Ken MacLeod - Learning the World

“No,” said Horrocks. “I’m sorry, but I don’t. It’s obviously a very primitive transmission.”

Constantine passed a hand across his eyes, rubbing his eyebrows with thumb and forefinger. “That’s exactly the problem,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

“No,” said Constantine. “You don’t.” He glared at Horrocks for a few seconds, then smiled. “Don’t do it again.”

14 365:01:13 20:19

Well, that’s it settled. Aliens.

What a day. There’s nothing to say that doesn’t sound banal. Is it always like this, on days when the world changes? Did people who wrote, assuming people did write, have this stupid gnawing feeling all the way back to the Moon Caves and before, that your words are inadequate to the events and that anything you say now will shame you in days to come with its inadequacy? What was it like to react to the first starship launch? The first extrasolar colony? The first news of a fast burn?

This changes the world more than any of these. I see from some of the comments I’ve received that some people don’t grasp this at all. They think intelligent aliens are just one more interesting thing out there, like any new biosphere, or a new stellar process, but more exciting and of more immediate import. Quote from D — :

Isn’t this cool? We’ll be able to settle the new system with help from an intelligence native to the system. Nobody’s ever done that before!

And so on. Lots more like that — check them out.

Look, dear readers: all of that is a possibility. What relations, if any, we establish with the natives of Destiny II is a very serious question and the one that’s raging through the air and airwaves as I write. All the boards and committees and juries are in permanent emergency session and everybody has suddenly got an opinion on it and it’s driving me crazy.

Because it’s not the most important question.

The most important question is this: what does the existence of other intelligent life tell us about the kind of universe we are in?

Yesterday we were in a universe that included us and lots of cool stuff : stars, galaxies, plasmas, cometary bodies, planets, and cows and giraffes and AIs and blue-green algae and lichen and microorganisms.

Today we are in a universe that contains us and lots of cool stuff and alien space bats .

That’s a different universe.

A universe with a different history, different potentialities, different future from the universe we thought we lived in. We are not living in the universe we thought we lived in yesterday.

We have to start learning the world all over again.

Awlin Halegap entertained in the grand manner. As a speculator, it was expected of him. For the occasion he’d hired a spherical space about a hundred metres in diameter. Horrocks presumed that its shape was why it was called a ballroom. He thrust in, snagged a drink-bulb from a drifting cluster, and floated a few metres away from the entrance, taking stock. The entire inner surface of the sphere was an image of the sky, with the planet Destiny II filling most of one side of it. The planetarium effect was illusory — you looked at the planet’s dayside, but if you glanced over your shoulder you found that the sun wasn’t there or had been edited out — but impressive. Horrocks guessed that it was patched together from the ship’s outside view, and the incoming data stream from the fast probe, whose arrival in planetary orbit the occasion celebrated. Almost everyone on the ship would be watching this, with outer or inner eye, but none, Horrocks guessed, would have so spectacular a view.

Hundreds of people floated and drifted in the frosty light. Crows hung, wings steady but for the occasional pinion flick, watched for food scraps and tattled amongst themselves. Hummingbirds, less sentient but more colourful, sipped from the tips of discarded drink-bulbs, and jinked about. Trays of food covered by elastic netting and propelled by tiny electric fan-jets drifted through the crowd, following simple algorithms of approach and avoidance. Clusters of drink-bulbs were plucked from and shoved away.

In the two weeks since Horrocks had cracked the television transmissions he had become famous, and the ship had become febrile. Its nets buzzed with debate. Factions had formed. In the crew areas of the forward and rearward cones, fashions: almost everyone was wearing things like wings, clever pleated contrivances that fanned out between their arms and their sides, or simpler rigid structures of cloth or paper. The big free-fall room looked like a butterfly house.

Horrocks scorned the fad. For tonight he wore a rayon replica of his utility suit, much buckled and multipocketed. He checked out the company as new arrivals drifted or hurtled past him. On the far side of the room hung a cluster of people he recognised from personal or fleeting acquaintance or from their fame: Halegap himself, in earnest conversation with the Oldest Man; around them some of the science team who had designed and launched the probes, and one or two from the science jury which had approved it; one delegate from the ship’s Board, looking — even at this distance — a little awkward and out of place.

Closer to hand, Horrocks noticed a group of people he knew better. He rolled, reached for a passing tray, and let it drag him to a drinks cluster from which he detached a handful of bulbs, and then sent the rest on their way, and himself in the opposite direction. A minute later, air resistance brought him to more or less a halt among the half-dozen people twenty metres away that he wanted to meet.

“Hi, Horrocks,” said Genome Console, catching his hand. She wore a filmy pink one-piece, cuffs draw-strung at wrist and ankle; rings on her toes and her yellow hair in a gold net. He and she circled each other; he passed her a bulb to counteract his remaining momentum.

“Hello,” said Horrocks. He looked around. The others, like Genome, were all training-habitat builders — colleagues and rivals — except for one man, naked and painted in whorls, with paired jet-packs on a belt. The stranger dipped his head as Genome introduced Horrocks.

“Grey Universal,” he said.

“Ah,” said Horrocks. “The contararian.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said the man, and laughed. Horrocks joined in to be polite. Genome let go of Horrocks’s hand and caught Grey’s, smiling at him in a determined way that Horrocks recognised and was relieved was not directed at him. The Consoles, like the Mathematicals, were an old crew family. Horrocks had played with Genome as a child and felt toward her a vague sense of siblinghood, which he’d sometimes suspected her of not sharing.

“My complaint for the occasion,” Grey Universal went on, “is that the atmosphere probe whose brave little adventure we’re all here to follow is a piece of gross irresponsibility that we’ll be lucky to live to regret.”

“Oh, come on,” said Horrocks. “This has been through a shipwide discussion, the Board, the science jury, and a crew poll. It’s settled.”

“Of course,” said Grey. “I’m still right. What if the bat people spot it?”

“This is a probe three metres long, with a wingspan of two metres, flying ten kilometres up at its lowest point,” Horrocks said. “A mere dot.”

“But a detectable dot.”

“They don’t have radar.”

“They have eyes,” said Grey. “Very acute eyes, by the looks of them.”

Horrocks shrugged. So far, he’d heard nothing that hadn’t been thrashed out already. Some arguments were like that; each side just kept repeating the same points, over and over.

“So they see an… unidentified flying object?” he said. “So what? They may have already seen our retro-flare. The orbiter’s thoroughly stealthed, but they may spot it someday. Maybe gradually building up evidence that we’re here will be a good thing for them. Better that than us descending one day out of the blue.”