“This is a skalkit. This is the terrible death you send your sons and daughters to every week. I thought you should know.”
No one said a word. Some of the Sapphians looked away, at the woods, and the sky, anything.
“And we’re taking Eyanna’s children.”
They were there, in the crowd, clinging to two Sapphian females. Eyanna approached them with a mixture of eagerness and anxiety. Denton knew the girls might be frightened and not want to go. But Eyanna spoke to them softly, kneeling, and within a few minutes she had gotten them to transfer their clinging arms to her. She stood, holding the two of them, one against each shoulder.
Denton looked around at the Sapphians one last time. He saw anger in a few eyes, anger at him. He smiled. “Let’s go, Eyanna. This is a terrible place.”
He took the youngest child from her and together they walked away from Sapphia.
20.3. Seventy-Thirty Jill Talcott
The alien got into an air car that was parked outside the antenna field and Jill got in as well, her butt poised half in and half out of the narrow seat. As with the elevator, there was hardly any sense of lift. The car glided through the buildings like a whisper of air. Jill watched the streets carefully and only realized after a moment that she was looking for Nate. She didn’t see him, but there was no reason that she should. He was probably not in this section of the City at all.
“What do I call you?” she asked, trying to establish some kind of personal contact.
“My designation does not translate. If you find it necessary to address me, you may use ‘Cargha.’ ”
“Cargha. My name is Jill Talcott.”
“Yes. I do not find any sense to your name in your language.”
“It’s just a name. What do you call this planet?”
“Difa-Gor-Das.”
He glided the car smoothly to a landing. It was difficult for Jill to judge how far they had come, though she had been paying attention. The City was so mindlessly the same and the air car’s speed so much faster than she was accustomed to.
She followed Cargha into a tall building and onto the elevator, which they rode up a dozen floors. They exited into a large room filled with computers and enormous box-shaped machines.
“Are these storage units?” Jill guessed, crossing to one of them.
“Yes. It is the insulation that makes them large. These units are protected against high degrees of radiation. That one stores ten billion data files.”
He sat down at a computer, his fingers flowing over the screen. The screen’s data changed so rapidly Jill couldn’t catch a word of it. He looked as if he were conducting music. His expression was glazed.
Jill pulled a seat closer and sat down. Although it still made her uneasy to be physically close to such a strange being, she was determined to watch him operate the computer. “What are you doing?”
“We estimate that it will be only an additional three-point-four centuries before the planet is completely depopulated. The legacy must be ready by then, so I have no time to waste, even though statistically I will be among the last survivors. That was why I was chosen for this office.”
“I see.”
Jill found it disturbing how calmly Cargha accepted his species’ demise. In fact, now that he was back at work—his fingers flew while he conversed—Cargha seemed willing, even eager, to talk about it.
“Statistically, it is probable that proper recipients will arrive to retrieve the legacy within one million years. However, the legacy will be fully protected for twice that long, two-point-two million years. The chance that proper recipients will find it in that time is ninety-three percent. We are comfortable with that percentile. To get to one hundred percent we would have to protect the legacy for twenty-point-six million years, a time frame outside our capability.”
“Even so—two million years! What exactly is in the legacy? Do you have any great masterpieces? Or maybe books by great scientists?”
Cargha contemplated this while his fingers never hesitated. His head tilted to one side as if searching through her mental concepts to find something he could relate to. “I do not understand.”
“We have great works of art, for example, paintings of famous historical battles or portraits…”
This was getting no response.
“Okay, what about books? For example, we had a scientist named Charles Darwin who wrote a famous book on the evolution of species. Surely you have similar works. Maybe on wave technology?” she added hopefully.
“The data on evolution of the species is in the legacy files along with all of our other knowledge. But we do not define such things by the individual that discovered them. All citizens provide valuable work in the advancement of our species.”
Somehow, that didn’t sound very appealing to Jill.
“We do record information about our individuals,” Cargha continued. “The legacy includes data on all individuals who have lived in the past one hundred fifty thousand years, which is as long as our records have been one hundred percent accurate. We have partial records before that time, and they have been stored in the legacy even though they are imperfect. For example, the legacy contains the birth designation of each individual, a map of their genetic DNA, their areas of expertise, and links into their specific work in the legacy.”
“What kind of work?”
Cargha brought up a file for a male who had been born 603 years ago and had “ceased” 300 years ago. He had been a specialist on the microstructure of minerals. His work on the subject went on for pages and pages—equations and chemical charts—but Jill could see no hint of individuality, of personality.
“This male’s work consists of one thousand pages in the mineral database, of which there are six million pages,” Cargha said.
Again Jill balked, her mind unable to comprehend those kinds of numbers. Six million pages? On minerals? How, in God’s name, could it take 6 million pages to describe anything, much less minerals? She squinted at the page in front of her, one page of accomplishments by that 300-year-old male. It was data. Just data.
With a thrill of horror, Jill got a very clear sense of what the legacy contained. Certainly there would be some interesting technology in all of this. How could there not be? But what she had a deeper sense of was the reams and reams and reams and reams of carefully collated and horribly pointless information that no one, and certainly not another species, not the “recipients,” was ever going to bother wading through.
Perhaps it was the earlier shock with the machine, perhaps she had already lost her faith in science at some fundamental level, but she suddenly had a paradigm shift. In a moment this intriguing, envy-inducing high-tech culture had become a pure waste that was terrifying in its scale. She felt physically ill.
“Our database is almost complete,” Cargha said. “In one hundred years it will be final, except for the last two-point-four hundred years of our existence. But only an estimated twenty members of the species will be living then. At that juncture I will begin making copies of the data. I will make two thousand thirty-three copies of the data in twenty different storage mechanisms, including holistic, digital, optical…”
His fingers moved obscenely over the computer screen, his eyes fixed open and staring.
Jill had a flash, seeing herself working, completely focused—just as blindly. What had Nate said to her? That there was no point in collecting the data about this planet if they couldn’t get home? If there wasn’t a use to put it to? And here was this creature, busily working away in his warren on things no one would ever care about while his civilization died all around him. Fiddling while Rome burned. Was that really her?
Dear God.
“Cargha,” she said carefully, “I need you to show me the old records on that machine at the antenna field. Right away.”