‘I have to keep with my group. Sorry.’
Too bad. You’re an attractive lady. Korean, are you? We’re a bit short of adjuncts to living over here. Monastic is what we are.’
‘Then leave your monastery and lecture us on particle physics.’
‘You might find it rather dull,’ he said. Then he smiled. ‘It’s a good idea. I’ll see what I can do. I’ll be in touch.’
At that stage, I did not realise how prophetic those words were.
We were waiting in the reception area for our buggybus to finish recharging. I started talking to the technician on duty, and asked her about the small white tongues we had seen outside the building.
‘Oh, the Watchers? I can show you them on the monitors, if you like.’
I went behind her desk to take a look at the surveillance system. It clearly showed the white tongues, unmoving outside.
The technician flicked from screen to screen. The tongues surrounded the establishment. Behind them, Olympus Mons could be seen distantly, dominating its region.
‘You get a clearer idea of them when I switch over to infrared,’ said the technician, so doing.
I exclaimed in alarm. The tongues were no longer tongues. They reminded me, much more formidably, of gravestones I had seen in an old churchyard, tall and unmoving. They formed almost a solid wall about the establishment. It seemed they were covered in a kind of oily, scaly skin of a dull green colour. I asked if they were going to break in.
‘They’re quite harmless. They don’t interfere. We think they’re observing. They don’t get in anyone’s way.’
As we looked, a maintenance engineer came into view on the screens, suited up and shouldering welding equipment. As if to confirm the duty technician’s words, the Watchers flicked back into the regolith and were gone, offering him no impediment. He moved out of view and the tongues at once returned.
I could not help feeling cold fear running through my body.
‘So there is life on Mars,’ I said.
‘But not necessarily Martian life,’ the technician said. ‘Sit down for a minute, pet. You look terribly pale. I’m only joking. There’s no life on Mars. We all know that.’
But jokes frequently hold bitter kernels of truth. Knowledge of the Watchers spread and caused alarm. But custom dulls the edge of many things. Whether alive or not, they made no hostile moves. We became used to their presence and finally ignored them.
After my return from Thorgeson and company, I told Kathi over the Ambient how impressed I was by Thorgeson’s intellect. She asked what he had said.
I tried to explain that he had claimed the consciousness of humanity, or of a species that might supersede us, was – what had he said? – an integral function of the universe.
She laughed scornfully. ‘Who do you think he got that idea from?’ she asked.
After a silence, she said, ‘If we cannot behave in a better and more Utopian way, then we deserve to be superseded, don’t you think?’
I changed the subject and spoke about the tongues surrounding the science unit.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said lightly. ‘We shall find out their function in good time. Do you know about quantum state-reduction? No? I’m reading up about it now. It’s the collapse of the wave function, such as Schrodinger’s cat – you know all about Schrodinger’s cat, Cang Hai?’
‘Of course I’ve heard of it.’
‘Well then, the collapse of the wave function resolves the problem of that poor hypothetical quantum-superposed moggie. It becomes either a dead cat or a live cat, instead of being in a quantum superposition of both a dead and an alive cat.’
‘I see … Is that better or worse for the cat?’
She scowled at me. ‘Don’t try to be funny, dear. Such quantum superpositions occur in the electron displacements in a quantcomp. The definitive experiments conducted by Heitelman early this century made it clear that state-reduction actually takes place when it is the internal gravitational influences that become significant. You see where this leads us?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m afraid I don’t, Kathi.’
‘I’m working on it, babe!’ With a cheery wave of its hand her image faded from view.