Rollback

"October 1974," supplied Gunter. " — it’s one of the most famous in all of philosophy. Just like the title says, it asks, ‘What’s it like to be a bat?’ And the answer is, fundamentally, we’ll never know. We can’t even begin to guess what it’s like to have echolocation, to perceive the world in a totally different way. Well, only a flesh-and-blood Dracon, with Dracon senses, can report to the home world what it’s really like, from a Dracon’s point of view, here on Earth."

"So they want us to make a Dracon who’ll grow up to do that?"

She shrugged a bit. "For thousands of years, people on Earth have been born to be kings. Why shouldn’t someone be born to be an ambassador?"

"But think of the existence it would have here, all alone."

"It doesn’t have to be. If we can make one, we can make several. Of course, they’ll be genetically identical, like twins, and—"

"Actually, Sarah," said Gunter, standing back up now, "I’ve been reading further into the document. It’s true that they only sent one master genome, but they’ve appended a tiny subset of modifications that can be substituted into the master sequence to make a second individual. Apparently, the DNA code provided was taken from two pair-bonded Dracons. Any living expressions of that DNA would be clones of those individuals."

" ‘If you were the only girl in the world, and I was the only boy…’ " said Don. "At least they’ll each know who to ask to the prom." He paused. "But, I mean, how do we even know that they’ve sent the genome for an actual, intelligent Dracon? It could be the genome for some, y’know, vicious monster, or for a plague germ."

"Of course, we’d create it in a biologically secure facility," said Sarah. "Besides, what would be the point of sending such a thing?"

"The message says the individuals whose genomes have been provided are alive on Sigma Draconis II," said Gunter. "Or, at least they were when this message was sent.

They hope to converse with their clones here, albeit with a 37.6-year round-trip message time."

"So the source Dracons back home are like the parents?" asked Don. Through the window opposite him, he could see that the sun was coming up.

"In a way," said Sarah. "And they’re looking for foster parents here."

"Ah, yes. The questionnaire!"

"Right," she said. "If you were going to have someone raise your children, you’d want to know something about them first. And, I guess, of all the answers they received, they liked mine best; they want me to raise the children."

"My… God," said Don. "I mean… my God."

Sarah shrugged a little. "I guess that’s why they cared about things like the" rights of the parent who wasn’t actually carrying the child."

"And the abortion questions — were they to make sure we wouldn’t get cold feet and terminate the fetuses?"

"Maybe. That would certainly be one interpretation. But remember, they liked my answers, and although I was willing to concede rights to the parent who wasn’t carrying the child, the rest of my answers must have made it pretty darn clear that I’m pro-choice."

"Why would that make them happy?"

"Maybe they wanted to see if we’ve transcended Darwin."

"Huh?"

"You know, if we’ve gotten past being driven by selfish genes. I mean, in a way, being pro-choice is anti-Darwinian, because it tends to reduce your reproductive success, assuming you terminate normal fetuses that you could have raised, without unreasonable cost, to adulthood. Doing that would be one psychological marker for no longer being bound by Darwinian notions, for having broken free of mindless genetic programming, for ceasing to be a lifeform driven by genes that want nothing but to reproduce themselves."

"I get it," said Don, watching now as the window autopolarized in response to the rising sun. "If all you care about are your own genes then, by definition, you don’t care about aliens."

"Right," said Sarah. "Notice they asked for a thousand survey replies. That means they knew we wouldn’t have just one set of views. Remember, you used to say that alien races either would become hive minds or totalitarian, because, after a certain level of technological sophistication is reached, they simply couldn’t survive any longer if they allowed the kind of discontent that gives rise to terrorism. But there must be some third alternative — something better than being Borg or having thought police. The aliens on Sigma Draconis apparently knew they would be dealing with complex, contradictory individuals. And they looked at the thousand responses and decided that they didn’t want anything to do with human beings in general — they only wanted to communicate with one oddball." She paused. "I guess I’m not surprised, since most of the sets of survey answers did suggest ethnocentrism, exclusive concern about one’s own genetic material, and so on."

"But knowing you, yours didn’t suggest those things. And that’s what makes you the one they want to be the foster mother, right?"

"Which surprises the heck out of me," Sarah said.