Analog SFF, January-February 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

That made her look at me, but her eyes were dead. “The British called the people at the Boston Tea Party a mob. The Alabama police called the Freedom Marchers a mob."

  “History judged both sides of those events,” I replied. “History judged what happened the day I took your picture, and what happened in the days after. You were on the wrong side."

  She made no answer to that. There was no way for me to tell if that was silent denial or a tacit admission of guilt. Her face, which had once burned with an expression anyone could read, now was as expressive as the flat stones beneath our feet.

  “What about later, when they announced what they were going to do?"

  “What about it?"

  “Did your opinions change? Did any of the hate subside?"

  A shrug, her gaze leaving me for her gardens once more.

  “Were you still listening to hate speech?"

  “I believed I was listening to the truth."

  This brought me to something I previously thought to be only a minor question, one that suddenly seemed important.

  “Some people say that the people you were listening to should have been silenced. What do you think?"

  I could see that my question had caught her by surprise. She seemed to take it seriously, taking a sip of her coffee, working on her answer.

  “I don't know,” she said at last. “Maybe there is an argument for that, but what if they had been right, the voice crying that the British were coming?"

  “What if one of—” I almost said your kind, but bit it back. “What if one of the extremists had managed to kill the Draconi? Where would we be now?"

  “I guess we will never know.” With that I lost her again, her attention returning to her flowerbeds.

  Little of what she had said meant all that much. I had no idea whether she still believed as she had then, if she felt remorse or shame, or even anger at my dredging it all up again.

  I had to wonder if she was part of any of the groups that denied the existence of the Draconi, or maintained that their saving us was a lie or ruse or plot. Every major human event has spawned those who, afterward and even in the smoking ruins, deny it ever happened. The Holocaust. Man on the Moon. Rwanda. Sarajevo. Every genocide, every war crime, every hate crime. You could bury these people in the skulls of their victims, and still they would maintain that it never happened.

  You are, we fear, hopeless, and doomed by the darker sides of your own natures.

  The Draconi said that before returning to their damaged ship and lifting off. The stardrive was useless, but the craft worked well enough to let it leave Earth and accelerate at ten gravities toward its apocalyptic rendezvous.

  We cannot bear to abide here. Death would be preferable.

  Now there was an indictment.

  You have our pity, and our hope that our actions may prove to be some sort of lesson to your kind.

  * * * *

  I was there, I heard the one we called Scratch say those words, and though his face showed nothing, and his translator's low monotone gave the words no special emphasis or inflection, they had an impact I can't even begin to describe.

  We had been judged, and we had been found wanting.

  * * * *

  I let out a sigh. The memory of that moment and what came after still made me feel sick, still broke my heart, still filled me with shame and despair.

  I was tempted to get up from the table right then. This was taking me further back than I wanted to go, a journey that was all pain and no gain. I could have given up and let it go. Taken that as my answer, gone home, and tried to live with it.

  But I had begun this, and I would see it through to the end.

  “We knew the Bullet was coming long before the Draconi appeared, right?"

  “I guess."

  “Were you aware of it? It was big news."

  A shrug, her eyes on distant flowers. She had put down her cup and begun worry-beading her trowel again. “I have to deadhead the geraniums this afternoon."

  “We learn that there is an asteroid headed for Earth, one big enough to cause severe devastation, if not outright mass extinction, and there is serious question whether it will miss us or not. You heard all of that and it didn't mean anything to you?"

  “I guess it didn't mean much to me until, you know."

  I knew. “Not until the Draconi arrived, and the crazies started screaming that they had sent it, that the Bullet was the gun they were holding to our head. Did you believe that?"

  “Isn't it obvious that I did?"

  “Why? Because you thought they were devils?"

  “I thought they looked like devils."

  “What about when astronomers proved that where they had come from, and where the Bullet came from, were almost directly opposite each other?"

  “You've never heard of a so-called expert lying? Or the government lying?” She lifted her arm and glanced at her watch. “Five minutes left, Mr. Brown."

  Five minutes, and I didn't feel like I had gotten anywhere.

  “Okay,” I said, “How about when the Bullet's trajectory was calculated well enough to be 95% certain it was going to hit us? What did you think about that?"

  A mirthless chuckle. “I believed we were all going to die."

  “And you still believed the Draconi were responsible."

  “I was pretty sure."

  “Some people were saying it was better we die than be ruled by aliens or demons. Did you believe that?"

  “Wouldn't you rather die than be ruled by aliens or demons, Mr. Brown?"

  I didn't want to waste what time I had left debating that. “What about when they made their announcement? When they stated that they found us so unpleasant, and what we had made of this world so terrible that they would rather splatter themselves against the Bullet and keep it from hitting us than be subjected to us and our world any longer. And even then, they could have lifted off and stayed safe, gone to sleep and waited for rescue. But they chose to help us instead, and sacrifice themselves. What did you think?"

  She waved a fly away. “Good riddance—if they really were going to do it."

  “You weren't grateful?"

  “How was I supposed to know it wasn't another trick?"

  “What they said about us. How did that make you feel?"

  “I didn't think they had any right to judge us."

  “Do you now?"

  “Only we can judge ourselves."

  So now, with my time almost over, we were finally getting nearer the issues that had driven me to seek out Marlene Jennings, but still I had nothing like the sort of answers I wanted.

  “Things have changed a bit since then,” I said. “Some of the things the Draconi said have been heeded, some of the cruelties and inequities and horrors addressed. They hoped we would learn something from what they did. Some of us have. But what about you? Did you learn anything? Was your mind in any way changed? Were you in any way changed? Have you come to understand how misplaced your hate was? Are you—are you sorry?"

  Marlene Jennings absorbed all of this impassively, her gaze still out on her gardens. After a moment, she stood up.

  “Your time is up, Mr. Brown."

  I opened my mouth to argue, then shut it again.

  “Thank you, Ms. Jennings,” I said tiredly as I got to my feet.

  “Just leave and let me get back to my gardens,” she said with a weariness to match mine. “I have too much to do to waste any more time like this."

  * * * *

  My career has cost me two marriages, but it did buy me my own plane. Fortunately, I'm a better pilot than a husband.

  I did my best to put my time with Marlene Jennings out of my mind as I ran my pre-flight checks and prepared to take off. It was only after I was off the ground and had a course laid in for my home airport back in Maryland that I let my mind return to my afternoon visit with the Face of Hate.

  What had I been looking for? What had I hoped to hear?

  You are, we fear, hopeless, and doomed by
the darker sides of your own natures.

  I had been looking for some proof that the Draconi were wrong. That we could change.

  We cannot bear to abide here. Death would be preferable.

  I had wanted some proof that we had been in some ways changed by their words and example. That we and all we had made would not be regarded as some horrific hellhole by some outside observer. That if we were not worthy of what they had done, we were at least moving in that direction.

  You have our pity, and our hope that our actions may prove to be some sort of lesson to your kind.

  Some of us had learned to look afresh at what we had made, to take steps to change things. How wide and deep and long-lived this rebirth and redirection was and would be was still subject to considerable debate. I had taken pictures showing both sides, but could not help but feel that we were already failing to turn ourselves around in any meaningful way.

  So why track down Marlene Jennings?

  I had come to regard her as a sort of litmus test.

  If the Face of Hate could change, had changed, then maybe there was hope for our kind after all.

  But if she hadn't—couldn't—then maybe I should just drive my plane into the side of a mountain the same way the Draconi had chosen to crash their crippled ship into the Bullet. More and more I had come to wonder if I could bear to abide here any longer. More than a few people committed suicide after they left. I could all too easily understand the impulse. Some people I knew had turned to drink, to drugs, to extreme behaviors both fleshily excessive and mortifyingly self-denying. Marlene Jennings had buried herself headfirst in her gardens.

  I wished I hadn't come. At best my trip had been for nothing. At worst I had just seen the utter futility of hope for my kind.

  I wondered if I should have screamed at her, shaken some sort of reaction from her, squeezed the truth out of her, done something to get through the non-responsive shell she had built around herself, a woman who tended beauty while inside, the roots of ugliness still thrived.

  Sudden impulse had me checking around me and changing my flight path, veering back the way I had come.

  In just a few minutes, I was nearing the place where Marlene Jennings lived. I wasn't sure why I'd come back. I wasn't gripping the wheel and bracing myself for the act that would send me screaming down on her, taking us both out in a perverse act of atonement.

  Maybe it was just as she had said: it wasn't about thinking, it was about taking some sort of action.

  I bent a few rules, taking the plane lower as I neared her place.

  Closer yet, I tipped one wing for a better look. That's when I saw it.

  The big field behind her house. The complicated garden beds. On the ground, a maze.

  But from above it all took on a new shape.

  A patchwork of geometric shapes. A large central bed, and made from flowers, her face as it had been in my picture. Around that, more beds arced, forming the words FORGIVE ME.

  I could see Marlene Jennings on her knees at the edge of one bed, tending her penance, tending her plea for forgiveness. Paying for what she had done in the only way she knew, and not even admitting to me that her life had been rededicated to erasing the wrongs she had committed.

  I leveled out and began climbing into the sky, something inside me rising faster than the machine around me, lighter than the hazy clouds above me.

  Suddenly I felt better about myself and my kind than I had since the moment I witnessed the delayed image of the Draconi taking the Bullet for our sakes, unworthy though we might have been.

  Maybe there was hope for us after all if the Face of Hate had come to see the light.

  * * * *

  When I got home, I sent her a postcard bearing the same message she had put out for the universe to see.

  Forgive me.

  A small thing, but that's how great things are begun.

  Copyright © 2006 Stephen L. Burns

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  RADICAL ACCEPTANCE

  by David W. Goldman

  Illustration by John Allemand

  * * * *

  A belief doesn't have to be true to be useful—but it doesn't have to be false, either!

  “Your problem, Mr. Karolev,” said the otter, “is angels."

  I wasn't sure that I had heard him correctly over the hot tub's burbling. “Angels?"

  He nodded his smooth brown head. “I don't specifically mean, of course, your personal problem."

  “Ah.” As I watched him duck his head underwater for a long moment, I wondered what specifically he did mean.

  He came up for air, shaking the water from his head with a quick up-and-down jerk. The spray missed me by inches. His sleek body rolled twice, just below the water's surface, before he settled back onto the fiberglass bench opposite me.

  If two years ago you'd told me that I would be sitting in a backyard tub high above Malibu, chatting with a six-legged, tenor-voiced river otter from outer space, you would have been pitching me a bad screenplay. Tonight, though, it was just a Tuesday evening business meeting.

  “It's angels, Mr. Karolev, that stand between humanity and the rest of galactic civilization. Of all your people's memes, angels are the most destructive you've invented."

  “Call me Jack.” I had assumed that I'd been invited over to discuss a business proposition. But if one of Earth's dozen visiting otters—their species had its own name, of course, but it was very long and involved a lot of gasps and whistles; they were the ones who had suggested we just call them “otters"—wanted to talk philosophy, who was I to complain?

  I asked, “Your people don't go in for religion, then?"

  His brief high-pitched chittering was an otter's version of a chuckle. “Oh, you wouldn't believe some of the religions out there! Why, among the species of the Yowsh domain alone there are over four thousand highly subscribed belief systems—everything from absolute solipsism to a pantheon of a million omnipotent, if largely apathetic, deities.” He reached for a walnut from the large glass bowl perched on the edge of the tub; he balanced the nut upon his chest. “No, no shortage of gods and believers anywhere in this galaxy.” With another forepaw he grabbed the nutcracker from beside the bowl and cracked open the walnut. I figured he was just being polite, since he then scooped the whole nut into his mouth, shell and all.

  I looked past the munching otter to the sunset, its pinks and oranges spreading wide over the Pacific far below us. I'd heard that he had purchased this house outright, with cash from the sale of some sort of otter power technology to a South American government. Though that might just have been a rumor started by Isolationists.

  “How about you?" I asked. “What do you believe?"

  He'd been reaching for another nut; now his arm froze and his deep brown, pupil-less eyes zeroed in on my own. “Some,” he said without a trace of his former amusement, “would consider that an insultingly personal question."

  Uh-oh. I held up a dripping hand. “Hey, no offense intended. If I—"

  But then he chittered and slapped the nutcracker down onto the water—sending a chlorinated splash across my face, right into my mouth. “Sorry,” he said, still chittering. “But I wish you could have seen your expression!"

  I coughed several times. Real jokers, these space otters; there were plenty of stories about their very alien sense of humor. Last year, though, I'd made some discreet inquiries of a few of the otters’ human staff (strictly business—I'm a producer, after all, and the otters are your quintessential Small But Influential Market); it turns out that the otters’ number one viewing preference is slapstick—Keaton, early Chaplin, the Three Stooges. Go spend an hour watching Earth otters in your local zoo, then tell me you're surprised.

  He cracked another walnut and popped it into his mouth. “My own people,” he said, his voice somehow unaffected by his vigorous chewing, “never invented a god meme. Just didn't occur to anyone, apparently."

  I frowned. Yet another ar
ea where the otters doubtless looked down at us as superstitious primitives.

  He seemed able to read my expression. “Don't get me wrong,” he said. “We've got creation myths, tricksters, an afterlife—the whole ball of wax. Just didn't come up with gods."

  “Or angels?"

  He grinned. Otters don't have individual teeth, just thick upper and lower plates with convoluted surfaces. It looked like his mouth was filled by a pair of dingy yellow hooves.

  My curiosity had been piqued. “No gods,” I asked, “but there's an afterlife? So who decides whether you go to heaven or hell?"

  He shook his head. “Hell didn't occur to us, either. After dying, everybody just gets reborn, more or less. In a better world."

  “Clouds and harps? Warriors and mead?"

  “More like a really big water park. Also lots of food and copulation."

  I lifted my bottle of Perrier from the plastic holder that was suction-cupped to the tub's inside wall, took a sip. The sunset had progressed into a streaky lilac phase. On either side of us a stand of pines shielded the otter's property from his neighbors; silhouetted branches waved up and down in a soft breeze.

  He slipped his head under again, then swam two fast, tight circles around the tub, avoiding me by inches. As he surfaced and settled back onto his bench, he twisted his head over his shoulder—way over his shoulder—toward the sunset and said, “You haven't asked what you want to ask."

  What he meant by that, I didn't have a clue. But negotiating from a position of ignorance was nothing new for me. I took another sip of Perrier and waited.

  “I've seen all your shows,” he continued. “And the new pilot, too."

  “What! How did—” Only one network had a copy of the pilot, and they certainly wouldn't be leaking it just as we started negotiations.

  He ignored my outburst. “You're no Utopian, Jack. In fact, I doubt there's anything we've told your people that you assume is necessarily true. Since we arrived, what have you produced? Let's see...” He ticked them off on his stubby webbed fingers. “A movie where a fledgling human space empire gets into a shooting war with a devious alien federation. A remake of a mini-series in which extraterrestrials bearing gifts to Earth turn out to have a nefarious secret agenda. And a sitcom whose well-meaning but bumbling immigrants keep accidentally blowing up their suburban neighbors with inappropriate technology.” His head remained turned toward the sunset. “All in all, a body of work that any Isolationist would be proud of."