“Ellie, how can you be so sure your story really happened? If, as you claim, all this isn’t a hoax, couldn’t it be a…delusion? It’s painful to consider, I know. Nobody wants to think they’ve gone a little crazy. Considering the strain you’ve been under, though, it’s no big deal. And if the only alternative is criminal conspiracy…Maybe you want to carefully think this one through.” She had already done so.
Later that day she met with Kitz alone. A bargain had in effect been proposed. She had no intention of going along with it. But Kitz was prepared for that possibility as well.
“You never liked me from the first,” he said. “But I’m going to rise above that. We’re going to do something really fair.
“We’ve already issued a news release saying that the Machine just didn’t work when we tried to activate it. Naturally, we’re trying to understand what went wrong. With all the other failures, in Wyoming and Uzbekistan, nobody is doubting this one.
“Then in a few weeks we’ll announce that we’re still not getting anywhere. We’ve done the best we could. The Machine is too expensive to keep working on. Probably we’re just not smart enough to figure it out yet. Also, there’s still some danger, after all. We always knew that. The Machine might blow up or something. So all in all, it’s best to put the Machine Project on ice–at least for a while. It’s not that we didn’t try.
“Hadden and his friends would oppose it, of course, but as he’s been taken from us…”
“He’s only three hundred kilometers overhead,” she pointed out.
“Oh, haven’t you heard? Sol died just around the time the Machine was activated. Funny how it happened. Sorry, I should have told you. I forgot you were…close to him.”
She did not know whether to believe Kitz. Hadden was in his fifties and had certainly seemed in good physical health. She would pursue this topic later. “And what, in your fantasy, becomes of us?” she asked. “Us? Who’s `us’?”
“Us. The five of us. The ones who went aboard the Machine that you claim never worked.”
“Oh. After a little more debriefing you’ll be free to leave. I don’t think any of you will be foolish enough to tell this cock-and-bull story on the outside. But just to be safe, we’re preparing some psychiatric dossiers on the five of you. Profiles. Low-key. You’ve always been a little rebellious, mad at the system–whichever system you grew up in. It’s okay. It’s good for people to be independent. We encourage that, especially in scientists. But the strain of the last few years has been trying–not actually disabling, but trying. Especially for Doctors Arroway and Lunacharsky. First they’re involved in finding the Message, decrypting it, and convincing the governments to build the Machine. Then problems in construction, industrial sabotage, sitting through an Activation that goes nowhere…It’s been tough. All work and no play. And scientists are highly strung anyway. If you’ve all become a little unhinged at the failure of the Machine, everybody will be sympathetic. Understanding. But nobody’ll believe your story. Nobody. If you behave yourselves, there’s no reason that the dossiers ever have to be released.
“It’ll be clear that the Machine is still here. We’re having a few wire service photographers in to photograph it as soon as the roads are open. We’ll show them the Machine didn’t go anywhere. And the crew? The crew is naturally disappointed. Maybe a little disheartened. They don’t want to talk to the press just yet.
“Don’t you think it’s a neat plan?” He smiled. He wanted her to acknowledge the beauty of the scheme. She said nothing.
“Don’t you think we’re being very reasonable, after spending two trillion dollars on that pile of shit? We could put you away for life, Arroway. But we’re letting you go free. You don’t even have to put up bail. I think we’re behaving like gentlemen. It’s the Spirit of the Millennium. It’s Machindo.”
CHAPTER 22
Gilgamesh
That it will never come again Is what makes life so sweet.
-EMILY DICKINSON
Poem Number 1741
In this time–heralded expansively as the Dawn of a New Age–burial in space was an expensive commonplace. Commercially available and a competitive business, it appealed especially to those who, in former times, would have requested that their remains be scattered over the county of their birth, or at least the mill town from which they had extracted their first fortune. But now you could arrange for your remains to circumnavigate the Earth forever–or as close to forever as matters in the workaday world. You need only insert a short codicil in your will. Then–assuming, of course, that you have the wherewithal–when you die and are cremated, your ashes are compressed into a tiny almost toy like bier, on which is embossed your name and your dates, a short memorial verse, and the religious symbol of your choice (choose one of three). Along with hundreds of similar miniature coffins, it is then boosted up and dumped out at an intermediate altitude, expeditiously avoiding both the crowded corridors of geosynchronous orbit and the disconcerting atmospheric drag of low-Earth orbit. Instead, your ashes triumphantly circle the planet of your birth in the midst of the Van Allen I radiation belts, a proton blizzard where no satellite in its right mind would risk going to in the first place. But ashes do not mind.
At these heights, the Earth had become enveloped in the remains of its leading citizens, and an uninstructed visitor from a distant world might rightly believe he had chanced upon some somber space-age necropolis. The hazardous location of this mortuary would explain the absence of memorial visits from grieving relatives.
S. R. Hadden, contemplating this image, had been appalled at what minor portions of immortality these deceased worthies had been willing to settle for. All their organic parts–brains, hearts, everything that distinguished them as a person–were atomized in their cremations. There isn’t any of you left after cremation, he thought, just powdered bone, hardly enough even for a very advanced civilization to reconstruct you from the remains. And then, for good measure, your coffin is placed smack in the Van Alien belts, where even your ashes get slowly fried.
How much better if a few of your cells could be preserved. Real living cells, with the DNA intact. He visualized a corporation that would, for a healthy fee, freeze a little of your epithelial tissue and orbit it high–well above the Van Alien belts, maybe even higher than geosynchronous orbit. No reason to die first. Do it now, while it’s on your mind. Then, at least, alien molecular biologists–or their terrestrial counterparts of the far future– could reconstruct you, clone you, more or less from scratch. You would rub your eyes, stretch, and wake up in the year ten million. Or even if nothing was done with your remains, there would still be in existence multiple copies of your genetic instructions. You would be alive in principle. In either case it could be said that you would live forever.
But as Hadden ruminated on the matter further, this scheme also seemed too modest. Because that wasn’t really you, a few cells scraped off the soles of your feet. At best they could reconstruct your physical form. But that’s not the same as you. If you were really serious, you should include family photographs, a punctiliously detailed autobiography, all the books and tapes you’ve enjoyed, and as much else about yourself as possible. Favorite brands of after-shave lotion, for example, or diet cola. It was supremely egotistical, he knew, and he loved it. After all, the age had produced a sustained eschatological delirium. It was natural to think of your own end as everyone else was contemplating the demise of the species, or the planet, or the massed celestial ascent of the Elect.
You couldn’t expect the extraterrestrials to know English. If they’re to reconstruct you, they’d have to know your language. So you must include a kind of translation, a problem Hadden enjoyed. It was almost the obverse of the Message decryption problem.
All of this required a substantial space capsule, so substantial that you need no longer be limited to mere tissue samples. You might as well send your body whole. If you could quick-freeze yourself after death, so to say, there was a subsidiary advantage. Maybe enough of you would be in working order that whoever found you could do better than just reconstructing you. Maybe they could bring you back to life–of course, after fixing whatever it was that you had died of. If you languished a little before freezing, though– because, say, the relatives had not realized you were dead yet–prospects for revival diminished. What would really make sense, he thought, was to freeze someone just before death. That would make eventual resuscitation much more likely, although there was probably limited demand for this service.
But then why just before dying? Suppose you knew you had only a year or two to live. Wouldn’t it be better to be frozen immediately, Hadden mused–before the meat goes bad? Even then–he sighed–no matter what the nature of the deteriorating illness, it might still be irremediable after you were revived; you would be frozen for a geological age, and then awakened only to die promptly from a melanoma or a cardiac infarction about which the extraterrestrials might know nothing.