Permutation City

"That's right. It's difficult to translate the motivation exactly, but they have a very precise aesthetic which dictates what they'll accept as a theory -- and it's almost physically impossible for them to contradict it. If they try to dance a theory which fails to resonate with the neural system which assesses its simplicity, the dance falls apart." He thought for a second, then pointed to the screen behind him; a swarm of Lambertians appeared. "Here's an example -- going back awhile. This is a team of astronomers -- all fully aware of the motions of the planets in the sky, relative to the sun -- testing out a theory which attempts to explain those observations by assuming that Planet Lambert is fixed, and everything else orbits around it."

Maria watched the creatures intently. She would have been hard-pressed to identify the rhythms in their elaborate weaving motions -- but when the swarm began to drift apart, the collapse of order was obvious.

"Now here's the heliocentric version, from a few years later."

The dance, again, was too complex to analyze -- although it did seem to be more harmonious -- and after a while, almost hypnotic. The black specks shifting back and forth against the white sky left trails on her retinas. Below, the ubiquitous grassland seemed an odd setting for astronomical theorizing. The Lambertians apparently accepted their condition -- in which herding mites represented the greatest control they exerted over nature -- as if it constituted as much of a Utopia as the Elysian's total freedom. They still faced predators. Many still died young from disease. Food was always plentiful, though; they'd modeled their own population cycles, and learned to damp the oscillations, at a very early stage. And, nature lovers or not, there'd been no "ideological" struggles over "birth control"; once the population model had spread, the same remedies had been adopted by communities right across the planet. Lambertian cultural diversity was limited; far more behavior was genetically determined than was the case in humans -- the young being born self-sufficient, with far less neural plasticity than a human infant -- and there was relatively little variation in the relevant genes.

The heliocentric theory was acceptable; the dance remained coherent. Repetto replayed the scene, with a "translation" in a small window, showing the positions of the planets represented at each moment. Maria still couldn't decipher the correspondence -- the Lambertians certainly weren't flying around in simple mimicry of the hypothetical orbits -- but the synchronized rhythms of planets and insect-astronomers seemed to mesh somewhere in her visual cortex, firing some pattern detector which didn't know quite what to make of the strange resonance.

She said, "So Ptolemy was simply bad grammar -- obvious nonsense. Doubleplus ungood. And they reached Copernicus a few years later? That's impressive. How long did they take to get to Kepler . . . to Newton?"

Zemansky said smoothly, "That was Newton. The theory of gravity -- and the laws of motion -- were all part of the model they were dancing; the Lambertians could never have expressed the shapes of the orbits without including a reason for them."

Maria felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck.

"If that was Newton . . . what came before?"

"Nothing. That was the first successful astronomical model -- the culmination of about a decade of trial and error by teams all over the planet."

"But they must have had something. Primitive myths. Stacks of turtles. Sun gods in chariots."

Zemansky laughed. "No turtles or chariots, obviously -- but no: no naive cosmologies. Their earliest language grew out of the things they could easily observe and model -- ecological relationships, population dynamics. When cosmology was beyond their grasp, they didn't even try to tackle it; it was a non-subject."

"No creation myths?"

"No. To the Lambertians, believing any kind of "myth" -- any kind of vague, untestable pseudo-explanation -- would have been like . . . suffering hallucinations, seeing mirages, hearing voices. It would have rendered them completely dysfunctional."

Maria cleared her throat. "Then I wonder how they'll react to us."

Durham said, "Right now, creators are a non-subject. The Lambertians have no need of that hypothesis. They understand evolution: mutation, natural selection -- they've even postulated some kind of macromolecular gene. But the origin of life remains an open question, too difficult to tackle, and it would probably be centuries before they realized that their ultimate ancestor was seeded "by hand" . . . if in fact there's any evidence to show that -- any logical reason why A. hydrophila couldn't have arisen in some imaginary prebiotic history.