Star's Reach (31 page)

Nineteen: A Different World

“There was a long argument about that in the
old world,” said Eleen. We were supposed to be eating lunch, but
nobody was paying much attention to the bread and soup, and Tashel
Ban wasn’t even pretending. He was over by the printer, muttering
bits of hot language under his breath when the thing tried to
jam.

“About numbers?” Berry asked.

“About math.” Scholars usually say
“mathematics,” but Eleen stopped saying that the second or third
time one of us gave her a blank look. “One side used to say that
math was universal, so every intelligent species in the universe
would end up understanding it the same way. The other side said no,
mathematics are just the way our brains work, and so every species
would have its own math. In the old world, most scholars agreed
with the first side, but the other side was right—at least about
the Cetans.”

“But how did that stop them from figuring out
what the Cetans were saying?” I asked.

“Because the first messages we sent them were
all about numbers.” She rapped on the table: once, twice, three
times, five times, seven times. “What do those have in common?”

“They’re prime numbers,” Berry said at once.
Eleen gave him a startled look, and he went on, as though he was
embarrassed: “My teacher at Nashul taught us about those.”

“Good,” Eleen said. “Yes, and that’s one of
the things they sent the Cetans, because they figured that any
intelligent species ought to recognize them—but they didn’t.
Meanwhile they were sending us the equivalent in their math,
expecting us to recognize them, and we didn’t. It took a hundred
years before anybody on either side realized that the problem was
that we think in numbers and they don’t.”

I tried to get my thoughts to fit around that
one. “They don’t even count on their fingers?”

“Cetans don’t have fingers.”

“Well, but—”

“But that’s just it. We’re born with so many
fingers—five, most of us—and we live in a world where things come
in nice neat packages you can count: four oranges, ten trees,
things like that. They don’t. If a Cetan wants to grab something—”
Her hand mimed flowing outwards. “—it grows as many fingers as it
needs, and when it doesn’t need them, they go away. Everything that
matters to them is like that. That’s why their math starts from
flows, not from numbers.

“We’ve got math that can handle flows. It’s
called calculus, and there are maybe a few hundred people in Meriga
who understand it, but we’ve got it. They’ve got math that can
handle numbers. It’s very advanced math to them—as far as anyone
here could figure out, they got there by imagining what happened
when a flow got slower and slower, until it approached what we call
zero—but they can do it. It took close to a hundred years for both
sides to figure out that these complicated relationships they were
finding in each other’s signals were what the others thought was
very simple, basic, easy math.”

“Their technology is the same way,” Tashel
Ban said, coming to the table with a stack of papers in his hands;
the printer had finally given up jamming and done its job. “After
the math issue got sorted out, the people here tried to explain to
the Cetans how we build radios, and asked them how they did it.” He
handed me my copy, and I glanced at the words on the top of the
front page: BRIEFING PAPER 4: OVERVIEW OF CETAN MATHEMATICS AND
TECHNOLOGY. “It turns out that they mix up something the
consistency of thick paint out of metal salts and start putting it
down in layers on a base, sprinkling in other compounds here and
there, and letting it dry a bit more or less as they go. When it’s
done, it’s a solid mass that takes in radio waves and electricity,
and puts out the magnetic fields they talk with, but nobody here
could figure out the details. The interesting thing is that they
couldn’t make sense of our circuits either—the way we split up
current into different resistors, capacitors, tubes, and so on
doesn’t make any sense to them, and their math can’t follow
it.”

“Can their radios,” Thu asked then, “do
anything ours cannot?” Everyone else looked at him. He hadn’t
spoken yet in the discussion, because he didn’t need to. Anything
we found out about Cetan technology brought us closer to the choice
between his alternative and Tashel Ban’s. That wasn’t a choice any
of us wanted to make in a hurry, if we had to make it at all.

Tashel Ban answered after a moment. “Nothing
any of the papers has mentioned so far. Electrons and radio waves
work there the way they work here—at least, that’s the theory, and
there’s nothing to suggest otherwise. It’s just the way they
understand radio, and the math behind radio, that doesn’t make
sense to us.”

“Nor should it,” Eleen said. “It’s a
different world.”

I read the briefing paper right then, even
though my soup was getting cold. At this point I’ve read enough
papers about the Cetans that I can follow them pretty well even
when I don’t know what they’re talking about, and this was no
different; I couldn’t tell you a thing about most of the
technologies the paper mentioned, but there were two things that
came through. One was that the Cetans can do pretty much the same
sort of things that we can, but trying to figure out how is the
sort of thing that makes scholars jump in the river and drown
themselves.

The other thing was that the Cetans don’t
seem to do the things that the old world did and we don’t do any
more. The scholars who wrote the paper weren’t sure whether that’s
because they hadn’t figured out how, or because there’s no way to
do those on Tau Ceti II, or because Cetans have more common sense
than human beings do, but the Cetans don’t seem to have cars or
airplanes or anything like them. They get their electricity from
sunlight and wind and water—well, gasoline, but there it’s the same
thing—the way we do, and they aren’t lobbing any false stars up
into the sky or building nukes or anything like that. Why is hard
to say, because Eleen’s right; it’s a different world.

We finally ate lunch, and then the rest of us
told Eleen and Tashel Ban that it wasn’t going to do anybody any
good if they worked themselves to death, and they agreed to take a
day or two off. Berry, who’s been learning how to run the computer
from Tashel Ban, promised that he’d keep an eye on it in case
anything happened, and the rest of us bullied the two of them into
getting some rest. I don’t know whether Tashel Ban slept, since he
wasn’t the one I was supposed to bully, but Eleen did the sensible
thing, settled down on our bed and slept until dinner.

At dinner Tashel Ban and Thu swapped stories
about Jinya pirates they’d tangled with, and everyone else ate and
drank and hoped that we wouldn’t find anything that would force the
two of them to take care of their argument the old hard way, knife
in hand, in a chalk circle four meedas across. We lounged around
for a while, talking about nothing in particular, and then Eleen
and I went to the room we share and things pretty much followed
from there.

Afterwards we lay curled up around each
other, feeling warm and comfortable and not saying much for a
while. I was hoping Eleen would fall asleep, because I was pretty
sure she still needed more rest, but instead she shifted and said,
“All those books about flying saucers.”

“What about them?”

“I can’t help thinking about the people who
spent their lives waiting for the aliens to land, back in the old
world. There were millions of them, you know.”

I didn’t, not until then. “The government had
that many people fooled?”

“It was more than that.” She settled on her
back. “There’s a thing called the Big Bang effect.”

“That sounds fun,” I said, and kissed the
nearer of her breasts. She laughed and said, “Not that kind. In the
old world, right up until a few years before it ended, scholars
believed that the whole universe started out with a big explosion:
the Big Bang.”

I gave her a puzzled look. “How could that be
the beginning? If there’s an explosion, you have to have something
to explode first.”

“I know. That’s what they thought, though,
and they had reasons for it. Did you ever hear something go by you
fast, making noise?” She moved a hand past my head and whistled,
and the whistle dropped from high to low as the hand went by.

“Sure.”

“That’s called the Doppler effect—the way the
sound is higher in pitch when it’s coming toward you, and lower
when it’s moving away. The same thing happens with light, and when
scholars studied the stars, they found that the light from the
stars is redder—lower in pitch—than it would be if they were still.
So they figured all the stars are flying apart, like bits of stuff
from an explosion. Do you see?”

I nodded. “But...”

“There’s more. There was also a theory about
the way the universe was put together, written by one of the most
famous scholars back then, a man named Einstein. There were many
ways to make the math in the theory work out, but the simplest way
only works if the universe is getting bigger.” I gave her a baffled
look, and she went on: “Again, think of an explosion. Something
small gets much bigger.”

“But...” I tried again.

She put a hand over my mouth. “And some
scholars figured out that outer space had just a bit of heat in it,
more than they thought it should have, and they decided that the
heat was left over from the explosion. So everyone thought, well,
the stars are moving away from us, and the theory of relativity
works best in an exploding universe, and here’s the heat from the
explosion—it’s got to be true.”

She took her hand off my mouth, and I said,
“But none of those proves that.”

“Of course not.” Then, smiling: “Why
not?”

“Because something else could have caused
each of those things.”

“Exactly.” She kissed me, then said: “If A
causes B, and B shows up, that doesn’t prove that A must have
happened—not unless you know for certain that A’s the only thing
that can cause B. People forget that. They forget it all the faster
if A can cause B, and C, and D, and all three of those things show
up—it’s easy to think that A’s got to be the cause.

“Then if things come up that don’t fit the
model, people don’t weigh things evenly; they don’t say, B and C
and D suggest that A happened, but E and F and G and H suggest that
it didn’t. They take each piece of contrary evidence one at a time:
here’s E, but E by itself doesn’t outweigh B and C and D, and
neither does F by itself, and so on. So you can end up with far
more evidence against a theory than for it, but nobody notices,
because they’re taking the evidence for the theory all together,
and the evidence against the theory as though each piece stands all
by itself. That’s what scholars nowadays call the Big Bang
effect.”

“So how did they figure out that the Big Bang
didn’t happen?”

“A scholar figured out that there’s something
else that makes starlight look redder when it comes from further
away. It wasn’t the Doppler effect after all. Then another scholar
took a second look at Einstein’s theory, and it turned out that
some puzzles that nobody had been able to solve were easy to work
out once you realized the universe wasn’t getting bigger. The heat
had other explanations, too, but nobody had time to figure out
which was right, because that’s as far as they got when the old
world ended.”

“There must have been a mother of a lot of
embarrassed scholars.”

“It was much worse than that.” Her face went
somber. “The Big Bang had become the foundation of half a dozen
sciences. People spent their entire lives working on theories that
depended on it—and suddenly there they were. I don’t think any of
them killed themselves, but there were scholars who kept on
insisting that it was all wrong and the Big Bang was real until
they went back into Mam Gaia’s belly. It was that or admit that
they’d wasted their lives.”

I realized then where she was going with all
this. “And the people who believed in the aliens made the same kind
of mistake.”

“Yes, but there was even more reason for them
to make it. I was taught that the people who believed in flying
saucers thought the aliens were about to land and solve all our
problems for us. When the old world was ending, most people hoped
that something like that would happen—that somebody would somehow
fix everything, so that the old world didn’t have to end. So every
light in the sky, and every story about—what was that place in the
desert?”

“Roswell.”

“Yes. Every story about Roswell, every faked
picture and faked sighting the government put into circulation, and
everything else, had to add up to aliens visiting Mam Gaia, or the
last scrap of hope they had was gone.” She shook her head. “So they
waited, and waited, and waited, and the flying saucers never
landed. For all I know there are still people waiting for that, the
way the Old Believers wait for their god to come back.”

I thought I could name at least one who was
still waiting for the aliens, but right then Eleen turned to face
me and reached for me. “Waiting?” she asked.

“Not any more,” I told her, and I didn’t,
either.

Afterwards, we curled up again, and a little
after that she dozed off. I waited until I was sure she was good
and sound asleep, then slipped out of bed and got some clothes back
on.

The hallway outside the room we share was as
hushed as it must have been in the years between when Anna’s people
left it and when we arrived. I closed the door as quietly as I
could and went down to the room where the alien-books were. It was
dark and empty. I turned on the light, and noticed that there was a
gap in one of the shelves where I’d put the alien-books earlier
that day. It was just about wide enough for one large book. I
looked at the gap for a moment, and wondered who else was reading
about aliens—Anna, or one of the others?