But when he got a friend to cadge some observatory time to try to spot it, she couldn't see anything. Not that that meant much. Jupiter system was full of junk, and if the monster's orbiter was like NASA's, it could use gravity slingshots to nudge itself all over the place. A touch of thrusters, a close flyby, and where it once was had no bearing on where it was now.
Then Tvashtar erupted and it no longer mattered. Whatever was left of Fido was slag, and so too was its visitor, if it hadn't already gone back to Alpha Centauri. If it had even existed.
* * * *
People who think they've seen aliens or flying saucers fall into two camps: those who obsess forever, and those who eventually go back to their ordinary lives.
For months, Frank obsessed. But that either made him one more wishful-thinking fool—or the idiot who'd made humanity's greatest discovery, only to turn and run when the aliens tried to use Fido's transmitter to say hello. His life was full of other projects, though, and slowly, he resumed them, even if it was likely that nobody would ever again let him drive a rover. But not everything was the same. Pre-Io, Frank hadn't thought much about whether humans were alone. If asked, he'd have said he didn't particularly care. Now, he cared, but nobody was asking.
And yet, in the back of his mind, there lingered the most devastating of questions. What if? What if he'd let the thing establish contact? It either existed or it didn't. If it did, then even if it did wreck the rover by trying to talk to it, simply knowing it was real would have been four hundred and fifty million dollars well spent. If it wasn't real, then there wasn't anything it could actually do to the rover, other than what it did, which was to make Frank panic.
Panic, at least, was something he could work on. When something unexpected happened, he refused to react until he'd thought it through. Professionally, it was still going to take him a long time to live down his reputation as the man who'd killed Fido. But in his personal life, he was startled to find that friends, family, and even grad students soon began turning to him for advice. They didn't want instant answers, he realized. They just wanted him to listen. And listening first was a big piece of what not panicking was about.
Then one day he was in the lab annex, a converted Victorian house on the edge of campus, when he heard a strange scratching. At first, he thought it was in the hallway, but it turned out to be under his window.
Outside was a gadget the size of a kid's radio-operated car—not anything most people would look at twice, especially on a college campus where the engineering students were always holding odd competitions. Once, he'd seen a pair of motorized bathtubs making their way across the Diag, carrying undergrads clad in little but bubbles.
But it floated slightly above the grass, and Frank knew those multifaceted eyes. Oddly, he'd never considered that he might not be the only one thinking about reaction times, orbits, and the desire to explore. Not to mention the files plucked from his computer.
There are lots of things one can say at such moments, but they were all too pompous. At least this time he didn't panic. “Hi,” he said, opening the window. “I'm glad one of us figured it out."
Then he thought about the engineering students and their strange gadgets. Maybe it really had been a hack all along. He leaned out, trying to catch someone ducking out of sight, but he and the new rover were alone.
"Okay,” he said. “I'll take you at face value for the moment. But we're going to have to find a way to verify that you're not from around here."
Nothing happened for several minutes. Frank had played this game before. Apparently, it was his move, but the only thing he knew was that he couldn't lean out the window forever. He stood up, massaging his back and rubbing his neck. When he looked up again, the rover was hovering at eye level, watching him.
He stepped back, and it floated in through the window, moved to his credenza, and settled, without disturbing a single sheet of paper.
"Okay,” he said. “That was a good trick. Pretty convincing, in fact.” He thought for a moment. “I'll call you Felix."
More time passed as he and the rover regarded each other. It was smaller than the one on Io, possibly because Earth's milder environment required less shielding, or possibly because the beefed-up hover field could only lift so much mass.
This time, Frank was determined not to overreact. Even when the phone beeped, he let it go. It was his wife, probably, calling to remind him it was his turn to pick up their daughter after soccer practice. Carefully, he glanced at his watch. Yep. Practice would be over in twenty minutes. One side effect of thinking before acting had been that he'd become a lot less likely to try to squeeze too many errands into too little time, but it would be a while before his family completely trusted him. Today, however, mother and daughter would have to figure something out. That's what cell phones were for.
Cautiously, he pulled his from his pocket, verifying that the call had been from her. Then inspiration struck. He thought a minute, but it was his turn to act. So, still moving cautiously, he opened the cell phone and took a picture of Felix, showing it to the rover. Then, while he was at it, he pushed send, so his wife at least had a hint of what was detaining him.
A couple of minutes later, one of Felix's antennae twitched. Then Frank's cell phone rang again. Frustrated, he looked down, wondering if he should just shut it off. But the call wasn't from his wife. Instead, it appeared to have come from his own number. He accepted it ... and found himself looking at a picture of himself, with the wall of his office behind him.
He showed it to Felix. “Nice job."
More time passed. Then Felix lifted an inch or two off the credenza and floated toward Frank's computer. A foot away, it settled back down and extruded one of those telescoping tentacle-antennae. Its eyes turned toward the computer, and Frank moved closer to see what was going on.
The tentacle moved slowly, letting him see everything it did. It never touched anything, but its tip slowly changed, twisting, morphing, and then hardening into what looked like a very good imitation of a USB plug. Then the rover backed away. Its eyes turned back to Frank, and the tentacle rested limply on the desk.
Frank grinned. He wasn't the only one who'd acted hastily on Io. Nor was he the only one who'd changed his approach. This time the aliens were asking.
He wondered what they'd look like when eventually they chose to reveal themselves. Insect eyes, he suspected, and tentacles, not arms. Possibly some odd means of locomotion, as well, perhaps cilia or something snakelike. Something that didn't lead them to design in terms of wheels and legs. But inside, where it mattered, there was obviously a lot of common ground. Not just the desire to explore, but to communicate scientist to scientist, rather than by governments. The ability to learn from mistakes.
He started to wave toward his computer: Be my guest. But thinking first was becoming a habit. He didn't actually believe there was much risk in letting an alien device into his computer, and from there into the internet. If this was a harbinger of invasion, the thing could have come at night, broken a window, and simply taken what it wanted. Not to mention that if it could ring up his cell phone, who knew what it could pull from WiFi, anywhere on the planet.
But that wasn't really his decision to make, so he and the rover again regarded each other in silence, while Frank turned a new idea over in his mind. There didn't seem to be any real risk, so unhastily, he reached behind his computer and unplugged the broadband cable.
Then, slowly, still without hurry, he stepped backward—even taking time to realize that this time he didn't need to look, because it was his own office and he knew exactly what was behind him.
The rover regarded him for a moment, then pointedly swiveled its eyes toward the cable, now sprawled on the floor. If a bug-eyed monster could nod, he'd have sworn it did. Then, very slowly, it reached for the USB port.
Frank grinned. “I think we're going to get along famously,” he said. The grin spread. “But I'd better call my wife. I think I'm going to be really late for soccer prac
tice."
Copyright (c) 2008 Richard A. Lovett
* * * *
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Short Story: MEA CULPA by Stephen L. Burns
Ever wonder where inspiration comes from?
Dear Span,
It's said that confession is good for the soul. I suppose it can be if it buys a loosening of the thumbscrews, and besides, the Winfrey Commission is circling my carcass like a shark scoping out a hapless swimmer and trying to decide whether it's in the mood for white meat or dark. So I figured I should write my favorite magazine editor and give him a heads-up before mine gets taken off.
Mention of Oprah's Inquisitors and my use of the word confession are, I'm sure, sufficient clues to give you dire warning as to what's coming next. My advice: reach for those Rolaids. Or that bottom draw where you keep a flagon of Old Blue Pencil whiskey.
Yes, it's true. I admit that for the past several years I've been on the juice, taking Macrologic Storieoids. Prolixitum has been my dope of choice. With occasional experimentation with Multiloquentia and Pleonastical.
Hell, I haven't been just taking them, I've been abusing them with all the cautious self-control of a frat boy with his lips wrapped around a beer tap. I have been drunk with them, blasted on them, my nervous system lit up like a magnesium tinsel Christmas tree struck by lightning.
Calling them “performance-enhancing” drugs is to damn them with pallid praise and downplay their tremendous effect. Thanks to ‘roids my head is so full of story ideas that my nose hair now comes out as plot twists, and my ear wax has sequels. Fully juiced, I can type at five hundred words per minute, and I burn out one of those old-style industrial-duty mechanical keyswitch keyboards per month. The letters on the keys are hammered off in less than a week. Once, after a mismeasured dosage, I got typing so fast I literally melted the keycaps. My fingers might have gotten stuck in this smoking goo if it weren't for the fact that I wore my fingerprints off in my first six months as a hype hack. Plus stepping back from the keyboard is easier since I have to type standing up; there are so many needle punctures in my backside that years ago I had to give up regular underwear on favor of Depends liberally greased with Neosporin.
Yes, I admit there have been a few minor slightly negative physical costs associated with keypounder's crack. My eyes are shot; I now have to work with a thirty-inch monitor placed less than a foot from my nose, and have to use actual Coke bottle bottoms as corrective lenses. My forearms look like Popeye's, and my knuckles are the size of walnuts. For some reason I am unable to eat any food that starts with a vowel. My testicles—well, let's not go there. Suffice it to say that my wife hasn't left me—yet—probably because those rare times I emerge from my writing room I am as biddable as a lobotomized clam and inclined to agree with everything she says. My social life is in ruins, but then again it wasn't in all that great shape before I got on “scrivener's smack.” The difference is only in degree; perhaps the difference between post-New Year's Times Square and present-day Baghdad.
Forgive me for digressing. Addiction does not tend to build character (though mine has made creating characters as easy and inevitable as producing dandruff) or courage. The subject I have been skirting is, of course, informing you how Winfrey Commission exposure of my sins will impact you, and Astrolab magazine.
Of the fifty-four Stalin L. Bungs stories you have purchased and run over the years, forty-nine were produced while I was spiked. Yet I believe that this in no way lessens their intrinsic merits, or the popular acclaim they have garnered in the Astrolab Reader's Poll. The work of Romantic poets is not diminished by their taste for the poppy and Green Fairy, or the product of the Golden Agers tainted by their fondness for booze. I hope you do not feel compelled to asterisk me.
Unfortunately there are a few other stories under various bylines you have run in the last decade or so that are actually my work as well. Okay, more than a few. Rather than force your long-suffering and already overburdened staff to try to find where the bodies are buried, I herewith present you with a list of my crimes, as best I can recall them. I was the following authors, and you purchased the listed number of stories from them—from me.
Mickey Flinch: 43
Inez Rambo Struck: 7
Ragu Vanishingcream: 15
Jolly Kookaberra: 19
Flan Pan Clove: 11
Raviola Loose Wheel: 7
Shea Turtlepot: 23
Mork Reach: 4
Mackey Burtankard: 31
Rod Soyuzer: 29
Crophone Moscow: 19
Now it's possible (actually, almost certain) that I've forgotten one or two noms de jus. There has been, regrettably, a certain amount of fairly serious brain damage. Which reminds me. When this goes public there are certain to be numerous ugly rumors and unfounded allegations swirling around, but I swear an oath on my tattered copy of Strunk & White that I am not now, nor have I ever been, Spud Starhake.
You may have detected a certain elegiac tone to this missive. The Winfrey Commission will come for me soon, taking down this gimpy second-string scrivener from the rear of the herd as a way of working itself up to going after some of the Big Names. But that is not the reason I am decamping into a hastily self-created writer protection program. No, there is a more ubiquitous and dangerous force out there, one worthy of beat-feet grade terror.
I am bailing out for fear of denizens of the Slush Pile. When that teeming and disgruntled demographic learns that I am not just one Old And In The Way, filling slots that should rightfully be filled with their deathless prose, but several of them, my life won't be worth a single blow-in card. They will come for me with pitchforks and Wite-Out, and if they find me their vengeance will be lurid and extravagant.
Do not judge them too harshly. And please do not allow any of the overheated rhetoric that may ensue to incline you toward prejudice when you read those over-the-transom submissions. There is a lot of undiscovered talent and untapped potential out among those writers who have yet to build any sort of name.
Watch your slush pile closely. I am sure you will find some promising new writer able to fill the hole the bowing out of Stalin L. Bungs will leave behind.
Actually, I bet you will soon find several of them.
Best, Stalin L. Bungs
Copyright (c) 2008 Stephen L. Burns
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Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: TURNINGS by Jeffery D. Kooistra
Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories take place in a Milky Way so overflowing with people that individual humans can be treated collectively as interchangeable units. A branch of statistical mathematics called psychohistory is used to predict the future evolution of human society in the galaxy, in much the same way that the mathematics of thermodynamics can be used to predict the behavior of an ideal gas. The laws of thermodynamics could not be worked out until a great deal of experience had been accumulated with steam engines and carefully designed experiments had produced sufficient useful data. It was only when a given set of prior conditions could be shown to consistently produce the same result at a later time that equations could be found that expressed this relationship, and made it possible to predict a future result from a prior set of conditions.
Therefore, implicit in Asimov's Foundation universe is the idea that human behavior and societies must be, in some way, cyclical. If this were not the case, if human progress was always evolving and never repeating, you wouldn't be able to develop the mathematics of psychohistory at all. This idea, that history may be cyclical, is an old one, but has largely fallen into disfavor in the West, pa
rticularly in the United States, where most of us have absorbed a linear idea of nearly continuous evolutionary “progress” from the past into the future.
Although the Foundation stories are set eons into the future, a book has already been published that could arguably be called “the first book on Psychohistory.” That book is The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy by William Strauss and Neil Howe (ISBN 0-553-06682-X, 1997).
In my September Alternate View, I ended by saying that the “inspiration for this column came from a rejection letter I got from Stanley Schmidt, in which he said (among other things) of my story: ‘(T)he human relationships had a very 1950ish flavor, with little feeling of the cultural differences that would surely develop between now and then.'” My reply to that statement is this: “I am aware of the similarity of my future culture to a past one. It is my belief that so called cultural evolution is in actuality a rather robust cultural cycling through a near century long repetition of remarkably similar eras. The reason my future characters evoke a feeling of the ‘50s is because they are living in the same kind of cultural ‘high’ that produced the mindset and mores that we consider ‘50ish."
Since my reply requires a bit of explanation, a brief discussion of The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy follows.
The use of the word “prophecy” should not be confused with the sort of prophecy one thinks of in connection with Nostradamus or Edgar Cayce. A more apt description is that it is a variant of the “if this goes on” science fiction story. It is “if this goes on,” but with corners, or as the book calls them, turnings.
We expect societies to change over time. We expect fads to come and go. We simplistically think of this in terms of a pendulum swing, which works fine with the width of ties or the length of skirts. But human societies are more complex than that. Strauss and Howe see the US as cycling through four similar turnings, or eras, again and again. It's fair enough to ask why not five or six or three, but the pattern they see fits well with four.
Analog SFF, November 2008 Page 17