Contact - Carl Sagan [64]
"Some people might kill it."
"It's hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness." He continued to carry both twig and lava.
They walked for a while in silence past almost 55,000 names engraved in reflecting black granite.
"Every government that prepares for war paints its adversaries as monsters," she said. "They don't want you thinking of the other side as human. If the enemy can think and feel, you might hesitate to kill them. And killing is very important. Better to see them as monsters."
"Here, look at this beauty," he replied after a moment. "Really. Look closely."
She did. Fighting back a small tremor of revulsion, she tried to see it through his eyes.
"Watch what it does," he continued. "If it was as big as you or me, it would scare everybody to death. It would be a genuine monster, right? But it's little. It eats leaves, minds its own business, and adds a little beauty to the world."
She took the hand not preoccupied with the caterpillar, and they walked wordlessly past the ranks of names, inscribed in chronological order of death. These were, of course, only American casualties. Except in the hearts of their families and friends, there was no comparable memorial anywhere on the planet for the two million people of Southeast Asia who had also died in the conflict. In America, the most common public comment about this war was about political hamstringing of military power, psychologically akin, she thought, to the "stab-in-the-back" explanation by German militarists of their World War I defeat. The Vietnam war was a pustule on the national conscience that no President so far had the courage to lance. (Subsequent policies of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had not made this task easier.) She remembered how common it was for American soldiers to call their Vietnamese adversaries "gooks," "slopeheads," "slant-eyes," and worse. Could we possibly manage the next phase of human history without first dealing with this penchant for dehumanizing the adversary?
* * *
In everyday conversation, der Heer didn't talk like an academic. If you met him at the corner newsstand buying a paper, you'd never guess he was a scientist. He hadn't lost his new York street accent. At first the apparent incongruity between his language and the quality of his scientific work seemed amusing to his colleagues. As his research and the man himself became better known, his accent became merely idiosyncratic. But his pronunciation of, say, guanosine triphosphate, seemed to give this benign molecule explosive properties.
They had been slow in recognizing that they were falling in love. It must have been apparent to many others. A few weeks before, when Lunacharsky was still at Argus, he launched himself on one of his occasional tirades on the irrationality of language. This time it was the turn of American English.
"Ellie, why do people say `make the same mistake again'? What does `again' add to the sentence? And am I right that `burn up' and `burn down' mean the same thing? `Slow up' and `slow down' mean the same thing? So if `screw up' is acceptable, why not `screw down'?"
She nodded wearily. She had heard him more than once complain to his Soviet colleagues on the inconsistencies of the Russian language, and was sure she would hear a French edition of all this at the Paris conference. She was happy to admit that languages had infelicities, but they had so many sources and evolved in response to so many small pressures that it would be astonishing if they were perfectly coherent and internally consistent. Vaygay had such a good time complaining, though, that she ordinarily did not have the heart to remonstrate with him.
"And take this phrase `head over heels in love,'" he continued. "This is a common expression, yes? But it's exactly backward. Or, rather, upside down. You are ordinarily head over heels. When you are in love you should be heels over head. Am I right? You would know about falling in love. But whoever invented this phrase did not know