The Humans (16 page)

He smiled and carried on watching the match. It was a long match. Elsewhere in the universe, stars formed and others ceased to be. Was this the purpose of human existence? Was the purpose
somewhere inside the pleasure, or at least the
casual simplicity
of a football match? Eventually, the game ended.

‘That was great,’ I lied, as we walked out of the grounds.

‘Was it? We lost four nil.’

‘Yes, but while I watched it I didn’t think once about my mortality, or the various other difficulties our mortal form will bring in later life.’

He looked bewildered again. He was going to say something but he was beaten to it by someone throwing an empty can at my head. Even though it was thrown from behind I had sensed it coming, and
ducked quickly out of the way. Ari was stunned by my reflexes. As, I think, was the can-thrower.

‘Oi, wanker,’ the can-thrower said, ‘you’re that freak on the web. The naked one. Bit warm, ain’t you? With all those clothes on.’

‘Piss off, mate,’ Ari said nervously.

The man did the opposite.

The can-thrower was walking over. He had red cheeks and very small eyes and greasy black hair. He was flanked by two friends. All three of them had faces ready for violence. Red Cheeks leaned in
close to Ari. ‘What did you say, big man?’

‘There might have been a “piss” in there,’ said Ari, ‘and there was definitely an “off”.’

The man grabbed Ari’s coat. ‘Think you’re smart?’

‘Moderately.’

I held the man’s arm. ‘Get off me, you fucking perv,’ he responded. ‘I was speaking to fat bastard.’

I wanted to hurt him. I had never wanted to hurt anyone – only needed to, and there was a difference. With this person, there was a definite desire to hurt him. I heard the rasp of his
breath, and tightened his lungs. Within seconds he was reaching for his inhaler. ‘We’ll be on our way,’ I said, releasing the pressure in his chest. ‘And you three
won’t bother us again.’

Ari and I walked home, unfollowed.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Ari. ‘What was that?’

I didn’t answer. How could I? What that had been was something Ari could never understand.

Clouds gathered together quickly. The sky darkened.

It looked like rain. I hated rain, as I have told you. I knew Earth rain wasn’t sulphuric acid, but rain, all rain, was something I could not abide. I panicked.

I started running.

‘Wait!’ said Ari, who was running behind me. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Rain!’ I said, wishing for a dome around the whole of Cambridge. ‘I can’t
stand
rain.’

‘Have a nice time?’ Isobel asked on my return. She was standing on top of one form of primitive technology (step-ladder) changing another one (incandescent
light-bulb).

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I did some good groaning. But to be honest with you, I don’t think I’ll go again.’

She dropped the new bulb. It smashed. ‘Damn. We don’t have another one.’ She looked, almost, like she might cry about this fact. She stepped down from the ladder, and I stared
up at the dead light-bulb still hanging there. I concentrated hard. A moment later it was working again.

‘That was lucky. It didn’t need changing after all.’

Isobel stared at the light. The golden illumination on her skin was quite mesmerising, for some reason. The way it shifted shadow. Made her more distinctly herself. ‘How weird,’ she
said. Then she looked down at the broken glass.

‘I’ll see to that,’ I said. And she smiled at me and her hand touched mine and gave it a quick pulse of gratitude. And then she did something I wasn’t expecting at all.
She embraced me, gently, with broken glass still at our feet.

I breathed her in. I liked the warmth of her body against mine and realised the pathos of being a human. Of being a mortal creature who was essentially alone but needed the myth of togetherness
with others. Friends, children, lovers. It was an attractive myth. It was a myth you could easily inhabit.

‘Oh Andrew,’ she said. I didn’t know what she meant by this simple declaration of my name, but when she stroked my back I found myself stroking hers, and saying the words that
seemed somehow the most appropriate. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay . . .’

I went to the funeral of Daniel Russell. I watched the coffin being lowered into the ground, and earth being sprinkled over the top of the wood casket. There were lots of
people there, most of them wearing black. A few were crying.

Afterwards, Isobel wanted to go over and talk to Tabitha. Tabitha looked different to when I had last seen her. She looked older, even though it had only been a week. She wasn’t crying,
but it seemed like an effort not to.

Isobel stroked her arm. ‘Listen, Tabitha, I just want you to know, we’re here. Whatever you need, we’re here.’

‘Thank you, Isobel. That really does mean a lot. It really does.’

‘Just basic stuff. If you don’t feel up to the supermarket. I mean, supermarkets are not the most sympathetic of places.’

‘That’s very kind. I know you can do it online, but I’ve never got the hang of it.’

‘Well, don’t worry. We’ll sort it out.’

And this actually happened. Isobel went to get another human’s shopping, and paid for it, and came home and told me I was looking better.

‘Am I?’

‘Yes. You’re looking yourself again.’

‘Are you sure you’re ready?’ Isobel asked me, the next Monday morning, as I ate my first peanut butter sandwich of the day.

Newton was asking it, too. Either that, or he was asking about the sandwich. I tore him off a piece. ‘Yes. It will be fine. What could go wrong?’

This was when Gulliver let out a mocking groan sound. The only sound he’d made all morning.

‘What’s up, Gulliver?’ I asked.

‘Everything,’ he said. He didn’t expand. Instead, he left his uneaten cereal and stormed upstairs.

‘Should I follow him?’

‘No,’ Isobel said. ‘Give him time.’

I nodded.

I trusted her.

Time was her subject, after all.

An hour later I was in Andrew’s office. It was the first time I had been there since I had deleted the email to Daniel Russell. This time, I wasn’t in a rush and
could absorb a few more details. As he was a professor, there were books lining every wall, designed so that from whichever angle you looked at him you would see a book.

I looked at some of the titles. Very primitive-looking in the main.
A History of Binary and Other Non-decimal Numeration. Hyperbolic Geometry. The Book of Hexagonal Tessellation. Logarithmic
Spirals and the Golden Mean
.

There was a book written by Andrew himself. One I hadn’t noticed the last time I had been here. It was a thin book called
The Zeta Function
. It had the words ‘Uncorrected
Proof Copy’ on the cover. I made sure the door was locked and then sat down in his chair and read every word.

And what a depressing read it was, I have to say. It was about the Riemann hypothesis, and what seemed like his futile quest to prove it and explain why the spaces between prime numbers
increased the way they did. The tragedy was in realising how desperately he had wanted to solve it – and, of course, after he’d written the book he
had
solved it, though the
benefits he’d imagined would never happen, because I had destroyed the proof. And I began to think of how fundamentally our equivalent mathematical breakthrough – the one which we came
to know as the Second Basic Theory of Prime Numbers – had on us. How it enabled us to do all that we can do. Travel the universe. Inhabit other worlds, transform into other bodies. Live as
long as we want to live. Search each other’s minds, each other’s dreams. All that.

The Zeta Function
did, however, list all the things humans had achieved. The main steps on the road. The developments that had advanced them towards civilisation. Fire, that was a biggie.
The plough. The printing press. The steam engine. The microchip. The discovery of DNA. And humans would be the first to congratulate themselves on all this. But the trouble was, for them, they had
never made the leap most other intelligent life forms in the universe had made.

Oh, they had built rockets and probes and satellites. A few of them even
worked
. Yet, really, their mathematics had thus far let them down. They had yet to do the big stuff. The
synchronisation of brains. The creation of free-thinking computers. Automation technology. Inter-galactic travel. And as I read, I realised I was stopping all these opportunities. I had killed
their future.

The phone rang. It was Isobel.

‘Andrew, what are you doing? Your lecture started ten minutes ago.’

She was cross, but in a concerned way. It still felt strange, and new, having someone be worried about me. I didn’t fully understand this concern, or what she gained by having it, but I
must confess I quite liked being the subject of it. ‘Oh yes. Thank you for reminding me. I will go. Bye, erm, darling.’

I walked into the lecture hall. It was a large room made predominantly of dead trees.

There were a lot of people staring at me. These were students. Some had pens and paper. Others had computers. All were waiting for knowledge. I scanned the room. There were 102 of them, in
total. Always an unsettling number, stuck as it is between two primes. I tried to work out the students’ knowledge level. You see, I didn’t want to overshoot. I looked behind me. There
was a whiteboard where words and equations were meant to be written but there was nothing on it.

I hesitated. And during that hesitation someone sensed my weakness. Someone on the back row. A male of about twenty, with bushy blond hair and a T-shirt which said ‘What part of N = R x
f
^s
x f
^p
x n
^e
x f
^l
x f
ⁱ
x f
^c
x L don’t you understand?’

He giggled at the wit he was about to display and shouted out, ‘You look a bit overdressed today, Professor!’ He giggled some more, and it was contagious; the howling laughter
spreading like fire across the whole hall. Within moments, everyone in the hall was laughing. Well, everyone except one person, a female.

The non-laughing female was looking at me intently. She had red curly hair, full lips and wide eyes. She had a startling frankness about her appearance. An openness that reminded me of a death
flower. She was wearing a cardigan and coiling strands of her hair around her finger.

‘Calm down,’ I said, to the rest of them. ‘That is very funny. I get it. I am wearing clothes and you are referring to an occasion in which I was not wearing clothes. Very
funny. You think it is a joke, like when Georg Cantor said the scientist Francis Bacon wrote the plays of William Shakespeare, or when John Nash started seeing men in hats who weren’t really
there. That was funny. The human mind is a limited, but high plateau. Spend your life at its outer limits and, oops, you might fall off. That is funny. Yes. But don’t worry, you won’t
fall off. Young man, you are right there in the middle of your plateau. Though I appreciate your concern, I have to say I am feeling much better now. I am wearing underpants and socks and trousers
and even a shirt.’

People were laughing again, but this time the laughter felt warmer. And it did something to me, inside, this warmth. So then I started laughing, too. Not at what I had just said, because I
didn’t see how that was funny. No. I was laughing at myself. The impossible fact that I was there, on that most absurd planet and yet actually liking being there. And I felt an urge to tell
someone how good it felt, in human form, to laugh. The release of it. And I wanted to tell someone about it and I realised that I didn’t want to tell the hosts. I wanted to tell Isobel.

Anyway, I did the lecture. Apparently I had been meant to be talking about something called ‘post-Euclidean geometry’. But I didn’t want to talk about that, so I talked about
the boy’s T-shirt.

The formula written on it was something called Drake’s equation. It was an equation devised to calculate the likelihood of advanced civilisations in Earth’s galaxy, or what the
humans called the Milky Way galaxy. (That is how humans came to terms with the vast expanse of space. By saying it looks like a splatter of spilt milk. Something dropped out of the fridge that
could be wiped away in a second.)

So, the equation:

N = R x f
^p
x n
^e
x f
^l
x f
ⁱ
x f
^c
x L

N was the number of advanced civilisations in the galaxy with whom communication might be possible. R was the average annual rate at which stars were formed. The f
^p
was the fraction
of those stars with planets. The n
^e
was the average number of those planets that have the right eco-systems for life. The f
¹
was the fraction of those planets where life
would actually develop. The f
ⁱ
was the fraction of the above planets that could develop intelligence. The f
^c
was the fraction of
those
where a communicative
technologically advanced civilisation could develop. And L was the lifetime of the communicative phase.

Various astrophysicists had looked at all the data and decided that there must, in fact, be millions of planets in the galaxy containing life, and even more in the universe at large. And some of
these were bound to have advanced life with very good technology. This of course was true. But the humans didn’t just stop there. They came up with a paradox. They said, ‘Hold on, this
can’t be right. If there are this many extraterrestrial civilisations with the ability to contact us then we would know about it because they would have contacted
us
.’

‘Well, that’s true, isn’t it?’ said the male whose T-shirt started this detour.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, it’s not. Because the equation should have some other fractions in there. For instance, it should have—’