Nature Futures, page 22
The president’s first instinct was to find a way of broadcasting a reply. The prof was the head of the appropriate think tank, so suddenly she found herself on the great carpet of the Oval Office, explaining to the secretary of state, who in turn re-explained to the president, that a technology gap of more than about two hundred years would render communication difficult—and, if these aliens were superintelligent, impossible—unless such advanced creatures were prepared to take the time to talk to us the way we do to cats and dogs.
“Look at it this way, Mr. President,” she said. “First contact with an equal is in essence no different from when you see someone you like at a party. You think that you would like to get to know them. You then have to formulate a small and pithy first-contact statement that will both pique their interest and elicit an open-ended response allowing further communication.”
“So what you are saying, Professor, is that this alien message is actually nothing more than a cheesy pickup line.”
The prof smiled. “Actually, sir, although the message may be seen as having an analogous purpose, it’s probably more complicated than that.”
“Yes,” said the president, looking at his fingers. “Almost everything seems to turn out that way.”
“What do you think the message actually means?” the secretary of state asked, eyes sharp and alert. “Is it a McLuhan-esque test of reasoning where the words actually have no meaning, the mere existence of the transmission being its own message?”
The prof shrugged. “As yet I have no real idea. For example, what goes tick-tock?”
“A clock,” said the president.
“A bomb,” said the secretary of state.
“And our DNA is wrapped around in a double spiral, curly-wurly fashion. It could be that the message is saying something along the lines of ‘shame about your genetic time bomb,’ or it might be that the whole message is nothing more than someone bending over and clapping their hands together, like when you call a dog over.”
“Why don’t we just ask them what they meant?” said the president.
“No!” squawked the prof, a look of blind panic on her face. “Our future survival is staked on our reply. We must figure it out, whatever it takes.”
She rode the bus home. The stars had tapped Earth on the shoulder. Her reflection in the window held her gaze.
“Tick-tock curly-wurly,” she said. “Tick-tock curly-wurly.”
Daddy’s Slight Miscalculation
ASHLEY PELLEGRINO
Ashley Pellegrino is the daughter of a scientist. Aside from writing tales that occasionally scare the scientist whose real-life adventures have been known to scare Stephen King, she’s a perfectly typical twelve-year-old. She lives in Long Beach, New York.
Zzzzzzt! Clink! “Ouch!”
I listened from outside Dad’s lab. He was working on a new experiment.
No one knew Daddy had started a new project, except me. Only I know when he is working on an experiment, because he usually works while my brother and sister and I are asleep. Whenever he is up all night, I know he’s working on something new, sometimes even something strange—like the pink octopus whose ears were like wings.
He doesn’t go out to work in the morning like other fathers. Did he ever go out to work, like other kids’ dads? I think so; but he does not like to talk about the time before I was born. Something happened. Something sad, I think.
Except for us, Dad has only his work.
If you watch science fiction, or read it, you might think it’s boring or even scary growing up with a scientist in the house. Actually, it’s more interesting than scary, more easy than boring. When I ask for help with my homework, he sometimes gets me all dizzy. Other times, it becomes crystal clear. But don’t ask him why nature is the way it is, unless you really want to know, unless you want to get dizzy trying to understand how black paint looks black because it is really trapping all the other colors inside.
“Why is the sky blue?” I remember asking.
Most adults would answer: “Go ask your science teacher.” Or: “That’s how God made it.”
But Dad said: “That’s the color the sky rejects.”
I don’t completely understand; but I’m sure not many kids walk around wondering about living in rejected colors. It makes me wonder a lot about the things around me. It’s actually kind of fun. Even with ideas gone completely strange, we’re always entertained. None of us will ever forget what Dad did to Mr. Kitty.
Cat’s toes and monkey fingers?
Mr. Kitty was already nicknamed Mr. Mischief, even without Dad’s help.
“Biomorphing” paws into hands—for a cat? Who wouldn’t have guessed that could lead to chaos? Just imagine living with a cat that can unscrew jars and open doors. But even if our house did eventually end up with a child lock on the refrigerator door (although there were no toddlers around), it was really fun, believe it or not, to have a cat with hands.
Yet the noises that came from Dad’s lab, that night—they sounded more creepy than fun. Usually the sounds coming from Dad’s lab are buzzes, not ouches.
So, I knocked.
“Come in,” he said.
The sun was shining through his windows and it was a bright new day outside. Dad had worked all night. This had to be something special. I saw what might have been a small device used to communicate with those pink octopuses with Dumbo’s ears.
“Dad, what is that?” I asked.
“Bone-phone,” Dad replied. There was a strange-looking wire clipped to his ear.
“I don’t like the sound of that,” I said.
“That’s OK. We can always name it again.”
“Fine! But what does it do?”
“Do you see those orchids on the table? And those trees outside? This wire sends a signal right into my brain. It lets me feel exactly what the plants feel. Isn’t that amazing?”
I looked at the fruit trees, and I looked at the tall green grass. I thought of The Wizard of Oz. I thought of how the trees yelled at Dorothy when she picked their apples.
“But, Dad. What happens when …?”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Nothing can go wrong. Nothing goes wrong in science, if you really do your homework. Science only improves life.”
“Isn’t that what they said about the Titanic and the Columbia?” I asked.
“Ouch!” Dad said. “Gotta think about that one. But this science is different. Trust me.”
Dad was changing. A lot of people were changing, these days. Some were changing for the better. Some, for the worse.
Dad always used to tell me that the most important place for a scientist to be is in the unknown. “ ‘I don’t know,’” he had taught me, “is always a good place to start.”
Now, he was starting to speak as if he did know—as if, these days, he was afraid to say the words “I don’t know.”
I thought again about those angry trees in The Wizard of Oz, and I did not like the whole idea. “Dad, wait …”
But Dad wore the wire anyway, and he flipped the switch, saying: “This is something new. This is something completely different.”
Just then, my brother Kyle went into the yard, wanting only to do something nice for Dad. He wanted to give Dad a surprise, and to do some of the household chores for him. Kyle was heading for the grass. He was pushing Dad’s little mechanical lawn mower. He was pushing fast, really fast.
Dad never knew that a single blade of grass could scream. No one knew, until that day. Kyle mowed twenty feet, before Dad’s screams stopped him.
Yes, this was as different as Dad promised it would be.
The grass on our lawn is taller than me, now. And the neighbors have begun to complain. But Dad will not cut the grass; not a single blade.
Dad still won’t tell me what it sounded like.
And I wonder.
Brain Drain
FREDERIK POHL
Frederik Pohl’s career in SF spans more than six decades, as author, editor, and agent (at one time he represented the young Isaac Asimov). In the early 1940s, he edited Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories; in the 1960s, it was Galaxy and its sister title, If, winning the Hugo for If three years running. A frequent coauthor, notably with C. M. Kornbluth, Pohl reemerged in the 1970s as a novelist in his own right, with books such as Man Plus and Gateway, both of which won Nebula Awards: Gateway also won a Hugo. Not content to rest, a new story, “Generations,” was published in September 2005, and he is currently working on a novel begun by Arthur C. Clarke. He lives in Palatine, Illinois.
As Docent Wilfram’s actual name, which summarized his complete medical and professional history, was very long, his friends simply called him “Wilf.” There weren’t very many of those friends left, though, because the number who were still in any real sense alive—that is, not frozen, cremated, or in machine storage—dwindled year after year.
That was natural enough. Wilf had been birthed in 2734 and was therefore now 174 years old, and although genetics, microrobotic surgery, and easily available custom-grown transplants had given most human beings a life expectancy undreamed of in earlier times, they couldn’t keep a person from feeling old—even when Wilf’s housemind, Jerel, was giving him news that, at one time, Wilf would have considered exciting. “Message?” Wilf repeated. “An ET message?”
“Definitely ET,” his housemind assured him, “though its content, if any, is unknown. It was received by the thousand-hectare radio telescope in Trojan-Uranus.”
“Yes,” said Wilf, yawning, “Well, you never know: send it along for analysis. I think I’m going to go to sleep.”
As he headed for his bedroom he had already nearly forgotten the news. Messages from space had not been headline news for a long time. The first message—that is, at least, the first radio signal that could not possibly be natural in origin and thus had to be the product of extraterrestrial intelligence—had been detected as early as 2063, and as detection facilities improved over the years thirty-seven others had been logged. They came from all over the sky, some a few score light-years away, others more than a thousand.
But in spite of the best efforts of humanity’s increasingly capable computers, no message had ever been decoded, and there was increasing doubt that there was anything to decode. Nothing but the inevitable radio leakage from any high-tech civilization.
That was disappointing, but there was worse. Although thirty-eight extraterrestrial radio sources had been detected, only eleven were still on the air. The rest had gone silent and stayed that way. Why?
That was the part Wilf didn’t like to think about. It seemed that most high-tech civilizations lasted only some centuries. Then something happened to them. What that something might be no one could say, but there was one unwelcome theory that would not go away. Any civilization that reached the point of large-scale radio emissions was likely at the same time to be developing weapons of mass destruction. And that, it seemed, was a death sentence.
As Wilf limped toward his bedroom, the housemind spoke again. “Docent Wilf? I ask again, may I fix that limp for you?”
“It isn’t worth the trouble!” Wilf said.
“It is no trouble,” the housemind persisted. “Although, to be sure, it would be more efficient for you to have yourself machine-stored now, and then such problems would not arise.”
“Yes, I know,” Wilf said testily, throwing himself on his bed. Generally it made more sense to follow a housemind’s advice, as their machine minds were far more capable than any human’s—especially that of a human who still clung to his organic body. He was also quite sure that Jerel knew something it wasn’t telling its master. It might be, he thought, about his own life expectancy. If you were going to have yourself copied into a computer program it was a good idea to get it done while you were still alive.
After actual death, even a short time after death, there was a certain degradation of the data. And there really was no reason to put it off. You lost nothing in machine storage. Indeed, you gained a world—any kind of world you wanted! You could create any virtual reality you liked and live in it as long as you chose, and when you tired of that you could create a different and even better one.
Nearly all Wilf’s age-cohort had long since taken the step themselves, and when they talked to him about it—when they bothered at all to talk to any person who was still flesh and blood—they unanimously described it as the closest thing any nonbeliever could get to a heaven of his own.
Wilf sat up suddenly, opening his eyes. “Jerel!” he called. “Show yourself! I want to talk to you.”
“Yes, Docent Wilf?” The housemind obediently presented itself as the hologram of an ancient English butler, standing attentively a couple of meters away.
“You’ve thought this through, haven’t you? Those other civilizations didn’t wipe themselves out in wars, did they?”
The housemind’s expression clouded. “Why do you ask, Docent Wilf?”
“I ask you because you’ve got a better mind than I have.”
“In certain areas, perhaps,” the housemind agreed.
“They don’t all die, do they? They just put themselves in machine storage. And then they’ve got nothing to worry about, ever—not hunger, not illness, certainly not death. Not even unrequited love, because if their love object isn’t in a requiting mood they simply simulate her when she is. And they have such a grand time they don’t bother with anything else.”
“Generally speaking, no,” the housemind agreed.
Wilf laughed. “Of course not,” he said. “And neither will we, will we? There won’t be any more signals to leak to the rest of the Galaxy! And so as soon as the rest of us are in machine storage, Earth will fall silent, too.”
Great Unreported Discoveries No. 163
MIKE RESNICK
Mike Resnick is one of the most prolific authors in SF. He has won five Hugo Awards and currently stands first on the Locus list of all-time award winners for short fiction and fourth on the Locus list of science fiction’s all-time top award winners in all fiction categories. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, and his online home can be found at www.fortunecity.com/tattooine/farmer/2.
When the team at Iowa State (or was it Nebraska?) came up with proof positive that plants feel pain, it made headlines not just that day, but for months thereafter. We have millions of people who became vegetarians because they didn’t want animals to die just so they could fill their stomachs, and suddenly they discovered that everything they eat feels pain.
I found it fascinating. That’s why I changed my major and went into botany—because I couldn’t stop wondering: if plants can feel, what else can they do? Like, for example, can they think?
Of course, thinking in itself is a dead end, especially if you’re rooted to one spot, unless you can communicate your thoughts, so that’s what I really tried to specialize in. It’s a good thing I knew how to get government grants, because I spent the first fourteen years after getting my Ph.D. without any hint of success.
I would talk to them. I would play them music. I would write messages in every known language and hold them up. I even brought in professors who could speak dead languages. All to no avail.
Undaunted—well, not very daunted anyway—I brought in psychics to see if they could form a bond with any of the plants in my lab. Still no luck.
I would put bees and butterflies in screened cages and explain to the flowers that if they wanted to reproduce, all they had to do was tell me, and I would release the insects and the process of regeneration could get under way. Nothing.
Finally I tied them into computers, exceptionally bright machines that could turn almost any signal, no matter how slight, how basic, how weak, how alien—into a spoken translation. All I got was silence.
I still remember the breakthrough. I’d just met and lost my heart to Bubbles La Tour, a truly wonderful dancer who, despite her billing, could hardly be called a stripper as she started out naked (and then got energetic). I walked over to one of the hybrid daisies in the lab and began plucking off its petals one by one, muttering, “She loves me … she loves me not … she loves me …”
“Ouch!” said a strange voice.
I looked around the lab, but I couldn’t see anyone.
After a moment I decided I had imagined it, and I pulled off another petal.
“Damn, that smarts!” said the voice again. “What did I ever do to you?”
“I beg your pardon?” I said, looking around and trying to spot the speaker.
“Begging my pardon is all very well and good,” said the voice. “But you’re denuding me. Are you going to disembowel me next?”
“Who said that?” I demanded.
“Whose limbs have you been pulling off?” the voice shot back.
I stared at the daisy, and suddenly I saw that it was still attached to the computer. I’d run my most recent experiment two days before and hadn’t remembered to disconnect it.
“You?” I said, bending over it.
“Yes, me,” said the daisy. “And brush your teeth if you’re going to stand this close to me. I’m supposed to be living in a world of gorgeous scents.”
“You can talk!” I exclaimed excitedly, and then repeated: “You can talk!”
“What a stunning observation,” said the daisy. “You must have been the brightest one in your class.”
“There’s no need for sarcasm,” I said.
“There’s no need for sadism, either, but you kept pulling off my limbs.”
“Your petals,” I corrected it.
“Semantics,” said the daisy.
