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发信人: bhfbao (嗖嗖与嗖嗖), 信区: SFworld
标  题: Contact II-12
发信站: 哈工大紫丁香 (Wed Feb  2 15:24:58 2000), 转信

发信人: isabel (伊莎贝尔~戒网中), 信区: SFworld
发信站: BBS 水木清华站 (Thu Jan 27 07:35:32 2000)

发信人: Sandoval (Companion Protector), 信区: SciFiction
标　题: Contact Part II - 12
发信站: The unknown SPACE (Tue Jan 25 01:08:05 2000) WWW-POST

CHAPTER 12
The One-Delta Isomer
Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I
dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on
a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the
sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?
-Vincent Van Gogh
it was a splendid autumn afternoon, so unseasonably warm
that Devi Sukhavati had left her coat behind. She and Ellie
walked along the crowded Champs-Elys俥s toward the Place de
la Concorde. The ethnic diversity was rivaled by London,
Manhattan, and only a few other cities on the planet. Two
women walking together, one in a skirt and sweater, the
other in a sari, were in no way unusual.
Outside a tobacconist's there was a long, orderly, and
polyglot line of people attracted by the first week of
legalized sale of cured cannabis cigarettes from the United
States. By French law they could not be sold to or consumed
by those under eighteen years of age. Many in line were
middle-aged and older. Some might have been naturalized
Algerians or Moroccans. Especially potent varieties of
cannabis were grown, mainly in California and Oregon, for
the export trade. Featured here was a new and admired
strain, which had in addition been grown in ultraviolet
light, converting some of the inert cannabinoids into the 1?
isomer. It was called "Sun-Kissed." The package, illustrated
in a window display a meter and a half high, bore in French
the slogan `This will be deducted from your share in
Paradise."
The shop windows along the boulevard were a riot of color.
The two women bought chestnuts from a street vendor and
reveled in the taste and texture. For some reason, every
time Ellie saw a sign advertising BNP, the Banque Nationale
de Paris, she read it as the Russian word for beer, with the
middle letter inverted left to right. beer, the signs-lately
corrupted from their usual and respectable fiduciary
vocations-seemed to be exhorting her, russian beer. the
incongruity amused her, and only with difficulty could she
convince the part of her brain in charge of reading that
this was the Latin, not the Cyrillic alphabet. Further on,
they marveled at L'Ob�1isque-an ancient military
commemorative stolen at great expense to become a modern
military commemorative. They decided to walk on.

Der Heer had broken the date, or at least that's what it
amounted to. He had called her up this morning, apologetic
but not desperately so. There were too many political issues
being raised at the plenary session. The Secretary of State
was flying in tomorrow, interrupting a visit to Cuba. Der
Heer's hands were full, and he hoped Ellie would understand.
She understood. She hated herself for sleeping with him. To
avoid an afternoon alone she had dialed Devi Sukhavati.
"One of the Sanskrit words for `vitorious' is abhijit.
That's what Vega was called in ancient India. Abhijit. It
was under the influence of Vega that the Hindu divinities,
our culture heroes, conquered the asuras, the gods of evil.
Ellie, are you listening? ... Now, it's a curious thing. In
Persia there are asuras also, but in Persia the asuras were
the gods of good. Eventually religions sprang up in which
the chief god, the god of light, the Sun god, was called
Ahura-Mazda. The Zoroastrians, for example, and the
Mithraists. Ahura, Asura, it's the same name. There are
still Zoroastrians today, and the Mithraists gave the early
Christians a good fright. But in this same story, those
Hindu divinities-they were mainly female, by the way- were
called Devis. It's the origin of my own name. In India, the
Devis are gods of good. In Persia, the Devis become gods of
evil. Some scholars think this is where the English word
`devil' ultimately comes from. The symmetry is complete. All
this is probably some vaguely remembered account of the
Aryan invasion that pushed the Dravidians, my ancestors, to
the south. So, depending on which side of the Kirthar Range
one lives on, Vega supports either God or the Devil."
This cheerful story had been proffered as a gift by Devi,
who clearly had heard something of Ellie's California
religious adventures two weeks before. Ellie was grateful.
But it reminded her that she had not even mentioned to Joss
the possibility that the Message was the blueprint for a
machine of unknown purpose. Now he would soon enough be
hearing all this through the media. She should really, she
told herself sternly, make an overseas call to explain to
him the new developments. But Joss was said to be in
seclusion. He had offered no public statement following
their meeting in Modesto. Rankin, in a press conference,
announced that while there might be some dangers, he was not
opposed to letting the scientists receive the full Message.
But translation was another matter. Periodic review by all
segments of society was required, he said, especially by
those entrusted to safeguard spiritual and moral values.
They were now approaching the Tuilerics Gardens, where the
garish hues of autumn were on display. Frail and elderly
men-Ellie judged them to be from Southeast Asia-were in
vigorous dispute. Ornamenting the black cast-iron gates were
multicolored balloons on sale. At the center of a pool of
water was a marble Amphitrite. Around her, toy sailboats
were racing, urged on by an exuberant crowd of small
children with Magellanic aspirations. A catfish suddenly
broke water, swamping the lead boat, and the boys and girls
became subdued, chastened by this wholly unexpected
apparition. The Sun was low in the west, and Ellie felt a
momentary chill.
They approached L'Orangerie, in the annex of which was a
special exhibition, so the poster proclaimed, "Images
Martiennes." The joint American-French-Sovict robot roving
vehicles on Mars had produced a spectacular windfall of
color photographs, some-like the Voyager images of the outer
solar system around 1980-soaring beyond their mere
scientific purpose and becoming art. The poster featured a
landscape photographed on the vast Elysium Plateau. In the
foreground was a three-sided pyramid, smooth, highly eroded,
with an impact crater near the base. It had been produced by
millions of years of high-speed sandblasting by the fierce
Martian winds, the planetary geologists had said. A second
rover-assigned to Cydonia, on the other side of Mars-had
become mired in a drifting dune, and its controllers in
Pasadena had been so far unable to respond to its forlorn
cries for help.
Ellie found herself riveted on Sukhavati's appearance: her
huge black eyes, erect bearing, and yet another magnificent
sari. She thought to herself, I'm not graceful. Usually she
found herself able to continue her part of a conversation
while mentally addressing other matters as well. But today
she had trouble following one line of thought, never mind
two. While they were discussing the merits of the several
opinions on whether to build the Machine, in her mind's eye
she returned to Devi's image from the Aryan invasion of
India 3,500 years ago: a war between two peoples, each of
whom claimed victory, each of whom patrioti-cally
exaggerated the historical accounts. Ultimately, the story
is transformed into a war of the gods. "Our" side, of
course, is good. The other side, of course, is evil. She
imagined the goateed, spade-tailed, cloven-hoofed Devil of
the West evolving by slow evolutionary steps over thousands
of years from some Hindu antecedent who, for all Ellie knew,
had the head of an elephant and was painted blue.
"Baruda's Trojan Horse-maybe it's not a completely foolish
idea," she found herself saying. "But I don't see that we
have any choice, as Xi said. They can be here in
twenty-some-odd years if they want to."
They arrived at a monumental arch in the Roman style
surmounted by a heroic, indeed apotheotic, statue of
Napoleon as chariot driver. From the long view, from an
extraterrestrial perspective, how pathetic this posturing
was. They rested on a nearby bench, their long shadows cast
over a bed of flowers planted in the colors of the French
Republic.
Ellie longed to discuss her own emotional predicament, but
that might have political overtones. It would, at the very
least, be indiscreet. She did not know Sukhavati very well.
Instead she encouraged her companion to speak about her
personal life. Sukhavati acquiesced readily enough.
She had been born to a Brahman but unprosperous family with
matriarchal proclivities in the southern state of Tamil
Nadu. Matriarchal households were still common all over
South India. She matriculated at Banares Hindu University.
At medical school in England she had met and fallen deeply
in love with Surindar Ghosh, a fellow medical student. But
Surindar was a harijan, an untouchable, of
a caste so loathed that the mere sight of them was held by
orthodox Brahmans to be polluting. Surindar's ancestors had
been forced to live a nocturnal existence, like bats and
owls. Her family threatened to disown her if they married.
Her father declared that he had no daughter who would
consider such a union. If she married Ghosh, he would mourn
her as though she were dead. She married him anyway. "We
were too much in love," she said. "I really had no choice."
Within the year, he died from septicemia acquired while
performing an autopsy under inadequate supervision.
Instead of reconciling her to her family, however,
Surin-dar's death accomplished the opposite, and after
receiving her medical degree, Devi decided to remain in
England. She discovered a natural affinity for molecular
biology and considered it an effortless continuation of her
medical studies. She soon found she had real talent in this
meticulous discipline. Knowledge of nucleic acid replication
led her to work on the origin of life, and that in turn led
her to consider life on other planets.
"You could say that my scientific career has been a sequence
of free associations. One thing just led to another."
She had recently been working on the characterization of
Martian organic matter, measured in a few locales on Mars by
the same roving vehicles whose stunning photographic
products they had just seen advertised. Devi had never
remarried, although she had made it plain there were some
who pursued her. Lately she had been seeing a scientist in
Bombay whom she described as a "computer wallah."
Walking a little farther on, they found themselves in the
Cour Napoleon, the interior courtyard of the Louvre Museum.
In its center was the newly completed and wildly
controversial pyramidal entrance, and in high niches around
the courtyard were sculptural representations of the heroes
of French civilization. Captioned under each statue of a
revered man-they could see little evidence of revered
women-was his surname. Occasionally, letters were eroded-by
natural weathering, or in a few cases perhaps effaced by
some offended passerby. For one or two statues, it was
difficult to piece together who the savant had been. On the
statue that had evidently evoked the greatest public
resentment, only the letters LTA remained.
Although the Sun was setting and the Louvre was open until
mid-evening, they did not enter, but instead ambled along
the Seine embankment, following the river back along the
Quai d'Orsay. The proprietors of bookstallswere fastening
shutters and closing up shop for the day. For a while they
strolled on, arm in arm in the European manner.
A French couple was walking a few paces ahead of them, each
parent holding one hand of their daughter, a girl of about
four who would periodically launch herself off the pavement.
In her momentary suspension in zero g, she experienced, it
was apparent, something akin to ecstasy. The parents were
discussing the World Message Consortium, which was hardly a
coincidence since the newspapers had been full of little
else. The man was for building the Machine; it might create
new technologies and increase employment in France. The
woman was more cautious, but for reasons she had difficulty
articulating. The daughter, braids flying, was wholly
unconcerned about what to do with a blueprint from the
stars.
Der Heer, Kitz, and Honicutt had called a meeting at the
American Embassy early the following morning to prepare for
the arrival of the Secretary of State later in the day. The
meeting was to be classified and held in the Embassy's Black
Room, a chamber electromagnetically decoupled from the
outside world, making even sophisticated electronic
surveillance impossible. Or so it was claimed. Ellie thought
there might be instrumentation developed that could make an
end run around these precautions.
After spending the afternoon with Devi Sukhavati, she had
received the message at her hotel and had tried to call der
Heer, but was able only to reach Michael Kitz. She opposed a
classified meeting on this subject, she said; it was a
matter of principle. The Message was clearly intended for
the entire planet. Kitz replied that there were no data
being withheld from the rest of the world, at least by
Americans; and that the meeting was merely advisory-to
assist the United States in the difficult procedural
negotiations ahead. He appealed to her patriotism, to her
self-interest, and at last invoked again the Hadden
Decision. "For all I know, that thing is still sitting in
your safe unread. Read it," he urged.
She tried, again unsuccessfully, to reach der Heer. First
the man turns up everywhere in the Argus facility, like a
bad penny. He moves in with you in your apartment. You're
sure, for the first time in years, you're in love. The next
minute you can't even get him to answer the phone. She
decided to attend the meeting, if only to see Ken face to
face.
Kitz was enthusiastically for building the Machine, Drumlin
cautiously in favor, der Heer and Honicutt at least
outwardly uncommitted, and Peter Valerian in an agony of
indecision. Kitz and Drumlin were even talking about where
to build the thing. Freightage costs alone made manufacture
or even assembly on the far side of the Moon prohibitively
expensive, as Xi had guessed.
"If we use aerodynamic braking, it's cheaper to send a
kilogram to Phobos or Deimos than to the far side of the
Moon," Bobby Bui volunteered.
"Where the bell is Fobuserdeemus?" Kitz wanted to know.
`The moons of Mars. I was talking about aerodynamic braking
in the Martian atmosphere."
"And how long does it take to get to Phobos or Deimos?"
Drumlin was stirring his cup of coffee.
"Maybe a year, but once we have a fleet of interplanetary
transfer vehicles and the pipeline is full-"
"Compared with three days to the Moon?" sputtered Drumlin.
"Bui, stop wasting our time."
"It's only a suggestion," he protested. "You know, just
something to think about."
Der Heer seemed impatient, distracted. He was clearly under
great pressure-alternately avoiding her eyes and, she
thought, making some unspoken appeal. She took it as a
hopeful sign.
"If you want to worry about Doomsday Machines," Drumlin was
saying, "you have to worry about energy supplies. If it
doesn't have access to an enormous amount of energy, it
can't be a Doomsday Machine. So as long as the instructions
don't ask for a gigawatt nuclear reactor, I don't think we
have to worry about Doomsday Machines."
"Why are you guys in such a hurry to commit to
construction?" she asked Kitz and Drumlin collectively. They
were sitting next to each other with a plate of croissants
between them.
Kitz looked from Honicutt to der Heer before answering:
"This is a classified meeting," he began. "We all know you
won't pass anything said here on to your Russian friends.
It's like this: We don't know what the Machine will do, but
it's clear from Dave Drumlin's analysis that there's new
technology in it, probably new industries. Constructing the
Machine is bound to have economic value-1 mean, think of
what we'd learn. And it might have military value. At least
that's what the Russians are thinking. See, the Russians are
in a box. Here's a whole new area of technology they're
going to have to keep up with the U.S. on. Maybe there's
instructions for some decisive weapon in the Message, or
some economic advantage. They can't be sure. They'll have to
bust their economy trying. Did you notice how Baruda kept
referring to what was cost-effective? If all this Message
stuff went away-burn the data, destroy the telescopes-then
the Russians could maintain military parity. That's why
they're so cautious. So, of course, that's why we're gung ho
for it." He smiled.
Temperamentally, Kitz was bloodless, she thought; but he was
far from stupid. When he was cold and withdrawn, people
tended not to like him. So he had developed an occasional
veneer of urbane amiability. In Ellie's view, it was a
molecular monolayer thick.
"Now let me ask you a question," he continued. "Did you
catch Baruda's remark about withholding some of the data? Is
there any missing data?"
"Only from very early on," she replied. "Only from
the first few weeks, I'd guess. There were a few holes in
the Chinese coverage a little after that. There's still a
small amount of data that hasn't been exchanged, on all
sides. But I don't see any signs of serious holding back.
Anyway, we'll pick up any missing data swatches after the
Message recycles."
"If the Message recycles," Drumlin growled. Der Heer
moderated a discussion on contingency planning: what to do
when the primer was received; which American, German, and
Japanese industries to notify early about possible major
development projects; how to identify key scientists and
engineers for constructing the Machine, if the decision was
made to go ahead; and, briefly, the need to build enthusiasm
for the project in Congress and with the American public.
Der Heer hastened to add that these would be contingency
plans only, that no final decision was being made, and that
no doubt Soviet concerns about a Trojan Horse were at least
partly genuine. Kitz asked about the composition of "the
crew."
"They're asking us to put people in five upholstered
chairs. Which people? How do we decide? It'll probably have
to be an international crew. How many Americans? How many
Russians? Anybody else? We don't know what happens to those
five people when they sit down in those chairs, but we want
to have the best men for the job."
Ellie did not rise to the bait, and he continued. "Now a
major question is going to be who pays for what, who builds
what, who's in charge of overall systems integration. I
think we can do some real horse trading on this, in exchange
for significant American representation in the crew."
"But we still want to send the best possible people," der
Heer noted, a little obviously.
"Sure," returned Kitz, "but what do we mean by `best'?
Scientists? People with military intelligence backgrounds?
Physical strength and endurance? Patriotism? (That's not a
dirty word, you know.) And then"-he looked up from buttering
another croissant to glance directly at Ellie- "there's the
question of sex. Sexes, I mean. Do we send only men? If it's
men and women, there has to be more of one sex than the
other. There's five places, an odd number. Are all the crew
members going to work together okay? If we go ahead with
this project, there's gonna be a lot of tough negotiation."
"This doesn't sound right to me," said Ellie. "This isn't
some ambassadorship you buy with a campaign contribution.
This is serious business. Also, do you want some
muscle-bound moron up there, some kid in his twenties who
knows nothing about how the world works-just how to run a
respectable hundred-yard dash and how to obey orders? Or
some political hack? That can't be what this trip is about."
"No, you're right." Kitz smiled. "I think we'll find people
who satisfy all our criteria."
Der Heer, the bags under his eyes making him look almost
haggard, adjourned the meeting. He managed to give Ellie a
small private smile, but it was all lips, no teeth. The
Embassy limousines were waiting to take them back to the
Elys俥 Palace.
"I'll tell you why it would be better to send Russians,"
Vaygay was saying. "When you Americans were opening up your
country-pioneers, trappers, Indian scouts, all that-you were
unopposed, at least by anyone at your level of technology.
You raced across your continent from the Atlantic to the
Pacific. After a while, you expected everything would be
easy. Our situation was different. We were conquered by the
Mongols. Their horse technology was much superior to ours.
When we expanded eastward we were careful. We never crossed
the wilderness and expected it would be easy. We're more
adjusted to adversity than you are. Also, Americans are used
to being ahead techno-logically. We're used to catching up
technologically. Now, everybody on Earth is a Russian-you
understand, I mean in our historical position. This mission
needs Soviets more than it needs Americans." Merely meeting
with her alone entailed certain risks for Vaygay-and for her
as well, as Kitz had gone out of his way to remind her.
Sometimes, during a scientific meeting in America or Europe,
Vaygay would be permitted to spend an afternoon with her.
More often he was accompanied by colleagues or a RGB
baby-sitter-who would be described as a translator, even
when his English was clearly inferior to Vaygay's; or as a
scientist from the secretariat of this or that Academy
commission, except that his knowledge of the scientific
matters often proved superficial. Vaygay would shake his
head when asked about them. But by and large, he considered
the baby-sitters a part of the game, the price you must pay
when they let you visit the West, and more than once she
thought she detected a note of affection in Vaygay's voice
when he talked to the baby-sitter: To go to a foreign
country and pretend to be expert in a subject you know
poorly must be filled with anxiety. Perhaps, in their heart
of hearts, the baby-sitters detested their assignment as
much as Vaygay did.
They were seated at the same window table at Chez Dieux. A
distinct chill was in the air, a premonition of winter, and
a young man wearing a long blue scarf as his only concession
to the cold strode briskly past the tubs of chilled oysters
outside the window. From Lunacharsky's continuing (and
uncharacteristically) guarded remarks, she deduced disarray
in the Soviet delegation. The Soviets were concerned that
the Machine might somehow redound to the strategic advantage
of the United States in the five-decade-old global
competition. Vaygay had in fact been shocked by Baruda's
question about burning the data and destroying the radio
telescopes. He had had no advance knowledge of Baruda's
position. The Soviets had played a vital role in gathering
the Message, with the largest longitude coverage of any
nation, Vaygay stressed, and they had the only serious
oceangoing radio telescopes. They would expect a major role
in whatever came next. Ellie assured him that, as far as she
was concerned, they should have such a role. "Look, Vaygay,
they know from our television transmis- sions that the Earth
rotates, and that there are many different nations. The
Olympic broadcast alone might have told them that.
Subsequent transmissions from other nations would have
nailed it down. So if they're as good as we think, they
could have phased the transmission with the Earth's
rotation, so only one nation got the Message. They chose not
to do that. They want the Message to be received by
everybody on the planet. They're expecting the Machine to be
built by the whole planet. This can't be an all-American or
an all-Russian project. It's not what our . . . client
wants."
But she was not sure, she told him, that she would be
playing any role in decisions on Machine construction or
crew selection. She was returning to the United States the
next day, mainly to get on top of the new radio data from
the past few weeks. The Consortium plenary sessions seemed
interminable, and no closing date had been set. Vaygay had
been asked by his people to stay on at least a little
longer. The Foreign Minister had just arrived and was now
leading the Soviet delegation.
"I'm worried all this will end badly," he said. `There are
so many things that can go wrong. Technological failures.
Political failures. Human failures. And even if we get
through all that, if we don't have a war because of the
Machine, if we build it correctly and without blowing
ourselves up, I'm still worried."
"About what? How do you mean?"
"The best that can happen is we will be made fools
of."
"Who will?"
"Arroway, don't you understand?" A vein in Lunacharsky's
neck throbbed. "I'm amazed you don't see it. The Earth is a
. . . ghetto. Yes, a ghetto. All human beings are trapped
here. We have heard vaguely that there are big cities out
there beyond the ghetto, with broad boulevards filled with
droshkys and beautiful perfumed women in furs. But the
cities are too far away, and we are too poor ever to go
there, even the richest of us. Anyway, we know they don't
want us. That's why they've left us in this pathetic little
village in the first place.

"And now along comes an invitation. As Xi said. Fancy,
elegant. They have sent us an engraved card and an empty
droshky. We are to send five villagers and the droshky will
carry them to-who knows?-Warsaw. Or Moscow. Maybe even
Paris. Of course, some are tempted to go. There will always
be people who are flattered by the invitation, or who think
it is a way to escape our shabby village.
"And what do you think will happen when we get there? Do you
think the Grand Duke will have us to dinner? Will the
President of the Academy ask us interesting questions about
daily life in our filthy shtetl? Do you imagine the Russian
Orthodox Metropolitan will engage us in learned discourse on
comparative religion?
"No, Arroway. We will gawk at the big city, and they will
laugh at us behind their hands. They will exhibit us to the
curious. The more backward we are the better they'll feel,
the more reassured they'll be.
"It's a quota system. Every few centuries, five of us get to
spend a weekend on Vega. Have pity on the provincials, and
make sure they know who their betters are."

--
... In 2345, on the 10th anniversary of the Shivan attack
on Ross 128, the Vasudan emperor Khonsu II addressed the
newly formed GTVA General Assembly. The emperor inaugurated
an ambiguous and unprecedented joint endeavor: the GTVA
Colossus...

※ 来源:．The unknown SPACE bbs.mit.edu．[FROM: 204.91.54.100]

--
Don't ever become a pessimist, Ira; a pessimist is correct
oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun--
and neither can stop the march of events.

--
☆ 来源:．哈工大紫丁香 bbs.hit.edu.cn．[FROM: baohf.bbs@smth.org]

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