Грег Иган - Schild’s Ladder

These words could not be left unchallenged. The idea of genocide might have shrunk to little more than a surreal figure of speech, but in modern times there had never before been a situation in which the effort required to commit mass murder would not have been vastly disproportionate to even the most deranged notion of the benefits. If anything could still awaken horrors from the Age of Barbarism, six hundred years of dislocation, and the opportunity to eradicate something truly alien, might just be enough to end the nineteen-thousand-year era in which no sentient being had died at the hand of another.

As Tchicaya struggled to frame his response, Tarek said, "I’d like to answer that, if I may."

Tchicaya turned to him, surprised. "Yes, of course."

Tarek walked to the podium and rested his hands on the lectern. He looked up and addressed Murasaki directly.

"You’re right: if there’s sentient life behind the border, it probably won’t share my goals. Unlike the people in this room, who all want exactly the same things in life as I do, and have precisely the same tastes in food, art, music, and sex. Unlike the people of Schur, and Cartan, and Zapata — who I came here in the hope of protecting, after losing my own home — who doubtless celebrate all the same festivals, delight in the same songs and stories, and gather every fortieth night to watch actors perform the same plays, in the same language, from the same undisputed canon, as the people I left behind.

"If there’s sentient life behind the border, of course we couldn’t empathize with it. These creatures are unlikely to possess cute mammalian neonate faces, or anything else we might mistake for human features. None of us could have the imagination to get over such insurmountable barriers, or the wit to apply such difficult abstractions as the General Intelligence theorem — though since every twelve-year-old on my home world was required to master that result, it must be universally known on this side of the border.

"You’re right: we should give up responsibility for making any difficult moral judgments, and surrender to the dictates of natural selection. Evolution cares so much about our happiness that no one who’s obeyed an inherited urge has ever suffered a moment’s regret for it. History is full of joyful case studies of people who followed their natural instincts at every opportunity — fucking whoever they could, stealing whatever they could, destroying anything that stood in their way — and the verdict is unanimous: any behavior that ever helped someone disseminate their genes is a recipe for unalloyed contentment, both for the practitioners, and for everyone around them."

Tarek gripped the lectern tightly, but continued in the same calm voice. "You’re so gloriously, indisputably right: if there is sentient life behind the border, we should wipe these creatures out of existence, on the mere chance that they might do the same to us. Then we can learn to predicate everything else we do on the same assumptions: there is no other purpose to life than an eternity of grim persistence, and the systematic extinguishment of everything — outside ourselves, or within us — that stands in the way of that goal."

He stood in place for several seconds. The room had fallen silent again. Tchicaya was both heartened and ashamed; he had never imagined Tarek taking a stand like this, though in retrospect he could see that it was an act of constancy, not betrayal. Perhaps Tarek had left his own family and friends behind solely in order to fight for the security of their future home, but in the very act of coming here, he’d been transformed from a member of that culture into an advocate for something universal. Maybe he was a zealot, but if so, he was an idealist, not a hypocrite. If there were sentient creatures behind the border, however foreign to him, the same principles applied to them as to anyone else.

Tarek stepped back from the podium. Santos, another of the newcomers, stood and delivered an impassioned defense of Murasaki’s position, in similarly chilling language. When he’d finished, half a dozen people rose to their feet simultaneously and tried to shout each other down.

Tarek managed to restore order. "Do we have more questions for Rasmah and Tchicaya, or is this the time to proceed with our own debate?"

There were no more questions. Tarek turned to them. "I’ll have to ask you to leave now."

Tchicaya said, "Good luck."

Tarek gave him a reluctant smile, as if to concede that the two of them finally could mean the same thing by those words. He said, "I don’t know how much longer this will take, but we’ll keep going until we have a decision."

Out in the corridor, Rasmah turned to Tchicaya. "Where are those people from? Murasaki and Santos?"

"I don’t know. It’s not in their signatures." He checked with the ship. "They both came via Pfaff, but they haven’t made their origins public."

"Wherever it is, remind me not to visit." She shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself. "Do we have to wait here for the verdict? It could be a while. And they will make it public."

"What did you have in mind? I don’t think I could face the Blue Room."

"How about my cabin?"

Tchicaya laughed. "You have no idea how tempting that sounds, right now."

"That’s how it was meant to sound." Rasmah took his hand; she hadn’t been joking. "These bodies are very fast learners, especially when they have memories of a prior attraction."

Tchicaya said, "I thought we’d put an end to all that."

"This is what’s known as persistence." She faced him squarely. "Whoever it is you’re still hung up about, I promise you I’ll make an impression that will erase all memories of the competition." She smiled at her own hyperbole. "Or I can try, if you’re willing to make the same effort."

Tchicaya was tongue-tied. He liked everything about her, but some deeply ingrained part of him still felt as if it was a matter of principle to back away.

He said, "I’m seven times your age. I’ve had thirty-one children. I have sixth-generation descendants older than you."

"Yeah, yeah. You’re a battered old creature, on the verge of slipping out of sentience into senility. But I think I can drag you back from the brink." She leaned closer; the scent of her body was beginning to regain significance for him. "If you have scars, I’ll kiss them away."

"I want to keep my scars."

"That’s all right. I can’t actually erase them."

"You really are sweet, but you hardly know me."

Rasmah groaned. "Stop dividing everything by four thousand years. Your age is not the natural unit of time, by which all else must be measured." She leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth; Tchicaya did not pull away.

She said, "How was that?"

Tchicaya gave her his best Quinean wine-judge frown. "You’re better than Yann. I think you’ve done this before."

"I should hope so. I suppose you waited a millennium to lose your virginity?"

"No, it just felt that way."

Rasmah stepped back, then reached out and took both his hands. "Come and wait with me for the vote. We can’t do anything you don’t want to do; it’s biologically impossible."

"That’s what they tell you as a child. But it’s more complicated than that."

"Only if you make it complicated." She tugged on his arms. "I do have some pride. I’m not going to beg you. I’m not even going to threaten you, and say this is your last chance. But I don’t believe we’re wrong for each other, and I don’t believe you’re sure that we are."

"I’m not," he conceded.

"And didn’t you just deliver a speech about the folly of making decisions without sufficient information?"

"Yes."

She smiled triumphantly. He wasn’t going to argue his way out of this. Logic had nothing to do with it; he simply had to make up his mind what he wanted. One instinct told him that he should turn her down, because it was a decision he’d made so many times before that it seemed like a betrayal of himself to do otherwise. And another told him that if he didn’t change, there was no point living even one more century.