She might have been confessing to some disease, some terrible wasting illness.
She seemed to feel the thought. Lately she had seemed able to interpret the smallest nuance of his expression, although he was laboring to conceal his grief.
“Daddy, I’m not sorry. About any of it. You’re a doctor—you know how many lives were saved. Even at the local hospital, how many terminal cancers were cured? How much heart disease? And in the world, my God, all the starvation, the malnutrition, the crippled lives—”
But Matt could not dispel the memory of the skin that had fetched up, a pathetic and unassailable statement of grim fact, on Tom Kindle’s leafless azalea bush. “Rachel, is this better?”
“Yes.” Firmly. “We couldn’t have gone on, you know, the way we were. The planet wouldn’t support us. We were damaging it beyond recognition, beyond its ability to recover. Something had to change, something human had to change. Do you know who said yes to Contact? Who accepted the offer of eternal life? Almost everybody. Everybody—including dictators, pickpockets, child molesters, murderers… people who killed people for their wristwatches, killed them for their tennis shoes. People who tortured children to death in front of their parents. But it was immortality with a price. They had to understand what it means to hurt someone, to damage someone. And if that didn’t work, if they could witness human pain and understand it intimately and still not care, or worse, enjoy it—that meant they were flawed, broken, not complete. So they had to be repaired.”
“They can’t choose to commit violence?”
“Anyone can choose anything. But only if they understand what they’re choosing and why.”
“Rachel… it sounds like compulsion.”
“Daddy, you’ve told me since I was a baby that there’s no good reason for all the wars, all the bullying, all the hurt in the world.”
It was what one told a child. And, pressed, he would have admitted to believing it himself. But the fact was—as Scott Fitzgerald had written, if Matt remembered his American Literature correctly—the fundamental decencies were parceled out unequally at birth. “There’s no excuse for it. But people don’t seem to know that.”
“Now they do.”
“You can’t change human nature, Rachel—not without taking away the thing that makes people human.”
“Then we’re not human. In a way, that was always the point. Humanity was reaching its limits, facing problems we couldn’t even begin to solve in the usual human way—global problems, planetary problems. And the main victim of our inadequacy was us! Our children*. They were already dying by the millions in Africa, and we were too human to do anything about it!”
Matt bowed his head. This was true, of course. The Contactees had done a better job. At least in the short term. “But what were they saved for, if their humanity wasn’t saved?”
“But it wasn’t lost, either, just outgrown. Do you know what we’re building? Has anyone told you? A spaceship. An Artifact of our own. A human one. Daddy, do you know what’s inside it? The Earth is inside it. Not literally, of course. But a model of it. All of it, every leaf of every tree, every mountaintop.…”
A memory of this was mingled with his own fading memory of Contact. “You mean a simulation. Like a computer program.” Or a paperweight, he thought: the Earth, in a globe of water, with snowflakes.
“More than a simulation. It’s a place, as real as this place, except that it doesn’t occupy a physical space. It’s alive in a very real way. It has winds. It has seasons. We’re human enough to need that—not just immortality, but a place to live.”
“Even if it’s an illusion?”
“Is it? Is an idea an illusion? Is the value of pi a hallucination, just because you can’t touch it?”
“Rachel, it’s not really the Earth.”
“No one pretends it is. No matter where we stand, we’ll know that. Because there will always be a door, not a physical door, but a sort of direction, a way to turn, and through the door is always the bigger world, all our knowledge and the knowledge we inherited from the Travellers—the epistemos, people are calling it; the idea-world.”
“We might have done it by ourselves,” Matt said. “Given time. If we’d survived a couple of centuries without vaporizing ourselves, without poisoning the planet, we might have moved into space. Maybe it seems trivial, but we walked on the moon without anyone’s help. Given time, maybe we could have met the Travellers on their own terms.”
Rachel’s eyes widened. “What a terrible thought!”
“Is it?”
She frowned. “Daddy… I know more human history than I used to. It’s an ugly parade. Infanticide, bloody warfare, human sacrifice—those are the norm. They’re not exceptional at all. And modern history is no better. When I was in school, we studied Roman history and we pretended to be horrified by it. The Romans left unwanted children to die by the side of the road, did you know that? How horrible. Well, it is horrible… but compared to what? The century of Auschwitz, of Hiroshima and the Khmer Rouge? Going into space wouldn’t have civilized us. We’d have had our robots disemboweling Moslems on the surface of Mars. You know we would.”
“Is that how the Travellers saw it?”
“Yes. And it terrified them. There’s no monopoly on power or knowledge. Given time, given our own survival, maybe we could have stopped them… destroyed them before they got close enough for Contact.”
“And that’s why all this is happening? Not because they’re doing us a favor. It’s self-defense.”
“In part. But they didn’t have to go to all this trouble. They had the means to exterminate us. That would have worked, too.”
The coldness of the statement made him feel both frightened and ashamed.
He took a long look at Racheclass="underline" who used to be his daughter, who used to be a human being.
“There wasn’t just brutality, Rachel. People lived lives—small, useful lives. Sometimes helped one another. Often loved one another. There was beauty. Sometimes there was even decency.”
Her expression softened. “Daddy, I know. They know. The Travellers know that about us.” She paused. “That’s why they couldn’t exterminate us.”
“Only change us.”
“Yes. Change us.”
A silence filled the room.
Rachel left the house before midnight, after her father had fallen asleep on the sofa.
She had wanted a better goodbye, but she supposed there was no way to say what she meant—no words to encompass her grief and fear.
She loved her father enormously and hated the idea of abandoning him to an empty planet… abandoning him to die.
A cold rain had begun to fall and the wind in the street was sharp and gusty. Rachel adjusted herself so that the temperature ceased to be unpleasant. Then she paused—alone among dark houses—and listened to the trees talk their sibilant winter language.
The wind lifted her hair and waved it behind her like a sad flag. Overhead, high above the streetlights, midnight clouds tumbled and dipped.
It was a stormy night, and there was worse to come. Although it was winter in the northern hemisphere, temperature gradients in the tropical oceans had risen dramatically; winds in the upper atmosphere had shifted. North and east of Hawaii, a low-pressure cell, a vast and powerful weather-engine, had begun to churn above the turbulent ocean. A typhoon—unheard of, this time of year. But all things were new.