Flux Tales Of Human Futures

by Card, Orson Scott

dog intelligence, but for a brief overview:

  "At the present time it is believed that dog intelligence surpasses that of the

  dolphin, though it still falls far short of man's. However, while the dolphin's

  intelligence is nearly useless to us, the dog can be trained as a valuable, simple

  household servant, and at last it seems that man is no longer alone on his planet.

  To which animal such a rise in intelligence will happen next, we cannot say, any

  more than we can be certain that such a change will happen to any other animal."

  Question from the class.

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  "Oh, well, I'm afraid it's like the big bang theory. We can guess and guess at the

  cause of certain phenomena, but since we can't repeat the event in a laboratory, we

  will never be quite sure. However, the best guess at present is that some critical

  mass of total dog population in a certain ratio to the total mass of dog brain was

  reached that pushed the entire species over the edge into a higher order of

  intelligence. This change, however, did not affect all dogs equally-- primarily it

  affected dogs in civilized areas, leading many to speculate on the possibility that

  continued exposure to man was a contributing factor. However, the very fact that

  many dogs, mostly in uncivilized parts of the world, were not affected destroys

  completely the idea that cosmic radiation or some other influence from outer space

  was responsible for the change. In the first place, any such influence would have

  been detected by the astronomers constantly watching every wavelength of the night

  sky, and in the second place, such an influence would have affected all dogs

  equally."

  Another question from a student.

  "Who knows? But I doubt it. Dogs, being incapable of speech, though many have

  learned to write simple sentences in an apparently mnemonic fashion somewhere

  between the blind repetition of parrots and the more calculating repetition at high

  speeds by dolphins-- um, how did I get into this sentence? I can't get out!"

  Student laughter.

  "Dogs, I was saying, are incapable of another advance in intelligence,

  particularly an advance bringing them to equal intellect with man, because they

  cannot communicate verbally and because they lack hands. They are undoubtedly at

  their evolutionary peak. It is only fortunate that so many circumstances combined to

  place man in the situation he has reached. And we can only suppose that somewhere,

  on some other planet, some other species might have an even more fortunate

  combination leading to even higher intelligence. But let us hope not!" said the

  professor, scratching the ears of his dog, B.F. Skinner. "Right, B.F.? Because man

  may not be able to cope with the presence of a more intelligent race!"

  Student laughter.

  "Owrowrf," said B.F. Skinner, who had once been called Hihiwnkn on a planet where

  white hexagons had telepathically conquered time and space; hexagons who had only

  been brought to this pass by a solar process they had not quite learned how to

  control. What he wished he could say was, "Don't worry, professor. Humanity will

  never be fazed by a higher intelligence. It's too damn proud to notice."

  But instead he growled a little, lapped some water from a bowl, and lay down in a

  corner of the lecture room as the professor droned on.

  ***

  It snowed in September in Kansas in the autumn of the year 2000, and Jim (Don't

  call me Jimmy anymore, I'm grown up) was out playing with his dog Robby as the first

  flakes fell.

  Robby had been uprooting crabgrass with his teeth and paws, a habit much

  encouraged by Royce and junie, when Jim yelled, "Snow!" and a flake landed on the

  grass in front of the dog. The flake melted immediately, but Robby watched for

  another, and another, and another. And he saw the whiteness of the flakes, and the

  delicate six-sided figures so spare and strange and familiar and beautiful, and he

  wept.

  "Mommy!" Jim called out. "It looks like Robby's crying!"

  "It's just water in his eyes," Junie called back from the kitchen, where she stood

  washing radishes in front of an open window. "Dogs don't cry."

  But the snow fell deep all over the city that night, and many dogs stood in the

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  snow watching it fall, sharing an unspoken reverie.

  "Can't we?" again and again the thought came from a hundred, a thousand minds.

  "No, no, no," came the despairing answer. For without fingers of some kind, how

  could they ever build the machines that would let them encapsulate again and leave

  this planet?

  And in their despair, they cursed for the millionth time that fool Mklikluln, Who

  had got them into this.

  "Death was too good for the bastard," they agreed, and in a worldwide vote they

  removed the commendation they had voted him. And then they all went back to having

  puppies and teaching them everything they knew.

  The puppies had it easier. They had never known their ancestral home, and to them

  snowflakes were merely fun, and winter was merely cold. And instead of standing out

  in the snow, they curled up in the warmth of their doghouses and slept.

  THE ORIGINIST

  Leyel Forksa sat before his lector display, reading through an array of recently

  published scholarly papers. A holograph of two pages of text hovered in the air

  before him. The display was rather larger than most people needed their pages to be,

  since Leyel's eyes were no younger than the rest of him. When he came to the end he

  did not press the PAGE key to continue, the article. Instead he pressed NEXT.

  The two pages he had been reading slid backward about a centimeter, joining a

  dozen previously discarded articles, all standing in the air over the lector. With a

  soft beep, a new pair of pages appeared in front of the old ones.

  Deet spoke up from where she sat eating breakfast. "You're only giving the poor

  soul two pages before you consign him to the wastebin?"

  "I'm consigning him to oblivion," Leyel answered cheerfully. "No, I'm consigning

  him to hell."

  "What? Have you rediscovered religion in your old age?"

  "I'm creating one. It has no heaven, but it has a terrible everlasting hell for

  young scholars who think they can make their reputation by attacking my work."

  "Ah, you have a theology," said Deet. "Your work is holy writ, and to attack it is

  blasphemy."

  "I welcome intelligent attacks. But this young tube-headed professor from-- yes,

  of course, Minus University--"

  "Old Minus U?"

  "He thinks he can refute me, destroy me, lay me in the dust, and all he has

  bothered to cite are studies published within the last thousand years."

  "The principle of millennial depth is still widely used--"

  "The principle of millennial depth is the confession of modern scholars that they

  are not willing to spend as much effort on research as they do on academic politics.

  I shattered the principle of millennial depth thirty years ago. I proved that it

  was--"

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  "Stupid and outmoded. But my deare
st darling sweetheart Leyel, you did it by

  spending part of the immeasurably vast Forska fortune to search for inaccessible and

  forgotten archives in every section of the Empire."

  "Neglected and decaying. I had to reconstruct half of them."

  "It would take a thousand universities' library budgets to match what you spent on

  research for 'Human Origin on the Null Planet.'"

  "But once I spent the money, all those archives were open. They have been open for

  three decades. The serious scholars all use them, since millennial depth yields

  nothing but predigested, preexcreted muck. They search among the turds of rats who

  have devoured elephants, hoping to find ivory."

  "So colorful an image. My breakfast tastes much better now." She slid her tray

  irrto the cleaning slot and glared at him. "Why are you so snappish? You used to

  read me sections from their silly little papers and we'd laugh. Lately you're just

  nasty."

  Leyel sighed. "Maybe it's because I once dreamed of changing the galaxy, and every

  day's mail brings more evidence that the galaxy refuses to change."

  "Nonsense. Hari Seldon has promised that the Empire will fall any day now."

  There. She had said Hari's name. Even though she had too much tact to speak openly

  of what bothered him, she was hinting that Leyel's bad humor was because he was

  still waiting for Hari Seldon's answer. Maybe so-- Leyel wouldn't deny it. It was

  annoying that it had taken Hari so long to respond. Leyel had expected a call the

  day Hari got his application. At least within the week. But he wasn't going to give

  her the satisfaction of admitting that the waiting bothered him. "The Empire will be

  killed by its own refusal to change. I rest my case."

  "Well, I hope you have a wonderful morning growling and grumbling about the

  stupidity of everyone in origin studies-- except your esteemed self."

  "Why are you teasing me about my vanity today? I've always been vain."

  "I consider it one of your most endearing traits."

  "At least I make an effort to live up to my own opinion of myself."

  "That's nothing. You even live up to my opinion of you." She kissed the bald spot

  on the top of his head as she breezed by, heading for the bathroom.

  Leyel turned his attention to the new essay at the front of the lector display. It

  was a name he didn't recognize. Fully prepared to find pretentious writing and

  puerile thought, he was surprised to find himself becoming quite absorbed. This

  woman had been following a trail of primate studies-- a field so long neglected that

  there simply were no papers within the range of millennial depth. Already he knew

  she was his kind of scholar. She even mentioned the fact that she was using archives

  opened by the Forska Research Foundation. Leyel was not above being pleased at this

  tacit expression of gratitude.

  It seemed that the woman-- a Dr. Thoren Magolissian-- had been following Leyel's

  lead, searching for the principles of human origin rather than wasting time on the

  irrelevant search for one particular planet. She had uncovered a trove of primate

  research from three millennia ago, which was based on chimpanzee and gorilla studies

  dating back to seven thousand years ago. The earliest of these had referred to

  original research so old it may have been conducted before the founding of the

  Empire-- but those most ancient reports had not yet been located. They probably

  didn't exist any more. Texts abandoned for more than five thousand years were very

  hard to restore; texts older than eight thousand years were simply unreadable. It

  was tragic, how many texts had been "stored" by librarians who never checked them,

  never refreshed or recopied them. Presiding over vast archives that had lost every

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  scrap of readable information. All neatly catalogued, of course, so you knew exactly

  what it was that humanity had lost forever.

  Never mind.

  Magolissian's article. What startled Leyel was her conclusion that primitive

  language capability seemed to be inherent in the primate mind. Even in primates

  incapable of speech, other symbols could easily be learned-- at least for simple

  nouns and verbs- and the nonhuman primates could come up with sentences and ideas

  that had never been spoken to them. This meant that mere production of language, per

  se, was prehuman, or at least not the deterinining factor of humanness.

  It was a dazzling thought. It meant that the difference between humans and

  nonhumans-- the real origin of humans in recognizably human form-- was

  postlinguistic. Of course this came as a direct contradiction of one of Leyel's own

  assertions in an early paper-- he had said that "since language is what separates

  human from beast, historical linguistics may provide the key to human origins" --but

  this was the sort of contradiction he welcomed. He wished he could shout at the

  other fellow, make him look at Magolissian's article. See? This is how to do it!

  Challenge my assumption, not my conclusion, and do it with new evidence instead of

  trying to twist the old stuff. Cast a light in the darkness, don't just churn up the

  same old sediment at the bottom of the river.

  Before he could get into the main body of the article, however, the house computer

  informed him that someone was at the door of the apartment. It was a message that

  crawled along the bottom of the lector display. Leyel pressed the key that brought

  the message to the front, in letters large enough to read. For the thousandth time

  he wished that sometime in the decamillennia of human history, somebody had invented

  a computer capable of speech.

  "Who is it?" Leyel typed.

  A moment's wait, while the house computer interrogated the visitor.

  The answer appeared on the lector: "Secure courier with a message for Leyel

  Forska."

  The very fact that the courier had got past house security meant that it was

  genuine-- and important. Leyel typed again. "From?"

  Another pause. "Hari Seldon of the Encyclopedia Galactica Foundation."

  Leyel was out of his chair in a moment. He got to the door even before the house

  computer could open it, and without a word took the message in his hands. Fumbling a

  bit, he pressed the top and bottom of the black glass lozenge to prove by

  fingerprint that it was he, by body temperature and pulse that he was alive to

  receive it. Then, when the courier and her bodyguards were gone, he dropped the

  message into the chamber of his lector and watched the page appear in the air before

  him.

  At the top was a three-dimensional version of the logo of Hari's Encyclopedia

  Foundation. Soon to be my insignia as well, thought Leyel. Hari Seldon and I, the

  two greatest scholars of our time, joined together in a project whose scope

  surpasses anything ever attempted by any man or group of men. The gathering together

  of all the knowledge of the Empire in a systematic, easily accessible way, to

  preserve it through the coming time of anarchy so that a new civilization can

  quickly rise out of the ashes of the old. Hari had the vision to foresee the need.

  And I, Leyel Forska, have the understanding of all the old archives that will make

  the Encyclopedia Galac
tica possible.

  Leyel started reading with a confidence born of experience; had he ever really

  desired anything and been denied?

  My dear friend:

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  I was surprised and honored to see an application from you and insisted on writing

  your answer personally. It is gratifying beyond measure that you believe in the

  Foundation enough to apply to take part. I can truthfully tell you that we have

  received no application from any other scholar of your distinction and

  accomplishment.

  Of course, thought Leyel. There is no other scholar of my stature, except Hari

  himself, and perhaps Deet, once her current work is published. At least we have no

  equals by the standards that Hari and I have always recognized as valid. Hari

  created the science of psychohistory. I transformed and revitalized the field of

  originism.

  And yet the tone of Hari's letter was wrong. It sounded like-- flattery. That was

  it. Hari was softening the coming blow. Leyel knew before reading it what the next

  paragraph would say.

  Nevertheless, Leyel, I must reply in the negative. The Foundation on Terminus is

  designed to collect and preserve knowledge. Your life's work has been devoted to

  expanding it. You are the opposite of the sort of researcher we need. Far better for

  you to remain on Trantor and continue your inestimably valuable studies, while

  lesser men and women exile themselves on Terminus.

  Your servant, Hari

  Did Hari imagine Leyel to be so vain he would read these flattering words and

  preen himself contentedly? Did he think Leyel would believe that this was the real

  reason his application was being denied? Could Hari Seldon misknow a man so badly?

  Impossible. Hari Seldon, of all people in the Empire, knew how to know other

  people. True, his great work in psychohistory dealt with large masses of people,

  with populations and probabilities. But Hari's fascination with populations had

  grown out of his interest in and understanding of individuals. Besides, he and Hari

  had been friends since Hari first arrived on Trantor. Hadn't a grant from Leyel's

  own research fund financed most of Hari's original research? Hadn't they held long

  conversations in the early days, tossing ideas back and forth, each helping the

  other hone his thoughts? They may not have seen each other much in the last-- what,