Stanislaw Lem - His Masters Voice

I could not ignore this background in my work. I had to keep it in mind as I pondered the two-sidedness of the message. The diplomats in their stiff tuxedos awaited, with a pleasant trembling in the knees, the Moment when at last we would be done with our unofficial, less important, preliminary labor, and when they, all in medals and stars, could fly off to the stars to proffer their letters of authorization and to exchange notes of protocol with a billion-year-old civilization. We were only to build the bridge for them. They would cut its ribbon.

But what really was the situation? In some corner of the Galaxy there appeared beings who, realizing the phenomenal rarity of life, decided to intervene in the Cosmogony — and correct it. The heirs of that ancient civilization possessed a Moloch of knowledge, beyond our conception, if they were able so precisely to combine a life-causing impulse with the utmost noninterference in every local path of evolution. The causal signal was not a Word turned to Flesh, because it gave absolutely no designation for what was to arise. The operation was, in its principle, very simple, but repeated over a time that was like an eternity; it represented two permanent riverbanks widely separated, between which the process of speciation was to proceed under its own power. The support was given with the greatest caution possible. No specifications, no concrete directives, no instructions of a physical or chemical nature — nothing other than the reinforcement of thermodynamically improbable states.

The probability intensifier was inexpressibly weak and worked only by virtue of the fact that, omnipresent, it penetrated every obstacle throughout an undetermined portion of the Galaxy. (Or perhaps the whole Galaxy? We did not know how many others of these invisible beams they were sending out.) This was not a single act but a presence whose permanence rivaled the stars themselves; yet, at the same time, it ceased the instant the desired process got under way. It ceased because the radiation’s influence on formed organisms was virtually nil.

The duration of the emission frightened me. Yes, and it was possible, too, that the Senders were no longer among the living; that the process set in motion by their astroengineers within a star or group of stars would continue to run as long as the energy of the solar transmitters held out. The sneaking secrecy of our research seemed to me — by comparison — criminal. What mattered was not a discovery, not a mountain of discoveries, but the opening of our eyes to the world. So far we had been blind puppies. In the darkness of the Galaxy shined an intelligence, an intelligence that did not attempt to impose its presence on us; on the contrary, it concealed itself with great care.

The hypotheses popular before the existence of the Project seemed to me incredibly shallow; they ricocheted back and forth between the pole of pessimism, which called the silentium universi a natural state, and the pole of the mindless optimism that expected announcements clearly and slowly spelled out, as if civilizations scattered among the stars would communicate with one another like children in kindergarten. Yet another myth has bitten the dust, I thought, and yet another truth has ascended overhead — and, as is usually the case with truths, it is too much for us.

There remained the second, semantic, side of the signal. A child may understand separate sentences taken from a work of philosophy, but the whole he will not grasp. Our situation was similar. A child may be enchanted by the content of a sentence here, a sentence there — and we, too, marveled at small fragments that had been deciphered. Having pored long over the stellar text, communing with it through repeated efforts, renewed attempts, I grew at home with it in a curious way, and more than once I saw — although this was purely intuitive, with the feeling that the thing towered above me like a mountain — I saw, always obscurely, the magnificence of its structure. Thus I had exchanged, as it were, a mathematical perception for an aesthetic sense; but perhaps what took place was a merging of the two.

Every sentence in a book means something, even when pulled out of context; but within that context it mingles with the meanings of other sentences, of those that precede it and of those that follow. From such permeation, accretion, and focal fusion emerges finally the idea, frozen in time, that is the work. In the stellar code what mattered was not so much the meaning of the elements, of the “pseudo sentences,” as their purpose, which I was unable to divine. But the code possessed an internal harmony, a purely mathematical harmony, the sort that is revealed in a great cathedral even to one who does not understand the cathedral’s purpose, or know the laws of statics and the canons of architecture, and is ignorant even of the styles embodied, harnessed in the stone. I was that ignorant, open-mouthed spectator. The text was unusual in that it had no “purely local” properties. A keystone without an arch and a weight above is not a keystone; here is nonlocalness in architecture. The synthesis of Frog Eggs was preceded by the tearing, from the code, of its elements, which were then assigned atomic and stereochemical “meanings.”

There was a sort of vandalism in this, as if on the basis of Moby Dick one were to begin slaughtering whales and rendering their blubber. It is possible to do this; the slaughtering is described in Moby Dick, although in a completely reversed, diametric way. But one can disregard that, and cut into pieces and rearrange as one pleases. And so, for all the wisdom behind it, was the code that defenseless? I was soon to learn that the situation could be worse; my fears would receive new fuel. Therefore, I do not disown in retrospect the sentimentality of these remarks.

Certain portions of the code, as frequency analysis indicated, appeared to repeat themselves like words in sentences, but each different neighborhood produced minute discrepancies in the shape of the impulses, discrepancies that were not taken into account by our binary informational version. The impatient empiricists, who could (after all) point to the treasures locked in their “silver vaults,” insisted that these had to be distortions caused by the journey of the neutrino streams through many parsecs of space, a phenomenon — negligible, at that, considering — of the signal’s desynchronization, its smearing. I decided to check this. I requested that a new recording be made of the signal — or at least of a large piece of it — and I compared the new text, received from the astrophysicists, with the corresponding segments from the five successive and independent results of the past reception.

It was strange that no one yet had done this precisely. If, in examining someone’s signature for authenticity, increasingly powerful magnifying glasses are used, eventually the enlarged lines that are the ink marks on the paper begin to disintegrate into elements spread out along the separate fibers, thick as rope, of cellulose; and it is impossible to determine just where, in the spectrum of magnification, the influence of the person writing ceases, the shape given to the letters by his “character,” and where begins the realm of the action of statistical movements, the slight tremors of the hand, of the pen, the unevenness in the flow of ink, factors over which the person writing has no control. Still, one can make a determination, by comparing a series of signatures — a series, and not merely two, because then what is a constant, a regularity, will stand out and be distinguished from what represents the effect of completely variable fluctuations.

I was able to show that the “smearing,” the “desynchronization,” the “diffusion” of the signal lay wholly in the imagination of my adversaries. The accuracy of the repetitions reached the very limit of the resolution of the recording instrument used by the astrophysicists — and, because it was ridiculous to assume that the text had been transmitted with a setting for an instrument of precisely that calibration, this meant that the accuracy was greater than our ability to test it. So we could not know the maximum performance of the transmitter.