“So you have a chance.”
Orro shook his head. “Geologically speaking, and regretfully, no.” He threw more brush on the fire. The flask passed back and forth. Orro talked about his military training, and about his friend Holder, who had enjoyed it so much that he’d moved from the civil service to the Regnal Air Force. They had remained friends, and it was only Orro’s choice of exile that had severed the connection.
“Surely you could write to him,” said Darvin.
“I did,” said Orro. He stared into the fire and spread his hands. “Some have seen my departure as a betrayal. I don’t say he has, but he didn’t reply.”
They banked the fire and lay down beside it, wrapped in their wings. At some point in the night, when the moons had risen and crossed the sky and were sinking in the west, Darvin woke to find Orro’s wing over him. He wondered what to do, and decided to appreciate the added warmth and go back to sleep. In the morning it seemed like a dream. The two men awoke a wingspan apart, shook the dew off their fur and wings, and flew to the cable station.
“Isn’t this impressive!” Orro said.
Darvin gazed at the tangle of wires and torch-bulbs that hung from the ceiling of Orro’s laboratory like some demented festive decoration. Now that he noticed, some of the bulbs were decorative, coloured red and green. There were about eight eights of bulbs — no, more, because all of them were paired: one white or red, one green.
“Aha!” he said, as he got the point. “Now I’m impressed.”
“I thought you would be,” said Orro. “It took me five days to work out the positions of the stars, and four to wire all this up.” He pulled up a chair. “Sit here.”
He pulled down blinds at each of the windows, leaving the room as dark as the desert night. He sat down at a bank of switches, and threw one. The bulbs flashed on in a three-dimensional display of stars. Seven were green, a close cluster. Another switch, and twenty more turned green. Then there were forty-nine, and then fifty-eight. In each case the new green stars were farther from the original seven, and themselves adjacent within a ragged arc. Orro repeated the process several times, to display again and again the green spreading like a Shockwave. Through it all one small bulb, hanging at the near end of the display in front of Darvin’s nose, remained at red.
“The Nearest Star,” said Darvin. He stood up, shifted about, narrowed his eyes until he could see the green bulbs as the Daughters appeared in the night sky. “Now run it through again,” he said.
The green wave rushed at him. He almost flinched.
“Something is coming,” he breathed. He’d deduced it himself, in the patterns of light and light-years he’d constructed from the ephemiris and the catalogues, but until now he had not quite believed it.
Orro snapped the blinds back up. Light filled the room, leaving the bulbs tawdry.
“How long,” Darvin asked, “before the Nearest Star turns green? Will we see it, or our descendants?”
“I don’t think we can wait that long,” said Orro. He slid some stapled sheets of paper across the table. Darvin spun it around and looked at the title, above his name and Orro’s: A Distant, Decelerating Celestial Object; with Some Observations on the Daughters. “We must publish this,” said Orro. “Now.”
7 — Television
14 365:01:13 06:10
Have you seen the pictures have you seen the pictures have you seen the pictures???
14 365:01:13 08:12
Lights on the nightside. Nobody expected this. Nobody has any doubt what it means. Not even Grey Universal. Those sims he rattled up in minutes for volcanoes, brush fires, and — wait for it — the phosphorescence of rotting wood, are just to show he can. He just likes being contrary, and likes the attention. His Coriolis storm sims had everyone fascinated, for a while, and arguing. But he doesn’t believe his latest: I’ve asked him; he admitted it. He doesn’t even buy the other contrary hold-out minority view, that the lights are from some kind of Red Sun robot or download colonies that claim-jumped us. Nobody but nobody would be mad enough to plant colonies on a unique planet, a terrestrial with multicellular life — least of all robots. That’s what he told me. He’s as excited as everybody else.
Excited is not the word. My hands are shaking as I write this.
There are aliens down there on Destiny II.
I sat and looked at that sentence for ten minutes. I still don’t wholly believe it. I still have that particle of doubt. I still feel that I risk being very foolish. Though being as foolish as everybody else is at least not embarrassing. (No, it would be, actually, now that I come to think of it.) All right. If ever I am going to put together a team, and take the lead in setting up a habitat, I’m going to have to build a reputation for being level-headed and thoughtful, as well as of course being the wonderful personality you all know I am.
So I have given this matter some thought already, as soon as we knew about the plants and the biosphere. That was the first hole in the hull, if you’ll forgive my crudity. If there really is intelligent life down there it makes things complicated in all sorts of ways, which I’ll come to in a minute. But the fundamental shock is finding multicellular life in the first place.
Think about it. Fourteen thousand years — longer, I suppose, because even in prehistory people must have looked at the sky and seen, you know, nothing like the green haze of the Civil Worlds — of expansion into a volume hundreds of light-years across, and we’ve never found anything more advanced than bacteria or algae or slime moulds or something like lichen. Nothing but rock crust and pond scum.
OK. Now, that makes sense, makes sense in a very deep way. It’s called the principle of mediocrity. I looked it up. What it means is that multicellular life, leave alone intelligent life, is either very rare, or very nearly ubiquitous. If it were the latter, our whole sky would have been green and the galaxy would have been called the Grassy Path. And because it’s not, we know it’s almost vanishingly rare. What we have found, all the way out from the Moon, has just confirmed this, over and over and over again. The planets have spoken with one voice, and what they’ve said thousands of times over is pond scum pond scum pond scum. The silence of the sky chimes in with nobody’s home nobody’s home nobody’s home. The silence is telling us: there’s nobody else out here to talk to.
Now there is, almost certainly. But think about it. Apply the principle that there’s nothing special about us. What are the odds against the only two intelligent species in the galaxy arising independently within five hundred light-years of each other, and arriving at civilisation (city lights and electromagnetic communications) within less than twenty thousand years of each other? On the scale of the galaxy, we’re neighbours. On the scale of evolutionary time, of billions of years, we’re in the same generation, the same cohort. More: we share the same birthday, to the hour, to the minute…
This is so unlikely that something else, something quite shattering, is more probable: we aren’t the only two.
It’s not just that we’re not alone. We, the humans and the aliens, are not alone. We two are not alone.
And that means, I’m afraid, that we can’t just do the colonisation thing, at least not without thinking about it very carefully. So let’s think about it very carefully.
14 365:01:13 13:45
Look, folks, lay off the hate mail, OK? I was just saying.