Franz and Renate are conscientious hosts. They take Victor to the museums and the historic sites. They take him to concerts and parties. They take him one frosty night to the famous annual parade on the Unter den Linden.
The starry flag of Europa flies high over the crowds alongside the black and red and gold of the German Bund. Statues and buildings loom eerily in the icy floodlights. Laser beams dance in the sky. There are drum majorettes, and decorated floats, and brass bands in lederhosen. And then, one after another, come the parade’s most famous marchers…
So many parades have been this way before: Prussian cavalrymen, Nazi brownshirts, goose-stepping soldiers of the DDR… But these are something of quite another kind. They are creatures from prehistory; denizens of the Pleistocene steppes, ancient giants shambling patiently between the Doric columns of the Brandenburg Gate.
Mammoths!
Franz and Renate lean on the railings while the animals go by. They have seen the parade before and watch the scene with a proprietorial air, from time to time looking round to check that their guest is suitably impressed.
They are immense beasts! And they walk with such calm, muscular gravity, such a sense of assurance of their place in the world, that it seems to Victor that perhaps their resurrection was not the incredible and improbable feat of science that it was claimed to be, but rather the result of some basic and inescapable law of nature: if you wait long enough, everything returns.
“Those huge tusks!”
“Berlin has 140 mammoths now,” says Franz.
“New York has twelve,” says Renate. “Even Tokyo only has sixty, even though the Japanese have much freer access to the frozen carcasses in Siberia than we do because of the Eastern Pact.”
Another huge male lumbers by; and Franz nods in its direction. “They have a few in Russia itself of course, but they are really rather a cheat. Less than 20 percent of the genes are actually authentic mammoth. They are really just glorified Indian elephants with big tusks and added hair. The Berlin mammoths are 80 or 90 percent pure.”
“Even the New York mammoths are only 70-percent genuine,” says Renate, “and the Americans are having considerable difficulty in successfully breeding from them for that reason…”
“Something to do with incompatible chromosomes I believe. And most of them have defective kidneys…”
But Victor the quiet Englishman suddenly gives a strangled cry: “For God’s sake! Can’t you two shut up even for one moment and just look at the things!”
Franz and Renate gape at him in astonishment, along with a whole segment of the crowd. Just as astonished as they are, Victor turns his back and walks away.
He has no idea where he is going, but a little later a thought occurs to him. He takes the battered visiting card out of his pocket and heads for the Kreuzberg apartment of Dr Heinrich Gruber.
“Come in, my friend, come in!”
It is musty and dark, like a brown cave, full of wood and the smell of pipe smoke, and Victor has the feeling that he is the first visitor for quite some time.
“Come on through!”
The old man’s eyebrows bristle with pleasure and animation as he ushers Victor into his small sitting room and dives off into a grubby little kitchen to fetch beer. Victor looks around, feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed and wondering why he came.
The sitting room clearly doubles as Gruber’s study. Half the floor-space is covered in books, journals and papers. On the desk under the window is roughly piled up a long print-out, covered with an unreadable gobbledegook of letters, numbers and punctuation marks.
…XXQpeNU’B VFF6VV G’NNLPP P*JJVNKL’L JGDSF’E^X MX9*M MMLXV XVOG? KK’B KQQZ…
“This is Cassiopeian?” Victor asks as Gruber returns with the beer.
“Ja, ja, that is the standard notation of Cassiopeian.”
The elderly man rummages through a stack of manila files on a small side table. “You probably remember that the message contains a repetitive element? Every 422 days it repeats the same five-day-long passage known as the Lexicon, which turns out to be a ‘Teach Yourself’ guide to the language. The key to understanding it was when we discovered that part of the Lexicon consisted of co-ordinates for a spatial grid. When these were mapped out, they produced pictures. The Cassiopeians taught us the basics of their language by sending us pictures and accompanying each picture with the appropriate word or words…”
He goes to a computer and taps on keys.
Suddenly a face stares out at Victor, thin and long, utterly inscrutable, crowned with spiky horns…
“This one is a female,” says Gruber, tapping another key. “This is a male. This belongs to the third sex, which I call promale. If you remember, the Cassiopeians have a triploid reproductive system, a simple biological fact which permeates the whole of their language, their culture, their metaphysics. They simply do not see the world in terms of black and white, yes or no, positive or negative. Everything is in mutually exclusive threes…”
He taps more keys and new images roll across the screen: plants and strange animals, buildings strung like spiders’ webs between enormous diagonal struts…
“They are incredible pictures,” says Victor. “I’ve seen them before of course, when they were in all the papers, but you’re quite right, it’s amazing how quickly we’ve all just forgotten them.”
Gruber smiles. “The images are fascinating of course, but they are really only the key to the text…”
Victor smiles. “Which is truly nothing but philosophy?”
He is dimly aware that this is where the controversy lies: the extent to which the text has really been translated or just guessed at.
After all, who would think of beaming out philosophy to the stars?
Gruber nods. “Even though they have made a powerful radio transmitter, the Cassiopeians are not especially sophisticated technologically. They simply don’t put such a high store by science and technology as we do: they consider all that to be only one of three distinct and separate fields of knowledge.”
Victor asks what the other two are but Gruber is too preoccupied with his own train of thought to answer.
“The point about the Cassiopeians is that they are not afraid to think,” says Gruber, standing up. “They still trust themselves to do something more imaginative than count! As a result their ideas are beautiful and they know it, so they beam them out for anyone who wants to listen.”
He laughs angrily. “Which on this planet at least, sometimes seems to amount to about eight people among all the seven billion inhabitants!”
He perches on a table, takes out his pipe and begins to fill it. Victor seems to remember that there had been some suggestion too that the pictures had been greatly enhanced: crude matrices of dots had been ‘interpreted’ to a point that was arguably simply wishful invention. Perhaps even deliberately doctored?
Gruber stands up again agitatedly, thrusting the still unlit pipe at the young Englishman.
“My dear friend, what the Cassiopeians offer us is something that we desperately need: wisdom! Our own ideas have grown stale. We are in a blind alley. Christianity was once a brilliant new liberating leap. So once was scientific rationalism. But they have grown old. We have no real ideas any more, not even us Germans, for whom ideas and philosophy were once almost a vice. Especially not us Germans. Human philosophy no longer dares to attempt the big picture. All we have is the pursuit of cleverer and cleverer technologies, all of them quite pointless of course in the absence of any system of values that could tell us what all this cleverness is for.”