When I was seven I got a new library card. My old card was a baby card that could only access baby books, but the new card was like an all-access pass to the wonderful world of young adult knowledge. Also it was bigger -- it could expand to nearly 40 cm on a side. I used to lie on our floor on long winter nights with the card spread out in front of me, slowly working my way through all the new books I could read about young girls and their horses. Yes, I was that shallow.
I'm not sure how I ended up reading about them. Of course I knew about Crabs. They were something of a worldwide mania about the time I was teething, so as a child of my culture I thought I had them pegged too. Technological creatures on a nearby star, different from us but proving once and for all that we're not alone; there's other intelligences like us in the universe; the brave explorers taking humanity's first steps toward galactic concordance of all living, thinking beings. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
I had no idea how wrong I was. Until I was seven, and stumbled on Strangest of All are the Crabs.
It was the pictures mostly. Incredible panoramas of their cities, crazy organic shaped buildings, walkways teeming with writhing masses of such strange and incomprehensible action. Those short videos screamed in my brain. Alien, disgusting, filthy, every neuron of revulsion lit up in horror. And yet, fascination, wonder, disbelief. And in part of me -- the latent scientist -- beauty.
I think Crabs are most engaging because of their size. Tiny little things -- you could have them as a pet. We think that small things can be smart -- we imagine the internal life of our dogs or our dolls -- so why can't Crabs be smart? And yet we know they can't be. Their brains are simply too small, even relative to their body size. As I read deeper it became crystal clear that these were not our brothers, our long-lost siblings separated by circumstance, eons and 40 light years. The Crabs were not the recognition that we and our ilk, the cognitive and introspective talkers, were the natural and eventual masters of the universe. There were others out there, and they followed a different path.
And that became my destiny. Once I read that book, and the many that it linked to, I was set in my path. I became determined, at age seven, that I would understand the mystery of the Crabs. How they did what they did. What quirk of Darwin allowed a complex, technological, space-faring species to evolve that had no consciousness, no language, and no world-modeling intelligence. My parents -- usually a calm oasis in a desert of confusion -- even they could not help me. It was the first real intellectual challenge of my child mind and it set me on the path that led me here, 518 light years from where I was born.
And it was solved, by the most brilliant mind it was ever my privilege to meet.
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