Existence (86 page)

Also note: In a vast majority of these tales, the “loser” tends to be whichever person or group was more aggressive or intolerant at the start. And we are especially hard and critical on our own institutions, portraying or criticising their failings. Doesn’t that say something about our moral heading?

The same holds for nonfiction. Despite news reports depicting a riotous world, the actual per capita rate of mayhem in human society has declined dramatically for generations. Look it up! More than three-quarters of all living humans never personally witnessed war, starvation, or major civil unrest. An unprecedented fraction are allowed to improve their lot in peace. Many ancient bigotries and cruelties have lessened, or at least been put in bad repute. And with spreading education, far greater advances seem possible.

True, these achievements are still woefully unfinished. They leave lots to do, in working toward a just and mature civilization. But they are clear signs of progress and overall good will by a majority of our species.

Despite all the self-critical news reports and flamboyantly exaggerated “action” stories you may watch, please be assured that most human beings are calm people who treat strangers well. Many millions of us would be thrilled to meet you, taking every effort to make honest visitors welcome.

71.

LURKERS

And so it becomes explicit.

She is talking
to
us now.

Challenging, even taunting us, charging us to explain our long silence. Provoking us with an implicit accusation of cowardice.

Already I sense a ferment of mental activity from Seeker and the others. The old debate renews, in full fury.

And this precocious little maker has only just begun to goad us!

THE LONELY SKY

Lurker Challenge Number Two

If you’ve monitored our TV, radio, and Internet—
and the reason you haven’t answered is that you see us as competitors,
please reconsider.

*   *   *

In our long, slow struggle toward decent civilization, humans have slowly learned that competition and cooperation aren’t inherent opposites, but
twins,
both in nature and advanced societies.

Under terms that are fair, and with goodwill, even those who begin suspicious of each other can discover ways to interact toward mutual benefit. Use the Web to look up the “positive-sum game” where “win-win” solutions bring success to all sides.

Surely there are ways that humanity—and other Earth species—can join the cosmos without injuring your legitimate aims. Remember, most stable species and cultures seem to benefit from a little competition, now and then! So please answer. Let’s talk about it.

72.

FOUR SPECIES OF HUMAN

Evolution is a bitch. Nearly all the time.

Only … on rare occasions … evolution gets to change her mind.

A reminder of that fact nearly plowed into Gerald, darting from a side corridor. Barely avoiding collision, the small figure windmilled, legs flying in the weird way that one “fell” in a centrifugal gravity wheel, tumbling toward the floor at a slant. Gerald’s hand shot out, grabbing a fistful of wildly braided hair, eliciting a shriek.

“Hey now, Ika. What’s your hurry?”

The girl was short—barely into adolescence—but hardly petite. Stocky and
strong,
when her hand clenched Gerald’s arm he had a sense that she could
snap
it. Ika made that point by squeezing, in a playful way that hurt just a bit.

“Cap’n Gerry!” Her pale legs whirled around red-striped shorts, twisting to meet the floor on agile tiptoes. Gerald released her braid, though the child kept her vicelike grip on his arm for a second longer, as her face passed his—somehow looking cute and pixielike, despite almost masculine ridges over hooded eyes. Her voice was deeper than one expected, with an echoing resonance that seemed not quite human.

“Be gentle, oh kind sir,” she said, playfully. “Don’t you know I’m a whole lot older ’n you?”

It was a running joke, and not just between the two of them. Members of the revived species
Homo neanderthalensis
insisted on being called the “Old Race,” for reasons that had little support in biology or fact.

Well, just so long as they don’t start demanding reparations for a genocide that happened 27,000 years ago. I wasn’t around, so I’m not paying.

“And where’re you rushing in such an all-fired hurry, child?” he asked, phrasing it deliberately as an elderly person (which he was) addressing a mere ten-year-old (though Neanders aged differently).

“We’re on a
cobbly hunt
!” Ika announced, proudly defiant, taking a step backward and planting both fists on her hips.

“On a … did you say
we
?”

She nodded toward the nearby side corridor where Gerald now spotted another figure, hanging back in shadows. Lanky and a bit stooped, with close-shaven hair and a nervous expression.

“Oh. Hello, Hiram. How are you today?”

Every autie was unique. Still, you followed some general rules when one of them grew agitated, as Hiram appeared to be right now. Eyes wide and darting, the gangly young man edged slowly outward, flashing quick looks near but never quite upon Ika’s face, or Gerald’s.

“So, Hiram. Why aren’t you two watching the new telescope unfold? It’s half the reason this ship came out here, all this way past Mars.”

Keep the conversation concrete but impersonal. Radiate calm friendliness. And thank the Great Spirit that our ship quotas are still small. Just two Neanders, two autistics, and five metal-people for this voyage.

What next? Will they demand we start taking along dolphins and apes? Gene-mod people with wings and foot-hands? It’s not a sapient civilization—it’s a menagerie!

Or else …
another metaphor occurred to Gerald …
an ark.

Unlike some auties, Hiram’s goggle-eyed, painfully thin face bore no resemblance to the Neanderthal girl, nearby.

“Were you and Ika …
fighting
?”

Ika laughed, a rich, bell-like sound that always made Gerald think of snowy forest canyons.

“We was just playing, Hiram!”

“But you—”

“Tell you what. If you promise to believe me, an’ relax, I’ll pay a bribe in our next imVRsive game.”

The wide eyes narrowed. “
What
bribe?”

“Three mastodon tusks.”

The young autie smirked, calculatingly.

“Three
green
ones. Four meters and twelve centimeters long. Starting almost straight at the base with a gradually shortening curvature culminating with a radius of one meter at the tip and with an inward thirty degree per meter corkscrew. One of them left-handed and two of them right-handed.”

“What? No deal!” Ika cried out. “Who
cares
if you relax or not, you space-traveling oddball. Just hold yer breath for all I care and go into a hissy fit!”

No. No, please don’t.
Gerald almost stepped forward to intervene. Hiram was a useful member of the crew—no one else had his startling knack at quick-decrypting the holocrystal fragments that
ibn Battuta
kept scooping up from nearby space. Only at a price. He retained much of the old-style emotional frailty that had thwarted his branch of humanity for thousands of years. Experts on Earth were still figuring out how to get the best of both worlds, unleashing savant skills without the accompanying baggage of disabilities.

But Gerald shouldn’t have worried. Ika’s folk had a talent for relating to auties—who must have appeared more often in tribes of Ice Age Europe. Instead of quailing back from Ika’s outburst, Hiram grinned.

“Okay. Orange ones, then. Want to show the cap’n what’s not a cobbly?”

Gerald blinked at the sudden topic change.

Not … a … cobbly.
Then he recalled.
Oh, yeah. The mythological nonentities that both Neanders and auties claim to believe in.

“I dunno. Homosaps can be awfully close-minded.” Ika tilted her head, looking archly at Gerald—then brightened suddenly. “On the other hand, he
is
Cap’n Gerry.…”

It seemed in character, even expected of him, to emit a sigh over childish time-wasting. Though, in all honesty, he could spare a few minutes.

“Will you two please get on with it?”

“Okay then.” Ika held out her right hand, palm up. “Give me your attention.”

Gerald used an almost-spoken command to change reality augmentation. Within his percept-view, a narrow cylinder took form, appearing to coalesce above Ika’s hand, then contracting into a convenient symbol of control, shaped like the sort of white baton that an orchestra conductor might wield.

As the girl reached for the animated vrobject, Gerald realized.
It also resembles a magic wand.

Uh-oh.

Her percept meshed seamlessly with his, and he sensed Hiram’s presence sliding in alongside. Their generation took this sort of thing for granted, starting at age three or younger. But it would always seem newfangled and creepy to Gerald.

Ika deftly appeared to grip the wand, by sight alone, without feedback gloves to provide sense of touch. Waving realistically, she gave it a flourish, then swiveled suddenly, aiming down the hall as she yelled.

“Expecto simakus cliffordiam!”

Gerald tried not to roll his eyes, or otherwise interfere with Ika’s incantation. Though it always struck him as ironic.
Wizards in the past were charlatans. All of them. We spent centuries fighting superstition, applying science, democracy, and reason, coming to terms with objective reality … and subjectivity gets to win, after all! Mystics and fantasy fans only had their arrow of time turned around. Now is the era when charms and mojo-invocations work, wielding servant devices hidden in the walls.

As if responding to Ika’s shouted spell, the hallway seemed to dim around Gerald. The gentle curve of the gravity wheel transformed into a hilly slope, as smooth metal assumed the textures of rough-hewn stone. Plastifoam doorways seemed more like recessed hollows in the trunks of giant trees.

All very nice,
Gerald admitted. Evocative. Even artistic. It helped one to imagine how the Pleistocene environment must have felt rich in mystery, wonder, and terror to his own ancestors, and those of Ika. Only with a crucial difference, Homo sapiens tended to respond in a way that was unique in all of nature—by trying to understand and manipulate the world. Well …
some
humans did that.

Neanderthals, apparently, had a different approach.

But what am I supposed to be looking at?

He felt a twinge. A sense of chiding that came from Ika without words.

No, not
looking-at.
The whole idea was
not-looking
. And
not-at.

With another sigh, Gerald called up his blind-spot program. It had been all the rage a decade or so ago, when Neanders first appeared in real numbers, enriching the diversity of Earth civilization. All mammalian eyes had a flaw—a small patch where nerve bundles pass through the back of the retina, leaving an off-center area of blankness where images couldn’t register. People generally ignored their blind spots, which lay some distance from the fovea, where the lens sent images you really cared about. And the eye kept jittering, glancing to and fro, giving the brain enough data to
splice over
the blind spot, so most people never even noticed it. One had to practice—or use computerized assistance—to find it, in fact.

Gerald closed one eye. And with ai-help, he relaxed the other one into looking
away
from the part of the hallway where Ika hurled her spell. The whole region dimmed further …

… and at last he was able to not-see the region … off below and to the side of the direction his eye was aimed. It took some effort not to
look
that way. The merest flick-glance of his eye would do that and his every instinct wanted to. But Gerald managed to relax.

And not-look.

Cobblies.
It was tempting to dismiss them as purely mythical, since cobblies had no real effects—nothing that a prim Homo sapiens could measure—in the real world. Yet, the deepest auties and many Neanders swore that they were worth not-noticing!

Another word for them was
antigonites,
after a poem by Hughes Mearns:

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

I wish, I wish he’d go away …

Gerald sensed something. Vaguely like a shadow. Only more so. And less.

He also knew how easily the imagination could be teased. All four species of humanity—even the silicon variety—tended to fret over the unseen or barely seen, filling in the blanks, envisaging danger, dread mysteries, or hints of great consequence.

Hard-won scientific habits pushed back, urging him to dismiss dark, unsupported suspicions.

Both science and eastern mystics preach that the observer should dispense with ego, in order to eff the ineffable. Funny, I never thought of that before—a Buddhist and a physicist differ over so many things, but they share that core prescription. Resist your sense of self-importance. Only then … why did shamans and magicians and hucksters in every culture praise the power of personal will?

Why the extremes? Is humanity hopelessly bipolar?

Gerald abruptly realized what seemed familiar. The sensation felt like long ago times, when he used to shave, scraping a sharp metal blade across his throat. You did it absently, not-thinking about your reflection, almost as if the mirror itself were a blind spot.

What are you saying?
He questioned his unconscious.
That this nonthing is like a mirror? That it’s all about me, yet again?

The blankness-shadow quivered. And now, Gerald felt reminded of that fateful day in the teleoperation bubble, near the old space station, with only a little monkey for company, when he whirled his twenty-kilometer lariat to capture a little piece of destiny. It had also felt a bit like this, when he piloted the grabber-camera closer to the crystal that would become known as the Havana Artifact, and then the First Artifact, and finally just Fomite Number One. An object whose boundaries were uncertain. Its inner depths as cold and dark as interstellar space.