WITHIN A FEW hours, the world’s attention had become focused on the object the media had begun calling the Terranova Rock. It was at the top of the news everywhere. Wolfie switched around and sampled several shows. The correspondents and their guests were alarmed. That was standard, of course. In an age of complete global media penetration, competition was fierce, and if you fell from a roof in Shanghai, people in Little Rock got the details. Shocking news from Shanghai, the anchors would proclaim. Life and death in the shadow of the Great Wall. Yes, it was not journalism’s finest hour. But, MacAllister often argued, it never had been. It was, however, the reason people appreciated Paris Watch and The Atlantic and The National. They were calm, analytical, serious.
Odd objects in the sky had been around for ages. Some enthusiasts claimed they’d been seen in biblical times, pointing to the first chapter of Ezechiel. There’d been other manifestations, but sightings became widespread during the Second World War when pilots in several air forces claimed to see objects they called foo fighters. In the mid twentieth century they became flying saucers, or UFOs. A hundred years later they were ghost lights. Now they were moonriders. The assumption always was that only delusional people encountered them, so it was easy enough to dismiss the reports. Anyone who claimed to have seen one could expect not to be taken seriously again during his or her lifetime.
When humans went to the stars, they continued to report strange objects. There were still occasional Earthbound sightings, for which no compelling evidence was ever brought forth. But when superluminals picked them up, it became a different story because there was usually a record. So the assumption became that the images reproduced by the AIs were gremlins in the software, manifestations of misaligned equations, or careless programming rather than actual objects. Or they might be reflections, or possibly even quantum fluctuations. But the Terranova Rock was changing all that. It was an intriguing story. The rock was there, and it was headed eventually for a living world.
…The rush to accept the notion that we have visitors, and that they constitute a threat to humanity, is not as premature as some would have us think. We should consider what our status will be if a technologically superior species arrives and begins making demands. Or worse yet, if they are overtly hostile. In the Terranova Incident, the evidence indicates a level of malice one would hope would have been bred out of beings with a high level of technological capability. If that is actually so, then what will our position be if they decide to amuse themselves at our expense as well? What defense have we? At the moment, no navy exists. An engagement would be a trifle one-sided. Let us hope either the World Council moves quickly to alleviate the risk, or that these neighbors, if they’re really there, don’t come this way.
— Jerusalem Post, Saturday, April 11
Accused Assailant Unrepentant in Interview
chapter 25
A surprising number of terrestrial worlds are in warm locations, with plenty of water, but no life. They are perceived as places where something went wrong. They are “sterile.” Maybe so. I tend to think of them as “clean.” If we’re at all honest with ourselves, we’ll recognize that life in fact is an infection. Cephei III has a pleasant climate and trillions of microscopic living things. Cephei IV also has a pleasant climate, and there’s nothing crawling around. Where would you rather spend your vacation?
— Gregory MacAllister, “On the Move”
When the robot flights went out from Earth during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, they were looking for signs of life. Researchers, and indeed the general public, hoped something would be found on Mars. The imagined creatures of H. G. Wells and Ray Bradbury were, of course, long off the table, but there was hope of finding fossilized bacteria. Or some other evidence that living things had once existed on the Red Planet.
But Mars was every bit as sterile as it had looked on July 20, 1976, when the Viking I lander set down in Chryse Planitia. It was dry, dusty, and a bitter disappointment to millions of people around the world who had hoped, and probably expected, to see at the very least a few shrubs.
The next best hope was Europa.
It had long been thought that life might be found in its ocean, which was sheltered beneath ice packs as much as twenty kilometers thick. There was liquid water, kept relatively warm by tidal effects.
An automated mission was dispatched during the third decade of the twenty-first century. It drilled through the ice but found no life or any indication it had ever existed.
There was talk for a while of life-seeding materials on comets, but that never provided a payoff either. So, as the century wore on, it became evident the solar system, save for Earth, was barren. Spectrographic analyses of planetary atmospheres in nearby star systems provided no evidence of an oxygen—carbon dioxide cycle. At that time, no one seriously believed humans would ever leave the solar system. So when, shortly after its eightieth anniversary, SETI shut down and was declared a failure, it looked as if the book had closed on the question of life elsewhere.
Then, on New Year’s Day 2079, a probe took pictures of a carved figure on the jagged surface of Saturn’s moon, Iapetus. At first, researchers thought it was, like the Martian face and the zigzag wall on Miranda, an illusion. But a manned mission brought the electrifying confirmation that someone had visited the Saturnian system. The figure was chilling, a nightmare creation of claws, surreal eyes, and muscular fluidity. Simultaneously humanoid and reptilian, it was a thing out of a horror show, and yet there was a kind of quiet placidity in its expression. Its age was established at about ten thousand years.
A set of prints in the dust suggested that the image was a self-portrait.
Its origin remained a mystery for the better part of a century. Until Ginny Hazeltine showed that FTL travel, despite the common wisdom, was possible. And went on to demonstrate how it could be done. Within two years, the first light-ships, as they were then called, headed out to Alpha Centauri and Lalande 8760 and Epsilon Eridani and Procyon. These voyages were magnificent achievements, but again the celebratory mood was dampened when word came back that no life had been found.
Most disappointing, at Lalande and Procyon, they saw terrestrial-style worlds, with broad water oceans and warm sunlight. And not so much as a blade of grass. For a time, the belief that humans had been the beneficiaries of a special creation made a comeback. The Iapetus figure became, in the minds of many, a hoax. Others thought it had been left by diabolical forces. And the idea that humans were alone in the universe gained credence.
The fifth expedition went to Alpha Cephei, where they found two terrestrial planets within the biozone. When seen from orbit, both looked sterile. And indeed, Cephei IV was without life. But its sister world was the gold card.
It was teeming with living creatures. They were single-celled, but they were there! Today, a half century later, scientists are still debating how it happens you can have two worlds in a biozone, with similar conditions on both. And life starts on one but not on the other.
When the Salvator arrived in that historic system, MacAllister was thinking about that first expedition and wondering precisely what drove the human effort to find life elsewhere. He had long ago dismissed this yearning for other life as infantile. His position was completely rationaclass="underline" We are better off if whatever neighbors there are stay at a distance. God had done things the right way, he’d once written, when He put such vast distances between technological civilizations. In both time and space.