“And neither have I. And no more have all the hundred-thousands who live in this city. And still we see. They,” he added, looking upwards. I actually (it makes me ashamed to say it) scrunked both my eyes tight shut, rather than follow his gaze. “They – are not hostile, I think.”
“I might hope you are correct,” I said, in a small voice, “I must fear you are not.”
“Mr Wells has clearly seen them clearer than most,” the stranger agreed. “And he thinks they come to wage war. But I wonder if – if they mean only to greet us. To say hello. And in their incomprehensible implacability they continue trying to greet us, as a fly butts his hairy head over and over upon the pane the glass. Or do they comprehend how difficult it is for us to meet them? Is that why they persevere so – could it be from kindness?”
The waiter returned with a new glass of hock-and-soda, gave us a stiff little bow, and retreated inside again.
“Perhaps it is as difficult for them,” I said.
My new companion nodded once, twice, long deep nods, as if this were a new thought, and he was pondering it. “What if Mr Wells stands at the head of a new form of storytelling?” he said.
This provoked me to a sharp speech close to rudeness. “That trash? Never – never! Sir, forgive me, but I consider myself something of a literatus, and Mr Wells has no posthumous reputation to which he can look. Read the novels of Henry James, or of George Meredith, or Gissing, and then read this novel, and then tell me which is truer to life!” I was growing heated, and took a sip of beer. The stranger was looking intently at me.
“Truer to life is the point, of course,” he said, in a distant voice. “True as a straight line is said to be true. True as a portrait is said to be true. Unless the cosmos itself is so constituted that the portrait precedes the sitter? Schopenhauer believed Will the structuring principle of the universe; and what is Will if not the idiom of mind? Well, then, it might not surprise us if the physical sitter, on his stool, in his artist’s studio, finds his nose changing length, or his eyes moving further apart, or his hair-colour darkening, as the portrait dictates.” I must have looked aghast at such a suggestion, and the fellow laughed. “Of course, it’s nonsense!”
My heart lightened. Of course it was! God was in his heaven, and all right with the world. I was touring, in the grand manner. The man I loved was asleep in the hotel, and soon I would return to him. I had seen nothing untoward.
“To repeat myself, though,” the other fellow said, musingly. “What if Mr Wells does stand at the head of a new form of storytelling? If he does, I’d wager many more people will… see. I’d wager the newspapers would fill up with accounts of strange beings, and lights in the sky, and tentacles and I know not what. But I daresay you are correct, sire. I daresay the twentieth century belongs to Mr James.”
We parted on good terms. On the way back to the hotel I went to the Opernhaus, and purchased two tickets for the evening’s performance.
Zeta Reticuli
Paul Cornell
On September 19-20th, 1961, on a road in New Hampshire, Barney and Betty Hill were the first people to experience the modern version of what would later come to be known as ‘alien abduction’. They recalled many details of their experience, including Betty’s detailed image of a ‘star map’, only under hypnosis. In 1968, an amateur astronomer called Marjorie Fish constructed a three dimensional map of nearby stars and claimed that a match for Betty’s map could be found from the point of view of the multiple star system Zeta Reticuli.
Nn is watching for where it knows the faint star will rise. It hasn’t lost its knowledge of the stars, despite the degradation. This star is special, of course. To Nn, if to nobody else. It’s a puzzle to Nn that so many have become so obsessed with what was done near that star, with what they allege has come from that star, and yet they don’t connect that to the star in the sky itself. They don’t point at it and say there, that’s where this fear is from. They don’t know where it can be found.
Nn likes this time in main morning, before the pollution from the manufacturing burrows closes down the sky. On minor mornings, when only the small sun is up, Nn sometimes can’t make itself leave its tiny gifted pod. It just stands there, thinking about finality. It does not have to work. Opting for gifted consensual degradation gave it that, at least, and a handful of plant at meal time. Nn remembers when there were three plants. They had three even on the expedition. It remembers itself and the rest of the crew eating the other two plants offhandedly, unaware that this would become a luxury. But of course the instruments with which they navigated were already a luxury, even the walls they were contained within. So much so that the pod had been taken apart and melted down soon after they’d returned, metal being much more important than history. History is now the rarest luxury of all. Instead, there is myth. It is Nn’s fate to stand on the border between those two things.
Nn hopes that today, as it makes its way, as usual, in the day-long walk it takes for recreation and in the hope of finding plant leftovers, nobody will recognise it. Nn has sometimes been stopped by those with mental degradation, who want to hiss loudly in its face, but they are not the worst. The worst are the drones with theories about Nn’s mission, usually that the grand burrow are hiding something about what happened, or, worse, that Nn must know all about the Barney and Betty, and what they are here to do, and is keeping a secret that Nn for some reason will suddenly reveal to them.
Nn is continually amazed that they are concerned about these things but not about the degradation all around them. The lifetime of a new drone is set shorter each year. Their worries about the expedition are artificial, have been constructed. Nn’s own fears about it are grown inside it. Nn has come to think that the constructed fear is there to immunise these drones against real fear. Nn wakes from the first state of reality almost every night to find itself in the second, still in those memories. It then has to will itself into the third state, before it really wants to, to get on with the day before the day has come. Memories live in Nn like a parasite.
They were lost, that was the most terrible thing. They were the first of their kind to go out there, and they made their tunnels between the stars, and they placed beacons, as their people had always done when going on expeditions on the surface, of the world or of the universe, but they had lost the last beacon, and were despairing of ever getting home.
They had taken the pod in and out of the second state of reality, putting their heads into the soil and out again, as the metaphor went, afraid to be seen by the creatures of the world they had found, amazed and scared that those creatures were so like themselves: two arms; two legs; and the eyes –! Nn still felt that fear every time it thought of them: those small, inscrutable eyes with tunnels in the centre of them, like the thing was looking right into you, with a flap of skin so they could withdraw their attention, so that they were in control of who they admitted into their third state of reality. Nn had heard in the clickings along the tunnels, from experts, that it was now thought that biological material from that world where life was so ancient might have had time to drift as far as their own suns, might have seeded or bonded with the earliest life in the burrows. The creatures of that world they had visited, the only life the expedition had found, were the ancients, the creators. Nn thought the myth that had grown around them was about the feeling that the expedition had disturbed them, as a newly hatched drone disturbs the hatcher. Nn feared for the young picking out those clicks from the hiss of the nightly sharing. No wonder this myth preyed on so many of them, seemed to make them mad. There was the feeling in the air of the tunnels that they were being punished. Nn could remember from his own earliest days when that hadn’t been so. Or at least when it hadn’t felt as overwhelming. Or perhaps that was just how the newly hatched always felt. Perhaps the sense that reality was punishing the conscious was a universal thing.
The leader of the expedition – it was dead now, they were all dead but Nn and perhaps Ghh, Nn hadn’t asked after it in the cl
icking – had decided they should set down in the third reality and interact with the creatures of the world they had found themselves falling into the burrow slope of. They might find out where they were, and how to get home. They had put on their uniforms, their luxurious caps and suits, all in the black of the night, the same they had been seen off in with glorious hisses and clicking that had vibrated around the whole world. Nn wondered if they had hoped to impress these huge beings, that this sign of their importance at home was meant to translate. As if one could ever impress that which hatched you.
The crew had waited by their pod, the lights on it wastefully full on, for one of the pods they had observed to approach along an artificial trail. Nn remembers those lights, white in the strange air of that world, that to their amazement they could breathe, unlike that of any other world they had found. The thought of the lights reminds Nn now of how quickly light information is degraded as it leaves a world, how what had been clickings sent on the electromagnetic spectrum became noise, almost before the final edge of the burrow slope of any drone worlds around a hatcher star. What their lights had been trying to say was that they were important, that their visit to that world was meaningful. Who knows if the Barney and Betty had got that message, or if they had heard something else? Who knows what their world had made of it? Every now and then, Nn wonders if the myth can somehow be true, if the Barney and Betty are really –? But then it stops that seed thought inside itself, feeling that there is the path to final degradation.
They had spaced themselves out across the trail, like young drones aiming to catch a beast, when there had been beasts. Nn remembers the taste of the air, so full of water and plant. There was too much of everything here. The head of the expedition had joked that they might annex this world, if they could only work out where it was, because it had so much that was needed back home. But none of them had thought that was possible. The thirteen of them were the most their world could manage to put out into the dark. They had found ways to many stars, but no matter what the plant at the end of the tunnel, they could not see how it would be possible to make more pods like this to follow them. Even then, they had known that. The expedition had been a way for the grand burrow to say they were big, and now here were Nn and his comrades, doing the same against the gods.
They had waited, across the track, trying to muster their authority. They had waited for something to arrive that they knew would be terrifying. But then they had not known just how terrifying it would be for their world.
Then there had been answering lights in the distance. Nn had waited, breathing only a little, trying to get information from those lights. The pod had appeared, and slowed, coming to a halt as the creatures inside it saw the lights that said something was across the track in front of them. Nn had joined with the others in clicking from his brain, making the electromagnetic messages that encouraged its own people to move from the third state into the first. The pod stopped, its lights went off. Nn and its comrades paused, clicked to each other to be brave, to approach. Nn remembers that it was the first to move, but that might be just the signal degradation of time. Nn got to the pod, and looked in through the transparent part of it... and saw them.
They were enormous, at least twice as tall as the tallest of Nn’s comrades, and they were full citizens then, fed on three plants, who had eaten beast. The creatures wore luxuriously varied clothes, many different colours and textures. Their faces were big as beasts, their mouths and noses enormous, to eat all this world had, to breathe this big wet air. Their skin colours were both opposed to the beautiful varieties of grey that Nn’s people were hatched in for their lives in tunnels, another startling luxury: one was much lighter, one much darker. Their bodies were different to each other too, varied in shape in multiple ways.
That was the first time, as they turned to look at Nn, with expressions that Nn could interpret, to some degree, as that of stunned beasts, and so it knew the clickings had been effective... that was the first time Nn had seen those eyes. They bored into it. They sought to make a connection, to impose their meaning on Nn, who couldn’t close its own. It was as if they threw meaning imperiously around them, wasting it, splashing it. They seemed startled not to have done so in this moment, having done so all their lives. Nn forced down its fear and clicked to them to get out. They did, their shadows impossibly huge on the track. Nn reached up a hand, its own fingers so thin, and took the enormous hand of one of them in its own, and led her, because they were about to find, as with some of the extinct beasts, that this was a her, towards Nn’s own pod.
They had taken the pod and their visitors and their pod out of the third state as soon as possible, in case another pod came along, and brought too many creatures to deal with. The creatures slowly asked questions, in their loud voices. Their language was expansive, so many sounds. The leader of the expedition clicked into them again, found that language, and then they at least had the sense of what was said. The leader spoke to them in their own tongue, its voice quiet and sibilant in comparison to how they said the same words, and it had to avoid some sounds it couldn’t stretch its mouth to say. It asked questions about what they knew of astronomy, about whether a number of specific multiple star burrows could be seen from this world, about where the biggest electromagnetic source in the sky was. The creatures could hardly answer, had the same limited knowledge of what they did not need to know as any drone did. Nn remembers feeling angry at them: these were not all wise hatchers; they would be no help in getting home. That feeling has been lost as the myth was made into artifice by repetition. The crafters wanted to examine the creatures for their records, as was their duty, so what they would find out to be the male, what would later become known as the Barney, was led away by them, while the leader showed the female the map of burrows that the expedition had built up during their wanderings. It showed the eleven worlds they had burrowed to. She looked at it for a long time, but seemed bemused, her huge finger wandering just as lost across it, taking no message from it. Nn remembers wondering at the time if these two were degraded by their world, were, to whatever extent, victims of it, if the expedition had the bad luck to pick such as that. But it had put the thought from its mind quickly: they brought such luxury with them, would any who were hatched into such excess ever be degraded? This one was the Betty, or rather she was not the Betty yet, she was just Betty, as she had called herself, Betty Hill. Dee dee dee. Nn can still recall the leader’s voice buzzing strangely as it repeated the expansive and formal name. The huge name of a god.
Nn took Betty into the other part of the pod, where the crafters were examining Barney. They had inserted a needle into his strange sexual organs. He was protesting, weakly, which had put the crafters on edge. They were worried that he might move back into the third state, and attack them, and then all would be lost. They drew out the needle, and projected what they had found onto the wall. Nn saw the horrid, scuttling shapes of how these creatures reproduced. The males threw this stuff out, and it could infect any female that got it inside them. The crafters told Nn that only one of these millions of cells would successfully mate with an egg. They had that from Barney’s knowledge. It was, again, frighteningly expansive, an obscene waste. The crafters told Barney to lie face down on the table, and inserted a rectal probe. They sampled what he’d eaten. The screen revealed such variety, so many sources, so many flavours that seemed to have no point except pleasure.
Betty was looking on, with a huge expression on her face, her feelings so obvious, as if she was projecting herself on the wall. It was actually a little hard to look at her. She seemed to occupy so much more space than her physical body did. The crafters told Barney to get up, and started to soothe Betty into getting onto the examination bench. They did this carefully, fearfully, and finally, her expression changing into something between emotions that was a shout and yet at the same time nebulous, she did so. They examined her womb with the needle, and, to Nn’s relief, she wasn’t carrying a child inside her. Nn squirmed at t
he idea of these creatures doing that. It was so unsafe. As if they felt able to waste their children as well.
Now, Nn sees the star appearing over the mound of a burrow to the east. It should feel a chill because of it, but over the years the fear has become Nn’s touchstone, its only certainty. This world, running down, its people and history draining away, hasn’t got much mythology left. What it does comes from that place. Nn is pleased, almost, for a moment, that it found that for its people. But no, it’s a burden, something that mocks them as they die. Nn wonders if the creatures near that star remember them. The expedition tried to click into Barney and Betty that they shouldn’t. But how certain could they have been that such big brains would obey? Perhaps they should have treated them more gently. Would things be different if they had? Nn keeps trying to find reasons for the myth. But perhaps myths are built because of different processes than reason. Perhaps myths are from the second state of reality.
Nn watches its star rise for a while, until the light of great dawn is in the sky, then begins its usual round. Things are as they always are to the extent that, as usual, Nn finds itself spending much of the time in the second state, its body just doing what it usually does, head popping out of the burrow only when something unusual is sighted on the daytime trail. It is towards the end of the day when it sees something surprising ahead, and it takes a moment to realise what it is seeing.
Here is Ghh, another member of the expedition. It is alive after all. Ghh is from a distant burrow, but Nn has often thought that it could go and see it if it really wanted to. Not wanting to is from the first reality and wanting to from the third, and that border is also one Nn stands on. Still, here Ghh is. Nn raises a hand and Ghh looks surprised to see Nn, not displeased on the surface, but certainly shaken inside.
They talk, initially, about their lives now, but there isn’t much to say. They talk about the expedition. Nn realises, with horror, that Ghh believes the myth. “We disturbed something,” says Ghh. “Strength like that, has to be a beast, following what hurt it back to its home. What a waste of what it has otherwise. Think about it.”
Paradox: Stories Inspired by the Fermi Paradox Page 7