Fiasco (38 page)

"That is correct. I understand the parable about the boat. I will not wait for it to sink. I will attempt to save that civilization with all the power at my disposal."

"And, if absolutely necessary, by destroying?"

"Yes."

"So we are back where we started. I have succeeded in postponing that absolute necessity, nothing more. True?"

"True."

"You are prepared to save life by taking life?"

"That
is
the sense of your parable, after all, Father Arago. I choose the lesser evil."

"By becoming a mass murderer?"

"I accept the word. It is possible, too, that I will save no one, that I will destroy both them and us. But I will not wash my hands. If we perish, the
Eurydice
will receive the information. An account of the state of things, indicating that I have ruled out retreat, is already on its way."

"In my eschatology there is no such thing as a lesser evil," said Arago. "With each slain being an entire world dies. For that reason arithmetic provides no measure for ethics. Irreversible evil cannot be measured."

He rose.

"I won't take up any more of your time. No doubt you want to continue the conversation that I interrupted?"

"No. I want to be alone."

The steel partitions that normally separated the two halls in the stern of the
Hermes
were moved to the middle of the ship, and only the wide tracks of the sliderless bearings, darker than the surrounding metal, showed where they had been. The enormous interior resembled a hangar that had housed a zeppelin of extraordinary size but was now serving some other purpose. About twenty stories above the tracks of the partitions, not far from the concave ceiling, like two white flies on a girder that ran transversely from starboard to port, sat the weightless pilots, Harrach and Tempe, attached by belts so that a gust of air would not blow them from their chosen position.

It was not really possible to say, in weightlessness, that they looked down, though it seemed to them that they did. In the gigantic interior, steady, rapid work was done by yellow, blue, and black automata, their enameled surfaces gleaming. Alternately they turned their prehensile arms to the side and to the front, in rows, as if bowing in a synchronized calisthenics. Assembly parts passed from pincers to pincers. The robots were building the solaser.

The thing was of an openwork construction, sievelike, the size of a torpedo boat. Its half-completed skeleton looked like the folded, spirally furled umbrella of a giant, an umbrella wrapped not with fabric but with segments of overlapping mirror-scales. For that reason it also brought to mind an antediluvian fish, or one of those extinct undersea reptiles whose bones were being assembled now by machines instead of paleontologists. In the front part, farthest from the pilots, where the body of the colossus would have had a head, were sparks among hundreds of wisps of bluish smoke: laser welding.

The solaser, designed to be a photon cannon fed with the power of a sun, was hurriedly changed by a reprogrammed team of assemblers into a pocket mirror for playing with the light. Granted, a terajoule pocket mirror.

The notion was taken initially from the physicists' fear that any renewed use of the sidereals—having highly characteristic effects, effects not merely gravitational—would give the planet undesired clues and eventually put its weapons experts on the track of the Holenbach interval. Therefore, instead of using the resources of that interval, the physicists chose a technology already somewhat old-fashioned, that of radiation conversion. Suspended before the face of the sun, the solaser would open like a fan, suck in with its receptors the chaotic, full-spectrum radiation, and compress it into a monochromatic battering ram. Nearly half the collected power served to cool the solaser; otherwise, it would evaporate instantly from the heat of the sun. But the remaining power sufficed for a column of bonded light—having a two-hundred-meter diameter at the muzzle of the radiator and triple that, given the inevitable spreading, by the time it reached the orbit of Quinta—to cut the planet's crust like a hot knife through butter.

Under this far-reaching blade of fire the ten-kilometer layer of ocean water would be parted to the bottom. The pressure from all sides on that great pit of rushing steam would have no effect on the sword of light. Through the shock-wave clouds of the boiling ocean (compared with which the mushroom cloud of a thermonuclear explosion was a speck) the solaser could bore into the suboceanic plate, pierce the lithosphere, and penetrate Quinta to a quarter of its radius.

No one intended to cause such a catastrophe. The solaser was supposed to graze the ice ring and the thermosphere of the planet. When this idea, too, was put aside, it turned out that to transform the light-cannon into a signaler was not difficult at all. El Salam and Nakamura wanted, with the least rebuilding possible, to solve two problems at the same time.

It was necessary to reach all the possible addresses simultaneously and "legibly." Such contact, though one-sided, went on the assumption that the planet was inhabited by beings endowed with the sense of sight as well as with enough intelligence to grasp the gist of the transmission.

The first condition the senders had no control over: they could not give eyes to beings that had none. The second required of the senders no little inventiveness, particularly as the rulers of the Quintans clearly did not want any direct communication between the cosmic intruders and the population. Therefore, the signaling was to fall as a rain of light on all the continents of the planet, piercing its thick cloud cover. An overcast sky, in fact, was advantageous, since no one with a grain of intelligence could then mistake the needles of light piercing it for rays of sun.

The hardest nut to crack was the form of the message. To teach an alphabet, to send certain numbers as signs, the universal constants of matter, would be nonsense. The solaser lay in the hall at the stern, ready for takeoff, but it did not move. The physicists, informationists, exobiologists found themselves in a quandary. They had everything they needed except a program. Self-explanatory codes did not exist. There was even talk of the semantics of the colors of the rainbow: the violet range would be gloomy, the middle band of visible light more cheerful, green would stand for plants or lush growth, red suggested aggression—yes, but only for people. A code that was a sequence of semiotic units indicating specific things could not be made of spectral lines. Then the second pilot put in
his
two cents: to tell the Quintans a story. Using the cloudy sky as a screen. Projecting on it a series of pictures. Over each continent. As Arago, who was present, laughed later,
"Obstupuerunt omnes."
Indeed, the experts' mouths dropped open.

"Is it technically possible?" asked Tempe.

"Technically, yes. But what would be the point? A show in the sky? Of what?"

"A story," the pilot repeated.

"Ridiculous," snorted Kirsting. He had devoted twenty years to the study of cosmolinguistics. "You might be able to convey something to Pygmies with cartoons, or to Australian aborigines. All races and cultures of humanity have things in common. But there are no humans there."

"Doesn't matter. They have a technological civilization and are already warring in space. That means that once they had a stone-age civilization. Then, too, they warred. And there were ice ages on the planet. Back before they built houses or wigwams, they must have sat in caves. And painted on the walls—fertility signs, the animals they hunted—to bring success. It was magic. They found out that the magic was only cartoons a couple of thousand years later—from their wise ones, like Professor Kirsting. Professor, would you care to bet with me that they don't know what stories are?"

Nakamura was laughing now. The others laughed, too, except Kirsting. The exobiologist-cosmolinguist, however, was not the type that defended his position at any cost.

"Well, I don't know…" he wavered. "If the idea isn't imbecilic, it's brilliant. Suppose, then, we show them a cartoon. What about?"

"Ah, that's not my field. I'm no paleoethnologist. And as far as the idea goes, it's not completely mine. Dr. Gerbert gave me, back on the
Eurydice
, a book of science-fiction short stories. I dip into it now and then. That's probably where…"

"Paleoethnology?" Kirsting thought out loud. "I'm not up on that. The rest of you?"

There was no such specialist on board.

"Perhaps in DEUS's memory," offered the Japanese. "It can't hurt to look. But a story, no. It should be a myth. Or, rather, a common element, a theme that appears in the earliest myths."

"Before the time of writing?"

"Of course."

"Yes. From the very beginnings of their protoculture," said Kirsting, surrendering. He was even warming to the idea—but then a doubt assailed him:

"Wait. Are we to appear to them as gods?"

Arago shook his head. "It will be difficult, precisely because we should not manifest our superiority. Nor ourselves. It should be happy news. Good tidings. At least, I see this in our pilot's proposal, because stories tend to have happy endings."

Thus began the deliberations, which had a double purpose: to consider what features Earth and Quinta might have in common—features of the environment, and of the plants and animals that arose in it—and at the same time to sift the collection of legends, myths, fables, rituals, and customs for those that were the most enduring, for the messages that thousands of years of history had not effaced.

In the first group of probable constants were: the division of the species into two sexes, most certain for vertebrates; food for animals, therefore also for intelligent beings on dry land; the alternation of day and night, of the sun and the moon, of hot and cold seasons of the year; the emergence of herbivores and carnivores, of preys and predators, the killing of animals by animals, since a universal vegetarianism seemed highly unlikely. And therefore the protoculture had hunting. Cannibalism, the hunting and consuming of beings of one's own species, was a possible phenomenon in the Eolithic or Paleolithic, though not absolutely certain. In any case, hunting was a universal, since according to the theory of evolution it promoted the growth of intelligence.

The incubation of the ape-men, the primates, in the bloody phase of predation, which accelerated the development of the brain—this idea once met with violent opposition. It was seen as an insult to humanity, a misanthropic invention of the evolutionists more slanderous even than their proclaiming of the consanguinity of man and ape.

But archeology confirmed the thesis, accumulating irrefutable evidence in support of it. Carnivorousness, of course, did not lead all predators to intelligence; many conditions had to be met for that. The reptile predators of the Mesozoic were far from intelligent, and there was nothing to indicate that, if they had not been exterminated by a catastrophe between the Cretaceous and Jurassic (a giant meteorite disrupting the food chain through the global cooling of the climate), the dominant reptiles of the time would have acquired humanlike brains.

The presence of intelligent beings on Quinta, however, could not be denied. Whether they evolved from reptiles or from a species unknown to Earth was not the crucial question. What was crucial was the form of their reproduction. But even if the Quintans were not placental mammals or marsupials, genetics argued for their division into two sexes, the form of multiplication favored by biological evolution. But that which a purely biological transmission gave to progeny, contained in the reproductive cells, did not help in the formation of culture, because such transmission produced changes in the species at a rate marked by millennia.

The acceleration of brain growth required a reduction of the instincts inherited biologically, in favor of learning received from parents. A creature that came into the world knowing—thanks to genetically built-in programming—"everything or practically everything" needed for survival might manage perfectly well but would not be able to change radically its tactics of living. Whatever could not do this was not intelligent.

So, to begin with, one had the division into sexes, and definitely hunting. Around these first elements—its binary seed—grew a protoculture.

But how did that seed manifest, express itself in the protoculture? By directing attention to what furthered sex and what furthered hunting. Before there was writing, before the invention of non-animal ways to use the body, the skill that hunting demanded transferred its reality into images: not yet symbols, but a magical coaxing of Nature to give what was desired. The images were pictures that could be painted, or likenesses that could be cut in rock.

And so on. DEUS, from these premises, performed the task assigned it: to adapt to the endeavors of sex and hunting a myth portrayed in a series of images. A tale, a show, a spectacle with actors. The sun, a dance before rainbows, the bowing of heads—but this would be the epilogue. In the beginning there was battle. Who battled? Creatures indistinct, but who walked upright. Attacks, struggles, concluding with a collective dance.

The solaser repeated this "planetary broadcast" in several variations for three days, with short intermissions that signified the end and the beginning. The broadcast was focused and collimated to appear in the cloudy sky of the planet, where it would be in view (confined to the central surface of the cloud-screens) over each continent, day and night. Harrach and Polassar remained skeptical. Suppose, they said, the Quintans saw and even understood. What of that? Hadn't we smashed their Moon? A less cheerful presentation, perhaps, but more dramatic. Suppose they nevertheless recognized this as a gesture of peace. But who? The population? But of what possible importance was public opinion in the middle of a hundred-year space war? Did the pacifists on Earth ever have the upper hand? What could the Quintan people do to make their voices heard—not to us, merely to their own governments? You might convince children that war was naughty, but what good would that do?