I didn't like his weird smile, as if human muscles couldn't quite frame alien intent. “Are you really so sure? To paraphrase a famous science fiction author, Any sufficiently advanced sentience is indistinguishable from God.'” I gulped and had another cold drink. But my insides were colder than the icy mug. Where was this leading? Here on Earth, we step on ants or use pesticides to exterminate them.
He went on. “You digress. One of my own—interests, shall we agree to call it?—is attempting to enhance communication with your species by methods not usually attempted, to access data channels that you possess, but which you do not recognize except in the most primitive form. Uplifting you, so to speak.” I smiled at the sci-fi reference, but didn't respond. “In this case it is music.” He handed me the latest version of a smartphone, complete with foldout screen and retractable earpods. “Put these on and listen, please."
I did so. He touched the screen, which unfolded, a recognizable video source image popping up on it. I could hear his voice over/through the earpods, “This is from 1998, a group called Blues Traveler. Listen and then tell me how you feel."
I smiled when I heard John Popper's fabulous harmonica playing and plaintive singing voice. Back in that day, his “Runaround” had been one of my favorites. I felt an old familiar tingle as Popper's manic instrumental solo kicked in, repeating and repeating the haunting bridge chords and refrain. A surefire way to stir up memories! When the video ended, I smiled and said, “Great, just great."
The alien cowboy frowned, nodded, and pressed the screen again. “Listen to all this playlist,” he said. “You don't have to speak afterwards; I am monitoring all of your physiological and neurological responses. They tell me more than you would know. What I want, need, to understand."
I really enjoyed listening and watching music videos over the next hour; this cowboy alien had picked out some favorite tunes from my early childhood, including some that my parents and grandparents used to play on old vinyl records. A lot of mostly good newer stuff, too.
The list continued with “San Antonio Rose,” a welcome and familiar melody followed quickly by “Don't Fear the Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult, then the Doors’ “Light My Fire,” the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up,” some Beach Boy hits, a militant Leroy Anderson instrumental piece called “The Phantom Regiment,” a Hank Williams tune, and several old Johnny Mercer hits, including “The Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” all interspersed with excerpts of classical music I didn't recognize, but whose names I read on the video screen: Beethoven, Bach, Haydn, Wagner, Mahler; followed by others, pop, technopop, metal, ska, conjunto and more.
Suddenly, the music stopped and I was back in the world of the Alamo and the alien. I had been guzzling Ziegenbach and munching nachos the whole time and felt pretty good by now. “So what's the verdict, Master?” I bowed smartly in his direction across the café table. “Do I pass this Turning Test, or am I only fit for dinner?” I noticed that even aliens wince at bad puns.
Under the wide brim of the white hat, his gaze was that of an ancient wise one. “Grasshopper,” he answered, using the same cultural reference, “did you understand the meanings of the messages in the panoply of music that you just heard? The overall theme, as it were? Any inkling of the coherent content, the insights, displayed by these structured vibrations?"
"Vibrations? I did like the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations.’ I really felt that one, if that's what you mean.” I stayed puzzled. Some of the tunes had been momentary favorites during parts of my life, usually associated with some romantic interlude or personal stress. But I had never felt I could communicate with aliens after hearing them.
"I see,” he said, glancing at the smartphone screen. “You have provided much data of interest. I had rather hoped that you might be one of the evolving Sensitives that some of us feel will develop from your species, ones with whom we can communicate more fully.” Frowning, he tapped the touchscreen. “But though the music touched you at times, you unfortunately are not progressed enough."
"So the music wasn't uplifting enough? Now what?” I asked. “Do I look at a little red light and you wipe my memory, make me forget all of this? I mean, an alien at the Alamo, a cowboy from the stars? Who would believe?"
He recoiled as if I had spat upon him. “There is no reason for me to do such an uncultured thing. Go tell everyone. Few will believe you. Of those who do, maybe some will be candidates for further testing."
I went on, “So, our deal was, I can ask you any question, and you will answer?"
"Seems fair enough, pard'ner,” he said, downing another brew. “You answered all mine, and more."
I had turned on the voice recorder of my own smartphone when we sat down. Hoping all of this conversation would withstand any unseen alien erasing technology, I asked anxiously, “Where do you come from? And how?"
He smiled, the not-quite-human-keyness much evident in the musculature. “From all over; out there in the sky are googols of stars and other sentience-inducing environments, plus an infinitude of alternities, truly countless intelligent species, more multiplanetary civilizations than there are grains of sand on all of Earth's beaches. We originate from planets, from gas clouds, from electrical fields, from various potentialities, from other dimensions, from different parts of the time/space continuum. And other places that are not really places at all.
"How do we get here? Some have always been here.” Now that surprised me. But he didn't stop there. “None come by physical space ships—entirely too primitive. Some arrive’ by what you might call quantum displacement, others by spacewarps, and others by simply, er, coalescing certain eigenverses, you might say.
"And we are here in the tens of millions."
I had always suspected as much. I gulped again and asked, “Are all of these species more intelligent than humans?"
His voice was very cool, distant, pedantic. “Put yourself in that ant's place and ask the question."
My many beers had somewhat prepared me for that answer, prepping me for a kind of intergalactic bar fight. I said loudly, challenging, “But with all this knowledge, all this intelligence, why haven't you shown yourselves?"
He didn't smile. “You don't pay attention. Our—what you call vehicles’ or craft’ but are actually not for travel at all, but for—you wouldn't understand, couldn't know—they are seen in your Earthly skies and seas all the time. Those who see and report them are called kooks,’ but we don't care if we are seen or not, or what the witnesses are called. It is of no interest."
I was adamant, defiant. “So what are you doing here?” I hoped the voice recorder was catching all of this. It did, as everyone has since heard.
His emotional reaction was very human. “Do?” he snorted, “We don't do; we are. We have always been involved in precisely the activities on Earth that we wish, interacting with only those humans we choose, if we choose, as we choose. Most of the interactivities would have absolutely no meaning for any of you. Though some of us do wish to communicate more completely with you, to share more than you are able to accept now. We influenced one of your famous motion picture productions to show music as an advanced form of communication, to no avail. And even though you yourself have shown some small improvements, our musical interventions have not yet accomplished sufficient enhancement. But we will keep on with its development."
Sensing an alien impatience, I saved the big question for the last. “One final question: why don't you land on the White House lawn? Why don't you reveal yourselves to the whole world, once and for all?"
He rose from the table as if to leave, but turned to me, his gaze from under the white cowboy hat more frigid than the icy pitcher. “My dear fellow,” he said in quite an upper class British accent, totally at odds with his cowboy persona, “didn't you understand me? We are all doing exactly what we desire to do.
"I will repeat: every single alien’ individual and group mind and collective on Earth is extremely intelligent, beyond the dreams of Earthlings.
"So exactly why would intelligent beings ever want to talk to a government?"
Copyright © 2010 Arlan Andrews
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Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME
Our November issue features something a bit unusual: “Phantom Sense,” a powerful novella by Richard A. Lovett and Mark Niemann-Ross, and a companion science fact article by the same authors about the real science and technology at the core of the story. Science fiction has often explored the consequences of people having capabilities far beyond those of most of us, but what if those abilities can be conferred by technology—and that technology is only available to a few? “Phantom Sense” will put you into the mind of a man with a complex of such abilities that is almost at our fingertips right now, and has potentials both exhilarating and terrifying. But the real problems lie in how the man who has those capabilities can relate to those who don't....
We'll also have a variety of stories by authors both familiar and new, including Allen M. Steele, Carl Frederick, Michael A. Armstrong, and one or two whose names you probably don't know yet but soon will.
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Novelette: NEVER SAW IT COMING by Jerry Oltion
Telling people the truth is easy. Getting them to hear it is another matter!
On March 2, 2009 an asteroid the size of a football field flew past Earth close enough to scare the pants off anybody who was paying attention. If it had hit, the impact would have created a blast equivalent to the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Amateur astronomers worldwide were disappointed. Not because they wanted to witness the impact, although a few undoubtedly did, but because the asteroid had been discovered two days before its passage, yet word hadn't gotten out in time for anyone to set up their telescopes and look at it. Worse, they learned after the fact; the news had been deliberately suppressed so it wouldn't cause a panic, even after the few astronomers who knew about it had calculated its orbit and confirmed it would miss the Earth.
When Craig Hendrickson learned about that, he set up the Near Earth Asteroid Reporting Database, or NEARD. People laughed at the acronym, but that didn't bother him. As long as the right people used it—and yes, most of those people were nerds—then he would be happy.
The idea was to give amateur astronomers like himself a place to post their observations of short-notice phenomena so others could confirm their sightings and share the joy of watching a normally invisible piece of the solar system drift by close enough to see. Craig rigged up an e-mail alert system so people didn't have to check the site every few hours, and he added a Twitter feed so people already in the field could get tweets on their cell phones to notify them of new targets to observe that same night. He publicized it on the Cloudy Nights astronomy forum, and a few months later Astronomy and Sky & Telescope magazines ran short articles on it.
There were the inevitable naysayers who condemned his effort as an irresponsible act sure to ignite a global panic the first time someone posted an unchecked observation, but Craig countered them by putting a prominent notice on the front page of the NEARD web site: “The observations reported on this site are preliminary, and speculation on any object's path is just that—speculation—until confirmed by several independent observers.” That was too many characters for a tweet, so he shortened it to simply “Spec Alert” in the Twitter announcement.
Near Earth asteroids are relatively rare. Craig didn't expect the system to be used more than once or twice a year, if that. For the first year it was pretty much as he'd expected: two posts, one for an object that turned out to be a known comet and one for something nobody else, not even the person who reported it, could find again. So Craig was surprised when he discovered his own asteroid just a few months into the second year while searching for the last remnant of Comet Murray as it dropped toward the Sun.
It wasn't as much a coincidence as it might have been. With the economy in the toilet for the third straight year—now officially a depression—Craig's job had evaporated along with most of the country's wealth. He was “between girlfriends” in pretty much the same way he'd been “between jobs” for the last eight months or so. He had plenty of time to spend outdoors with his telescope, and no worries about keeping anybody up at home or having to get up early himself for work. Even better: he had discovered that time spent under the stars was time not spent worrying about his future. The joy of simply looking at the cosmos overrode all other concerns. So he spent hours simply scanning the sky with his telescope, and he had become pretty good at recognizing what he saw.
It was a warm night in early May, one of the first shirtsleeve nights of the season. Craig was in his driveway, cursing the neighbor's porch light as he always did when he set up his scope at home. He hadn't intended this to be a major night out, since the Moon was coming up in an hour and a half, so he hadn't bothered to go to any of his more dark-friendly sites. Just a quick look before the Moon rose and ruined the sky even worse than the city lights. He hadn't even gotten out his big telescope. He was using his six-inch Dobsonian, the one he called the “yard cannon” because it was just about the size of a portable artillery piece and you aimed it pretty much the same way.
Taurus and Orion had already set. Craig was hunting around near M35, the open cluster at the right foot of Gemini, for the comet when he found a relatively bright star that wasn't on his finder chart. At first he didn't think much of it, since M35 was full of stars; then he began comparing this one to what was on the chart and realized that the unknown star was at least a magnitude brighter than the chart's lower limit. It should have been listed.
He checked its position carefully against the surrounding stars and drew it in on his chart. Then he went inside and posted it on the NEARD web site. His tweet simply said, “Found new object in M35. What is it?"
It takes three observations spaced out over time to calculate an orbit. The NEARD alert ensured plenty of observations, but there wasn't much anybody could do for time, especially since the object was barely moving against the stellar background. That meant it would be several days before it moved enough to get even a rough idea of its path through the solar system.
That didn't stop people from speculating. One possible explanation for its slow apparent motion was that it was coming straight at Earth, and since that was clearly the most exciting possibility, that's the one people latched onto. The internet was soon abuzz with doomsday descriptions of how bad the damage would be when it hit. Apparently it gave people something besides the depression to worry about.
And Craig Hendrickson's name was on the original post. Worse, his “Spec Alert” notice at the head of the Twitter announcement had been misunderstood as “Special Alert,” which added yet more artificial urgency to the whole business. He found himself inundated with emails and phone calls from journalists all over the world, all with the same question: How long do we have to live?
"Look,” he told them, “we don't know where it's headed. It could be moving away from us. But even if it's not, the odds of it hitting Earth are almost zero."
On the news feeds, that translated to: “Discoverer unsure where it will hit!” Craig's phone began ringing practically nonstop after that, and his email inbox filled up faster than he could read it.
He spot-checked what he could. At least half of it was forwards of his original NEARD announcement, the disclaimer conveniently snipped off, with several added posts building toward the inevitable “WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!"
Late on the third night after he'd made his discovery, Craig stared at his inbox, watching the “percent full” bar inch upward pixel by pixel. His cell phone added its low-battery warning to the incessant ring.
He navigated to the NEARD site, opened up a text window, and wrote, “YOU'RE ALL A BUNCH OF IDIOTS.” Then he deleted that, took a deep breath, and began writing a reassuring post, explaining how unlikely an asteroid strike really was and how the fact that there was any apparent motion at all meant that this
one was definitely not aimed at the Earth. “Close, maybe,” he wrote, “but close only counts in horseshoes. There is absolutely no chance that this thing will hit us."
He imagined all the nit-pickers out there who would pounce on that statement, so he amended it to read “...absolutely no chance that this thing will hit us on this pass. It will glide around the Sun, just like it's probably been doing for millions of years, and it will head back into the outer solar system. By the time it crosses Earth's orbit again we'll have its trajectory figured down to the gnat's whisker, and if it comes anywhere close to Earth on the way out, I'll eat my telescope."
He read it over twice. He thought he'd stated the facts pretty clearly. He hit “send” and turned off his computer. Then he turned off his cell phone, plugged it in to charge, and went to bed.
He woke to pounding on the front door. Bright moonlight washed in through his bedroom window. From the angle, it was about 4:30 in the morning. Craig staggered out of bed and pulled on his robe and trudged to the door.
When he opened it, a spotlight far brighter than the Moon glared straight into his eyes. His astronomer's reflexes kicked in and he threw his left arm over his eyes to protect his night vision, simultaneously shouting, “Turn off the fucking light!"
It didn't go off. Instead, a resonant female made-for-TV voice said, “We're here at the home of Craig Hendrickson, discoverer of the asteroid that is poised to destroy the Earth in a scant six months’ time. Mr. Hendrickson, can you tell us how it feels to be the harbinger of doom for our entire planet?” She pronounced it “Harbin-grr,” like a dog might.
He lowered his arm and squinted into the spotlight. There was a TV van parked in front of his house. A shadowy bulk below the spotlight must have been the camera and its operator. To the right of it stood Andrea LeTour, the local news station's morning newscaster. Her bleach-blonde hair looked salon-perfect, as did her makeup. Craig had always thought she looked pretty hot on TV, but in person she looked like a plastic mannequin.
Analog SFF, October 2010 Page 15