Xenophobia

by Peter Cawdron

  “Why did I help your pilot? Because that’s what it means to be intelligent. Anything less would have been wrong. Sure, I was frightened. I was afraid.”

  Elvis spoke up.

  “Fear makes people do stupid things, but we knew we had to help your pilot.”

  Pilot or pilots? Was that an accurate description of the three Stellas? Did the term pilot translate? Bower wasn’t sure.

  “War.”

  Bower swallowed. At the very least, they were moving away from interrogatives and on to nouns, but she’d have preferred a noun that wasn’t so pregnant with meaning. She wanted a sentence, a conversation, a discussion.

  “We were at war,” Elvis said. “You must understand war, the clash and conflict that follows power. But war is not our default. The war in Malawi was forced on us.”

  Elvis paused. Bower could see he was looking for a response but none came.

  “To have not gone to war would have been to give in to those who would abuse their power over others. War is never symmetrical. The strong prey on the weak. We chose to stand up against that wrong.”

  Bower held her hand out, signaling for Elvis to stop. He may not have felt it, but she thought they were asking why humanity had waged war against them. She doubted they cared for Malawi.

  For Bower, the terrifying thing about standing there in the light was the implication of the darkness. The pitch black beyond tormented her. She wanted to see them, to observe this alien congress as it made its deliberation, but instead she faced the cold night. For humanity, black had always represented death, but why? Darkness held the unknown. Darkness was beyond sight. Darkness was beyond control.

  Stella and her kind were out there in the darkness. They weren’t dumb. They clearly understood English and could communicate, and yet they chose to get her and Elvis talking. Bower couldn’t shake the feeling her words were being weighed carefully, with judicious precision.

  Elvis must have sensed that too, as he continued softly, saying. “When you arrived, we mistook your floaters for an invasion fleet, for an act of aggression, but that was a mistake.”

  “Peace,” echoed out from the darkness.

  “Yes, yes, I know,” Bower snapped, surprising herself. She wanted to see them, to address them in person and not from this prison of light. She slowed herself down, saying, “We heard you, but we did not believe you. We were afraid.”

  She swallowed the lump in her throat. The thought of speaking on behalf of humanity as a whole intimidated her. The pressure bore down on her like a lead weight.

  “You must have seen the hornets,” she began, pointing out into the darkness, gesturing toward where she imagined the tree of lights stood. “For you, arriving on Earth must have been like knocking over a hornet’s nest.

  “All of life on Earth is hostile. Life fights to survive, surely that is the same elsewhere.”

  The silence that followed her statement seemed to condemn her.

  “But now we understand,” she said. “We’ve seen the tree of life. Your ship is one of discovery, a research vessel. We have had many such vessels ourselves. From the Santa Maria to the HMS Endeavor and the Beagle, we too have explored in peace. We too have sought to learn, to explore, to understand.”

  A dark shape moved on the edge of her vision, staying in the shadows. Bower squinted, making out the silhouette of a man standing just outside the light.

  “They are endemic, diseased,” the man began, speaking with a neutral English accent, one she couldn’t place. “They war against themselves, they decimate their own planet. They are barbarians, base and brute, to be culled for the better of all.”

  “There is intelligence,” a woman’s voice replied, and Bower could see her vague outline next to his.

  Bower went to move forward, but her feet wouldn’t respond, leaving her stranded, bathed in the brilliant, white light. It wasn’t that she couldn’t move, but that her strength faltered and she found herself shaking.

  “Where there is intelligence,” the woman continued, “there is hope.”

  “They are mindless,” the male voice replied. “They destroy habitat, drive species to extinction.”

  “But there is reason,” the woman protested.

  “Reason enslaved by instinct,” the man said.

  Bower turned, following them as they walked around her and Elvis, staying in the shadows.

  “Who are they?” Elvis asked.

  Bower was silent.

  The woman replied coldly, saying, “We ... are you.”

  As she stepped forward into the light, Bower got her first good look at this strange woman. She was well over six feet tall and dressed in a long, flowing garment accentuating her height. Light played on her silky, white dress, giving off the subtle hues of the rainbow. Her arms were thin, almost anemic, while her skin appeared jaundice. Her long straight hair was jet black in stark contrast to her soft features, while her eyes were a soft brown.

  “I don’t understand,” Elvis said. Even he looked short compared to her.

  Bower stood a mere five foot six inches and felt dwarfed by the thin woman.

  The man stepped into the light beside her, easily seven feet in height, but equally as thin.

  The woman spoke again, saying, “Based on our observation of naturally selective and sexually selective pressures within your species, and taking into account previous rates of genetic mutation, we are your future. Within fifty thousand stellar orbits, your species will approximate this state.”

  Bower was stunned. She was speechless. Elvis, though, seemed quick to realize there was something cryptic and implicit in their appearance. He was astute, asking, “What is it you mean to do?”

  The man ignored him, saying, “We have come many times before, sampling your world, observing progress.”

  “Before?” Bower asked. “When?”

  The woman answered. “By your reckoning, this would be measured with a frequency of millions of orbits. But never before have we seen such domination of the biosphere by a single species. You number in excess of seven billion. Each year, your births outweigh deaths by seventy million, causing your ranks to swell even further. Such increase is not sustainable, not without consequence. And so, you have achieved a hundred times the biomass of any large animal species we have previously encountered.”

  The man’s voice was harsh, as though he were speaking out of bitterness.

  “You have humbled nature. You have removed the natural checks on growth, but you have done so with reckless abandon, without regard for your planet and the diversity of life around you. You have lost sight of your place in nature.”

  “So you’re going to interfere,” Bower said, piecing the threads of logic together.

  She moved closer to Elvis. He responded, taking her hand in his. There was something eerie about their encounter with these tall humanoids, something surreal. Touch grounded her to reality. It was silly really, and yet both of them seemed to relish the touch of each other’s hand.

  “We seek to restore balance,” the mysterious man replied.

  “How?” Elvis asked. It was a good question, but Bower figured she already knew the answer inherent in this prophetic vision. She let go of Elvis and stepped forward within the light. Reaching out, she touched at the tall man standing before her. As she expected, her hand passed harmlessly through his ethereal image.

  “We will not hurt you,” the woman said. “We mean only to remove the bias.”

  “You’re going to destroy mankind,” Elvis said.

  “Not destroy,” the woman responded. “Enhance.”

  “But don’t you see?” Bower protested. “This is precisely what they were afraid of, this is why they lashed out at you. If you do this, you’re vindicating their madness.”

  The two humanoids were silent.

  “I don’t understand,” Elvis said, turning to Bower. “What are they going to do?”

  “They’re not going to wipe out humanity,” Bower replied. “They’re going to chan
ge us, to transform us into this.”

  “But why?” Elvis asked. “What would that accomplish?”

  The woman replied, “Because the root of your irrational behavior is instinctive, inherited over thousands of generations. We will remove the source of your fear, your predication to violence, your irrational tendencies. We will lift the veil from your eyes.”

  Bower understood. She looked at Elvis as she said, “They mean to fast-forward Homo sapiens to a time where these primal urges, these absolutist tendencies have mellowed.”

  “Is that not what your religions ask of you?” the woman asked. “Peace on Earth?”

  “He wouldn’t understand,” the man added, scorn carrying in his voice. “He is a warrior, a man of war, nothing but a brute beast.”

  Elvis flinched, and Bower pulled on his arm, preventing him from stepping forward.

  “Who the hell are you to sit in judgment of us?” Elvis cried, the veins in his neck standing out.

  “Who are you?” the man asked in reply, raising his eyebrows. “Who gave you the right to abuse the evolutionary pedigree of almost four thousand million revolutions around this star? Who gave you the right to systematically decimate a planetary life system? You plunder and squander this planet for your own selfish ends with no regard for life.”

  “You are stewards,” the woman continued in a notably calmer voice. “That is all. You are passing through, not staying. Your lives are fleeting. Your concern should be to extend the life of your planet into the future, not to exploit all you can now.”

  “How long do you think Earth will survive under your reign?” the man asked. “Honestly? In the last hundred orbits, you’ve strip-mined the planet, tearing down forests, decimating ocean stocks, polluting the land and sea. How far will you go? How long will you persist at the expense of life? Another one or two hundred orbits? And then what? Then you’ll leave this planet a husk, an empty shell.”

  “But you don’t know that,” Bower protested. “You don’t know where we will be in two hundred years. You’re assuming we won’t change, but you’re wrong.

  “If you’ve visited our planet several times over millions of years then you must have seen tremendous change, not just in the species that roam Earth but in the very shape and position of the continents, the ice ages and dry spells. You must know that life is not static.”

  Bower was driving her mind to grasp their perspective, to see her world from their point of view and hopefully find a weakness in their argument.

  “Two hundred orbits is nothing,” she suggested. “For an interstellar species that catalogs worlds over millions of our years, a mere two hundred years is a blip on the radar. What if you’d turned up two hundred years ago? What if you’d seen us when horses pulled our farmer’s carts to the markets and trading ships sailed with the wind? What would your estimation of us have been then? Would you have drawn the same conclusion?”

  Neither of the apparitions offered a reply.

  “If you would not have condemned us then, how can you judge us now when you know not what will become of us? You might be able to simulate our evolution, but you cannot simulate our culture, our growth, our learning.”

  “We will save you from yourselves,” the man said.

  “You don’t even know if your intervention will work?” Bower protested. “By intervening, you could upset the balance and make things worse.”

  “We won’t let you do this,” Elvis said, his lips drawn tight.

  The woman addressed him, asking, “And what will you do, O man of war?”

  “We’ll fight.”

  The man laughed.

  The woman smiled, saying, “We have seen your species before, but you have progressed rapidly. Whereas once, you roamed the grasslands in search of prey, now you revel in the luxuries of technology. You fabricate heroics, conjuring up fantasies of victory against any intrusion from the stars. You could not so much as have scratched one of our ships had we not been bound to observe. We were caught unawares. We overestimated your social cohesion and desire for harmony. We will not make that mistake again.”

  “She’s right,” Bower said. “This isn’t Hollywood. There’s no Hail-Mary play to be made. This isn’t some movie where we can scrounge up a nuclear warhead from somewhere, smuggle it into the heart of the ship, and still escape in time for supper with the President. We’re like a nest of ants taking on a battleship.

  “And besides, our ability to wage war is not what has set us apart from the other animals, it’s our ability to think, to reason.”

  As those words left her lips, she spotted a subtle, almost imperceptible change in the demeanor of their phantom hosts. They weren’t real; she knew that. They were programmed; they had to be. They were virtual representations of the alien congress, conversing with the two of them in a more natural form. Although they were apparitions, they represented the alien position.

  When they’d first spoken, there was disagreement between them. The man was more forthright, while the woman had appealed to reason as a motive to spare humanity. Without intending to, Bower had touched on that same point, and from the glitch in their response, that had struck a raw nerve.

  “You’re afraid,” Bower said. “You’re afraid of what we might become, of how we might one day threaten you among the stars ... Please, don’t act out of fear. If you do, you’re no better than them.”

  ‘Them’ had been the term Bower had unconsciously settled upon, not us. Without realizing it, she had inadvertently transformed this debate into a three-party discussion, distinguishing both herself and Elvis from the rest of humanity and the destruction of the floaters. She hadn’t accepted her position as defendant in their court.

  From their silence, Bower sensed the aliens accepted her position, and that must have complicated the situation further, as that one, small word, them, implied humanity was not a cohesive group. If the alien edict didn’t apply to Bower and Elvis, then there were others that could equally claim exemption, those that also detested the acts of violence unleashed upon the floaters.

  “Fear is the enemy of reason,” Bower said. “You must have seen that. Your pilots, those we named Stella, they must have told you about us, that we too were afraid, and yet fear need not rule over reason.

  “When I first stood before Stella I was afraid, but I chose not to act out of fear. Standing there in that darkened prison, I was shaking, trembling, but I could not hurt her. Together, we reached out to each other and overcame our fears.”

  Neither the man nor woman replied. The man opened his lips but seemed to halt in the middle of a word, as though something was caught in his throat.

  There has to be more to this, Bower thought. Although she felt as though she was speaking to two individuals, she was acutely aware the alien congress sat out there somewhere in the darkness, tens of thousands of them watching her, listening to her words. Perhaps they were divided into two camps, represented by the two humanoid apparitions she saw before her. They differed. They weren’t in agreement. She could exploit this.

  “As an intelligent species, we are much closer to you than you think,” she said, talking not to the figures before her, but to the audience at large. To emphasize her point, she broke eye contact and turned as she spoke, ignoring the seemingly angelic representations before them and speaking directly to the extraterrestrial congress hidden in the darkness. “We may not speak the same language. We may not share the same mannerisms, but we share one thing, reason.”

  The two futuristic representations of humanity stood still, but not as she or Elvis would. They were frozen, nothing more than mannequins in the wax works, statues in a museum. Bower knew she had the alien congress flustered.

  “We can learn. That is what has allowed us to ascend above the other animals that inhabit our world. Yes, we’ve made mistakes, but our strength comes not from force of arms, it comes from recognizing those mistakes and having the willingness to change.”

  Bower continued to ignore these futuristic d
oppelgängers, but out of the corner of her eye she could see they had remained stationary, as though they were storefront dummies modeling clothing. Although there was no outward activity, she felt confident she’d unleashed a flurry of discussion behind the scenes. Doubts were rising. She had to exploit that uncertainty.

  “We have struggled with the same dilemmas as you now face. For us, it was eugenics, whether to be selective with breeding, whether to sterilize our fellows based on race, class or creed so as to consciously shape the future of our species, but reason prevailed. Reason demanded equality. We have made mistakes, but reason is self-correcting.”

  Bower shook her head as the realization sank home.

  “Look at me,” she said, gesturing with her arms held wide, looking down at the dark skin on her forearms and the back of her hands. “I am a black woman. I am everything that was feared.

  “Less than two hundred orbits have passed since my ancestors were freed from slavery. Barely a hundred orbits have passed since women of any color were granted the most basic of rights, that of the right to vote and be heard as individuals. And yet just over fifty orbits ago, I could not have sat on a bus next to a white man like Elvis, and all because of a layer of pigmentation that sits no more than a millimeter beneath my skin.”

  Bower breathed deeply, composing herself, surprised by the upswell of emotion within. She forced herself to go on.

  “And yet these orbits have come and gone and we have changed. We have moved on. Those that were once despised are now heroes, and not because they fought in a physical battle, because they stood for what was right.”

  Bower wasn’t too sure how well her point communicated. Would these creatures even know what a bus was? Would they have access to the historical records that would explain the life of Rosa Parks? Would they at least recognize the principle?

  “Barely five hundred orbits ago,” she continued, using their terminology. “We thought Earth was the center of this vast universe. We thought stars were but a pinprick of light, smaller than a grain of sand, and yet slowly we have learned to expand our thinking to match reality.”