by C. L. Kagmi
“—how best to approach you.”
Carol barely heard him.
“Who are you?”
A broader smile. “We are—‘aliens’ is an alarming term, I’m told, in the lexicon of your people. But you don’t seem to associate particular alarm with it.”
It was true that “alarm” was not exactly the right word for the sensation that her stomach had dropped out of her body and was plummeting towards the Earth’s core.
Hallucinating, she reminded herself desperately.
Although this is not entirely outside of the realm of wish fulfillment.
“We live somewhere—not physical,” he says. “Somewhere else.”
‘Where else’ can be parsed out later, if she still has a brain to parse with. But right now that seems academic, and a more burning question is:
“What’s happening? Why me?”
He looks at her carefully, as though considering his words. “We apologize for—specimen collection.”
“Specimen collection?” She had thought herself beyond indignation, but there it is. It combines with embarrassment to become anger. This doesn’t seem to fit the wish fulfillment script.
“You blew me out into space for specimen collection?”
Nothing so cruel, she tells herself. An act of random nature, not of will. This is a hallucination. My last dream.
And yet—
And yet she had known, even as she felt the world sucked out from under her, that the odds of colliding with an object that size in near-Mars orbit were astronomically low. Had thought briefly that she might just be the first person in human history to be killed by a near-direct collision with a meteor.
The man whose face still sends her heart fluttering when she meets his eyes says: ““You will be—well cared-for. Your crew—is safe.”
Suddenly, Carol feels very tired. If he is an alien—
“Can we drop the illusions, please?” she asks wearily.
The man smiles. “Not possible. Your mind will require time to adjust.”
“I don’t have eyes anymore, do I?”
“No,” he confirmed gently.
“Will I ever have eyes again?”
“That remains to be seen.”
She sees nebulae. Nebulae as humans see them through false-color images, nebulae as they exist in the human lexicon, sprawling and beautiful and vast. That each dot within the glowing gas clouds is a sun, most of them with orbiting planets, is well beyond her ability to comprehend.
Humans think of nebulae as the nurseries of stars, but they are also graveyards.
The scientists back on Earth had said that the Population II stars could not have supported life. Said they were too poor in metals, in carbon, in every element beyond the hydrogen and helium birthed in the Big Bang. That the necessary materials for complex life—carbon at least, better with nitrogen and oxygen and other even heavier things—were lacking.
As the Population II stars lived, they created those building blocks of life through fusion in their cores. When they exploded in blinding glory, those building blocks were flung across parsecs to seed new star systems.
Humans thought of this as birth.
Her guide had introduced himself as “Daniel,” and walked with her on the beach, the two of them alone, until he deemed her ready for something more.
Now he tells her how the birth of the nebulae had been death for his people.
We are an old form of life. Very old. Wise, we like to think. And yet still powerless.
You managed to ram a meteor into my ship, she reminds him, and telepathically lifted me from my dying body. That seems pretty powerful to me.
Power, he tells her, is a relative term.
He shows her the spread of his civilization.
It’s like a dream.
He shows her not one civilization, but thousands; life and intellect and society spawning on a thousand worlds. From electrical impulses in the perpetual storms of gas giants, from chains of simple hydrocarbons in the roiling seas of massive gas giants, from crystals of ice in everlasting convection currents. In all of these places, she sees patterns form, change, re-form.
Wherever patterns form and change, the potential for self-replication exists.
Wherever self-replication began on those ancient worlds, so too did evolution.
“It still begins.” Daniel corrects her, casting her eyes to a dozen, then a hundred watery, rocky worlds that no human scientist has ever heard of.
She is momentarily awed by this—then realizes something even stranger.
“When the stars you showed me died—that was billions of years ago. You are from—one of them?”
“Yes,” Daniel confirms. “We were lucky. We were taken.”
“Taken?”
“Lifted. Preserved. By another. Much as I took you. My people were naturally doomed. Old even then, far older than your race is now. We had survived long enough to overcome war. Not long enough to escape our dying Sun. That was—a mistake, on our parts.
He shows her something else, a layout of the galaxy and through it, a web of light, spreading.
“Only one species, he explains, “had to learn the higher geometries well enough to live there. To draw on vacuum to perpetuate patterns of thought. Only one to teach the others. They took us before the end came.”
And she saw ‘the end,’ an explosion of light and heat and searing ultraviolet, of vital elements sowing the seeds of a dozen new stars with planets.
Planets like her own. Born from the deaths, not just of stars, but of civilizations. Parents they might never know.
If this was true, Daniel was more than five billion years old.
If he had been paying attention, he could have watched the Earth itself congeal from dust, seen the Moon thrown off in a titanic clash of worlds, watched the oceans condense out of a haze of water vapor and the first cells arise from the complex organic soup.
He would see Carol as a product of those cells—and human evolution as an infinitesimally tiny fraction of his own lifespan.
He would be, for all intents and purposes, a god.
Had he watched her species grow? Or had he been occupied elsewhere, part of some inconceivable, eternal society?
Carol is too afraid to ask.
“So,” she no longer knows if she is dreaming, and no longer cares, “both of my hypotheses were right.”
Daniel sends her waiting-silence.
“You’re an alien. And this is also Heaven. The afterlife.”
She doesn’t like the tone of the silence he sends back.
“I mean, you take dying humans, don’t you? You must. Why not? When do I get to see Ron?”
Silence.
“Answer me!”
“Please give us time,” Daniel beseeches her, “to explain it to you properly.”
There is a waiting that is much like death or sleep. And then there is a room, with people—aliens that look like things out of fantasy and science fiction sitting along its wall. Most of them are humanoid, and Carol is sure that this is for her benefit. She is standing in the middle as though on trial.
And she is angry.
“I am not an animal,” she says, upon flickering back into consciousness. “Don’t tranquilize me just because you don’t want to deal with me.”
Daniel sits at the head of the council, and it is he who says: “We apologize. Your pattern made it clear that you would not accept distractions. You asked the right questions more quickly than we expected. We needed to prepare.”
“Prepare what?”
Carol feels oddly betrayed by his words. By his very presence standing with the others and against her. His disguise worked well enough that she’d stopped thinking of it as a disguise. Started thinking of him as a friend.
Not human. She finds her mind is quick to jump to that now that she feels offended.
She feels offended with good reason. They are the ones who killed me. They are the ones who do not care about people like me.
/>
But something nags at her. Some part of her has not yet managed to shake her belief, perhaps because of his beauty, in Daniel’s inherent goodness.
The council is silent. Not answering her question. Glancing at each other, murmuring to each other in words she cannot understand. She feels as though this is some sort of answer.
We had to prepare this council to judge you.
“You’re damn right I won’t accept distractions!” she fumes. Remembers losing faith in the God of her childhood, in all gods.
Remembers why. The image of the judge sitting on the throne, ready to condemn, indifferent to his own responsibility.
“You have great power. You have a duty. You can do for others what they cannot do for themselves. If you can bring me here, if there is no technical limitation—you should be saving everyone who dies. Regardless of species. Regardless of merit. Answer the question I asked before: do you save the people who die on Earth? Do you let them walk among you?”
She is confronted with hope, the greatest hope humanity has ever had; and with it, the threat of losing her faith all over again.
A long silence gives her answer.
A glowing woman with fairy wings stirs uncomfortably to Daniel’s left, avoids Carol’s gaze. Seems a mockery of the magical creature she resembles, until the tears begin to pour down her fluorescent cheeks.
“No,” Daniel says.
Carol is confused again. Why is the immortal woman crying? Why does Daniel seem sad, genuinely sad—
Sudden hope flares again.
“Can you save them?” she asks swiftly. “Is there some sort of technical problem? Is that why you’re studying me? Please, study away—”
“No,” Daniel cuts her off. “We could save them. It is not beyond our capabilities.”
She stares at him, at a loss.
“You,” he says, “are an astronaut.”
She doesn’t see what that has to do with anything.
“Tested for your ability to work in teams. In close quarters. To resolve conflicts. To put mission before yourself.”
“Yes.”
“And you are—an astrosociologist.” Daniel tilted his maddeningly, heartbreakingly, rage-inducingly beautiful head at her. “Your chosen path is to think about people like us.”
“Yes.”
She finds that she does not care, now, whether she has truly realized her life’s goal. The question of whether she stands before true alien intelligence or the hallucination of a dying mind rings hollow. She looks to the weeping fairy, who meets her eyes with wells of great liquid sadness.
She remembers the sight of the Agena slipping away from her, so near, so hopelessly out of reach. Remembers the oxygen rushing from her lungs and into the hungry void.
Remembers her brother dying back on Earth at the tender age of thirty-four, his liver too badly riddled with cancer to filter the toxins from his blood. The cancer had also infiltrated half a dozen organs, but it was the liver failure that killed him.
She raises her eyes to Daniel’s again, looking for an answer. “Why?”
“You know about the Drake Equation.”
Yes. She does. The equation for calculating the total number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the galaxy. It has no known solution, because the value of so many of its component parts are unknown.
In the past century, humans had gained insight into two of the variables: the rate of star formation and the average number of planets per star. Both numbers turned out to be vast. There were trillions of planets, in all likelihood, in the Milky Way alone.
But other essentials were still unknown. The number of planets capable of supporting life; the number of life-bearing planets which become civilized—and Carol’s area of expertise, of study and questioning:
How long do civilizations survive after they develop technology?
The troubling thing, of course, was that until now, the answer to the Drake Equation was “one.” Only one civilization in the Milky Way galaxy was known to humans—their own. No other radio signals had ever reached the lonely ears in the desert, the massive radio telescope arrays built to seek companionship out there in the infinite void.
That meant that one of the unknown variables—the probability of life, the likelihood of civilization, or the lifespan of a civilization once it developed sufficient technology to broadcast radio waves—had to be so vanishingly small as to reduce a trillion planets to just a single civilization existing in this space and time.
It would have been Carol’s wish, would have been the best thing her dying brain could give her, to believe she had found a myriad of other civilizations. That the infinite Universe was not entirely hostile to life, that it might have been designed for it in some way. That civilization was not a flickering anomaly, vanishingly rare or comically short-lived.
Is this real? It can’t be.
She studies the aliens in the chamber around her. She no longer has eyes, and these people, if they exist at all, no longer have bodies. Are they choosing their own appearances, or is it her own mind which crafts the woman with the shining fairy wings at Daniel’s right and the ponderously long-necked creature at his left?
“What,” she asks quietly “does the Drake Equation have to do with anything?”
“You are interested in the lifespan of a civilization.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what determines that?”
Carol smiles bitterly. If she did, how many Nobel prizes would she have?
“Violence,” Daniel says simply. “Violence is good for non-technological species. It helps them live long enough to become what they are. But technological development, once it has taken off—must not be paired with violence. The lifespan of civilizations that retain violence in their technological age is vanishingly short.”
Carol is still waiting to hear what this has to do with her question.
“Your species is violent. How can we risk introducing them to the level of technology we possess?”
What he is suggesting seems laughable.
“You’re saying we’d destroy you?”
“You might. We might not be able to stop you. To free your minds would be to open the gates of hell for a thousand species that came before you. We collect specimens—rarely—to see if you have yet outgrown this malady.”
“So you chose me,” she says steadily, “because I have studied human history.”
“Yes.”
“Do you want me to judge them for you?”
“No. We wanted to study your reactions.”
The truth that’s settling into her bones could well be insanity-inducing.
Her people don’t have to die. Ever.
People like her brother don’t have to die—if she can convince these people that they can be trusted with godlike power.
And she can’t.
She cannot even try. Not in good conscience.
The hatred and sense betrayal that roils in her own heart at Daniel’s actions, at his revelations, bear testament to that.
She cannot even tell them that she can be trusted with power. Not now. Not knowing what they have refused to do in order to preserve themselves. How soon would she grow angry enough to learn how to kill these immortals?
What about Ron? What would it have taken to turn him to deadly force?
Not enough. Not enough to risk it.
She suspects that they can see this. That in her eyes, humanity has already failed a crucial test. How long until they test again? A century? More? A hundred years would be the blink of an eye to these people.
Daniel’s mind wraps around her, gentle, warm, nurturing.
You’ve done the right thing, he tells her. You have been honest.
And she sees through his mind, as he sees through hers—that her honesty, her failure to insist violently that his people save hers, is itself a sign of progress.
A small comfort. Not enough for a woman who has seen what might have been, what may yet be, what is.
/> What will they do with me now?
She doesn’t know; it doesn’t matter.
And what about her people? That species struggling to life around an infant star?
In a millennium or three, we may be ready.
Sky Children
I wrestled with whether to include “Skychildren” in this collection. With the Own Voices movement requesting that people stick to writing their own ethnic groups, I now try to avoid writing viewpoint characters whose heritage I do not share. I have updated some details of this story in hopes of mitigating these concerns. But changing Chinwe’s race always felt wrong. And excluding her felt worse.
“Skychildren” was first published in Issue 5 of Compelling Science Fiction in March of 2019. It appeared again in print in “Compelling Science Fiction: The First Collection.” It has been translated into Vietnamese by Long Nguyễn for the Vietnamese fanzine SFVN.
Chinwe has become a monster.
She had known that it would be part of the assignment. They warned her about what she’d have to do to fit in. She had signed the forms, but none of it had seemed real until the first time her teacher had approached her with a needle.
On this boat she’d be the odd one out if she didn’t look like an alien.
The residents of the Orún are all adapted to make some of their own nutrients and oxygen from the light of the fusion core. The Orún’s children still need to eat and breathe, but the engineers cheerfully remind Chinwe that all progress comes from experimentation each time she visits them for a new injection. In time, they hoped to eliminate those needs.
Bright growing lights are everywhere here; warm white by day, dimmed to a pink that incorporates only the wavelengths most nourishing to chloroplasts by night. Gigawatts more power pour from Orún’s core into batteries: for the shuttles, for the outposts, for Orún’s own emergency backup systems (though with fusion at its heart, the asteroid is more likely to overheat than experience a power outage).
The vast majority of core’s power is creatively wasted; through temperature regulators, convection pumps, and any other mechanism anyone could come up with to do the job.