by Janis Ian
and measure out the time in coffee spoons
In fading suns, and dying moons
~ from Aftertones by Janis Ian
The first time they came through the neighborhood there really wasn’t much neighborhood to speak of. Widely dispersed hydrogen molecules, only two or three per cubic meter. Traces of heavier elements from long-ago supernovae. The usual assortment of dust particles, at a density of one particle every cubic mile or so. The "dust" was mostly ammonia, methane, and water ice, with some more complex molecules like benzene. Here and there these thin ingredients were pushed into eddies by light pressure from neighboring stars.
Somehow they set forces in motion. I picture it as a Cosmic Finger stirring the mix, out in the interstellar wastes where space is really flat, in the Einsteinian sense, making a whirlpool in the unimaginable cold. Then they went away.
Four billion years later they returned. Things were brewing nicely. The space debris had congealed into a big, burning central mass and a series of rocky or gaseous globes, all sterile, in orbit around it.
They made a few adjustments and planted their seeds, and saw that it was good. They left a small observer/recorder behind, along with a thing that would call them when everything was ripe. Then they went away again.
~~~~
A billion years later the timer went off, and they came back.
~~~~~
I had a position at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, but of course I had not gone to work that day. I was sitting at home watching the news, as frightened as anyone else. Martial law had been declared a few hours earlier. Things had been getting chaotic. I’d heard gunfire from the streets outside.
Someone pounded on my door.
"United States Army!" someone shouted. "Open the door immediately!"
I went to the door, which had four locks on it.
"How do I know you’re not a looter?" I shouted.
"Sir, I am authorized to break your door down. Open the door, or stand clear."
I put my eye to the old-fashioned peephole. They were certainly dressed like soldiers. One of them raised his rifle and slammed the butt down on my doorknob. I shouted that I would let them in, and in a few seconds I had all the locks open. Six men in full combat gear hustled into my kitchen. They split up and quickly explored all three rooms of the apartment, shouting out "All clear!" in brisk, military voices. One man, a bit older than the rest, stood facing me with a clipboard in his hand.
"Sir, are you Doctor Andrew Richard Lewis?"
"There’s been some mistake," I said. "I’m not a medical doctor."
"Sir, are you Doctor—"
"Yes, yes, I’m Andy Lewis. What can I do for you?"
"Sir, I am Captain Edgar and I am ordered to induct you into the United States Army Special Invasion Corps effective immediately, at the rank of Second Lieutenant. Please raise your right hand and repeat after me."
I knew from the news that this was now legal, and I had the choice of enlisting or facing a long prison term. I raised my hand and in no time at all I was a soldier.
"Lieutenant, your orders are to come with me. You have fifteen minutes to pack what essentials you may need, such as prescription medicine and personal items. My men will help you assemble your gear."
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
"You may bring any items relating to your specialty. Laptop computer, reference books..." He paused, apparently unable to imagine what a man like me would want to bring along to do battle with space aliens.
"Captain, do you know what my specialty is?"
"My understanding is that you are a bug specialist."
"An entomologist, Captain. Not an exterminator. Could you give me ... any clue as to why I’m needed?"
For the first time he looked less than totally self-assured.
"Lieutenant, all I know is... they’re collecting butterflies."
~~~~~
They hustled me to a helicopter. We flew low over Manhattan. Every street was gridlocked. All the bridges were completely jammed with mostly abandoned cars.
I was taken to an airbase in New Jersey and hurried onto a military jet transport that stood idling on the runway. There were a few others already on board. I knew most of them; entomology is not a crowded field.
The plane took off at once.
~~~~~
There was a Colonel aboard whose job was to brief us on our mission, and on what was thus far known about the aliens: not much was really known that I hadn’t already seen on television.
They had appeared simultaneously on seacoasts worldwide. One moment there was nothing, the next moment there was a line of aliens as far as the eye could see. In the western hemisphere the line stretched from Point Barrow in Alaska to Tierra del Fuego in Chile. Africa was lined from Tunis to the Cape of Good Hope. So were the western shores of Europe, from Norway to Gibraltar. Australia, Japan, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and every other island thus far contacted reported the same thing: a solid line of aliens appearing in the west, moving east.
Aliens? No one knew what else to call them. They were clearly not of Planet Earth, though if you ran into a single one there would be little reason to think them very odd. Just millions and millions of perfectly ordinary people dressed in white coveralls, blue baseball caps, and brown boots, within arm’s reach of each other.
Walking slowly toward the east.
Within a few hours of their appearance someone on the news had started calling it the Line, and the creatures who were in it Linemen. From the pictures on the television they appeared rather average and androgynous.
"They’re not human," the Colonel said. "Those coveralls, it looks like they don’t come off. The hats, either. You get close enough, you can see it’s all part of their skin."
"Protective coloration," said Watkins, a colleague of mine from the Museum. "Many insects adapt colors or shapes to blend with their environment."
"But what’s the point of blending in," I asked, "If you are made so conspicuous by your actions?"
"Perhaps the ‘fitting in’ is simply to look more like us. It seems unlikely, doesn’t it, that evolution would have made them look like …"
"Janitors," somebody piped up.
The Colonel was frowning at us.
"You think they’re insects?"
"Not by any definition I’ve ever heard," Watkins said. "Of course, other animals adapt to their surroundings, too. Arctic foxes in winter coats, tigers with their stripes. Chameleons."
The Colonel mulled this for a moment, then resumed his pacing.
"Whatever they are, bullets don’t bother them. There have been many instances of civilians shooting at the aliens."
Soldiers, too, I thought. I’d seen film of it on television, a National Guard unit in Oregon cutting loose with their rifles. The aliens hadn’t reacted at all, not visibly … until all the troops and all their weapons just vanished, without the least bit of fuss.
And the Line moved on.
~~~~~
We landed at a disused-looking airstrip somewhere in northern California. We were taken to a big motel, which the Army had taken over. In no time I was hustled aboard a large Coast Guard helicopter with a group of soldiers—a squad? a platoon?—led by a young lieutenant who looked even more terrified than I felt. On the way to the Line I learned that his name was Evans, and that he was in the National Guard.
It had been made clear to me that I was in charge of the overall mission and Evans was in charge of the soldiers. Evans said his orders were to protect me. How he was to protect me from aliens who were immune to his weapons hadn’t been spelled out.
My own orders were equally vague. I was to land close behind the Line, catch up, and find out everything I could.
"They speak better English than I do," the Colonel had said. "We must know their intentions. Above all, you must find out why they’re collecting…" and here his composure almost broke down, but he took a deep breath and steadied himself.
"Collecting
butterflies," he finished.
~~~~~
We passed over the Line at a few hundred feet. Directly below us individual aliens could be made out, blue hats and white shoulders. But off to the north and south it quickly blurred into a solid white line vanishing in the distance, as if one of those devices that make chalk lines on football fields had gone mad.
Evans and I watched it. None of the Linemen looked up at the noise. They were walking slowly, all of them, never getting more than a few feet apart. The terrain was grassy, rolling hills, dotted here and there with clumps of trees. No man-made structures were in sight.
The pilot put us down a hundred yards behind the Line.
"I want you to keep your men at least fifty yards away from me," I told Evans. "Are those guns loaded? Do they have those safety things on them? Good. Please keep them on. I’m almost as afraid of being shot by one of those guys as I am of … whatever they are."
And I started off, alone, toward the Line.
~~~~~
How does one address a line of marching alien creatures? Take me to your leader seemed a bit peremptory. Hey, bro, what’s happening … perhaps overly familiar. In the end, after following for fifteen minutes at a distance of about ten yards, I had settled on excuse me, so I moved closer and cleared my throat. Turns out that was enough. One of the Linemen stopped walking and turned to me.
This close, one could see that his features were rudimentary. His head was like a mannequin, or a wig stand: a nose, hollows for eyes, bulges for cheeks. All the rest seemed to be painted on.
I could only stand there idiotically for a moment. I noticed a peculiar thing. There was no gap in the Line.
I suddenly remembered why it was me and not some diplomat standing there.
"Why are you collecting butterflies?" I asked.
"Why not?" he said, and I figured it was going to be a long, long day. "You should have no trouble understanding," he said. "Butterflies are the most beautiful things on your planet, aren’t they?"
"I’ve always thought so." Wondering, did he know I was a lepidopterist?
"Then there you are." Now he began to move. The Line was about twenty yards away, and through our whole conversation he never let it get more distant than that. We walked at a leisurely one mile per hour.
Okay, I told myself. Try to keep it to butterflies. Leave it to the military types to get to the tough questions: When do you start kidnapping our children, raping our women, and frying us for lunch?
"What are you doing with them?"
"Harvesting them." He extended a hand toward the Line, and as if summoned, a lovely specimen of Adelpha bredowii fluttered toward him. He did something with his fingers and a pale blue sphere formed around the butterfly.
"Isn’t it lovely?" he asked, and I moved in for a closer look. He seemed to treasure these wonderful creatures I’d spent my life studying.
He made another gesture, and the blue ball with the Adelpha disappeared."What happens to them?" I asked him.
"There is a collector," he said.
"A lepidopterist?"
"No, it’s a storage device. You can’t see it because it is … off to one side."
Off to one side of what? I wondered, but didn’t ask.
"And what happens to them in the collector?"
"They are put in storage in a place where … time does not move. Where time does not pass. Where they do not move through time as they do here." He paused for a few seconds. "It is difficult to explain."
"Off to one side?" I suggested.
"Exactly. Excellent. Off to one side of time. You’ve got it."
I had nothing, actually. But I plowed on.
"What will become of them?"
"We are building a … place. Our leader wishes it to be a very special place. Therefore, we are making it of these beautiful creatures."
"Of butterfly wings?"
"They will not be harmed. We know ways of making … walls in a manner that will allow them to fly freely."
I wished someone had given me a list of questions.
"How did you get here? How long will you stay?"
"A certain … length of time, not a great length by your standards."
"What about your standards?"
"By our standards … no time at all. As to how we got here … have you read a book entitled Flatland?"
"I’m afraid not."
"Pity," he said, and turned away, and vanished.
~~~~~
Our operation in Northern California was not the only group trying desperately to find out more about the Linemen, of course. There were lines on every continent, and soon they would be present in every nation. They had covered many small Pacific islands in only a day, and when they reached the Eastern shores, they simply vanished, as my guide had.
News media were doing their best to pool information. I believe I got a lot of those facts before the general population, since I had been Shanghaied into the forefront, but our information was often as garbled and inaccurate as the rest of the world was getting. The military was scrambling around in the dark, just like everyone else.
But we learned some things:
They were collecting moths as well as butterflies, from the drabbest specimen to the most gloriously colored. The entire order Lepidoptera.
They could appear and vanish at will. It was impossible to get a count of them. Wherever one stopped to commune with the natives, as mine had, the Line remained solid, with no gaps. When they were through talking to you, they simply went where the Cheshire Cat went, leaving behind not even a grin.
Wherever they appeared, they spoke the local language, fluently and idiomatically. This was true even in isolated villages in China or Turkey or Nigeria, where some dialects were used by only a few hundred people.
They didn’t seem to weigh anything at all. Moving through forests, the Line became more of a wall, Linemen appearing in literally every tree, on every limb, walking on branches obviously too thin to bear their weight and not even causing them to bend. When the tree had been combed for butterflies the crews vanished, and appeared in another tree.
Walls meant nothing to them. In cities and towns nothing was missed, not even closed bank vaults, attic spaces, closets. They didn’t come through the door, they simply appeared in a room and searched it. If you were on the toilet, that was just too bad.
Any time they were asked about where they came from, they mentioned that book, Flatland. Within hours the book was available on hundreds of websites. Downloads ran to the millions.
~~~~~
The full title of the book was Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. It was supposedly written by one Mr. A Square, a resident of Flatland, but its actual author was Edwin Abbott, a 19th century cleric and amateur mathematician. A copy was waiting for me when we got back to camp after that first frustrating day.
The book is an allegory and a satire, but also an ingenious way to explain the concept of multi-dimensional worlds to the layman, like me. Mr. Square lives in a world of only two dimensions. For him, there is no such thing as up or down, only forward, backward, and side to side. It is impossible for us to really see from Square’s point of view: A single line that extends all around him, with nothing above it or below it. Nothing. Not empty space, not a black or white void … nothing.
But humans, being three-dimensional, can stand outside Flatland, look up or down at it, see its inhabitants from an angle they can never have. In fact, we could see inside them, examine their internal organs, reach down and touch a Flatlander heart or brain with our fingers.
In the course of the book Mr. Square is visited by a being from the 3rd dimension, a Sphere. He can move from one place to another without apparently traversing the space between point A and point B. There was also discussion of the possibilities of even higher dimensions, worlds as inscrutable to us as the 3-D world was to Mr. Square.
I’m no mathematician, but it didn’t take an Einstein to infer that the Line, and the Linemen, came from one
of those theoretical higher planes.
The people running the show were not Einstein, either, but when they needed expertise they knew where to go to draft it.
~~~~~
Our mathematician’s name was Larry Ward. He looked as baffled as I must have looked the day before and he got no more time to adjust to his new situation than I did. We were all hustled aboard another helicopter and hurried out to the Line. I filled him in, as best I could, on the way out.
Again, as soon as we approached the Line, a spokesman appeared. He asked us if we’d read the book, though I suspect he already knew we had. It was a creepy feeling to realize he, or something like him, could have been standing … or existing, in some direction I couldn’t imagine, only inches away from me in my motel bedroom, looking at me read the book just as the Sphere looked down on Mr. A. Square.
A flat, white plane appeared in the air between us and geometrical shapes and equations began drawing themselves on it. It just hung there, unsupported. Larry wasn’t too flustered by it, nor was I. Against the background of the Line an anti-gravity blackboard seemed almost mundane.
The Lineman began talking to Larry, and I caught maybe one word in three. Larry seemed to have little trouble with it at first, but after an hour he was sweating, frowning, clearly getting out of his depth.
By that time I was feeling quite superfluous, and it was even worse for Lieutenant Evans and his men. We were reduced to following Larry and the Line at its glacial but relentless pace. Some of the men took to slipping between the gaps in the line to get in front, then doing all sorts of stupid antics to get a reaction, like tourists trying to rattle the guards at the Tower of London. The Linemen took absolutely no notice. Evans didn’t seem to care. I suspected he was badly hung over.
"Look at this, Doctor Lewis."
I turned around and saw that a Lineman had appeared behind me, in that disconcerting way they had. He had a pale blue sphere cupped in his hands, and in it was a lovely specimen of Papilio zelicaon, the Anise Swallowtail, with one blue wing and one orange wing.
"A gynandromorph," I said, immediately, with the spooky feeling that I was back in the lecture hall. "An anomaly that sometimes arises during gametogenesis. One side is male and the other is female."