But for all that, as I say, I hope we can learn from them. They are a more rational and kinder species. I have two theories to explain this. One is immediate and, as it were, specific. The other is more general, and one I must approach less directly, by way of some recent events.
The specific theory is this, and it’s very simple: they never bore the yoke. Because they had the trudges, they never enslaved each other. Because they had vast herds of wild prey and forests of fruit trees, they never toiled in fields. They fought, yes, they had their lords and kingdoms, but the discontented always had the possibility of flight. To cripple a human like a trudge was unthinkable, for all but the worst crimes. Compared with us, they had in every sense an easier ascent.
I turn now to the recent events, and my provisional final theory, which is at the same time my solution to the problem that bothered me from the first discovery of the aliens: a problem now increased, at the latest discovery of an alien radio source, thirteen times over. A Galaxy we had thought was empty is lighting up with intelligence, and all at once. What is strangest in that baffling simultaneity is the singularity of our precedence; and this I think I have at last understood.
The ship, with the old cones now joined to a new and almost full cylinder, began not many days ago the long burn of its acceleration out this system, and on to the next. In times past, Constantine once told me, it used to be hundreds of years after a ship arrived in a new system that it departed for another. Today the interval is down to a decade: turnaround time, no more or less. Every new departure selects, yet again, for the footloose.
People change. Some you wouldn’t expect have left with the ship. I’d never have figured Grant for someone who wanted to be a founder, and to spend the next three hundred and seventy-two years turning that full tank into a spacious habitat. But there you go — he sold up his waterworld orbital resort business and bought his stake. Personally I put it down to the novel — after researching it he wanted to live the story, not write it.
Horrocks was a more painful loss in a way. As you might guess from my teenage rattlings, he and I did eventually hit it off, at a crew party shortly after the contact. So that distasteful little genetic bet that (I soon learned) had been made by Synchronic and Constantine paid off. Probably enough to buy them both a drink, anyway. Grant, Genome, Horrocks, and I formed a complex mutual orbit for years.
And then Horrocks went off to the founder-controlled asteroids and shacked up with Synchronic. I still shake my head over that. It’s not unheard of, but it seems almost indecent.
But it’s Constantine, strangely enough, that I’ll miss the most. He was never more than a genefather when I was a child, except for that one wondrous incident when he took me to see the engine. But in the years since the contact I’ve seen more of him, and he’s always been understanding and kind, if a little distant.
I called him up just as the ship was leaving. He wasn’t as busy as I’d feared. We talked a little about what are, to me, old times, and new ideas.
“And what do you think now?” he asked me.
“I have a theory,” I said.
“You always do,” he said. “Grant was right about you, back in the day. Your thinking is metaphysical.”
I laughed. “You read that?”
“Oh yes.”
“Well,” I said, “here’s my latest metaphysical theory. You remember when you took me to see the engine?”
He nodded after a moment. The light-speed lag was only just becoming noticeable.
“You said then that you had named it. You never told me why, but that I would know someday. I once thought I knew, but now I’m not so sure. Anyway, this is my theory. The engine generates new universes all the time. These universes are similar but not identical to the one we live in, yes?”
“To the best of our knowledge, yes,” he said. “Information is conserved.”
“Well then,” I said, “what that means is that in some of these universes, there will be starships with cosmogonic engines of their own.”
His expression was inscrutable. “That would seem to follow, yes.”
“So,” I went on, “just as the birth of universes from black holes selects over cosmic time for universes with laws of physics such that black holes can be formed, hence universes with stars and galaxies, so the birth of universes from starship engines selects for more universes in which starships can exist. And what more likely universes to have many starships in, than ones in which intelligence emerges all over the place at almost the same time?”
This time the pause was longer than the light-speed lag could account for.
“There may be something in what you say,” he said. “What inference do you draw from it?”
I swallowed. “That we’re not the first,” I said. “Not the original universe, by a long, long way. We’re a long way down the line from the first universe in which somebody looked at a high-energy physics experiment and saw that it could fly to the stars.”
“That’s a good inference,” said Constantine. “It’s one I once made myself, and—”
The screen went fuzzy. I adjusted the gain. The image came back.
“I’m losing you,” he said. “It’s time we said goodbye, just in case, and then we can carry on until we’re too far apart.”
“Goodbye, Constantine,” I said. “I just wanted to ask. You said information is conserved. How much information?”
“More than you might think,” said the Oldest Man.
The picture and sound became hopelessly indistinct. He may have said more after that, but I didn’t catch it and could never retrieve it. The transmitters the bat people build back there on Destiny II are good, but not good enough to reach us now as we accelerate away.
But as I go about my work with the rest of the crew I’m haunted by two thoughts. One is of a man in the Moon Caves, looking at a high-energy physics experiment and looking up and saying, “But the sky, my lady! The sky!”
For when I imagine that man, I see Constantine.
The other is more troubling. If cosmic evolution works on the scale that I outlined to Constantine, and that he seemed to find plausible, and if as he said information is conserved — then perhaps those like us who come first are changed the least, and are thus doomed always to find themselves in a universe in which they are in every sense primitive, and to encounter species wiser and kinder than they.
Long before the starships and the Moon Caves, these words were written: