LAST SUPPER
Returning to
Manhattan is a comfort of sorts for Gregor, after the exposed
plazas and paranoid open vistas of the capital. Unfortunately, he
won’t be here for long—he is, after all, on an assignment from
Brundle—but he’ll take what comfort he can from the deep stone
canyons, the teeming millions scurrying purposefully about at
ground level. The Big Apple is a hive of activity, as always,
teeming purposeful trails of information leading the busy workers
about their tasks. Gregor’s nostrils flare as he stands on the
sidewalk on Lex ington and East 100th. There’s an Italian
restaurant Brundle recommended when he gave Gregor his briefing
papers. “Their spaghetti con polpette
is to die for,” Brundle told him. That’s probably true, but what’s
inarguable is that it’s only a couple of blocks away from the
offices of the Exobiology Annex to Cornell’s New York Campus, where
Sagan is head of department.
Gregor opens the door
and glances around. A waiter makes eye contact. “Table for
one?”
“Two. I’m
meeting—ah.” Gregor sees Sagan sitting in a booth at the back of
the restaurant and waves hesitantly. “He’s already
here.”
Gregor nods and
smiles at the astronomer-exobiologist as he sits down opposite the
professor. The waiter drifts over and hands him a menu. “Have you
ordered?”
“I just got here.”
Sagan smiles guardedly. “I’m not sure why you wanted this meeting,
Mr., uh, Samsa, isn’t it?” Clearly he thinks he gets the joke—a
typical mistake for a brilliant man to make.
Gregor allows his
lower lip to twitch. “Believe me, I’d rather it wasn’t necessary,”
he says, entirely truthfully. “But the climate in DC isn’t really
conducive to clear thought or long-range planning—I mean, we
operate under constraints established by the political process.
We’re given questions to answer, we’re not encouraged to come up
with new questions. So what I’d like to do is just have an
open-ended informal chat about anything that you think is worth
considering. About our situation, I mean. In case you can open up
any avenues we ought to be investigating that aren’t on the map
right now.”
Sagan leans forward.
“That’s all very well,” he says agreeably, “but I’m a bit puzzled
by the policy process itself. We haven’t yet made contact with any
nonhuman sapients. I thought your committee was supposed to be
assessing our policy options for when contact finally occurs. It
sounds to me as if you’re telling me that we already have a policy,
and you’re looking to find out if it’s actually a viable one. Is
that right?”
Gregor stares at him.
“I can neither confirm nor deny that,” he says evenly. Which is the
truth. “But if you want to take some guesses, I can either discuss
things or clam up when you get too close,” he adds, the muscles
around his eyes crinkling conspiratorially.
“Aha.” Sagan grins
back at him boyishly. “I get it.” His smile vanishes abruptly. “Let
me guess. The policy is predicated on MAD, isn’t it?”
Gregor shrugs then
glances sideways, warningly: the waiter is approaching. “I’ll have
a glass of the house red,” he says, sending the fellow away as fast
as possible. “Deterrence presupposes communication, don’t you
think?” Gregor asks.
“True.” Sagan picks
up his bread knife and absentmindedly twirls it between finger and
thumb. “But it’s how the idiots—excuse me, our elected
leaders—treat threats, and I can’t see them responding to
tool-using nonhumans as anything else.” He stares at Gregor. “Let
me see if I’ve got this right. Your committee pulled me in because
there has, in fact, been a contact between humans and nonhuman
intelligences—or at least some sign that there are NHIs out there.
The existing policy for dealing with it was drafted sometime in the
sixties under the influence of the hangover left by the Cuban war,
and it basically makes the conservative
assumption that any aliens are green-skinned Soviets and the only
language they talk is nuclear annihilation. This policy is now seen
to be every bit as bankrupt as it sounds, but nobody knows what to
replace it with because there’s no data on the NHIs. Am I
right?”
“I can neither
confirm nor deny that,” says Gregor.
Sagan sighs. “Okay,
play it your way.” He closes his menu. “Ready to
order?”
“I believe so.”
Gregor looks at him. “The spaghetti con
polpette is really good here,” he adds.
“Really?” Sagan
smiles. “Then I’ll try it.”
They order, and
Gregor waits for the waiter to depart before he continues. “Suppose
there’s an alien race out there. More than one. You know about the
multiple copies of Earth. The uninhabited ones. We’ve been here
before. Now let’s see . . . Suppose the aliens aren’t like us. Some
of them are recognizable, tribal primates who use tools made out of
metal, sea-dwelling ensemble entities who communicate by
ultrasound. But others—most of them—are social insects who use
amazingly advanced biological engineering to grow what they need.
There’s some evidence that they’ve colonized some of the empty
Earths. They’re aggressive and territorial, and they’re so
different that . . . Well, for one thing, we think they don’t
actually have conscious minds except when they need them. They
control their own genetic code and build living organisms tailored
to whatever tasks they want carried out. There’s no evidence that
they want to talk to us, and some evidence that they may have
emptied some of those empty Earths of their human population. And
because of their, um, decentralized ecosystem and biological
engineering, conventional policy solutions won’t work. The military
ones, I mean.”
Gregor watches
Sagan’s face intently as he describes the scenario. There is a
slight cooling of the exobiologist’s cheeks as his peripheral
arteries contract with shock: his pupils dilate and his respiration
rate increases. Sour pheromones begin to diffuse from his sweat
ducts and organs in Gregor’s nasal sinuses respond to
them.
“You’re kidding?”
Sagan half asks. He sounds disappointed about
something.
“I wish I were.”
Gregor generates a faint smile and exhales breath laden with
oxytocin and other peptide messengers fine-tuned to human
metabolism. In the kitchen, the temporary chef who is standing in
for the regular one—off sick, due to a bout of food poisoning—will
be preparing Sagan’s dish. Humans are creatures of habit: once his
meal arrives, the astronomer will eat it, taking solace in good
food. (Such a shame about the chef.) “They’re not like us. SETI
assumes that NHIs are conscious and welcome communication with
humans and, in fact, that humans aren’t atypical. But let’s suppose
that humans are atypical. The human
species has only been around for about a third of a million years,
and has only been making metal tools and building settlements for
ten thousand. What if the default for sapient species is measured
in the millions of years? And they develop strong defense
mechanisms to prevent other species moving into their
territory?”
“That’s incredibly
depressing,” Sagan admits after a minute’s contemplation. “I’m not
sure I believe it without seeing some more evidence. That’s why we
wanted to use the Arecibo dish to send a message, you know. The
other disks are far enough away that we’re safe, whatever they send
back: they can’t possibly throw missiles at us, not with a surface
escape velocity of twenty thousand miles per second, and if they
send unpleasant messages, we can stick our fingers in our
ears.”
The waiter arrives
and slides his entrée in front of Sagan.
“Why do you say
that?” asks Gregor.
“Well, for one thing,
it doesn’t explain the disk. We couldn’t make anything like it—I
suppose I was hoping we’d have some idea of who did. But from what
you’re telling me, insect hives with advanced biotechnology . . .
That doesn’t sound plausible.”
“We have some
information on that.” Gregor smiles reassuringly. “For the time
being, the important thing to recognize is that the species who are
on the disk are roughly equivalent to ourselves in technological
and scientific understanding. Give or take a couple of hundred
years.”
“Oh.” Sagan perks up
a bit.
“Yes,” Gregor
continues. “We have some information—I can’t describe our
sources—but anyway. You’ve seen the changes to the structure of the
galaxy we remember. How would you characterize that?”
“Hmm.” Sagan is busy
with a mouthful of delicious tetrodotoxin laced meatballs. “It’s
clearly a Kardashev type-III civilization, harnessing the energy of
an entire galaxy. What else?”
Gregor smiles. “Ah,
those Russians, obsessed with coal and steel production! This is
the information age, Dr. Sagan. What would the informational
resources of a galaxy look like if they were put to use? And to
what use would an unimaginably advanced civilization put
them?”
Sagan looks blank for
a moment, his fork pausing halfway to his mouth, laden with a
deadly promise. “I don’t see—ah!” He smiles, finishes his forkful,
and nods. “Do I take it that we’re living in a nature reserve? Or
perhaps an archaeology experiment?”
Gregor shrugs.
“Humans are time-binding animals,” he explains. “So are all the
other tool-using sentient species we have been able to
characterize; it appears to be the one common factor. They like to
understand their past as a guide to their future. We have sources
that have . . . Think of a game of Chinese whispers. The belief
that is most widely held is that the disk was made by the agencies
we see at work restructuring the galaxy, to house their, ah,
experiments in ontology. To view their own deep past, before they
became whatever they are, and to decide whether the path through
which they emerged was inevitable or a low-probability outcome. The
reverse face of the Drake equation, if you like.”
Sagan shivers. “Are
you telling me we’re just . . . memories? Echoes from the past,
reconstituted and replayed some unimaginable time in the future?
That this entire monstrous joke of a cosmological experiment is
just a sideshow?”
“Yes, Dr. Sagan,”
Gregor says soothingly. “After all, the disk is not so large
compared to an entire galaxy, don’t you think? And I would not say
the sideshow is unimportant. Do you ever think about your own
childhood? And wonder whether the you that sits here in front of me
today was the inevitable product of your upbringing? Or could you
have become someone completely different—an airline pilot, for
example, or a banker? Alternatively, could someone else have become you? What set of circumstances combine to produce
an astronomer and exobiologist? Why should a God not harbor the
same curiosity?”
“So you’re saying
it’s introspection, with a purpose. The galactic civilization wants
to see its own birth.”
“The galactic hive
mind,” Gregor soothes, amused at how easy it is to deal with Sagan.
“Remember, information is key. Why should human-level intelligences
be the highest level?” All the while he continues to breathe
oxytocin and other peptide neurotransmitters across the table
toward Sagan. “Don’t let such speculations ruin your meal,” he
adds, phrasing it as an observation rather than an implicit
command.
Sagan nods and
returns to using his utensils. “That’s very thought-provoking,” he
says, as he gratefully raises another mouthful to his lips. “If
this is based on hard intelligence it . . . Well, I’m worried. Even
if it’s inference, I have to do some thinking about this. I hadn’t
really been thinking along these lines.”
“I’m sure if there’s
an alien menace, we’ll defeat it,” Gregor assures him, as Sagan
masticates and swallows the neurotoxin-laced meatball in tomato
sauce. And just for the moment, he is content to relax in the
luxury of truth: “Just leave everything to me, and I’ll see that
your concerns are communicated to the right people. Then we’ll do
something about your dish, and everything will work out for the
best.”