Is Anybody Out There

by Nick Gevers

  Avouris slammed to a stop in mid-sentence and froze in place, hands clamped on the podium. A hastily summoned EMT crew had been required to remove him from behind the lectern.

  Alavoine Academy had been very understanding and sympathetic. The tenured holder of the Stridor Chair of Anthropology simply needed a sabbatical; he had been working too hard. A university-sponsored ticket for the next cruise of the Melungeon Bride would solve everything. He’d return invigorated and in top- notch mental health.

  But now, three planets into the cruise, as Fayard Avouris contemplated more sightseeing—this time, thankfully, on a world devoid of humans—any such recovery seemed increasingly problematical. The matter of how he could ever reawaken his quondam fascination with the antics of his race plagued him. Moreover, he had begun to suspect that his own dalliance with neurosis was not unique—that this affliction was becoming widespread, and that his own anticipatory bout with it reflected merely a greater sensitivity to the zeitgeist.

  On this cruise, Avouris had discreetly probed his fellow passengers, seeking to ascertain their level of excitement regarding their itinerary. The first three stops had occurred at worlds that boasted supremely exotic cultures that deviated far from the galactic norm, a con-sensual baseline of behaviors continually updated by astromesh polling.

  On the world known as Karoshi, people vied to perform the most odious jobs possible in order to attain the highest social status. The most admired and rewarded citizens, virtual royalty, were those who applied medicinal salves to the sores of plague victims via their tongues.

  On Weebo III, exogamy was enforced to the exact degree that no two citizens could enjoy intercourse unless a different stranger was invited into the affair each time.

  And on Tugnath, a booming trade in afterlife communications involved the perilous enactment of near-death experiences among the interlocutors.

  And here they were now at the edenic Youth Regained, afterwards to be visiting Rowl, Lyrely, Ahab’s Folly, Zizzofizz and Port Canker. Surely, an itinerary to feed a lifetime of vibrant memories.

  And yet Avouris’s companions manifested little real excitement. They seemed bored or apathetic, no matter how bizarre their encounters with oddball races. Why? Not because they were all jaded cosmopolites; many of the travelers aboard the Melungeon Bride were entirely new to starfaring. No, the only explanation that Avouris could sustain involved immunization to the limited ideational space of human customs and beliefs.

  No matter how strange a culture looked initially, upon closer contemplation it became merely one more predictable example of a general class of human behaviors. Death, sex, piety, hedonism, sports, procreative ardor, fashion sense, artistic accomplishment—these few motivators, along with a couple of others, constituted the entire range of determinants for human culture. True, the factors could be combined and permuted in a large number of ways. But in the end, a discerning or even a naïve eye could always unriddle the basic forces at work.

  This sense of a limited ideational space constraining the potentials of the species was what had brought Avouris down with a crash. And he suspected that some of the same malaise was beginning to afflict the general populace as well, a millennium into the complete expansion of humanity into the peerless galaxy.

  If only other modalities of sentience had presented themselves, mankind could have had various educational windows to look through, rather than an endless hall of mirrors. But galactic evolution had been cruel and parsimonious with regards to intelligence. . . .

  Flatscreens across the observation deck and on various personal devices came to life with the voice and face of Slick Willywacker, the ship’s obnoxious tummler. Fayard Avouris experienced a crawling dislike for the clownish fellow.

  “Hey-nonny-nay, sirs and sirettes! Prepare to embark for a glamorous groundling’s go-round! We’ll be loading the lighters with the guests from cabins A100 through A500 first. Meanwhile, have a gander at these little imps cavorting in realtime down below!”

  The screens filled with Drunken Monkey-mites at play in the surf. The tiny agile beings seemed beguilingly human, but Avouris knew that they were in reality no smarter than a terrestrial gecko.

  Sighing deeply, Avouris turned toward the exit. Perhaps he’d just sit at the bar and drink all day. . . .

  Startled exclamations and shrieks caused the anthropologist to whirl around and face the windows again.

  In the moment of turning his back upon Youth Regained, the planet had changed radically.

  Where before empty plains and coasts and mountain ranges had loomed, there now reared vast conurbations, plainly artificial in nature. From this low- orbit vantage, Avouris could even make out extensive agricultural patternings.

  Avouris inquired of a stranger, “What happened?”

  The elderly woman replied in a dazed fashion. “I don’t know. I just blinked, and life was altered!”

  The screens had gone blank during this inexplicable and impossible transition. But now they flared back to life.

  A single Drunken Monkey-mite face dominated each display. But this creature resembled the little imps of a minute past only insofar as a lemur resembled a human. This evolved being wore clothing, and stood in a room full of alien devices.

  The Monkey-mite spoke in perfect astromesh-standard Galglot.

  “Hello, ship in orbit. Who are you? Where do you come from? We have never had visitors before!”

  Fayard Avouris felt a big smile crease his face.

  Life had suddenly become vitally interesting again.

  The stark and cheerless offices of the Okhranka on Muntjac in the Al’queem system had not been designed to coddle visitors. Generally speaking, the only types who visited the Okhranka willingly and via the public entrance were vendors of spyware and concealed weaponry; informers either vengeful or altruistic; errant politicians being called out to correct their views; and kooks with sundry theories regarding infernal dangers and utopian opportunities.

  Fayard Avouris knew without a doubt that the officials of the galactic security apparatus would certainly place him in the last- named category. An academic from a small institution, however respectable, purporting to hold unique insights regarding the biggest conundrum of recorded history, a puzzle which had kept all the best minds of the galaxy stymied for the past six months—well, how else could he appear to them, other than as one of those eccentric amateurs who claimed to hold the answer to the fabled disappearance of the Pitchforth Lady, or the key to the unbreakable ciphers of the Neo-Essenes?

  Knowing how he must appear to these bureaucrats, who were probably observing him in secret even now, Avouris strove to maintain his dignity, composure and respectability, even as he tallied his third excruciating hour of waiting in this uncomfortable chair. For the twentieth time he paged through a hardcopy leaflet entitled A Field Agent’s Best Practices for Intra-urban Rumor Quelling without seeing a word of the text, all the while revolving in his mind the most compelling way to deliver his pitch.

  Ever since making his discovery some five weeks ago, Avouris had striven to reach someone in the government who would pay heed to his findings. After many futile entreaties, this appointment with a mid-level apparatchik had been the best meeting he could secure. He wondered now what I. G. Narozhylenko would look like, how receptive he would be. Avouris had tried searching the astromesh for details of the man, but as an Okhranka functionary, the fellow was almost nonexistent so far as public records went. Avouris hoped he would be neither too apathetic nor too closed- minded to listen to an unconventional theory.

  Just as the anthropologist was about to peruse the old leaflet for the twenty-third time, an inner door opened and Narozhylenko’s personal assistant appeared. Avouris instinctively admired the young woman’s grace and shape and modest yet stylish fashion sense. Short hair the color of a raven’s wing, arrayed in bangs across an intelligent forehead, nicely framed alert, inquisitive features.

  “You may enter now, Professor Avouris.”

&
nbsp; Inside the office, Avouris dropped down into a guest chair microscopically more comfortable than his previous seat. To his astonishment, the woman took up a desk chair on the far side of a nameplate scribed AGENT I. G. NAROZHYLENKO.

  “You are I. G. Narozhylenko?”

  “Yes, Ina Glinka Narozhylenko.” The woman smiled wryly. “You had a pre-formed conception of me at variance with reality?”

  “No, of course not! That is, I—” Avouris gave up apologies and explanations as a waste of time. Luckily, Narozhylenko did not seem put out or inclined to pursue the embarrassing matter. Indeed, Avouris seemed to detect a small smile threatening to escape bureaucratic suppression.

  “Let’s get right to your business then, Professor. I won’t apologize for keeping you waiting so long. As you might imagine, our agency has been stressed beyond belief in dealing with the advent of these nonhuman sophonts. Not only must we manage the pressing practical issues involved in fitting them into galactic culture, but the implications of their instant creation carry even more disturbing challenges. The past six months have overturned so many paradigms that we can barely get our heads above the wreckage. Galactic culture is churning like a Standeven milkmaid on the eve of the springtime butter-sculpting festival.”

  Avouris appreciated the clever metaphor. It seemed to bespeak learning, humor and broad-mindedness: three qualities he could appeal to in his pitch.

  “I agree absolutely. Out of nowhere, our age has become a revolutionary era.”

  The miraculous and instantaneous transformation of Youth Regained from a wilderness planet into the seemingly long-established homeworld of the first nonhuman civilization ever encountered had been merely the opening note in a bizarre symphony of spontaneous generation.

  Shortly thereafter, the world known as Pronk- Kissle had instantly flipped from uninhabited desert wastes to the thriving techno-hives of giant talking sand fleas.

  Voynet VII suddenly sported a global culture of stratospheric sentient gasbags.

  Spaethmire now hosted a single group intelligence distributed across billions of individuals resembling both sessile and mobile slime molds.

  Los Caminos now featured continent-spanning burrows populated by sensitive and poetical beings who resembled naked mole-rats crossbred with whales, each one large as a subway car.

  And so on, for another two dozen transformed worlds scattered across the formerly humans-only galaxy, with fresh instances occurring at regular intervals.

  All these new alien civilizations had just two things in common.

  They all claimed to have arisen naturally over geological timespans on their native planets.

  None of them had ever encountered humans before.

  These mutually exclusive assertions—each tenet impossible in its own way, given humanity’s long acquaintance with these worlds—had engendered scores of theories, none of which had yet been proven to represent the truth.

  Ina Glinka Narozhylenko regarded Avouris sternly. “You’re not here to tell me you have the answer to these manifestations, are you, Professor? Because I do not believe that your field of expertise—anthropology, is it not?—could feature insights unavailable to our best quantum physicists and plectic fabulists.”

  Momentarily distracted by the deep grey eyes of the attractive Okhranka agent, Fayard Avouris hesitated a moment before saying, “Oh, no, Agent Narozhylenko, I don’t pretend to know the origins of these aliens. However, I do believe that I can predict with some degree of accuracy where the next such outbreak will occur.”

  Narozhylenko leaned forward intently. “You have exactly fifteen minutes to justify this bold assertion, Professor.”

  “I have here a memory stick. If you would be so kind as to plug it into your system, Agent Narozhylenko . . .”

  The woman did so.

  On a large screen popped up a navigable simulacrum of the galaxy. Avouris rose to stand beside the screen where he could interact with the display.

  “Here are the recorded outbreaks.” The map zoomed and shrank across several scales, as Avouris called up the locations of the alien worlds as he had plotted them earlier. “Do you see any pattern to their distribution?”

  “No. And neither did any of several thousand experts.”

  “Ah, but that is because you do not have a solid theory that would allow you to examine and compare the relevant data sets.”

  Avouris went on to explain about his personal disillusionment, his dismal anti- epiphany regarding human limitations and sameness, and how he believed that such a malaise was now a general, albeit unrecognized, condition across the galaxy.

  “I call this spiritual ailment ‘Mirror Sickness.’ Perhaps you’ve seen symptoms of it around you, or even in yourself . . . ?”

  Agent Narozhylenko sat pensive. “Yes . . . yes . . . I recognize the feeling. Proceed with your presentation.”

  “I have spent hundreds of hours since the first alien incursion performing astromesh polling across thousands of worlds on the phenomenon of Mirror Sickness.” The screen came alive with animated histograms. “Sifting the results involved the employment of a number of expert machine systems, or I would not have finished for years. In any case, here is a map of the neurosis, graded by severity of symptoms.”

  Avouris overlaid his findings atop the display of alien outbreaks.

  Agent Narozhylenko rose slowly to her feet. “They match . . . they match exactly! Aliens are appearing at equidistant loci relative to those human worlds most despairing of the limitations of our species.”

  “Let’s call them ‘the loneliest worlds,’ for convenience’s sake. And you’ll note that the manifestations are precisely encoding the severity gradient of Mirror Sickness, from worst case downward.”

  Narozhylenko approached the screen and magnified a sector of the galactic map. “Wustner’s Weatherbolt should display the next outbreak then. In just a week’s time.” She turned to Avouris. “Are you currently free from teaching duties, Professor Avouris?”

  “Now, and perhaps for the rest of my life!”

  Agent Ina Glinka Narozhylenko manifested superior piloting abilities at the helm of her little space clipper, the Okhranka-supplied Whispering Shade. Fayard Avouris felt utterly safe in her hands, although her extremely speedy and cavalier passage through the Oort Cloud on the extremes of the Sockeye star system where the world called Wustner’s Weatherbolt revolved had induced a little transient anxiety in the anthropologist.

  But now, as the homely little ship floated serenely and safely above the rondure of the planet where—if Avouris’s theory and calculations were correct—a miraculous transformation from nescient virgin mudball to home of another unprecedented alien civilization was about to occur, Avouris could not fully relax. Unable to quell a griping sense of injustice, he felt compelled to speak.

  “I still can’t believe that you and I were deputed alone to affirm my theory. Are your superiors insane or merely mingy, that they could not devote more resources than this to such a potentially lucrative information-gathering expedition? Where is the vast armada of research vessels that should have accompanied us?”

  Across the cabin from where Avouris sat, Agent Narozhylenko fussed with the craft’s small food reconstituter, preparing a meal. Avouris admired her efficient, graceful movements. He only wished the woman would open up and discuss personal matters with him. The social ambiance during their journey of three days had been rather more arid and formalistic than Avouris could have wished. But so far, Agent Ina Glinka Narozhylenko had maintained a scrupulously businesslike demeanor. After his one attempt to call her by her given names and to probe into her familial background had been met with silence and a frosty stare and the subliminal threat of esoteric martial-arts dissuasions, he had refrained from any further pleasantries. So now all he could do by way of conversation was complain.

  “The Okhranka Directorate,” said the agent in response to his gripe, “are not fools or gamblers. And their resources are always limited, never more so tha
n at present. Oftentimes only a single agent is tasked with a complex assignment. We are highly competent and trained across a broad number of surprising disciplines. The Whispering Shade boasts all the sensors of a larger craft, so more vessels would be superfluous. And the satellites I’ve launched give us complete telemetric coverage of the planet. Believe me, if we witness the fulfillment of your prediction, the next such occasion will merit a fuller contingent.”

  Avouris grumped before responding. “Well, I suppose you people know what you’re doing.”

  Narozhylenko cocked one eyebrow. “A very generous allowance on your part, Professor Avouris. Now, would you care for some shabara filets?”

  After eating they rested in their separate berths, under a programmed bout of artificial sleep. The guardian machines triggered wakefulness well in advance of the projected time for the planetary transition. Then commenced the nerve-wracking waiting.

  “What do you see as the probable cause of these eruptions of nonhuman sentience, Professor?” Narozhylenko asked, while she fiddled with the satellites’ feed. “Of the theories so far proposed, I place Planck-level punctuated equilibrium first, global de-masking of long-established hidden worlds second, and mass mind-tampering third.”

  Avouris shook his head thoughtfully. “No, no, none of those explanations appeal to me as sufficiently comprehensive. Whatever the answer, it will be more complex than any scenario so far advanced. And then we have the question of motive. I can’t believe this is a natural phenomenon. A prime mover is implied. Who and why? And why now?”