Star's Reach (47 page)

She turned to face me then. “A little,” she
said. “My mother told me about the Others just before she died. I
didn’t know what to make of it. Now I do.”

No one else said anything. I glanced around
the table. Tashel Ban had his owl-look on; Berry was pale and
distant, Thu still as an old stone. It was Eleen’s face that caught
my eye, though; she was watching Anna with an odd, sad look. It
took me a moment to realize what it meant: Eleen knew something
about all this, something she wasn’t saying. What?

I didn’t know, and there was something that
had to be settled right away. “Tashel Ban,” I said. “Can you make
the program run?”

He nodded. “All I have to do is type in the
command.”

“Thu?”

He was the one who mattered most, just at
that moment. If he decided it was time, we’d clear a space for a
circle, he and Tashel Ban would go at each other with knives, and
if it was Tashel Ban’s time to bleed out his life there on the
floor, I’d have Berry or Eleen delete the program and that would be
the end of it, until whoever sent it decided to try again. That was
the agreement we had, and if that was the way things had to go, I
knew it would be better to get it over with at once.

Thu thought about it for a moment, then shook
his head. “The program ran once before, and it did not bring
spaceships down from the skies. I will not invoke our agreement on
the mere possibility that this thing would violate it. If it proves
to be a message or gives access to a technology, then it may be
necessary to settle the matter in the circle. Not until then.”

“I think,” I said then, “we need to run the
program, and find out what it is.”

“Even though the last people who ran it
killed themselves?” Berry asked.

“We have to know,” I said, and after a
moment, he nodded.

So we all got up and went over to the
computer. Tashel Ban typed at the keyboard for a bit, and then
glanced back at me. I nodded, and he hit the enter button.

I realized over the next few minutes that
there’s more than one kind of silence. There’s ordinary silence,
and there’s deep silence, and then there’s the sort of silence that
you get when everything seems to stop, just like that, and hang
there in the stillness until the silence breaks. That last kind is
how silent it was there in Star’s Reach as we stood around the
computer and watched the screen go black. After a while, some words
appeared in the middle of the screen:

please wait

So that’s what we did. Lights down on the
body of the computer flashed and flickered as though they were
frantic about something. Around the time I was wondering if the
thing was calling home to somewhere off past Tau Ceti II and
waiting for the answer, a red point appeared at the center of the
screen, and then grew into a ball that turned slowly. More words
appeared:

Is something visible on
the screen? y/n

Tashel Ban tapped the Y key. I swear the
sound echoed off the walls of the room.

Is it a sphere?
y/n

He tapped it again.

Is it red? y/n

Another tap. A moment later, a sound like a
flute playing one note came out of the computer.

Can you hear the sound?
y/n

Tashel Ban tapped the same key.

“Can you hear this voice?” It was the
computer, no question, talking out of the little holes on both
sides of the screen, but it sounded like a woman’s voice, cool and
calm and not quite saying the words the way they’re supposed to be
said.

“Yes,” said Tashel Ban.

“Is it speaking the English language?”

“Yes.”

“Is it clear and understandable to you?”

“Close enough.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

I think we all looked at each other just
then. “Yes,” Tashel Ban said after a moment.

“Thank you,” said the voice. The red ball
vanished, and the screen stayed black for another longish time
while the little lights on the computer body went frantic again.
Then stars appeared, coming out slowly the way they do after
sunset, and in the middle of them something that nobody in Meriga
has ever seen in person and everybody in Meriga knows at a glance:
what Mam Gaia looks like from space.

“This is your world,” said the same voice.
All at once, Mam Gaia shot away into distance, as though the screen
had turned into a window on a spaceship like the ones in all those
stories I read. After a bit you could see the sun and the other
planets scattered around it, and then everything else fell into the
sun and the sun turned into a little white star out there among all
the other stars, and then you could hardly see the sun at all. The
spaceship, if that’s what it was, slowed down; another sun came
past on one side, and then another world came into view, big and
pale green and covered with swirls and stripes.

“This is ours,” the voice said. “You would
call it the fourth planet of the star Delta Pavonis.”

The screen turned and plunged down toward the
planet. Green swirls filled it, and then all at once we were in
among the swirls, in a place where the sky was pale green and big
white clumps of something else that might have been clouds drifted
past, and there was no ground at all, just green sky above and
below and as far as you could see in every direction. Something
drifted into sight, something that looked a little like a clump of
soap bubbles with a lot of thin feathers dangling down from it, but
the feathers were moving and the soap bubbles got bigger and
smaller as it drifted on by.

“That’s one of them,” Eleen said in a
whisper.

She was right, too. Two others came into the
screen, and the voice said, “You cannot visit our world and meet
us, but if you could, this is what you would see.”

The image drew back, so we could see hundreds
of the bubbles-and-feathers things, drifting around in the green
sky. “More than four million of your years ago,” the voice said,
“our species reached the stage of complex technology.” Something
like a vast heap of soap bubbles and spiderwebs came into sight,
glowing with points of light; I guessed it was a city, or something
like one. “We made the usual mistakes, and suffered the usual
consequences.” The image changed; the sky turned brown and murky,
and another of the city-things came into sight, torn, lightless,
empty. “Our recovery was long and difficult. Afterwards, we began
reaching out, as you have, to try to contact other species on other
worlds.

“We succeeded.” Another of the city-things
appeared, tiny compared to the first, but with something I guessed
was an antenna spread out over what must have been a huge piece of
green sky. “Other worlds had already contacted one another by
radio, beginning almost twenty-two million of your years ago. There
are thirty-eight species currently in contact with one another. If
you and the species you call Cetans both choose to open radio
contact with us, you will be the thirty-ninth and fortieth. Our
world is closer to your world and the Cetans’ world than any of the
others, and we have been listening to your radio communications for
many of your years now, so it is our place to invite you both to
enter into communication with us. Here are the other species who
are waiting for your answer.”

One at a time, as the voice went on, pictures
appeared on the screen. Every one of them had something toward the
middle that must have been an alien, and something behind it that
must have been an alien world, but that’s about all that I can say
about most of them. As I write this, I’m remembering one of them, a
little like an upside-down flower with seven long fleshy petals, or
maybe they were feet. The petal-feet were orange and so was the
body of the flower, where the petal-feet came together in a spray
of long thin drooping spines. Around the top of the body, where the
stem would be, were a couple of dozen stalks with bright blue cones
on the end of them; I guessed they were eyes. The alien stood on
what looked like blue sand, or maybe it was snow, and something
like blue fog swirled around it. The reason I remember that alien
is that it looked more like a human being than any of the others
did.

“Your messages to the Cetans, and theirs to
you, have taught us much about how you communicate and how you
understand the universe,” said the voice, as the aliens appeared
and disappeared. “The message you received from us was designed to
launch a set of self-replicating patterns that can adapt themselves
to any information technology. Those patterns analyzed your
technology and your means of communication so that this message
could be given to you in a form you will understand. If you choose
to accept our invitation, the analysis will be sent to us by radio,
and we will be better able to understand what you say to us
thereafter. If you accept our invitation, we know that you will
have many questions. We can anticipate certain of these questions
and will answer them now.

“Most species, when first contacted by one of
the worlds already conversing with one another, want to know if we
can travel to their world, or bring them to one of ours. We cannot.
Most of the technological species we have contacted have attempted
space travel, and made, as you did, short trips to nearby moons and
worlds. That much can be done, at a great cost in energy and
resources. To travel from star to star, however, involves a cost in
energy and resources that no species known to us has ever been able
to meet, and technological challenges that no species known to us
has ever succeeded in overcoming. You are free to make the attempt,
and other species will gladly teach you what they have learned from
their failures, but we cannot offer you any hope of success.

“Most species want to know if we can help
them repair the damage to their world that they caused when they
first reached the stage of complex technology. We cannot. We can
share our own experiences with you, and other species can do the
same, but each world that supports life has its own unique patterns
and problems, and the experiences of other species on other worlds
may be of little help to you. At best, principles learned from
those experiences may be of use to you, if it happens that you have
not yet learned them yourselves.

“Most species want to know if we can teach
them sciences and technologies they have not already learned for
themselves. We can try, but this is less easy than you may yet
realize. You will already have learned from your communications
with the Cetans that different species understand the universe in
very different ways, that many of the things you think are true
about the universe are actually reflections of the deep structures
of your own organisms, and that many more depend on conditions on
your world that are not found elsewhere. We encourage you to tell
us about your technology and the ways in which you understand the
universe, and we will gladly try to share our knowledge with you.
We will marvel at what we learn from you, but much of what you
share with us, we will never fully understand; and you will find
the same experience waiting for you.”

The parade of aliens finished, and then the
screen showed the green sky of Delta Pavonis IV and the
bubble-and-feather things floating in it.

“When our species first reached out to find
other beings on other worlds, we expected to find beings much like
us, living on worlds that were much like ours. We found ourselves
instead communicating with beings we can scarcely imagine, living
on worlds we will never fully comprehend. You will find the same
thing.

“Thus we cannot solve your problems; we
cannot come to you or take you to some other world; we cannot teach
you anything you are not ready to learn. All we can offer is the
chance to communicate with other intelligent beings, to try to
grasp something of the way we and other species experience our
worlds, to share your own experiences with others who are eager to
learn about them, and to know that you are not alone in the
universe. If that is enough, we welcome you to the conversation
between worlds.

“Please communicate this message to the
appropriate members of your species and make the decision according
to your ways. We await your reply.”

The screen went black again, and words
appeared a moment later:

You may repeat the message
at any time. After each repetition, this device will ask if a
decision has been made, and if the decision is favorable, you will
receive instructions on how to proceed.

I have no idea how long it was after the
words appeared that anyone talked or moved. I know that I spent a
good long time staring at the screen, thinking about the green
skies and bubble-and-feather creatures of Delta Pavonis IV and the
other aliens, scattered across who knows how much of space, talking
to each other since long before our first ancestors followed
whatever hint Mam Gaia gave them and climbed down out of the trees
in Affiga, if the priestesses are right and that’s where it
happened. I thought of the blobby yellow Cetans, who practically
seem like friends and neighbors to me, and wondered what they
thought when they got the same message, the same offer to sit down
and talk around a table made of stars, knowing that whole lives
would pass by between asking a question and getting an answer.

“The usual mistakes,” said Thu. It was a
moment before I realized he was quoting the voice. “And the usual
consequences.”

“I was thinking about that, too,” Tashel Ban
replied. “Also about what it means that they can send a program to
a computer they know nothing about, and still get results like the
ones we’ve seen. That shouldn’t be possible.”

“With four million years of practice?” Eleen
pointed out.

“Twenty-two million years,” said Thu, “if
they learned the trick from others.”