Carl Sagan’s Hunt for Intelligent Life in the Universe Read Free

dining room below.
    A loud clacking almost woke him. And then he realized the clacking was coming from the wave. More specifically, from an aquatic organism not as tall as Hsissh’s shoulder, ovoid, with a brilliant green, luminescent exoskeleton to protect it from the pressure of the ice-crusted oceans of the moon it evolved on seventeen billion light years away. It was Shissh, snapping two pincers at the front of her carapace, sending her consciousness to interrupt his nap and heckle him for not slipping out of his body. He almost woke up just to spite her; but seeing her, even in this new form, caused his body to release a flood of bonding hormones. He purred with familial love. Did she still feel the bond in that hard, cold shell? Did she still think of Third—the only member of their three parents whose werfle body had been inhabited by The One?
    Shissh spoke into his mind. “Are you coming to The Gathering … Fluffy ?”
    Betrayed by familial love. He never should have told her that name. “No, of course not. Go away and let me sleep.” He tried to burrow deeper into the furs.
    Shissh clicked her pincers and waved her eye stalks. “If you want to keep your warm human nest, you’d better come now. Misch is pushing for a fourth plague and—”
    A vision of Noa’s eyes dulled by death permeated Hsissh’s dream. Hsissh sent his thoughts into The Gathering before Shissh had finished.
    Shissh’s crustacean dream-self emerged beside him, eye stalks pointed in his direction. “Mighty fast entrance, Hsissh.”
    “I’ve got a good thing going,” Hsissh grumbled, looking out at The Gathering. It was held in a cavern with an opening directly above that let in the sparkle of the stars—but not the glow of the time gate or human satellites. The cavern had been destroyed thousands of cycles ago, and this was only the memory of a memory that The One all shared. It was crowded with dream versions of The One. Most were in the form of werfles, but there were exotic creatures from several dozen worlds scattered among them.
    “I’ve been to Earth!” one of The One’s consciousnesses roared. It was Misch. He wore the form of a “cat,” one of the few species on the human home world that was a compatible host and could tolerate living in close quarters with humans. The One had tried to inhabit humans; it didn’t work. Human bodies rebelled and were inevitably drugged for “schizophrenia” and often “institutionalized.” But cats were easy enough to possess. Pacing on his four feet, Misch said, “The humans have no fur, no claws, no speed, and no natural armor. They can’t see in the dark, and they are more ignorant of the waves than a cat … and I can tell you, cats are short on brains.”
    Hsissh’s whiskers twitched. His host species, the werfle, weren’t particularly “long on brains” either, but The One outsourced their big thinking to the collective consciousness of the waves.
    Swishing his feline tail, Misch declared, “They have stripped and poisoned their home world of natural resources to make up for their inadequacies. Introduce the Fourth Plague before it happens here!”
    Hsissh had seen the results of the Third Plague in holos with Noa. He had seen orphaned human children too weak to defend themselves from rats feasting on their flesh. Hsissh’s two hearts beat faster as he stretched his mind out to all who were in The Gathering. “But they are wave aware!”
    He felt the focus of the room shift to him.
    “Impossible!”
    Misch sat down and swished his tail. “Hsissh, what are you doing here?”
    Someone else said, “Shouldn’t you be napping?”
    A member of The One, wearing the same species host as Hsissh, stood up on her hind legs. “We know the humans don’t use waves.”
    Ish, wearing a werfle body, said, “They do.”
    There were hisses and grumbles among The One.
    Hopping up and down with the excitement of his own recent epiphany, Hsissh explained. “The circular metal devices