Contact - Carl Sagan [155]
She hugged him with all her might. She knew it was a trick, a reconstruction, a simulation, but it was flawless. For a moment she held him by the shoulders at arm's length. He was perfect. It was as if her father had these many years ago died and gone to Heaven, and finally-by this unorthodox route-she had managed to rejoin him. She sobbed and embraced him again.
It took her another minute to compose herself. If it had been Ken, say, she would have at least toyed with the idea that another dodecahedron-maybe a repaired Soviet Machine-had made a later relay from the Earth to the center of the Galaxy. But not for a moment could such a possibility be entertained for him. His remains were decaying in a cemetery by a lake.
She wiped her eyes, laughing and crying at once.
"So, what do I owe this apparition to-robotics or hypnosis?"
"Am I an artifact or a dream? You might ask that about anything."
"Even today, not a week goes by when I don't think that I'd give anything-anything I had-just to spend a few minutes with my father again."
"Well, here I am," he said cheerfully, his hands raised, making a half turn so she could be sure that the back of him was there as well. But he was so young, younger surely than she. He had been only thirty-six when he died.
Maybe this was their way of calming her fears. If so, they were very…thoughtful. She guided him back toward her few possessions, her aim around his waist. He certainly felt substantial enough. If there were gear trains and integrated circuits underneath his skin, they were well hidden.
"So how are we doing?" she asked. The question was ambiguous. "I mean-"
"I know. It took you many years from receipt of the Message to your arrival here."
"Do you grade on speed or accuracy?"
"Neither."
"You mean we haven't completed the Test yet?" He did not answer.
"Well, explain it to me." She said this in some distress. "Some of us have spent years decrypting the Message and building the Machine. Aren't you going to tell me what it's all about?"
"You've become a real scrapper," he said, as if he really were her father, as if he were comparing his last recollections of her with her present, still incompletely developed self.
He gave her hair an affectionate tousle. She remembered that from childhood also. But how could they, 30,000 light-years from Earth, know her father's affectionate gestures in long-ago and faraway Wisconsin? Suddenly she knew.
"Dreams," she said. "Last night, when we were all dreaming, you were inside our heads, right? You drained everything we know."
"We only made copies. I think everything that used to be in your head is still there. Take a look. Tell me if anything's missing." He grinned, and went 0n.
"There was so much your television programs didn't tell us. Oh, we could figure out your technological level pretty well, and a lot more about you. But there's so much more to your species than that, things we couldn't possibly learn indirectly. I recognize you may feel some breach of privacy-"
"You're joking."
"-but we have so little time."
"You mean the Test is over? We answered all your questions while we were asleep last night? So? Did we pass or fail?"
"It isn't like that," he said. "It isn't like sixth grade." She had been in the sixth grade the year he died. "Don't think of us as some interstellar sheriff gunning down outlaw civilizations. Think of us more as the Office of the Galactic Census. We collect information. I know you think nobody has anything to learn from you because you're technologically so backward. But there are other merits to a civilization."
"What merits?"
"Oh, music. Loving kindness. (I like that word.) Dreams. Humans are very good at dreaming, although you'd never know it from your television. There are cultures all over the Galaxy that trade dreams."
"You operate an interstellar cultural exchange? That's what this is all about? You don't care if some rapacious, bloodthirsty civilization develops interstellar spaceflight?"
"I said we admire loving