Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show

by Edmund R. Schubert

  I tried to avoid wondering why their leader had chosen me to bow to, but I wasn’t very successful.

  Imagine if eating an octopus in a certain way would allow you to grow tentacles on your body. Or if by eating a horse, you could replace your two human legs with four horse legs. According to Singh and Zalcberg’s observations of our newfound friends, that is essentially what the Aurorans can do: manipulate their own bodies by absorbing an animal and using its genetic code to recreate some aspect of that animal’s body. The wide variety of body shapes and parts among the Aurorans comes from deliberate change, not from their inherited genes.

  Within a few days, the Aurorans remedied our failure to bring a linguistics expert by providing one of their own. His name was a short trill that most of us could not reproduce, so someone called him Mozart. I pointed out that, given “Beeth” was one of the two words he knew, Beethoven might have been more appropriate, but by then the name had already stuck.

  Biologically speaking, Mozart was neither a he nor a she, but none of us really felt comfortable calling it “it.” Since the real Mozart had been a he, we defaulted to that usage for the most part.

  Through trial and error, we determined that the Auroran vocal apparatus simply was incapable of making most of the sounds of human languages. Fortunately, Mozart had brought rough sheets of a paper-like substance, inks of various colors, and a collection of clay stamps that could be used to imprint various symbols on the paper. While a few of the simpler symbols bore a resemblance to letters in various Earth alphabets—X, O, I, T, —there did not appear to be any connection between them and their Earthly sounds, so Rachel’s aleph-bet explanation for “Alla Beeth” was a dead end.

  Since Mozart understood the concept of written symbols representing ideas, once he got over his astonishment at the interaction between a computer keyboard and monitor, we were able to teach him to use his tentacles to type. We would communicate back by typing and saying words at the same time, so he could learn to associate the text of a word with its sound.

  Whoever had decided to send Mozart to communicate with us had made a good choice. After only four days, he had learned enough English to carry on simple conversations, so during my shift for teaching him, I asked him the question that had been bothering me. “Why did your leader bow to me?”

 

  “One of your people with swords. The most important one.”

 

  “Yes.”

 

  I demonstrated a bow.

 

  The nearest town, which someone had imaginatively dubbed Neartown, was not the place Mozart was from. That was new information, and I felt a little pleased with myself for discovering it. Still, I pressed on to find out more about what was bothering me. “Why did the leader of the close people bow to me?”

  He stopped typing and said, “Alla Beeth.”

  I typed it out for him.

 

  “You do not think I am Alla Beeth?”

 

  “Who is Alla Beeth?”

  Mozart whistled a staccato tune.

  I thought fast. If Alla Beeth was some sort of deity and I denied knowledge of it, I wasn’t sure what sort of complications that would cause. “Our language is so different from yours that our name for Alla Beeth may be different, too.” I hoped that wasn’t some sort of heresy.

 

  I felt the tremble in my stomach that I get when I realize I’m on the verge of a major story. “When did Alla Beeth visit your people?”

 

  Fifty years. Their planet’s year was more than two Earth years long, so he was claiming a human had visited Aurora over a hundred years ago, back before we’d even walked on Mars.

  “Wait a minute.” Even though this was being recorded, I wanted someone else with me before I proceeded any further. I commed Commander Gutierrez and asked her to come join us.

  After reading the transcript of our conversation to that point, she asked, “Is this a joke?”

  “If it is, someone’s setting me up. I swear I had no idea he was going to say this.”

  She nodded, then turned to Mozart. “Did someone tell you to say that Alla Beeth was human?”

 

  Gutierrez typed and spoke slowly. “Mozart, we are the first humans to visit your people.”

  Mozart let out a long, descending note, and began typing furiously.

  Gutierrez and I looked at each other.

 

  I looked into Mozart’s shiny black eyes. “I believe you, Mozart.” He believed that this Alla Beeth had visited his world, and even if I couldn’t believe it was a human, I was sure that something must have visited the Aurorans.

  Merging requires much more commitment than human mating, because neither of the Aurorans involved will survive. The larger of the two Aurorans swallows the other whole to begin the reproductive process, then hardens its skin into a thick shell. After about eighty days of cocoon-like existence, four small Aurorans break out of the shell to begin their lives. But their minds are not blank slates. In addition to a genetic heritage from both adults, each new Auroran carries a portion of the memories from the brains of its parents. Some Aurorans can remember events from over a thousand years ago.

  This time it was Cacciatore who brought up religion, breaking the stunned silence after Commander Gutierrez and I had shown the rest of the crew the recordings of our conversation with Mozart. “If nobody else say it, I will. Technology could not have brought a human here before us. Only the power of God.”

  The racial and religious proportionality requirements during the crew selection process had been intended to represent all of Earth in our tiny ship. Not surprisingly, the scientific community had undergone a small religious revival when those requirements were announced. So, no matter how recently converted, we had a good cross-section of religious belief on board.

  Some of the Christians in the crew backed Cacciatore’s theory that the visitor had been an angel; others thought it had been Jesus himself. A few of the Muslims could accept the idea of an angel but insisted that Allah must have sent the angel. The rest of the Muslims supported Khadil, who insisted that the visitor must have been Mohammed. The Hindus spoke of the possibility that it had been one of the avatars of Vishnu. Rachel, as the only Jew on board, was arguing against all sides at once, while admitting the barest possibility that the visitor was an angel.

  Commander Gutierrez mostly succeeded in remaining above the fray. The atheists and agnostics stayed out of it, as did the Buddhists.

  As for me? From when I was four years old until I was eighteen, I alternated weekends between my mom and my dad. Sundays with my mom meant going to church; Sundays with my dad meant watching TV on the couch or playing catch in the yard while listening to his old-time music collection. By the time I was fourteen, I pretty much felt that I took after my dad more than my mom, at least as far as preferred Sunday activities went, and my mom eventually quit asking me to go with her.

  So I stuck with the atheists and agnostics in trying to ignore the potential religious aspect of Alla Beeth.

  Nothing was settled that night, of course. But the hard feelings engendered by the argument disrupted the work the various scientific teams had been doing. Over the next few days, as I tried interviewing different scientists about their work, I could see that the crew had fractured: Whenever possible, they avoided their colle
agues who were on the “wrong” side.

  Mozart didn’t help in resolving the dispute. In fact, when he revealed that he could not show us a picture of Alla Beeth because the Creator had commanded against making images of living things, the arguments erupted with new fervor.

  There are several possible rational scientific explanations for the Aurorans’ visitor, none of which involve the intervention of any god or other supernatural entity. Since the Aurorans have no pictures of the visitor and are relying on memories passed through several generations of mergings, it is possible that some significant details have become distorted, and a natural event has been imbued with mystical significance. Our descent from the sky was then connected to memories of that event. Another possibility is that the visitor was from another alien race, one that is humanoid in appearance. Under the theory of convergent evolution, it is quite possible that an intelligent, tool-using species could look superficially like us—even some of the Aurorans walk on two legs, have two arms, and have a head with two forward-facing eyes. Perhaps we will encounter such a race in a few years and be able to resolve this mystery. Until we have actual evidence, though, nothing about “Alla Beeth” can be said with any certainty.

  “He trusts you more than any of the rest of us.” Commander Gutierrez sat on my bed, facing me in my chair. Her voice was tired.

  “Maybe so, but he believes Alla Beeth was a human, and I don’t think I can change his mind.”

  “There has got to be more evidence than these memories and traditions. Some artifact left behind. Something. The crew is splitting apart: I spend all day ordering people to share their data with each other. Some of them have actually gotten physical. I’m sure part of it is just the stress of the mission, but this mystery has pushed us to the breaking point. We need proof that this is something explainable by the laws of science, like you said in your column. Then, I think, people will calm down.”

  I shrugged. “What can I do? I’m just a science reporter, not a scientist.”

  “Mozart and his people see you as our ambassador.” She gave a half laugh, half sigh. “I’ve been careful never to call you that, you know. But I didn’t try to put a stop to it, either. Interpersonal dynamics: People need a scapegoat, and I felt you could take the jokes. But now, I need you to be the ambassador. Ambassador Lawrence Jensen, descending from the sky with the full unity of Earth behind you. Push Mozart, push his people, until they show you everything they know, everything they have. Find the truth.”

  Find the truth. Scientist or reporter, it distills to that: Find the truth.

  The nearest large city, which we call Metropolis, has a massive building near its center that rivals the old cathedrals of Europe in its intricate craftsmanship. Since only members of a certain priest class are allowed to enter, most Aurorans have never seen what it looks like from the inside. Mozart is a member of that class, and he explains that it is a place of scholarship. It was from that building that he was sent to find out if “Alla Beeth” had truly returned. Though we proved to be a disappointment to that hope, he stayed on to learn from us, as we learn from him. Despite the vast evolutionary and cultural gulf between our people and his, he has become our friend and has come to trust us. I leave it to you, the reader, to draw your own conclusion from that.

 

  “Yes,” I lied.

 

  “She is in charge of the ship that brought me here, but I am the ambassador.”

  He bobbed his head affirmatively, a gesture he had learned from us.

  “One of my functions is to find the truth, and report that truth to my people.”

  Mozart piped surprise.

  After six weeks, his English was good enough that I knew the capitalization was not accidental. “Yes, I am a Seeker of Truth.” And I’m willing to lie in order to get it.

 

  “What you have told us about Alla Beeth is causing arguments among my people. I must find a way to resolve those arguments. I must find the truth. Is there anything more you can tell me or show me about Alla Beeth?”

  He tapped the tips of his tentacles against his forelegs for a few moments.

  I suppressed a grin and replied gravely, “I would be most honored.”

  Commander Gutierrez had one of the pilots take us in the blimp, so we arrived in Metropolis before sundown.

  It took him nearly half an hour of consultation with members of his order before he came over to me and began typing on the portable computer we’d brought with us.

 

  “I thank them.”

 

  He led the way, and I followed him into the cathedral.

  I probably hadn’t been in a church more than a dozen times since I stopped going with my mom, mostly as a tourist. I could tell that the Aurorans had spent years of painstaking effort in creating this building, carving delicate patterns into solid stone. We passed through various archways and doors, and I started to hear Auroran voices harmonizing. Finally we entered a round room; about twenty Aurorans stood in the middle, singing.

  I felt a chill on the back of my neck, like I used to get sometimes listening to the choir at my mom’s church. But there was something more; there was something about this tune that made me nostalgic, homesick even. It felt like a memory that I couldn’t quite pull from the depths of my mind.

  Then Mozart walked to a curtain that hung on one of the walls and pulled it back.

  There, in violation of one of their commandments, was a painting of a man—definitely human—dressed all in white.

  My childhood Sunday memories came flooding back, and between the music and the picture there was no doubt in my mind as to who had been the first ambassador from Earth.

  “Alla Beeth” was the Aurorans’ way of saying “Elvis.”

  Anyone else on this expedition would have to be taken seriously. But not me. I’m a proven liar. Even worse—I’m a tabloid reporter. I would be accused of fabrication, of planting the evidence, of corrupting Auroran culture as part of some tabloid hoax.

  The biggest story of my career had fallen in my lap, and I couldn’t tell anyone without ruining whatever credibility I had managed to regain. Whatever powers that be must not want the publicity.

  Of course, my mom would say this was punishment for having lied.

  “Thank you for sharing the secrets of Alla Beeth with me,” I told Mozart as we left the cathedral.

 

  “You were right: Alla Beeth is human.”

  Mozart trilled joyfully.

  “But his message is intended for your people, not mine.” I sighed. “You were right to keep the image hidden. You must keep it hidden, because my people would not understand. They would reject your belief in him.”

  After a pause, Mozart asked,

  “The truth,” I said. “I will tell them the truth.”

  I refused Commander Gutierrez’s request for a private briefing on what I’d found, insisting instead on speaking to the assembled scientists. After everyone gathered outside the LM, I sat on the rim of the airlock and recounted exactly what happened up unt
il the moment Mozart pulled back the curtain and revealed the picture of Alla Beeth. Then I stopped.

  After a long pause, Khadil said, “Did you recognize the person?”

  “He was a human,” I said. “Unmistakably. We are not the first to travel the stars. But as for who it was…You really want to know the truth?”

  “Yes,” said Cacciatore.

  “Do you?” I looked at him. “If I say it was Mohammed, will you become a Muslim?” I turned to Khadil. “If I say it was Moses or Elijah, will you become a Jew?” I shook my head. “You want me to give you scientific proof of your religious beliefs? Well, I’m not going to; it’s called ‘faith’ for a reason. Here’s the real truth: You’ve all been acting like a bunch of ignorant yahoos, not the cream of Earth’s scientists. So quit bickering and get back to work.”

  I rose, turned my back on them, and stalked through the airlock into the LM.

  Commander Gutierrez caught up with me just outside my quarters. “That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”

  I stopped. “Yes.”

  She looked at me appraisingly. “You know they’ll all hate you for that little show-and-not-tell.”

  I shrugged. “As long as they’re united again…That’s what you wanted, right?”

  Gutierrez nodded. “Just between you and me, though, who was it in the picture?”

  Cocking an eyebrow, I said, “Assuming it was one of the great religious leaders of the past, how on Earth—or Aurora—would I know him from Adam?” I hit the button to open the hatch to my quarters. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Commander, I have a column to file.”

  The mystery of just who Alla Beeth was and how he got to Aurora may never be fully explained. But as Earth’s first ambassador to Aurora, he prepared the way for peaceful relations between our two worlds. And for that, we can only say, “Thank you, thank you very much.”

  Afterword by Eric James Stone

  In early 2004 I sold a story called “The Man Who Moved the Moon.” It was a combination of some fairly hard science fiction and a fairly ridiculous premise, and to this day it remains one of my favorites. Having succeeded with that rather strange combination, I decided to try it again in time for the next Writers of the Future contest deadline.