Rollback

"I — um, well, I look a mess…"

"You look gorgeous."

"Besides, who the hell is watching TV at this hour?"

"Shut-ins, insomniacs, people cha

"Dad!" Emily had her little hands planted on her hips.

"-but they’ll keep repeating the report, and it’ll be picked up all over the world, I’m sure."

"We’d been so wrong," Sarah told Shelagh Rogers the next morning. Don wasn’t the Toronto sound engineer for Sounds Like Canada — Joe Mahoney was doing that these days — but Don stood behind Joe as he operated the board, looking over Joe’s shoulder at Sarah.

And, while doing so, he reflected on the irony. Sarah was in Toronto, but Shelagh was in Vancouver, where Radio One’s signature program originated — two people who couldn’t see each other, communicating over vast distances by radio. It was perfect.

"Wrong in what way?" Shelagh’s voice was rich and velvety, yet full of enthusiasm, an intoxicating combination.

"In every way," Sarah said. "In everything we’d assumed about SETI. What a ridiculous notion, that beings would send messages across the light-years to talk about math!" She shook her head, her brown hair bouncing as she did so. "Math and physics are the same everywhere in the universe. There’s no need to contact an alien race to find out if they agree that one plus three equals four, that seven is a prime number, that the value of pi is 3.14159, et cetera. None of those things are matters of local circumstance, or of opinion. No, the things worth discussing are moral issues — things that are debatable, things that an alien race might have a radically different perspective on."

"And that’s what the message from Sigma Draconis is about?" prodded Shelagh.

"Exactly! Ethics, morality — the big questions. And that’s the other thing, the other way in which we were totally wrong about what to expect from SETI. Carl Sagan used to talk about us receiving an Encyclopaedia Galactica. But no one would bother sending a message across the light-years to tell you things. Rather, they’d send a message to ask you things."

"And so this message from the stars is… what? A questio

"Yes, that’s right. A series of questions, most of which are multiple choice, laid out like a three-dimensional spreadsheet, with space for a thousand different people to provide their answers to each question. The aliens clearly want a cross section of our views, and they went to great pains to establish a vocabulary for conveying value judgments and dealing with matters of opinion, with sliding scales for precisely quantifying responses."

"How many questions are there?"

"Eighty-four," said Sarah. "And they’re all over the map."

"For instance?"

Sarah took a sip from the bottle of water she’d been provided with. " ‘Is it acceptable to prevent pregnancy when the population is low?’ ‘Is it acceptable to terminate pregnancy when the population is high?’ ‘Is it all right for the state to execute bad people?’ "

"Birth control, abortion, capital punishment," said Shelagh, sounding amazed. "I guess those are posers even for extraterrestrials."

"So it seems," said Sarah. "And there are lots more, all in one way or another about ethics and acceptable behavior. ‘Should systems be set up to thwart cheaters at all costs?’ ‘If an identifiable population is disproportionately bad, is it permissible to restrict the entire population?’ These are just preliminary translations, of course. I’m sure there’ll be a lot of quibbling over the exact meaning of some of them."

"I’m sure there will be," said Shelagh, affably.

"But I wonder if the aliens aren’t a bit naive, at least by our standards," said Sarah. "I mean, basically, we’re a race of hypocrites. We believe societal norms should be followed by others, and that there are always good reasons for ourselves to be exempt. So, yeah, asking about our morals is interesting, but if they actually expect our espoused beliefs to have any strong relationship to our actual behavior, they could be in for a big surprise. The fact that we even need a platitude ‘practice what you preach’ underscores just how natural it is for us to do exactly the opposite."

Shelagh made her trademark throaty laugh. "Do as I say, not as I do."

"Exactly," said Sarah. "Still, it’s amazing, really, the sociological concepts the aliens were able to get to from talking about math. For instance, building on some discussion of set theory, several of their questions deal with in-groups and out-groups. William Sumner, who coined the term ‘ethnocentrism,’ noted that what he called ‘primitive peoples’ had very different ideas about morality for in-group versus out-group members. The aliens seem to want to know if we’ve risen above that."

"I’d like to think we have," said Shelagh.

"For sure," agreed Sarah. "One might also expect them to wonder whether we’d outgrown religion." She looked through the glass at Don. "The vocabulary the Dracons established certainly would have made it possible to formulate questions about whether we believed an intelligence existed outside the universe — essentially, whether a God exists. They could have also asked if we believed any information persisted after death — in other words, whether souls exist. But they didn’t ask those things. My husband and I were arguing about that on the way down here this morning. He said the reason they didn’t ask about religious matters is obvious: no advanced race could still be caught up in such superstitious beliefs. But maybe it’s just the opposite. Maybe it’s so blindingly obvious to the aliens that God exists that it never even occurred to them to ask us if we’d failed to notice him."

"Fascinating," said Shelagh. "But why, do you think, do the aliens want to know all this?"

Sarah took a deep breath, and let it out slowly — causing Don to briefly cringe at the dead air. But, at last, she spoke. "That’s a very good question."

Chapter 15

Like most astronomers, Sarah fondly remembered the movie Contact, based on Carl Sagan’s novel of the same name. Indeed, she argued it was one of the few cases where the movie was actually better than the overlong book. She hadn’t seen it for decades, but a reference to it in one of the news stories about the attempts to decrypt the response from Sigma Draconis had brought it to mind. With pleasant anticipation, she sat down next to Don on the couch to watch it on Wednesday night. Slowly but surely, she was getting used to his newly youthful appearance, but one of the reasons she felt like watching a movie was that she’d be doing something with Don in which they’d be sitting side by side and not really looking at each other.

Jodie Foster did a great job portraying a passionate scientist, but Sarah found herself smiling in amusement when Foster said, "There are four hundred billion stars out there, just in our galaxy alone," which was true. But then she went on to say, "If only one out of a million of those had planets, and if just one out of a million of those had life, and if just one out of a million of those had intelligent life, there would be literally millions of civilizations out there." Nope, a million-million-millionth of four hundred billion is so close to zero as to practically be zero.

Sarah looked at Don to see if he’d caught it, but he gave no sign. She knew he didn’t like being interrupted by asides during movies — you couldn’t memorize trivia the way he did if you weren’t able to concentrate — and so she let the screenwriter’s minor flub pass. And, besides, despite its inaccuracy, what Foster had said rang true, in a way. For decades, people had been plugging numbers made up out of whole cloth into the Drake equation, which purported to estimate how many intelligent civilizations existed in the galaxy. Foster’s wildly inaccurate figure, pulled out of the air, was actually quite typical of these debates.