Weisman announced a fifteen-minute recess. Once it was over and everyone was reseated, Piotr Sudeyko said, “I have a few more questions for you, Ursula.”
The avatar’s eyestalks swiveled to follow him as he paced in the open area in front of the judge’s bench. “I’ll do my best to answer them.”
“I spent a lot of time looking through some of the photographs that were included in the Reticulum. Naturally, many of them were unrecognizable to me. I was very grateful for the automatic captioning; otherwise, in most cases, I’d have had no clue what I was looking at. But there were some photos that were startlingly familiar. Both your people and mine seem to have a fondness for sunsets.”
“Sunsets are beautiful.”
“Indeed they are. And both your sun and ours are very similar, what we call class-G yellow dwarfs. In fact, I’d have a hard time telling in a lot of cases whether a picture was of one of your sunsets or one of ours.”
Ursula’s eyestalks rippled in agreement. “I imagine it could be difficult.”
“But, of course, after the sun finally sets, things are different. Your system is forty-six light-years away from ours.”
“Forty-six of your light-years,” said Ursula amiably. “One hundred and two of ours.”
“Right, right. But, no matter which way you reckon it, it’s enough to shift the arrangement of stars. I’m not an astronomer, like Dr. Plaxton over there, but, if I understand correctly, the brightest star in our nighttime sky is the one we call Sirius, whereas in your sky, it’s the one we know as Canopus.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“Of course, here, the moon outshines any star at night, especially when it’s full.”
“True.”
“And I suppose the same thing happens on your world.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
Sudeyko stopped his pacing as if startled. “Why not?”
“My world has no moon.”
“Really?” said Sudeyko, raising his eyebrows dramatically. “But then how do you know what a moon is?”
“There are two gas-giant planets in our system; each has several moons that we can observe through telescopes.”
“Ah, I see,” said Sudeyko. “And these gas giants—do they show visible disks to your unaided eyes, or are they just pinpoints of light like the stars?”
“The latter—though of course they move from night to night against the stellar background.”
“And, just to be clear, your world is a rocky planet, like ours?”
“More or less. It’s a little larger, and about two billion of your years older.”
Sudeyko waved those irrelevancies away. “Fine. But, again, to be clear, it’s not, in itself, a moon; that is, the object it orbits around is your sun, not a larger world.”
“That’s right.”
“I imagine on a clear night that you can see what we call the Milky Way, the band of stars visible when you look in toward the galactic center.”
“Yes. We call it the ‘Sky River.’”
“And perhaps, if you’re at the right place on your planet, you can even see our two satellite galaxies—the ones we call the Clouds of Magellan—or the tiny smudge of the nearest separate galaxy, Andromeda.”
“If one’s eyesight is normal, yes.”
“But there are no solid objects—nothing that shows as a disk; nothing that shows visible surface features—in your night sky, correct?”
“That’s right.”
Sudeyko seemed to consider for a time, but of course he was simply letting the impact of this register on the jurors. “Huh,” he said at last. “And, before the recess, Dr. Emily Chiu told us there are no seas or oceans on your world. So, perhaps you could tell me a bit about your previous experience with first contact.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that.”
Someone had stolen Emily’s seat during the recess; she was now four rows from the front. She shifted uncomfortably: Ursula was giving the correct answer, but Emily was afraid the journalists would misinterpret it as a failure on the software’s part.
“Oh,” said Sudeyko, as if a great mystery had been solved. “Right. Your planet is all one big land mass. So, there are no populations that were geographically isolated for millennia, correct?”
“If I follow your meaning, yes, that is correct.”
“So you never underwent anything like, say, what happened here when Europeans came to the Americas, or to Australia. You never had the devastation, the disease, and the decimation of populations that we experienced time and again when formerly isolated cultures came into contact, especially when one was clearly technologically more advanced than the other?”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“Well,” said Sudeyko, “the past’s the past. Let’s turn to the present. Tell me about your space program.”
“Pardon me?”
“You know: your astronauts, your spaceships.”
“I don’t know the words ‘astronauts’ or ‘spaceships.’”
“So you don’t have a space program?”
“Apparently not.”
“Why not? Judging by the material in the Reticulum, your civilization is substantially more advanced than ours, and we’ve been putting people in space for almost seventy years now.”
“It never occurred to us that such a thing was possible.”
“You didn’t dream from ancient times about going to other worlds?”
Ursula twirled her inside arm in baffled negation. “No. Why would we?”
“Well, that’s an interesting question,” said Sudeyko. “I suppose it’s possible that if we didn’t have a large moon ourselves—if we didn’t have another world hanging over our heads since the dawn of time, tantalizingly just out of reach—perhaps we wouldn’t have been inspired to venture into space, either.”
“That’s an interesting supposition,” agreed Ursula.
“You said earlier that an overwhelming majority of your whole population voted to send the Reticulum to planets in other star systems.”
“Yes.”
“Which means presumably most of you considered it a safe thing to do.”
“Of course.”
“Because, after all, if it never occurred to your people to travel even within your own solar system, it presumably never occurred to you that beings in other star systems might physically bridge the gulf between their world and yours.”
“What a novel suggestion! Yes, you’re right: That never occurred to us.”
Sudeyko moved over and began pacing back and forth in front of the jury box. It was hard to get anyone to take their eyes off Ursula in all her surrealist glory, but the historian wanted to be sure that everyone was looking at him, so his point would land with maximum force. “And so,” he said, “when your people voted, they were not considering the possibility that beings from another world, or their automated probes, might come and enslave, plunder, or destroy your world, isn’t that so?”
“Yes,” said Ursula. “That is so.”
“And, because of your planet’s specific circumstances, you blithely went ahead shouting your existence to neighboring stars, without the slightest thought you might be endangering your existence.”
“Yes.”
“But we, who have a history of disastrous first contacts even among our own people, and who have a space program and recognize that others might, too, do understand that attracting attention to ourselves on the galactic stage might in fact bring on unwanted, indeed dangerous, visitors.”
“Objection!” said Hannah, rising to her feet. “Your honor, opposing counsel is arguing his case!”
“Yes,” Judge Weisman said. “He certainly is—and very effectively, too, I might add. Court is recessed until nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”