5

Lissa awoke early and lay in bed looking out at the mountains. The wind, she knew, was frigid out there, and it blew constantly. She stretched, feeling fresh and encouraged, and wondered how she could have felt down at all last night. Everything was still waiting to be accomplished, and there would be enough time to work around every failure, every disappointment.

She thought of her parents. Morey would be getting ready for his Monday morning physics class. Sharon would already be at the hospital, or she might even have been there all night. They were thinking of her, Lissa felt sure.

As she gazed out at the piece of blue sky visible through her window, she thought of where she had been born—in a small town on the inside of a spinning hollow ball located in the Moon’s Orbit. The only other worlds she had known were the other space colonies at L-5 and L-4 and the growing Lunar settlements. She had thought more about the colonies on Mars, the asteroid hollow orbiting Mercury, the habitats in Saturn’s rings, than of Earth. Yet here she was on the home world, where everyone had come from originally. For a moment it seemed a backward thing to do, to come here, the place of countless old and dead civilizations, where for thousands of years people had warred and died; even in the last century millions had died in world wars. There was no place on the planet where people had not died, where human bones did not lie buried in the ground. Suddenly she felt the age of the Earth, and she startled herself with the fact that no one had built the Earth; it had condensed out of interstellar materials in orbit around the youthful sun, and after billions of years humanity had evolved from the thin layer of bio-matter that had formed in the outer crust. Some crust, she thought, sitting up and looking at the mountains. But even though the Earth had not been constructed especially for human beings, she realized with curiosity, it had become livable because human life had evolved by adapting to the planet’s environment. The habitats she knew had only taken that environment of earth, air, and water out into space.

She got up finally and sat down at her desk. Her screen tilted up, and she entered her palm print. A greeting appeared:

GOOD MORNING. I AM YOUR PERSONAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. MY NAME IS AUGIE. HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO ADDRESS ME—WITH WORD DISPLAY OR WITH A VOICE? WOULD YOU ALSO PREFER TO GIVE ME ANOTHER NAME?

Lissa typed:

WORD DISPLAY WILL DO JUST FINE FOR NOW. AUGIE IS A GOOD NAME.

Augie replied:

THANK YOU. LET ME PRESENT YOU WITH YOUR SYLLABUS FOR THIS TERM.

A long list of book titles began to march up from the bottom of the screen. The list included science and humanities, current texts, and key works in the history and methodology of contact with alien civilizations, including introductory works on exobiology and exopsychology. Logic, mathematics, and languages made up a separate list.

Augie added some comments:

YOU ARE ENCOURAGED TO BROWSE AND READ SECTIONS OF WORKS THAT STRIKE YOUR INTEREST. DO NOT TRY TO BE SYSTEMATIC AT FIRST, BUT MOVE TOWARD THAT APPROACH AS YOUR INTEREST GROWS.

The rest of the list marched through, and Lissa realized that this part of the Institute was a kindergarten. Elsewhere in Sunspace, the advanced listeners were at work, examining the alien signal with a sophistication that she could only guess at. As the list ended, she realized that the Institute’s educators believed that to break the alien message might require the sensitivity and intellect of all human history and experience, concentrated, of course, in highly motivated, trained individuals. She wondered whether she could ever become one of those individuals. It was possible to fail at this school, she told herself; perhaps not in terms of grades, but by being unable to handle this kind of independent study. Some people needed rigid schedules and clearly defined courses. There was only one way to find out—by trying; and maybe one day they would send her to a more advanced center, where she would work with the finest Artificial Intelligences and colleagues.

A terrible fear suddenly crossed her mind: What if all humanity’s efforts were not enough to understand the message, ever? What would that mean? She couldn’t believe that was possible. Still, her father’s criticism that the project was taking too long was bothersome. That humankind had failed to unravel the signal’s meaning might indicate something, but it couldn’t be that humanity was too stupid. It just couldn’t.

She asked Augie a direct question:

WHY DO YOU THINK IT’S TAKING SO LONG TO DECIPHER THE ALIEN MESSAGE?

Augie seemed to hesitate as she took her fingers off the keyboard. Then his reply came up on the screen:

IT WAS PREDICTED AS EARLY AS A CENTURY AGO THAT SUCH A COMMUNICATION WAS NOT LIKELY TO BE SHORT. IT WOULD BE ENCYCLOPEDIC, AND PROBABLY SENT OUT ON A CONTINUING BASIS BY A CIVILIZATION USED TO MAKING SUCH TRANSMISSIONS ROUTINELY. THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY SCIENTIST PHILIP MORRISON WROTE IN THE 1980S THAT SUCH A MESSAGE “WILL HAVE A LOT TO SAY,” AND HE PREDICTED THAT “IT WILL NOT BE SOMETHING THAT THE NEW YORK TIMES WILL BE ABLE TO PRINT IN ITS ENTIRETY. INTERPRETING IT WILL, I THINK, BE A LONG, SLOW PROCESS, COMPARABLE WITH THE GROWTH OF A SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINE. IT WILL TAKE DECADES TO UNDERSTAND, TO STUDY, TO ARGUE AND WRITE ABOUT.”

Augie stopped. She felt disappointed. He hadn’t told her anything that she didn’t know.

Lissa typed:

IS THAT ALL YOU CAN TELL ME?

THAT IS ALL.

She knew what her father would say. There had been no progress at all. The same ideas were current today that had been a century ago, long before the signal had even been picked up. It was depressing, unless Augie knew more and was not allowed to reveal it to students. After all, Augie was only one small part of a much larger Artificial Intelligence, the part that had been assigned to work with her.

She typed in another question:

ARE THERE OTHER DATA BASES FOR THIS QUESTION?

NOT TO MY KNOWLEDGE.

ARE YOU SURE?

OF COURSE, LISSA.

ARE ALL DATA BASES ON THIS SUBJECT AVAILABLE TO YOU?

PROBABLY. BUT THE QUESTION CANNOT BE ANSWERED AS PUT. I DO NOT GATHER DATA. THEY ARE GIVEN TO ME.

Lissa sighed and punched up the first assignment: selected readings from Norbert Weiner’s work on cybernetics and from Noam Chomsky’s explorations of human language, both from the late twentieth century.