Charles Sheffield: Resurgence

Let us be willing to consider heresy. From recent experience, we can speculate as to the possible nature of such assistance. All Builder activities seem designed to operate over vast lengths of time. Conceivably, Builder actions and reactions are obliged to function in a long-extended mode. Humans, like all species that develop on planetary surfaces, have perforce evolved to respond rapidly to any threat. We are short-lived, but we are fast. Could our speedy reactions be of value to the Builders? Could our ultimate relationship be not the subservience of one to the other, but some form of symbiosis? Facing great dangers, will we perhaps help and support each other?

This is such a radical notion that it cannot, of course, be justified by speculation alone. Evidence must be sought, and crucial experiments performed.

That’s the point that the dummies on the inter-clade council don’t get. Sure, you can send survival specialists to the Sag Arm. Send a hundred, send a thousand, but if you don’t send scientists , what can you hope to learn? You can’t prove general theorems based on a couple of cases—though that’s what I’ve just been doing here, and I certainly hate it. I must find a way to be part of the second expedition, even if I have to sneak on board in disguise.

Disguised as what? Maybe I could bribe somebody. Hans says that in any group of over fifty, you can always find one that can be bribed. I wonder if that applies to inter-clade council members?

What am I saying? Delete after “crucial experiments performed,” and Continue .

Hard evidence will be needed to support such a radically new hypothesis. We note, however, that many of the listed “theories” concerning Builder origins and activities are based upon the analysis of a single event or artifact. In the case of the Sag Arm, forty or more stellar systems offer proof that something on the scale of Builder artifacts and activity is at work there.

At work there . Not here, in our local arm. I wonder what Professor Merada and the others at the Artifact Research Institute will say when they hear what we found in the Sag Arm. I can make a guess. They will say lots, but they won’t do one damn thing. They’ll sit around the conference table and talk about it for the next ten years. I don’t see much help from them.

But I have to be on that next expedition. Who can I rely on? Well, there’s E.C. Tally. He certainly wants to go. But if you’re reduced to relying on E.C. you are in a bad way. Louis will help me. He and I are becoming very close. There’s a price for that, though. Hans would normally help me, too, if I treated him the right way, but I can’t handle both of them at once. I don’t have the nerve or the experience. Glenna could give me pointers, and she would probably enjoy doing it, but she’s back on Sentinel Gate. By the time we get there it will be too late.

Of course, the person who could make all the difference if he wanted to is Julian Graves. He must have influence on picking the members of the next expedition. Maybe if I switched my efforts to him—wait a minute. He’s an Ethical Councilor. He’d see through me in half a second. And he’d better never see any of this. Delete after “activity is at work there,” and Continue .

There already exists a plethora of theories about the Builders, and now we are proposing to add another one. It is still in embryonic form, and it, like all its predecessors, may take hundreds or thousands of years to be disproved, or to confirm its credibility. A century is a long time by human standards. However, to the Builders a millennium is no more than the blink of an eye. We must remain open-minded, yes. We must be careful in our work, yes. But most of all, we must be patient.

Patient. Right. Easy to say and hard to do. I’d be a lot less itchy if I could find a way to be assured a place on the next expedition to the Sag Arm. With so much going on there, major new discoveries have to be ripe for the picking. Maybe I could organize an expedition of my own, nothing to do with the inter-clade council. There’s always Claudius. He says he can’t wait to go home. And there’s a Chism Polypheme ship sitting at Upside Miranda Port, the one that the Marglotta came in.

Maybe I ought to be making advances to Claudius. Hold on. Claudius! That goggle-eyed green freak. I’m not that desperate yet. Am I? Oh my God, I think I am.

Delete . . . .