Learning the World

Because it’s not the most important question.

The most important question is this: what does the existence of other intelligent life tell us about the kind of universe we are in?

Yesterday we were in a universe that included us and lots of cool stuff: stars, galaxies, plasmas, cometary bodies, planets, and cows and giraffes and AIs and blue-green algae and lichen and microorganisms.

Today we are in a universe that contains us and lots of cool stuff and alien space bats.

That’s a different universe.

A universe with a different history, different potentialities, different future from the universe we thought we lived in. We are not living in the universe we thought we lived in yesterday.

We have to start learning the world all over again.

Awlin Halegap entertained in the grand ma

Hundreds of people floated and drifted in the frosty light. Crows hung, wings steady but for the occasional pinion flick, watched for food scraps and tattled amongst themselves. Hummingbirds, less sentient but more colourful, sipped from the tips of discarded drink-bulbs, and jinked about. Trays of food covered by elastic netting and propelled by tiny electric fan-jets drifted through the crowd, following simple algorithms of approach and avoidance. Clusters of drink-bulbs were plucked from and shoved away.

In the two weeks since Horrocks had cracked the television transmissions he had become famous, and the ship had become febrile. Its nets buzzed with debate. Factions had formed. In the crew areas of the forward and rearward cones, fashions: almost everyone was wearing things like wings, clever pleated contrivances that fa

Horrocks scorned the fad. For tonight he wore a rayon replica of his utility suit, much buckled and multipocketed. He checked out the company as new arrivals drifted or hurtled past him. On the far side of the room hung a cluster of people he recognised from personal or fleeting acquaintance or from their fame: Halegap himself, in earnest conversation with the Oldest Man; around them some of the science team who had designed and launched the probes, and one or two from the science jury which had approved it; one delegate from the ship’s Board, looking — even at this distance — a little awkward and out of place.

Closer to hand, Horrocks noticed a group of people he knew better. He rolled, reached for a passing tray, and let it drag him to a drinks cluster from which he detached a handful of bulbs, and then sent the rest on their way, and himself in the opposite direction. A minute later, air resistance brought him to more or less a halt among the half-dozen people twenty metres away that he wanted to meet.

“Hi, Horrocks,” said Genome Console, catching his hand. She wore a filmy pink one-piece, cuffs draw-strung at wrist and ankle; rings on her toes and her yellow hair in a gold net. He and she circled each other; he passed her a bulb to counteract his remaining momentum.

“Hello,” said Horrocks. He looked around. The others, like Genome, were all training-habitat builders — colleagues and rivals — except for one man, naked and painted in whorls, with paired jet-packs on a belt. The stranger dipped his head as Genome introduced Horrocks.

“Grey Universal,” he said.

“Ah,” said Horrocks. “The contararian.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said the man, and laughed. Horrocks joined in to be polite. Genome let go of Horrocks’s hand and caught Grey’s, smiling at him in a determined way that Horrocks recognised and was relieved was not directed at him. The Consoles, like the Mathematicals, were an old crew family. Horrocks had played with Genome as a child and felt toward her a vague sense of siblinghood, which he’d sometimes suspected her of not sharing.

“My complaint for the occasion,” Grey Universal went on, “is that the atmosphere probe whose brave little adventure we’re all here to follow is a piece of gross irresponsibility that we’ll be lucky to live to regret.”

“Oh, come on,” said Horrocks. “This has been through a shipwide discussion, the Board, the science jury, and a crew poll. It’s settled.”

“Of course,” said Grey. “I’m still right. What if the bat people spot it?”

“This is a probe three metres long, with a wingspan of two metres, flying ten kilometres up at its lowest point,” Horrocks said. “A mere dot.”

“But a detectable dot.”

“They don’t have radar.”

“They have eyes,” said Grey. “Very acute eyes, by the looks of them.”

Horrocks shrugged. So far, he’d heard nothing that hadn’t been thrashed out already. Some arguments were like that; each side just kept repeating the same points, over and over.

“So they see an… unidentified flying object?” he said. “So what? They may have already seen our retro-flare. The orbiter’s thoroughly stealthed, but they may spot it someday. Maybe gradually building up evidence that we’re here will be a good thing for them. Better that than us descending one day out of the blue.”

“Assuming we make contact at all,” Genome pointed out.

“All right,” said Horrocks. “Assume we don’t. Assume even that we go away—”

He flinched at the chorus of disapprobation.

“I said, assume,” he persisted. “What then? An astronomical and… atmospheric anomaly enters their records. No harm done.”

“Perhaps not,” said Grey Universal. “We will have changed their history nonetheless. A minute change, you may say. True. But not therefore necessarily insignificant.”

“I’ve seen your chaos sims,” Horrocks said. “I’m unconvinced.”

Grey Universal shook his head and squirted wine into his mouth. He savoured it, pursing his lips, and swallowed. “As a contrarian, I naturally hope you are right.”

The discussion was bypassed a moment later as the cruciform atmosphere probe detached itself from the orbiter and dropped away. A cheer sounded across the room as the view switched to the probe’s camera and the planet’s atmosphere filled the view in an arc of blue and white. The event shown had happened hours earlier, Horrocks reflected, but still he had the sense that something irrevocable had just taken place.

He had the same uneasy feeling when, a couple of hours later, the probe entered the atmosphere. It went in on the dayside, where its friction flare would not be conspicuous, and within minutes it had stabilised in steady, ramjet-powered flight. Around the bulky glass lens of its ground camera the probe had been designed; that, unlike the hardware and software behind it, could not be miniaturised. But it was these that processed and enhanced the images, and that selected — according to the well-established algorithm for interestingness — which to zoom in on, and to show as though from hundreds rather than thousands of metres up.

Over the next hours Horrocks drifted about the room, occasionally joining in one of the formal three-dimensional dance acrobatics that usually ended with all or most participants recoiling off the wall or drifting helplessly and laughing. Every so often a hush would traverse the spherical room at the speed of sound, as the camera viewpoint soared over a mountain range, or pa