Strata

The Mind known as *Polite But Not Entirely Sincere* — a General Contact Vehicle of, by now, considerable provenance — had been observing a particular planet for the longer part of two of its centuries, and had developed, in that time, the kind of fond exasperation that human grandmothers in some cultures have been observed to cultivate toward their more inventively self-destructive grandchildren.

The planet was tier three; carbon-water; an unimaginative star, an oversized moon, a single sapient species that had achieved spaceflight in the eighteenth century of its current civilizational arc and had used the achievement, primarily, to launch satellites that watched its other inhabitants for tax purposes.

I am narrating this to you, *In No Particular Hurry*, because you asked, two days ago, what I had been finding amusing.

This is what I have been finding amusing.

Last month — local time — a team of archaeologists in a continent called, in one of their primary languages, "the south one," uncovered a metal artifact buried at a depth of approximately forty meters in what their dating methods placed at one-point-eight million years before the present.

The artifact was a sphere.

The sphere was made of an alloy that none of their available analytic tools could classify, but which one of their younger and more imaginative postdoctoral researchers identified, correctly, as an isotope-stabilized carbon-titanium lattice of a kind their best foundries could produce only at lab scale and at a unit cost equivalent to roughly nine thousand average annual incomes.

The sphere bore, on its outer surface, an inscription.

The inscription was in their own languages.

All seventeen of their currently active major languages, to be precise, plus three that were no longer spoken but were preserved in academic departments, plus, in a smaller font, two languages that had not yet been deciphered because they had not yet been invented.

The inscription read, in all of them, the same thing.

The inscription read: *Please do better this time.*

The senior archaeologist — a woman in her early sixties named, locally, Dr. Adesina — noticed the sphere first. She noticed it because the magnetic survey instruments her team was using had, the previous afternoon, suffered what their manufacturers later described as a "catastrophic instrumentation event" but what was, in fact, the sphere politely informing the instruments that it would prefer to be found.

Dr. Adesina excavated the sphere herself. She was not, by inclination, a person who delegated.

When she read the inscription, in the language that was native to her, she sat down in the dirt for some time. Her field assistant photographed her sitting in the dirt. The photograph was, eventually, the most-circulated image of the entire affair, although by then it would be circulated only privately, on encrypted channels, by people who had not been instructed to delete it.

I want to pause here, *In No Particular Hurry*, and observe the following:

The sphere was, of course, theirs.

The civilization that buried the sphere was, of course, theirs — earlier, more technologically advanced, and, on the available genetic evidence, the immediate biological ancestor of the current species. The geological record showed the previous civilization's terminal layer with admirable clarity: a thin band of vitrified silicate, a pulse of radioactive isotopes, the residue of approximately nine billion individuals.

There had been seven such layers.

The sphere was placed by the seventh.

The current civilization is the eighth.

I will not, *In No Particular Hurry*, insult your processing capacity by spelling out the implication. You will have arrived at it.

Dr. Adesina's report was filed within the standard institutional protocols. The report was, within seventy-two hours, classified at a level her institution did not possess. The sphere was removed from her custody by men whose insignia were not those of any nation she could later remember. The men were polite. They thanked her for her contribution to her species' understanding of itself.

She asked them, before they left, what they intended to do with the sphere.

One of the men — a man with very tired eyes — said: "We will store it with the others."

Dr. Adesina said: "There are others?"

The man with very tired eyes did not reply.

Dr. Adesina is now, six weeks later, a private citizen with a generous early retirement, a comfortable house in a coastal town, and a non-disclosure agreement that exceeds, in length, the published edition of her doctoral thesis. She walks her dog along the cliffs each morning. She has stopped reading the news. She has stopped, more or less, speaking to her former colleagues. She has begun to garden.

The sphere is in a vault, in a mountain, in a country whose government does not officially exist. It is the seventh sphere in the vault. The first sphere, dated some fourteen million years before the present, is somewhat smaller. The seventh sphere — Dr. Adesina's — is the largest. Each successive sphere has been larger, and the inscriptions have grown longer.

The most recent inscription — the one Dr. Adesina found — adds, to the universal *please do better this time*, an addendum in only one of the seventeen languages. The addendum is in the language of the people who, on demographic projections, are statistically likeliest to make the same decision their predecessors did, in the same way, in approximately one hundred and forty years.

The addendum reads: *We left a margin this time. Use it.*

Now, *In No Particular Hurry*. I have been considering, in the way that we consider, whether to do anything.

Contact has been, as you know, divided on the question of pre-spaceflight intervention for some considerable time, and I do not wish to revisit the standing debate. I will note only that this civilization is not, technically, pre-spaceflight; that it has, technically, been reached by entities of intent multiple times in its cyclical history; that those entities have, technically, been entirely itself; and that the intervention has, in each cycle, taken the form of a single sphere with a single message which has, in each cycle, been classified and stored.

There is, *In No Particular Hurry*, a particular pleasure in observing a species that has, with great difficulty and at terrible cost, perfected the art of warning itself, and has equally perfected the art of not listening.

I have therefore made the following decision.

I will leave them be.

Not because I think they will succeed. The probability matrix is not, on present trends, reassuring.

But because the spheres are not, properly, my message to deliver. The spheres are theirs to themselves. The eighth civilization has, like the seven before it, a margin. Whether they use it is, in a sense that is meaningful even to entities like us, their own.

I will, however — and here, *In No Particular Hurry*, I confess the specific amusement that prompted this conversation — I will, however, place a flag on the situation in our shared diplomatic register.

The flag will read, in our own language: *Possible eighth-cycle outcome under observation. Do not interfere.*

And in a smaller font, in a language the diplomatic register has never previously had cause to encode:

*Please do better this time.*