“Is there anything I can do to help?” Gunter asked.
“Just keep me company,” Sarah said.
“Of course.”
While Gunter looked over her shoulder, she began to softly dictate instructions to the computer, telling it to bring up a copy of her old set of responses to the Dracon questionnaire.
“Okay,” she said to the computer. “Go to my answer to question forty-six.”
The highlight on the screen moved.
“Now, change that answer to ‘no,’” she said.
The display updated appropriately.
“Now, let’s recompile all my answers. First…” and she went on, giving instructions that were dutifully executed.
“Your pulse is elevated,” said Gunter. “Are you okay?”
Sarah smiled. “It’s called excitement. I’ll be fine.” She addressed the computer again, fighting to keep her voice steady: “Copy the compiled string into the clipboard. Bring up the reply we received from the Dracons…Okay, load the decryption algorithm they provided.” She paused to take a deep, calming breath. “All right, now paste in the clipboard contents, and run the algorithm.”
The screen instantly changed, and—
Eureka!
There it was: long sequences spelled out in the vocabulary established in the first message. Sarah hadn’t looked at Dracon ideograms in decades, but she recognized a few at once. That block was the symbol for “equals,” that upside-down T meant “good.” But, like any language, if you don’t use it, you lose it, and she couldn’t read the rest.
No matter. There were several programs available that could transliterate Dracon symbols, and Sarah told her computer to feed the displayed text into one of those. At once, the screen was filled with a rendering of the alien message in the English notation she had devised all those years ago.
Sarah used the scroller to quickly page through screen after screen of decrypted text; the message was massive. Gunter, of course, could read the screens as fast as they were displayed, and he surprised Sarah at one point by very softly saying, “Wow.” After a bit, Sarah jumped back to the beginning, adrenaline surging. Most of the introductory text was displayed as black, but some words and symbols were color-coded, indicating a degree of confidence in the translation—the meanings of some Dracon terms were generally agreed upon; others were still contentious. But the gist was obvious, even if a few subtleties were perhaps being lost, and, as she took it all in, she shook her head slowly in amazement and delight.
–-- Chapter 37 --–
DON WOKE UP a little before 6:00 a.m., some noise or other having disturbed him. He rolled over and saw that Sarah wasn’t there, which was unusual this early in the morning. He rolled the other way, looking into the little en suite, but she wasn’t there, either. Concerned, he got out of bed, headed out into the corridor, and—
And there she was, and Gunter, too, in the study.
“Sweetheart!” Don said, entering the room. “What are you doing up so early?”
“She has been up for two hours and forty-seven minutes,” Gunter said helpfully.
“Doing what?” Don asked.
Sarah looked at him, and he could see the wonder on her face. “I did it,” she said. “I figured out the decryption key.”
Don hurried across the room. He wanted to pull her up out of the chair, hug her, swing her around—but he couldn’t do any of those things. Instead, he bent down and kissed her gently on the top of her head. “That’s fabulous! How’d you do it?”
“The decryption key was my set of answers,” she said.
“But I thought you’d tried that.”
She told him about the last-minute change she’d made in Arecibo. While she did so, Gunter knelt next to her, and began scrolling rapidly through pages on the screen.
“Ah,” Don said. “But wait—wait! If it’s your answers that unlocked it, that means the message is for you personally.”
Sarah nodded her head very slowly, as if she herself couldn’t believe it. “That’s right.”
“Wow. You really do have a pen pal!”
“So it would seem,” she said softly.
“So, what does the message say?”
“It’s a—a blueprint, I guess you could call it.”
“You mean for a spaceship? Like in Contact?”
“No. Not for a spaceship.” She looked briefly at Gunter, then back at Don. “For a Dracon.”
“What?”
“The bulk of the message is the Dracon genome, and related biochemical information.”
He frowned. “Well, um, I guess that’ll be fascinating to study.”
“We’re not supposed to study it,” Sarah said. “Or at least, that’s not all we’re supposed to do.”
“What then?”
“We’re supposed to”—she paused, presumably seeking a word—“to actualize it.”
“Sorry?”
“The message,” she said, “also includes instructions for making an artificial womb and an incubator.”
Don felt his eyebrows going up. “You mean they want us to grow one of them?”
“That’s right.”
“Here? On Earth?”
She nodded. “You’ve said it yourself. The only thing SETI is good for is the transmission of information. Well, DNA is nothing but that—information! And they’ve sent us all the info we need to make one of them.”
“To make a Dracon baby?”
“Initially. But it’ll grow up to be a Dracon adult.”
There was only one chair in the room. Don moved so he could perch on the desk, and Sarah swiveled to face him. “But…but it won’t be able to breathe our atmosphere. It won’t be able to eat our food.”
Sarah motioned at the screen, although Don could no longer see what was on it. “They give the composition of the air it will require: needed gases and their acceptable percentages, a list of gases that are poisonous, the tolerable range of air pressure, and so on. You’re right that it won’t be able to breathe our air directly; we’ve got too much CO2 in our atmosphere, for one thing. But with a filter mask, it should be fine. And they’ve given us the chemical formulas for the various foodstuffs it will need. I’m afraid Atkins didn’t catch on beyond Earth; it’s mostly carbohydrates.”
“What about—I don’t know, what about gravity?”
“Sigma Draconis II has a surface gravity about one and a third times our own. It should have no trouble with ours.”
Don looked at Gunter, appealing to the robot’s rationality. “This is crazy. This is nuts.”
But Gunter’s glass eyes were implacable, and Sarah simply said, “Why?”
“Who would send a baby to another planet?”
“They’re not sending a baby. Nothing is traveling.”
“All right, fine. But what’s the point, then?”
“Did you ever read—oh, what was his name, now?”
Don frowned. “Yes?”
“Damn it,” said Sarah, softly. She turned to face Gunter. “Who wrote ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’”
The Mozo, still looking at pages of text, said at once, “Thomas Nagel.”
Sarah nodded. “Nagel, exactly! Have you ever read him, Don?”
He shook his head.
“That paper dates back to the 1970s, and—”
“October 1974,” supplied Gunter.
“—it’s one of the most famous in all of philosophy. Just like the title says, it asks, ‘What’s it like to be a bat?’ And the answer is, fundamentally, we’ll never know. We can’t even begin to guess what it’s like to have echolocation, to perceive the world in a totally different way. Well, only a flesh-and-blood Dracon, with Dracon senses, can report to the home world what it’s really like, from a Dracon’s point of view, here on Earth.”
“So they want us to make a Dracon who’ll grow up to do that?”
She shrugged a bit. “For thousands of years, people on Earth have been born to be kings. Why shouldn’t someone be born to be an ambassador?”
br />
“But think of the existence it would have here, all alone.”
“It doesn’t have to be. If we can make one, we can make several. Of course, they’ll be genetically identical, like twins, and—”
“Actually, Sarah,” said Gunter, standing back up now, “I’ve been reading further into the document. It’s true that they only sent one master genome, but they’ve appended a tiny subset of modifications that can be substituted into the master sequence to make a second individual. Apparently, the DNA code provided was taken from two pair-bonded Dracons. Any living expressions of that DNA would be clones of those individuals.”
“‘If you were the only girl in the world, and I was the only boy…’” said Don. “At least they’ll each know who to ask to the prom.” He paused. “But, I mean, how do we even know that they’ve sent the genome for an actual, intelligent Dracon? It could be the genome for some, y’know, vicious monster, or for a plague germ.”
“Of course, we’d create it in a biologically secure facility,” said Sarah. “Besides, what would be the point of sending such a thing?”
“The message says the individuals whose genomes have been provided are alive on Sigma Draconis II,” said Gunter. “Or, at least they were when this message was sent. They hope to converse with their clones here, albeit with a 37.6-year round-trip message time.”
“So the source Dracons back home are like the parents?” asked Don. Through the window opposite him, he could see that the sun was coming up.
“In a way,” said Sarah. “And they’re looking for foster parents here.”
“Ah, yes. The questionnaire!”
“Right,” she said. “If you were going to have someone raise your children, you’d want to know something about them first. And, I guess, of all the answers they received, they liked mine best; they want me to raise the children.”
“My…God,” said Don. “I mean…my God.”
Sarah shrugged a little. “I guess that’s why they cared about things like the rights of the parent who wasn’t actually carrying the child.”
“And the abortion questions—were they to make sure we wouldn’t get cold feet and terminate the fetuses?”
“Maybe. That would certainly be one interpretation. But remember, they liked my answers, and although I was willing to concede rights to the parent who wasn’t carrying the child, the rest of my answers must have made it pretty darn clear that I’m pro-choice.”
“Why would that make them happy?”
“Maybe they wanted to see if we’ve transcended Darwin.”
“Huh?”
“You know, if we’ve gotten past being driven by selfish genes. I mean, in a way, being pro-choice is anti-Darwinian, because it tends to reduce your reproductive success, assuming you terminate normal fetuses that you could have raised, without unreasonable cost, to adulthood. Doing that would be one psychological marker for no longer being bound by Darwinian notions, for having broken free of mindless genetic programming, for ceasing to be a lifeform driven by genes that want nothing but to reproduce themselves.”
“I get it,” said Don, watching now as the window autopolarized in response to the rising sun. “If all you care about are your own genes then, by definition, you don’t care about aliens.”
“Right,” said Sarah. “Notice they asked for a thousand survey replies. That means they knew we wouldn’t have just one set of views. Remember, you used to say that alien races either would become hive minds or totalitarian, because, after a certain level of technological sophistication is reached, they simply couldn’t survive any longer if they allowed the kind of discontent that gives rise to terrorism. But there must be some third alternative—something better than being Borg or having thought police. The aliens on Sigma Draconis apparently knew they would be dealing with complex, contradictory individuals. And they looked at the thousand responses and decided that they didn’t want anything to do with human beings in general—they only wanted to communicate with one oddball.” She paused. “I guess I’m not surprised, since most of the sets of survey answers did suggest ethnocentrism, exclusive concern about one’s own genetic material, and so on.”
“But knowing you, yours didn’t suggest those things. And that’s what makes you the one they want to be the foster mother, right?”
“Which surprises the heck out of me,” Sarah said.
But Don shook his head. “It shouldn’t, you know. I told you this ages ago. You’re special. And you are. SETI, by its very nature, transcends species boundaries. Remember that conference you attended in Paris, all those years ago? What was it called?”
“I don’t…”
Gunter spoke up. “‘Encoding Altruism: The Art and Science of Interstellar Message Composition.’” Don looked at the Mozo, who did a mechanical shrug. “I’ve read Sarah’s CV, of course.”
“‘Encoding altruism,’” repeated Don. “Exactly. That’s the fundamental basis of SETI. And, well, you were the only SETI researcher whose answers were sent to Sigma Draconis. Is it any wonder that the recipients, who, by definition, are also in the SETI business, found your responses to be the closest to what they were looking for?”
“I suppose. But…”
“Yes?”
“My child-rearing days are way behind me. Not that that’s unusual, I suppose, in a cosmic sense.”
Don frowned. “Huh?”
“Well, Cody McGavin was probably right. The Dracons, and just about every other race that survives technological adolescence, almost certainly is very long lived, if not out-and-out immortal. And unless you’re endlessly expansionist, moving out to conquer new worlds constantly, you’d soon run out of room if you kept breeding and lived forever. The Dracons have probably all but given up reproducing.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
Sarah’s eyebrows went up. “In fact, that might be the third alternative!”
“Huh?”
“Evolution is a blind process,” said Sarah. “It has no goal in mind, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a logical outcome. It selects for aggression, for physical force, for being protective of one’s blood relations—for all the things that ultimately contribute to technological races destroying themselves. So maybe the Fermi paradox isn’t a paradox at all. Maybe it’s the natural result of evolution. Evolution eventually gives rise to technology, which has a survival value up to a point—but once technologies of mass destruction are readily available, the psychology that the Darwinian engine forces on lifeforms almost inevitably leads to their downfall.”
“But if you stop breeding—”
“Exactly! If you voluntarily opt out of evolution, if you cease to struggle to get more copies of your own DNA out there, you probably give up a lot of aggression.”
“I guess that does beat becoming a hive mind or totalitarian,” said Don. “But—but, wait! They’re reproducing now, in a way, by sending their DNA here.”
“But only two individuals.”
“Maybe they breed like rabbits, though. Maybe it’s a way of launching an invasion.”
“That’s not a concern,” Gunter said. “The two individuals are both of the same sex.”
“But you said the source Dracons were pair-bonded…” Don stopped himself. “Right, of course. How provincial of me. Well, well, well…” He looked at Sarah. “So what are you going to do?”
“I—I don’t know. I mean, it’s not like the artificial womb and incubator are things you and I could cobble together out in the garage.”
Don frowned. “But if you tell the world, governments will try to control the process, and—forgive me, but they’ll probably try to squeeze you out.”
“Exactly,” said Sarah. “The Dracons surely understand that upbringing is a combination of nature and nurture. They wanted a specific sort of person to be responsible for the…the Draclings. Besides, if the genome gets out, who’s to say that others wouldn’t create Dracons just to dissect them, or put them in zoos?”
“But once th
e child is born, anyone could steal its DNA, no? Just by picking up some of its cells.”
“They might be able to get that, but not the plans for the incubator or all the other things. Without actual access to the full message, it would be very hard to create a Dracon.” She paused, considering. “No, we have to keep this secret. The Dracons entrusted the information to me, and I’ve got an obligation to protect it.”
Don rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “Maybe—but there’ll be those who’ll say you should release all the information. They’ll say your principal obligation is to your own kind.”
But Sarah shook her head. “No,” she said. “It isn’t. That’s the whole point.”
–-- Chapter 38 --–
“IT’S IMPORTANT,” SARAH said a few hours later, “that you commit to memory the decryption key—not the whole thing, of course, but how to recover it.”
Don nodded. They were sitting in their kitchen, eating a late breakfast. He was now dressed in a T-shirt and jeans; she was wearing a robe and slippers.
“My survey was number 312 out of the thousand sent,” she said, “and I changed my answer to one of the questions at the very last minute. It was question forty-six, and the answer I actually sent was ‘no.’ Got that?”
“Three-twelve, forty-six, and no. Can I write that down somewhere?”
“As long as you don’t put any explanatory text with it, sure.”
“So number forty-six was the magic question? The one the Dracons cared about the most?”
“What? No, no. It just happened to be the one I changed my answer to. The key consists of all eighty-four of my answers exactly as I actually transmitted them. Any time you need the key you can reproduce it by looking up the archival copies of what was supposedly sent to Sigma Draconis, and making that one change.”
“Got it.”
“Now, make sure you keep it secret!”
He looked across the table at his wife, who seemed visibly older, and not just because she’d gotten very little sleep. Over the last few weeks, she had aged noticeably. “I, ah, don’t think we can keep it secret from everybody,” he said. “I really think you need to tell Cody McGavin.”