Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

And it was living. We zeroed in on some of the worlds. They were green . And there were animals. But nothing that seemed intelligent. Lots of predators, though. Predators you wouldn’t believe, Phil. It was why he’d brought me in. What were the conditions necessary to permit the development of intelligent life? Nobody had ever put the question in quite those terms before, and I wasn’t sure I knew the answer.

No, we couldn’t see any of this stuff in real time. We had to take pictures and then slow everything down by a factor of about a zillion. But it worked. We could tell what was going on.

We picked out about sixty worlds, all overrun with carnivores, some of them that would have gobbled down a T-rex as an appetizer. Abe had a technique that allowed him to reach in and influence events. Not physically, by which I mean that he couldn’t stick a hand in there, but we had some electromagnetic capabilities. I won’t try to explain it because I’m not clear on it myself. Even Abe didn’t entirely understand it. It’s funny, when I look back now, I suspect Mac was the real genius.

The task was to find a species with potential and get rid of the local carnivores to give it a chance.

On some of the worlds, we triggered major volcanic eruptions. Threw a lot of muck into the atmosphere and changed the climate. Twice we used undersea earthquakes to send massive waves across the plains where predators were especially numerous. Elsewhere we rained comets down on them. We went back and looked at the results within a few hours after we’d finished, our time. In most cases we’d gotten rid of the targets, and the selected species were doing nicely, thank you very much. Within two days of the experiment we had our first settlements.

I should add that none of the occupants looked even remotely human.

If I’d had my way, we would have left it at that. I suggested to Abe that it was time to announce what he had. Report the results. Show it to the world. But he was averse. Make it public? he scowled. Jerry, there’s a world full of busybodies out there. There’ll be protests, there’ll be cries for an investigation, there’ll be people with signs. Accusing me of playing God. I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to reassure the idiots that there’s no moral dimension to what we’re doing.

I thought about that for several minutes and asked him if he was sure there wasn’t.

He smiled at me. It was that same grin you got from him when you’d overlooked some obvious detail and he was trying to be magnanimous while simultaneously showing you what a halfwit you are. “Jerry,” he said, “what have we done other than to provide life for thousands of generations of intelligent creatures? If anything, we should be commended.”

Eons passed. Tens of thousands of subjective years, and the settlements went nowhere. We knew they were fighting; we could see the results. Burned out villages, heaps of corpses. Nothing as organized as a war, of course. Just local massacres. But no sign of a city. Not anywhere.

Maybe they weren’t as bright as we thought. Local conflicts don’t stop the rise of civilization. In fact there’s reason to think they’re a necessary factor. Anyhow, it was about this time that Mac’s plane went down. Abe was hit pretty hard. But he insisted on plunging ahead. I asked whether we would want to replace him, but he said he didn’t think it would be necessary. For the time being, we had all the capability we needed.

“We have to intervene,” he said.

I waited to hear him explain.

“Language,” he added. “We have to solve the language problem.”

“What language problem?” I asked.

“We need to be able to talk to them.”

The capability already existed to leave a message. No, Phil, we didn’t have the means to show up physically and conduct a conversation. But we could deposit something for them to find. If we could master the languages.

“What do you intend to do?” I asked.

He was standing by a window gazing down at Crestview, with its single large street, its lone traffic light, Max’s gas station at the edge of town, the Roosevelt School, made from red brick and probably built about 1920. “Tell me, Jerry,” he said, “Why can none of these creatures make a city?”

I had no idea.

One of the species had developed a written language. Of sorts. But that was as far as they’d gotten. We’d thought that would be a key, but even after the next few thousand local years, nothing had happened.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” Abe said. “They haven’t acquired the appropriate domestic habits. They need an ethical code. Spouses who are willing to sacrifice for each other. A sense of responsibility to offspring. And to their community.”

“And how would you propose to introduce those ideas, Abe?” I should have known what was coming.

“We have a fairly decent model to work with,” he said. “Let’s give them the Commandments.”

I don’t know if I mentioned it, but he was moderately eccentric. No, that’s not quite true. It would be closer to the mark to say that, for a world-class physicist, he was unusual in that he had a wide range of interests. Women were around the lab all the time, although none was ever told what we were working on. As far as I knew. He enjoyed parties, played in the local bridge tournaments. The women loved him. Don’t know why. He wasn’t exactly good-looking. But he was forever trying to sneak someone out in the morning as I was pulling in.

He was friendly, easy-going, a sports fan, for God’s sake. You ever know a physicist who gave a damn about the Red Sox? He’d sit there and drink beer and watch games off the dish.

When he mentioned the Commandments, I thought he was joking.

“Not at all,” he said. And, after a moment’s consideration: “And I think we can keep them pretty much as they are.”

“Abe,” I said, “what are we talking about? You’re not trying to set yourself up as a god?” The question was only half-serious because I thought he might be on to something. He looked past me into some indefinable distance.

“At this stage of their development,” he said, “they need something to hold them together. A god would do nicely. Yes, I think we should do precisely that.” He smiled at me. “Excellent idea, Jerry.” He produced a copy of the King James, flipped pages, made some noises under his breath, and looked up with a quizzical expression. “Maybe we should update them a bit.”

“How do you mean?”

“‘Thou shalt not hold any person to be a slave.’“

I had never thought about that. “Actually, that’s not bad,” I said.

“‘Thou shalt not fail to respect the environment, and its creatures, and its limitations.’“

“Good.” It occurred to me that Abe was off to a rousing start. “Maybe, ‘Thou shalt not overeat.’“

He frowned, ignoring my contribution, and shook his head. “Maybe that last one’s a bit much for primitives. Better leave it out.” He pursed his lips and looked again at the leather-bound Bible. “I don’t see anything here we’ll want to toss out. So let’s stop with twelve.”

“Okay.”

“The Twelve Commandments.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s try it.”

“For Mac,” he said. “We’ll do it for Mac.”

The worlds had all been numbered. He had a system in which the number designated location, age, salient characteristics. But you don’t care about that. He decided, though, that the world we had chosen for our experiment should have a name. He decided on Utopia . Well, I thought, not yet. It had mountain ranges and broad seas and deep forests. But it also had lots of savages. Smart savages, but savages nonetheless.