Alien Contact

by Marty Halpern

  He could not go any great distance—he supposed a few hundred kilometers would be his limit, for it would do no good to range so far that he could not return and report his findings.

  With the help of the lead xenogeneticist, Ix Tolo, Sel prepared a kit of the sampling and testing equipment he’d need—well, not all that he’d need, but all that he could carry along with his supplies. It was a meager kit, but Ix didn’t even argue with him about it, which was unusual. “Why aren’t you telling me that there’s no point in making this journey if I don’t have the equipment I need?”

  “Because,” said Ix, “I know you’re not really traveling as a scientist.”

  “I’m not?”

  “Look at you—an old man, planning a hundred-klick journey.”

  “Farther than that.”

  “Like an old elephant, searching for a place to die.”

  “I don’t plan on dying.”

  “Governor Menach,” said Ix, “you’re an old man who doesn’t want to face his fourteen-year-old successor.”

  “I don’t want to get in his way,” said Sel.

  “You know everybody and everything, and he knows very little.”

  “He saved the human race.”

  “He knows very little about governing this colony. He has authority without relationships or influence. You’re making it far harder for him by going.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Sel. “It’s going to be hard enough for him without everybody turning to me for answers all the time. And they will. You will. The new colonists have been in stasis throughout the voyage. They don’t know him—so they’ll tend to follow whomever the old settlers follow. And if I’m here, that’ll be me. No matter what we do or say, Ender Wiggin will be treated like my grandson, not like the governor.”

  “Maybe Ender Wiggin needs a grandfather more than he needs a position as governor.”

  “Make no mistake,” said Sel. “Wiggin will be governor. He’ll be better than the Admiral and I ever were. But let’s make it happen as quickly and smoothly as possible. You set the example—treat him as governor and help him as much as you can.”

  “I will.”

  “So you can unpack that other bag, because you’re not going with me.”

  “Other bag?”

  “I’m not an idiot. Half the equipment I decided not to take, you’ve put into another pack, along with more food and an extra bedroll.”

  “I never thought you were an idiot. But I’m not so stupid I’d endanger the colony by sending both our lead xenobiologists on the same journey.”

  “So who’s the pack for?”

  “My son Po.”

  “I’ve always been bothered that you named him for an insanely romantic Chinese poet. Why nobody from Mayan history?”

  “All the characters in the Popol Vuh have numbers instead of names. He’s a sensible kid. Strong. If he had to, he could carry you back home.”

  “I’m not that old and wizened.”

  “He could do it,” said Ix. “But only if you’re alive. Otherwise, he’ll watch and record the process of decomposition, and then sample the microbes and worms that manage to feed on your old Earthborn corpse.”

  “Glad to see you still think like a scientist and not a sentimental fool.”

  “Po is good company.”

  “And he’ll allow me to carry enough equipment for the trip to be useful. While you stay here and play with the new stuff from the colony ship.”

  “And train the xenobiologists they’ve sent along. I’ll have plenty of work to do without babysitting the new governor.”

  “And Po’s mother is happy about his going with me?”

  “No,” said Ix. “But she knows he’d never speak to her again if she barred him from it. So we have her blessing. More or less.”

  “Then first thing in the morning, we’re off.”

  “Unless the new governor forbids you.”

  “His authority doesn’t begin until he sets foot on this planet. He isn’t even in orbit yet.”

  “Haven’t you looked at their manifest? They have four skimmers.”

  “If we need one, we’ll radio back for it. Otherwise, don’t tell them where we went.”

  “Good thing the Formics got rid of all the major predators on this planet.”

  “There’s no self-respecting predator would eat an old wad of gristle like this.”

  “I was thinking of my son.”

  “I’ll watch out for him.”

  That night, Sel went to bed early and then, as usual, got up to pee after only a few hours of sleep. He noticed that the ansible was blinking. Message. Not my problem.

  Well, that wasn’t true, was it? If Wiggin’s authority didn’t begin until he set foot on the planet, then Sel was still acting governor. So any messages from Earth, he had to receive.

  He sat down and signaled that he was ready to receive.

  There were two messages recorded. He played the first one. It consisted of the face of the Minister of Colonization, Graff, and his message was brief. “I know you’re planning to skip town before Wiggin gets there. Talk to Wiggin before you go. He won’t try to stop you, so relax.”

  That was it.

  The other message was from Wiggin. He really was fourteen, but his adult height was coming on him. He didn’t look like an actual child now. In the colony, teenagers his size were expected to do a man’s work. So maybe his work wouldn’t be as hard as Sel expected.

  “Please contact me by ansible as soon as you get this. We’re in radio distance, but I don’t want anyone else to be able to intercept the signal.”

  Sel toyed with the idea of turning the message over to Ix to answer, but decided against it. The point wasn’t to hide from Wiggin, was it? Only to leave the field clear for him.

  So he signaled his intention to make a connection. It took only a few minutes for Wiggin to appear. Now that the colony ship wasn’t traveling at a relativistic speed, there was no time differential, and therefore the ansible transmitted instantly. Not even the time lag of radio.

  “Governor Menach,” said Ender Wiggin.

  “Sir,” Sel replied.

  “When we got word that you were leaving, my first thought was to beg you to stay.”

  “I wonder who reported my plans?”

  “Everyone with access to the ansible,” said Wiggin. “They don’t want you to go. And I thought at first that they were right. But the more I thought about it, the more I knew that if I’ve got any brains, I’ll rely on the decision of the man who actually understands the situation on the ground.”

  “Good,” said Sel.

  “Your genetic work has been brilliant. The xenobiologists have been reviewing it ever since I woke them up. They were unanimous in praising the restrained way you adapted terrestrial plants and animals to the new environment. They are already working on following your example and using your techniques on the animals and plants we brought with us.”

  “On the manifest I saw a full range of beasts of burden as well as milk, wool, egg, and meat beasts.”

  “The Formics cleared out most of the larger indigenous animals. Within a few years we should be able to start filling those ecological niches.”

  “Ix Tolo has ongoing projects.”

  “Ix Tolo will remain the head xenobiologist, in your absence,” said Wiggin. “You have trained him to an exacting standard, and the xenos on this ship intend to learn from him. Though they’re hoping you’ll return soon. They want to meet you. You’re something of a hero to them. This is the only world that has non-Formiform flora and fauna. The other colonies have been working with the same genetic groups—this is the only world that posed unique challenges, so you had to do, alone, what all the other colonies were able to do cooperatively.”

  “Me and Darwin.”

  “Darwin had more help than you,” said Wiggin. “I hope you’ll keep your radio dormant instead of off. Because I want to be able to ask for your counsel, if I need it.”

  �
��You won’t.”

  “I’m fourteen, Governor Menach.”

  “You’re Ender Wiggin, sir.”

  Wiggin said nothing.

  “We soldiers who fought under you may be getting old, but we haven’t forgotten what you did.”

  “I gave orders in a nice, safe room far from any danger, and without a clue what I was actually doing. You were the ones who fought the war.”

  “Who builds the house, the architect or the bricklayer? It’s not an interesting question. You led us, sir. We destroyed the enemy. We lived to found this colony.”

  “And the human race will never again be tied to one world,” said Wiggin. “We all did our part. The two of us will continue to do whatever we can.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Please. Call me Andrew. When you return, I want us to be friends. If I have any skill, it’s knowing how to learn from the best teachers.”

  “If you call me Sel.”

  “I will.”

  “I’m going back to bed now. I have a lot of walking to do tomorrow.”

  “I can send a skimmer after you. So you don’t have to carry your supplies. It would increase your range.”

  “But then the old settlers will expect me to come back soon. They’ll be waiting for me instead of relying on you.”

  “I can’t pretend that we’re not able to track you and find you.”

  “But you can tell them that you’re showing me the respect of not trying. At my request.”

  “Yes,” said Ender. “I’ll do that.”

  There was little more to say. They signed off and Sel went back to bed. He slept easily. And, as usual, woke just when he wanted to—an hour before dawn.

  Po was waiting for him.

  “I already said good-bye to Mom and Dad,” he said.

  “Good,” said Sel.

  “Thanks for letting me come.”

  “Could I have stopped you?”

  “Yes,” said Po. “I won’t disobey you, Uncle Sel.”

  Sel nodded. “Good. Have you eaten?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s go. I won’t need to eat till noon.”

  You take a step, then another. That’s the journey. But to take a step with your eyes open is not a journey at all, it’s a remaking of your own mind. You see things that you never saw before. Things never seen by the eyes of human beings. And you see with your particular eyes, which were trained to see not just a plant, but this plant, filling this ecological niche, but with this and that difference.

  And when your eyes have been trained for forty years to be familiar with the patterns of a new world, then you are Antony van Leeuwenhoek, who first saw the world of animalcules through a microscope; you are Carl Linnaeus, first sorting creatures into families, genera, species; you are Darwin, sorting lines of evolutionary passage from one species to another.

  So it was not a rapid journey. Sel had to force himself to move with any kind of haste.

  “Don’t let me linger so long over every new thing I see,” he told Po. “It would be too humiliating for my great expedition to take me only ten kilometers south of the colony. I must cross the first range of mountains, at least.”

  “And how will I keep you from lingering, when you have me photographing and sampling and storing and recording notes?”

  “Refuse to do it. Tell me to get my bony knees up off the ground and start walking.”

  “All my life I’m taught to obey my elders and watch and learn. I’m your assistant. Your apprentice.”

  “You’re just hoping we don’t travel very far so when I die you don’t have so long to carry the corpse.”

  “I thought my father told you—if you actually die, I’m supposed to call for help and observe your decomposition process.”

  “That’s right. You only carry me if I’m breathing.”

  “Or do you want me to start now? Hoist you onto my shoulders so you can’t discover another whole family of plants every fifty meters?”

  “For a respectful, obedient young man, you can be very sarcastic.”

  “I was only slightly sarcastic. I can do better if you want.”

  “This is good. I’ve been so busy arguing with you, we’ve gone this far without my noticing anything.”

  “Except the dogs have found something.”

  It turned out to be a small family of the horned reptile that seemed to fill the bunny rabbit niche—a big-toothed leaf-eater that hopped, and would only fight if cornered. The horns did not seem to Sel to be weapons—too blunt—and when he imagined a mating ritual in which these creatures leapt into the air to butt their heads together, he could not see how it could help but scramble their brains, since their skulls were so light.

  “Probably for a display of health,” said Sel.

  “The antlers?”

  “Horns,” said Sel.

  “I think they’re shed and then regrown. Don’t these animals look like skin-shedders?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll look for a shed skin somewhere.”

  “You’ll have a long look.”

  “Why, because they eat the skins?”

  “Because they don’t shed.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Sel. “But this is not a Formic import, it’s a native species, and we haven’t seen any skin shedding from natives.”

  So the conversation went as they traveled—but they did cover the ground. They took pictures, yes. And now and then, when it was something really new, they stopped and took samples. But always they walked. Sel might be old and need to lean on his walking stick now and then, but he could still keep up a steady pace. Po was likely to move ahead of him more often than not, but it was Po who groaned when Sel said it was time to move on after a brief rest.

  “I don’t know why you have that stick,” said Po.

  “To lean on when I rest.”

  “But you have to carry it the whole time you’re walking.”

  “It’s not that heavy.”

  “It looks heavy.”

  “It’s from the balsa tree—well, the one I call ‘balsa,’ since the wood is so light.”

  Po tried it. Only about a pound, though it was thick and gnarled and widened out at the top like a pitcher. “I’d still get tired of carrying it.”

  “Only because you put more weight in your backpack than I did.” Po didn’t bother arguing the point.

  “The first human voyagers to the moon and the planets had an easy time of it,” said Po, as they crested a high ridge. “Nothing but empty space between them and their destination. No temptation to stop and explore.”

  “Like the first sea voyagers. Going from land to land, ignoring the sea because they had no tools that would let them explore to any depth.”

  “We’re the conquistadores,” said Po. “Only we killed them all before we ever set foot on land.”

  “Is that a difference or a similarity? Smallpox and other diseases raced ahead of the conquistadores.”

  “If only we could have talked to them,” said Po. “I read about the conquistadores—we Mayans have good reason to try to understand them. Columbus wrote that the natives he found ‘had no language,’ merely because they didn’t understand any of the languages his interpreters knew.”

  “But the Formics had no language at all.”

  “Or so we think.”

  “No communication devices in their ships. Nothing to transmit voice or images. Because there was no need of them. Exchange of memory. Direct transfer of the senses. Whatever their mechanism was, it was better than language, but worse, because they had no way to talk to us.”

  “So who were the mutes?” asked Po. “Us, or them?”

  “Both of us mutes,” said Sel, “and all of us deaf.”

  “What I wouldn’t give to have just one of them alive.”

  “But there couldn’t be just one,” said Sel. “They hived. They needed hundreds, perhaps thousands to reach the critical mass to achieve intelligen
ce.”

  “Or not,” said Po. “It could also be that only the queen was sentient. Why else would they all have died when the queens died?”

  “Unless the queen was the nexus, the center of a neural network.”

  “As I said, I wish we had one alive, so we could know something instead of guessing from a few desiccated corpses.”

  “We have more of them preserved than any of the other worlds. Here, there are so few scavengers that can eat them, the corpses lasted long enough for us to get to the planet’s surface and freeze some of them. We actually got to study structure.”

  “But no queens.”

  “The sorrow of my life,” said Sel.

  “Really? That’s your greatest regret?”

  Sel fell silent.

  “Sorry,” said Po.

  “It’s all right. I was just considering your question. My greatest regret. What a question. How can I regret leaving everything behind on Earth, when I left it in order to help save it? And coming here allowed me to do things that other scientists could only dream of. I have been able to name more than five thousand species already and come up with a rudimentary classification system for an entire native biota. More than on any of the other Formic worlds.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they stripped those and then established only a limited subset of their own flora and fauna. This is the only world where most of the species evolved here. The only place that’s messy. The Formics brought fewer than a thousand species to their colonies. And their home world, which might have had vastly more diversity, is gone.”

  “So you don’t regret coming here?”

  “Of course I do,” said Sel. “And I also am glad to be here. I regret being an old wreck of a man. I’m glad I’m not dead. It seems to me that all my regrets are balanced by something I’m glad of. On average, then, I have no regrets at all. But I’m also not a bit happy. Perfect balance. On average, I don’t actually exist.”

  “Father says that if you get absurd results, you’re not a scientist, you’re a philosopher.”

  “But my results are not absurd.”

  “You do exist. I can see you and hear you.”

  “Genetically speaking, Po, I do not exist. I am off the web of life.”