Fiasco (29 page)

"You exaggerate." Harrach shrugged in irritation.

"Not at all. Imagine that it is the year 1950, or 1990, and above the Earth galactic cruisers hover, a mile long. Even if they rained down only chocolates, there would be tremendous confusion, panic, not to mention political crises, since every civilization in the multistate phase must have internal conflicts. No show of strength is needed from us, because the crossing of a hundred parsecs itself is such a demonstration—to those who cannot accomplish it…"

"Very well, then, Captain—what do you suggest we do? How are we to show our good-natured, mild-mannered, peaceful, friendly intentions? How do we assure them that we present no threat to them in any way, that we are just a group of boy scouts on a hike, headed by a priest—when four of their best fighting machines, each fifty times heavier than our archangel, were blown out of the continuum by it like specks of dust? El Salam and I, I see now, were mistaken. The guests arrived with flowers; in the garden, the host's dog attacked them; one guest, attempting to drive the beast away with his parasol, inadvertently impaled the host's auntie. Why talk of a show of strength? It's the snows of yesteryear, it already took place!"

Harrach, with a broad grin, and not without malice, addressed this to the captain but kept his eyes on the monk.

"The asymmetry does not lie where you think it," said the Dominican. "To those who do not understand us we cannot be the bearers of good tidings. Saintly intentions cannot be demonstrated as long as they remain only intentions. Evil, on the other hand,
can
be demonstrated, by causing harm. It is a
circulus vitiosus:
in order to communicate with them, we must convince them of our peaceful intentions, but to convince them of our peaceful intentions, we first need to communicate with them…"

"How is it that everything that's happened here wasn't taken into account by our great thinkers, the planners-directors of CETI and SETI?" asked Tempe angrily. "All this just fell on us out of the blue? It's unbelievably stupid."

The cabin was filled with raised voices arguing. Steergard said nothing. He thought that in this fruitless debate—he saw the futility of it—the men, without fully realizing it, were giving vent to the frustration that had mounted in the course of the repeated attempts to communicate with Quinta. This was the result of sleepless nights, the unrewarded zeal of the investigation of the Moon, the building of hypotheses that, instead of giving insight into the alien civilization, fell apart like a house of cards. The frustration made some feel that they were surrounded by riddles without solutions, or were lost in a maze without an exit, and it made others suspect "them," more and more, of collective paranoia.

If indeed there was paranoia on Quinta, it was contagious. Steergard noted that the indicator light above the shelf by his bunk, in the back of the cabin, was off. Someone had thrown the switch in the control room, cutting off the central brain of the ship from this cabin, someone who apparently did not want the cold, rational, logical presence of DEUS at this meeting. Steergard did not ask who had done it. He knew his men; among them there was no coward or liar who would deny the action—but it might have been done unconsciously, like covering one's nakedness before a stranger, in a reflex quicker than modesty.

So he said nothing, but turned the terminal back on and requested DEUS to make an optimal decision prognosis.

DEUS replied that it lacked sufficient data to optimize moves. In the request, besides, there was implicit an inevitable anthropocentrism. People spoke about themselves and others in terms of good or bad. The same applied to their general history. Many considered history an accumulation of cruelties, of senseless subjugations—senseless even without considering ethics, since neither the aggressors nor their victims derived anything but the breakup of culture, the fall of empires, on whose ruins new empires rose. In a word, many held human history in contempt, but as a rule no one thought that it was some hideous, horrible psychozoic aberration in the Universe—that the Earth was a planet of brutal murderers, unique among millions of globes, a place where intelligence yielded blood and pain, contrary to the cosmic norm. As a rule, people, in their heart of hearts, without thinking about it overmuch, considered Earth's history—in its whole course, from the paleopithecus and australopithecus up to the modern day—to be "normal," a type frequently encountered in the set of cosmic civilizations.

But in this matter nothing was known, and no method existed whereby from that informational zero anything more than zero could be extracted. The Ortega-Nilssen chart indicated only the average time separating the birth of the protoculture from the technological explosion. The curve of the diagram—the so-called main road of the psychozoics—did not reflect either biological or sociological (cultural, political) factors, which together shaped the specific history of the Intelligent Beings. Such an omission was justified by terrestrial experience, because the clashes between different faiths and cultures, between different forms of government and ideology—colonializations and decentralizations, the rise and fall of empires—in no way interfered with the
pace
of technological advances. This was a parabolic curve unaffected in its course by such historical disturbances and shocks as invasions, plagues, and genocides, because technology, once it gained momentum, became a variable independent of the civilizational substructure. It became, in integration, a logistic curve of an autocatalytic process.

Individual people—on the microscopic scale—always made inventions and discoveries, whether singly or in groups, but these creators could be factored out of the equation, because it was inventions that gave rise to inventions, and discoveries that led to discoveries. This acceleration described a parabola that seemed to soar to infinity. A saturation bend in the curve was not caused by other individuals who sought to protect the environment; the curve would bend only where a failure to bend would destroy the biosphere. Invariably it would bend at the critical point, for if technologies for saving or replacing the biosphere did not come to the rescue of the technologies of expansion, the given civilization would enter a crisis to end all crises, i.e., extinction. With no air to breathe, there could be no one to make further discoveries and receive Nobel prizes.

According to the data of cosmology and astrophysics, the main road of Ortega-Nilssen thus reflected only the limiting
capacity
of the given biosphere (also termed its maximum technological load). But that capacity did not depend on anatomy or on the organizational forms of collective life; it depended on the physical-chemical features of the planet, its ecospheric position, and other cosmic factors, including stellar and galactic influences, etc. Wherever the biosphere's load limit was reached, the main road broke off, which meant only that the civilizations in question were obliged to come to some global decisions about their future. When they were unwilling or unable to do this, they perished.

The breaking off of the main road coincided with the so-called upper frame of the window of contact. That frame or boundary—also called the "growth barrier"—accounted for the subsequent branchings from the monolithic trunk that was the main road, because different civilizations continued their existence in different ways. Though as yet no information had been exchanged with any psychozoic, it was known from calculation that there was not one and only one optimal decision, no best way out of the trap created by the technosphere's damage to the biosphere. Even a united civilization did not have before it a single path that would lead it safely through the multiplying dilemmas and perils.

As for the current situation, it was the result of inappropriate actions that came of departing from the expedition's original program. In DEUS's opinion, the series of wrong steps ensued because they did not appear wrong at the time that they were made; their wrongness revealed itself only in retrospect. More precisely, the
Hermes
had been drawn into Arrow's paradox: the decider attempts to accomplish two things that are each of value but that cannot both be accomplished. In the range between maximum risk and maximum caution ran a resultant from which it would be difficult to extricate themselves. DEUS did not think that the captain was to blame for the present impasse, because the captain had sought to strike a compromise between risk and caution. After capturing the Quintan orbiters behind Juno and discovering their "viroids," he had deviated from the program toward excessive caution, camouflaging the ship and not sending signals to Quinta announcing visitors from outer space. The price of that caution was evident now.

The second error lay in giving the
Gabriel
too much autonomy, too much inventiveness. Paradoxically, this also came from excessive caution—and from the mistaken assumption that the
Gabriel,
superior in speed to the orbiters or rockets of Quinta, could land without letting itself be intercepted. In order for it to possess such speed, it was given a teratron drive. And in order for it to respond suitably to the unforeseen behavior of the host upon landing, it was given a too-intelligent computer. The SETI program called for sending, first, smaller probes; but this was rejected when the diplomatic exertions of the Ambassador all came to nothing. No one dreamed that the
Gabriel
would transform its drive unit into an implosive sidereal gun. Thus, because of the ingenuity of the
Gabriel's
computer, they found themselves in a predicament. It was now impossible to send other probes as if nothing had happened. A new situation called for new tactics. DEUS needed twenty hours to think. That was where the matter stood.

After his evening watch, the pilot could not sleep. He kept thinking about the council; it had resulted in nothing for him but an increased dislike for DEUS. That mighty electronic mind might be brilliant at logic, but the effect it produced was strikingly pharisaical. Mistakes had been made, they had all departed from the program, yet the captain was not held accountable, nor did DEUS itself bear the least responsibility for this, as it proved with great precision. Arrow's paradox; the camouflage fraught with evil consequences; the excessive suspicion regarding the Quintans, kindled by the sabotage hypothesis to explain the origin of the viroids, as DEUS now so clearly defined the problem—and who had served, all this time, as adviser to the captain?

Buckled to the bed because he was weightless, he finally grew so angry that sleep was out of the question. So he turned on the point-light over his head, pulled a book out from under the bunk,
The Hermes Program,
and started to read.

First he leafed through the general assumptions about Quinta. This was a computer printout made just before takeoff from the
Eurydice,
based upon the collected and interpreted astrophysical observations. The Quintans had at their disposal energy on the order of 10
³⁰
ergs. Their civilization was thus on the pre-sidereal level. The major sources of energy were undoubtedly thermonuclear reactions of the stellar type, but power stations had
not
been launched into space. Most likely, the exhaustion of fossil fuels, as on Earth, led to a period of the use of the uranides, whose further exploitation proved unprofitable after mastery of the Bethe Cycle. It seemed improbable that in the last hundred years the planet had gone through wars waged with nuclear weapons. The equatorial cold spot could not have been the result of such warfare. Any postatomic winter would have had to encompass virtually the entire planet, since the masses of dust thrown into the stratosphere would increase the albedo of the whole surface. The reasons for halting the construction of the ice ring from ocean water were unknown.

He flipped through pages filled with graphs and tables, until he came to the chapter "Hypotheses on the Civilization."

1) Quinta suffers from internal conflicts, which have influenced technological development. This suggests the presence of antagonistic nations or other aggregations. The period of open military encounters, belonging to the past, led to no resolution of the "conqueror-conquered" type. Instead, it gradually entered the phase of secret warfare.

At this point an additional printout from DEUS was attached, done later, on board the
Hermes:

Evidence supporting the thesis of cryptomilitary activity are the parasites found in the two Quintan satellites. In this interpretation, blocs of adversaries remain, together, in a state that is neither classical peace nor classical war in the Clausewitzian sense.

Their struggle takes place beyond front lines, in meteorological damage inflicted on the enemy, or in mutual catalytic erosion of technoindustrial potentials. This may have halted the creation of the ice ring, since that task would require global cooperation.

The continuation again was from the
Eurydice:

If there exist such groups of antagonists and they contend nonclassically, then contact with any visitor from space may be rendered considerably more difficult. The
a priori
establishment of an alliance with the visitor is highly unlikely for either of the parties, if there are only two, because the extraplanetary intruder would have no rational reason, would have nothing to gain by taking sides in the conflict. Contact could actually serve as the spark that would turn the quiet, smoldering, steady, and stubbornly pursued secret war into a full-scale, head-on clash between both powers.

An example. Let there be, on planet T, blocs A, B, and C, all locked in mutual conflict. If B establishes contact with the intruder, A and C will feel themselves seriously threatened. They may either attack the intruder—to keep him from increasing B's potential—or join in attacking B. The situation is unstable to begin with, and any introduction of an outside factor of great technological potential—such as the visitor must possess, having made his galactic jump—may suffice to escalate the hostilities.

2) Quinta is united, a federation or a protectorate. There are no equal antagonists on the planet, since one of the powers has acquired dominion over the others. Such dominion, whether the result of military victories or accomplished through nonmilitary subjugation, the weaker sides having submitted to the major power of the globe, also does not provide stability in the face of contact with a galactic intruder.

One should not impute to the global power demonic or imperialistic designs of extraplanetary expansion. In this model of Quinta, the power does not wish to destroy the visitor but only to frustrate his efforts to establish contact—and, especially, to land on the planet. The technological gifts of the visitor could easily turn out to be poisonous. (Yet the attempt itself to keep such gifts from being offered, to prevent them from disturbing the current sociopolitical equilibrium, could disturb that equilibrium.) Thus in a united system as well, refusal of contact could be a sensible decision for the global powers. This policy of isolationism, directed toward outer space, has many precedents on Earth. The information threshold of contact to be surmounted by the visitor is indeterminate in magnitude.

3) According to Folger, Kraft, and their group, a unified planet that has neither conquerors nor conquered, neither oppressors nor oppressed, may still not desire contact. The basic dilemmas of such a civilization that is beginning to veer from the Ortega-Nilssen path, near the upper region of the window, lie at the intersection of its culture and its technology. Culture is always characterized by a consistent lag of legal and moral-ethical norms behind the technology in its presaturated, parabolic period of acceleration. The technology makes possible what the cultural tradition forbids and considers unchangeable. (Examples: genetic engineering applied to beings corresponding to people; the control of sex; brain transplants.) In the light of such difficulties, contact with visitors shows its equivocal nature. The planetary party, rejecting contact, need not ascribe to the intruders any unfriendly motive. But its fears are justified: the injection of radically new technologies can destabilize social bonds and relations. Contact, moreover, is unpredictable in its consequences. This does not apply to radio contact—or any contact at a distance—since the receivers of the signals can, at their own discretion, make use of or ignore the acquired information.