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CHAPTER 17 The Dream of the Ants

ELLIE WAS in the midst of packing notes, magnetic tapes, and a palm frond for shipment to Japan when she received word that her mother had suffered a stroke. Immediately afterward, she was brought a letter by project courier. It was from John Staughton, and there were no polite preliminaries:

“Your mother and I would often discuss your deficiencies and shortcomings. It was always a difficult conversation. When I defended you (and, although you may not believe it, this happened often), she told me that I was putty in your hands. When I criticized you, she told me to mind my own business.”

“But I want you to know that your unwillingness to visit her in the last few years, since this Vega business, was a source of continuing pain to her. She would tell her cronies at that dreadful nursing home she insisted on going to that you'd be visiting her soon. For years she told them that. “Soon.” She planned how she would show her famous daughter around, in what order she'd introduce you to that decrepit bunch.”

“You probably won't want to hear this, and I tell it to you with sorrow. But it's for your own good. Your behavior was more painful to her than anything that ever happened to her, even your father's death. You may be a big shot now, your hologram available all over the world, hobnobbing with politicians and so on, but as a human being, you haven't learned anything since high school…”

Her eyes welling with tears, she began to crumple the letter and its envelope, but discovered some stiff piece of paper inside, a partial hologram made from an old two-dimensional photograph by a computer extrapolation technique. You had a faint but satisfactory sense of being able to see around edges and corners. It was a photo she had never seen before. Her mother as a young woman, quite lovely, smiled out of the picture, her aim casually draped over the shoulder of Ellie's father, who sported what seemed to be a day's growth of beard. They both seemed radiantly happy. With a surge of anguish, guilt, fury at Staughton, and a little self-pity, Ellie weighed the evident reality that she would never see either of the people in that picture again.

Her mother lay immobile in the bed. Her expression was oddly neutral, registering neither joy nor regret, merely… a kind of waiting. Her only motion was an occasional blink of her eyes. Whether she could hear or understand what Ellie was saying was unclear. Ellie thought about communications schemes. She couldn't help it; the thought arose unbidden: one blink for yes, two blinks for no. Or hook up an encephalograph with a cathode ray tube that her mother could see, and teach her to modulate her beta waves. But this was her mother, not Alpha Lyrae, and what was called for here was not decryption algorithms but feeling.

She held her mother's hand and talked for hours. She rambled on about her mother and her father, her childhood. She recalled being a toddler among the newly washed sheets, being swept up to the sky. She talked about John Staughton. She apologized for many things. She cried a little.

Her mother's hair was awry and, finding a brush, she prettified her. She examined the lined face and recognized her own. Her mother's eyes, deep and moist, stared fixedly, with only an occasional blink into, it seemed, a great distance.

“I know where I come from,” Ellie told her softly. Almost imperceptibly, her mother shook her head from side to side, as though she were regretting all those years in which she and her daughter had been estranged.

Ellie gave her mother's hand a little squeeze and thought she felt one in return.

Her mother's life was not in danger, she was told. If there was any change in her condition, they would call at once to her office in Wyoming. In a few days, they would be able to move her from the hospital back to the nursing home, where the facilities, she was assured, were adequate.

Staughton seemed subdued, but with a depth of feeling for her mother she had not guessed at. She would call often, she told him.

The austere marble lobby displayed, perhaps incongruously, a real statue—not a holograph—of a nude woman in the style of Praxiteles. They ascended in an Otis-Hitachi elevator, in which the second language was English rather than braille, and she found herself ushered through a large barn of a room in which people were huddled over word processors. A word would be typed in Hiragana, the fifty-one-letter Japanese phonetic alphabet, and on the screen would appear the corresponding Chinese ideogram in Kanji.

There were hundreds of thousands of such ideograms, or characters, stored in the computer memories, although only three or four thousand were generally needed to read a newspaper. Because many characters of entirely different meanings were expressed by the same spoken word, all possible translations into Kanji were printed out, in order of probability. The word processor had a contextual subroutine in which the candidate characters were also queued according to the computer's estimate of the intended meaning. It was rarely wrong. In a language which had until recently never had a typewriter, the word processor was working a communications revolution not fully admired by traditionalists.

In the conference room they seated themselves on low chairs—an evident concession to Western tastes— around a low lacquered table, and tea was poured. In Ellie's field of view, beyond the window was the city of Tokyo. She was spending much time before windows, she thought. The newspaper was the Asahi Shimbun—the Rising Sun News—and she was interested to see that one of the political reporters was a woman, a rarity by the standards of the American and Soviet media. Japan was engaged in a national reassessment of the role of women. Traditional male privileges were being surrendered slowly in what seemed to be an unreported strect-by-strect battle. Just yesterday the president of a firm called Nanoelectronics had bemoaned to her that there wasn't a “girl” in Tokyo who still knew how to tie an obi.

As with clip-on bow ties, an easily donned simulacrum had captured the market. Japanese women bad better things to do than spend half an hour every day wrapping and tucking. The reporter was dressed in an austere business suit, the hem falling to her calves.

To maintain security, no press visitors were permitted at the Hokkaido Machine site. Instead, when crew members or project officials came to the main island of Honshu, they routinely scheduled a round of interviews with the Japanese and foreign news media. As always, the questions were familiar. Reporters all over the world had nearly the same approach to the Machine, if you made a few allowances for local idiosyncrasies. Was she pleased that, after the American and Soviet “disappointments,” a Machine was being built in Japan? Did she feel isolated in the northern island of Hokkaido? Was she concerned because the Machine components being used in Hokkaido had been tested beyond the strictures of the Message?

Before 1945, this district of the city had been owned by the Imperial Navy, and indeed, immediately adjacent she could see the roof of the Naval Observatory, its two silver domes housing telescopes still used for timekeeping and calendrical functions. They were gleaming in the noonday Sun.

Why did the Machine include a dodecahedron and the three spherical shells called benzels? Yes, the reporters understood that she didn't know. But what did she think? She explained that on an issue of this sort it was foolish to have an opinion in the absence of evidence. They persisted, and she pleaded the virtues of a tolerance for ambiguity. If there was a real danger, should they send robots instead of people, as a Japanese artificial intelligence expert had recommended? Are there any personal effects she would be taking with her? Any family pictures? Microcomputers? A Swiss Army knife?

Ellie noticed two figures emerge through a trapdoor onto the roof of the nearby observatory. Their faces were obscured by visors. They were garbed in the blue-gray quilted armor of medieval Japan. Brandishing wooden staffs taller than they were, they bowed one to another, paused for a heartbeat, and then pummeled and parried for the next half hour. Her answers to the reporters became a little stilted; she was mesmerized by the spectacle before her. No one else seemed to notice. The staffs must have been heavy, because the ceremonial combat was slow, as if they were warriors from the ocean bottom.

Had she known Dr. Lunacharsky and Dr. Sukhavati for many years before the receipt of the Message?

What about Dr. Eda? Mr. Xi? What did she think of them, their accomplishments? How well were the five of them getting on? Indeed, she marveled to herself that she was a member of such a select group.

What were her impressions of the quality of the Japanese components? What could she say about the meeting the Five had had with Emperor Akihito? Were their discussions with Shinto and Buddhist leaders part of a general effort by the Machine Project to gain the insights of world religious figures before the Machine was activated, or just a courtesy to Japan as the host country? Did she think the device could be a Trojan Horse or a Doomsday Machine? In her answers she tried to be courteous, succinct, and noncontroversial. The Machine Project public relations officer who had accompanied her was visibly pleased.

Abruptly the interview was over. They wished her and her colleagues all success, the Managing Editor said.

They had every expectation of interviewing her when she returned. They hoped she would visit Japan often afterward. Her hosts were smiling and bowing. The quilted warriors had retreated down the trapdoor. She could see her security people, eyes darting, outside the now open door of the conference room. On the way out she asked the woman reporter about the apparitions from medieval Japan.

“Oh yes,” she replied. “They are astronomers for the Coast Guard. They practice Kendo at their lunch hour every day. You can set your watch by them.”

Xi had been born on the Long March, and had fought the Kuomintang as a youngster during the Revolution.

He served as an intelligence officer in Korea, rising eventually to a position of authority over Chinese strategic technology. But in the Cultural Revolution he was publicly humiliated and condemned to domestic exile, although later he was rehabilitated with some fanfare.

One of Xi's crimes in the eyes of the Cultural Revolution had been to admire some of the ancient Confucian virtues, and especially one passage from the Great Learning, which for centuries before every Chinese with even a rudimentary education knew by heart. It was upon this passage, Sun Yat-sen had said, that his own revolutionary nationalist movement at the beginning of the twentieth century was based: The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the Kingdom first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in then-thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things. Thus, Xi believed, the pursuit of knowledge was central for the well-being of China.

But the Red Guards had thought otherwise.

During the Cultural Revolution, Xi had been consigned as a worker on an impoverished collective farm in Ningxia Province, near the Great Wall, a region with a rich Muslim tradition—where, while plowing an unpromising field, he uncovered an intricately ornamented bronze helmet from the Han Dynasty. When reestablished in the leadership, he turned his attention from strategic weapons to arche-ology. The Cultural Revolution had attempted to sever a 5,000-year-old continuous Chinese cultural tradition. Xi's response was to help build bridges to the nation's past. Increasingly he devoted his attention to the excavation of the underground funerary city of Xian.

It was there that the great discovery had been made of the terra-cotta army of the Emperor after whom China itself was named. His official name was Qin Shi Huangdi, but through the vagaries of transliteration had come to be widely known in the West as Ch'in. In the third century B. C., Qin unified the country, built the Great Wall, and compassionately decreed that upon his death lifelike terracotta models be substituted for the members of his entourage—soldiers, servants, and nobles—who, according to earlier tradition, would have been buried alive with his body. The terra-cotta army was composed of 7,500 soldiers, roughly a division. Every one of them had distinct facial features. You could see that people from all over China were represented. The Emperor had welded many separate and warring provinces into one nation. A nearby grave contained the almost perfectly preserved body of the Marchioness of Tai, a minor functionary in the Emperor's court. The technology for preserving bodies—you could dearly see the severe expression on the face of the Marchioness, refined perhaps from decades of dressing down the servants—was vastly superior to that of ancient Egypt.

Qin had simplified the writing, codified the law, built roads, completed the Great Wall, and unified the country. He also confiscated weapons. While he was accused of massacring scholars who criticized his policies, and burning books because some knowledge was unsettling, be maintained that he bad eliminated endemic corruption and instituted peace and order. Xi was reminded of the Cultural Revolution. He imagined reconciling these conflicting tendencies in the heart of a single person. Qin's arrogance had reached staggering proportions—to punish a mountain that had offended him, he ordered it denuded of vegetation and painted red, the color worn by condemned criminals. Qin was great, but he was also mad. Could you unify a collection of diverse and contentious nations without being a little mad? You'd have to be crazy even to attempt it, Xi laughingly told Ellie.

With increasing fascination, Xi had arranged for massive excavations at Xian. Gradually, he became convinced that the Emperor Qin himself was also lying in wait, perfectly preserved, in some great tomb near the disinterred terracotta army. Nearby, according to ancient records, was also buried under a great mound a detailed model of the nation of China in 210 B. C., With every temple and pagoda meticulously represented.

The rivers, it was said, were made of mercury, with the Emperor's barge in miniature perpetu-ally navigating his underground domain. When the ground at Xian was found to be contaminated with mercury, Xi's excitement grew.

Xi had unearthed a contemporary account that described a great dome the Emperor had commissioned to overarch this miniature realm, called, like the real one, the Celestial Kingdom. As written Chinese had hardly changed in 2,200 years, he was able to read the account directly, without benefit of an expert linguist. A chronicler from the time of Qin was speaking to Xi directly. Many nights Xi would put himself to sleep trying to envision the great Milky Way that sundered the vault of the sky in the domed tomb of the great Emperor, and the night ablaze with comets which had appeared at his passing to honor his memory.

The search for Qin's tomb and for his model of the universe had occupied Xi over the last decade. He had not found it yet, but his quest bad captured the imagination of China. It was said of him, “There are a billion people in China, but there is only one Xi.” In a nation slowly easing restraints on individuality, he was seen as exerting a constructive influence.

Qin, it was clear, had been obsessed by immortality. The man who gave his name to the most populous nation on Earth, the man who built what was then the largest structure on the planet, was, predictably enough, afraid he would be forgotten. So he caused more monumental structures to be erected; preserved, or reproduced for the ages, the bodies and faces of his courtiers; built his own still-elusive tomb and world model; and sent repeated expeditions into the Eastern Sea to seek the elixir of life. He complained bitterly of the expense as he launched each new voyage. One of these missions involved scores of ocean-going junks and a crew of 3,000 young men and women. They never returned, and their fate is unknown. The water of immortality was unavailable.

Just fifty years later, wet rice agriculture and iron metallurgy suddenly appeared in Japan—developments that profoundly altered the Japanese economy and created a class of warrior aristocrats. Xi argued that the Japanese name for Japan clearly reflected the Chinese origin of Japanese culture: The Land of the Rising Sun. Where would you have to be standing, Xi asked, for the Sun to be rising over Japan? So the very name of the daily newspaper that Ellie had just visited was, Xi proposed, a reminder of the life and times of the Emperor Qin. Ellie thought that Qin made Alexander the Great a schoolyard bully by comparison. Well, almost.

If Qin had been obsessed with immortality, Xi was obsessed with Qin. Ellie told him about her visit to Sol Had-den in Earth orbit, and they agreed that were the Emperor Qin alive in the waning years of the twentieth century, Earth orbit is where he would be. She introduced Xi to Hadden by videophone and then left them to talk alone. Xi's excellent English had been honed during his recent involvement in the transfer of the Crown Colony of Hong Kong to the Chinese People's Republic. They were still talking when the Methuselah set, and bad to continue through the network of communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit. They must have hit it off. Soon after, Hadden requested that the activation of the Machine be synchronized so that he would beoverhead at that moment. He wanted Hokkaido in the focus of his telescope, he said, when the time came.

“Do Buddhists believe in God, or not?” Ellie asked on their way to have dinner with the Abbot.

“Their position seems to be,” Vaygay replied dryly, “that their God is so great he doesn't even have to exist.”

As they sped through the countryside, they talked about Utsumi, the Abbot of the most famous Zen Buddhist monastery in Japan. A few years before, at ceremonies marking the fiftieth anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima, Utsumi had delivered a speech that commanded worldwide attention. He was well connected in Japanese political life, and served as a kind of spiritual adviser to the ruling political party, but he spent most of his time in monastic and devotional activities.

“His father was also the Abbot of a Buddhist monastery,” Sukhavad mentioned. Ellie raised her eyebrows.

“Don't look so surprised. Marriage was permitted to them, like the Russian Orthodox clergy. Isn't that right, Vaygay?”

“That was before my time,” he said, a little distractedly. The restaurant was set in a grove of bamboo and was called Ungetsu—the Clouded Moon; and indeed there was a clouded moon in the early evening sky.

Their Japanese hosts had arranged that there be no other guests. Ellie and her companions removed their shoes and, padding in their stocking feet, entered a small dining room which looked out on stalks of bamboo.

The Abbot's head was shaved, his garment a robe of black and silver. He greeted them in perfect colloquial English, and his Chinese, Xi later told her, turned out to be passable as well. The surroundings were restful, the conversation lighthearted. Each course was a small work of art, edible jewels. She understood how nouvelle cuisine had its origins in the Japanese culinary tradition. If the custom were to eat the food blindfolded, she would have been content. If, instead, the delicacies were brought out only to be admired and never to be eaten, she would also have been content. To look and eat both was an intimation of heaven.

Ellie was seated across from the Abbot and next to Lu-nacharsky. Others inquired about the species—or at least the kingdom—of this or that morsel. Between the sushi and the ginkgo nuts, the conversation turned, after a fashion, to the mission.

“But why do we communicate?” the Abbot asked. “To exchange information,” replied Lunacharsky, seemingly devoting full attention to his recalcitrant chopsticks. “But why do we wish to exchange information?”

“Because we feed on information. Information is necessary for our survival Without information we die.”

Lunacharsky was inteat on a ginkgo nut that slipped off his chopsticks each time be attempted to raise it to his mouth. He lowered his head to meet the chopsticks halfway.

“I believe,” continued the Abbot, “that we communicate out of love or compassion.” He reached with his fingers for one of his own ginkgo nuts and placed it squarely in his mouth.

“Then you think,” she asked, “that the Machine is an instrument of compassion? You think there is no risk?”

“I can communicate with a flower,” he went on as if in response. “I can talk to a stone. You would have no difficulty understanding the beings—that is the proper word? — of some other world.”

“I am perfectly prepared to believe that the stone communicates to you,” Lunacharsky said, chewing on the ginkgo nut. He had followed the Abbot's example. “But I wonder about you communicating to the stone. How would you convince us that you can communicate with a stone? The world is full of error. How do you know you are not deceiving yourself?”

“Ah, scientific skepticism.” The Abbot flashed a smile that Ellie found absolutely winning; it was innocent, almost childlike.

“To communicate with a stone, you must become much less… preoccupied. You must not do so much thinking, so much talking. When I say I communicate with a stone, I am not talking about words. The Christians say. “In the beginning was the Word. ” But I am talking about a communication much earlier, much more fundamental than that.”

“It's only the Gospel of Saint John that talks about the Word,” Ellie commented—a little pedantically, she thought as soon as the words were out of her mouth. “The earlier Synoptic Gospels say nothing about it. It's really an accretion from Greek philosophy. What kind of preverbal communication do you mean?”

“Your question is made of words. You ask me to use words to describe what has nothing to do with words. Let me see. There is a Japanese story called The Dream of the Ants. ” It is set in the Kingdom of the Ants. It is a long story, and I will not tell it to you now. But the point of the story is this: To understand the language of the ants, you must become an ant.”

“The language of the ants is in fact a chemical language,” said Lunacharsky, eyeing the Abbot keenly.

“They lay down specific molecular traces to indicate the path they have taken to find food. To understand the language of the ants, I need a gas chromatograph, or a mass spectrometer. I do not need to become an ant.”

“Probably, that is the only way you know to become an ant,” returned the Abbot, looking at no one in particular. “Tell me, why do people study the signs left by the ants?”

“Well,” Ellie offered, “I guess an entomologist would say it's to understand the ants and ant society.

Scientists take pleasure in understanding.”

“That is only another way of saying that they love the ants.”

She suppressed a small shudder.

“Yes, but those who fund the entomologists say something else. They say it's to control the behavior of ants, to make them leave a house they've infested, say, or to understand the biology of soil for agriculture. It might provide an alternative to pesticides. I guess you could say there's some love of the ants in that,” Ellie mused.

“But it's also in our self-interest,” said Lunacharsky. “The pesticides are poisonous to us as well.”

“Why are you talking about pesticides in the midst of such a dinner?” shot Sukhavati from across the table.

“We will dream the dream of the ants another time,” the Abbot said softly to Ellie, flashing again that perfect, untroubled smile.

Reshod with the aid of meter-long shoehorns, they approached their small fleet of automobiles, while the serving women and proprietress smiled and bowed ceremoniously. Ellie and Xi watched the Abbot enter a limousine with some of their Japanese hosts.

“I asked him, If he could talk with a stone, could he communicate with the dead?” Xi told her. “And what did he say?”

“He said the dead were easy. His difficulties were with the living.”