As Little Children

David J. Strumfels

Analog (1994-02)

So long ago. So long ago. And yet, looking into these enormous brown eyes I remember as though it is but yesterday. The sweet ‘bama sun, and the June breezes on my face, and the cool grasses thick beneath my feet like God’s carpeting. Yes, I remember it all too well; all I need do is close my eyes, and drift a moment or two, and I am there…

Late twentieth-century Earth. A tiny place, but full of troubles: crime, disease, poverty, hatred, riots, Los Angeles, Saddam Hussein, the Middle East, oil, fire, greenhouse effect, ozone depletion, global catastrophe, AIDS, nuclear weapons, overpopulation…

My biological family was poor even by the standards of the time, trashy poor some would say though we never knew it, never thought that way, were proud of what we had and did. Pa worked in the ball bearing factory all day, ma did housecleaning and other odd jobs when she could. There was enough to eat, a roof over our heads, a school and a church. Especially a church.

I can still see that church clearly. A vast crumbling eggshell of a structure, high up on a hill, gazing down on us like a portrait, watching you wherever you went. Every Sunday the folks packed us off, and one by one we walked the dusty road up the hill and filed into the great eggshell where we sat. A sea of noisy black faces on silent white pews, and listened to the Reverend Stetson tell us about God and Jesus and the hereafter and the faith of little children.

Faith was the central element in our lives, the fulcrum about which our lives turned. I know that is difficult to believe, or even to imagine now, but it is true. Faith was our air and water and food; it burned in the hearth, and sent smoky tendrils up into the stratosphere. It was our wire into the cosmos. It vibrated in the walls of our beings. Pa came home every evening coated with it, a grime that no amount of soap and water could ever quite wash off. Ma beat an upbringing into us with it.

Sitting on his lap, looking up into those moist old eyes. I was five or six, maybe younger, small for my age but nanorazor sharp even then. He knew it too; and I knew it from the expression in those eyes, the way he saw opportunity and danger at the words that had just come from my mouth—I knew I had asked the forbidden question.

‘You must find Jesus in your heart,” he answered it; “you must open your heart to him, and then He will fill you with His love. That is the only way you can know Him; the only way to Heaven. There is no other way.”

I’ve cheated you, the accusation screams through my head, like a cry of damnation. But the brown eyes are still on me, still innocent, trusting, still moist with expression. Mine are filled with tears.

I was the youngest of seven, or eight—or was it nine? That I don’t remember clearly anymore. Also the brightest. Maybe it was my brother and sisters beating on me too. Whatever, I got a full scholarship, got packed off to the University. Hugs and kisses from everybody, including the Reverend Stetson himself, now a doddering old man. Myself, I was seventeen.

Could I really have been seventeen once? It’s a misty dream to me now; no, a nightmare in a swirling fog: urban warfare, deindustrialization, MacPherson, Green Revolution, animal rights, tuberculosis and smallpox, desertification, global cooling, mass extinctions, Moscow, South Africa, Kotube…

And yet in the midst of all this now inconceivable carnage, flowers did bloom in the desert. Remember cancer from your history plugins? This was when it was at last licked for good. And a host of other genetic slow deaths. Other important developments to recall: the first permanent space station, a return to the Moon, the commercialization of fusion power, the first practical human-computer interfaces. Of course it seems like hell now, it was hell, by any standards, but a few rungs of the ladder were climbed. More importantly, we climbed them.

My major was engineering, with minors in astronomy and electronics, not a common combination even then but I’d always had my own ideas. I’d grown up in an isolated backwater of a world, and when I realized there was more I wanted it. Joined the National Space Society, the L-5 Society, you name it. I was determined for a career on the High Frontier. Ma didn’t understand of course; she thought it was my duty to spend my life improving the lot of those “down here, where all th’ needin’ ‘n’ suffrin’ is; why, there’s nothin’ ‘n’ no one up there to help.” Reverend Stetson just shook his head sadly, and said he’d pray for me.

Pa wasn’t there. The bearing factory had shut down a year ago, replaced by robots in Korea or Mexico or some place like that, and the government had sent him to a school in another state, to learn computer programming on twenty-year-old machines that nobody used anymore. I never saw him again. I assumed he was at last with God.

I was on the first International Mars expedition in 2016, just before the first big breakthroughs in age control. We stood on the ocher sands and looked into the twilight, and felt a billion years and an entire cosmos leech into our bones. Earth was a tiny, if still tragic, sapphire in the sky, the Moon a tinier diamond beside it. There are moments in each life that remain fresh with you forever; that was one of mine (as, of course, is the one now). The expedition had cost a trillion dollars, about 5 percent of the GWP, but any fool could see that it had been worth it; at that moment seven billion faces were gazing up at hope instead of down at their troubles. It was a moment that set the pace of mankind for centuries to come. I wouldn’t have traded it for all the gods in all the scriptures.

I stroke the furry face before me, and curse myself for having thought that thought. I’m sorry.

We could have stayed in orbit. We could have contented ourselves with looking down with our telescopes and probes and sniffers. We would have learned just as much, and they would never have known.

But we couldn’t do that. No, we have to be God. Of course, we don’t tell ourselves that; we persuade ourselves instead that we are doing them a great favor, in showing them what is possible. That they will take hope from our example, the same hope those seven billion took so long ago. But deep inside, we all know it is a fraud. We know they wouldn’t see it that way. And that that is the real reason we came down—to be worshipped. God damn us all to hell.

I returned from the Mars expedition to learn that Reverend Stetson had passed on to his reward. A heart attack in the middle of delivering his Sunday sermon. He was eighty-two.

Ma had just reached her sixtieth year herself. I comforted her—I tried to comfort her—by talking about the future, about the developments going on in the genetics laboratories: “In another decade they’ll be able to reverse the aging process in humans completely. You’ll have eternal life—and eternal youth.” But ma was horrified at such a prospect: “All mah life I been gettin’ ready t’meet the Lord, ‘n’ now you want t’take it away from me? What’s matter with you, boy?”

I tried arguing, until I realized it was hopeless, that this person had spent her entire life preparing for the day she would face her God, and that to steal that moment was to steal that life, too. That I had no right to such a theft. That night I cried like a baby, cried myself to sleep for the first time in as long as I could remember.

That was the last time I ever went home, at least physically. Talents like mine were needed elsewhere than on a minuscule planet, especially one so long on problems and short on hope. I spent the next half century expanding and developing the new empire: L-5, Mare Imbrium, Cydonia, the

Belt, Ganymede, the Rings, Triton…

I was a planner, a builder, a solver, a trouble-shooter (and maker), an explorer and a rogue. And I was successful everywhere, at all of these. Successful and happy. I became famous. I forgot where I had come from. I forgot everything.

It was glorious and exhilarating and an awful fat lot of fun, but of course it didn’t last forever, couldn’t last forever. For at the edge of every frontier is still another frontier, and the spirit inevitably yearns for that too. Yet—the stars! Even the closest was ten thousand times farther away than the farthest distance I had yet traveled. It was a journey I could not comprehend. Even immortality seemed too short a time to cross those gulfs. But cross them I would, of that I had no doubt; I just did not know how yet.

The moment they came bounding out of their huts toward us we knew we had made a tragic mistake. We’re the answer to their prayers; the realization, at once undeniable and irrevocable, flashed through our minds. We didn’t even have to look at each other to know that all had picked up the thought simultaneously.

Perhaps if we had been expecting intelligent life…but that had been the furthest thing from our expectations when we’d entered their system. After all, didn’t the experiments of Barkley and Bleigh prove once and for all that life—even at the simplest level—was so improbable that it would not occur in more than one in a million galaxies? And didn’t the Fermi Paradox (if intelligence were common in the Universe, it would have come to us long ago) confirm our solitude? Where, and how, had we so badly miscalculated? Or was it just our misfortune?

Our misfortune?!

To the Alpha Centauri system and back was a little over seventy years that first time. When we got home, we discovered that Earth had finally solved her population problem, thus her resources problem, once and for all. For by then space for sentient minds in the net was essentially infinite, and people who still wanted families could raise virtual ones to their hearts’ content.

Many did, as well as live other lives fulfilling to them, but for us it was an empty life, devoid of—of—to tell the truth, we could not have told you what it was devoid of. All we knew was that if mankind had solved all the problems, had conquered all the dangers of living in the Sol system, then that system was not the place for us anymore.

We needed faster starships. We needed to press as close to the light barrier as possible. No, not really; with our infinite lives, and youths, it shouldn’t have mattered how long it took us to fill the Universe. But matter it did, terribly. For we were still human though our bodies no longer were, all too human, with minds sculpted by millions of years of natural selection to think in terms of years, or decades at most. We were far too impatient in the pursuit of what gave us joy. So we labored toward our dream.

And succeeded.

A thousand years later. It still seems like eternity to us, when we think it out loud. Yet it is but an eyeblink: Homo sapiens (to the extent we can still be called that) is but one half of one percent older; the Atlantic Ocean has widened another part in a hundred thousand; the Sun has completed one four-hundred-thousandth of its orbit about the Galaxy. We have touched some ten thousand systems, yet a hundred times that many lie within our reach, and ten trillion times that sum lay beyond. It is only arrogance that makes us feel old.

We should have known better. The moment we saw the tiny sapphire, and the tinier diamond beside it, we should have stopped, pulled back, and reached into our stores of wisdom. Hell, we should have been on our guard the moment we entered the system: a G2 single, age approximately three billion years, low angular momentum, metals, an Oort cloud. The fact that we’d been through a hundred similar systems should not have made us lax.

But it did. And when we tasted water in all three phases, we lost our grip on reality. We swooped in for a closer look. When we found free oxygen and chlorophyll, we dove closer still.

And found them.

The sculpted hives of vegetation, clustered around lakes and river deltas, were clearly visible from orbit. Through the scopes we could easily make out the mud and straw huts, and the dirt roads they traveled on.

They are much like us, in many ways. Forget the fur, and the six fingers (including fully opposable thumbs) on each of six limbs, and the short stubs of tails no doubt left over from their tree-dwelling ancestors. They’re still eggheads, with (big!) binocular eyes and faces that glow brightly with intelligence and curiosity. It will take time to completely decipher their language, but its complexity is instantly obvious in the richness of vocabulary and bodily expressions. Their emotions range the spectrum, from simple fear and anger all the way to humor and reverence (don’t ask me how—you can just tell, that’s all). And if all this isn’t enough, then know that at night they sit and gaze at their moon—larger than Earth’s—and the stars and wonder, and argue.

Yes, they are children, but in another ten thousand years or so, they will be where we are now.

Excuse us, for a moment I forgot. But looking into those eyes reminds me again, with stark cruelty: would have been where we are now.

Lord, can you forgive us?

Where would we be now, if ten thousand years ago, or even a thousand years ago, our gods had descended from the sky, and touched us with their reality? Of course, maybe they had. Maybe that is why the journey had taken ten thousand years. And so many billions of lives that might have been spared. We have been too content to sit back and wait for salvation to come to us.

Where would ma, or pa, be now if…

No; you’re evading your own guilt. The present.

The brown eyes gaze softly into mine, the most innocent of trusts. I’m not sure why, but I reach out again, and touch that face with crooked fingertips, as though I could reach right into the mind and pull out memory of what it has experienced today, as though I could make it forget.

Do not despair, young one.

I pull away, touched by the lightning of the thought. My breathing is suddenly fast, and ragged. “What…?”

It says nothing, but takes my hand and places the fingers carefully against its temple and forehead. There, that’s better. Soon you will not need physical contact, perhaps in another million or so of your years, but it is not a great encumbrance for now. It is even comforting, in a way.

“How—who—did you say a million years?”

A day in the lifetime of the cosmos. Which, as you have chosen me for the honor, allow me to welcome you into. Your first steps were certainly exciting to watch!

I try to say something intelligible, but my facilities fail me.

Oh come on, you didn’t really think we would allow you to make such a terrible mistake, did you? We didn’t allow it to happen to you, and we would never permit you to do it to another species. No, these beings will reach adulthood just as you have, by their own glorious efforts.

Adulthood?

Well, let us say, provisional adulthood. Adolescence. You’ve made it. Congratulations. Your folks must be proud of you.

Before I can react to that statement, I am standing on God’s carpeting, with the Sun on my face and the soft breezes in my hair. I am not alone; ma and pa, and Reverend Stetson, are beside me. I am seventeen.

“This is cruel!”

Limited perception always is. That, too, you will outgrow.

I am on ocher Martian sands, a pair of worlds at my fingertips.

Faith has sustained you this far. But now it is time to move on. Your first responsibility. I am back with reality again, the warmth of fur upon me. Here. Making sure they don’t run around with scissors, or put things in their mouths, and learn to share their toys. Discreetly of course. You know how to do that…

Strangely enough, I do. More important, I am ready.