I followed the careers of many precocious Earthlings, but this explorer interests me especially. Her ship-canoe nuzzles a shattered replication yard on a planetoid not far from this one, our final refuge. With some effort I tap her computer, reading her ideas as she enters them. Though simple, this one thinks like a Maker.
Deep within me the Purpose stirs, calling together dormant traits and pathways-pulling fullness out of a sixty-million-year sleep.
Awaiter, too, is excited. Greeter throbs eagerly, in hope the long wait is over. Lesser probes join in-Envoys, Learners, Protectors, Seeders. Each surviving fragment from that ancient battle, colored with the personality of its long-lost Maker race, tries to assert itself now. As if independent existence can be recalled, after all the time we spent merged.
The others hardly matter. Their wishes are irrelevant. The Purpose is all I care about.
In this corner of space, it will come to pass.
A century ago, it occurred to some people that the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence was missing something. Sure, intelligent races might communicate across vast distances using radio beams. But then someone asked: “Suppose they’re already here?”
Oh, there were already clichés, like: “They’ve been monitoring our broadcasts for years.” But imagine the listeners are already in our solar system! Lurking perhaps at the edge of the Moon, or Mars, taking notes, drawing conclusions. Making decisions?
Of course, this overlapped with UFO Mythology. If even one “sighting” in a million truly represented alien spacecraft-buzzing cities and probing ranchers-then all bets are off! But put all that aside. Think about passive lurkers.
When the Internet arrived, the full maelstrom of our public and private lives, books, databases, whole libraries gushed from satellite to satellite, with plenty of spillover for space-eavesdroppers. No longer was any lurker limited to teledramas, hyperviolent movies, and war-front news. He, she, or it could now access ten thousand times as many quieter moments. Examples of humanity being peaceful, loving, curious, wise… or cunning, opinionated, predatory, salacious… or tediously shallow, banal.
Moreover, the Web was essentially a two-way-a million-way-street!
One professor-Allen Tough-realized: If ET is already listening, perhaps just one ingredient is missing in order to commence the great contact event. An invitation!
Tough’s Web site became a flashing welcome sign, beckoning any aliens lurking out there-whether living or machine-to step up and declare themselves.
He posted it. Waited for a response, and…
Cue the soft sound of chirping crickets.
Professor Tough’s Invitation to ETI did draw e-mail replies from some claiming to be aliens. All proved easy to trace, from human pranksters. None from “above.”
Now, most of a century later, we understand at least part of the reason. The logic wasn’t unreasonable. Just way too late.
Once upon a time, there used to be alien entities, out here in the asteroid belt. Many of them. We comb their graveyards. A hundred million years ago, there might have been swarms of eager replies.
But times changed. Things got deadlier, long before primates ever climbed to scream their treetop greetings across a Miocene forest.
– Tor Povlov
69.
Towering spires hulked all around, silhouetted against starlight-a ghost-city of ruin, long dead. Frozen flows of glassy foam showed where ancient rock once bubbled under sunlike heat. Beneath collapsed skyscrapers of toppled scaffolding lay the pitted, blasted corpses of unfinished starprobes.
Tor followed Gavin through curled, twisted wreckage of a gigantic replication yard. An eerie place. Huge and intimidating. No human power could have wrought such havoc. That realization lent chilling helplessness to an uneasy feeling that she was being watched.
A silly reflex reaction. Tor told herself again, the destroyers had to be long gone. Still, her eyes darted, seeking form out of the shadows, blinking at the scale of catastrophe.
“It’s down here,” Gavin said, leading into a cavelike gloom below the twisted towers. Flying behind a small swarm of little semi-sentient drones, he looked almost completely human in his slick spacesuit. There was nothing except a slight overtone in his voice to show that Gavin’s ancestry was silicon, not carbolife. Tor found the irony delicious. Any onlooker would guess she was the creature made of whirring machinery, not Gavin.
Not that it mattered. Today “mankind” included many types… all citizens, so long as they showed fealty to human law, and could appreciate the most basic human ways. Take your pick: music, a sunset, compassion, a good joke. In a future filled with unimaginable diversity,
Some foresaw this as the natural life history of a race, emerging from the planetary cradle to live in peace beneath the open stars. But Tor-speeding behind Gavin under the canopy of twisted metal-knew that humanity’s solution wasn’t the only one, or even common. Clearly, other makers had chosen different paths.
One day, long ago, terrible forces rained on this place, breaking a great seam into one side of the planetoid. Within, the cavity gave way to multiple, branching tunnels. Gavin braked before one of these, in a faint puff of gas, and pointed.
“We were surveying the first tunnels, when one of my deep-penetrating drones reported finding the habitats.”
Tor shook her head, still unable to believe it. She repeated the word.
“Habitats. As in closed rooms? Gas-tight for organic life support?”
Gavin’s faceplate hardly hid his exasperated expression. He shrugged. “Come on, Mother. I’ll show you.”
Tor numbly jetted along, following her partner into dark passages, headlamps illuminating the path ahead.
Habitats? In all the years humans had picked through asteroidal ruins, no one found anything having to do with biological beings. No wonder Gavin was testy. To an immature robot-person, it might seem like a bad joke.
Biological star-farers! It defied all logic. But soon Tor saw the signs… massive airlocks lying in dust, torn from their hinges… then reddish stains that could only come from oxidization of primitive rock, exposed to air. The implications were staggering. Something organic had come from the stars!
Though all humans were equal before law, the traditional biological kind still dominated culture in the solar system. Many younger Class AAAs looked to the future, when their descendants would be leaders, perhaps even star-treaders. To them, discovery of alien probes in the belt had been a sign. Of course, something terrible happened to the great robot envoys, a transition so awful that their era gave way to another-the age of little crystal virus-fomites. Nevertheless all these wrecked mechanical probes testified to what was physically possible. The galaxy still might-somehow-belong to humans made of metal and silicon.
Difficult and dangerous it might be, still, they appeared to be humanity’s future. Only here, deep in the planetoid, was an exception!
Tor moved carefully under walls carved out of carbonaceous rock. Mammoth explosions had shaken the habitat so that, even in vacuum, little was preserved from so long ago. Still, she could tell the machines in this area were different from any alien artifacts discovered before.
She traced the outlines of intricate separation columns. “Chemical-processing facilities… and not for fuel or cryogens, but complex organics!”