Infinity One

by Robert Hoskins (Ed. )

  “You learn Moonwalking fast,” Sergeant Aigunov said.

  Roban ignored the attempt at friendliness. He admitted the need for guidance before he could safely travel on the surface; and in fact, the rule that no one went topside alone was sensible. Nevertheless—

  “I’ll check the radio telescope first,” he said.

  “W'y? No good. Not fix yet.”

  “Eactly,” Roban said. “But it, and the optical instruments for that matter—the X-ray receivers, the particle counters, the gravity wave meters, everything here—is the property and responsibility of the Order. You don’t think we simply kept star talk alive for two thousand years, do you? We were always astronomers too. Each time civilization cut its own throat, or just wallowed back in swinish ‘practicality,’ we had to carry science on alone.”

  His gaze went to the huge spidery skeleton which overhung the area. Most of the Station was underground. Most of the exterior installations were in buildings sufficiently sturdy to survive three centuries of abandonment. The scattered blockhouse shapes, like the grounded spaceship, were dwarfed in this landscape but hardly touched by its meteoritic sleet. However, the radio dish and its field of antennae had suffered cruelly.

  Repairs would cost wealth as well as time and skilled labor. Roban wasn’t sure the Order could do the job unassisted. It had considerable holdings and revenues, but were they that great? Probably not. Earth was still crawling back from impoverishment. Had the Communicators been able to construct spaceships, they would not have waited a decade for the Domination of Bailkal to offer two of them a ride.

  Not that the Domination had regained all that was lost when mankind last went crazy. Technical knowledge didn’t go up with cities in radioactive smoke. It was too widely diffused in too many books and microreels. The Order preserved most information; but between them, secular libraries doubtless retained as much of what had been generally known. No, the problem was scarcity of resources, including trained personnel. Theoretically, the first post-collapse spaceship could have been a System-spanning photon-drive giant, totally automated, able to take herself anywhere. In practice, she had to be simple enough for today’s industry to produce.

  “If you’d taken us here from the beginning,” Roban said bitterly, “that observatory would be in action right now." But no. You had to see if you couldn't read the messages that had come in, with the help of renegades from our ranks, and keep what you discovered to yourselves.

  He started toward the ’scope. Baikalan reports on it were available, but he ought to investigate personally. Motion eased his mood a trifle, until a grin twitched one comer of his mouth. In the end, as always before, the Order was prevailing over mere armed strength.

  Its Board of Directors had protested when the Dominator denied repeated requests to send its people Moon-side. Roban, then a boy, had asked with tearful indignation why it didn’t call down the ban on Baikal. His arithmetic teacher, a female member of Seattle Station, which cooperated closely with what public schools there were, had explained quite frankly.

  “Roban, dear, the Communicators haven’t survived the rise and fall of civilizations by being impulsive. We serve the whole human race: eventually, we hope, the whole of intelligent life everywhere in this universe. We do more than gather and safeguard knowledge. We try to keep it working. That’s why anyone who joins us has to renounce his nationality: so he can travel freely, judge and advise impartially. Oh, yes, we charge what seems right for our services, because we must keep our treasury alive. But the important thing is the services themselves, halting a plague, establishing a factory, educating a generation.”

  (An ideal, as the boy already vaguely knew. The truth was as complicated and disorderly as human affairs always are—episodes of corruption, crankery, schism, abasement, abuse of trust, over-weening arrogance; but also reforms, scholarship, reunity, martyrdom, honesty, humble helpfulness. The Order endured, in its quest for understanding, because ultimately that quest was religious. Whatever name a Communicator might give to God, including Void, his search across the cosmos was a search into the spirit.)

  Sister Marja’s eyes crinkled. “As for the practical politics, Roban, well, we can only invoke the ban—withdraw ourselves from a country—in the gravest cases. If we did it often, governments might decide they could manage without us! Worse, the mass of the people might lose their reverence for us. No, I think here we need merely bide our time.”

  She was right. Key information lay hidden—somewhere —in the secret files of the Order. Renegades or no, the Dominator’s agents could not interpret those sendings from the stars. There had been immense laughter in Australia Station’s auditorium when Luizo read aloud the announcement by Yuri Khan himself: “Thanks to the skill and devotion of our space project personnel, technical difficulties have been overcome to the point where it is possible to carry a limited number of foreign guests—”

  Bouncing along beside Roban, Aigunov said: “We not fix becausse got odder t’ings first.” His hand chopped across the Milky Way. “We got to reach Mars. Radio say colony did not die. Got to reach asteroids, mine again, use dose minerals to build up Eart’ again. Stars, dey wait.”

  Well, Roban thought, the Baikalans are scarcely a sentimental folk.

  You couldn’t even say that their adherence to dark-age tradition—bonds of kinship, old rites, hunting and herding, the warrior ethic—had such a basis. Rather, it was necessary. Their diversity of peoples, most still more than half barbarian, could never have formed a viable state on the melting pot theory. Nothing would have melted except the pot. Instead, ethnic identity, pride, vying for glory, must be turned into the engine of empire.

  And—Roban admitted reluctantly—the imperialism was itself pragmatic. From the beginning, the Dominators had made their objective clear. Several major nations were emerging. Rivalries were sharpening. Baikal would not attempt world conquest; that had always led to disaster. But it would try for military and economic hegemony.

  The attempt was succeeding. Through fair means or foul—persuasion, diplomacy, purchase, conquest, alliance —in fact if not everywhere in name, the horse-tailed banner of the Lightning Bolt was flying halfway around the North Pole. And it stood on the Moon. And it was bound for Mars, the Belt, the verges of the Solar System.

  But not for the stars, Roban told himself. Those are ours.

  Stopping at the clifflike base of the radioscope, standing in its immense shadow, he became able to see better aloft. Sun after sun trod forth, unwinking, winter-keen, blue Sirius, red Betelgeuse, the galaxy’s frosty rush across blackness, the Orion nebula where new suns were coming to birth as he watched, Andromeda’s vortex whose light was two million years old, host upon radiant host, and those among them where planets circled unseen and minds yearned outward like his own and the signals winged away, Are you there, are you there, my brother?

  He swallowed. His head whirled. He wanted to cast himself on his knees. Now he understood how, once that first faint cry sounded in its receivers, the Foundation for Extraterrestrial Communications was bound to endure, evolve into the Order, outlive wars, famines, pestilences, upheavals, ages of chaos and ages of indifference, kings and peoples and gods. A man asked a question knowing that he would be dust before the answer could come; was this not what made him a man?

  “E-yi. Ya inyah," resounded through Roban’s hearing. He turned. Aigunov was making gestures at the sky, mumbling some formula. “Om mani padme hum. Om, om, am'' He might be a well-drilled spacehand, but down underneath he was a herdsman who shivered when demons galloped overhead on the night wind. We'll be a long time about shedding the animal in us, Roban thought.

  Anger flared afresh: Animals like him—walking my homeland with my girl!

  Returning hours later to report—dry-mouthed, sore-eyed .itchy and smelly with perspiration, shaky with fatigue, but borne on a tide of eagerness—he found Luzio talking with Iwan Duna. Roban waited by the door. He could not interrupt a Primary.

  The office wa
s cramped and austere. One wall was covered with bookshelves whose volumes had not yet been dusted. Opposite, beneath an air grille, hung a chart of known interstellar links; three centuries of underground darkness and vacuum had left it wonderfully clear, as if for a token of the Order’s timelessness. Luzio sat behind a desk, Duna in front. Though he had thrown the embroidered cope of his rank over his coverall, the references and papers lay spread before him, the Communicator seemed to be the soldier, erect and correct. The colonel sprawled back in his chair, collar open, malodorous cigar between fingers, tattooed countenance loosely smiling.

  “—you succeeded in beaming a message at Kappa Ceti,” Luzio said.

  “Yass,” Duna answered. “Five . . . no, seven years ago. Of course, wit’ t’irty-two light-years to cross ...” He shrugged.

  “Have you tried no other star?”

  “Not dat I know of. Kappa Ceti iss de closest dat transmits, no?" Lazily: “Unless you know of some closer dat you have not told de world about.”

  “None,” Luizo rapped. “A priori absurd. First a star has to have a life-breathing planet, then intelligence has to evolve, then a civilization has to develop that is willing and able to exchange information with others. Our forebears were surprised to find that, judging from what they learned directly and indirectly, as many as one percent of the main sequence suns qualify—in this galactic neighborhood, at least.”

  “None of dem have told you how far de network reaches?”

  “I doubt any are certain. A message from the center of the galaxy would take thirty thousand years to get here. Longer, actually, since it would have to zigzag between civilizations which could relay it. Under those conditions, one doesn’t beam blindly into the wilderness. One holds regular discourse with his nearest available neighbors. Each party passes on what comes in to him from elsewhere. But that takes time itself; first one must understand what the newcomers are trying to convey, next put it into terms that one hopes the neighbors will comprehend. Our predecessors have recorded their belief that it is unfeasible to relay past the third or fourth stage of translation. The garbling would become hopeless.”

  ' Luizo tugged his beard. “To be sure,” he continued, “man is a baby in this respect. We know the Kappa Cetians have been in the network for some fifty thousand years. To them, it is only yesterday that they finally got a response from us. And others have been sending on the maser beams much longer than them. So our guesses about the system and how it works are apt to be wrong more often than right, I suppose.”

  “You really have dat much trouble understanding?” Duna blew a smoke ring. “I should t’ink, wit’ deir experience, dey would know how to convey information fast to anybody.”

  “How fast is fast?” Luizo countered. “In two millennia, how many direct exchanges have we had with Kappa Ceti? The largest possible number is thirty-one; and the hiatuses in space, during our mad-dog history, have cost us ten of those chances.”

  He cocked his head. “Colonel, why are you asking me about things that a school child ought to know?”

  Duna laughed. “Because I am not a school child.” He lifted a hand. “No, really. I have studied dis part of man’s past as closely as odder parts. I have read, and seen in ancient films, how de world jubilated w’en first contact wass made. W’at strikes me as strange is dat it has had so little effect on us. Astronomy, physics, chemistry, planetology, biology . . . science, certain technologies, yas, we learned w’at we did not know, got ideas we might never have t’ought of by ourselves, like de tricky way to make a spaceship dat can really do her own sensing and computing, or de photon drive. But art, religion, politics, maters dat touch de common man w’ere he really lives— no, none, in all dis time. W’y?”

  Luizo drew breath. Roban wondered if the Primary really thought the Dominist was ignorant, or was quietly insulting him.

  “If nothing else, transmission lag. Oh, yes, one does not proceed on a simple dialogue basis, one sends a long continuous program, even in the initial exploratory signal. But consider what happens when such a signal is acknowledged.

  “The acknowledgers have to work out the code. Men had devised theoretical schemes, even before space travel. For instance, a set of on-off pulses could be arranged in a rectangle, each side a prime number of units, and form a crude picture. But in practice—as might have been guessed—the Kappa Cetians did not think that way. It took them a human generation to realize that we did not realize they were trying to send us a group of circuit diagrams. Then they had to regress to an elementary level and instruct us in their symbolism—and several times we went astray, which they could not know for thirty-two years—and we, in turn, eventually found out that they did not know we cared about the ecology of their planet.. . Well no matter. You can read the chronicles.” “I have,” Duna said. “Not easy for alien minds to mesh. Like you and me, ha?”

  Luizo’s eyes clashed with his. “Yes, probably.”

  They noticed Roban. “Come in, Brother,” Luizo said. “Be seated. What did you find?”

  The Norrestlander placed himself nervously on a chair’s edge. “As reported, sir,” he answered. “Damage repairable, but will take time and be expensive.” He hesitated. “Uh ... I can’t help wondering, sir, if we shouldn’t let it go. Now that we’re back in the network, or will be, the Others can surely answer our astrophysics questions for us, like they’ve done in the past.”

  “When we knew what questions to ask,” Luizo reminded him. He shook his grizzled head. “No, we will always have to do most of our own work. And we don’t want to be parasites, either. We have something to tell the universe.” He glanced back at Duna. “Concerning the point you raised, there have in fact been transmissions of literally vital importance. I might mention our learning about the variations and analogues of DNA on a number of different planets. You must be aware of the impact that a biological science thus broadened has had on fields like agriculture and medicine, in eras when we have the means to apply the techniques.”

  In Roban’s mind lifted the pictures (heartbreakingly blurred and few) that had finally been sent when the request was finally, perhaps, comprehended. “Intelligent life form” ... in every case, an equivalent of eyes and hands, or so men assumed, though the shapes were too strange and the accompanying text too meager for identification . . . but were those half-dozen species typical? More pictures should have arrived, after Earth’s desire had passed along the network. Unless the theory was right that difference piled upon difference, from race to race, soon choked off the flow. Luizo himself, in spite of having mentioned it, was skeptical of that theory. Eventually proof or disproof ought to be fourthcoming.

  Patience. Patience. They've been talking out of Kappa Ceti for fifty thousand years. Elsewhere, we're told, for more than a million. Give us time—but I have no time!

  Duna was scowling. “Dat is not w’at I meant.” He leaned forward. “You know, I t’ink maybe de reason we got trobble getting humanistic—” his earnestness shattered in a canine laugh—“or nonhumanistic information is, de Odders send to much t’rough robots—cybernets—you know, dey turn de job over to computers.”

  “That is no new speculation, Colonel,” Luizo told him. “I consider it plausible. Wasn’t the original search for extra-Solar intelligence—the beaming and listening—automated by us? It’s obvious that the least of the alien civilizations is technologically ahead of us, and far older than any culture of ours has ever lived to become. With that kind of progress behind it, that kind of stability within it, would you not expect affairs to be rationalized, well-ordered, to the point where machines handle all routines?” He smiled. "I rather imagine that the early stages of communication with a race as primitive as ours count as routine.”

  Duna’s good humor vanished. He chewed his cigar. “I don’t like it, if dey really are no more interested in us dan dat. We may be less intellectual dan dem, but we are alive, and derefore we must have uniquenesses dey ought

  to ask about. Intellect should be de
servant of life, not de odder way around.”

  “Your opinion.” Contempt barely edged Luizo’s voice.

  Duna shook his cigar at the Primary. “And w’at about dis? We humans, soon as we could, we would make ships for going dere to see for ourselves. If dey ar furder along dan us, w’y have dey not come here?”

  “Maybe they did, in Earth's prehistoric past,” Luizo answered. “Frankly, though, I doubt it. Have you not read the records of our inquiries about astronautics?”

  “Yas, but-”

  “Why should the Kappans lie to us? They explained that a spacecraft could be build to travel as fast as one-sixth light speed, but the radiation encountered—from the engine and interstellar gas—would pose difficulties.” Luizo smiled with scant mirth. “Difficulties! Our own calculations showed that any living organism, behind any feasible shielding, would last less than one hour.

  “As for automated probes: in the early days, to the nearest stars, perhaps. But no longer, at least not to stars within the network. Not when so much more information, from so much wider a range, can travel so much faster along the maser beams. I keep telling you, Colonel, those are rational beings out there.”

  “Maybe you have right.” Duna puffed ferociously. “Me, I would not want to be dat rational.” He swung to face Roban. “You! You are young. Would you not like to go?”

  “Uh—well—” the Norrestlander stammered, “if it’s impossible—”

  “W’y do you say impossible? W’y not try to find a way around de radiation barrier? Or go off in a slow boat, take a t’ousand years for Alpha Centauri but wait dem out in biostasis along wit’ friends and pretty girls. Or at minimum—send dat probe! If not’ing else, live to see television pictures, like people did who watched de first Moon landing and cried for glory. Wy not, Brudder Roban? I would!”

  Luizo said bleakly: “The problem is that whenever man has gotten to the point where such an effort could be mounted, some lunatic or some barbarian comes along and smashes him back. We won’t be able to reach the stars till we have the stable, rational civilization you affect to despise, Colonel; and then we will be past the need for such children’s outings.”