The third section of each language was a long passage of text with no pictures. That section had to be the end goal of all the other content: the real message in the Message.
#
When Luulianni was a child she had accidentally tunneled through the wall of her playroom into her neighbor’s home. The familiar feel of dirt under her tentacles had suddenly given way to air, a terrifying feeling of falling, an opening into an exciting new world of unexpected sights and smells.
This felt just like that.
The air in the compartment was very dry, and her lips and her tentacles chapped and then began to crack. She did not sleep. She did not eat. Sometimes she realized just how thirsty she was and drank some water.
Everything took on an amazing lucidity. Occasionally her parents would come by and ask how she was doing, but she waved them away impatiently. It was only later that she remembered her parents were dead.
Geeni appeared at the window again and again, increasingly frantic. Luulianni was being accused of horrible crimes — datajacking and drug smuggling and slavery — and Station Security had interviewed him repeatedly. They obviously suspected he was hiding her.
She waved him away too.
Word by word, the Message emerged from its three-billion-year sleep like a tiny plant cracking its seed and thrusting toward the light. She was frustrated by her clumsy, chapped tentacles. They could not write as fast as she could read, now. She even knew the real name of Language Three — or at least she knew the symbols in her own notation that made up its name. At times she even felt she knew how to pronounce it.
At last there came a point where she sat back and just read the sentences she had successfully translated, read them over and over, let their meaning soak into her.
And then she trembled with sorrow, in a way she had never done since her mother died. All the anger she had felt toward the Consortium drained away, replaced by gratitude — the regretful gratitude of an adult child who realizes at last just how much her parents have done for her — and by sadness for the lonely race that had sent the Message.
She only hoped it had not been received too late.
#
An unknown time later she was jerked from her stupor by Geeni’s insistent pounding on the hatch. He said there was an important meeting she must not miss. She knew she needed to go, but it was hard to remember why.
Moving as though underwater, Luulianni gathered her papers and forced them clumsily into her pack, then climbed slowly into the bag she had come in.
“Are you sure you’ve sealed it properly?” Geeni shouted. His voice in the radio was tiny and funny. Had he said that before?
“Yes, I’m sure,” she said. She looked at it again. Was she really sure? Maybe not.
She pulled the zipper shut the last few tentacle-widths just as Geeni opened the hatch. The bag puffed out and she felt a horrible pain in her ears. Forgotten papers rushed out the hatch like students released from class, dragging her bag along with them. Then she was through the hatch and the stars were all around. She tumbled, falling freely, for a long long moment until Geeni’s hand snagged one of the carrying loops on the bag and she fell with a squeak to the bottom.
The trip back to the airlock was much easier than the trip out, because she was unconscious.
#
Geeni smuggled her through service corridors to the big conference room. All the Section heads and many important linguists from off-station were there to hear Doun Epotkup present his findings on Language Eight. Even Jun Dal-Nieri was there, her sleek black form seated imposingly in the place of honor on the left side of the podium. Luulianni was nearly certain it was really Jun and not just another mirage brought on by lack of sleep.
At first, nobody noticed the small disheveled figure making its way slowly up the center aisle toward the podium. But then Epotkup stopped speaking, his words trailing off in the middle of a sentence, and every eye in the room turned to her.
Nektopk shouted “Call Security! This person is a dangerous criminal!” But before anyone else could move, Jun Dal-Nieri sprang to the microphone. Her people were predators, and her powerful limbs commanded as much respect as her position and reputation.
“I have never known anyone more talented or trustworthy than Linguist Luulianni,” Jun said as Epotkup sidled hastily away. “We should at least listen to whatever she has come here to say.”
Nektopk’s fur bristled in fear, but he stood his ground. “You don’t know the harm she could do.”
Just then Kutotop, the third Ptopku from Luulianni’s demotion, rose from his seat. “Let her speak,” he said. Nektopk sputtered an enraged sentence at him in some Ptopku dialect, but Kutotop replied in Consortium Trade Language. “I have grown very uncomfortable with our handling of this situation, Nektopk.”
“This could mean the end of the Project!”
“It could mean the conclusion of the Project. But perhaps the time has come.”
Nektopk shouted again in Ptopku dialect.
Kutotop waved a hand in negation. “It is not worth the risk of war.”
Nektopk’s eyes darted from Kutotop to Jun to Luulianni, his gaze hard and cold as the stars outside her little window. “I refuse to be party to this disaster,” he said, and in three great swings of his arms was out the door.
Luulianni shuffled to the podium and climbed awkwardly up to the lectern, with Kutotop and Jun’s help. As Kutotop placed his microphone around her neck, he said “I’m so sorry we treated you this way, Linguist Luulianni. Nektopk’s faction believed we could win a war with the Turundi. They blocked progress on the Message and spread false intelligence about a super weapon to provoke an attack, hoping to get the rest of the Consortium on our side.”
Jun’s ears were flattened in shame. “I owe you an apology too. We suspected they were deliberately prolonging the Project, but we didn’t know why. I feared if I shared my suspicions with you on a Ptopku-controlled channel it could jeopardize you. I didn’t realize how much trouble you could get into on your own!”
Later, Luulianni did not remember her speech, but those who had heard it told her it was quite coherent and very moving. She began by thanking Jun and the whole Consortium for the help they had given her and her species. The audience rumbled when she explained what she had discovered about Language Eight, and made a shuffling and mumbling sound as the sample pictures that Geeni had printed out were passed around. Luulianni explained the structure of the three sections of each language and gave a few examples.
Then she read the portions of the Message that she had translated.
Pandemonium. The conference fragmented into a hundred individual, indelible memories…
– Jun sat stunned, tears leaking slowly from her eyes, overwhelmed by the poignancy of the Message itself…
– Epotkup covered his head with his hands, muttering in Ptopku Dominant: “Lost, all lost…”
– Kutotop argued excitedly with the other linguists…
– Geeni bounded out of the room, tumbling end over end, rushing to tell his government that the Message held no military secrets, that the war could be called off…
– Nektopk, in his quarters, turned a small black pill over and over between his fingers, thinking that the new Ptopku government would have to find another scapegoat…
…but Luulianni saw none of them. She slid to the floor and passed out.
#
One hundred Consortium Standard years later a monument was dedicated at the spaceport on the Muuli homeworld. There was a statue of Luulianni, of course, showing her as she had looked in her later years as the Muuli representative to the Consortium Grand Council. But the largest part of the monument consisted of the text of the Message, in its seven original languages and all the languages of the Consortium.
It read as follows:
Greetings from the species once known as Homo Sapiens. You who read this are, in a way, our children. We hope that you will forgive us for what we have done to you.
&
nbsp; We lived a long time, as a species, but in that time we spread over only a small portion of a single galaxy. In all that time we met only one other intelligent species, and that was nearly dead. We heard messages from two others, but they were so far away that conversation was impossible.
We learned much about our universe, and we learned how to break many of the rules of physics. But the speed of light was one rule we never could break. So, in the end, we died.
We died of loneliness.
Before we died we scattered many tiny machines into the void. These machines broke some of the rules, and made more of themselves to break them further. Eventually they caused our universe to collapse, to return itself to its initial state. And, in the final moments of that collapse, these machines changed the rules for the new universe that was to follow.
If we succeeded, your universe is smaller and hotter and faster than ours. You have many different life forms and they can talk with and visit each other.
You may hate us for the wars that easy travel and communication make possible, and for the stars that burn themselves out so quickly, and for interfering with your universe before it was even born. But we did it because, like all parents, we wanted our children to have a better life than we did.
The window between universes is small, and this Message is our attempt to preserve a small part of our language and culture. Please remember us. Please forgive us.
Goodbye.
GREG EGAN
Greg Egan (born 20 August 1961) is an Australian science fiction writer.
He is the author of more than fifty short stories and eleven science fiction novels. During the early 1990s Egan published a body of short fiction—mostly hard science fiction focused on mathematical and quantum ontological themes—that established him as one of the most important writers working in science fiction. His work has won the Hugo, John W Campbell Memorial, Locus, Aurealis, Ditmar, and Seiun awards. His most recent book, The Arrows of Time (the concluding volume in the Orthogonal trilogy), was published in November 2013 by Gollancz in the UK, and is due out from Night Shade books in the US in Fall 2014.
We take our cues from the world around us. In the powerful and engaging story that follows, Egan turns gravity on its side and takes us through a disorientating landscape as he explores what it means to be a bit player in the near future.
Bit Players, by Greg Egan
1
She was roused from sleep by a painful twitch in her right calf, then kept awake by the insistent brightness around her. She opened her eyes and stared up at the sunlit rock. The curved expanse of rough gray stone above her did not seem familiar—but what had she expected to see in its place? She had no answer to that.
She was lying on some kind of matting, but she could feel the hardness of stone beneath it. She shifted her gaze and took in more of her surroundings. She was in a cave, ten or twelve feet from the entrance—deep enough that her present viewpoint revealed nothing of the world outside but clear blue sky. As she rose to her feet and started toward the mouth of the cave, sunlight struck her face unexpectedly from below, and she raised an arm to shield her eyes.
“Be careful,” a woman’s voice urged her. “You’ve made a good recovery, but you might still be unsteady.”
“Yes.” She glanced back toward the rear of the cave and managed to discern the woman’s face in the shadows. But she kept walking. With each step she took the sunlight fell on more of her body, warming her chest and abdomen through her grubby tunic, reaching down past the hem to touch her bare knees. This progression seemed to imply that the floor was tilted—that the cave was like a rifle barrel aimed at a point in the sky well above the newly risen sun—but her own sense of balance insisted that she was crossing level ground.
At the mouth of the cave she knelt, trembling slightly, and looked out. She was bent almost horizontal, and facing straight down, but the bare gray rock outside the cave presented itself as if she were standing in a vertical hole, timidly poking her head above ground. The rock stretched out below her in a sheer drop that extended as far as she could see, disappearing in a shimmering haze. When she raised her eyes, in front of her was a whole hemisphere of sky, with the sun halfway between the “horizon” directly below and the blue dome’s horizontal midpoint that in a sane world would have sat at the zenith.
She retreated back into the cave, but then she couldn’t stop herself: she had to see the rest, to be sure. She lay down on her back and inched forward until the cave’s ceiling no longer blocked her view, and she was staring up across the jagged wall of rock that continued on above her, as below, until it blurred into the opposite “horizon”. A cold, dry wind pummeled her face.
“Why is everything tilted?” she asked.
She heard the slap of sandals on stone, then the woman grabbed her by the ankles and slid her back away from the edge. “You want to fall again?”
“No.” She waited for her sense of the vertical to stop tipping, then she clambered to her feet and faced her gruff companion. “But seriously, who moved the sky?”
“Where did you expect it to be?” the woman asked obtusely.
“Er—” She gestured toward the cave’s ceiling.
The woman scowled. “What’s your name? What village are you from?”
Her name? She groped for it, but there was nothing. She needed a place-holder until she could dredge up the real thing. “I’m Sagreda,” she decided. “I don’t remember where I’m from.”
“I’m Gerther,” the woman replied.
Sagreda looked back over her shoulder, only to be dazzled again by the rising sun. “Can you tell me what’s happened to the world?” she pleaded.
“Are you saying you’ve forgotten the Calamity?” Gerther asked skeptically.
“What calamity?”
“When gravity turned sideways. When it stopped pulling us toward the center of the Earth, and started pulling us east instead.”
Sagreda said, “I’m fairly sure that’s something I would have remembered, if I’d come across it before.”
“You must have had quite a fall,” Gerther decided. “I’ve been nursing you for a day, but you might have been out cold on the ledge for a while before that.”
“Then I owe you my thanks,” Sagreda replied. Gerther had no gray hairs but her face was heavily lined; whatever her age, she could not have had an easy life. She was dressed in a coarsely woven tunic much like Sagreda’s, and her sandals looked as if they’d been hand-made from animal hide. Sagreda glanced down at her own body. Her arms were grazed but the wounds had been cleaned.
“If you honestly don’t know where you belong, we’ll need to find a place for you in the village,” Gerther declared.
Sagreda stood in silence. Part of her was humbled by the generosity of the offer, but part of her balked—as if she was being asked to assent to a far less benevolent assimilation. The stone was cold on the soles of her feet.
“What’s holding us up?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“If gravity points east, everywhere…” Sagreda gestured toward the floor, “then what’s keeping this rock from heading east?”
“The rock below it,” Gerther replied, deadpan.
“Ha!” Sagreda waited for the woman to crack a smile and admit that she was teasing. “I might have come down in the last landslide, but I’m not a five-year-old. If there’s nothing keeping up the rock below us except the rock below that, and you repeat the same claim all the way around the planet…then there’s nothing holding up any of it. You might as well tell me that a wheel can’t be spun because each part of it obstructs the part beside it.”
“I meant the rock closer to the center of the Earth,” Gerther explained. “We believe that the Change doesn’t reach all the way in. Once you go deep enough, gravity becomes normal again. After all, that’s what happens far above the ground: the moon still orbits us in the old way.”
Sagreda examined the walls of the cave. “So this rock is being pulled ea
st by its own weight, but you’re saying that because it’s of a piece with some deeper rock that isn’t being pulled east…that’s enough to keep the floor from falling out from under us?” The gray mineral around them made her think of granite, but whatever it was it certainly appeared solid and unyielding.
And heavy.
“That still makes no sense,” she said. “Before the Calamity, what’s the longest overhang you ever saw jutting out from a cliff?”
“I have no knowledge of those times,” Gerther insisted.
Sagreda had no clear memories, herself. But she could still picture rock formations with various shapes, and judge them plausible or preposterous. “I doubt there was ever an overhang longer than thirty or forty feet, and even then it was probably supported in part by some kind of natural arch—you wouldn’t see forty feet of rock just sticking out like a plank! If the Change spans a range of altitudes that encompasses most of the surface of the Earth—and if it didn’t, why would we be here at all, instead of living a normal life in whatever lowlands or highlands break out into normal gravity?—then it must be exerting an eastwards force on slabs of rock thousands of feet long. And if there’s nothing stopping such a massive object from moving east under its own weight except the fact that it joins up at one end with a deeper body of rock, it’s going to tear free. Neighboring slabs won’t help: they have their own weight to bear, they can’t prop up anything else. So everything down to the depth where the Change begins should be rubble by now: an endless landslide of boulders, tumbling around in ever faster circles.”
Gerther spread her arms. “It doesn’t look like it.”
Sagreda rubbed her temple. “No, it doesn’t,” she admitted. Maybe she was simply mistaken about the strength of rock. Amnesic or not, she was fairly sure that she’d never been a professional geologist.
“If the rock doesn’t fall, what about sand?” she wondered. “And what about the oceans! There ought to be the mother of all waterfalls cascading around the planet—growing faster with every cycle!”
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 277
