Blind Lake

“The natives of UMa47/E are not human, but we are, and human beings interpret the world by constructing narratives to explain it. The fact that some of our narratives are naive, or wishful, or simply wrong, hardly invalidates the process. Science, after all, is at heart a narrative. An anthropologist, or an army of anthropologists, may pore over fragments of bone and catalog them according to a dozen or a hundred apparently trivial features, but the unspoken object of all this work is a narrative — a story about how human beings emerged from the other fauna on this planet, a story about our origins and our ancestors.

“Or consider the periodic table. The periodic table is a catalog, a list of the known and possible elements arranged according to an organizing principle. It looks like static knowledge, exactly the kind of knowledge we’re accumulating about the Subject and his kindred. But even the periodic table implies a narrative. The periodic table is a defining statement in the story of the universe, the end point of a long narrative about the creation of hydrogen and helium in the Big Bang, the forging of heavy elements in stars, the relationship of electrons to atomic nuclei, the nucleus and its process of decay, and the quantum behavior of subatomic particles. We have our place in that narrative too. We are in part the result of carbon chemistry in water — another narrative hidden in the periodic table — and so, I might add, are the observed peoples of UMa47/E.”

She paused. There was a glass of ice water on the flat-topped podium, thank God. Marguerite took a sip. Judging by the background noise, she had already ignited a few whispered arguments in the audience.

“Narratives intersect and diverge, combine and recombine. Understanding one narrative may require the creation of another. Most fundamentally, narrative is how we understand. Narrative is how we understand the universe and it is most obviously how we understand ourselves. A stranger may seem inscrutable or even frightening until he offers us his story; until he tells us his name, tells us where he comes from and where he’s going. This may be true of the chthonic inhabitants of UMa47/E as well. It would not surprise me if they are, in their way, also exchanging and creating narratives. Perhaps they are not; perhaps they have a different way of organizing and disseminating knowledge. But I promise you we will not understand them until we begin to tell ourselves stories about them.”

She could see more faces in the audience now. There was Chris, on the center aisle, nodding encouragingly. Elaine Coster beside him, Sebastian Vogel next to her. She assumed they had their servers in hand, in case Ray bolted for the Plaza.

And down in the front row was Tess, listening attentively. Ray must have brought her. Marguerite aimed a smile at her daughter.

“Of course, we’re scientists. We have our own name for a tentative narrative: we call it a hypothesis, and we test it against observation and experimentation. And of course any hypothesis we venture about the native peoples must be very, very tentative. It will be a first approximation, an educated guess, even a shot in the dark.

“Nevertheless I believe we have been far too shy about making such guesses. I think this is because the questions we have to ask in order to create that narrative are extremely unsettling. Any sentient species we encounter — and for the first time in history we have another example to compare against our own — will be grounded in its biology. Some of its behavior, in other words, will be specific to its genetic history. If it is truly a sentient species, however, some of its behavior will also be discretionary, will be flexible, will be i

“And here, I think, is the fundamental issue we have been reluctant to confront. We harbor closely-held beliefs about ourselves. A theologian might say we are a God-seeking species. A biologist might say we are an assembly of interrelated physiological functions capable of highly complex activity. A Marxist might say we’re players in a dialogue between history and economics. A philosopher might say we’re the result of the appropriation by DNA of the mathematics of emergent properties in semistable chaotic systems. We treat these beliefs as mutually exclusive and we cleave to them, according to our preferences, religiously.

“But I suspect that in the native peoples of UMa47/E we will find all of these descriptors both useful and insufficient. We will have to arrive at a new definition of a ‘sentient species,’ and that definition must include ourselves and the natives.

“And that, I would suggest, is what we have been avoiding.”

Another sip of water. Was she too close to the microphone? From the back rows it probably sounded like she was gargling.

“Anything we say about the native peoples implies a new perspective on us. We will find them comparatively more or less brave than ourselves, more or less gentle, more or less warlike, more or less affectionate — perhaps, ultimately, more or less sane.

“In other words, we may be forced to draw conclusions about them, and consequently about ourselves, which we do not like.

“But we’re scientists, and we aren’t supposed to shy away from these matters. As a scientist it is my cherished belief — I’m tempted to say, my faith — that understanding is better than ignorance. Ignorance, unlike life, unlike narrative, is static. Understanding implies a forward motion, thus the possibility of change.

“This is why it’s so important to maintain focus on the Subject.” As long as we can, she added to herself. “A few months ago one might plausibly have argued that the Subject’s life was a rigidly repetitive routine and that we had gleaned from it all we could. Recent events have proven that argument wrong. The Subject’s life, which we had mistaken for a cycle, has become very much a narrative, a narrative we may be able to follow to its conclusion and from which we will surely learn a great deal.

“We’ve already learned much. We’ve seen, for instance, the ruins at 33/28, an abandoned city — if I may use that word — apparently older than the Subject’s home and very different in architectural style. And this, too, implies a narrative. It implies that the architectural behavior of the native peoples is flexible; that they have accumulated knowledge and put that knowledge to diverse and adaptive uses.

“It implies, in short, and if any doubt remains, that the native peoples are a people — intellectually proximate and morally equivalent to human beings — and that the best way to construct their narrative is by reference to our own. Even if that comparison is not always flattering to us.”

That was her big finish. Her defiant thesis. Problem was, nobody seemed sure she had finished. She cleared her throat again and said, “That’s all, thank you,” and walked back to her chair. Applause welled up behind her. It sounded polite, if not enthusiastic.

Ari went to the podium, thanked her, and introduced Ray.

Sue Sampel spent twenty minutes at her desk in the anteroom of Ray’s office, looking busy for the sake of the video monitors embedded in the wall.

She had set aside some work to make her presence here seem plausible. Not that there was much in the way of real work. It was a fucking joke, these reports Ray insisted on putting together, documenting the daily trivia of Blind Lake site management. The reports went nowhere except into a file marked PENDING — pending what, the end of the world? — but they would serve as an alibi if it came down to the question of what Ray had been up to during the lockdown. It seemed to her that Ray spent a lot of time preparing to be questioned about things.