Asimov's Science Fiction: September 2013 (21 page)

"NO!" I shouted.

I put my face in my hands, ran them through my thinning hair, and thought about that one in a thousand that disappeared after visitation. How many were suicides? What an indirect way of killing people!

"Let's change the subject," Zena said. "I've upset you." "Good," I said. "Something easy, please."

"Okay," Zena said. "Let's talk about God."

So we talked about God. I'm an agnostic, or an atheist, when I'm talking with a religious person I don't like, which would be most of them. With Zena, for some reason, I didn't want to poke fun at believers. Religion was important to a lot of people, and I'm people. I felt defensive about my species.

Finally, exhausted, I said we lived on a tiny dust speck on the edge of eternity, and if there was a god, some kind of universal intelligence, that we couldn't be a huge priority for him.

For
it,
I corrected, because God probably didn't have a long white beard. Or a penis.

"The penis seems unlikely," Zena said. I didn't notice that she'd almost offered an opinion, at first. Then I did, and stopped talking.

Zena smiled silently at me. Her eyes were kind without being patronizing.

I couldn't stand it anymore.

"You made us? Seeded the planet?" This was a pretty common assumption now. Life on Earth, Mars, and Europa, all based on DNA.

Zena raised her eyebrows. She turned to look at my wallscreen and cocked her head a fraction of a degree. Task windows, camera feeds, my friend prof iles, started blanking out, filled with buffering icons. A big "Network Outage" clock appeared center screen.

There were no recorded visitations; no audio; no video. The only thing we knew was what the visited had to tell us, and the visited never said anything important.

Except for the cultists. Every cult's story was different. Well, they generally involved credit card payments.

"That's an interesting idea, isn't it? Directed panspermia."

"You're not going to answer, are you?" I said.

"Not yet."

My heart skipped a beat. Yet? "Is this... a test?"

Zena nodded. "Test isn't a bad word for it."

"Has anyone else passed?"

"I can't talk about anyone else."

"How much longer is the test?"

"I won't know until it's over," she said.

"Do you leave when I fail?" Zena smiled. "Yes."

I blinked. I grabbed her by the shoulders, the first time I'd laid hands on her. Her shoulders felt normal. Nice even.

"Yes? Just yes? Not, 'what do I think will happen'?"

"Yes, and yes. Just yes."

I wanted to kiss her. I was worried if I did I'd fail, though, so I just stood there grinning like a fool.

"I'm hungry," she said, disentangling herself gently. "Let's get something to eat."

I picked an outf it up off the couch, and got dressed in my bedroom with the door half open. I'd left Zena downstairs, flipping through a public photo album of mine on the wall (a local cache, the network outage persisted).

"What kind of music do you play," she called up. "In your band."

"It's hard to describe," I said. What had I called it in the end? Klesmer Folk Fusion? I didn't want to talk about it. I grabbed my ear protectors, bulky plastic earmuffs, the kind you use at shooting ranges, and met her at the door. She took in the ear protectors without comment.

"You eat falafel?" I asked.

"I'm omnivorous," she said. "Well. This body is."

"Very good falafel, up the street, in the Square, about a half mile."

She nodded. So we walked. I wore my ear protectors past the construction site a block from the condominium. An old, static, off ice building was being pulled down, to be replaced with something smarter. I waved to a neighbor tending his roof garden. He'd have strawberries to trade for my tomatoes in a week or so.

Zena said something I couldn't quite hear. Walking in the city without the protectors was always a crapshoot. A cop car might turn on its siren without warning and I'd have a headache for two days. Still, I was chatting with an alien. I pulled off the protectors and hoped for the best.

"Lunch is my treat," Zena repeated.

She paid for our sandwiches with her phone. There was no place to sit, the falafel joint was tiny, a converted White Castle hamburger place that had been made a landmark around the turn of the century. So we found a bench under a tree in the park across the street.

We sat across from a large fenced-in play area teeming with kids of a dozen skin shades and national origins. My fair city, the Hub, was home to tens of thousands of skilled temporary workers, in biotech, nanotech, and infotech, as well as the usual nannies and home health aides happy to live in the beltway dormitories.

"What would you say to getting off-planet?" Zena asked.

"Is it something you're likely to ask, do you think?"

"Seriously," Zena said. "I'm saying it. You. Off the planet. In a colony."

I stared at my falafel.

As a kid, I'd grown up playing video games, watching movies, TV shows, filled with space travel. The discovery of extraterrestrial life by unmanned probes, even though it was just bacterial mats and worms, had made space travel relevant, less of a kitchsy, retro, twentieth century nostalgia thing. The super rich now routinely orbited the moon for fun. Zuckerberg's generation ship was being constructed at L5.

"I don't have the skills, or the prof ile, for Zuckerberg's Ark. I'm turning thirty. We wouldn't reach a habitable exoplanet in my lifetime anyway, even if I made the cut. Assuming they ever finish the thing. Assuming it doesn't blow up.

"I'm not talking about a ship."

"No ship?"

"We don't use them," she said.

"What about all the sightings," I said. "The saucers and spheres and cigars—"

"Surface craft. We don't use them any more, anyway. They upset you. We use doors."

"Doors? Teleportation? Wormholes?"

"Kind of."

I took a bite. The hummus def initely improved the sandwich, and was worth the extra buck.

Zena took a bite. "This is excellent. Best I've had, outside New Jerusalem."

I thought about it while we ate.

"Why would you help us colonize other planets?" I asked.

"That's a good question," she said around a mouthful of sandwich. A bit of tahini dressing had dribbled from the corner of her mouth. I brushed the same place on my chin. "You got a—"

"Oh!" she laughed. She wiped it off with a napkin. "Thanks." "You gonna answer?" I asked.

She shook her head. "No. Well. If you guess, I might nod."

I considered that. "Is that part of the test?"

"Yeah," she said. "You could say that."

We finished our sandwiches, and walked to where a scaffold had been erected against one wall of the basketball court. A group of kids were working on a mural mosaic, embedding fragments of colorful recycled material in some quick-setting adhesive. A WPA artist with a large data pad was directing the project. A stylized globe was taking form, recognizably the earth.

My planet. Which Zena was telling me I might leave behind.

"Fermi's Paradox," I said. "Given the age of the universe, our own rate of development, the Drake equation, what we know... where is everybody?"

Zena nodded. "Your light cone should be packed with the evidence of intelligent species disassembling stars into Dyson spheres. Ringworlds. Immortal technological civilizations, self-replicating robot factories in the asteroid belts. Solar sails, ion drives, every habitable zone planet a radio star."

"Yeah," I said. "But we don't. There's nothing."

"I could ask, how do you know what you see and hear is real?" My stomach lurched. "It's
fake?"
An old woman watching a pair of kids on a teeter-totter gave shot me a dirty look. I'd shouted. I waved back at her, regaining my composure. "Our light cone is
fake?"

Zena laughed. "Sorry. We don't do that. There's nothing much to see, is all."

"So there's no quarantine," I said. "No prime directive. There isn't a big sprawling galactic empire out there, waiting to embrace us, the new guys?

"No."

"Too bad," I said.

"Yeah. That's the Universe we dreamed of, too. When we were your age."

We sat comfortably for a while, saying nothing.

"Want another hint?" Zena asked.

"Do I fail if you give me a hint?" I asked.

She shook her head.

"Then yes."

"Intelligence evolves frequently. It isn't rare. But it's fragile and self-destructive."

The self-destructive part needed no explanation. But fragile?

She continued as if reading my mind. "Cultural vitality, viability, is fragile, self-esteem, purpose, meaning, the big questions. The why of things. You don't know it, because nothing has come in from the outside, to prick the bubble."

We were walking in front of a storefront Buddhist center. Through the soundproof glass, you could see a class in progress, a grid of fifteen or so people seated in lotus posture on woven mats.

Zena smiled at the statue of the Buddha, a faux bronze thing seated blissfully by the Zen center's door.

"Was he one of you?" I asked.

She shook her head. "We don't mess with religion. Anymore." She made a bad smell face as she caressed the Buddha's bald head. "Not with your species."

"You're Watchers?"

She paused. If she was a person, I might think she'd subvocalized a search on Watcher, and was reading an online answer spat out by a search engine as a data overlay in a contact lens. Maybe that was what she was doing. I was avoiding wearable computing as long as possible, personally. But I had friends who had joined the Borg.

"The bald guys who introduced the Silver Surfer comics?"

"Yeah."

"Would watchers disclose their presence?"

"No."

"We're not watchers," Zena said. "We're doers. But we're careful."

"The Watchers made terrible mistakes. Their gifts were turned into weapons. Species, whole planets were destroyed."

Zena nodded. "That would be terrible, wouldn't it? To know you were responsible for such things. That your people were."

My great-great-grandfather on my father's side had been in the Luftwaffe. "You would get over it, I guess."

"Probably," Zena agreed.

"But afterward..."

"Careful," she whispered, looking down at the statue, her finger tracing the Buddha's smile. "Very, very careful."

"So, if life is plentiful, but intelligence is self-destructive and fragile. Panspermia... empty real estate? And you said you wanted company. That big Universe full of friends. You asked me if I wanted off the planet... "

We'd stopped at the entrance to a community garden by the river. A half dozen people were working in their plots, weeding, or putting in seedlings. Mostly vegetables, tomatoes, small high-yield GMO melons and breadfruit, fresh herbs, but there were flowers too; sunf lowers and roses.

"You're gardeners," I said.

She nodded. Once.

I thought about the silence, the great silence, of the Universe. Of the Martian bacterial mats, and the European vent worms.

"But it's going slowly."

She sighed. "Even for us. So slowly."

"Do I pass?" I said.

"You passed two hours ago, when you said God didn't have a penis. I was enjoying myself, though. I like your city." She stopped, and looked me in the eye. "I like you, too."

I laughed. "Why?"

She shrugged. "No idea. Isn't it like that with people, too?"

I thought about Amy.

"Yeah, it is, sometimes."

We stopped at another park, and watched the kids playing in the sprinklers, some made up kid game that involved lots of running, and screaming, and laughing, and filling up plastic buckets and throwing the water on kids who didn't yet know they were playing. Off to one side, a little red-haired girl who hadn't wanted to get wet was sobbing inconsolably. A lanky boy with dreadlocks a head taller than her stood sheepishly beside her, eyes downcast, as he was upbraided by a woman too young to be his mother. Probably a nanny.

"How many people pass?" I asked, thinking of that one in a thousand.

"About a third of you are fit to leave the planet. A third of you are deeply confused about your place in the Universe. And there's a third that shouldn't be allowed to use sharp objects."

This jibed with my own observations, over the years.

"The problem is, if we leave you alone, most of the time, the crazy third convinces the confused third to do stupid things and you die out. Sometimes you take the whole biosphere with you."

I thought of the massive /files/02/46/26/f024626/public/private investment in sustainable energy and carbon sequestration that had come on the heels of Disclosure. The polar solar arrays that had begun to put a stop to the runaway greenhouse effect.

I didn't need to ask Zena if they'd had a hand in that.

"Which third am I in, again?"

"You barely pass," she said. "I'm kinda bending the rules, to be honest."

This made sense to me, too.

"I'm not a pioneer. I don't enjoy camping. My practical skills are in middle management. I enjoy gardening, but if I had to do it all the time, I'd hate it." I was thinking out loud, about Zena's offer.

"We haven't relocated anyone yet," Zena said.

I figured as much. There had been maybe twenty million visitations, according to the Terran authority website. So there were millions of candidates, by Zena's rule of thirds. You can't hush up that many disappearances.

"The colonization, using the doors, when we start, we become real; really real... we're only mostly real now. It might kill your culture. Most of the models say it will. Of course the models are wrong sometimes. That's what makes them models."

"Kill the culture?"

She blinked at me. "You know about the cargo cults?"

I nodded. During World War II, the Pacif ic islanders believed that the airplanes and radios and technology of the Americans were gifts from Cargo Gods. They didn't think human beings could have made such perfect magical things. The belief was persistent. You could take a cargo cultist to a factory where cars were assembled, and the cultist believed the parts had been delivered as cargo.