Robert Sawyer: The Eagle Has Landed

Still, perhaps the failure of Russia had been a good thing. Not that there was anything inherently evil about it, from what I could tell—indeed, in principle, it espoused the values that all other known civilized races share—but it was the rivalry between it and the nation that had launched the inhabited ships to the moon that had caused an incredible escalation of nuclear-weapons production. Finally, it seemed, they would abandon that madness… and perhaps if abandoning space exploration was the price to pay for that, maybe, just maybe, it was worth it.

I was in a quandary. I had spent much longer here than I’d planned to—and I’d as yet filed no report. It’s not that I was eager to get home—my brood had long since grown up—but I was getting old; my frayed scales were losing their flexibility, and they were tinged now with blue. But I still didn’t know what to tell our homeworld.

And so I crawled back into my cryostasis nest. I decided to have the computer awaken me in one of our bigyears, a time approximately equal to a dozen Earth years. I wondered what I would find when I awoke…

What I found was absolute madness. Two neighboring countries threatening each other with nuclear weapons; a third having announced that it, too, had developed such things; a fourth being scrutinized to see if it possessed them; and a fifth—the one that had come to the moon for all mankind—saying it would not rule out first strikes with its nuclear weapons.

No one was using controlled fusion. No one had returned to the moon.

Shortly after I awoke, tragedy struck again: seven humans were aboard an orbital vehicle called Columbia — a reused name, a name I’d heard before, the name of the command module that had orbited the moon while the first lander had come down to the surface. Columbia broke apart during reentry, scattering debris over a wide area of Earth. My dorsal spines fell flat, and my wing claws curled tightly. I hadn’t been so sad since one of my own brood had died falling out of the sky.

Of course, my computer continued to monitor the broadcasts from the planet, and it provided me with digests of the human response.

I was appalled.

The humans were saying that putting people into space was too dangerous, that the cost in lives was too high, that there was nothing of value to be done in space that couldn’t be done better by machines.

This from a race that had spread from its equatorial birthplace by walking— walking! —to cover most of their world; only recently had mechanical devices given them the ability to fly.

But now they could fly. They could soar. They could go to other worlds!

But there was no need, they said, for intelligent judgment out in space, no need to have thinking beings on hand to make decisions, to exalt, to experience directly.

They would continue to build nuclear weapons. But they wouldn’t leave their nest. Perhaps because of their messy, wet mode of reproduction, they’d never developed the notion of the stupidity of keeping all one’s eggs in a single container…

So, what should I have done? The easiest thing would have been to just fly away, heading back to our homeworld. Indeed, that’s what the protocols said: do an evaluation, send in a report, depart.

Yes, that’s what I should have done.

That’s what a machine would have done. A robot probe would have just followed its programming.

But I am not a robot.

This was unprecedented.

It required judgment.

I could have done it at any point when the side of the moon facing the planet was in darkness, but I decided to wait until the most dramatic possible moment. With a single sun, and being Earth’s sole natural satellite, this world called the moon was frequently eclipsed. I decided to wait until the next such event was to occur—a trifling matter to calculate. I hoped that a disproportionately large number of them would be looking up at their moon during such an occurrence.

And so, as the shadow of Earth—the shadow of that crazy planet, with its frustrating people, beings timid when it came to exploration but endlessly belligerent toward each other—moved across the moon’s landscape, I prepared. And once the computer told me that the whole of the side of the moon facing Earth was in darkness, I activated my starbird’s laser beacons, flashing a ruby light that the humans couldn’t possibly miss, on and off, over and over, through the entire period of totality.

They had to wait eight of Earth’s days before the part of the moon’s face I had signaled them from was naturally in darkness again, but when it was, they flashed a replying beacon up at me. They’d clearly held off until the nearside’s night in hopes that I would shine my lasers against the blackness in acknowledgment.

And I did—just that once, so there would be no doubt that I was really there. But although they tried flashing various patterns of laser light back at me— prime numbers, pictograms made of grids of dots—I refused to respond further.

There was no point in making it easy for them. If they wanted to talk further, they would have to come back up here.

Maybe they’d use the same name once again for their ship: Columbia .

I crawled back into my cryostasis nest, and told the computer to wake me when humans landed.

“That’s not really prudent,” said the computer. “You should also specify a date on which I should wake you regardless. After all, they may never come.”

“They’ll come,” I said.

“Perhaps,” said the computer. “Still…”

I lifted my wings, conceding the point. “Very well. Give them…” And then it came to me, the perfect figure… “until this decade is out.”

After all, that’s all it took the last time.