The floor was divided into open-plan offices, but nobody else seemed to be about. Durham saw her peering around the partitions and said cryptically, "There are other workers, but they come and go."
Zemansky led the way into a small conference room. She said to Maria, "We can move to a VR representation of Planet Lambert, if you like -- but I should warn you that it can be disorienting: being visually immersed but intangible, walking through vegetation, and so on. And moving at the kinds of speeds necessary to keep track of the Lambertians can induce motion sickness. Of course, there are neural changes which counteract both those problems --"
Maria wasn't ready to start tampering with her brain -- or to step onto the surface of an alien planet. She said, "Viewing screens sound easier. I'd be happier with that. Do you mind?" Zemansky looked relieved.
Repetto stood at the end of the table and addressed the three of them, although Maria knew this was all for her benefit.
"So much has been happening on Lambert, lately, that we've slowed it right down compared to Standard Time so we can keep up with developments." An elliptical map of the planet's surface appeared on the wall behind him. "Most recently, dozens of independent teams of chemists have begun looking for a simpler, more unified model underlying the current atomic theory." Markers appeared, scattered across the map. "It's been three hundred years since the standard model -- thirty-two atoms with a regular pattern of masses, valencies and mutual affinities -- became widely accepted. The Lambertian equivalent of Mendeleev's Periodic Table." He flashed a smile at Maria, as if she might have been a contemporary of Mendeleev -- or perhaps because he was proud of his arcane knowledge of the history of a science which was no longer true. "At the time, atoms were accepted as fundamental entities: structureless, indivisible, requiring no further explanation. Over the last twenty years, that view has finally begun to break down."
Maria was already confused. From the hurried reading she'd done in the past few days, she knew that the Lambertians only modified an established theory when a new phenomenon was discovered which the theory failed to explain. Repetto must have noticed her expression, because he paused expectantly.
She said, "Autoverse atoms are indivisible. There are no components you can separate out, no smaller stable entities. Smash them together at any energy you like, and all they'll do is bounce -- and the Lambertians are in no position to smash them together at any energy at all. So . . . surely there's nothing in their experience that the current theory can't account for perfectly."
"Nothing in their immediate environment, certainly. But the problem is cosmology. They've been refining the models of the history of their star system, and now they're looking for an explanation for the composition of the primordial cloud."
"They accepted the thirty-two atoms and their properties as given -- but they can't bring themselves to do the same with the arbitrary amounts of each one in the cloud?"
"That's right. It's difficult to translate the motivation exactly, but they have a very precise aesthetic which dictates what they'll accept as a theory -- and it's almost physically impossible for them to contradict it. If they try to dance a theory which fails to resonate with the neural system which assesses its simplicity, the dance falls apart." He thought for a second, then pointed to the screen behind him; a swarm of Lambertians appeared. "Here's an example -- going back awhile. This is a team of astronomers -- all fully aware of the motions of the planets in the sky, relative to the sun -- testing out a theory which attempts to explain those observations by assuming that Planet Lambert is fixed, and everything else orbits around it."
Maria watched the creatures intently. She would have been hard-pressed to identify the rhythms in their elaborate weaving motions -- but when the swarm began to drift apart, the collapse of order was obvious.
"Now here's the heliocentric version, from a few years later."
The dance, again, was too complex to analyze -- although it did seem to be more harmonious -- and after a while, almost hypnotic. The black specks shifting back and forth against the white sky left trails on her retinas. Below, the ubiquitous grassland seemed an odd setting for astronomical theorizing. The Lambertians apparently accepted their condition -- in which herding mites represented the greatest control they exerted over nature -- as if it constituted as much of a Utopia as the Elysian's total freedom. They still faced predators. Many still died young from disease. Food was always plentiful, though; they'd modeled their own population cycles, and learned to damp the oscillations, at a very early stage. And, nature lovers or not, there'd been no "ideological" struggles over "birth control"; once the population model had spread, the same remedies had been adopted by communities right across the planet. Lambertian cultural diversity was limited; far more behavior was genetically determined than was the case in humans -- the young being born self-sufficient, with far less neural plasticity than a human infant -- and there was relatively little variation in the relevant genes.
The heliocentric theory was acceptable; the dance remained coherent. Repetto replayed the scene, with a "translation" in a small window, showing the positions of the planets represented at each moment. Maria still couldn't decipher the correspondence -- the Lambertians certainly weren't flying around in simple mimicry of the hypothetical orbits -- but the synchronized rhythms of planets and insect-astronomers seemed to mesh somewhere in her visual cortex, firing some pattern detector which didn't know quite what to make of the strange resonance.
She said, "So Ptolemy was simply bad grammar -- obvious nonsense. Doubleplus ungood. And they reached Copernicus a few years later? That's impressive. How long did they take to get to Kepler . . . to Newton?"
Zemansky said smoothly, "That was Newton. The theory of gravity -- and the laws of motion -- were all part of the model they were dancing; the Lambertians could never have expressed the shapes of the orbits without including a reason for them."
Maria felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck.
"If that was Newton . . . what came before?"
"Nothing. That was the first successful astronomical model -- the culmination of about a decade of trial and error by teams all over the planet."
"But they must have had something. Primitive myths. Stacks of turtles. Sun gods in chariots."
Zemansky laughed. "No turtles or chariots, obviously -- but no: no naive cosmologies. Their earliest language grew out of the things they could easily observe and model -- ecological relationships, population dynamics. When cosmology was beyond their grasp, they didn't even try to tackle it; it was a non-subject."
"No creation myths?"
"No. To the Lambertians, believing any kind of "myth" -- any kind of vague, untestable pseudo-explanation -- would have been like . . . suffering hallucinations, seeing mirages, hearing voices. It would have rendered them completely dysfunctional."
Maria cleared her throat. "Then I wonder how they'll react to us."
Durham said, "Right now, creators are a non-subject. The Lambertians have no need of that hypothesis. They understand evolution: mutation, natural selection -- they've even postulated some kind of macromolecular gene. But the origin of life remains an open question, too difficult to tackle, and it would probably be centuries before they realized that their ultimate ancestor was seeded "by hand" . . . if in fact there's any evidence to show that -- any logical reason why A. hydrophila couldn't have arisen in some imaginary prebiotic history.