Contact - Carl Sagan [158]
She half-remembered a summer's night in Michigan when she was a girl. She had feared she would fall into the sky. "Oh, it's not just us. This is a…cooperative project of many galaxies. That's what we mainly do-engineering. Only…few of us are involved with emerging civilizations."
At each pause she had felt a kind of tingling in her head, approximately in the left parietal lobe.
`There are cooperative projects between galaxies?" she asked. "Lots of galaxies, each with a kind of Central Administration? With hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy. And then those administrations cooperate. To pour millions of suns into Centaurus…sorry, Cygnus A? The…Forgive me. I'm just staggered by the scale. Why would you do all this? Whatever for?"
"You mustn't think of the universe as a wilderness. It hasn't been that for billions of years," he said. "Think of it more as…cultivated." Again a tingling.
"But what for? What's there to cultivate?"
"The basic problem is easily stated. Now don't get scared off by the scale. You're an astronomer, after all. The problem is that the universe is expanding, and there's not enough matter in it to stop the expansion. After a while, no new galaxies, no new stars, no new planets, no newly arisen lifeforms-just the same old crowd. Everything's getting run-down. It'll be boring. So in Cygnus A we're testing out the technology to make something new. You might call it an experiment in urban renewal. It's not our only trial run. Sometime later we might want to close off a piece of the universe and prevent space from getting more and more empty as the aeons pass. Increasing the local matter density's the way to do it, of course. It's good honest work." Like running a hardware store in Wisconsin. If Cygnus A was 600 million light-years away, then astronomers on Earth-or anywhere in the Milky Way for that matter-were seeing it as it had been 600 million years ago. But on Earth 600 million years ago, she knew, there had hardly been any life even in the oceans big enough to shake a stick at. They were old. Six hundred million years ago, on a beach like this one…except no crabs, no gulls, no palm trees. She tried to imagine some microscopic plant washed ashore, securing a tremulous toehold just above the water line, while these beings were occupied with experimental galactogenesis and introductory cosmic engineering.
"You've been pouring matter into Cygnus A for the last six hundred million years?"
"Well, what you've detected by radio astronomy was just some of our early feasibility testing. We're much further along now."
And in due course, in another few hundred million years she imagined, radio astronomers on Earth-if any-will detect substantial progress in the reconstruction of the universe around Cygnus A. She steeled herself for further revelations and vowed she would not let them intimidate her. There was a hierarchy of beings on a scale she had not imagined. But the Earth had a place, a significance in that hierarchy; they would not have gone to all this trouble for nothing.
The blackness rushed back to the zenith and was consumed; Sun and blue sky returned. The scene was the same: surf, sand, palms, Magritte door, microcamera, frond, and her…father.
"Those moving interstellar clouds and rings near the center of the Galaxy-aren't they due to periodic explosions around here? Isn't it dangerous to locate the Station here?"
"Episodic, not periodic. It only happens on a small scale, nothing like the sort of thing we're doing in Cygnus A. And it's manageable. We know when it's coming and we generally just hunker down. If it's really dangerous, we take the Station somewhere else