Rollback

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 CO in our atmosphere, for one thing. But with a filter mask, it 2 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?"

"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 questio

"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."