Xenia and Dorothy had some trouble reaching Frank Paulis and Malenfant, so walled off was the astronaut by a crowd of eager young engineer types.

Dorothy studied Xenia’s expression. “You don’t quite go for all this hero worship, do you, Xenia?”

“Do you think I’m cynical?”

“No.”

Xenia grimaced. “But it… frustrates me. We’re living through first contact, an era unique in the human story, whatever the future holds. At least Bootstrap is trying to respond. Away from here, aside from what we’re doing, all I see is irrationalism. That, and positioning. Various bodies trying to use this discovery for their own purposes.”

“Like the Church?”

“Well, isn’t it?”

“We all must pursue our own goals, Xenia. At least the Church’s involvement in this project of yours represents a tangible demonstration that we are working our way through the crisis of faith the Gaijin have caused us.”

“What crisis?”

“The Vatican began its first modern evaluation of the implication of extraterrestrial life for Christianity back in the nineties. But the debate has been going on much longer than that. We seem to have believed there were other minds out there long before we even had any clear notion of what out there actually was… This intuition seems to be an expression of our deep embedding in the universe; if the cosmos created us, it could surely create others. Did you know that Saint Augustine, back in the sixth century, speculated about ETs?”

“He did?”

“Augustine decided they couldn’t exist. If they did, you see, they would require salvation — a Christ of their own. But that would remove the uniqueness of Christ, which is impossible. Such theological conundrums plague us to this day… You can laugh if you like.”

Xenia shook her head. “The idea that we might go out there and try to convert the Gaijin does seem a little odd.”

“But we don’t know why they are here,” Dorothy pointed out. “Would seeking truth be such an invalid reason?”

“And now you’re here to bless the BDB,” Xenia said.

“Not exactly. Perhaps you’ve already done that, by naming it after Giordano Bruno. I take it you know who he was.”

“Of course.” The first thinker to have expressed something like the modern notion of a plurality of worlds — planets orbiting Suns, many of them inhabited by beings more or less like humans. Earlier thinkers about other worlds had imagined parallel versions of a Dante’s Inferno pocket universe, centered on a stationary Earth. “You have to imagine other worlds before you can conceive of traveling there.”

“But Bruno was anticipated,” Dorothy said gently. “A cardinal we know as Nicolas of Cusa, who lived in the fifteenth century…”

Dorothy’s lecturing tone seemed quite inappropriate to Xenia, making her impatient. “Whatever his antecedents, Bruno was killed by the Church for his heresy.”

“He was burned, in 1600, for a mystical attack on Christianity,” Dorothy said, “not for his argument about aliens, or even his defense of Copernicus.”

“That makes it okay?”

Dorothy continued to study her quietly.

At last the crowd of techie acolytes was breaking up.

“You can’t know how much I admire you, Colonel Malenfant,” Frank was saying. “I’m twenty years younger than you. But I modeled myself on you.”

Malenfant eyed him dubiously. “Then I’m in hell.”

“No, I mean it. You started a company called Bootstrap. You had plans to exploit the asteroids.”

“It failed. I was a lousy businessman. And when I lost my wife—”

“Sure, but you had the right idea. If not for that—”

Malenfant was looking longingly at the BDB mock-up. “If not for that, if the universe was a different shape — yes, maybe I’d have done all this. And who knows what I’d have found?”

The silence stretched. Dorothy Chaum was frowning, Xenia noticed, as she studied Malenfant’s cloudy, troubled expression.

Chapter 3

Debates

It was four more years before Malenfant encountered Frank J. Paulis again.

In 2029, Malenfant was invited to the Smithsonian at Washington, D.C., as a guest at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science — or at least, a stream of it supported by the SETI Institute, a privately funded outfit based in Colorado and devoted to the study of the Gaijin, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and other good stuff.

Despite the subject matter of the conference, Malenfant had come here with some reluctance.

He had grown wary of appearing in public. As Paulis’s robot probe swung relentlessly out from Earth, the unwelcome notoriety he had attracted nine years back was picking up again. He thought of it as the Buzz Aldrin syndrome: But you were there… When people looked at him, he thought, they saw a symbol, not a human being; they saw somebody who was incapable of doing original work ever again. It was a regard that was embarrassing, paralyzing, and it made him feel very old. Not only that, Malenfant had found himself the target of unwelcome attention of the most extreme factions from either side of the spectrum, both the xenophobes and xenophiles.

But he had been invited here by Maura Della, a now-retired congresswoman he’d encountered in the course of the unraveling of that initial discovery.

Maura Della was about Malenfant’s age, small, neat, and spry. She had served as part of the president’s science advisory support at the time of the Gaijin announcement, when Malenfant and Nemoto had been dragged before the president himself, the secretary of defense, the Industrial Relations Council, and various presidential task forces as the administration sought an official posture concerning the Gaijin. Unlike some of the Beltway apparatchiks Malenfant had encountered in those days, Della had proved to be tough but straightforward in her dealings with Malenfant, and he had grown to respect her sense of responsibility about SETI and other issues. It would be good to see her again.

And, he hoped, maybe she was still close enough to the center of power to give him a genuine insight into anything new.

In that, as it turned out, he would not be disappointed.

At first, though, the conference — summing up what was known about the Gaijin, nine long years after discovery — proved to be meager stuff. In the absence of new facts the proceedings were dominated by presentations on the impact of the Gaijin’s existence on philosophical principles.

Thus, the first talk Maura Della escorted him to was on the brief and unrewarding history of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Since the 1950s, appropriately tuned radio telescopes had been turned on promising nearby stars, like Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eradini. Over the years the search was taken up by NASA and upgraded and automated until it was possible to search thousands of likely radio frequencies at very high speed.

But decades of patient, longing search had turned up nothing but a few evanescent, tantalizing whispers of pattern.

As Malenfant listened to the stream of detail and acronyms, of project after project — Ozma, Cyclops, Phoenix — he became consumed with pity for these patient, hungry listeners, hoping to hear the faintest of whispers from beyond the stars. For, of course, it had always been futile, wrong-headed. Equilibrium, he thought: Either the sky is silent because it is empty, or else the aliens should be everywhere. There should have been no need to seek out whispers; if we weren’t alone, the sky should, metaphorically, have been blazing with light.

The next speaker impressed Malenfant rather more. She was a geologist from Caltech called Carole Lerner — no older than thirty, spiky, argumentative. She had tried to come up with a new answer to the conundrum of the arrival of the Gaijin. Maybe there had been no sign of the Gaijin before, Lerner said, because they had only recently evolved — and not among the stars, but where they had been found, in the asteroid belt itself.