Space

clumsy looking — and defiantly not symmetrical. It didn’t fit.

Human researchers were lined up with their noses pressed against the curtain. A huge bank of cameras and other apparatus was trained on the Gaijin’s every move. She knew a continuous image of the Gaijin was being sent out to the net, twenty-four hours a day. There were bars that showed nothing but Gaijin images on huge wall-covering softscreens, all day and all night.

The Gaijin was reading a book, turning its pages with cold efficiency. Good grief, Madeleine thought, disturbed.

“The Gaijin are deep-space machines,” Brind said. “Or life-forms, whatever. But they’re hardy; they can survive in our atmosphere and gravity. There are three of them, here in this facility: the only three on the surface of the planet. We’ve no way of knowing how many are up there in orbit, or further out, of course…”

“We think we’re used to machinery,” Dorothy Chaum said to her. “But it’s eerie, isn’t it?”

“If it’s a machine,” Madeleine said, “it was made by no human. And it’s operated by none of us. Eerie. Yes, you’re right.” She found herself shuddering, oddly, as that crude mechanical limb clanked. She’d lived her life with machinery, but this Gaijin was spooking her, on some primitive level. “We speak to them in Latin, you know,” Dorothy Chaum murmured. She grinned, dimpling, looking younger. “It’s the most logical human language we could find; the Gaijin have trouble with all the irregular structures and idioms of modern languages like English. We have software translation suites to back us up. But of course it’s a boon to me. I always knew those long hours of study in the seminary would pay off.”

“What do you talk about?”

“A lot of things,” Brind said. “They ask more questions than they volunteer answers. Mostly, we figure out a lot from clues gleaned from inadvertent slips.”

“Oh, I doubt that anything about the Gaijin is inadvertent,” Chaum said. “Certainly their speech is not like ours. It is dull, dry, factual, highly structured, utterly unmemorable. There seems to be no rhythm, no poetry — no sense of story. Simply a dull list of facts and queries and dry logic. Like the listing of a computer program.”

“That’s because they are machines,” Paulis growled. “They aren’t conscious, like we are.”

Chaum smiled gently. “I wish I felt so sure. The Gaijin are clearly intelligent. But are they conscious? We know of examples of intelligence without consciousness, right here on Earth: social insects like ant colonies, the termites. And you could argue there can be consciousness without much intelligence, as in a mouse. But is advanced intelligence possible without consciousness of some sort?”

“Jesus,” Paulis said with disgust. “You gave these clanking tin men a whole island, they’ve been down here for five whole years, and you can’t even answer questions like that?”

Chaum stared at him. “If I could be sure you are conscious, if I even knew for sure what it meant, I’d concede your point.”

“Conscious or not, they are different from us,” Brind said. “For example, the Gaijin can turn their brains off.”

That startled Madeleine.

“It’s true,” Chaum said. “When they are at repose, as far as we can tell, they are deactivated. Madeleine, if you had an off switch on the side of your head — even if you could be sure it would be turned back on again — would you use it?”

Madeleine hesitated. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t see how I could tell if I was still me, when I rebooted.”

Chaum sighed. “But that doesn’t seem to trouble the Gaijin. Indeed, the Gaijin seem to be rather baffled by our big brains. Madeleine, your mind is constantly working. Your brain doesn’t rest, even in sleep; it consumes the energy of a light bulb — a big drain on your body’s resources — all the time; that’s why we’ve had to eat meat all the way back to Homo Erectus.”

“But without our brains we wouldn’t be us,” Madeleine protested.

“Sure,” Chaum said. “But to be us, to the Gaijin, seems to be something of a luxury.”

“Ms. Chaum, what do you want from them?”

Frank Paulis laughed out loud. “She wants to know if there was a Gaijin Jesus. Right?”

Chaum smiled without resentment. “The Gaijin do seem fascinated by our religions.”

Madeleine was intrigued. “And do they have religion?”

“It’s impossible to tell. They don’t give away a great deal.”

“That’s no surprise,” Paulis said sourly.

“They are very analytical,” Chaum said. “They seem to regard our kind of thinking as pathological. We spread ideas to each other — right or wrong, useful or harmful — like an unpleasant mental disease.”

Brind nodded. “This is the old idea of the meme.”

“Yes,” Chaum said. “A very cynical view of human culture.”

“And,” Paulis asked dryly, “have your good Catholic memes crossed the species barrier to the Gaijin?”

“Not as far as I can tell,” Dorothy Chaum said. “They think in an orderly way. They build up their knowledge bit by bit, testing each new element — much as our scientists are trained to do. Perhaps their minds are too organized to allow our memes to flourish. Or perhaps they have their own memes, powerful enough to beat off our feeble intruder notions. Frankly, I’m not sure what the Gaijin make of our answers to the great questions of existence. What seems to interest them is that we have answers at all. I suspect they don’t…”

“You sound disappointed with what you’ve found here,” Madeleine said.

“Perhaps I am,” Chaum said slowly. “As a child I used to dream of meeting the aliens: Who could guess what scientific and philosophical insights they might bring? Well, these Gaijin do appear to be a life-form millions of years old, at least. But, culturally and scientifically, they are really little evolved over us.”

Madeleine felt herself warming to this earnest, thoughtful woman. “Perhaps we’ll find the really smart ones out there among the stars. Maybe they are on their way now.”

Chaum smiled. “I certainly envy you your chance to go see for yourself. But even if we did find such marvelous beings, the result may be crushing for us.”

“How so?”

“God shows His purposes through us, and our progress,” she said. “At least, this is one strand of Christian thinking. But what, then, if our spiritual development is far behind that of the aliens? Somewhere else He may have reached a splendor to which we can add nothing.”

“And we wouldn’t matter anymore.”

“Not to God. And, perhaps, not to ourselves.”

They turned away from the disappointing aliens and walked out into the flat light of Kefallinian noon.

Later, Frank Paulis took Madeleine to one side.

“Enough bullshit,” he said. “Let’s you and me talk business. You’re fast-forwarding through thirty-six years. If you’re smart, you’ll take advantage of that fact.”

“How?”

“Compound interest,” he said.

Madeleine laughed. After her encounter with such strangeness, Paulis’s blunt commercial calculation seemed ludicrous. “You aren’t serious.”

“Sure. Think about it. Invest what you can of your fee. After all you won’t be touching it while you’re gone. At a conservative five percent you’re looking at a fivefold payout over your thirty-six years. If you can make ten percent that goes up to thirty-one times.”

“Really.”

“Sure. What else are you going to do with it? You’ll come back a few months older, subjectively, to find your money has grown like Topsy. And think about this. Suppose you make another journey of the same length. You could multiply up that factor of thirtyfold to nearer a thousand. You could shuttle back and forth between here and Sirius, let’s say, getting richer on every leg, just by staying alive over the centuries.”

“Yeah. If everything stays the same back home. If the bank doesn’t fail, the laws don’t change, the currency doesn’t depreciate, there’s no war or rebellion or plague, or a takeover of mankind by alien robots.”

He grinned. “That’s a long way off. A lifetime pumped by relativity is a whole new way of making money. You’d be the first, Meacher. Think about it.”

She studied him. “You really want me to take this trip, don’t you?”

His face hardened. “Hell, yes, I want you to make this trip. Or, if you can’t get your head sufficiently out of your ass, somebody. We have to find our own way forward, a way to deal with the Gaijin and those other metal-chewing cyborgs and giant interplanetary bugs and whatever else is heading our way from the Galactic core.”

“Is that really the truth, Paulis?”

“Oh, you don’t think so?”

“Maybe you’re just disappointed,” she goaded him. “A lot of people were disappointed because the Gaijin didn’t turn out to be a bunch of father figures from the sky. They didn’t immediately start beaming down high technology and wisdom and rules so we can all live together in peace, love, and understanding. The Gaijin are just there. Is that what’s really bugging you, Paulis? That infantile wish to just give up responsibility for yourself?”

He eyed her. “You really are full of shit, Meacher. Come on. You still have to see the star of this freak show.” He led her back into the facility. They reached another corner, another curtained- off Gaijin enclosure. “We call this guy Gypsy Rose Lee,” he said.

Beyond the curtain was another Gaijin. But it was in pieces. The central dodecahedron was intact, save for a few panels, but most of those beautiful articulated arms lay half disassembled on the floor. The last attached arm was steadily plucking wiry protrusions off the surface of the dodecahedron, one by one. Lenses of various sizes lay scattered over the floor, like gouged-out eyeballs.

Human researchers in white all-over isolation gear were crawling over the floor, inspecting the alien gadgetry.

“My God,” Madeleine said. “It’s taking itself apart.”

“Cultural exchange in action,” Paulis said sourly. “We gave them a human cadaver to take apart — a volunteer, incidentally. In return we get this. A Gaijin is a complicated critter; this has been going on six months already.”

A couple of the researchers — two earnest young women — overheard Paulis, and turned their way.

“But we’re learning a lot,” one of the researchers said. “The most basic question we have to answer is: Are the Gaijin alive? From the point of view of their complexity, you’d say they are; but they seem to have no mechanism for heredity, which we think is a prerequisite for any definition of a living thing—”

“Or so we thought at first. But seeing the way this thing is put together has made us think again—”

“We believed the Gaijin might be von Neumann machines, perfect replicators—”

“But it may be that perfect replication is impossible in principle. Uncertainty, chaos—”

“There will be drift in each generation. Like genetic drift. And where there is variation, there can be selection, and so evolution—”

“But we still don’t know what the units of replication are here. It may be a lower level than the individual Gaijin—”

“The subcomponents that comprise them, perhaps. Maybe the Gaijin are a kind of vehicle for replication of their components, just as you could say we humans are a vehicle to enable our genes