Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever by Phoenix Sullivan (bill gates book recommendations TXT) 📗

he says to Geri, “Sorry, I have to talk to this person.” She shrugs her indifference.

“Yes, hello Doctor.”

She walks around his desk to get a closer look at the images of the planet: mostly landscapes and buildings.

“Yes, I’m familiar with the anthropic principles, and what you’re saying does make sense, although these theories are all a bit … conjectural.”

One picture must have been taken by an aspiring amateur photographer, and could have been the illustration for a book of pictorial poems about wheelbarrows and such things. Or rather their alien versions, as the main subject looks like a cross between a gavel and a mini scythe propped next to some kind of barrel divided into two compartments.

“Well, yes, if there are aliens around every other star, I suppose we might have to worry about resources, but on the other hand what if it is only us?” His tone and a brief eye meeting indicates to his daughter that he is humoring the Doctor. They share a smile.

He stands up and walks to the window, his tone now clipped, indicating his desire to end the call.

Waiting, Geri sits in his swivel chair and, spinning back and forth, studies the titles on his bookshelf. Astrophysics and Technology, Alien Civilizations: Projections of the Mind, The Mind of Man in Space. He has made up his mind on possibilities. She admires him deeply. And tries to imagine what it would be like to have his knowledge. Almost like having built a space station inside yourself, a stepping stone to the stars. It could also give you a firmer grasp on your home planet. But she always wonders where he really lives. With no memory of her mother, he is the earth and stars, and space as well.

The phone is cradled.

“You said on TV you don’t know much about them.”

“Well, we know a lot about them, but there’s so much to know, it’s hard to say what a whole race is like.”

She thinks about it.

“We know they look something like us, and had a similar evolutionary history. And their technology was about at the level ours is now.”

“But you don’t know what happened to them.”

He leans against his desk. “It could have been a couple of things.” He hesitates, a tape recorder pause, like he doesn’t want to be quoted on it, even by her. “They could have been in a war. Or maybe they left the planet because the colony wasn’t doing well. Or they might have died out. Or maybe they just abandoned the place, for whatever reason. We’ve barely done any study on it, so we can’t say anything for certain.”

“Are those pictures from there?” She points to an album on his desk.

“Yep,” he says, gesturing for her it’s okay to look at them.

It isn’t like looking at a group of images from a TV show where they show you a ship landing on an alien world, and you see the headquarters of their government and everything is stylized to look like a certain culture, with one taste, uniform and homogenized. Instead it is much like Earth just a handful of years back before the big thrust for more planning in cities’ constructions, with buildings of all sorts and jumbled purposes clashing and rising up against each other in the mostly natural landscape. Like a soft grid of streets surrounding a metropolitan community — a nerve center, with strong industrial capability. It looks run down by a few decades of overgrowth and decay, rusted and jungled. Resources and terrain, technology and construction methods make it alien, but the same would make it home.

“So they’re going back then.”

“Yeah, and soon.”

“You’ll probably be going with them.”

“I’m not sure.”

“Sounds like the opening to a horror movie.”

~~~

Riding her bike home, she thinks about what her father is doing. Everyone knows who her father is. She’s popular at school. She could have any boy she wants.

She sprawls out on her bed, surrounded by books she’s bought since junior high, from popular science thrillers to philosophy and non-fiction on The Varieties of Religious Experiences and Art and Aesthetics to Metaphysics and Being and Nothingness. And thinks about the hype everywhere.

I mean! — If any of those newscasters busy bothering all those scientists up at where Dad works discovered this bookshelf! And thought this bookshelf were from outer space… They’d put more work into studying these texts than they had in reading anything else in their lives. But they’d never pick them up otherwise.

People are stupid.

If I grow up to be the writer I hope to be, she thinks, I’ll put that in a book.

Or no, she thinks. I won’t. Some things you shouldn’t write down. That…

That would be saying too much, maybe. It’s a truth everyone should see so obviously. It’d be obscene to put it down.

Yes, she decides, I won’t write it down. I’ll keep that one for myself. And she wraps it around herself to keep.

I imagine the civilization out there is much like ours, she thinks. They may be surprised to meet us, or maybe they’ve already met many others like us. Maybe they’ll change us when we meet them. Maybe it will change us all.

She pulls a blanket over her. It’s nice to have someone else now to think about — or so the planet thinks, she thinks. But really, life here is life here. And that shouldn’t change. She wants — needs — to think about her own life, and the things going on at school, with her friends, with the boys she talks to. There’s a lot going on right here, even in this boring capeside town, she thinks, as she drifts off to sleep.

~~~

“I thought you were still working on the Pre-Columbian excavation?” she says across the table. Her father’s finally home for dinner.

“I … was.”

“The one you said was going to bring up more answers to man’s past than any dig inhistory … And was the most important thing you ever did? Could ever do? And? You’re just quitting what