Alien Caller

by Greg Curtis

  Still, the Leinians had been lucky in his opinion. More than lucky, but they had been careful too. They had landed in a backwater and had fortunately only made contact with good, reliable people. They had dealt with them openly and honestly and had only gradually widened their circle of confidants when necessary. Moreover they had “rewarded” those who kept their secrets with the gift of excellent healthcare and employment. People like David who had a background in security they had generally steered clear of, and David would never have known anything had it not been for the crash.

  But while the Leinians had been lucky and careful, it still wasn’t enough. Their circle of confidants had grown so large that sooner or later it had to spring a leak.

  David was determined not to be that leak.

  He’d been careful with Cyrea, making sure he hadn’t asked all of the questions he wanted to. Not because he didn’t want to know, because of course he did. But he also didn’t want to compromise either her or himself. Having been in the secrets game for so long he had a fair idea of what she could and couldn’t tell him, and more importantly, what she shouldn’t. All he really knew about her work was that she and most of the other security people were there to observe the researchers, keep them safe and make sure the researchers didn’t breach any of the conditions that had been placed upon them. Things like making official contact with the Earth’s governments, or spying on its citizens for example.

  This group she told him, had become particularly lax, which was why she had been called in from home. She was simply the latest in a string of extra officers who had been brought in to beef up the security of the party. It wasn’t just the fact that they were breaching protocol, it was the frequency with which they did it, and the way that they abused even those permits that they had.

  Making contact with individuals was often considered acceptable for research parties if the proper safeguards were maintained. However, these researchers had gone beyond the normal one or two that might be contacted. Way beyond. Then there were the unauthorized flights, as they almost routinely seemed to want to fly over major cities, despite the risk of being seen. They had also begun spying on individuals, namely him, which had already earned some of them another wrap over the knuckles. Worse still, they had brought in advanced medical care for too many of their contacts. Far too many. One or two miracle recoveries were acceptable. But when lots of people in the region started recovering from incurable ailments or living longer than the norm, that was something else. It would be noticed.

  Sooner or later if they weren’t both lucky and careful Cyrea told him, they were going to get found out and while the party could leave, those they had made contact with would have to stay and deal with the authorities. And then maybe the press and agents from other governments. It was a sobering thought for David, who had a better idea of what might lie in store for them than Cyrea.

  He’d asked her if they could perhaps take the others with them when they left. All things considered, he thought it might be for the best and she’d happily agreed which surprised him. It was a big thing to take so many refugees, surely, and for a single low ranked security officer to agree to it so easily seemed above her pay grade. Then again maybe they’d already made that decision long before he asked. Or maybe it was just what they would do naturally. It wasn’t impossible. But they both knew that most of the locals wouldn’t go even if offered the chance. It was a difficult and terrible thing to leave your home and everyone and everything you knew for the great unknown. Most would stay and risk it no matter how much they liked their visitors, believing that the law would protect them. Maybe a little too much of the Leinians' idealism had rubbed off on them over the years.

  Cyrea had also told him about the researchers’ work and about their time on Earth.

  The Leinians were doing exactly what Alice had told him that first day. They were studying the Earth and humanity, preparing for the day when mankind finally arrived in space. They had to be ready. As such there were two key questions they had to answer. How far was humanity away from space flight? And how would they react to other races?

  The Leinians had every technological edge at their disposal and they used them. They could intercept all communications across the planet, and were able interpret most of them, which was a nightmare for him. Cyrea had promised him again and again that whatever military top secret codes they might have found or cracked, that that information would stay with the ship and not the crew. That sort of knowledge was a no no for the party, just in case one of them ever got caught. It could ruin lives, destroy the balance of power, maybe even start a nuclear war and they understood that much at least. So far the scientists at least had respected that rule. Mainly out of fear of the penalties he suspected. They couldn’t really accept the concept of nuclear warfare.

  That their scientists could be so naive was a comforting thought for David as was Cyrea’s belief that the scientists were actually following the ethical guidelines and laws, and also being properly policed. Mostly. It was completely different to that of the world he knew where scientists seemed to do pretty much as they wanted, while rules and ethics were considered as and when the scientists felt like it. It was just another of those things that kept reminding him that these people really weren’t human. But then so did many of the issues that had caused them alarm. Things that humans generally took for granted.

  Despite their huge technological advantages it hadn’t been an easy study, and as a result a five year mission was looking like becoming ten. If they lasted that long. They’d had several huge setbacks from the very beginning. The first and strangest was when they had first heard about UFOs and alien abductions.

  The first few times they’d heard about them the party had been worried, thinking that their craft were somehow being spotted despite their extensive camouflage. After all many of them were saucer shaped. But when they finally managed to track the sightings down to times and places they discovered their craft had been nowhere nearby. It wasn't them. So they had finally decided it must be local effects such as ball lightning and swamp gas that people were seeing, exactly as the air force had found many years earlier.

  But then the stories of alien abductions had come to their ears, and they had started wondering all over again. There was no way such stories could be explained away so easily. Instead they’d started working on the hypothesis that there was another race on Earth, one that looked nothing like any people they knew of according to the descriptions. They’d termed them ‘the others’ and immediately started searching. It was a big thing. Another space going race in the galaxy that they’d never met. That didn’t happen every day.

  Immediately they’d launched a major investigation that had lasted nearly their entire first year. When they should have been studying humanity they had searched the skies for other craft, examined the stories in incredible detail, filtered out any common elements and then rigorously assessed them.

  It had become a work of increasing paranoia, as the less they found the more it convinced them that these other visitors were incredibly secretive. More and more of their energies began to be sucked up in the search for the others, until everything else was being neglected. Nearly a year had passed before someone finally reached the conclusion that the reason they couldn’t find anyone was that there was actually no one else out there. David could have told them that on the first day. Of course the day before that he wouldn’t have believed there were any aliens on Earth at all.

  In their second year the biologists who had finally been free to work again on something more productive than mythical aliens, started making discoveries that left them speechless. After having initially found that human and Leinian organ systems were stunningly similar and that they performed the same functions, the party learned that human metabolisms and their own were almost identical. Many, in fact most medicines that would work on the Leinians would work on humans and vice versa. That was unheard of among the alien races.

  So it turned out tha
t David could have used the antibiotics on Cyrea that first day, as well as some of the other medicines he kept in his emergency kit which would have perhaps helped her to heal more quickly. Not that she was complaining. Similarly, they could eat the same foods, mostly, though fish was a no no for Leinians. With too much protein and the omega 3 oils, it didn’t digest well, giving them gas and diarrhoea. The two races could even engage in sexual relations, though nobody had ever thought that it would happen. After all, the humans were distinctly bald and clumsy. Again, the work of the social scientists was neglected as the biologists demanded all the time and resources.

  The computer technologists started to dominate in the third year, as they started to assess the capabilities of the Earth’s computer industry, and became awed. Despite their huge technological advantages, the Earth’s microchip industries were almost on a par with their own, and improving at an ever accelerating pace. A dozen of the most modern home computers could have controlled their star ship, if they’d been used correctly. But thanks to the consumer demand, the machines were used largely for gaming, something their scientists found unbelievable. The incredible computational power of the human computer chip was simply being wasted on peripheral graphics. The flasher graphics cards themselves had massive computer chips of their own, something that appalled them. Waste piled on waste.

  Despite that, before they left the technologists were planning on buying a truck load of the latest generation chips and re-engineering them. There was every reason to believe they would actually surpass Leinian computer processors by then, and when properly used, would help to improve their own society. Also, the speed with which the industry was developing almost ensured that even afterwards they would still keep coming back and buying them. Though as Cyrea had pointed out at great pain, it wouldn’t be theft. When the humans finally arrived in space, the Leinians would give them full credit for the technology they had developed. Plus, for the moment they were buying them anyway with gold, thereby supporting the local community. Which explained why the local computer shop was now looking so flash.

  So it had continued as group after group within the party had discovered things about the humans that had never before been found anywhere else. Things that rocked their understanding of life and evolution. The physicists early on had learned of Einstein’s theory of relativity and the subsequent theoretical work that had been based on it, and immediately dismissed the Earth’s potential for space travel within the foreseeable future. For, as long as they considered space and time malleable, and somehow dependent upon velocity and gravity, the humans would be stuck on Earth. They needed a whole new mindset. Or rather an old one. Thus the party had thought that at least one of their questions was answered.

  Then the internet had intruded on their smugness and they discovered that many other physicists had moved away from that paradigm. There were some physicists who still believed strongly in a Newtonian universe, old hat as it might be, and spent their time trying to explain the results in those terms. While they too were off the mark, still, some of their speculations were much closer to the truth. Space flight for humanity could be either a few years away, or a few centuries, depending.

  Finally the sociologists had had their chance. Pushed into the background for three, nearly four long years, forced into doing much of their research from their home world based on the transmissions the ship sent them, they were rearing to go. Intensive interviews with the locals, detailed survey work, exhaustive comparative cultural analysis - they were prepared for it. But barely had they begun to take their bite of the cherry when they suddenly discovered that they had no idea where they stood.

  The humans would not fit any models that they could explain. They were neither logical nor irrational. Neither communal nor individualistic. They both loved and hated their own people. For some a simple shade of skin colour was enough to cause absolute detestation; for others race was nothing at all. For some religion was the definition of difference and intolerance. For others it was the reason for inclusion and understanding. Politics, history and sex were also confusing dimensions.

  The sociologists had spent their first three years simply being shoved into the background by the others, and then, when they finally had their chance, they found that they knew less than they thought. Their best guess was that at present, the humans were unable to become part of the Interstellar Community or be given any advanced technology. Some countries would launch a war to stop it, while others would retreat into complete denial of the presence of other worlds, other life forms. More would choose to openly welcome the Leinians, while covertly trying to steal every technology they could. But that was as a race. As individuals, they were much more tolerant.

  Many individual humans, perhaps even the entire race as individuals, could all adapt very easily and well to life among others. They had an incredible ability to accept new things, to grow, adapt and learn. Perhaps that trait would be their most useful in the years to come. But coupled with it was the way they managed to throw that same tolerance away the moment they became a tribe. It was then that prejudice raised its ugly head. Intolerance, bigotry, paranoia, suspicion, mistrust; all seemed to be almost non-existent in most individuals, and overwhelming in groups.

  For the first time in all their years of study of new races the Leinians were actually stumped. But they had a job to do. They had to work out how to deal with humanity when they arrived in space. Somehow. And so they were considering a cadet programme, with humans being brought aboard in small groups to acquire the skills needed to live peacefully among the other races, and to bring them back to Earth. It was something that had never been tried before, and if they ever did do it, it would be decades or centuries away. But they also feared that if they didn’t, the humans would arrive by themselves, and that could well lead to disaster.

  To that end hundreds more locals had been contacted and brought into the fold, and the results to date had been a spectacular success, if a security nightmare for Cyrea and her bosses. Not one local out of that number had so much as dreamed of either contacting the authorities or attacking them. And as for prejudice or fear, they’d found nothing. Thus far the most extreme reaction they’d had was from Mrs. Stenson, another of his neighbours, who’d discovered a whole new allergy. She was allergic to Leinians. But then she was allergic to most animals, bee stings and an awful lot of food groups as well, and their doctors had been successful in desensitising her.

  Their findings might have shocked the Leinians but David found he could understand them perfectly. People, on their own were usually much more reasonable than you would expect. Religious bigots would happily chat with those they called sinners, white racists would work with black men and Jews. Even gang members on their own were generally okay. Put them in two’s and three’s and things often started to slide, as a few felt they had to show off to each other. In small groups one always had to dominate and it was about then that people not part of the group became rivals and outsiders instead of simply other people.

  But it was when they formed larger groups that the problems really began. It was as though the one or two bad seeds somehow managed to sway the rest, overcoming the moderates’ views and pushing the extremist positions. He had seen it too many times. One powerful bad egg whether a bigot or a bully, somehow managed to sway the rest to his views. Throw in some religion a dash of politics and some good old-fashioned racism, and things went downhill rapidly from there.

  Personally David liked the idea of a cadet programme. It seemed an intelligent way to approach the problem. But he could also see it having its own complications, as he’d told Cyrea sadly. Not the least of which was that the cadets themselves, once they were identified, would start to be considered as an outside group themselves. Sooner or later the prejudice, bigotry, fear and intolerance would apply to them as well. Better he told her, to remove all the decent people in small family groups that they could, and never let the rest leave at all.

  Suggesting such a thing
was almost a betrayal of his own people, but it was also true. Let those that could adapt and live among them do so, and then when that exodus was complete, and if they thought it wise, use the society that they created as a template to change the Earth. To reshape it into a truly interstellar society. Not piecemeal, but in one continuing drive until even the most recalcitrant were persuaded.

  Human beings were fine but human society was a nightmare. If humanity was to live at peace among the stars their society would have to be broken down to the bare bones, and then carefully rebuilt from the ground up. And unfortunately, it wasn’t just some people who would have to go through the transformation. It was all of them.

  If the religiously intolerant would have to discover tolerance, the prejudiced learn equality, and tyrants learn humility, the capitalists would also have to be reined in. Exploitation of others couldn’t be allowed. Greed might have its place on Earth, but among the stars it would have to be service to society that dominated humanity’s new way of life. Democracy too was a fine system of government, but it needed fixing. When political parties started owning it and preventing other voices from being heard, that too was unacceptable. It couldn’t be allowed to be accepted by only a few countries either. Everybody had to have the same right to be heard. Men, women and aliens.