The Dark Forest (2 page)

“But … ours is the only civilization we know of right now.”

“Which is why no one’s done it before. The opportunity is left to you.”

“Fascinating, Dr. Ye. Please go on.”

“My thinking is that this can link your two disciplines together. The mathematical structure of cosmic sociology is far clearer than that of human sociology.”

“Why do you say that?”

Ye Wenjie pointed at the sky. Twilight still illuminated the west, and they could still count the stars that had come out, making it easy to remember how the firmament had looked a few moments ago: a vast expanse and a blue void, or a face without pupils, like a marble statue. Now, though the stars were few in number, the giant eyes had pupils. The void was filled. The universe had sight. The stars were tiny, just single twinkling points of silver that hinted at some unease on the part of its creator. The cosmic sculptor had felt compelled to dot pupils onto the universe, yet had a tremendous terror of granting it sight. This balance of fear and desire resulted in the tininess of the stars against the hugeness of space, a declaration of caution above all.

“See how the stars are points? The factors of chaos and randomness in the complex makeups of every civilized society in the universe get filtered out by the distance, so those civilizations can act as reference points that are relatively easy to manipulate mathematically.”

“But there’s nothing concrete to study in your cosmic sociology, Dr. Ye. Surveys and experiments aren’t really possible.”

“That means your ultimate result will be purely theoretical. Like Euclidean geometry, you’ll set up a few simple axioms at first, then derive an overall theoretic system using those axioms as a foundation.”

“It’s all fascinating, but what would the axioms of cosmic sociology be?”

“First: Survival is the primary need of civilization. Second: Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant.”

The ant had not gone far before it realized that there were other troughs above it, many of them, in a complicated maze structure. The ant was sensitive to shapes and was confident of being able to work it out, but the limited storage capacity of its tiny neural network meant it had to forget the shapes it had previously crawled through. It did not feel any regret at forgetting the “9,” for constant forgetting was part of life. There were few things that it needed to remember forever, and those were etched by its genes into the storage area known as instinct.

Having cleared its memory, the ant entered the maze. After navigating its twists and turns, it established another pattern in its simple consciousness: the Chinese character
—
mu,
meaning “grave,” although the character and its meaning were not known to the ant. Farther up was another combination of troughs—far simpler this time, but to continue its exploration the ant had no choice but to clear its memory and forget the
mu
. Then it entered a wonderful line-trough, a shape that reminded it of the abdomen of a recently deceased cricket it had discovered not long ago. It quickly made out the new structure:
,
zhi,
the Chinese possessive modifier. Then, as it continued upward, it encountered two more trough combinations, the first of which consisted of two droplet-shaped depressions and a cricket stomach: the character
—
dong,
meaning “winter.” The top one was split into two parts, which together formed the character
—
yang,
meaning “poplar.” This was the last shape the ant remembered, and the only one it retained from its entire journey. The interesting shapes it previously encountered had all been forgotten.

“Those two axioms are solid enough from a sociological perspective … but you rattled them off so quickly, like you’d already worked them out,” Luo Ji said, a little surprised.

“I’ve been thinking about this for most of my life, but I’ve never spoken about it with anyone before. I don’t know why, really.… One more thing: To derive a basic picture of cosmic sociology from these two axioms, you need two other important concepts: chains of suspicion, and the technological explosion.”

“Interesting terms. Can you explain them?”

Ye Wenjie glanced at her watch. “There’s no time. But you’re clever enough to figure them out. Use those two axioms as a starting point for your discipline, and you might end up becoming the Euclid of cosmic sociology.”

“I’m no Euclid. But I’ll remember what you said and give it a whirl. I might come to you for guidance, though.”

“I’m afraid there won’t be that opportunity.… In that case, you might as well just forget I said anything. Either way, I’ve fulfilled my duty. Well, Xiao Luo, I’ve got to go.”

“Take care, Professor.”

Ye Wenjie went off through the twilight to her final meet-up.

The ant continued its climb and reached a round basin on the rock face, whose slick surface bore an extremely complicated image. It knew that its tiny neural net had no way to store such a thing, but after determining the overall shape of the image, its primitive one-cell aesthetic was as sparked as it had been by the sense of the “9.” And somehow it seemed to recognize part of the image, a pair of eyes. The ant was sensitive to eyes, because their gaze meant danger. Yet it felt no anxiety now, for it knew the eyes were lifeless. It had already forgotten that when the giant being named Luo Ji knelt down in silence before the formation, he had been looking at those eyes. The ant climbed out of the basin and up onto the formation’s peak. It felt no sense of towering above its surroundings, because it had no fear of falling. It had been blown off of places higher than this many times without any injury. Without the fear of heights, there can be no appreciation for the beauty of high places.

At the foot of the formation, the spider that Luo Ji had swept aside with the flowers was beginning to reconstruct its web. It drew a glistening strand from the rock face and swung itself like a pendulum to the ground. Three more swings and the skeleton of the web was complete. Ten thousand times the web could be destroyed, and ten thousand times the spider would rebuild it. There was neither annoyance nor despair, nor any delight, just as it had been for a billion years.

Luo Ji stood in silence for a while and then departed. When the vibrations in the ground had dissipated, the ant crawled a different way down the formation to hurry back to the nest and report on the location of a dead beetle. The stars had grown dense in the sky. When the ant passed the spider down at the foot of the formation, they felt each other’s presence, but did not communicate.

As that distant world held its breath to listen, neither ant nor spider was aware that they, out of all life on Earth, were the sole witnesses to the birth of the axioms of cosmic civilization.

*   *   *

Somewhat earlier, in the dead of night, Mike Evans was standing on the bow of
Judgment Day
as the Pacific Ocean slipped past like a swath of satin beneath the heavens. Evans enjoyed talking with the distant world at times like these because the text the sophon displayed on his retinas stood out wonderfully against the night sea and sky.

This is our twenty-second real-time conversation. We have come across some difficulties in our communication.

“Yes, Lord. I’ve learned that you can’t actually understand a significant amount of the reference materials on humanity we’ve given you.”

Yes. You’ve explained the parts very clearly, but we are unable to understand the whole. Something is different.

“Just one thing?”

Yes. But it sometimes seems as if your world is missing something, other times that it has something extra, and we don’t know which.

“What is the area of confusion?”

We’ve carefully studied your documents and have discovered that the key to understanding the problem lies in a pair of synonyms.

“Synonyms?”

There are many synonyms and near-synonyms in your languages. In the first language we received from you, Chinese, there were words that expressed the same meaning, like “cold” and “chill,” “heavy” and “weighty,” “long” and “far.”

“What pair of synonyms created the obstacle to understanding you’ve just mentioned?”

“Think” and “say.” We’ve just learned, to our surprise, that they are not, in fact, synonyms.

“They are not synonyms at all.”

In our understanding, they ought to be. “Think” means using thought organs to conduct mental activity. “Say” means communicating the content of thoughts to a counterpart. The latter, in your world, is accomplished through the modulation of vibrations in the air produced by the vocal cords. Are these definitions correct?

“They are. But doesn’t this demonstrate that ‘think’ and ‘say’ aren’t synonyms?”

In our understanding, this shows that they are synonyms.

“May I think about this for a moment?”

Very well. We both need to think about it.

For two minutes, Evans gazed in thought at the waves undulating beneath the starlight.

“My Lord, what are your organs of communication?”

We do not have organs of communication. Our brains can display our thoughts to the outside world, thereby achieving communication.

“Display thoughts? How is that done?”

The thoughts in our brains emit electromagnetic waves on all frequencies, including what is visible light to us. They can be displayed at a significant distance.

“So that means that to you, thinking is speaking?”

Hence they are synonyms.

“Oh … That is not the case for us, but even so, that shouldn’t present an obstacle to understanding those documents.”

True. In the areas of thought and communication, the differences between us are not large. We both have brains, and our brains produce intelligence through huge numbers of neural connections. The only difference is that our brain waves are stronger and can be directly received by our counterparts, eliminating the need for communication organs. That’s the only difference.

“No. I suspect a major difference might be getting lost. My Lord, let me think about it again.”