“That’s why I’m asking for this moratorium. Whether you recoil from the vision I’ve painted, or merely doubt its solidity, don’t make a decision in ignorance. Give us one more year, work beside us, help us find the answers — and then make your choice. Thank you.”
Rasmah took half a step back from the podium. Someone in the audience coughed. There was no polite applause, but no jeering either. Tchicaya didn’t know how to read the indifferent silence, but Rasmah had been fishing for converts rather than searching for a compromise, and if anyone had been swayed by her message that would probably not be a response they’d wish to broadcast.
Tarek said, “We’ll take questions when Tchicaya has spoken.”
Rasmah nodded and walked away from the podium. As she passed Tchicaya, she smiled encouragingly and touched his arm. He was beginning to wish he’d gone first, and not just because she was a hard act to follow. Before a gathering of Yielders, a speech like the one she’d just delivered would have fired him up, filling him with confidence. Watching it received with no visible effect by the people who counted was a sobering experience.
Tchicaya reached the podium and looked up at the crowd, without fixing his eyes on any one face. Mariama would be here, somewhere, but he counted himself lucky that he hadn’t spotted her, that her certain presence remained an abstraction.
“There is a chance,” he said, “that there is sentient life behind the border. We have no proof of this. We lack the depth of understanding we’d need even to begin to quantify the odds. But we do know that complex processes that would have been inconceivable in a vacuum — or in the kind of hot plasma present in our own universe, six hundred years after its birth — are taking place right now on the far side. Whether or not you count the vendeks as living creatures, they reveal that the basic structure of this region is nothing at all like empty space.
“None of us arrived here armed with that knowledge. For centuries, we’d all pictured the novo-vacuum as the fireball from some terrible explosion. I came here myself in the hope that we might gain something from the challenge of learning to survive inside that fireball, but I never dreamed that the far side could harbor life of its own.
“Life does not arise easily in a universe of vacuum. Apart from the Earth, there are just four quarantined planets strewn with single-celled organisms, out of almost a million that have been explored. For twenty thousand years, we’ve clung to a faint hope that the Earth would not be unique as the cradle of sentience, and I don’t believe that we should abandon that hope. But we’re now standing at the border, not between a desert with rare oases on one side, and a lake of molten lava on the other, but between that familiar desert and a very strange ocean.
“This ocean might be a desert, itself. It might be turbulent, it might be poisonous. All we know for certain is that it’s not like the universe we know. But now we’ve seen something fluttering beneath the surface. To me, it looks like a beacon, a declaration of intelligence. I concede that this interpretation might be completely wrong. But if we’d ever spotted something a tenth as promising on a planet, wouldn’t we be shouting with joy, and rushing to investigate?
“The homes and communities of billions of people are at stake here. One full year’s delay would mean the certain loss of one more world.” Tchicaya had agonized over the best way to phrase this; apart from starkly requesting an entire planet as a sacrifice, he had to tiptoe around the issue of exactly how close the Preservationists were to producing Planck worms. “But whole worlds have been evacuated before, to leave the rare life we’ve found with a chance to develop undisturbed. We can create far more sophisticated organisms in vitro, but we’ve still recognized in the simplest alien microbes both a chance to understand better the science of our origins, and a distant kinship with whatever these creatures might become. I’m willing to write off the vendeks as little more than Planck-scale chemistry, but even a slim possibility of sentient life on the far side, just beyond our grasp, has to count for at least as much as the possibility that the microbes we’ve left to their own devices will flourish into anything as rich as life on Earth.
“I’m not asking anyone in this room to abandon the values that brought them here. But no one came here with the goal, or even the thought, of wiping out another civilization. If you believe there can be no sentient life on the far side, take the opportunity to prove yourself right. If you harbor even the slightest doubt, take the opportunity to gather more information.
“We’re not asking you to wait for certainty. The far side is too large; however advanced our techniques became, there’d always be a chance that a part of it remained hidden. But after six centuries in which the border has been completely opaque, and a few weeks in which we’ve managed to see through it a very short distance, we’re asking for one more year of exploration. We might never find out what’s at stake here, but now that we have our first real chance to do more than guess, I don’t believe we have the right to shut our eyes and refuse to look any closer.
“Thank you.”
Tchicaya backed away from the podium. He hadn’t felt too bad while he was speaking, but the discouraging silence that followed turned his stomach to water. Maybe the Yielders had merely decided to present the enemy with their best poker face, but the effect was still one of indifference verging on hostility. He instructed his Exoself to calm his body; whatever sense of urgency he’d managed to convey by allowing his stress hormones free reign, the effect had either succeeded or failed by now.
Tarek said, “Questions and comments.”
Birago rose to his feet and addressed his former colleague. “The vendeks appear genuine to me, and I doubt that you could have engineered them into existence without us noticing. I’m much less confident about this so-called signaling layer. How do we know you didn’t create it?”
Rasmah replied, “I’m not sure what you expect me to say. I suppose you could move the Right Hand away across the border and look for an edge to the layer, then see if the whole thing lies centered around the Left Hand. But if you seriously believe that we were skilled enough to create the layer at all, maybe you believe we could have disguised its point of origin.” She spread her arms. “Look more closely, gather more evidence. That’s exactly what we’re asking for, and if you have doubts, that’s the only cure for them.”
Birago laughed curtly, unimpressed, but he resumed his seat.
Tchicaya had come prepared for accusations of fake data, but the idea that anything indisputably present behind the border could be taken as counterfeit had never crossed his mind. If the Preservationists did have spies, surely they’d know how ludicrous this was? But then, spies would probably only share that knowledge with people who would not be swayed by it.
Sophus stood. “I’ve studied this question, and I don’t believe the layer could have been built from the Left Hand without us noticing, any more than the vendeks could. This thing is genuine, and it needs to be investigated. I came here to preserve civilizations, not to destroy them. The chance that we’re seeing intelligence here is extremely slim, but this is a matter of the utmost seriousness.
“I support the idea of a moratorium. This need not be lost time for us; we don’t have to stop thinking, we don’t have to stop planning. A year in which we were forced to consider our next step very carefully — in combination with all the information about the deeper structure of the far side that might be gained as part of this investigation — could easily save more worlds than it costs. The border is expanding at half the speed of light; the success of any attempt to halt or reverse it will be extremely sensitive to the propagation speed of the agent we finally deploy. Rushing to adopt the very first solution we think we’ve found, when we could be refining it into something vastly more effective, would be a shallow victory. If we can clear our conscience of any lingering doubt that we might be committing an atrocity, while continuing to hone our weapons against this threat, we will be steering an honorable course between arrogance and timidity — between laying waste to whatever lies before us, and jumping at shadows.”