Alien Contact

by Marty Halpern

  The larl presented his blunt muzzle to me in what might have been meant as a friendly smile. Perhaps not; the expression hangs unreadable, ambiguous in my mind even now. Then he stood and padded away into the friendly dark shadows of the Stone House.

  I was sitting staring into the coals a few minutes later when my second-eldest sister—her face a featureless blaze of light, like an angel’s—came into the room and saw me. She held out a hand, saying, “Come on, Flip, you’re missing everything.” And I went with her.

  Did any of this actually happen? Sometimes I wonder. But it’s growing late, and your parents are away. My room is small but snug, my bed warm but empty. We can burrow deep in the blankets and scare away the cave-bears by playing the oldest winter games there are.

  You’re blushing! Don’t tug away your hand. I’ll be gone soon to some distant world to fight in a war for people who are as unknown to you as they are to me. Soldiers grow old slowly, you know. We’re shipped frozen between the stars. When you are old and plump and happily surrounded by grandchildren, I’ll still be young, and thinking of you. You’ll remember me then, and our thoughts will touch in the void. Will you have nothing to regret? Is that really what you want?

  Come, don’t be shy. Let’s put the past aside and get on with our lives. That’s better. Blow the candle out, love, and there’s an end to my tale.

  All this happened long ago, on a planet whose name has been burned from my memory.

  he media followed our course from colony to colony all the way out to Denebola, where the conference was held. Our ship moved magisterially into and out of dock at each port, unnecessarily slow. At first it amused us, but after ten such stops it became ridiculous. We wanted to huddle in our quarters, close together, and ignore the hectoring questions, the lights, the monitors, the enforced celebrity.

  Merril, our liaison, did his best to mollify us and satisfy them, but in the end his efforts always came up short. It occurred to me that the public nature of the project was a mistake, but when I gave this notion to the rest they shrugged together and said it wasn’t our mistake.

  Earth to Median, halfway to the Centauri group; on to Centauri Transit Station; then to Procyon and on to Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti. We bypassed Eurasia, the colony at 40 Eridani. We were never told why. But we stopped at 82 Eridani, the colony of Eridanus. Aquas, Fomalhaut, Nine Rivers, Millennium, and Pollux.

  Pan Pollux proved the worst. We felt like curiosities under glass for the wealthy patrons of the resorts. Till then I’d always believed people had a finer appreciation of the difference between the merely unusual and the special. We gathered together in the lounge and formed a cluster in the center of the floor and communed with each other, playing games of dancing from mind to mind, chasing ideas back to their sources, switching perspectives, and seeing how many we could be at one time. In the middle of this probes managed to sneak in past our security. I’m still convinced this was allowed to happen. The Forum counted on a rich political reward from our mission and the temptation to exploit us through any media outlet available was irresistible. Poor Merril, he believed in his job, tried ardently to meet its requirements, but there was only so much he could do in the face of the great need of human polity. We were ostensibly the saviors of humankind, it was necessary that our march toward Golgotha be witnessed.

  All the probes saw, though, was a group—thirty-three of us—sitting tightly together on the floor of our lounge, eyes closed, heads bobbing slightly, here and there drool from a mouth, the twitch of a limb, perhaps an occasional tuneless hum. What the viewing public must have thought of its savior! Their fate in the hands of—what?

  When they changed me there was no question of choice. Seven hundred days old, you don’t even realize that the world isn’t part of you, much less that it doesn’t care. Understanding that only discreet parts of it care is something that comes much later, if at all. It’s a sophisticated distinction, this sorting out, a concept constantly threatened by the fact that even the caring parts probably don’t care about you. But in time we all learn that everything around us, everything that happens, is organized into packets of information and those packets can be assembled by consciousness into something that has order and meaning. A fiction, perhaps, and it’s a question whether the boundaries that keep everything apart are internal or external. An academic question, of no real consequence.

  Unless those boundaries disappear.

  When they changed me—and the others, all thirty-three of us—several of those boundaries vanished and had to be replaced by something else, a different method of perception and ordering. At seven hundred days old I didn’t “understand” this—none of us did—all we could do was react. There is a murk at the bottom of my memory that intrudes from time to time into my dreams, but which I assiduously avoid contemplating most of the time. I tell myself that this swamp is the residue of my reaction. I tell myself that. On the rare occasions when I conjure enough courage to be determinedly self-analytical I think—I believe—that it is the residue of thirty-three reactions. Then I wonder how we all sorted ourselves out of the mix. Then I wonder if we ever did. Then I stop thinking about it.

  Our ship met with a convoy halfway from Pan Pollux to Denebola. You never really see ships at dock, each one is berthed separately in the body of the station. Once in a while another ship leaves dock at the same time you do and you get to see one of them against the stars. I sometimes think these vessels are the most beautiful objects humans ever built. Elegant, powerful, freighted with every aspect of our natures—hope, pride, ambition, curiosity, wonder, and fear. When the convoy gathered around us we stared at the two dozen ships.

  “Whales.”

  “No, methane floaters.”

  “A school of armor.”

  I listened to the ripple of comparisons, trying to decide which one fit best. None really did. Whales in space? Too many lines, dark masses, geometries. Methane floaters drifted with the currents of their atmospheres, virtually helpless to control direction. These moved with power, purpose, a logical order to the way they arranged themselves around us, protecting us.

  “Admiral Kovesh’s task force,” Merril announced. “They’ll be our escort to Denebola.”

  “Will there be seti task forces there, too?” I asked.

  Merril frowned slightly, clasped his hands behind his back the way he did when something made him uneasy. “I expect so.”

  I looked back at the Armada ships, excited at the prospect of comparing human and alien.

  There was a reporter from the Ares-Epsilon NewsNet that kept up with us from Sol to Nine Rivers. He must have interviewed every one of us by then, some twice. On our last interview I decided to go for shock, to see how he’d react.

  “The development of telepaths is a radical step in human evolution,” he said. “According to scientists, we’ve been capable of such a step for a long time but we’ve refrained. Why do you think it took a First Contact situation to push us into it?”

  “Fear.”

  “Fear? In what way?”

  “They couldn’t talk to the seti, so the Armada started planning for war. It’s that simple. Say something we understand or we’ll shoot. The Pan Humana wanted to believe the human race was beyond ancient formulas for defending the cave, but it’s been centuries since words failed to convey meaning, so the old ways had been forgotten.”

  His eyes brightened. This was better than the prepared statements we’d been delivering all along.

  “Then the seti showed up and the race panicked. Not one word made sense. You’re right, we’ve been capable of producing telepaths—actually, the term is telelog, there’s a difference—for a long time. But people are afraid of the idea. That’s the only real area of privacy, your thoughts. But when the Chairman, the Forum, and the Armada realized that the most insurmountable problem confronting them with the setis was language, they seized the opportunity. It was a question of weighing competitive fears. Of course, fear of the alien won out.”


  “Yes, but in a very fundamental way, you’re alien, too.”

  “But at least we look human.”

  I don’t think his report ever made it onto the newsnets. He didn’t continue on with us after Nine Rivers.

  Denebola is a white, white sun, forty-three light-years from Earth. It shepherds a small herd of Jovians and two hard planets, none of which is hospitable to human life without considerable manipulation. As far as I have learned, no plans have been made to terraform.

  I always wondered why Denebola. Well, it is right out there at the limit of our expansion. There are a few colonies further out, but in the pragmatic way such things are judged by the Forum they don’t count because they’re too tenuous. But we didn’t pick Denebola. They did. The setis.

  Stars have many names and now that we’ve met our neighbors I’m sure the number will increase again. Denebola has three that I consider ironically appropriate. Denebola itself is from the Arabic Al Dhanab Al Asad, the Lion’s Tail. But there’s another Arab name for it, Al Sarfah, the Changer. I like that better, it seems more relevant to my own situation, to our situation. The place of changes, changes wrought by the place itself.

  The third name? Chinese, Wu Ti Tso, Seat of the Five Emperors.

  Admiral Kovesh came over to meet us after the convoy arrived at the orbital platform. She was a tall, straight-backed woman with deep creases in her face and very pale eyes. I thought she looked perfect for her command.

  “As soon as our counterparts signal us,” she explained, “then you’ll all be taken down by shuttle. The Forum negotiators are already here.”

  “Can we see the other ships?” I asked.

  Kovesh frowned. “What—?”

  “The seti ships.”

  “Oh. Of course. As soon as I’ve briefed you on procedures.”

  “We’ve already been briefed.”

  Kovesh looked at Merril, who seemed nervous.

  “Before we left Earth,” he said, “we were all given a thorough profile of what to expect. They know their mission, Admiral.”

  “I don’t care what they were told on Earth. We’re thirteen parsecs out and this conference is under my aegis.”

  Merril gave us an apologetic look. “I see. Well, perhaps you could let them take it directly?”

  “How do you mean?”

  Merril blinked. “They’re telelogs, Admiral. It would be quicker, surer—”

  “Not on your life.”

  “I assure you it’s painless, Admiral—”

  “I’m assured. The answer is no. Now, if you don’t mind…”

  I felt sorry for Merril. He meant well, but I was glad the Admiral refused. Merril had an exaggerated notion of what we did. People are really a muddle.

  The Change was mechanistic. We aren’t psychics in the traditional sense. That’s why we’re called telelogs rather than telepaths. At infancy we were implanted with a biopole factory, a device called the logos. The logos transfers a colony of biopole, which seats itself in the recipient brain, and starts setting up a temporary pattern analyzer. Very quickly—I’m talking nanoseconds—the colony establishes a pattern, sets up a transmission, and within moments the contents of the mind are broadcast to the primary logos.

  But the contents!

  To be honest, it is much easier for someone to simply tell me, verbally, than for me to try to make sense of all this clutter!

  We grew up living in each other’s minds, we know how we operate, but the rest of humanity? It’s a miracle there’s any order at all.

  Still, Admiral Kovesh’s reaction disturbed me.

  The idea made elegant sense.

  Humans can’t communicate with the seti, and vice versa. There is no mutual foundation of language between us. Even the couple of humanoid ones have languages grown from linguistic trees sprouted in different soils. Nothing matches up except for a few snatches of mathematics, which was how we all managed to pick one system in which to have a meeting.

  That and the evident desire on the part of the seti to figure out how to communicate demands a solution.

  There are only two solutions. The first will take decades, maybe centuries, and that will be the construction of an object by object lexicon. State a word—or group of words or collection of sound-signifiers, which will only be valid for those species that use sounds for communication—and point at the thing to which it attaches. How this will work with abstracts no one knows.

  The other solution is us.

  We smiled at each other, passed along encoded biopole of self-congratulation and mutual support, broadcast positive logos. Of course, we thought, what better way to decode a completely alien language than to read the minds of the speakers?

  We learned linguistics and practiced decoding language on native speakers of disparate human tongues. With difficulty we learned to decode the patterns into recognizable linguistic components and eventually came to speak the language ourselves. Navajo, Mandarin, !Kung, Russian, Portuguese, English—the hard part was finding speakers of all these languages who were not also fluent in Langish, official Panspeak. But there are enclaves and preserves and the subjects were found and we learned.

  The only troubling part—and none of us actually brought this up, but I imagine we all thought it—was that all these languages are ultimately human languages. All grown from the same soil. Hardwired. At some level, then, all the same.

  Details. Kovesh went over them again and again. All we wanted to do was see a seti ship. Until we learned our lessons that would wait. We worked our way through to our reward, then stood before the viewer and gazed at the array of ships.

  A small platform orbited the planet. Clouds smeared across a cracked grey-blue surface of alkalis and yttrian earths. The clouds, we learned, came from fine oxide powders blown through the lithium-fluorine atmosphere. We wondered how anything could oxidate in such an atmosphere and were told that a complex form of lichen lived underground and released oxygen through the soil. The surface constantly eroded under the breezes and picked up the deposits of oxidated metals once exposed.

  The seti ships orbited close to the platform. As distinct as each appeared, all shared one common trait. They were all shells, protection, walls between life and death.

  But what marvelous walls!

  I had thought our ships were beautiful, and I still do, but compared to the array of alien ships they seem so…expected. Some of the vessels actually resembled ships. Certain shapes lend themselves to travel, to containing biospheres against hard vacuum, so inevitably globes, discs, tubes, and boxes of various sizes repeat from species to species. But the lines…

  The nearest group looked like giant gourds, sectioned by sharp lines emanating from a central locus into seven equal parts. As we watched, though, a segment would drift away from the main body, float to another body, and change places with another segment.

  Beyond these, we saw an enormous mass like dirty gelatin. Pieces extruded, broke off, drifted among the other groups, returned to merge with the whole. The entire surface roiled and bubbled.

  Then there were the candyfloss yachts catching the sunlight and glimmering along the countless threads that interlaced to form their conic assemblies…

  We passed impressions among ourselves, all of them optimistic. We were here to learn to speak with these beings who built these lovely ships. Because we marvelled at what they had built we knew we would marvel at who they were, at what they were. We were a short flight from the fulfillment of our life’s purpose.

  Marines escorted us to our shuttles. The wide corridors of the ship suddenly felt tight. We stayed close together, hands touching, and said nothing. Even through the logos all we shared were vague assurances, the soldiers’ stiff presence acting like a muffle on our enthusiasm.

  Kovesh waited in the lead shuttle.

  “A platoon is waiting on the surface,” she said. “Each group will go down with an escort of three. I’ll ride this one down. All the shuttles will maintain standby once we’re down, so sho
uld anything arise we’ll be able to get you off quickly.”

  Eleven of us in each group. I missed Merril. He rode down with a different shuttle. We sat in couches that faced across a narrow walkway from each other. One marine sat forward, the other aft, while Kovesh went up by the pilot.

  There was no view outside. We held hands and looked across at ourselves and tried to imagine what happened from sounds and vibrations. We knew the moment the shuttle left the ship, we had all felt that characteristic sensation before. Then the soundless time of freefall…then the first brush of atmosphere…the shuttle bounced and we could hear a high-pitched whine through the bulkheads. An air leak? That meant a breach…but no alarms flashed, except the fear transmitted back and forth through our hands, building quickly to near panic until Kovesh came back and told us we would land in five minutes. The panic subsided like water sloshing back and forth until it loses momentum and finds equilibrium.

  But our equilibrium now rested on a thin layer of anxiety.

  A series of harsher sounds and heavier shocks followed. I squeezed the hands I held tight and they gripped me harder till my fingers began to go numb, till everyone’s fingers tingled, and passed the sensation back and forth.

  Then silence.

  Kovesh stepped down the walkway between us. A few seconds later the hatch opened with a loud pneumatic hiss.

  We waited. I imagined us as cargo, the marines our deliverers, and passed the thought along. A few smiles came back and we relaxed a little.

  “All right,” Kovesh snapped, leaning into the shuttle. “Stay close. The other shuttles are down now. You’ll be taken to your temporary quarters.”

  Umbilicals attached the shuttle locks to the environ module. We stepped into a wide chamber, the support ribs naked against the walls and ceiling, the air chilled so that we could see our breath. We came together immediately, all thirty-three of us, in the center of the chamber, reestablishing contact as if we had been separated for days or years. Merril walked around our perimeter saying over and over that everything was all right, everything was fine.