Contact - Carl Sagan [128]
"The best would be if the ship wasn't coming back. Your last hours, surrounded by space and stars and worlds. If you had an incurable disease, or if you just wanted to give yourself a really nifty last indulgence, how could you top that?"
"You're serious? You want to market this…scheme?"
"Well, too soon to market. Maybe it's not exactly the right way to go about it. Let's just say I'm thinking of feasibility testing."
She decided that she would not tell Hadden of her decision, and he did not ask. Later, as the Narnia was beginning its rendezvous and docking with Methuselah, Hadden took her aside.
"We were saying that Yamagishi is the oldest person up here. Well, if you talk about permanently up here- I don't mean staff and astronauts and dancing girls-I'm the youngest person up here. I've got a vested interest in the answer, I know, but it's a definite medical possibility that zero g'll keep me alive for centuries. See, I'm engaged in an experiment on immortality.
"Now, I'm not bringing this up so I can boast. I'm bringing it up for a practical reason. If we're figuring out ways to extend our lifespans, think of what those creatures on Vega must have done. They probably are immortal, or close enough. I'm a practical person, and I've thought a lot now about immortality. I've probably thought longer and more seriously about it than anybody else. And I can tell you one thing for sure about immortals: They're very careful. They don't leave things to chance. They've invested too much effort in becoming immortal. I don't know what they look like, I don't know what they want from you, but if you ever get to see them, this is the only piece of practical advice I have for you: Something you think is dead cinch safe, they'll consider an unacceptable risk. If there's any negotiating you get to do up there, don't forget what I'm telling you."
CHAPTER 17
The Dream of the Ants
Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
-GUSTAVE FLAUBERT Madame Bovary (1857)
Popular theology…is a massive inconsistency derived from ignorance…The gods exist because nature herself has imprinted a conception of them on the minds of men.
-CICERO De Natura Deorum, I, 1
ELLIE WAS in the midst of packing notes, magnetic tapes, and a palm frond for shipment to Japan when she received word that her mother had suffered a stroke. Immediately afterward, she was brought a letter by project courier. It was from John Staughton, and there were no polite preliminaries:
Your mother and I would often discuss your deficiencies and shortcomings. It was always a difficult conversation. When I defended you (and, although you may not believe it, this happened often), she told me that I was putty in your hands. When I criticized you, she told me to mind my own business.
But I want you to know that your unwillingness to visit her in the last few years, since this Vega business, was a source of continuing pain to her. She would tell her cronies at that dreadful nursing home she insisted on going to that you'd be visiting her soon. For years she told them that. "Soon." She planned how she would show her famous daughter around, in what order she'd introduce you to that decrepit bunch.
You probably won't want to hear this, and I tell it to you with sorrow. But it's for your own good. Your behavior was more painful to her than anything that ever happened to her, even your father's death. You may be a big shot now, your hologram available all over the world, hobnobbing with politicians and so on, but as a human being, you haven't learned anything since high school…
Her eyes welling with tears, she began to crumple the letter and its envelope, but discovered some stiff piece of paper inside, a partial hologram made from an old two-dimensional photograph by a computer extrapolation technique. You had a faint but satisfactory sense of being able to see around edges and corners.