Blind Lake (27 page)

Marguerite arrived at the community center auditorium at 12:45, and when she spotted Ari Weingart looking for her in the lobby crowd she turned to Chris and said, “Oh, God. This is a mistake.”

“The lecture?”

“Not the lecture. Going on stage with Ray. Having to look at him, having to listen to him. I wish I could—oh, hi, Ari.”

Ari took a firm grip on her arm. “This way, Marguerite. You’re up first, did I mention that? Then Ray, then Lisa Shapiro from Geology and Climatology, then we throw it open for audience questions.”

She took a last look back at Chris, who shrugged and gave her what she guessed was a supportive smile.

Really, she thought, trailing Ari through a staff-only door into the backstage dimness, this
is
crazy. Not just because she would be forced to appear with Ray but because it would be a charade for both of them. Both pretending they hadn’t seen clues about the Crossbank disaster (whatever it was). Both pretending there had never been a confrontation over Tess. Pretending they didn’t despise each other. Pretending, not to civility, but at least to indifference.

Knowing it could end at any time.

This is a prescription for disaster, Marguerite thought. Not only that, but her “lecture” was a series of notes she had made for herself and never really planned to reveal—speculation about the UMa47 project that verged on the heretical. But if the crisis was as bad, as potentially deadly, as it seemed, why waste time on insincerity? Why not, for once in her life, stop calculating career goals and simply say what she thought?

It had seemed like a good idea, at least until she found herself onstage behind a closed curtain with Lisa Shapiro sitting between her and her ex-husband. She avoided his eyes but couldn’t shake a claustrophobic awareness of his presence.

He was impeccably dressed, she had noticed on the way in. Suit and tie, creases razor-sharp. A little pursed smile on his face, accentuated by his jowls and his receding chin, like a man who smelled something unpleasant but was trying to be polite about it. A sheaf of paper in his hands.

To the left of her there was a podium, and Ari stood there now signaling for someone to raise the curtain. Already? Marguerite checked her watch. One on the dot. Her mouth was dry.

The auditorium accommodated an audience of two thousand, Ari had told her. They had admitted roughly half that number, a mixture of working scientists, support staff, and casual labor. Ari had arranged four of these events since the beginning of the quarantine, and they had all been well-attended and well-received. There was even a guy with a camera doing live video for Blind Lake TV.

How civilized we are in our cage, Marguerite thought. How easily we distract ourselves from the knowledge of the bodies outside the gates.

Now the curtain was drawn, the stage illuminated, the audience a shadowy void more sensed than seen. Now Ari was introducing her. Now, in the strange truncation of time that always happened when she addressed an audience, Marguerite herself was at the podium, thanking Ari, thanking the crowd, fumbling with the cue display on her pocket server.

“The question—”

Her voice cracked into falsetto. She cleared her throat.

“The question I want to pose today is, have we been deceived by our own rigorously deconstructive approach to the observed peoples of UMa47/E?”

That was dry enough to make the laypeople in the audience feel sleepy, but she saw a couple of familiar faces from Interpretation coagulate into frowns.

“This is deliberately provocative language—the observed
peoples
. From the beginning, the Crossbank and Blind Lake projects have sought to purge themselves of anthropocentrism: the tendency to invest other species with human characteristics. This is the fallacy that tempts us to describe a panther cub as ‘cute’ or an eagle as ‘noble,’ and we have been doing it ever since we learned to stand on two legs. We live in an enlightened age, however, an age that has learned to see and to value other living things as they are, not as we wish them to be. And the long and creditable history of science has taught us, if nothing else, to look carefully before we judge—to judge, if we must, based on what we see, not what we would prefer to believe.

“And so, we tell ourselves, the subjects of our study at 47 Ursa Majoris should be called ‘creatures’ or ‘organisms,’ not ‘peoples.’ We must presume nothing about them. We must not bring to the analytical table our fears or our desires, our hopes or our dreams, our linquistic prejudices, our bourgeois metanarratives, or our cultural baggage of imagined aliens. Check Mr. Spock at the door, please, and leave H.G. Wells in the library. If we see a city we must not call it a city, or call it that only provisionally, because the word ‘city’ implies Carthage and Rome and Berlin and Los Angeles, products of human biology, human ingenuity, and thousands of years of accumulated human expertise. We remind ourselves that the observed city may not be a city at all; it may be more analogous to an anthill, a termite tower, or a coral reef.”

When she paused she could hear the echo of her voice, a basso resonance returning from the back of the hall.

“In other words, we try very hard not to deceive ourselves. And by and large we do a good job of it. The barrier between ourselves and the peoples of UMa47/E is painfully obvious. Anthropologists have long told us that culture is a collection of shared symbols, and we share none with the subjects of our study.
Omnis cultura ex cultura
, and the two cultures are as imiscible, we presume, as oil and water. Our epigenetic behaviors and theirs have no point of intersection.

“The downside is that we’re forced to begin from first principles. We can’t talk about a chthonic ‘architecture,’ say, since we would have to strip from that seemingly innocent word all its buttresses and beams of human intent and human esthetics—without which the word ‘architecture’ becomes insupportable, an unstable structure. Nor dare we speak of chthonic ‘art’ or ‘work,’ ‘leisure’ or ‘science.’ The list is endless, and what we are left with is simply raw behavior. Behavior to be scrutinized and catalogued in all its minutiae.

“We say the Subject travels here, performs this or that action, is relatively slow or relatively fast, turns left or right, eats such-and-such, at least if we don’t balk at the word ‘eats’ as creeping anthropocentrism; maybe ‘ingests’ is better. It means the same thing, but it looks better in the written report. ‘Subject ingested a bolus of vegetable material.’ Actually, he ate a plant—you know it and I know it, but a peer reviewer a
Nature
would never let it pass.” There was some cautious laughter. Behind her, Ray snorted derisively and audibly. “We patrol the connotation of every word we speak with the censorious instinct of a Bowdler. All in the name of science, and often for very good reasons.

“But I wonder if we aren’t blinding ourselves at the same time.

“What is missing from our discourse about the peoples of UMa47/E, I would suggest, is narrative.

“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 innovative. Which is not to say it will be unfailingly rational. Quite the opposite, perhaps.

“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.