and the occasional worrying hawk of bloody vomit, that his whole world would become—if he lost SETI. And the argument which Terr had so cannily absorbed, was, he knew, the most damning of all the arguments against his dream. The odd thing was, it lay outside the Drake Equation entirely, which was probably why that dumb article of his had avoided mentioning it. What Terr was saying was a version of a question that the founding father of the nuclear chain reaction Enrico Fermi had once asked in the course of a debate about the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence nearly a century and half—and how time flew!—ago. The question was simply this: “Where are they?”
There were these things called von Neumann machines; perhaps Terr knew that as well. They’d once been a theory, and stalwarts of the old tales of the future Tom had loved reading, but now they were out working in the asteroid belt and on Jupiter’s lesser moons, and down in deep mines on earth and the sea trenches and on Terr’s moon and any other place where mankind wanted something but didn’t want to risk its own skin by getting it. They were robots, really, but they were able to manufacture new versions of themselves—reproduce, if you wanted to make the obvious biological comparison—using the available local materials. They were smart, too. They could travel and adapt to new environments. They could do pretty much anything you wanted of them. So surely, went the argument which sometimes crept along with the depression and the morning hangover into Tom’s head, any other intelligent lifeform would have come up with a similar invention? Even with the staggering distance involved in travel between the stars, all you had to do was launch some into space, wait a few million years—a mere twitch of God’s eye, by any cosmological timescale—and the things would be colonising this entire galaxy. So where were they?
The answer was as simple as Fermi’s question: They aren’t here. And humankind was a freak; they and his planet were a fascinating outrage against all the laws of probability. The rest of the universe was either empty, or any other dim glimmerings of life were so distant and faint as to be unreachable in all the time remaining until the whole shebang collapsed again. Better luck next time, perhaps. Or the time after that. By one calculation of the Drake Equation Tom had read, life of some kind was likely to appear somewhere in the entire universe once in every 1010 big bangs, and even that was assuming the physical laws remained unchanged. The guy hadn’t bothered to put the extra spin on the figure which would involve two communicating intelligences arising at the same time and in the same corner of the same galaxy. Probably hadn’t wanted to wreck his computer.
Half the sky was greying out now. Star by star by star. At least he’d soon get a proper look at Terr, and she’d get a proper look at him, although he wasn’t sure that that was what either of them wanted. Perhaps there was something to be said for the grey mists of uncertainty, after all.
“I always said—didn’t I, Tom?—that I’d bring you a message.”
“And this is it? You saying I should give up on the one thing that means something to me?”
“Don’t look at it like that, Tom. Think of it as…” A faint breeze had sprung up, the start of the wind that would soon lift the flyers as the temperature gradients hit the valley. Tom thought for a moment that they must still have a candle burning on the table between them, the way Terr seemed to flicker and sway beyond it. She was like smoke. Her hair, her face. He poured himself some more absinthe, which he decided against drinking. “The thing is, Tom, that you’ve got yourself into this state when you imagine that whether or not you listen in itself proves something. It doesn’t, Tom. They’re out there—they’re not out there. Either way, it’s a fact already isn’t it? It’s just one we don’t happen to know the answer to…And wouldn’t it be a pity, if we knew the answer to everything? Where would your dreams be then?”
“Science is all about finding out the truth—”
“—And this life of yours Tom! I mean, why on earth do you have to go down to the village to pick up those messages? Can’t you communicate with people from up here? It’s looks like