Contact - Carl Sagan [137]
The Tanabata Festival in the Honshu city of Sendai was now a staple on Japanese television for people who now could rarely see the real Altair or Vega. She wondered if the Vegans would continue broadcasting the same Message to the Earth forever. Partly because the Machine was being completed in Japan, it received considerable attention in the television commentary accompanying this year's Tanabata Festival. But the Five, as they were now sometimes called, had not been required to appear on Japanese television, and their presence here in Sapporo for the Festival was not generally known. Nevertheless, Eda, Sukhavati, and she were readily recognized, and they made their way back to the Obori Promenade to the accompaniment of polite scattered applause by passersby. Many also bowed. A loudspeaker outside a music shop blared a rock-and-roll piece that Ellie recognized. It was "I Wanna Ricochet Off You," by the black musical group White Noise. In the afternoon sun was a rheumy-eyed, elderly dog, which, as she approached, wagged its tail feebly.
Japanese commentators talked of Machindo, the Way of the Machine-the increasingly common perspective of the Earth as a planet and of all humans sharing an equal stake in its future. Something like it had been proclaimed in some, but by no means all, religions. Practitioners of those religions understandably resented the insight being attributed to an alien Machine. If the acceptance of a new insight on our place in the universe represents a religious conversion, she mused, then a theological revolution was sweeping the Earth. Even the American and European chiliasts had been influenced by Machindo. But if the Machine didn't work and the Message went away, how long, she wondered, would the insight last? Even if we had made some mistake in interpretation or construction, she thought, even if we never understood anything more about the Vegans, the Message demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were other beings in the universe, and that they were more advanced than we. That should help keep the planet unified for a while, she thought.
She asked Eda if he had ever had a transforming religious experience.
"Yes," he said.
"When?" Sometimes you had to encourage him to talk.
"When I first picked up Euclid. Also when I first understood Newtonian gravitation. And Maxwell's equations, and general relativity. And during my work on superunification. I have been fortunate enough to have had many religious experiences."
"No," she returned. "You know what I mean. Apart from science."
"Never," he replied instantly. "Never apart from science." He told her a little of the religion he had been born into. He did not consider himself bound by all its tenets, he said, but he was comfortable with it. He thought it could do much good. It was a comparatively new sect-contemporaneous with Christian Science or the Jehovah's Witnesses-founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in the Punjab. Devi apparently knew something about the Ahmadiyah as a proselytizing sect. It had been especially successful in West Africa. The origins of the religion were wrapped in eschatology. Ahmad had claimed to be the Mahdi, the figure Muslims expect to appear at the end of the world. He also claimed to be Christ come again, an incarnation of Krishna, and a buruz, or reappearance of Mohammed.
Christian chiliasm had now infected the Ahmadiyah, and his reappearance was imminent according to some of the faithful. The year 2008, the centenary of Ahmad's death, was now a favored date for his Final Return as Mahdi. The global messianic fervor, while sputtering, seemed on average to be swelling still further, and Ellie confessed concern about the irrational predilections of the human species.
"At a Festival of Love," said Devi, "you should not be such a pessimist."
In Sapporo there