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-Soviet 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 patriotically 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, Surindar’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 bookstalls were 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 electro magnetically 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.