Worst Contact

by Hank Davis

  “—five thousand years?” inserted Mohandas Nayyal, our linguist from Delhi Commune. “Of course the Hindi tradition, as carried by the Vedas, goes back easily that far.”

  “Actually,” Meyers continued, a bit miffed. “I was thinking more along the lines of six thousand—”

  He cut short as the alien let out a warbling sigh, waving both “hands.”

  “Once again, you misconstrue. The genealogy we seek is genetic, but a few thousand of your years is wholly inadequate.”

  Jane muttered— “Bugger! It’s like dickering with a Pattie over the price of a bleeding iceberg . . . no offense, Skipper.”

  The captain returned a soft smile. Patagonians are an easy-going lot, til you get down to business.

  “Well then,” Mobutu resumed, nodding happily. “I think we can satisfy our alien friends, and win Federation membership, on a purely biochemical basis. For many years now, the Great Temple in Abijian has gathered DNA samples from every sub-race on Earth, correlating and sorting to trace out our genetic relationships. Naturally, African bloodlines were found to be the least mutated from the central line of inheritance—”

  Jane groaned again, but this time Kwenzi ignored her.

  “—stretching back to our fundamental common ancestor, that beautiful, dark ancestress of all human beings, the one variously called Eva, or M’tum, who dwelled on the eastern fringes of what is now the Zairean Kingdom, over three million years ago!”

  So impressive was Mobutu’s dramatic delivery that even the least sanguine of our crew felt stirred, fascinated and somewhat awed. But then the N’Gorm servant-entity vented another of its frustrated sighs.

  “I perceive that I am failing in my mission to communicate with lesser beings. Please allow me to try once again.

  “We in the Federation are constantly being plagued by young, upstart species, rising out of planetary nurseries and immediately yammering for attention, claiming rights of citizenship in our ancient culture. At times, it has been suggested that we should routinely sterilize such places—filthy little worlds—or at least eliminate noisy, adolescent infestations by targeting their early stages with radio-seeking drones. But the Kutathi, who serve as judges and law-givers in the Federation, have ruled this impermissible. There are few crimes worse than meddling in the natural progress of a nursery world. All we can do is snub the newcomers, and restrict them to their home systems until they have matured enough for decent company.”

  “That’s all?” The Captain spoke for the first time, aghast at what this meant—an end to the Earth’s bold ventures with interstellar travel. Crude our ships might be, by galactic standards, but humanity was proud of them. They were a unifying force, binding fractious nations in a common cause. It was awful to imagine that our expedition might be the last.

  The translator apparently failed to convey the Captain’s sarcasm. The alien envoy-entity nodded in solemn agreement.

  “Yes, that is all. So you may rejoice, in your own pathetic way, that your world is safe for you to use up or destroy any way you see fit, since that is the typical way most puerile species finish their brief lifespans. If, by some chance, you escape this fate, you will eventually be allowed to send forth your best and brightest to serve in carefully chosen roles, earning eventual acceptance on the lowest rungs of proper society.

  Jane Fingal growled. “Why you puffed-up pack of pseudo-pommie bast—”

  I cut in with urgent speed. “Excuse me, but there is one thing I fail to understand. You spoke earlier of an ‘evaluation.’ Does this mean that our fate is not automatic?”

  The alien emissary regarded me for a long time, as if pondering whether I deserved an answer, Finally, it must have decided I was not that much lower than my crewmates, anyway. It acknowledged my query with a nod.

  “There is an exception—if you can prove a relationship with a citizen race. To determine that possibility was the purpose of my query about species-lineage.”

  “Ah, now it becomes clear,” Mohandas Nayyal said. “You want to know if we are genetically related to one of your high-born castes. Does this imply that those legends may be true? That star beings have descended, from time to time, to engage in sexual congress with our ancestors? By co-mingling their seed with ours, they meant to generously endow and improve our . . .”

  He trailed off as we all saw the N’Gorm quiver. Somehow, disgust was conveyed quite efficiently across its expressive “face.”

  “Please, do not be repulsive in your bizarre fantasies. The behavior you describe is beyond contemplation, even by the mentally ill. Not only is it physically and biologically absurd, but it assumes the high-born might wish to improve the stock of bestial nuisances. Why in the universe would they want to do such a thing?”

  Ignoring the bald insult, Meyers, the exobiologist added—

  “It’s unlikely for another reason. Human DNA has been probed and analyzed for three centuries. We have a pretty good idea where most of it came from. We’re creatures of the Earth, no doubt about it.”

  When he saw members of the contact team glaring at him, Meyers shrugged. “Oh, it would all come out in time, anyway. Don’t you think they’d analyze any claim we made?”

  “Correct,” buzzed the translator. “And we would bill you for the effort.”

  “Well, I’m still confused,” claimed our Uzbecki memeticist. “You make it sound as if there is no way we could be related to one of your citizen-races, so why this grilling about our genealogy?”

  “A formality, required by law. In times past, a few exceptional cases won status by showing that they possessed common genes with highborn ones.”

  “And how did these commonalities come about?” Mobutu asked, still miffed over the rejection of his earlier claims.

  The N’Gorm whistled yet another sigh. “Not all individuals of every species behave circumspectly. Some, of noble birth, have been known to go down to planets, seeking thrills, or testing their mettle to endure filth and heavy gravity.”

  “In other words, they go slumming!” Jane Fingal laughed. “Now those are the only blokes I’d care to meet, in your whole damn Federation.”

  I caught Jane’s eye, gesturing for restraint. She needn’t make things worse than they already were. The whole of Earth would watch recordings of what passed here today.

  Nechemia Meyers shook his head. “I can see where all this is leading. When galactics go slumming, as Jane colorfully put it, they risk unleashing alien genes into the ecosystem of a nursery world. This is forbidden interference in the natural development of such planets. It also makes possible a genetic link that could prove embarrassing later, when that world spawns a star-travelling race.”

  The translator buzzed gratification. “At last, I have succeeded in conveying the basic generalities. Now, before we take your ship in tow, and begin the quarantine of your wretched home system, I am required by law to offer you a chance. Do you wish formally to claim such a genetic link to one of our citizen races? Remember that we will investigate in detail, at your expense.”

  A pall seemed to settle over the assembled humans. This was not as horrible as some of the worst literary fantasies about alien contact, but it was pretty bad. Apparently, the galaxy was ruled by an aristocracy of age and precedence. One that jealously guarded its status behind a veneer of hypocritical law.

  “How can we know whether or not to make such a claim!” Kwenzi Mobutu protested. “Unless we meet your high castes for ourselves.”

  “That will not happen. Not unless your claim is upheld.”

  “But—”

  “It hardly matters,” inserted Nechemia, glumly.

  We turned and the Captain asked— “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that we cannot make such a claim. The evidence refutes it. All we need is to look at the history of life on Earth.

  “Consider, friends. Why did we think for so long that we were alone in the cosmos? It wasn’t just that our radio searches for intelligent life turned up nothing, decade afte
r decade. Aliens could have efficient technologies that make them abandon radio, the way we gave up signal-drums. This is exactly what we found to be the case.

  “No, a much stronger argument for our uniqueness lay in the sedimentary rocks of our own world.

  “If intelligent life was plentiful, someone would invent starships and travel. Simple calculations showed that just one such outbreak, if it flourished, could fill the galaxy with its descendants in less than fifty million years . . . and that assumed ship technology far cruder than this N’Gorm dreadnought hovering nearby.”

  He gestured at the sleek, gleaming hull outside, that had accelerated so nimbly in response to Jane Fingal’s hail.

  “Imagine such a life-swarm, sweeping across the galaxy, settling every habitable world in sight. It’s what we humans thought we’d do, once we escaped Earth’s bonds, according to most science fiction tales. A prairie fire of colonization that radically changes every world it touches, forever mixing and re-shuffling each planet’s genetic heritage.”

  The emissary conceded. “It is illegal, but it has happened, from time to time.”

  Meyers nodded. “Maybe it occurred elsewhere, but not on Earth.”

  “How can you be sure?” I asked.

  “Because we can read Earth’s biography in her rocks. For more than two billion years, our world was ‘prime real estate,’ as one great 20th century writer once put it. It had oceans and a decent atmosphere, but no living residents higher than crude, prokaryotes—bacteria and algae—simmering in the sea. In all that time, until the Eukaryotic Explosion half a billion years ago, any alien interference would have profoundly changed the course of life on our world.”

  Jane Fingal edged forward. “This ‘explosion’ you spoke of. What was that?”

  “The Eukaryotic Explosion,” Meyers explained, “occurred about 560 million years ago, when there evolved nucleated cells, crammed with sophisticated organelles. Soon after, there arose multi-celled organisms, invertebrates, vertebrates, fishes, dinosaurs, and primates. But the important datum is the two billion years before that, when even the most careful of colonizations would have utterly changed Earth’s ecology, by infecting it with advanced alien organisms we would later see in sediments. Even visitors who flushed their toilets carelessly . . .”

  Meyers trailed off as our astronomer made choking sounds, covering her mouth. Finally, Jane burst out with deep guffaws, laughing so hard that she nearly doubled over. We waited until finally Jane wiped her eyes and explained.

  “Sorry, mates. It’s just that . . . well, somethin’ hit me when Nechemia mentioned holy altars.”

  I checked my memory files and recalled the euphemism, popular in Australian English. Every Aussie home is said to contain at least one porcelain “altar,” where adults who have over-indulged with food or drink often kneel and pray for relief, invoking the beer deities, “Ralph” or “Ruth.” On weekdays, these altars have other, more mundane uses.

  Kwenzi Mobutu seemed torn between outrage over Jane’s behavior and delight that it was all being recorded.

  “And what insight did this offer you?” He asked with a tightly controlled voice.

  “Oh, with your interest in genealogy you’ll love this, Kwenzi,” Jane assured, in a friendly tone. She turned to Nechemia. “You say there couldn’t have been any alien interference before the Eukaryotic Explosion, and after that, everything on Earth seems to be part of the same tree of life, right? Neither of those long periods seems to show any trace of outside interference.”

  The Israeli nodded, and Jane smiled.

  “But what about the explosion, itself? Isn’t that just the sort of sudden event you say would be visible in rocks, if alien toilets ever ever got dumped on Earth?”

  Meyers frowned, knotting his brow. “Well . . . ye-e-e-es. Off hand, I cannot think of any perfect refutation, providing you start out assuming a general similarity in amino and nucleic acid coding . . . and compatible protein structures. That’s not too far-fetched. From that point on, prokaryotic and early eukaryotic genes mixed, but the eukaryote seed stock might have come, quite suddenly —”

  A short squeal escaped the alien emissary.

  “This is true? Your life history manifested such a sudden transformation on so basic a level? From un-nucleated to fully competent multicellular organisms? How rapid was this change?”

  Meyers shook his head. “No one has been able to parse the boundary thinly enough to tell. But clearly it was on the order of a million years, or less. Some hypothesize a chain of fluke mutations, leveraging on each other rapidly. But that explanation did always seem a bit too pat. There are just too many sudden, revolutionary traits to explain . . .”

  He looked up at Jane, with a new light in his eyes. “You aren’t joking about this, are you? I mean, we could be onto something! I wonder why this never occurred to us before?”

  The Captain uttered a short laugh. “Trust an Australian to think of it. They don’t give a damn what you think about their ancestors.”

  A flurry of motion drew our eyes to the tunnel leading to the N’Gorm ship, just in time to catch sight of the envoy-entity, fleeing our presence in a state of clear panic. A seal hissed shut and vibrations warned that the huge vessel was about to detach. We made our own prudent exit, hurrying back to our ship.

  Last to re-board was Kwenzi Mobutu, wearing a bleak look on his face, paler than I had ever seen him. The African aristocrat winced as Jane Fingal offered a heartfelt, Australian prayer of benediction, aimed at the retreating N’Gorm frigate.

  “May Ruth follow you everywhere, mates, and keep you busy at her altar.”

  Jane laughed again, and finished with a slurpy, flushing sound.

  Many years have passed since that epiphany on the spacelanes. Of all of the humans present when we held the fateful meeting, only I, made of durable silicon and brass, still live to tell an eyewitness-tale.

  By the laws of Earth, I am equal to any biological human being, despite galactic rules that would have me enslaved. No noble genes lurk in my cells. No remnants of ruffians who went slumming long ago, on a planet whose only life forms merged in scummy mats at the fringes of a tepid sea. I carry no DNA from those alien rapscallions, those high-born ones who carelessly gave Earth an outlawed gift, a helpful push. But my kind was designed by the heirs of that little indiscretion, so I can share the poignant satisfaction brought by recent events.

  For decade after decade, ever since that fateful meeting between the stars, we have chased Federation ships, who always fled like scoundrels evading a subpoena. Sometimes our explorers would arrive at one of their habitat clusters, only to find vast empty cities, abandoned in frantic haste to avoid meeting us, or to prevent our emissaries from uttering one terrible word—Cousin!

  It did them no good in the long run. Eventually, we made contact with the august, honest Kutathi, the judges, who admitted our petition before them.

  The galactic equivalent of a cosmo-biological paternity suit.

  And now, the ruling has come down at last, leaving Earth’s accountants to scratch their heads in awe over the damages we have been awarded, and the official status we have won.

  As for our unofficial social position, that is another matter. Our having the right to vote in high councils will not keep most of the haughty aliens from snubbing Earthlings for a long time to come. (Would we behave any better, if a strain of our intestinal flora suddenly began demanding a place at the banquet table? I hope so, but you can never tell until you face the situation for yourself.)

  None of that matters as much as the freedom—to come and go as we please. To buy and sell technologies. To learn . . . and eventually to teach.

  The Kutathi judges kindly told our emissaries that humans seem to have a knack, a talent, for the law. Perhaps it will be our calling, the Kutathi said. It makes an odd kind of sense, given the jokes people have long told about the genetic nature of lawyers.

  Well, so be it.

  Among humans of all races and nation
s, there is agreement. There is common cause. Something has to change. The snooty ways of high-born clans must give way, and we are just the ones to help make it happen. We’ll find other loopholes in this rigid, inane class system, other ways to help spring more young races out of quarantine, until at last the stodgy old order crumbles.

  Anyway, who cares what aristocrats think of us, their illegitimate cousins, the long-fermented fruit of their bowels?

  Jane Fingal wrote our anthem, long ago. It is a stirring song, hauntingly kindred to Waltzing Matilda, full of verve, gumption, and a spirit of rebellion. Like the 1812 Overture, it can’t properly be played without an added instrument. Only in this case, the guest soloist plays no cannon, but a porcelain altar, one that swishes, churns and gurgles with the soulful strains of destiny.

  THEY’RE MADE

  OUT OF MEAT

  by Terry Bisson

  Those poor, pathetic humans are more to be pitied than scorned (not that any self-respecting extraterrestrial would associate with them). They can’t help it—it’s in their makeup.

  ***

  Terry Ballantine Bisson a native of Kentucky, a resident of New York City for “some thirty years,” now residing on the west coast, has worked as an auto mechanic and as a magazine and book editor. Though good auto mechanics are in short supply, we should all be grateful that he published his first novel in 1981, and has been a working science fiction writer ever since. Politically he was part of the New Left, associated with the John Brown Anti-Klan Ctte and the May 19 Communist Organization. His novels include Wyrldmaker, Talking Man, Fire on the Mountain, Voyage to the Red Planet, Pirates of the Universe, The Pickup Artist, Numbers Don’t Lie, and Any Day Now. His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Asimov’s, Omni, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Harper’s, Socialism & Democracy, Tor.com, Southern Exposure, Infinite Matrix, and Flurb. His story collections include Bears Discover Fire, In the Upper Room and Other Unlikely Stories, Greetings, Billy’s Book, and TVA Baby. His short story, “Bears Discover Fire” won the Nebula and Hugo awards, the Theodore Sturgeon short fiction award, and the Asimov’s and Locus readers’ awards. Other awards and honors he has received are the Phoenix Award, France’s Gran Prix de l’Imaginaire, a second Nebula for his short story, “macs,” a Fellowship in Screenwriting and Playwriting by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and his induction into the Owensboro, Kentucky Hall of Fame. He was selected by the estate of Walter M. Miller, Jr. to complete Miller’s Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, the unfinished sequel to the SF classic, A Canticle for Leibowitz. He is the editor of PM Press’s Outspoken Author series which features such SF icons as Michael Moorcock, Ursula K. LeGuin, Rudy Rucker, Cory Doctorow and Kim Stanley Robinson. In his copious spare time, Bisson hosts an author reading series, SFinSF, in San Franscisco. The superhumanly busy Mr. Bisson lives in Oakland, California with his companion of 40 years, Judy Jensen. For much more about him, including his nonfiction, screenwriting, novelizations, scripting for comics, etc., etc., including the stage and film adaptations of the brilliant short story which follows, visit terrybisson.com.