The holographic object was either some sort of pump, a fluid switching system, a symbolic interpretation of an electronic circuit, or none of the above. The image focused deeper and deeper inside it, highlighting various parts, but I couldn’t make any sense of it. Tubes and walls kept moving around seemingly at random, new structures grew and resorbed for no apparent reason, and yet the whole object continued to do nothing that I could identify as a usual function.
“Does this make any more sense to you that it does to me?” I asked Gretchen.
“Well sure, that goes without saying,” she answered with a grin. “But that still doesn’t mean I get it.” She touched one of the buttons on the reader’s side and the image shifted to a much more complex something-or-other, of which the first unit was a minor component at the junction of six arms sticking out at right angles.
“That must have been extreme fast-forward,” she said, touching the button again. Now we were looking at something like a snowflake.
“I wish we had some sense of scale,” I said. “I mean, is this a virus or a space station?”
“You got me. But I’ll tell you what this is,” Gretchen said, hefting the reader in her hand. “It’s the galaxy on a platter, that’s what it is.”
I nodded. “I think you’re right. But is that necessarily a good thing?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
I shrugged, finding it difficult to put my misgivings into words. “Well,” I said, “it’ll probably upset a lot of what we’re doing out here. For instance, if there’s a plan for a ground-to-orbit elevator in there, then the orbital colonies probably aren’t going to be importing their volatiles from Saturn anymore. They’ll get them directly from Earth.”
Gretchen laughed. “What, you’re worried about your job?”
“Maybe. I’m worried about a lot of things. I worry what will happen to us if we accept everything in here without question. I worry that maybe this isn’t as innocuous a package as it seems.”
Gretchen pointed a finger at the holographic snowflake. “You think this might be a machine that’ll make the Sun go nova or something?”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t think there’s plans for a machine to blow up the Sun. If they’d wanted to do that, they’d have just sent the machine. But there’s almost certainly a plan in there. Interstellar travel takes a lot of energy. You don’t send something like this without a reason. So what’s their reason? What’s in it for them?”
Gretchen shrugged. “Maybe this is just their way of saying hello. Maybe they intend to visit, and they want to make sure we have hot and cold running water when they get here. How should I know? They’re alien.”
I took the book reader from her and held it in my hand. It was narrower than a human would have made it, and thicker; it didn’t feel comfortable in my grip, but it came close. It could have been far stranger than it was. I said, “They aren’t that alien. They want something from us, guaranteed. And I’m really uneasy about accepting anything from them until I know what they want in return.”
“Come on, you’re being paranoid.”
“You’re damn right I’m being paranoid. The stuff in these memory cubes could change—could change, hell, will change—humanity. I want to know what those changes will be before I turn it loose.”
Gretchen sighed in exasperation. “Who knows? There could be a million different things we’ve never heard of in here. How can we know what effect they’re going to have until we at least find out what they are?”
“Yes, how can we know? But once we’ve learned all the stuff in here, how do we un-learn it if we don’t like what we see?” I popped the cube loose from the top of the reader, and the image swirled into static, but I knew I could see it again whenever I closed my eyes. If I’d actually understood what it was, there would be no way I could forget it.
Gretchen watched me put the cube back in the rack. “What do you want to do, just seal this up again and toss it back out into the ring?”
“I was thinking more of tying a pair of attitude jets to it and sending it down to Saturn.”
I didn’t often astonish my co-workers, but Gretchen was astonished now. “You’re kidding. This is a care package from another civilization! It’s a gift!”
Patiently, I tried again to explain. “Yes, I agree; it’s certainly that. And I think it may be a trap, too.”
“Well, what did you dig it out for if you think that way?”
That one stopped me for a moment. Why had I been so hot to retrieve it? “Because I thought it was part of a probe, I guess. Something we could stand up in a museum and show everybody, or maybe take apart and figure out how it was built, maybe learn a few things, but I didn’t think it was a goddam encyclopedia.”
Gretchen shook her head, unbelieving. “What you’re telling me is that you’re afraid of knowledge. ‘There are things mankind was not meant to know.’ Well that’s bullshit. We—”
“No, that’s not it at all.” Waving the reader for emphasis, I said, “Look, we just saw a demonstration of how to smelt iron without the use of fire. Can you imagine how different things would be now if we had picked this up before we learned to do it our way?”
“Oh come on; you think we wouldn’t have discovered fire? The first little kid with a magnifying glass would have figured that out.”
“Maybe. But how about the generator? We developed that on our own, too, but what about the stuff we learned from the blind alleys? If we’d had electricity earlier, would we have developed internal combustion engines? Drilled for oil? Made plastics?”
“So what if we hadn’t? If we need to know something, it’s probably in there.” Gretchen nodded toward the canister full of memory cubes.
“Exactly!” I said. “If we need to know it, it’s probably in there, but who decides what we need to know? They do. But what if theirs isn’t the only way? What if theirs isn’t even the best way? With this stuff to look at every time we have a question, do you think we’ll ever come up with anything different? That’s the problem. I’m afraid of what won’t happen if we take this alien gift. I’m afraid what we won’t become, and that’s unique. We’ll be just like them.” A sudden realization made me laugh.
“What?” Gretchen asked.
“You said it yourself: ‘Maybe they intend to visit, and they want to make sure we have hot and cold running water when they get here.’ That’s exactly what they want. They don’t care if we go visit them first or if they visit us, but either way they don’t want any surprises. They want to make sure we’re civilized when we meet. Their idea of civilized.”
“So you want to hang onto our spears and our warpaint just to spite them?” Gretchen shook her head. “I don’t buy it, Jack.”
Of course she wouldn’t. The threat wasn’t personal enough for her to take seriously. “All right then, what do you want to do?” I asked. “Turn it over to the UN, or keep it for ourselves and get rich off the patents?”
“Huh?” She hadn’t expected that.
So I asked the next question: “And if we keep it for ourselves, do we want to admit to anyone that we’ve got it, or would you rather live the rest of your life without bodyguards?”
“Bodyguards?”
I didn’t bother to answer; she figured it out before I could have explained it anyway. So I said, “And do we want to warn our friends to dump their stock before the market collapses, or do we just brush them off like the pitiful worms that they are? For that matter, I suspect we’d better wait at least until we’ve been rotated back to Earth before we spring this on anyone, or we’re liable to wake up in vacuum some night. Or starve to death out here when the supply shut-ties quit running.”