Fiasco (37 page)

"I repeat my question: why didn't you present this retrospect earlier? You had the opportunity."

"Various versions of what I have said were circulating on board. Privately or not privately, they circulated. None could be proved. The limits of the imagination lie far beyond the limits of theorizing. Separate fragments of the puzzle, as data, came in slowly. While there were still few of them, it was possible to construct innumerable medley-explanations, filling in the gaps and blanks with unsupported invention. I am a combinatorial machine. Had I inundated all of you with all the variants in the analysis that I had done, you would have had to sit through weeks of lectures. With every sentence full of uncertainties. In addition, I received instructions that ran counter to your orders. Dr. Rotmont wanted SGs of Quinta. I explained to him that using the full power of the ship's units for that could not be concealed and would therefore reduce the chances of contact. He insisted, so I sent out light spinoscopes capable of camouflage. You know this, Captain. Rotmont hoped to see what was impossible to see with this method. He gained nothing, but it was not I that disappointed him. I had complied with his request, because doing so could do no harm. Hypotheses not taken as the springboard for real action may be false but not fatal."

The blue indicator light went out. The pilots and Nakamura, though they sat at the same table as Steergard and Arago, seemed only spectators, who could not participate in the scene being played out. It was as if they did not count in this meeting.

"This was to explain," said Steergard. "You saw fit to say once, Reverend Father, that the matter was in good hands. I said nothing in reply—not out of modesty, being praised, but because I knew how different were our notions of good and evil. I had already made the decision to take this new step. None of us can influence what will happen, myself included. Now, I have no wish to offend anyone present. But the time of unflinching action is the time for complete candor. Our second pilot—what he said was stupid. We did not come here to throw gauntlets or engage in duels to defend the honor of Earth. If that was the case, I would not have accepted command of the reconnaissance. A man can keep only so much in his head at a time. A tremendous undertaking is therefore divided into parts by his mind. For this reason the means can easily obscure the ends and themselves become the ends.

"When I assumed command, I requested first some time to think: to step back and take in the gigantic whole. The thousand labors of CETI and SETI, the millions of hours of work by the shipbuilders, the flights to Titan, the conferences in the capitals of the world, the funds gathered in banks, and the teams that played out endless variants of the game of contact to find the one unfailing, or at least the optimal, variant that would win—all this was an expression of hope, a hope that went deeper than the cheap sensationalism of the newspapers. I realized that, whether on the
Eurydice
or the
Hermes,
I was only an ant in the human anthill, an anthill lost in the boundless reaches of the Universe, and that therefore I would be accepting a task beyond my powers—beyond the powers, probably, of any man. It would have been easier to decline. When I accepted, I had no idea what awaited us. I knew only that I would perform my duty, doing whatever had to be done. If I called meetings, it was not to find a better course of action but to lighten the burden that lay on me. To shift the responsibility, at least in part, onto other shoulders. Then I saw that I did not have the right to do this. So I have made the decision myself. No one can now influence what will happen, but everyone still has the right to his opinion, and to be heard. Particularly you, Reverend Father."

"You intend to break the ring?"

"Yes. The machinery is already being assembled in the hall astern."

"Breaking the ring will throw it from the planet?"

"No. Trillions of tons will fall to the planet. The pieces will be too large to melt. They will strike even the places that are most heavily protected. In addition, the outer layers of the atmosphere will be blown away. This will lessen the pressure at sea level some hundred bars. It will be a warning."

"It will be murder."

"Definitely."

"To force contact at any price?"

"No. Contact has become a secondary matter. This will be an attempt to save them. Left to themselves, they will hit upon the Holenbach interval. Are you familiar, Reverend Father, with the arcana of sidereal physics?"

"As a layman only. Captain—you're basing this genocide on a hypothesis? A hypothesis not even your own, but from a machine?"

"Hypotheses are all we have. And the machine helped me. Truly. But I know the hypersensitivity of the Church toward the
animus in machina
."

"
I
do not share that feeling. Let me repay your explanation, Captain, with one of my own. Often a man does not recognize what people on the sidelines plainly see. DEUS spoke of how the means of war used by the opponents on Quinta became uniform. This applies to you as well."

"I don't understand."

"You have dispensed with our method of proceeding, in the conviction that parliamentarianism should be replaced by autocratic rule. I do not question the nobility of your intentions. You wish to take upon yourself full responsibility. But in so doing you have succumbed to the Quintans—by the mirror effect. That is, in the brutality of the decision made. You wish to answer their blows with blows. Since they have doubly barricaded their command centers, you wish to strike those centers with doubled force. In so doing—I use your own words—you are subordinating the organizational structure of the crew of the
Hermes,
the relations between its people, to the structure of the strategy to be carried out."

"DEUS's words."

"So much the worse. I am not suggesting that the machine dominates you in the decision. I am suggesting that the machine also has become a mirror. A mirror that enlarges, from you, an aggression born of frustration."

For the first time, Steergard showed surprise. But he said nothing, and the monk went on:

"Military operations require authoritarian command centers. And that is all that has happened on the planet. We, however, should not join in that type of activity."

"I have no thought of declaring war on Quinta. You insinuate."

"Unfortunately, I speak the truth. War can be waged without declaration, and without the name of war. It's not blows we came here to exchange, but information."

"I'm all in favor of that, but how?"

"It's plain. Happily, the principle of military secrecy is not maintained on board. I know that in the labs they're building a solar laser that will hit the planet."

"Not the planet itself: the ring."

"And the atmosphere, which constitutes a vital part of the planet. A solar laser—solaser, as the physicists say—can be used not just for genocidal strikes but to send information."

"We sent information over hundreds of hours, with no result."

"It is curious, indeed, that I should be able to see a possibility that the experts, along with their superintelligent machine, have completely overlooked. The signals beamed from our satellite, the Ambassador, required special devices for reception: antennas, decoders… I'm no radio engineer, but if Quinta is engulfed in war, then all equipment capable of receiving radio signals would have been requisitioned for military use. The receivers, therefore, are the command centers, not the population of Quinta.

"If the population has been at all apprised of our arrival, it is in the deceitful manner that you presented: to make us look, in the eyes of the Quintans, like a fleet of imperialist invaders. A merciless enemy. And you, Captain, are about to turn that lie into the truth, with your solaser."

Steergard listened in amazement. More, he seemed to be losing his categorical certainty.

"I didn't think of that…"

"Because it is so simple. You and DEUS rose to such heights of sophistication with your game theory, minimax, quantified decisional space, that no notice was taken of the little pocket mirrors children play with, catching the sunlight. The solaser could be a pocket mirror for all of Quinta. It can produce flashes, surely, brighter than the sun. Whoever lifts his head will see them."

"Father Arago," said Steergard, leaning toward him across the table. "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. You have demolished me. Deflated me more than our pilot did to DEUS… How did you hit on the idea?"

"I played with a pocket mirror when I was a boy," smiled the Dominican. "But DEUS was never a boy."

"For transmitting information, that's excellent," Nakamura put in. "But will they be able to reply? If they comprehend?"

"Before the conception was the annunciation," answered Arago. "Perhaps they won't be able to reply in a way that we understand. At least let them understand
us
."

Tempe, looking at the monk with unconcealed admiration, could no longer keep silent.

"Now, there's a real eureka … and of course they have pocket mirrors. Even in wartime, pocket mirrors aren't confiscated."

The monk did not seem to hear. Something was bothering him. Quietly, haltingly, he asked:

"I have a request. I would like to exchange a few words with the captain in private, if he doesn't mind—and you gentlemen won't take umbrage?"

"Fine. We're in your debt, Father. Jokichi, it'll be necessary to make modifications so the solaser can scan Quinta—and besides the optical problems there are informational ones. Such a signaling assumes an audience on an elementary level of education."

When the physicist and the pilots left, Arago rose.

"Please forgive what I said at the beginning. I walked in thinking that I would find you alone, Captain. I don't put much stock in the pocket-mirror idea. I could have—I had actually intended to present it on the lowest level: as a proposal from a layman, for the professionals to consider. Such a signaling might be worthless, or might knock us out of the frying pan into the fire. It's anthropocentric through and through. Before, though, you were indignant, offended, then felt relief."

"Let us say. What are you driving at, Father?"

"Not spiritual comfort. To work out the technical aspects of this experiment, you and the others will be including DEUS in it."

"Of course. It will do the calculations. What of that? It will make a program. It will do what lies within the bounds of possibility. You're not suggesting, are you, Father, that it's an
advocatus diaboli
?"

"No. Nor do I set myself up as a
doctor angelicus.
I don't need to assure you, I hope, that I am a Christian?"

Steergard again was surprised by the turn the conversation had taken.

"What are you driving at?" he repeated.

"Theology. So that you can better understand me, I'll put it in words that are not only worldly but, in my mouth, practically blasphemous. I justify myself, in my conscience, by our unprecedented situation. The language of physics is closer to you than the hermeneutics of religion. Translating into the conceptual system of physics, then: the varied forms of the Sacred correspond to the various spectral lines of matter, matter that is omnipresent and the same throughout the Universe. With this comparison, one can say that besides a spectrum of bodies there exists a spectrum of faiths. It extends from animism, totemism, polytheism, all the way to faiths in a personal god. The terrestrial line of my faith presents God as a family at once human and divine. Are you familiar with the debates set off in theology by SETI, from the moment the search for Others engendered that expedition?"

"To be honest, no. You think, Father, that I ought to be?"

"Not at all. But that was my duty. Positions moved apart in my church. Some maintained that the corruption of Created Beings might be universal and that such universality went beyond the terrestrial notion of the word
katholikos;
that worlds were possible in which the sacrifice of Redemption had not been made, and which therefore were damned. Others said that salvation—as a choice between Good and Evil, given by Grace—had appeared everywhere. This disagreement threatened the Church. The organizers and members of the expedition were too occupied with their work to be affected by the sensations that increased the circulation of the newspapers. Sex and violence had grown a little stale, you see, so the
Eurydice
—without intending to—provided novelties for the reader.

"Such as the jokes based on the premise that the
Credo quid Absurdum est
had acquired a multiplier that discredited it quite effectively. The image, for example, of innumerable planets with a multitude of apples where there were no apple trees, or figs that the Son of God could not curse because no fig trees grew there. You had an army of Pilates washing their hands in billions of vessels; a forest of crucifixions; crowds of Judases; and immaculate conceptions of beings whose reproductive physiology provided no room for the idea, since they multiplied without copulating. In short, the multiplication of the Gospel by all the arms of all the spiral galaxies turned our Credo into a caricature, a parody of a religion. Thanks to these arithmetical jokes, the Church lost many of her faithful.

"Why not me as well? Because Christianity demands more of a man than can be demanded. It demands not only the renouncing of cruelty, baseness, and lies. It demands that one love the base, the liars, the murderers, and the tyrants.
Ama et fac quod vis
—nothing will destroy that commandment. Please do not be surprised to hear such a catechism on board such a ship. My duty is to look beyond the reconnaissance, beyond its chances of contact with alien minds. Your duties are different. I will try to demonstrate. Suppose you stand on a packed lifeboat, and those drowning, for whom there is no room, grab at the sides, putting the boat in danger of capsizing and sinking. You would cut away the hands, true?"

"I am afraid I would. If there was no other way."

"Therein lies the difference between us. It means that you will not retreat."