Life went on. Angie started a new school year, with all the tears and little traumas that accompanied a life change of that magnitude—no sarcasm intended. She was fifteen. A year of school was a huge deal. Hell, I was thirty–seven, and a year of school was a huge deal. My little girl was growing up. I covered her in kisses and sent her out the door into the hands of strangers, while I went back to my lab and kept trying to find a way to change the world.
Looking back, I wish I’d taken more time off. I wish I’d pulled her out of classes and gone to see the country. I wish I’d talked Lisa into doing the same with Nate, so that all four of us could have gone to California like we’d always threatened. I wish we’d taken the kids to Disneyland.
I wish we’d gotten married. Lisa had been hinting for the better part of a year and I’d been brushing her off every time, making excuses, claiming that my work needed me. My work had needed me, but not nearly as much as my girlfriend had, as the boy who was my son in all but the eyes of the law had. They had been my world, not some distant alien planet, and they had needed me, and I had ignored them in the interest of making history.
Well, we’d made history after all. There wasn’t going to be any history after this; we’d made it all, at least so far as the human race was concerned. We wrote the last chapter and then we closed the book, and we’d been totally open while we were doing it, and somehow no one had noticed what was going on. Not even us.
Nate is a boneless weight in my arms, not moving, not even seeming to breathe. I close my eyes and hold my own breath, trying to pick up a sign that he’s still alive. I could check his pulse, or pull out my compact and see if the mirror goes foggy when I hold it up to his mouth, but once I start doing that, it’s over. I’ll have admitted that we’ve lost.
Angie stirs, lifts her head, blinks blearily at me. “Mom?” she asks, in a voice that barely registers as a whisper. “What’s wrong with Nate?”
“He’s sleeping,” I say, and that’s a lie, but for right now, I’ll take it. Sometimes the truth is an unfair burden to put on anyone. Especially a fifteen–year–old girl. Especially my fifteen–year–old girl. She should be thinking about homecoming games and dates and final exams, not the end of the world. So I’ll lie to her, because she deserves it.
Because I have nothing else to give her.
“Maybe they’ll leave,” she says. “Maybe they’ll… maybe they’ll realize that we don’t want this, and they’ll leave.”
“Maybe,” I say, and I’m still lying, and I think she knows that. She crawls to me, putting her head on my shoulder, and closes her eyes. I close mine, and we exist, the three of us, for one brief and shining moment. We exist.
We were here. Things have consequences, but we were here, and nothing anyone does can take that away from us.
We were here.
The first sign of trouble came eight months after the first robots trundled through the gateway and onto the world we’d been casually referring to as “Way Over Yonder,” or “Yonder” for short. (The official name would be chosen by committee and to placate whatever governmental branch needed placating when the time came, which most of us assumed would be five minutes after we found something valuable.) We’d been monitoring their progress, sending new units through when necessary, and passing the samples they brought back on to the relevant scientific teams. The botanists were having a field day. Half the “plants” we gave them turned out to be minerals of some kind, but enough of them had been actual, honest–to–God vegetation that there were about nine new schools of thought forming, with another half dozen waiting in the wings.
I was on duty, thinking idly about what I was going to make for dinner, when the board began to flash. Not a warning light, which would have been red and accompanied by a warning klaxon; just a little green light turning on in the upper corner and starting to blink. It was almost friendly. Here I am, said the light. Look at me. I am scientific discovery made manifest. I am your future. Hi.
We had been waiting for that light, all of us, for months. We had been living for that light. And I sat there, motionless, staring at it with uncomprehending eyes, because we had all been waiting for that light for so long that it no longer made any sense. That light never flashed. That light never turned on. But it was flashing. It was on. Bit by bit, I adjusted my impressions of the world.
The light was on.
“We have a light!” I shouted. I also stood up. Probably unnecessary—the light didn’t care whether I was sitting down—but it felt right. “People, we have a light!”
The reaction was immediate and deeply validating. Technicians and researchers rushed in from every corner of the room, crowding around the control board as if proximity would be enough to guarantee them their place in the discoveries to follow.
“Calm down!” shouted Earl. He was one of our shift leaders; it was a matter of five minutes and bad luck that he hadn’t been the one manning the board when the light started flashing. “Calm down, all of you! There’s enough science here for everyone!”
Someone laughed. Someone else whooped, a joyful sound that could have come from almost any throat, one that was felt in every single heart. Because we had a light, and if we had a light we had done it: after doing the improbable, we had followed it up by doing the impossible. We had made contact.
“Do we have a visual?” barked Earl. He was never a man who did anything at a normal volume.
(He’d been one of the first to die, slowing and finally stopping altogether as the water in his cells converted into a crystalline dust. When his body had collapsed inward on itself and blown away, we’d all thought that it was an accident, an unexpected interface between Earth and alien biology. We’d been so wrong. We’d already been too late.)
“I’m on it,” I said, my hands moving rapidly across the controls. One of the screens began to roll in lines of irregular static, finally stabilizing on a picture of an alien world. Our alien world, Yonder, which remained as beautiful as ever, but had grown somewhat familiar and hence not as exciting as it had been. Now, as the amber and peach glory of it came into focus on the screen, I remembered how beautiful it was, and how excited I had been the first time I’d seen it.
Now, the most exciting thing was the alien—the alien—standing in front of our robot.
Everyone saw the aliens inside of the week, of course: even if we’d wanted to classify their existence, we couldn’t have done it. The project was too public, and there were too many leaks for us to have closed them all that late in the game. They made the cover of every magazine in the world. It didn’t help that they looked like velvet worms the size of anacondas, waving their stubby little legs and their featureless antennae at our robots like some sort of threat display.
A few people murmured, disappointed by what seemed to be an enormous, if alien, animal. Earl motioned for them to be quiet. The alien kept waving its stubby little legs. The light kept flashing. And then, in a slow crawl across the bottom of the screen, came the sentence that changed the world:
“What do you mean, ‘hello’?”
The room exploded again. This time, Earl couldn’t get us back under control. He barely even tried. We had discovered an alien world; we had discovered alien life; we had done it all, and history was going to remember our names.
Things have consequences.
Angie lifts her head from my shoulder and sighs, a long, slow exhalation that bears no resemblance to the giddy cheers that still echo like ghosts in the haunted hallways of my memory. She sounds utterly broken, utterly defeated, and for a moment, my heart seizes in my chest, because that’s my daughter making that sound, my daughter with the life beaten half out of her by the uncaring, uncompassionate world.
“Mom,” she says. “Look.”
I don’t want to. Things have consequences, yes, but I am tired of consequences, and I don’t want to look.
I look.
Nate isn’t moving. Nate isn’t breathing, either; Nate hasn’t been breathing for quite
some time. The skin on his face is waxy and tight, and already crumbling around the edges. Skin has edges, especially on the face; nostrils, eyes, the mouth. Everything about it seems to have been essentially designed to fall apart.
“He’s sleeping,” I lie.
Angie doesn’t meet my eyes.
“He’ll wake up soon.”
“Mom, if he was exposed…”
“Don’t finish that sentence, baby girl. We’re going to be fine. We’re going to keep climbing, and we’re going to be fine.”
More lies. We’re not going to be fine. No one is going to be fine. If Nate was exposed, so was Angie, and if they both crumble into dust in my arms, that’s it: that’s the ballgame, at least for me. Let someone else fight to save the human race. I helped to condemn it, and that seems like more than enough.
Someone else will be the hero in this story. Someone else will storm the mothership or charge through the shimmering gateway that connects us to an alien world, an alien sky; someone else will find the words to say in the necessary order to convince our next door neighbors to stop killing us. Someone else. Not me. I’m a nameless, faceless extra in this story, one of the white–coated scientists from the first ten minutes of the movie, the ones who set events in motion and doom us all. Because things have consequences. Things have always, always had consequences.
“Do we even know why?” asks Angie.
“Because they’ve killed the Earl of Moray, and the Lady Mondegreen,” I say.
She looks at me blankly. I sigh. A lock of Nate’s hair crumbles and blows away. I close my eyes. I don’t want to see the look on her face when she realizes just how stupid this has all been, or how easily it could all have been avoided.
“We didn’t stop to think about atmospheric density,” I say, and on that hinges the world.
The light was on: nothing was going to change that. Even if the alien got bored and wandered away, we would always have made first contact. Us, a group of physicists and astronomers just trying to better the future of mankind, we had made first contact.
“It’s like living in a science fiction novel,” said one of the assistants, and everyone laughed, and everyone secretly—or not–so–secretly—agreed with her.
(She would die shortly after Earl, shattering when she was knocked over by a fleeing engineer. Her body would blow away in the wind from the open laboratory door. So far as I know, nobody called her family.)
The alien continued to wave its legs at our helpful robot as, one sentence at a time, we unlocked the world.
“The translator program is working,” I breathed. Oh, how I wished Lisa had come to visit the office, so she could see it: see the moment when my late nights and long hours transformed into something concrete, something real, like lead turning into gold. This was the moment when we made history once and for all.
We’d been so set on making history that we had never stopped to ask ourselves whether making history mattered. Maybe it would have been better to sit back and accept that history made itself, assembling a grand puzzle one minute at a time, until we found ourselves standing on the other side of it. We’d been working hard, eyes on the prize, and we’d been so busy wallowing in intellectual ideals that we’d never stopped to think.
Earl grabbed the microphone. “Hello,” he said, pulling it close to his mouth, so that not a sound would be missed. Was that the problem? Was that where the interference had come in, where things had gone askew?
I don’t think so. I think the trouble started with “hello.” It was such an innocuous word, “hello.” It only made sense that it would be the word that doomed us.
The robot relayed Earl’s voice. The alien pulled back, arms waving in dismay, before it leaned closer once more, studying our emissary.
“Hello?” it echoed. “Are you hello?”
“This is the planet Earth, speaking to you across the cosmos,” said Earl, and the robot relayed his words, translating them into a dozen languages, into pulses of light, into mathematical sigils. It translated them every way it knew how, and the alien waved its arms, and this was going better than we could possibly have hoped.
(We couldn’t read the alien’s reactions—it was too alien, too much like the sort of thing you might find under a rock, rather than having a coherent conversation with a space–faring robot—but we were encouraged when two more appeared to join the discussion. They waved their arms and they spoke slowly to the robot, and we were making history, and things have consequences.)
“Hello,” said the newest alien. “You are sure hello?”
“Hello,” repeated Earl, and “Hello,” repeated the robot, and someone ran to fetch a reporter while someone else went to call the President.
The aliens stayed close to the robot for three days, coming and going and always circling back to one question:
“You are sure hello?”
Nate barely weighs anything. If I opened my eyes, I’m sure I would find him more than halfway gone, dissolving into the wind. I don’t open my eyes.
When the first ship appeared above us, a thing that was half saucer and half ornate coral structure, too delicate and fractal to have been constructed within planetary gravity, people rejoiced. Most people. I was back in the lab, running and rerunning hours of footage of our first meeting with the aliens. Something was troubling me. It was such a small thing, but…
We knew they were intelligent. We had observed tool use. Not just sticks and rocks and other things that a creature with a dozen grasping appendages might be expected to pick up and use: complicated little machines with lights that flashed and disks that spun, which had sent our xeno anthropologists into fits of delight. It seemed likely that we had opened our gate onto their home world, based on how many of them there were and how well they fit into their environment, but that was just a guess: human scientists had been talking about Terraforming for decades. Who was to say that Yonder wasn’t the result of Wormforming?
We had so much left to learn. They spoke to our robots in short, measured sentences, and they grasped all our languages with remarkable speed…but a few words seemed to stymie them. Including, surprisingly, the innocuous “hello.”
When we said it, they waved their limbs and asked if we were sure. They became distressed. Some members of the team theorized that greetings were somehow taboo in their culture; we started trying to avoid them.
And then the President had come to visit again, and had boomed hello after hello across the unfathomable distance at our space–worm friends. They had slowly stopped their waving. They had stopped sounding distressed. One—the first one, the Prime Worm—had bowed its head and said, “We understand.”
The next morning, all the worms had been gone.
A week later, the ships had arrived. We had yet to see the pilots, but most people were assuming that they contained our friends the worms, who had been charming and friendly and seemed harmless, if anything alien could be considered “harmless.” I locked myself in the lab, watching and re–watching every scrap of footage, trying to figure out what they were reacting to.
Something about the word “hello.”
On a whim, I began enhancing the background noise, trying to pull up the conversations the aliens had amongst themselves. They were garbled slightly by wind and distance, but I was able to piece together a relatively clean string of words and accent sounds. I fed it into the translator.
The translator flashed red.
Frowning, I looked at the screen.
> MULTIPLE LANGUAGES DETECTED. CONTINUE?
I typed “yes,” and hit “enter.” The red light went off. Two strings of text appeared.
One, labeled “Yonder,” read, “They are asking us to relieve their unending misery. They have asked repeatedly. We must grant them our aid.”
The other, labeled “Multiple,” read, “They are asking us to hello. They have asked repeatedly. We must grant them our aid.”
I stared at the two lines of text. One made sense as read. The other�
��
My chair fell when I launched myself out of it and ran to find someone who could check my work. It made a clattering sound when it hit the ground. I didn’t look back. As far as I know, it may still be there.
“When people talk, we’re talking for this air,” I say, and the words don’t make any sense, and the words make all the sense there is; the words are everything, they define the future that we’ve made for ourselves, one careless choice at a time. “We’re making our words for this atmospheric density. We’re measuring their sounds and their stops and their distortion for this atmospheric density.”
I still don’t open my eyes. I don’t want to see what’s become of Nate, who hasn’t spoken since he started to crumble, and I don’t want to see if Angie has started to go clear around the edges. The part of me that’s still a scientist wonders idly how they did this to us, wishes that we’d had the time to pick their pathogens apart and understand them, even if it had been too late to cure them. It would be nice to know. I’ve spent my life knowing, and now I’m going to die not knowing.
“What does that mean?” asks Angie.
“It means that when the aliens heard us speaking, they didn’t hear us there the way we hear ourselves here. The air on Yonder has a different composition. It’s not as dense. We couldn’t breathe there even if we had reached the point where we could make the crossing, because the air isn’t right. And when humans speak there, the words sound funny. Some of them sound a lot like words the people on Yonder have in their own language. Some of them sound so familiar that the people on Yonder never figured out that we might mean something else.”
The Long List Anthology Volume 3 Page 12