“You mean we haven't completed the Test yet?” He did not answer.
“Well, explain it to me.” She said this in some distress. “Some of us have spent years decrypting the Message and building the Machine. Arent you going to tell me what it's all about?”
“You've become a real scrapper,” he said, as if he really were her father, as if he were comparing his last recollections of her with her present, still incompletely developed self.
He gave her hair an affectionate tousle. She remembered that from childhood also. But how could they, 30,000 light-years from Earth, know her father's affectionate gestures in long-ago and faraway Wisconsin?
Suddenly she knew.
“Dreams,” she said. “Last night, when we were all dreaming, you were inside our heads, right? You drained everything we know.”
“We only made copies. I think everything that used to be in your head is still there. Take a look. Tell me if anything's missing.” He grinned, and went 0n.
“There was so much your television programs didn't tell us. Oh, we could figure out your technological level pretty well, and a lot more about you. But there's so much more to your species than that, things we couldn't possibly learn indirectly. I recognize you may feel some breach of privacy-”
“You're joking.”
“—but we have so little time.”
“You mean the Test is over? We answered all your questions while we were asleep last night? So? Did we pass or fail?”
“It isn't like that,” he said. “It isn't like sixth grade.” She had been in the sixth grade the year he died.
“Don't think of us as some interstellar sheriff gunning down outlaw civilizations. Think of us more as the Office of the Galactic Census. We collect information. I know you think nobody has anything to learn from you because you're technologically so backward. But there are other merits to a civilization.”
“What merits?”
“Oh, music. Lovingkindness. (I like that word.) Dreams. Humans are very good at dreaming, although you'd never know it from your television. There are cultures all over the Galaxy that trade dreams.”
“You operate an interstellar cultural exchange? That's what this is all about? You don't care if some rapacious, bloodthirsty civilization develops interstellar spaceflight?”
“I said we admire lovingkindness.”
“If the Nazis had taken over the world, our world, and then developed interstellar spaceflight, wouldn't you have stepped in?”
“You'd be surprised how rarely something like that happens. In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always. It's their nature. They can't help it. In such a case, our job would be to leave them alone. To make sure that no one bothers them. To let them work out their destiny.”
“Then why didn't you leave us alone? I'm not complaining, mind you. I'm only curious as to how the Office of the Galactic Census works. The first thing you picked up from us was that Hitler broadcast. Why did you make contact?”
“The picture, of course, was alarming. We could tell you were in deep trouble. But the music told us something else. The Beethoven told us there was hope. Marginal cases are our specialty. We thought you could use a little help. Really, we can offer only a little. You understand. There are certain limitations imposed by causality.”
He had crouched down, running his hands through the water, and was now drying them on his pants.
“Last night, we looked inside you. All five of you. There's a lot in there: feelings, memories, instincts, learned behavior, insights, madness, dreams, loves. Love is very important. You're an interesting mix.”
“All that in one night's work?” She was taunting him a little.
“We had to hurry. We have a pretty tight schedule.”
“Why, is something about to…”
“No, it's just that if we don't engineer a consistent causality, it'll work itself out on its own. Then it's almost always worse.” She had no idea what he meant. “ “Engineer a consistent causality. ” My dad never used to talk like that.”
“Certainly he did. Don't you remember how he spoke to you? He was a well-read man, and from when you were a little girl he—1—talked to you as an equal. Don't you remember?”
She remembered. She remembered. She thought of her mother in the nursing home.
“What a nice pendant,” he said, with just that air of fatherly reserve she had always imagined he would have cultivated had he lived to see her adolescence. “Who gave it to you?”
“Oh this,” she said, fingering the medallion. “Actually it's from somebody I don't know very well. He tested my faith…. He… But you must know all this already.” Again the grin.
“I want to know what you think of us,” she said shortly, “what you really think.”
He did not hesitate for a moment. “All right. I think it's amazing that you've done as well as you have.
You've got hardly any theory of social organization, astonishingly backward economic systems, no grasp of the machinery of historical prediction, and very little knowledge about yourselves. Considering how fast your world is changing, it's amazing you haven't blown yourselves to bits by now.
That's why we don't want to write you off just yet. You humans have a certain talent for adaptability— at least in the short term.”
“That's the issue, isn't it?”
“That's one issue. You can see that, after a while, the civilizations with only short-tem perspectives just aren't around. They work out their destinies also.”
She wanted to ask him bow he honestly felt about humans. Curiosity? Compassion? No feelings whatever, just all in a day's work? In his heart of hearts—or whatever equivalent internal organs he possessed—did he think of her as she thought of… an ant? But she could not bring herself to raise the question. She was too much afraid of the answer.
From the intonation of his voice, from the nuances of his speech, she tried to gain some glimpse of who it was here disguised as her father. She bad an enormous amount of direct experience with human beings; the Stationmasters had less than a day's. Could she not discern something of their true nature beneath this amiable and informative facade? But she couldn't. In the content of his speech he was, of course, not her father, nor did he pretend to be. But in every other respect he was uncannily close to Theodore F. Arroway, 1924–1960, vendor of hardware, loving husband and father. If not for a continuous effort of will, she knew she would be slobbering over this, this… copy. Part of her kept wanting to ask him how things had been since he had gone to Heaven. What were his views on Advent and Rapture? Was anything special in the works for the Millennium? There were human cultures that taught an afterlife of the blessed on mountaintops or in clouds, in caverns or oases, but she could not recall any in which if you were very, very good when you died you went to the beach.
“Do we have time for some questions before… whatever it is we have to do next?”
“Sure. One or two anyway.” “Tell me about your transportation system.”
“I can do better than that,” he said. “I can show you. Steady now.”
An amoeba of blackness leaked out from the zenith, obscuring Sun and blue sky. “That's quite a trick,” she gasped. The same sandy beach was beneath her feet. She dug her toes in. Overhead… was the Cosmos.
They were, it seemed, high above the Milky Way Galaxy, looking down on its spiral structure and falling toward it at some impossible speed. He explained matter-of-factly, using her own familiar scientific language to describe the vast pinwheel-shaped structure. He showed her the Orion Spiral Arm, JH which the Sun was, in this epoch, embedded. Interior to it, in decreasing order of mythological significance, were the Sagittarius Arm, the Norma/Scutum Arm, and the Three Kiloparsec Arm.
A network of straight lines appeared, representing the transportation system they had used. It was like the illuminated maps in the Paris Metro. Eda had been right. Each station, she deduced, was in a star system with a low-mass double black hole. She knew the black holes couldn't have resulted from stellar collapse, from the normal evolution of massive star systems, because they were too small. Maybe they were primordial, left over from the Big Bang, captured by some unimaginable starship and towed to their designated station. Or maybe they were made from scratch. She wanted to ask about this, but the tour was pressing breathlessly onward.
There was a disk of glowing hydrogen rotating about the center of the Galaxy, and within it a ring of molecular clouds rushing outward toward the periphery of the Milky Way. He showed her the ordered motions in
