I expected some kind of explosion from the Park camp, but Dae responded almost mildly: “We’ll . . . see about Professor Ohara’s unbelievable claims, but I agree with the rest. Today we’ve shown that there are places off Earth where something more advanced than simple bacteria can exist—or has existed. The transition is possible. After today, I would put a meaningful value for factor ‘fl’ to be at least one in hundred.”
There were nods around the table. Since we had discovered ten Brin worlds and another handful that had had surface water for some time, her numbers made sense.
“Very good,” I said, moving right along before Ohara could respond, “that gets us to more interesting territory, namely factor ‘fi,’ the fraction of life-bearing worlds that develop intelligent life.”
Trevor laughed. “I consider Earth to be such a world, but if it’s not to be counted in this arithmetic—” He sounded discouraged for a moment. “All the thousands of worlds we’ve visited the last fifteen years. And yet we’ve come up with nothing.” Strange. Trevor Dhatri had seemed such an unrestrained cheerleader. I hadn’t thought he’d take note of failure—though somehow I doubted this little speech would show up in his online show. He paused and sounded a bit more chipper; maybe he’d figured how to spin this. “On the other hand, what we’ve discovered today gives me faith that the possibility of alien intelligent life is greater than zero. If we can just get a large enough baseline, a large enough sample size, we’ll find our peers in the universe.”
“It doesn’t matter think we are effectively alone.” This was Hugo Mendes. “You talk about how many worlds we’ve looked at. Fine. But in fact, we have visual access almost to the cosmological horizon—and nowadays we have observatories that can watch all that, every second. If there were an intelligent civilization anywhere, don’t you think it would ask the same questions we do? Wouldn’t it make signals we could recognize? But we don’t get anything. Whatever the other factors, I don’t think there are other civilizations in the observable universe, at least none that make signals.” He waved at the silvery formula. Factor “fc” got the annotation: “Zero or as close as makes no difference.”
We were getting near the end of the list. I really didn’t want to resume the argument about who deserved to hog the research gear. Give them some time to cool off and I could pull a Solomon on them, dividing everything down the middle—which would leave Park with enough to do some real science. I gave Cookie a poke on my private voice channel: “When will you be in with the first course? Appetizers at least?”
“Not more’n five minutes, ma’am! I promise.” Cookie sounded breathless.
I turned back to my mob of academics. Some of them looked unhappy with Hugo Mendes. Maybe he had gored their funding opportunities. This could burn up five minutes, but it might also cause real argument. I took a chance and brought them back on topic. “Ladies and gentlemen. We have only one more item on the Drake list, namely the length of time that a civilization might exist in a communicating form.”
Ohara laughed. “Well, we’ve lasted. We’ve got several real colonies. I think factor ‘L’ could be a very long time.”
That seemed hard to dispute.
“Oh, I don’t know.” This was one of the software jocks, a young fellow with a kind of smart-alecky air. “I think ‘L’ is as easily zero as any of the other factors.”
Trevor Dhatri gave him a look. “Come, come. We’re here aren’t we?”
“Are we?” The software guy leaned forward, a wide smile on his face. “Have you ever wondered why computer progress leveled off in the teens, just a few years before the invention of the stardrive?”
Trevor shrugged. “Computers got about as good as they can be.”
“Maybe. Or maybe”—the kid paused self-importantly—“maybe the computers kept getting better, and became superhumanly intelligent. They didn’t need us anymore. Maybe no stardrive was ever invented. Maybe the super AIs shuffled the human race off into a star travel game running on an old hardware rack in some Google server farm.”
“Ah, I . . . see,” said Trevor. “A novel cosmology indeed.” I’ll give Trevor this, he didn’t roll his eyes the way most did. Me? I thought all the Singularity types had died or been carted off to old folks homes long ago. But here was living example, and not an old fart. I guess like Nostradamus, some notions will never go away.
The embarrassed silence was broken by Cookie, who stuck his head into the room and said, “Captain, dinner is ready at your pleasure.”
Bless him, Cookie’s timing couldn’t have been better. I waved him in. As the mess staff trundled in their silver kettles and table settings, I brought up the lights. I noticed that Frito had hunkered down behind some rocks, no doubt bored by all the chitchat. Hopefully he and Ohara would keep a low profile while we had a good meal.
Whatever Cookie had magicked up, it smelled delicious. As his people set out the plates and silverware, he launched into his grand chef patter. “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this dish is one that you might find at the best New York restaurants. I ordered it myself for this mission.” That was a lie. Cookie yearned for his days in New York, but I knew that logistics was the responsibility of APA, with Cookie only allowed to state his general wishes. “I do apologize for the delay this evening. The ship’s loaders made a major bungle of where they stored what.”
“Yes,” I said, “but we’re just beginning to use the new universal shipping containers. Except for the ID codes, they all look alike.” APA had supervised the loading so I didn’t want to sound too critical.
Ron Ohara was sniffing suspiciously. He looked pale. “Just where did you find your . . . food supplies?”
Cookie, oh innocent Cookie. Without even trying, he brought down an academic career. “Oh,” he said, “they were in Lab Space 14. Stored live.” He waved to his servers, and they simultaneously raised the silver lids. “I give you broiled lobster in the shell!”
It smelled like lobster. It even looked like lobster—if you discounted the greenish flesh and the extra claws.
No wonder Frito was trying to hide.
Of course, Ron Ohara was thoroughly screwed. I mean discredited. He tried to claim that the critters had all been brought up during his single dive earlier that day. There were just too many Frito creatures for that explanation to fly. In fact, Ron had intended to plant the others during his later dives—after I gave him both submersibles and clearance to hog all our equipment.
In one grand coup de cuisine, Cookie had solved all my problems. Dae Park got the resources to complete her epoch-making survey of Lee’s World. In the process, she discovered two more of the famous “Park stromatolites.” Analysis back on Earth extended for months and years thereafter. The fossils show signs of metamorphic distortion; the fine detail has been lost. And yet a good argument can be made that they’re something like an early eukaryotic form. No doubt they originated several cataclysms earlier in the geological history of Lee’s world. Alas, since Park’s intense search, no further examples were found. Some claim this makes her work suspect. Of course this is balderdash. The isotope ratios in Park’s fossils are a perfect match for the isotopic fingerprint of the crust of Lee’s World.
Now thirty years have passed since our voyage to Lee’s World and our preliminary assessment of the Drake equation. That equation has crept back into the vernacular of speculation, if only because it captures disappointment and possibility on such a grand scale. In those thirty years we’ve colonized six of the most terrestrial worlds. A number of others are still in the process of terraforming—teleporting in oceans, for instance. (See chapter 8 for my part in the development of this technique.)
The last thirty years have transformed exploration, but not entirely for the better. Too many people are satisfied with terraforming; they don’t expect we can find worlds any better. The massive government funding of the early years has dried up. On the other hand, with the super-scalar extension of the stardrive, now we can go anywhere in less than ten days. Any
where in the observable universe? Sure, but that’s just the beginning. The vast majority of the universe is so far away that its light will never be visible from Earth or from any place you can see from Earth. That’s why a system memory failure is so dangerous in modern exploration— you might be so far from home that a lifetime of jumping wouldn’t bring you to a recognizable sky. Having a Hugo Mendes on board wouldn’t be any help. (If you’re a cache booby or have access to a planetary Internet, you can look this up. Search on “cosmological horizon.” Or better yet, buy my book, Beyond this Horizon: Star Captain Y.-T. Lee’s Voyage to the Cosmic Antipodes.)
Nowadays, the best explorers pop out to supra-cosmological distances, survey visually for the one-in-a-million exceptional star—and then home in on that. This strategy has two advantages: first, it may eventually get us to some far corner of the universe where the Drake statistics are improved. Second (a more practical reason), it makes it easier for explorers to keep proprietary control over the location of their discoveries; we’re less tied to the capricious funding of APA. Without this innovation, the public could never benefit from our Planets for Sale program.
So what have we found Out There? No little green men (or even little green lobsters). No stable planetary ecology with breathable pressures of free oxygen—i.e., no living eukaryotes or even cyanobacteria. We have seen four planets with fossil algae mats such as Park discovered on Lee’s World. Thus, the transition to complex life does happen off the Earth. I think it’s just a matter of time before we find such life. I know some folks say we have failed. Some explorers want to shift the focus to hypothetical nonorganic life-forms in Extreme Environments—the surface of neutron stars and black hole accretion disks. This is all very nice, but the Extremists are getting way too much funding for their agenda. There is no evidence that Extreme Life is even possible.
Our voyage to Lee’s World was full of surprises. Some of them didn’t surface till we got back to Chicago: Trevor’s webcast was an enormous hit all over Earth—more for the world itself than Park’s discovery and the drama of Ohara’s fraud. Without actually lying, the videos convinced millions that the place was indeed a paradise. Furthermore, the geologists concluded that although the planet was overdue for a crustal “readjustment” (Krakatoa on a planetary scale), and even though such a catastrophe might come with only a few hours’ warning, it might not happen for decades.
The Advanced Projects Agency can go nuts when it’s hit with a fad. In this case, APA boosted the terraform priority on Lee’s World to the max. Planets like Eden and Dorado, stable environments that were already as congenial as Earth’s Antarctic and Sahara respectively, just needing a little atmosphere tweaking, these got moved to lower priority. Meantime, fifty million people queued up to homestead Lee’s World.
Thirty years later, the place still hasn’t blown itself up. A million crazy people live on Paradise. (That’s what they call it. Maybe I should be glad my name isn’t attached to this incipient disaster. Still, I was the discoverer. What’s wrong with “Lee” anyway?)
I actually visited the place last year, at the invitation of the planetary government. Still another surprise is that the planetary government of Paradise is none other than Ron Ohara! I got my own parade and tours all over the hundred-kilometer-wide continent. The towns are beautiful, but with a weirdness you won’t find on Earth. Where else will you see architectures designed to survive more rock ’n’ roll every week than a century of Ankara earthquakes? Where else will you find building codes that require every residence to have an escape-to-orbit vehicle built in? (They look like large-bore fat-ass chimneys.) Anyway, the citizens of Paradise treated me royally. I even got to unveil a discoverer’s statue (of me!) in the capital. Maybe my name is okay.
All the while, I was trying to figure who was really behind the hospitality—and if it was Ron, why? Maybe he knew the world was going to blow while I was there. I should stay close to fat chimneys.
The last afternoon of my visit, I had a private lunch with Ron at his presidential lodge at the Place of First Landing. We sat out on the veranda, not more than two hundred meters from the original camp. That ground had long since fallen onto the beach, but the remaining terrace was everything that Trevor’s wacky video had implied about this world. We might as well have been at some Mauna Kea resort. And unlike that last time I was on this world, there wasn’t even a need for oxy masks!
I hadn’t seen Ron in all the years since our expedition returned to Chicago. He’s showing his age. But then, I imagine I am too. When his staff had left us alone with our drinks, he raised his beer as if giving a toast to the scenery. “Paradise was the easiest terraform job in the history of starflight. We seeded a few million tonnes of the proper ocean bacteria and now after less than three decades we have breathable levels of free oxygen.”
Considering the investment’s dubious future, that was only fair. But I didn’t say that. I just puffed on my cigar and enjoyed the view. You couldn’t see the talus from here, just the sea in the farther distance (complete with some certifiably insane surfers). Closer, above the drop off, there were wide grassy lawns. The planetary flag fluttered on a flagpole between two palm trees.
“Have you seen our flag, Captain?”
“Oh yes.” The flag was everywhere: a blue field surmounted by a green lobster with too many claws. “How is Frito, anyway?”
Ron laughed. “Frito, or at least his offspring, are doing great. We tweaked their biology so they’re filter feeders. Now they’re the most plentiful large animal in the sea, having a feast on the new plankton. But you should know that they’re a legally protected species.” He smiled. “I don’t think I could survive another surprise lobster dinner.”
I smiled back. He seemed mellow enough. “There’s a question I always wanted to ask you, Mr. President. Did you ever think you could get away with such a transparent hoax?”
“Actually, I thought I had a shot at it. I was betting that Paradise would blow up before any third expedition got here. Meantime, I’d have the subsea videos I intended to make of Frito’s siblings—the ones you cooked.”
“Yes, but even without Cookie’s menu, once we got back to Earth and serious DNA analysis was done on Frito—”
Ron looked embarrassed. “Well, as I’m sure you’ve read, I rather misrepresented my academic qualifications; my PhD is in sociology. I used a hobby kit to insert the green genes and muck around with a few other things like claw count. Trevor said that would be enough to give us deniability. Actually, I think Trevor was leading me on a bit. He only needed the hoax to last long enough to boost the ratings for his video. In the end, your cook didn’t give us even that much time.”
He leaned back, looking awfully content for someone who’d had his great hoax blown away. “But that was thirty years ago. Amazing how it all turned out isn’t it? I call it the luck of Paradise. You and your cook debunked Frito so fast that no one talked seriously about sending me to jail. And Trevor’s video was still a smash hit. We were able to take advantage of all the publicity to become land developers here.” He grinned at me. “Life is good.”
Hmm. “Paradise could end tomorrow, you know.”
“True.” Ron set his beer down and clasped his hands across his gut. “But we Paradiseans are ever alert. Besides,” he gave me a sidelong look, “we have you and your fellow explorers working tirelessly on our behalf. I understand you’ve discovered ten worlds that are a match for Paradise.”
We at Planets for Sale don’t release the exact totals, but I said, “That’s about right. And every one of them is at least as unstable as this world. Are you talking about a culture of throwaway worlds?”
“Sure. If you give us a cheap enough price. Traditional terraforming also has its place, of course. Both ways, the human race is spreading out.” He smiled at the gleaming day. “Up to a few decades ago, we were trapped on one tiny world—and we were getting crowded and deadly. We were close to global catastrophe. That was a very narrow passage. But we got th
rough it. And because of the near-zero values of ‘fl’ and ‘fi’ and ‘fc,’ we’ve discovered that ‘L’ may be unbounded. The whole universe is our private playground! We just have to supply the trees and the grass and the pets. I know the biologists are still hunting for higher life. I read how Dae Park is flying around beyond the beyond. She’ll be ecstatic if she ever finds a living algae mat. But don’t you see? It really doesn’t matter anymore. A thousand years from now, we humans will be beyond the reach of any disaster. A hundred thousand years, and the profs will be arguing about whether humans originated on a single world or many. And a million years from now . . . well, by then life will be scattered across the universe and evolved into new species. I’ll bet some will be as smart as us. That will be the time for a new assessment of the Drake equation!”
Maybe Ron is right about the future; his view is widely held these days. But I can’t wait a million years—or even a thousand. And in a way, the spread of Earth’s life messes with our learning the truth. It did on Mars. It tried to on Lee’s World. I’d like to stay ahead of that, to continue to open up the universe to you, my customers. I remain an explorer, my boots planted in the hard vacuum of reality, my gaze directed beyond this horizon.
About It
Terry Bisson
Terry Bisson (www.terrybisson.com) lives in Oakland, California. Originally from Kentucky, Bisson lived in New York City for many years, where he wrote copy for publishing companies and ran a revolutionary mail-order book service, Jacobin Books, with his wife, Judy. They moved to Oakland, California, in 2002. He is the author of seven genre fantasy or SF novels, including Talking Man (1987); Fire on the Mountain (1988); Voyage to the Red Planet (1990); The Pickup Artist (2001); and, most recently, Dear Abby (2003) and Planet of Mystery (2007)—and a number of movie tie-in books of unusually high quality for that subgenre. His short fiction, which he continues to publish every year, is collected in Bears Discover Fire (1993), In the Upper Room (2000), and in Greetings (2005). His most recent book is The Left Left Behind (2009), a satire on the bestselling Christian fantasy series, Left Behind; the volume also includes “Special Relativity,” described by the publisher as “a one-act drama that answers the question: When Albert Einstein, Paul Robeson, and J. Edgar Hoover are raised from the dead at an anti-Bush rally, which one wears the dress?”
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