Contact - Carl Sagan [159]
"Of course. Routine. You built it all? The subways, I mean. You and those other…engineers from other galaxies?"
"Oh no, we haven't built any of it."
"I've missed something. Help me understand."
"It seems to be the same everywhere. In our case, we emerged a long time ago on many different worlds in the Milky Way. The first of us developed interstellar space-flight, and eventually chanced on one of the transit stations. Of course, we didn't know what it was. We weren't even sure it was artificial until the first of us were brave enough to slide down."
"Who's `we'? You mean the ancestors of your…race, your species?"
"No, no. We're many species from many worlds. Eventually we found a large number of subways- various ages, various styles of ornamentation, and all abandoned. Most were still in good working condition. All we did was make some repairs and improvements."
"No other artifacts? No dead cities? No records of what happened? No subway builders left?" He shook his head. "No industrialized, abandoned planets?" He repeated the gesture.
"There was a Galaxy-wide civilization that picked up and left without leaving a trace-except for the stations?"
"That's more or less right. And it's the same in other galaxies also. Billions of years ago, they all went somewhere. We haven't the slightest idea where."
"But where could they go?" He shook his head for the third time, but now very slowly.
"So then you're not…"
"No, we're just caretakers," he said. "Maybe someday they'll come back."
"Okay, just one more," she pleaded, holding her index finger up before her as, probably, had been her practice at age two. "One more question."
"All right," he answered tolerantly. "But we only have a few minutes left."
She glanced at the doorway again, and suppressed a tremor as a small, almost transparent crab sidled by.
"I want to know about your myths, your religions. What fills you with awe? Or are those who make the numinous unable to feel it?"
"You make the numinous also. No, I know what you're asking. Certainly we feel it. You recognize that some of this is hard for me to communicate to you. But I'll give yon an example of what you're asking for. I don't say this is it exactly, but it'll give you…"
He paused momentarily and again she felt a tingle, this time in her left occipital lobe. She entertained the notion that he was rifling through her neurons. Had he missed something last night? If so, she was glad. It meant they weren't perfect.
"…flavor of our numinons. It concerns pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. You know it well, of course, and you also know you can never come to the end of pi. There's no creature in the universe, no matter how smart, who could calculate pi to the last digit-because there is no last digit, only an infinite number of digits. Your mathematicians have made an effort to calculate it out to…"
Again she felt the tingle.
"…none of you seem to know… Let's say the ten-billionth place. You won't be surprised to hear that other mathematicians have gone further. Well, eventually-let's say it's in the ten-to-the-twentieth-power place-something happens. The randomly varying digits disappear, and for an unbelievably long time there's nothing but ones and zeros."
Idly, he was tracing a circle out on the sand with his toe. She paused a heartbeat before replying.
"And the zeros and ones finally stop? You get back to a random sequence of digits?" Seeing a faint sign of encouragement from him, she raced on. "And the number of zeros and ones? Is it a product of prime numbers?"
"Yes, eleven of them."
"You're telling me there's a message in eleven dimensions hidden deep inside the number pi? Someone in the universe communicates by…mathematics? But…help me, I'm really having trouble understanding you. Mathematics isn't arbitrary. I mean pi has to have the same value everywhere. How can you hide a message inside pi? It's built into the fabric of the universe."
"Exactly." She stared at him.
"It's even better than that," he continued.