“You have signed non-disclosure agreements. If you go any further, you will sign more. And there will be considerable penalties for not abiding by the terms of those agreements.”
I read the fine print. And other than asking for my firstborn male child, I couldn’t imagine what greater security they could have required. All I could figure was that this was involved in some kind of Psyop program, designed to …
Oh hell, I didn’t know.
We signed. Then the President herself emerged, and my lungs froze. Yes, we were in Washington. Yes, I thought that I was above such things as idol worship or being impressed by power. But here she was, in the flesh, and the charisma with which Sophia Gonzalez had won two presidential elections was now bottled in a confined space, just a few meters away, and it was devastating. By the time I remembered to breathe she and Jalil had finished conferring.
“Thank you,” Madame President said with that disarming southern accent. “You understand that what is said in this room remains in this room. In fact, if you agree to this commission, you will be out of touch with your company, friends and family for the next ninety days.”
The wall lit up with images of gelatinous objects with glowing lights suspended within, like floating Portuguese Man O’Wars filled with Chinese lanterns.
“Fifteen months ago,” she said, “we made contact with what we call the Travelers. We are uncertain of their origins. Some who have studied the communications believe the answer is the Horsehead Nebula. Others some other dimension of being.”
An image. Unmistakably, a photo of the furry protozoan. “Is this a joke?” I heard myself ask.
“No joke,” she said. “A ‘Traveler’. They came here to meet us, and we want you to help ease the way.”
Rhonda was grinning … then frowned when she realized we weren’t laughing. “Holy shit. You aren’t kidding? Like, ‘phone home’?”
I’d read as many UFO loony tune tracts as anyone. Stein and Baker had promoted “Saucer Flakes,” a breakfast cereal with little ovals (they levitate in the bowl!) so I knew about the pale-skinned almond-eyed space people said to mutilate cattle and anal probe redneck trailer trash from Montana to Mississippi.
“Roswell Grays?” Rhonda asked. “Zeta Reticulans? Real aliens?”
“Yes. They arrived outside lunar orbit and made contact through encoded diplomatic channels. Our most secure and shielded communications were child’s play to the Travelers. It was an unprecedented emergency, as you can imagine. But they said that they came in friendship, and would not even come down or announce themselves to the general public until we gave permission.”
“Really?” Rhonda asked. “The Grays came umpteen trillion miles and then just … hung out? They didn’t demand? Or even plead?”
The President considered. “No. What they did do was bargain.”
“What kind of bargain?”
“They said that they have gifts. Technologies they can offer.”
Whoa, there, cowboy. And welcomed little fishies in with gently smiling … “What kind of technologies?”
“Communications. Transportation. Energy. Biologicals. How would you like to live 120 years without illness?”
Boom. That’s what I’m talking about. “You’re shitting me.”
“No. Not at all. We’ve tested samples of their tech, and its real.”
“And what do they want in return?”
The President broke eye contact. “They want to be our … friends.”
She cleared her throat.
The President began speaking more rapidly, with greater confidence. This part had been rehearsed. “I’ve had many meetings with our best xenobiologists, and they tell me that a species capable of reaching our world would have a limited number of motivations to do so. Colonization, of course, but they’ve not asked for land.”
“You know, like … our resources?” I asked.
“Water? Energy? Easier to get outside a gravity well. The general opinion is that an alien species would come for reasons similar to those human beings used, if one removes the profit motive.”
“Tourism?” Rhonda laughed.
“Yes,” the President said, mouth held in a carefully neutral expression. “Sheer exploration.”
“Seeing the sights? Eating the food?”
An unpleasant thought. “Hunting?”
She smiled. “This isn’t a horror movie. They’re not looking for pelts. The Travelers want … friends.”
A pause. An unspoken possibility hung in the air.
“Wait a minute,” Rhonda said. “You’re talking about sex?”
The President’s expression never changed, but she gave an almost imperceptible nod.
“The Grays came a trillion miles for … sex tourism?”
“Not to put too fine a line on it, but … yes.”
“Wait just a minute,” Rhonda said. “Those ads we made up. Those cartoons. You didn’t hire us in spite of what we did. You hired us because of it.”
I wanted to laugh, but the sound was stuck in my throat. “You have to be kidding me. This whole thing is…”
Without further preamble, Madame President raised her hand for quiet. “They, um … studied our culture, and 1950s television broadcasts reached them first. Ladies and gentlemen … I’d like to introduce you to Elvis.”
“Of course you do,” I muttered.
The lights went down. And something sort of … flowed in from the wings. It wore a kind of white sequined Vegas stage suit. An amoeba in polyester. The hair stood up on my forearms, and the air sort of sizzled, as if he carried a thunderstorm’s worth of static charge.
“You’ve gotta be fuckin’ kidding me,” I heard myself mutter. Just a hunk a hunk of burnin’—
In a very Steven Hawkings, synthesized voice, Elvis said: “Greetings, my friends. I believe that ‘kidding’ implies a kind of deception or prevarication. My people do not lie. It is not in our nature.” He paused. “I am very grateful … that you have agreed to help us. We have come much [meaningless squawk]. To be with you. We seek to know you.”
“In the Biblical sense,” Rhonda muttered. She raised her hand. “Ah … Elvis? May I ask a question?”
“Yes, please.”
“On Earth, sex is most important for … reproduction. You aren’t saying you want to breed with us?”
In his flat, cold voice, Elvis replied: “That would not be possible. But sex is not merely reproduction. It is pleasure. And bonding. And healing. And expression of love. These things exist among all peoples we seek to know. We wish to share this bounty of … the heart. And have gifts to offer in return.”
Out of the side of my mouth, I whispered: “Most times, flowers are enough.”
“Will you help us?” Elvis asked.
“Umm…” the speaker was an Asian dressed in belt and suspenders over a long-sleeve denim shirt. Tufts of white framed a very bald pate. I thought I recognized him. “What … ah.… do you see as the largest barrier?”
“It is that your people will think us ugly, Professor Watanabe.” The Watanabe? The man who had authored my Commercial Aesthetics text? Elvis’s cat eyes blinked. His color shifted, became a bit pinkish. Emotions?
I drummed my fingers on the desk. This was … beyond surreal. “You understand that … well, you aren’t even ‘ugly.’ Ugly would be … well,” I felt trapped. Everyone was looking at me, and I just blurted it out. “Ugly would be a step up.”
The room held its collective breath. The President squinted at me, awaiting disaster. But to my surprise, Elvis’ color did not shift. “We can change. Will you help us?”
A hologram of a bank account screen appeared on the screen before me.
The President spoke. “A very select group of companies have already bid on Traveler technologies. The number you see in front of you is the amount they are willing to pay to acquire your services.”
I whistled. Damn. Stein and Baker had just won the lottery.
“Will you help us?”
&n
bsp; Despite the computerized voice, the call was plaintive. I … felt it. Deeply. A cosmic loneliness, a sense of feeling lost in the spaces between the stars, only rarely finding other creatures with whom to contemplate existence …
I shook my head, as if emerging from an opium den. Something was either very right about this, or very wrong indeed.
All that money, though …
“Say yes,” the President said.
I glanced at Rhonda. She gave the slightest of nods. “Yes,” I replied.
* * *
And that was how it began. Via Secret Service helicopter, we were lifted to a repurposed private college in upstate New York, where … well, I don’t know what everyone else was working on, but it was abuzz with dignitaries, scientists, military people, media people … a beehive, and we were just workers. We had one year to prepare the public.
Rhonda and I grew very close during these months. We laughed, and cried, and even considered quitting. But the Travelers were good to their word. They made no effort to land, or interfere with us, or do anything except keep to their promises. They rarely even visited what we called the Facility, when they did I never was able to tell one from the other. They changed costumes and cultural jewelry as if trying on various ways of being human, with one exception: Elvis was always Elvis, and slimed around the Facility like a gigantic slug in rhinestones. Damned if his organelles didn’t have a sleepy look, and the facial protoplasm seemed to have a sneering lip.
Nobody else could see that. Maybe it was just me.
Every denizen of the Facility was committed to making a home for our guests, or to evaluate the impact of their arrival. Who generated endless scenarios about what would happen to our culture, religion, governments … the psychological and spiritual and economic impact, and how we might best manage the stress. It was massive.
Every room and team seemed to be doing something different. I probably understood one percent of it all. Some were, I knew, testing and applying odd technologies. Too many moving parts for me to remember, but they included unlimited-wear contact lenses with built-in microscopes, telescopes and multi-spectrum scanners. Shoes that sent the energy from walking back up your body in the strangest ways, simultaneously massaging and exercising every muscle with every step. Instantaneous communication via space-time ripples, as the Travelers communicated with others of their kind across the universe. Much more.
Occasionally an actual Traveler toured the Facility. Perhaps taking part in experiments, maybe just supervising. I never knew, and tried to avoid them: their sweet-sickly scent made me want to puke, and about them there seemed always to be a prickling of static discharge, enough to make your hair twitch.
But I can tell you that the Travelers delivered on every single promise. Our hunger to begin the next phase knew no bounds. There was just one little hurdle …
* * *
One day we were called down to a laboratory on the lower levels. Professor Watanabe welcomed Rhonda, myself, and a military officer who seemed to find the whole thing distasteful. “Carver. Rhonda. General Lucas. Thank you for coming down.”
“I … well, we need to know what we have to work with,” Rhonda said.
The Professor scratched his shock of Einstein-white hair. “Well, we have a couple of different levels. Needless to say, there are human beings who will have sex with almost anything. No.… let’s cancel the ‘almost.’ For enough money, some people will couple with anything possessing an orifice or protrusion.”
“Porn stars?” I asked. “Prostitutes?”
He nodded. “Yes, and they have been the first recruits to the cause.”
General Lucas frowned. “You mean it’s already happened?”
A faint smile. “Would you like to see vid?”
“No!” I sputtered, realizing that Rhonda had simultaneously said: “Yes!”
Watanabe flicked a switch, and an image appeared on the screen. A sparsely furnished room, with heavy floor matting. A muscular white male entered, nude but for a black Zorro mask. He was fully and rather impressively engorged.
“He’s a porn star, but insisted that his face be covered.”
Rhonda craned her head sideways. “I think I recognize him. Is that Maximum?”
Even I’d heard that name. Maybe you have too: “Maximum Thrust,” “Maximum Overdrive” and “Maximum’s Minimum” and so forth. He was notorious for his endless appetite and ability to perform under any and all circumstances. Considering his reputation, I wondered who’d paid whom.
“And now, there’s our visitor…”
A hidden panel in the ceiling slid open. On slender wires, something resembling a blow-up sex doll descended toward the floor. Its arms and legs were cut short, and out bulged a mass of tissue as gelatinous as half-melted Jello.
“We’ve used other volunteers, augmenting with a Traveler-tweaked phosphodiesterase inhibitor. I think we have our first T-pharmaceutical. One dose seems to last … well, it hasn’t stopped working yet. We just don’t know. It might be permanent. I don’t mean erect constantly, I mean tumescence on demand. Whenever. Maximum didn’t need it.”
Rhonda uttered the most sincere “damn” I’d ever heard.
Once the union began, the outer shell seemed to dissolve. It looked as if it was devouring our volunteer. His splayed limbs, glistening perspiration and the trembling of lower-back muscles implied a kind of slack-jawed overwhelm that was very much at odds with his cool, controlled porno personae.
“Good lord,” I said.
Rhonda leaned forward. “So … they prefer males?”
“Oh, no, they like females as well.”
She emitted a short, rather chipper sigh.
The image was clipped short, followed by another. A woman, this one unmasked. A brown-skinned woman, Indonesian perhaps, cadaverously thin, and pock-marked as a golf ball. The Traveler crawled all over her. Her faux passion became real, and she bucked like a flag in a windstorm.
Rhonda’s eyes went wide. Watanabe switched it off. “So we have begun to fulfill the minimal contract. Some of their tech is filtering in already. And we might need it.”
“Why?”
“Because the next step is to prepare humanity for their arrival. We have begun subliminal and implanted imagery.”
A series of slides appeared: Brief flashes of aliens implanted in crowd scenes. Fuzzy-wuzzy faces implanted in comedies, Coca-Cola commercials backed with snatches of what sounded like whale mating calls played backwards.
“What is that?”
“Their cultural music. We’re trying everything.”
“Carver and I have been working day and night to create the campaigns,” Rhonda said. “The biggest idea was to create one of Dr. Watanabe’s ‘aesthetic bridges.’ Images that are blends of human and Visitor, that help desensitize us to the sensory shock.”
“And is that working?” the general asked.
“The problem,” Watanabe said, “is what the cybersemiotics people refer to as the ‘uncanny valley.’ That if something looks nothing like us, we might have a positive or negative reaction. But as it gets closer to us, there is a point of greater and greater attraction … and then we flinch.”
“Why is that?”
He shrugged. “Could be a mechanism for detection of mutations. Birth defects. We don’t know. There is speculation that this is behind some forms of racism, or even why Cro-Magnons exterminated the Neanderthals.”
“Close,” Rhonda whispered, “but no cigar.”
“But there’s another set of responses. We fear the ‘other’ but are also exogamous. So there is something to play with, and always has been.”
“Do we have any sense of success?” Rhonda asked.
“Combinations of the subliminals, the sound, and manipulation of language and imagery in television and film—it’s like buying product placement, really—has reduced the revulsion rate by 17 percent. And I think that might be our tipping point.”
* * *
The announcement was t
imed to go over every channel, all over the world, at the same time. The first images of what Rhonda always called “The Grays” were fuzzy and slightly doctored. And despite all our preparations, they still triggered an ocean of nausea and fear.
Like crystal cathedrals floating in a sea of clouds, the alien ships hovered above New York, L.A., Tokyo, Lagos, Johannesburg, London, Beijing, Moscow and fifty other major cities. Panic and riots ensued, but contrary to wide expectations the Travelers didn’t land, let alone destroy or conquer. They just … hovered. We were told the situation, and what the visitors offered. State by state, the citizens were allowed to vote on whether the Visitors could touch ground.
Demonstrations. Signs abounded. “Hell no!” or their equivalents in a dozen languages.
Most places that sentiment was almost universal. But a few … California, for instance, said yes. And so at last aliens were among us. And again, they delivered on their promises, enabling those states to enjoy the bounty. The technology was tightly controlled, and only allowed into the areas that welcomed the Travelers. That was clever. We were both in control … and totally on the hook. Because everyone knew someone wasting away from some nasty ailment. Someone who was healed … or employed in one of the new industries that sprang up and became Google overnight. Within two years there wasn’t a country on Earth that denied them. Traveler tech created a hundred billionaires and a thousand multimillionaires in the first year.
You rarely saw Travelers on the street. When you did, it was in those odd suits and usually in a limo of some kind, usually piloted by a live human being. They appeared on documentaries and news shows, and then entertainment as well. Television, billboards, films … break-dancing amoebas, torch-song warbling slime molds. Slowly we began to see these concoctions more often, associated with puppies and smiling children … and sexy men and women.
The Travelers wanted to see that humans were accepting them.
They masked their pheromones, poured themselves into better and better fabrications, and even managed to appear in a series of Indian films. I thought I recognized Elvis doing a very creditable Bollywood Bhangra dance. Hard to say.
All paramecia look alike to me.
The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 48