by Neil Clarke
Clarkesworld Magazine
Issue 117
Table of Contents
And Then, One Day, the Air was Full of Voices
by Margaret Ronald
Things With Beards
by Sam J. Miller
.identity
by E. Catherine Tobler
The Snow of Jinyang
by Zhang Ran
The Promise of God
by Michael Flynn
Pathways
by Nancy Kress
The Science Fiction Future of the Microbiome
by Matthew Simmons
The 'Quarter Turn' of History: A Conversation with Guy Gavriel Kay
by Chris Urie
Another Word: Publishing—Jump In, the Water's Fine
by Alethea Kontis
Editor's Desk: In My Own Way
by Neil Clarke
XTC
Art by Vincent LAÏK
© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2016
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com
And Then, One Day, the Air was Full of Voices
Margaret Ronald
It’s near the end of the first day of the conference when Randall shows up. I’m in the middle of the “End of a Zeitgeist” panel, waiting for one of the other panelists to wind up an interminable digression about SETI, when I see him at the back of the room, checking his glass. I meet his eyes, just long enough to acknowledge that he’s there, and he nods. He’s wearing a badge; he must have paid the money for a one-day pass, even though he can’t stand Coronal academics and the fringe element even less. Got enough of one from me, and enough of the other from Wallace, I’d guess.
The other panelist—I’ve forgotten his name—isn’t winding up, and because he’s remoting in he doesn’t notice the moderator casting irritated glances at him. “The mistake we’ve always made, it seems to me, is that we have always assumed that communication must be the same no matter whether human or xenosapient. The Corona Borealis informational space proved the exact opposite.”
“That isn’t exactly true,” I interrupt. The panelist blinks; he must have assumed that I was zoning out. Safe assumption, these days. “The actual transmissions found in Coronal infospace are remarkably similar to what you’d find in a thirty-year slice of human broadcast media—in fact, what we find in most recorded communication: lists, transactions, announcements, stories. The context is different, but the content is similar. It was the method that was opaque.”
He splutters, ready to argue. But the moderator’s still young enough to be nostalgic, and she doesn’t like him any more than I do. “Speaking of opacity, Dr. Kostia, it’s really been your metaphor that’s driven most of our understanding of Coronal transmissions. Would you care to recapitulate it?”
I glance at Randall and decide against drawing it out. “You’ve got to leave me something for the closing keynote,” I say, and get a chuckle from somewhere in the audience. “It’s a story for another time.”
Wrong choice of words. I can see that in the faces of the front row. The stories have all been told. The stories are all gone now.
“Imagine a man in a bright room,” I say. It’s two days later, I’m giving the ending keynote, and bright room is a little too on-the-nose for where I am currently standing. I can barely see the edge of the stage past the lights, and I can only assume my images are up on the screens. “He wanders around the room, calling out, and wonders why there is no answer from outside. On that basis, he assumes that outside must be empty.”
Randall isn’t here. I hope he’s home, with Brendan and the girls. I hope he’s had the sense to ignore all of this. I know I don’t have to hope, because Randall has always been the quietly sensible one of us, the one who empathized and cared and knew that the best thing to do was to steer his own ship. The Coronals had heroes like him, I know.
My breath catches in my throat. “Imagine that man,” I say again, and swallow. “And then, imagine his realization that if he stands close to the glass of his walls, blocking the glare of his lights, he can see through them. And there is someone on the other side, waving.”
Randall waits for me to make my way to him through the departing audience. “Hello, Randall,” I say, and reach out for a hug.
He pulls me in, almost off my feet. “Hi, Ma.” It feels like hugging a cinderblock in a sweater.
“Oof. Give me my ribs back, won’t you? How’s Brendan? How are the girls?”
“He’s fine. Sinny made a picture for you—I should have brought it, I wasn’t thinking.” He shoves both hands in his pockets, checks his glass again. “Ma, have you heard from Wally at all?”
“I’m rarely in touch with Wallace,” I say breezily, and it doesn’t even begin to mask the sting. “I’d hoped we’d see him at Thanksgiving this year.”
“Yeah, that’s—I’d hoped so too, but he’s . . . ” He raises both hands as if to offer me something, then lowers them. “You know he’s with one of the—these groups.” He nods to some of the one-day attendees, two wearing carefully reconstructed Coronal jewelry, one with her ears pinned forward in what some idiot has claimed must be some resemblance to the Coronal cranial shape. There are always a few at any conference, but these are as hollow-eyed as the rest of us, their hope as extinguished as the empty lanterns some carry (a reference to a Coronal song cycle, and likely mistranslated). “Like the ones he was with in high school. And college.”
I take a long, slow breath and let it out. College was news to me; I thought he’d gotten away from the cults when he left high school. “You think I’m likely to see him here? That’d be lovely. I mean it; I’d love to see him before November.”
“No, I mean—not like the dress-up-and-sing-songs people. The group he’s with sounds, well, kind of scary-intense.” He lowers his voice. “Ma, he asked me if I had any access to Granma’s old cloud. I mean, I get descendant-right requests all the time, but they’re all from, you know.” He nods to the girls and to the man behind them holding a mandala-patterned banner. I think of Virginia and Denmark, and shiver. “And if he’s asking me, it has to be something that he doesn’t have first full descendant-right to, so it’s probably one of the ones Granma shut off from immediate request. Like the, the original Coronal code.”
I do the thing with the breath again. “That’s . . . not good.”
“Even if it’s nothing, I think—he sounded down, Ma. Real depressed, like back in high school. And I think about the, the news out of Virginia—”
“Hush.” I put my fingertips to his lips. The room’s emptied out, but more people will be coming in shortly, and right now no one wants to think about mass suicides. The fringe because they want to distinguish themselves from that level of crazy; the academics because we’re guiltily aware we’ve contributed to it. “You really think he might?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been able to tell, with him.” Poor sensible Randall, beset on either side by the Coronals. “I know you can, though.”
To my shame, I think seriously about telling him I can’t go. It’s the middle of the conference, after all, and I have two more panels in the next couple of days, never mind the closing keynote. And it’s not like this conference will be happening again. “Where is he?” I finally ask.
“On the coast.” I feel my glass twitch with the information he’s sent over. “It’s about a day’s drive. I’d go, but you know he doesn’t listen to me. Well, he listens, but it’s not like he lets it make a difference.”
I can make it there and back before the closing keynote. Assuming nothing goes wrong. Assuming it’s not too late already. “Come on. Help me check my car back out.”
“For those of you who were around for the initial signal—that’s,
what, half of us?—you remember how much of a shift it was. Here we were, going along in our bright room, and suddenly this signal from ADS 9731 in Corona Borealis starts rewriting an entire high performance computing center.” I’ve told the story about that day so many times, and I’m suddenly tired of telling it. It’s the embellished version, anyway; I mostly knew something was up because the power went out in the base and I couldn’t play Puppy Duel on my dad’s tablet until it recharged. But the story made a good introduction, and I could still remember Mom’s face when she came out of lockdown.
“Danforth and Rajasthani were the first ones who realized that the initial signal wasn’t an attack. It was, and is, the closest thing we have to semisapient code. When the signal came in contact—and by which I mean when it was recorded, replayed, and analyzed in an appropriately complex context—it did exactly what it was supposed to do. It changed our world, though that was really more of a side effect.”
Someone laughs, nervously. I ignore it. “What it did was to rewrite its surroundings—the computing center—and turn it into a receiver for Coronal infospace.” And then go dormant, for which my mother was grateful every day of her life. The signal in its dormant form was usable, understandable, replicable to the point that just about anyone could make their own access to infospace—and it didn’t go trying to rewrite anything. Mom once told me that some idiot had attempted to encode the Coronal signal into human DNA to see if it would perceive that as an informational context. Lucky for us all, either the semisapient code deemed it not complex enough or detected significant harm done in potential rewrite, so it just fizzled. But it gave her, and then me, nightmares.
“There was one metaphor—I’m glad it wasn’t mine—that it was like giving a radio to a ‘savage.’ Strip away the racism, and there’s a grain of truth: because we had never known about infospace, we’d assumed there was nothing to hear. But now we switch that radio on, and we find that what was silence is now chatter. The air is full of voices. Strange voices, from four hundred light-years away.”
They’ve heard this before. Those voices are why they are here.
“Incomprehensible voices, mind you. Do any of you remember those first few translations? I think someone set them to a dance remix when I was in junior high. But the second genius of the initial transmission was that it didn’t just convert itself into an infospace receiver; it made itself a translator for whatever linguistic context it was in. All of the Coronal communications—all of the drama, news, bulletins, pleas, shopping lists, everything that went out into their infospace—was so much clearer when viewed through multiple translations.
“With every language I learned, I was able to focus my understanding of Coronal broadcasts, get a better sense of their original meaning. I would imagine the same holds true for most of us in this room. For decades, we have had the entire infospace of an alien civilization to investigate. And look at all the things we found!”
I hold up the program, read a few names of papers. It’s a cheap trick, meant to make people feel as if their work hasn’t been for naught. I’d planned to say more about the smaller discoveries, the paths that Coronal Studies have made, as if I were pleading before the university trustees again not to disband the department. I don’t have it in me, now. My joints hurt from travel; my throat from shouting, even now; my eyes just hurt. I drop the program, and it slides off the stage. Somewhere behind me, I can almost hear the conference organizers frowning.
“And yet there’s so much we don’t know.” And won’t, now. “We do not know what it means that so many of their family sagas ended mid-childbirth scene. Nor why their military might was measured in what translated to most Earth languages as moons. I personally have always wondered why in the Interleaf broadcast, the speaker repeats You are my taste, my tongue, my scenting organ. It obviously meant something. But like an inscription in a secondhand book, that meaning is lost.”
So much of what I’ve had from my second son has been secondhand. So much lost.
Randall apologizes again for not bringing Sinny’s drawing, asks what I’m going to do now that the department is closing. I haven’t told him my real plans. I think once he finds out, he’ll be just as worried about me on some level as he is about Wallace. We make our way out, through the protests, the crowds, the gawkers, and I give Randall a goodbye kiss.
I start driving up the coast. I used to drive this way with the boys on vacation. And earlier, coming up this way with Mom and Dad, hearing them argue about infospace, whether it could be anything but a hoax, how much work it would take to make such a hoax, why her computing cycles had been co-opted by Danforth and Rajasthani and why was Rajasthani such a bitch anyway. (They were colleagues, not friends.)
This far off the interstates, there are still billboards: Cathedral Mountain Retreat/Divinity Center (with Coronal Meditation removed so recently the shadow of the letters is still there); Legal Advice? You Deserve More; Samaritans—We’re Here to Listen; Apple Picking and Hayride—You Just Missed Us. Book for Family Events! Next Exit! It’s Not Too Late!
If I were on the interstate, I could pull down a screen to block those advertisements from view; as it is, I read each as it goes by. After a while, I make myself spell out alphabets from them, one by one. Another game from those long drives.
I’m doing that breath thing again. It’s not as if I have to psych myself up to say this. It’s nothing new. “About sixteen, seventeen years ago, I noticed something off about Coronal infospace. I didn’t point it out at the time mainly because I thought I was projecting. Coronal communications are so easy to reinterpret to fit the details of whatever the interpreter is concerned with, and right then I was very concerned with death.”
Silence. The organizers are probably in the wings now, trying to figure out whether to cut my mike; I must sound like I’m going confessional. Well, so I am. “Both of my parents were dying at the time, Dad from a slow-escalating kidney failure, Mom from ovarian cancer that threatened to overtake Dad’s timeline. I had doctors’ appointments and hospice preparation and PTA and soccer and meetings and meetings and meetings . . . and whenever I reviewed infospace, I kept seeing the same things.
“The official broadcasts had shifted a little, more reassurance that all was well, that citizens should be aware of their risks, that all was well. It’s just a stomach cramp, don’t worry. No, I don’t need to get it checked out. I’m fine.
“Local transmissions were less sanguine, sometimes directing emergency services, sometimes eliminating entire subjects or regions from their discussions. I don’t want to talk about it. I’m seeing a doctor, and that’s all you need to know.
“Occasionally there would be sudden bursts of frantic activity, calls for help. We’d gotten used to that, but these—there wouldn’t be any follow-up. No answer to those calls. This is a lot to put on you, but here’s what’s happening. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
“The music and art had always been diverse in subject and style, but there seemed to be a melancholic, pensive tone to much of it now. Well, you get to a certain point, and you know there’s fewer days ahead than behind. How does that one poem go, the one about regret?
“Individual communications had always been a very minor subset of the transmissions, but the few I followed seemed to be Coronals reaching out for each other, trying to find each other, holding on. Sit with me here a while. This is nice, isn’t it? I’ve always been so proud of you.”
My eyes are watering. “I was, at the time, very aware that I was reading my parents’ deaths into infospace. I hoped it was just me.”
Half of the conference is on flow; I tune the car’s glass to mine and let presentation after presentation eat the road. “Linguistic Difference in a Cross-Section of the Early Conquest Dramas” derails pretty quickly, assuming that the Conquest Dramas are a purposeful corpus rather than a loose grouping of similar works. I can’t watch the visuals on a road like this—I have to keep watch on the road—but I can imagine the expressions of the atten
dees. “Infospace as Archive? The Purpose of Coronal Transmission” tries to claim that infospace was meant as a sacred repository, rather than what they had available—like assuming we used radio out of worship of a sky-deity.
I pull into a rest stop after the day closes with “Marking Time: Signatures in Coronal Rhythm-Intensive Music,” and none too soon; Coronal music does not translate well, and it’s always made me drowsy. My glass wakes me before dawn, and after I return from a trip to the restrooms the early-morning presentations have begun with “Fear of the Other and Governmental Responses to the Initial Signal.” My bones hurt even more now, and it takes me a couple of minutes to fold myself back into the car, more to make myself eat a breakfast muffin from the vending machines.
I reach the address Randall sent just after noon. The sign used to read COSMIC ILLUMINATION MEDITATION RETREAT, but it’s been papered over poorly with a crude poster of a hand holding a torch. I don’t know which worries me more.
It’s a small cluster of houses, close to the ocean, probably once a little resort before its cosmic phase. There’s a big, bare circle in the middle, not a parking lot as I first think. I get out and see it’s a sand painting, or rather dirt painting, gravel raked into a crosshatch pattern that I recognize. Infospace didn’t have visuals for the most part, but many broadcasts described mandalas like this.
I think of the images from Virginia, the painted mandala on the concrete and the bodies laid out carefully around it, the similar images from Malawi, from Honduras, from Denmark. There are people walking around the houses, some talking expressively, waving their hands; some pumping water; one or two regarding me with curiosity.
I march up to the women at the pump, absently identifying the language they’re speaking as Finnish. “I’m looking for Wallace,” I say. “Estin Wallace.”
One of them has the pinned-ear look; the other is wearing a gauze skirt and blouse, what my mother would have called another goddamn hippie and my father tried to capture in paint. Both of them wear glass, though, and they don’t bristle at my presence. The End of Speech cult, the one that Wallace got involved in when he turned seventeen—they scorned anyone who actually knew Coronal studies instead of “sensing their way through them.”