuscript of The Order of the Phoenix, so that it didn’t come out until 2003.

  I guess since there was no Harry Potter on the ballot, a hairy Ponter was the next-best thing…

  I’d also like to thank the Hugo administrators for deciding that Neil Gaiman’s book Coraline was really a novella rather than a novel. I’ve never been so thrilled by a word-count statistic in my life.

  Seriously, though, I’d very much like to express to my fellow nominees—Dave, Stan, Michael, and China—what an honor it’s been for the last few months to share a ballot with you guys.

  My thanks go, of course, to Stanley Schmidt, Sheila Williams, and everyone at Analog, where Hominids was first published, in the form of a serial.

  My thanks also go to Tor Books, particularly my publisher Tom Doherty, editors David G. Hartwell and Moshe Feder—plus art director Irene Gallo, and artist Donato who were responsible for the wonderful covers for my Neanderthal books.

  And of course, thanks to my agent, Ralph Vicinanza, who does everything in his power to put the screws on my behalf to those kind people at Tor.

  Here in Canada, my books do better than I would have ever thought possible, thanks to Tor’s Canadian distributor, H. B. Fenn and Company.

  My thanks to Harold and Sylvia Fenn, Rob Howard, Heidi Winter, Melissa Cameron, David Leonard, Steve St. Amant, David Cuthbertson, Leo MacDonald, and everyone else who works there.

  Most of all, though, I want to thank science fiction fandom.

  Everything good in my life I owe to fandom.

  All the best friends I’ve had came from fandom, including the members of my high-school science fiction club, NASFA, some of whom are here tonight—hi, Ted and Gillian!

  It was also at fannish events that I first got to know my mentors and colleagues, John Robert Colombo, Terence M. Green, Andrew Weiner, and Edo van Belkom.

  And many thanks for the wonderful support to the members of the fan group I’m currently a proud member of, the USS Hudson Bay.

  It was also through fandom that I met Sally Tomasevic and Marcel Gagne, the two dudes to whom Hominids is dedicated.

  Most important of all, though, I also met my wife Carolyn Clink through fandom.

  Without her, I’d be just a fat, bald, geek who knows way too much Star Trek trivia. Okay—even with her, I’m just a fat, bald, geek who knows way too much Star Trek trivia, but it’s a lot more fun having her along for the ride. Carolyn, I love you totally and completely.

  Along with Carolyn came her family—David, Patty, Melissa, and Megan are here tonight.

  And…and…I—I only wish my mother could have seen this…but…but…but it’s over a hundred bucks for a day pass to the con!

  Seriously, though, fandom also lets me have the best job in the universe: writing science fiction. And now it’s given me the single greatest honor of my life. Thank you all, very, very much!

  The Future Is Already Here

  On November 10, 1999, I gave this speech at the Library of Congress in Washington, D. C. (staying with my great buddy Roger MacBride Allen while visiting town); I enjoyed giving the speech but an even bigger thrill was the behind-the-scenes tour.

  Among those in the audience were Richard Lynch, co-editor of the wonderful fanzine Mimosa; SF writer Roger MacBride Allen; and British academic Farah Mendlesohn, who requested permission to reprint my speech in Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction; it appeared in the Autumn 2000 edition, with a smiling photo of me as the cover illustration.

  This was my first major public-speaking gig. Since then, I’ve signed up with Speakers’ Spotlight, one of Canada’s top speakers’ bureaus, and have been enjoying a very interesting, and, I must say, lucrative, sideline giving talks at conferences such as the Second International Symposium on Physical Sciences in Space, the 2003 conference of the New York Library Association, the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association of Science Centres, and BioMedex 2004, a conference devoted to the biopharmaceutical industry.

  There are countless definitions for that amorphous entity we call science fiction, but one of the most succinct is that employed by Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the famed Mars trilogy: “Science fiction stories are stories set in the future.” And, of course, for decades now, we’ve thought of the 21st century, the dawn of the third millennium, as the very embodiment of the future.

  But now, the future is here. We’re right on the doorstep of the 21st century, and, indeed, the year 2001, with all the resonances that magic figure has had for us since the film of the same name debuted thirty-odd years ago, will soon be a historical date.

  If the future is already here, what role does science fiction have in it? Was SF a literature of the 20th century, the way gothic romances were a literature of the 19th? Or is there a place—a societal role—for science fiction in the new millennium?

  To answer that question, it’s necessary, of course, to define the current societal role of science fiction, and that role, I firmly believe, comes out of the central message of most of the memorable, ambitious stories in the genre.

  Now, of course, there are those who think that fiction is not the place for messages: “If you want to send a message, call Western Union”—the old American telegram company—used to be standard advice given in creative-writing classes. Still, whether the authors are consciously aware of it or not, all fiction does convey messages or fundamental moral statements.

  Before I delve into what the central message is for science fiction, let’s set the stage by first looking at another genre closely allied with science fiction—another category with its own publishing imprints and dedicated magazines. I’m talking about mystery fiction.

  What is the fundamental message present in every mystery story? There’s one that, in fact, is virtually required—without it, the story falls completely apart. The central moral statement of all mystery fiction is this: “Don’t commit murder, because you won’t get away with it.” In just about every mystery novel, a character tries to take the life of another human being. And in just about every one, despite clever planning on the part of the murderer, the killer is brought to justice.

  Now, let’s assess how successful the writers of mystery fiction have been at convincing the general public of the truth of their fundamental assertion “Don’t commit murder, because you won’t get away with it.” Do we still have murder? Yes. Are murder rates decreasing? No. Despite hundreds of thousands of iterations on this theme in mystery stories from Edgar Allan Poe through Agatha Christie to Sara Paretsky—a theme which, put another way, is often stated as, “There’s no such thing as a perfect crime”—there has been no societal change. Murder is rampant.

  And that’s good news for the mystery-fiction writers of the world. It means they have job security. It means they still have work to do. It means their message still needs to be heard.

  But what about me and my colleagues? What of the SF writers of the world? How good have we been at communicating our central message? And, indeed, what is the central message of SF?

 
To my way of thinking, the central message of science fiction is this: “Look with a skeptical eye at new technologies.” Or, as William Gibson has put it, “the job of the science-fiction writer is to be profoundly ambivalent about changes in technology.”

  Now, certainly, there are science-fiction writers who use the genre for pure scientific boosterism: science can do no wrong; only the weak quail in the face of new knowledge. Jerry Pournelle, for instance, has rarely, if ever, looked at the downsides of progress. But most of us, I firmly believe, do take the Gibsonian view: we are not techie cheerleaders, we aren’t flacks for big business or entrepreneurism, we don’t trade in utopias.

  Neither, of course, are we Luddites. Michael Crichton writes of the future, too, but he’s not really a science-fiction writer; if anything, he’s an anti-science-fiction writer.

  Indeed, both Gregory Benford and I have discussed with our shared agent, Ralph Vicinanza, why it is that Crichton outsells us. And Ralph explained that he could get deals at least approaching those Crichton gets if—and this was an unacceptable “if” to both me and Greg—we were willing to promulgate the same fundamental message Crichton does, namely, that science always goes wrong.

  When Michael Crichton makes robots, as he did in Westworld, they run amuck, and people die. When he clones dinosaurs, as he did in Jurassic Park, they run amuck and people die. When he finds extraterrestrial life, as he did in The Andromeda Strain, people die.

  Crichton isn’t a prophet; rather, he panders to the fear of technology so rampant in our society—a society, of course, which ironically would not exist without technology. His mantra is clearly the old B-movie one that “there are some things man was not meant to know.”