And she wanted to sleep alone. She was too exhausted to rouse herself to anything else. The night after their first day in China, Conn and Daniels had slept together, Daniels going on about wanting to have sex in a country he’d never had sex in before. She currently found herself hoping against hope he had already had sex in Russia. She didn’t even want to have the conversation.
Their public relations guide noted that the facility would send an elaborate series of unmanned probes to the moon in the current calendar year, which would be controlled from the second flight control room. Conn’s interest was briefly piqued: Russia sure did want to know what the Basalites were up to.
The aliens’ exploitation of the moon had begun shortly after Conn and Jake’s return to Earth. Basalite spacecraft left and landed on Siberian ground on a regular basis, and Gasoline Alley was accommodating their traffic, for parking or for maintenance. As yet, the Basalites hadn’t availed themselves of Conn’s offer of transportation from Earth to space. She wasn’t complaining—each such launch was still hugely expensive, even if Dyna-Tech could do it more cheaply than anyone else. She supposed the Basalites could do it a lot cheaper.
Nobody had yet seen a Basalite. They would move a complement of workers from Siberia to Gasoline Alley in one of their large rocketships, and shuttles from the moon came and got them as needed, dropping off others. When there was total turnover, they ferried their new passengers back to Siberia. Regularly, a fuel freighter would arrive at Gasoline Alley for use by the spacecraft there, but it seemed to Conn from observing Basalite patterns that the craft must also be getting fuel on the moon, and maybe even Earth. Whatever the particulars, the aliens had been able to remain unseen.
Any interaction with humans was through avatars of twentieth-century luminaries. Each of the avatars spoke Hindi, Japanese, or English, when on state visits to India, Japan, or Canada (the US hadn’t agreed to receive them yet). The Basalites had refused to teach their language to anybody else. The four moon walkers were the only humans on Earth who could (rudimentarily) understand it.
Whatever the Basalites were doing on the moon wasn’t visible—the prevailing theory was that they were mining the far side. What signals humans could intercept often ended abruptly, presumably because whatever was originating them passed on to the far side.
The fact that pretty much all the human race could do at the moment was look at the moon through telescopes was a tragedy, and an embarrassment, Conn thought. NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory had the opportunity to “see” the far side of the moon twice a year, but not at any useful resolution.
No fewer than two deputy directors of the CIA, and then the director herself, requested permission to embed a spy on the space station who would observe and examine the Basalite craft and tech. Conn denied these requests, and took the further precaution of insisting that she be made aware of every arrival and departure from Gasoline Alley. She didn’t doubt the CIA, and probably other countries’ intelligence agencies, would try to buy a mole to do their bidding.
She practiced some preventative medicine in that area. Working in space got Dyna-Tech employees and contractors hazard pay: an additional two-thirds of their wages or salary. Conn bumped it up to double pay. She wanted her people to be less susceptible to economic pressure to spy. The goodwill the move generated didn’t hurt, either.
She felt some small measure of additional satisfaction from turning down the CIA after Deputy Director Raich had made her life so miserable. But she also enjoyed the fact that her people were examining the Basalite spacecraft, to the point where they were starting to draw up schematics. If the CIA wanted information on Basalite tech, they could damn well come to her for it.
The tour finally—thankfully, as far as Conn was concerned—concluded, the public relations chaperone drove them back to their hotel. She watched from the car as Conn and Daniels entered the building. Inside, they took the elevator up to the twelfth floor and entered their respective rooms. Conn collapsed on her bed. She was dozing off when a knock on her door woke her. “Go away,” she said, thinking it was Daniels. It wasn’t. She could hear someone knocking on another door in the hallway, too—Daniels’s room, she was pretty sure.
She dragged herself upright and to the door. “Can I help you?” she said, through the closed door.
“Constance Garrow?”
“Who are you?”
“Federal Security Service. Open the door.”
“Show me identification.” The man held up a badge to the door as Conn watched through the peephole.
She opened the door and was under arrest.
FORTY-TWO
A Sighting
January, 2035
While Conn and Daniels were on tour in Russia, someone on the space station saw a Basalite. And got lots of pictures and video.
The Basalite rocketship was moored in its usual space, resting underneath two bays and tethered to one of them. This clearance allowed the smaller shuttle craft to dock with it and exchange workers.
Sam Hogarth, a Dyna-Tech systems analyst, happened to be looking out a window in the direction of the rocketship when a Basalite took a spacewalk. Hogarth couldn’t tell what he was doing there: well, he may have been a she, but Hogarth obviously had no way to tell them apart—and anyway, Basalites had three sexes. Hogarth thought of him as a he. He was using a pressure field, and unless he had lost a bet and had to spacewalk naked, it was apparent that the Basalites didn’t wear clothes.
After a moment in shock, Hogarth recovered himself enough to start taking photos with his fone, and he got the attention of two of his coworkers, who thereafter witnessed the spacewalk, too. “You keep taking pictures,” one of them said. “I’ll get video.” That quick thinking made Molly Imrie, Dyna-Tech mechanical engineer, more famous than Hogarth, although Hogarth went on to earn a healthy amount of money from the feeds for rights to use his stills. The pictures were much clearer than the video, and less bouncy, but people ate up the videos.
What they showed: three squat torsos, each connected to the other two radially. At the ends of the torsos, three limbs each, in a sort of triangular formation, skinny and bent midway, similar to human arms, with digits resembling fingers at the end. Scales covering everything, bluish and purplish in the prevailing light outside the rocketship. A large, three-sided slit, dead center, where the torsos met, which caused many arguments. Some thought it must be a mouth; some saw the breathing apparatus attached to the Basalite’s underside and decided that must be covering the mouth. Magnified stills showed an oval-shaped slit at the center of all three clusters of limbs, and six indentations, two on each side of the torso where they met in the center. The slits looked like eyes, and the indentations like ears. Some thought it was the other way around. Still others refused to assume Basalites had access to only the five senses humans have.
The pictures and video were taken from above, looking down, and the Basalite was helpful enough to stretch out as he thrust himself from one place to another. The images couldn’t have been better if he had posed.
Humanity’s first impression was on the scale between discomfort and revulsion. Scientists noted the Basalite’s radial symmetry: three equal parts, relating to one another by rotation around a center. On Earth, nature had produced this symmetry by way of some sea creatures and flowers. One prominent scientist, canny enough to make himself available quickly for live interviews, coined the term Pelorian to describe the alien. It came from the word to describe the aberration when a plant which normally produces bilaterally symmetrical flowers instead produces a radially symmetrical one. Within hours, Basalite had been replaced in Earth’s lexicon by Pelorian. (Conn’s triune never really caught on.) It only added to the momentum that peloria is also Greek for monster.
Public opinion of the aliens, positive in the weeks after the meeting on the moon, and particularly Conn’s rescue, began to turn.
# # #
Conn and Daniels were back in the air. At least they were flying first
class. Ten hours from Moscow to New York, followed by five and a half from New York to San Francisco, would have been unbearable in coach.
They were leaving Russia as empty-handed as they’d left China. But at least they were leaving. If Conn never set foot on Russian soil again, she would count her blessings.
She and Daniels watched the feeds’ coverage of the pictures and video of the Pelorian spacewalk. Daniels was repulsed enough that Conn told him he was being a little boy. Conn was merely fascinated. And disappointed nobody was calling them Basalites or triunes anymore.
“I wonder if they can roll on their outstretched arms, like a wheel,” Daniels said. Conn could picture it, and she swatted him, laughing despite herself.
“Excuse me,” said an older woman who had stopped in the aisle beside Conn’s seat. She was trim and pretty, with emerald green eyes and a smoky voice. “You’re Conn Garrow, right?”
“Yes, I am,” Conn said as brightly as she could manage. “You know, we’re on vacation, though, and we only have a little more time alone...I’m sure you understand?”
“Scott Daniels,” Daniels said, reaching across Conn to offer his hand. Conn rolled her eyes. Soon, all of first class was hearing Conn hold forth on the Pelorians: no, she’d never seen one before today. No, they were kind and gentle, not even remotely monsters. Yes, they do look strange, but she was sure human beings all looked strange to the Basalites.
“Should we call them Basalites or Pelorians? The feeds are all calling them Pelorians.”
“Basalite is like Earthling, and Pelorian is like human,” Conn said. “Either one should be OK. Also, I don’t think they care.”
Conn supposed all this was preferable to being in custody in Moscow, although that should never have gotten as far as it did. Not only were she and Daniels internationally known moon walkers, they were also diplomats: maybe not officially, in Conn’s case, but nobody was in the mood to argue the finer points of diplomatic immunity in the face of the fiasco that was their arrest. While the US consulate dithered, a Russian at a higher pay grade at the Federal Security Service facility where they were being held got wind of the arrests, and had them released to head off a potential international incident. It wasn’t even clear why they had been arrested in the first place. Conn was sure it was because Daniels had told Gene Pepelyaev that they knew what China had given up in exchange for nitrogen power. And she resented having to go through that ordeal because Daniels liked to run his mouth.
When the passengers finally left Conn alone, she slept six hours straight. She woke with pain in her neck and shoulder from sleeping in an airplane seat, but she felt refreshed. She mentally restarted her internal flight clock: it was now a two-hour flight to New York, then a five-and-a-half-hour flight to San Francisco. That was manageable.
So it was in an improved frame of mind that she got up and retrieved her carry-on at LaGuardia Airport. She felt a gravitational pull from her bed at home, even though it was still all the way across the continent. Five and a half hours, she assured herself. I’m going home. Customs first, but it wasn’t helpful to think that way. Just the five-and-a-half-hour flight ahead.
Daniels, unshakable and immune to weariness and jet lag up to that point, looked worn out himself. Conn caught his eye, and he smiled—but Conn could tell it was forced. She felt a perverse satisfaction that it was all finally catching up to him.
Her renewed cheerfulness persisted to the end of the ramp off the plane. There, a man and a woman were waiting for them. The woman was Deputy Director Raich of the CIA.
FORTY-THREE
Questions
January, 2035
Conn and Daniels were escorted to customs, and then separated. Conn was conveyed to a small, bare interview room. She put her head in her hands and tried not to cry from exhaustion and frustration.
Perfect time to question somebody, she mused. I’m not exactly my sharpest. The effect only got worse as she waited about half an hour for anybody to join her. She wrote off the possibility of catching her flight to San Francisco.
Finally, a man in an off-the-rack suit came in with what looked like a thick file in his hands. Conn knew that whole file couldn’t be about her. The man was early thirties at the oldest, with a chubby, dimpled face under shaggy blond hair. He looked to be in exceptional shape, as best Conn could tell.
“What’s that?” Conn asked him.
“Your file,” he said.
“No, it’s not,” Conn said.
“With as often as you’re in the feeds? You better believe it.”
“And you print it all out, do you?”
“I’m old fashioned.”
Conn stretched. “You should try Memorly.”
“Can’t. I get addicted. If I print everything out, I won’t save absolutely everything like I would in an m-file.”
Conn sighed. “I don’t have anything to declare,” she said. She had decided to use that line when somebody first came in, but she’d forgotten. She really wasn’t her sharpest—exhausted, jet lagged, benumbed.
“I’m Harold Fraser. I’m with the CIA. I have to ask you a few questions.”
“ID?”
“Pardon?”
“Do you have ID?”
He looked at her quizzically. “Did the people who brought you here not show you ID?”
“Well, yeah.”
“And you think someone off the street snuck in here just to talk to you?”
“Surely, Harold, you have ID on you. Why are you being so difficult? Something to hide?”
He dug out his wallet and held his CIA ID up for her to examine. She didn’t actually care.
“I need you to translate something for me,” Harold said.
“Basalese?”
“Yes.”
“Ask Daniels. He’s one of yours.”
“Don’t worry about Daniels. Put this on.” He brandished a slim pair of headphones. Conn was tired and pissed off enough to talk back, but she didn’t want to do anything which would actually extend this ordeal. She put on the headphones.
Fraser gestured to the camera up the wall opposite Conn. Someone on the other side of it started a recording. Conn heard a clear, crisp snippet of Basalese. “What is this?”
“This is a phrase the Basalites say whenever they’re visiting or visited by a world leader. You know, ‘As they say on my home world, blah blah blah.’”
“And they don’t tell you what it means afterward?”
“They give what they say is the translation. I want to know what you think they’re saying.”
“I offer you my hand, my heart and my mind,” Conn said.
“Right,” Fraser said. “That’s what they say it means. OK. Here’s another one.” Gesture to the camera.
“I can barely hear it.”
“We did our best. Can you tell what they’re saying?”
“Context?”
“I don’t want to give you that, at least at first.”
“It sounds like this was recorded without their knowledge.”
“Can you tell what they’re saying?”
“Look. I’m really not interested in Spy vs. Spy bullshit. Daniels is a federal government employee, and he can translate this just as easily as I can.”
“You’ve spent far more time with the Basalites than he has.”
“Speaking English, mostly.”
“We’ll get Daniels’s opinion, too. Can you please tell me what they’re saying?”
“It’s complicated,” Conn said. “I don’t mean what they’re talking about is complicated, I mean we only learned the very basic structure of their language.”
“But you have the vocabulary.”
“Yeah, but. It’s hard to explain. You know how bring and brought don’t sound like the same thing? Every verb in Basalese is like that. There’s no rule—that we know—that says how to conjugate any verb you run into, you just have to know the definitions of all the words related to bring. So they taught us the definition of bring, and they
taught us the definition of brought, but just the definitions—we didn’t learn how to conjugate bring; as far as we know you don’t. If we want to say brought, we have to think about what word of theirs means the past tense of bring. It may only take a second to remember, but if you have to take an extra second every third or fourth word...Make sense?”
“No, you lost me. But you should have enough to tell me basically what they’re saying, yeah?”
Conn sighed. “One is saying ‘the pressure field power with nitrogen artificial climate is because col’—I mean, ‘warm.’ The other is saying ‘a thing one relies for life...does not desire crush as with...’ a word I don’t know.”
“Because it’s past tense, like brought?”
“No, listen to me. We know past tenses, we just...Never mind. The last word, in context, sounds to me like a proper name.”
“Their names all have translations, I thought.”
“Brand name, maybe. Like a product. Or, I might just not be able to make it out on this terrible recording. You know, if you people had shown up at my office and asked for my help, I would be giving you this same information, but I wouldn’t be pissed off about it.”
“One more.” Conn rolled her eyes, but concentrated.
“That one’s even worse.”
“Can you tell what they’re saying?”
“‘We give in exchange for...essence.’ Play it one more time? ‘Essence devotion eternal death shield’—er—‘protect.’”
“Eternal death shield?”
“Calm yourself, sheriff. I think essence might have been closer to life. They give devotion in exchange for eternal life and/or a shield from death. I think.”
“Does that sound alarming to you?”
“No more than Catholic mass did, growing up. You said one more. Does that mean we’re done?”
“You have a flight to catch. I think I have everything I need.”
Conn checked her watch. “I think I can kiss my flight goodbye, thanks. I’m not up to running all the way to the other terminal.”
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