Twenty-Five: At a Table of Stars

 

 

Berry and I were in the radio room last night, listening to the broadcast from Sanloo. There wasn’t much new, just a speech by somebody important in Congrus who said nothing at all in the most graceful way you can imagine, and some guessing about how soon the funeral’s going to be. Berry was there because Tashel Ban taught him how to run the radio, and because he had even more reason to listen than the rest of us. I was there with him partly because I wanted to know what was happening back home in Meriga, partly because Berry’s my prentice and my friend and I figured he could use the company. Tashel Ban and Eleen were still working on the computer, trying to get the last file on it to make some kind of sense; Anna never listened to the radio, and I have no idea where Thu was just then.

So it was Berry and I, sitting there listening. He didn’t say a thing until the broadcast was over and the last of the music faded back into hisses and crackles. Then, suddenly, he turned toward me. “Trey,” he said, “do you know the thing I’m sorriest about? It’s all the nonsense I told you about who I am and why I ended up as a ruinman’s prentice.”

It took me a moment to remember what he was talking about. “The business about your mother being an Old Believer and all that.”

“Yes.”

“Well, you had to say something.”

He tilted his head, considered that. “You’re probably right. Still...”

“Did you really grow up in Nashul?”

A quick shake of his head denied it. “I spent some time there, so I could make the story believable if anybody who knew the place asked questions. No, I grew up in Sisnaddi, inside the walls. My mother wanted me close, so she could visit me sometimes, and one of her servants came to check on me pretty often.”

“So there are people in Sisnaddi who know about you.”

His face tensed. “Some. Not many, and I hope they keep their mouths shut.”

We talked a little more, I forget about what, and then he turned off the radio and said goodnight and went back to his room. I watched him go, and then went back to the main room, where Tashel Ban was hammering at the keyboard as though he meant to keep at it all night, and Thu was sitting over in the opposite corner doing one of his meditations, and Anna was finishing up the dishes. She saw me come in, gave me and Tashel Ban her sidelong look, and then smiled to herself. She doesn’t smile often, and I’m just as happy for that. This one was worse than usual; it curved like the blade of a knife.

So I went back to the room Eleen and I share, made sure she was sound asleep, and started writing. Well, to be honest, I sat here thinking for a long while, and then finally picked up the pen. Ever since I wrote about the conversation Plummer and I had in the field outside the tents of the Baraboo Sirk, I’ve been thinking about what we’re going to do once we finish up here, and especially what I’m going to do.

Partly, of course, I’m wondering about what’s going to happen to Meriga, and whether there’s going to be any safe place at all, even for a ruinman, if we get a fourth civil war. Partly, there’s Plummer’s offer. Partly, there’s what happened to Jennel Cobey, and I still don’t know what’s going to happen because of that. Partly, there are all the places I passed on my travels where every scrap of ruin was stripped bare by ruinmen long before I was born, and wondering what’s going to happen to the guild when there aren’t enough ruins left for us to work; and of course partly I’m thinking about the fact that I managed, by sheer dumb luck and a lot of wandering, to find the place that everybody’s been looking for since the old world came crashing down, and what do you do after you’ve done that?

At any rate, I wasn’t ready to sleep yet and couldn’t make myself write, and so I slipped out of the little room Eleen and I share and went into the big space where the people who were here before us used to grow their vegetables. The glass block skylights up above were pure black, no trace of starlight in them at all, though I was pretty sure it was a clear desert night and plenty of stars were looking down on this side of Mam Gaia’s round belly. I sat on the edge of one of the concrete tubs full of dirt where the vegetables used to be, and looked back up at them.

I was pretty sure that something was going to happen the next day, something big. Eleen went to bed with a look on her face that wasn’t the one I expected. Ruinmen talk about trying to get through a concrete wall by pounding your head against it, and I’m sure the scholars in Melumi have a more elegant way of saying the same thing; I know the look Eleen gets when that’s what she’s been doing, but that wasn’t the way she looked.

She looked frightened. Not frightened as though something’s come lunging out of the darkness at you, the way Thu came at me on that night in Memfis; frightened as though everything you thought you could trust just dropped from beneath your feet, the way—I was about to write “the way the floor dropped from beneath my feet in the Shanuga ruins,” but I knew better, any ruinman’s prentice past his first season knows better, than to think you can ever trust an old concrete floor. I sat there and stared up at the night, and thought about the frightened look on Eleen’s face, and all the things we’d learned about the Cetans, and the night stared down at me and didn’t say a thing. Finally I got tired enough to sleep, and went to bed.

The next morning I was up before it was light. It was my turn and Anna’s to make breakfast, and so I washed and dressed and headed for the kitchen. She was already there, which was unusual. We didn’t see her much before breakfast unless it was her turn to help with the cooking, and even then she’d get to the kitchen when things were well along and do most of the serving to make up for it. This time she was waiting. She didn’t say much most mornings, and this morning she smiled her knife-curved smile, and watched me out of the corners of her eyes, and didn’t say a word.

I don’t think any of us said a dozen words during breakfast. Everyone knew that something was about to happen. People don’t live together as long as we have, here at Star’s Reach, without getting to sense when a discovery’s been made or a problem’s come up. The longer breakfast went on, the thicker the silence got, until finally Tashel Ban drained his cup of chicory brew and said, “When the rest of you are finished, there’s something Eleen and I have found that we all need to talk about.”

The rest of us were finished. Berry and Thu took a couple of minutes to clear the table, but nobody even thought about washing the dishes. Tashel Ban waited until they were back at their places, then leaned forward onto his elbows and said, “We’ve recovered the last thing that was put on the computers before the people here died.”

He stopped there, and after a moment I said, “And?”

“I have no idea what to make of it. It’s not a document. It’s a program, a huge one, and we can’t figure out what it is or what it’s supposed to do. It’s—” He gave us all his owlish look. “I’m not at all sure how much of an explanation you would prefer.”

“Details,” said Thu, “are more useful than generalities. Please go on.”

Tashel Ban sat back in his chair. “I don’t claim to know everything about the way computer programs were put together back in the old world, but I know a fair amount, probably as much as anybody does nowadays. The Nuwingan government has a few computers that are still in working order—I’m pretty sure the Merigan government has some, too—and I’ve worked on ours. I’ve learned enough to look at a program written for the kind of computer they put here at Star’s Reach, and know what to expect, what the files look like, and so on.

“The program we’ve found is gibberish. Or it looks like gibberish. It’s got things stuck into it that are ordinary pieces of programming code, but I think they were lifted out of other programs that were already in the computer, and they do things with those other programs or the operating system that runs the computer. The rest of it is nonsense, letters and numbers and other things all jumbled together without any structure I recognize at all. But—” Here he leaned forward again. “I don’t think it’s actually nonsense. There are patterns in it. I just can’t figure out the first thing about them.

“So we tried to figure out where it came from and when it was used—you can find that out from inside the computer if you know how—and that’s when things got truly puzzling. The program ran just once, a few hours before the people here tried to delete all their files and then shut everything down. It was downloaded onto the computer a day before, by another program, an even bigger one. This other program was downloaded onto the system four days before that, spent all four of those days doing something I can’t figure out, and then deleted itself.

“Then we tried to find out where the first program came from, and that’s what kept us busy most of yesterday. It looked as though it just popped up out of nowhere, until we thought of checking the logs for the main radio receivers. That’s where it came from. There was a radio message, a long one, that repeated itself over and over again—” He moved his hands in a circle. “And somehow that set up a repeating pattern all through the communications and computer system here, and the big program somehow unpacked itself from that. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t think anyone anywhere knows how to do that.”

“Clearly someone did,” Thu pointed out. “I wonder if it came from Sisnaddi.”

“Not those receivers,” Tashel Ban said.

It took just a moment for that to sink in. When it did, Thu’s eyes narrowed. “You are saying that the program came from—” A motion of his chin pointed upwards. “Out there.”

“As best we can tell, yes.”

I thought I understood then. “So it’s something from the Cetans?”

“That’s the question we asked,” Tashel Ban said. “But the program doesn’t look anything like what the Cetans send, and it doesn’t correspond at all to what the people here before us were able to learn about Cetan computing.”

I was still trying to get my head around that when Berry spoke. “That message,” he said. “The one that brought the program. When did it arrive?”

“That was the next question we asked,” Tashel Ban told him. “I gather you’ve guessed the answer.” Then, because Thu and I were both looking puzzled: “The main antennas point whichever way this part of Mam Gaia’s belly is facing. Right now, they’re facing Tau Ceti in the morning hours. More than a few hours to either side, and—” He shrugged. “They’re pointing to another part of the sky.”

That’s when I realized what he was saying. “So it’s—someone else.”

“Apparently so,” said Tashel Ban. “And I have no idea what to make of that.”

We all stared at him, and then someone laughed. It was a dry, harsh laugh like paper tearing, and it took me a good long moment before I realized that it was coming from Anna.

“Forgive me,” she said, still laughing. “Of course you don’t know what to make of that. You haven’t been looking in the right place.” She looked straight at me, then. “You understand. Or you should. You’re the only one who read the books they left for us—the only one but me.”

I knew right away what she meant, but before I could think of any way to answer, Tashel Ban said to her, “Perhaps you can explain it to the rest of us, then.”

“If you wish.” She looked at him, and then at the rest of us. “The Cetans aren’t the reason all of this is here. They were the one species who answered the radio messages we sent, because they’re at about the same level of technology we are, and they haven’t been contacted yet by the Others.” The way she said that last word, you could tell she would have written it with the capital letter. “The Others are the reason Star’s Reach was built.”

“Another species.” This from Thu.

She gave him something I’d have called a pitying look from anybody else. “Thousands of other species,” she said. “Millions of years more technologically advanced than we are. They have ships that can travel from star to star in less time than it took us to walk here from Cansiddi. They have answers to all the questions human beings tried and failed to find back in the old world. They were already visiting this planet before the old world went away. One of their ships crashed here, at a place called Roswell, off in the desert, and that’s when the government back then started building Star’s Reach, to make contact with them, to talk to them and get the technologies that would keep the old world from ending the way it did.

“But they wouldn’t answer. We weren’t ready for first contact, not then, not for a long time afterwards. They knew that if they landed, if they even communicated with us openly, people couldn’t stand knowing that we’re nothing more than a backward species on a backward planet that needs all the help the Others can give us.” She gestured outwards, the movement sharp as broken metal. “Think of all the people in Meriga who spend their days praying to Mam Gaia. What would they do if they suddenly found out that their Mam Gaia is nothing more than a grain of dust spinning around an ordinary star in an out of the way corner of the galaxy?

“So the Others didn’t contact us. They didn’t think we were ready. They didn’t contact the Cetans, either, and so we and the Cetans made contact with each other, and spent a couple of hundred years talking back and forth by radio. And maybe it was that—” She stopped, and shook her head. “Maybe it was that, that we were able to communicate with an alien species and bear it, that convinced the Others that we were ready to be contacted. And when they contacted us, we still weren’t ready.”

“You think that’s why the people here killed themselves,” said Eleen.

“I don’t know,” Anna admitted. “I’ve told you already most of what I remember; it was a long time ago, and I was very young. Still, once I got here and started reading the books they left for us, it all made sense. And—” She gestured again, palms up. “They left the books about the Others here for us to find, when they burned so much else. Why?”

“Tell us,” said Eleen.

“To give us the chance to figure out ahead of time that the Others are out there. I don’t think they expected anyone to be able to read the computer files, the way you have, but they probably guessed that when Star’s Reach was found, we’d start talking to the Cetans again, and sooner or later the Others would try to contact us a second time. That’s what the program’s for, I’m sure of it—a way to contact them, or a message from them. They’re still waiting out there with their advanced technology—waiting for us to be ready to welcome them, waiting until they can make this world even better than it was before the old world ended. Waiting to come down and take humanity to the stars.”

There was a light in her eyes like nothing I ever saw there before. All at once I remembered the books we’d both read, the alien-books and the make-believe stories set in space, and I knew what was in her mind. I’d read the books and scratched my head and wondered, but she’d read them and believed all of it, and I thought I could guess why. “Anna,” I asked her, “did your parents tell you any of this?”

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.”

That brought another long silence. I don’t know for sure that everyone else was thinking about what that much time means, but I certainly was.

“There was a debate,” Eleen said then, “in the old world, about technology. Almost everyone back then thought that technology could just keep on progressing forever, becoming more and more powerful, until human beings could do anything they could imagine. There were a few scholars who pointed out that everything else follows what’s called the law of diminishing returns. Trey, if you’re digging for metal in a ruin, the longer you keep digging, the harder it gets to find metal, am I right?”

“True enough,” I said.

“What these scholars were saying is that knowledge works the same way, and technology works the same way. So the kind of thing that Anna—”

Her voice trailed off. After a moment I realized why. Anna was nowhere in the room, and from the blank looks on everyone’s faces, nobody had seen her go. A cold thought stirred, and I thought I knew where she would be; I turned away from the computer and headed at a run to the room where the old alien-books were.

I was wrong, but as I got there I heard something hit the floor in the kitchen. I sprinted that way, and there she was, lying in a puddle of blood with her hands on a knife and the knife in her chest. Her eyes were already staring up at nothing as the last color drained out of her.