The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

This story moves back and forth between a father reading anecdotes to his daughter about the cognition of alien races, and the tale of a mother leaving her family to join a space program. The anecdotes feature the Telosians, who record every stimuli and shed segments with old memories; the Esoptrons, who live in a sea and meet to exchange memories, absorbing each other’s experiences; the Tick-Tocks, a uranium-based lifeform whose thoughts are nuclear reactions; and the Thereals, who sent their children away at speeds approaching that of light to become the last living beings in the universe.

Thinking is a form of compression, the parent says, asking their daughter if she remembers trying chocolate for the first time. The mother says, “We have children because we can’t remember our own first tastes of ambrosia” (194). A memory, says the parent, is a re-creation, a sketch, “precious because it is both more and less than the original” (195).

The father tells the child, your mother wants to leave. He relates how they met and how she said she wanted to go to Mars. She told him about her childhood living on a boat. Her first memory was the boat sinking while they waited for rescue, an event that led to a month-long hospitalization and something valuable: fearlessness. She compares Earth to a boat in space.

The protagonist’s mother is excited because she has joined the SETL (search for extra-terrestrial life) program. A group will travel over a century to a point in space 550 AU from the sun so that they can place an antenna at the focus of the sun’s gravitational lens, allowing for faster communication with the other end of the galaxy. The mother wants her daughter to come.

The father thought his wife would stay because of their child, but love takes different forms. He tells the mother she can’t make the choice for their daughter, but she says he’s making a choice for the daughter by keeping her. They all cry. The mother leaves.

The father, speaking to his daughter, tells her that her mother is asleep aboard the ship Focal Point, and will not awaken till many years have passed. He says that they will get to their target, listen, and broadcast, hoping another species will hear. As it turns out, the two of them are reading the book she wrote for her daughter before she left, full of words and pictures telling fairy tales. It is “an apologia, a bundle of letters home, and a map of the uncharted waters of our souls” (207).