"But it won't come to that; after a few more decades banging their heads against the problem of the primordial cloud, I think they'll guess what's going on. An idea whose time has come can sweep across the planet in a matter of months, however exotic it might be; these creatures are not traditionalists. And once the theory that their world was made arises in the proper scientific context, it's not going to drive them mad. All Alisa was saying was that the sort of primitive superstitions which early humans believed in wouldn't have made sense to the early Lambertians."
Maria said, "So . . . we'll wait until 'creators' are no longer a non-subject before we barge in and announce that that's exactly what we are?"
Durham replied, "Absolutely. We have permission to make contact once the Lambertians have independently postulated our existence -- and no sooner." He laughed, and added, with evident satisfaction, "Which we achieved by asking for much more."
Maria still felt uneasy -- but she didn't want to hold up proceedings while she grappled with the subtleties of Lambertian culture.
She said, "All right. Cosmology is the trigger, but they're looking for a deeper explanation for their chemistry. Are they having any luck?"
Repetto brought back the map of Planet Lambert; the markers showing the locations of the teams of theorists were replaced by small bar charts in the same positions. "These are the dance times sustained for various subatomic models which have been explored over the past five years. A few theories are showing some promise, improving slightly with each refinement; other groups are getting fairly random results. Nobody's come up with anything they'd be capable of communicating over any distance; these dances are too short-lived to be remembered by teams of messengers."
Maria felt her skin crawl, again. False messages die, en route. There was something chilling about all this efficiency, this ruthless pursuit of the truth. Or maybe it was just a matter of injured pride: treating some of humanity's most hard-won intellectual achievements as virtually self-evident wasn't the most endearing trait an alien species could possess.
She said, "So . . . no team is on the verge of discovering the truth?"
Repetto shook his head. "Not yet. But the Autoverse rules are the simplest explanation for the thirty-two atoms, by almost any criterion."
"Simplest to us. There's nothing in the Lambertians' environment to make them think in terms of cellular automata."
Zemansky said, "There was nothing in their environment to make them think in terms of atoms."
"Well, no, but the ancient Greeks thought of atoms -- but they didn't come up with quantum mechanics." Maria couldn't imagine a preindustrial human inventing the cellular automaton -- even as a mathematical abstraction -- let alone going on to hypothesize that the universe itself might be one. Clockwork cosmologies had come after physical clocks; computer cosmologies had come after physical computers.
Human history, though, clearly wasn't much of a guide to Lambertian science. They already had their Newtonian -- "clockwork" -- planetary model. They didn't need artifacts to point the way.
She said, "This 'aesthetic' which governs the acceptability of theories -- have you been able to map the neural structures involved? Can you reproduce the criteria?"
Repetto said, "Yes. And I think I know what you're going to ask next."
"You've devised your own versions of possible Lambertian cellular automaton theories? And you've tested them against the Lambertian aesthetic?"
He inclined his head modestly. "Yes. We don't model whole brains, of course -- that would be grossly unethical -- but we can run simulations of trial dances with nonconscious Lambertian neural models."
Modeling Lambertians modeling the Autoverse . . .
"So how did it go?"
Repetto was hesitant. "The results so far are inconclusive. None of the theories I've constructed have worked -- but it's a difficult business. It's hard to know whether or not I'm really stating the hypothesis in the way the Lambertians would -- or whether I've really captured all the subtleties of the relevant behavior in a nonconscious model."
"But it doesn't look promising?"
"It's inconclusive."
Maria thought it over. "The Autoverse rules, alone, won't explain the abundances of the elements -- which is the main problem the Lambertians are trying to solve. So what happens if they miss the whole idea of a cellular automaton, and come up with a completely different theory: something utterly misguided . . . which fits all the data nonetheless? I know, they've grasped everything else about their world far more smoothly than humans ever did, but that doesn't make them perfect. And if they have no tradition of giving up on difficult questions by invoking the hand of a creator, they might cobble together something which explains both the primordial cloud and the chemical properties of the elements -- without coming anywhere near the truth. That's not impossible, is it?"
There was an awkward silence. Maria wondered if she'd committed some terrible faux pas by suggesting that the criteria for contact might never be met . . . but she could hardly be telling these people anything they hadn't already considered.
Then Durham said simply, "No, it's not impossible. So we'll just have to wait and see where the Lambertians' own logic take them."
27
(Rut City)
Peer felt the change begin, and switched off the lathe. He looked around the workshop helplessly, his eyes alighting on object after object which he couldn't imagine living without: the belt sander, the rack full of cutting tools for the lathe, cans of oil, tins of varnish. The pile of freshly cut timber itself. Abandoning these things -- or worse, abandoning his love of them -- seemed like the definition of extinction.
Then he began to perceive the situation differently. He felt himself step back from his life as a carpenter into the larger scheme of things -- or non-scheme: the random stuttering from pretext to pretext which granted his existence its various meanings. His sense of loss became impossible to sustain; his enthusiasm for everything to which he'd been devoted for the past seventy-six years evaporated like a dream. He was not repelled, or bewildered, by the phase he was leaving behind -- but he had no desire to extend or repeat it.
His tools, his clothes, the workshop itself, all melted away, leaving behind a featureless gray plain, stretching to infinity beneath a dazzling blue sky, sunless but radiant. He waited calmly to discover his new vocation -- remembering the last transition, and thinking: These brief moments between are a life in themselves. He imagined picking up the same train of thought and advancing it, slightly, the next time.
Then the empty ground grew a vast room around him, stretching in all directions for hundreds of meters, full of row after row of yellow wooden specimen drawers. A high ceiling with dusty skylights came together above him, completing the scene. He blinked in the gloom. He was wearing heavy black trousers and a waistcoat over a stiff white shirt. His exoself, having chosen an obsession which would have been meaningless in a world of advanced computers, had dressed him for the part of a Victorian naturalist.
The drawers, he knew, were full of beetles. Hundreds of thousands of beetles. He was free, now, to do nothing with his time but study them, sketch them, annotate them, classify them: specimen by specimen, species by species, decade after decade. The prospect was so blissful that he almost keeled over with joy.