Worst Contact

by Hank Davis

  ”They’re made out of meat.”

  “Meat?”

  “Meat. They’re made out of meat.”

  “Meat?”

  “There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”

  “That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”

  “They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”

  “So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”

  “They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”

  “That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”

  “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they’re made out of meat.”

  “Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”

  “Nope. They’re born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn’t take long. Do you have any idea what’s the life span of meat?”

  “Spare me. Okay, maybe they’re only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside.”

  “Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They’re meat all the way through.”

  “No brain?”

  “Oh, there’s a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “So . . . what does the thinking?”

  “You’re not understanding, are you? You’re refusing to deal with what I’m telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat.”

  “Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”

  “Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?”

  “Omigod. You’re serious then. They’re made out of meat.”

  “Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they’ve been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years.”

  “Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?”

  “First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual.”

  “We’re supposed to talk to meat.”

  “That’s the idea. That’s the message they’re sending out by radio. ‘Hello. Anyone out there. Anybody home.’ That sort of thing.”

  “They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?”

  “Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat.”

  “I thought you just told me they used radio.”

  “They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat.”

  “Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?”

  “Officially or unofficially?”

  “Both.”

  “Officially, we are required to contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing.”

  “I was hoping you would say that.”

  “It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?”

  “I agree one hundred percent. What’s there to say? ‘Hello, meat. How’s it going?’ But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?”

  “Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can’t live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact.”

  “So we just pretend there’s no one home in the Universe.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you probed? You’re sure they won’t remember?”

  “They’ll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we’re just a dream to them.”

  “A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat’s dream.”

  “And we marked the entire sector unoccupied.”

  “Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?”

  “Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again.”

  “They always come around.”

  “And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be if one were all alone . . .”

  ALIEN STONES

  by Gene Wolfe

  The starship had encountered a gigantic alien ship drifting between the stars, apparently abandoned with no beings aboard—until one of the humans exploring the alien vessel’s interior mysteriously disappeared.

  ***

  Gene Wolfe is one of, if not the most critically-praised and award-winningest writers in science fiction and fantasy (if he sees a difference; he has been quoted as saying that “All novels are fantasy. Some are more honest about it.”). He has received two Nebula Awards, four World Fantasy Awards, a John W. Campbell Memorial Award, an August Derleth Award, a British SF Association Award, a Rhysling Award, seven Locus Awards, and has been nominated for a Hugo Award eight times, but with no wins, which is . . . interesting . . . in view of some of the specimens of thin gruel that have lately won that tarnished rocket. And when it comes to lifetime achievement, he has received the World Fantasy Award and the Science Fiction Writers of America’s awards for just that. In 2007, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. All that, and, according to Wikipedia, in his other life as an engineer, he contributed to the machine used to make Pringle’s Potato Chips. Of such things is immortality made. Ursula K. LeGuin has stated, “Wolfe is our Melville.” I don’t recall his writing about pursuit of great white whales so far, or even of scriveners, but the millennium is still young. In the meantime, go read this enigmatic, multi-layered yarn about another kind of pursuit. Or pursuits.

  “Heading unchanged,” Gladiator said. “Speed unchanged.” She flashed figures on the cathode-ray-tube terminal at the command console to substantiate it.

  Daw nodded. Twenty-eight firing studs stretched along the mid-band of the console. They would permit him, Daw, alone on the bridge (as he liked it) to launch every missile aboard the ship; even if Gladiator’s central processing unit were knocked out or under system overload, there would be strike vectors from the independent minicomputers that clung, embryonic self-brains, to the walls of the missile foramens.

  But there was no need for the minis. His ship was untouched; he could order Gladiator herself to do the shooting. Instead he asked, “Drive?”

  And Gladiator answered: “No indication of drive in use.”

  “Okay.”

  “Shall present course be maintained? Present course is a collision course in point three one hours.”

  “Match their velocity and lay us alongside. How long?”

  “One point forty-four hours.”

  “Do it. Meantime maintain battle stations.” Daw flipped on his console mike without touching the switch that would have put his own image on the terminals in every compartment of the ship. Naval tradition decreed that when the captain spoke he should be seen as well as heard, but Daw had watched tapes of hi
s own long, brown face as he announced, in what he felt to be unbearably stiff fashion, various unimportances, and he found it impossible to believe that his crew, seeing the same stretched cheeks and preposterous jaw, would not snicker.

  “This is your captain. The ship sighted last night is still on her course.” Daw chewed his lower lip for a moment, trying to decide just what to say next. The crew must be alerted, but it would be best if they were not alarmed. “There is no indication, I repeat, no indication, that she is aware of our presence. Possibly she doesn’t want to scare us off—she may want peace, or she may just have something up her sleeve. Possibly something’s wrong with her sensors. My own guess—which isn’t worth any more than yours—is that she’s a derelict; there’s no sign of drive, and we haven’t been able to reach her on any frequency. But we have to stay sharp. Battle conditions until further notice.”

  He flicked off the mike switch. Several como lights were blinking and he selected one: the reactor module. Mike switch again. “What is it, Neal?”

  “Captain, if you could give me a breakdown on the radiation they’re putting out, it might be possible for me to work up an estimate of how long it’s been since they’ve used their drive.”

  “I’m happy to hear that you know their engineering,” Daw said. “Especially since Gladiator’s been unable to identify even the ship type.”

  Neal’s face, seen in the CRT, flushed. He was a handsome, slightly dissipated-looking man whose high forehead seemed still higher under a thick crest of dark hair. “I would assume their drives are about the same as ours, sir,” he said.

  “I’ve done that. On that basis they shut down only an hour before we picked them up. But I’m not sure I believe it.” He cut Neal off and scanned the rest of the lights. One was from the ship’s cybernetics compartment; but Polk, the cyberneticist, was bunking with the systems analyst this trip. Daw pushed the light and a woman’s face appeared on the screen. It was framed in honey-toned hair, a face with skin like a confection and classic planes that might have shamed a fashion model. And a smile. He had seen that smile often before—though as seldom, he told himself, as he decently could.

  “Yes, Mrs. Youngmeadow?”

  “Helen, please. I can’t see you, Captain. The screen is blank.”

  “There’s some minor repair work to be done on the camera here,” Daw lied. “It’s not important, so we’ve given it low priority.”

  “But you can see me?”

  “Yes.” He felt the blood rising in his cheeks.

  “About this ship, Captain . . .” Helen Youngmeadow paused, and Daw noticed that her husband was standing behind her, beyond the plane of focus. “Captain, everyone on the ship can hear me—can’t they?”

  “I can cut them out of the circuit if you prefer.”

  “No—Captain, may I come up there?”

  “To the bridge? Yes, if you like. It’s a long way.”

  Another como light. This time the alternate bridge module—in appearance much like his, but lacking the battered Old and New Testaments bound in steel and magnetically latched to the console. “Hello, Wad,” Daw said gently.

  Wad made a half-salute. His young, dark-complexioned face showed plainly the strain of two years’ involvement in a hell that demanded night and day a continual flow of deductions, inferences, and decisions—all without effect. Looking at Daw significantly, he drew a finger across his throat, and Daw gave him the private circuit he had offered Mrs. Youngmeadow.

  “Thanks, Skipper. I’ve got something I thought you ought to know about.”

  Daw nodded.

  “I’ve been running an artifact correlation on the visual image of that ship.”

  “So have I. Electronic and structural.”

  “I know, I got your print-out. But my own analysis was bionic.”

  “You think that’s valid?”

  Wad shrugged. “I don’t know, but it’s interesting. You know what the biologists say. Man has reached the stage where he evolves through his machines. The earliest spacecraft resembled single-celled animals—pond life. The dilettante intellectuals of the time tried to give them a sexual significance—that was the only thing they knew—but they were really much closer to the things you find in a drop of pond water than to anything else.”

  “And what does your analysis say about this ship?”

  “No correlation at all. Nothing higher than a tenth.”

  Daw nodded again. “You think the lack of correlation is significant?”

  “It suggests to me that it may have originated somewhere where life forms are quite different from what we are accustomed to.”

  “Mankind has colonized some queer places.”

  With heavy significance Wad said, “Would it have to be mankind, Captain?” He was speaking, Daw knew, not to him but to his instructors back home. If his guess were correct he would, presumably, be given some small number of points; if not, he would lose ground. In time he would, or would not, be given his own command. The whole thing embarrassed Daw and made him feel somehow wretched, but he could not really blame Wad. He was Wad. To keep the ball rolling—mostly because he did not want to answer the other como lights—he said, “Men have spread their seed a long way across the galaxy Wad. We’ve seen a lot of strange ships, but they’ve always turned out to be of human origin.”

  “The part of the galaxy we know about is tiny compared to the vastness we don’t know. And there are other galaxies!”

  Daw said, “I’ve been thinking about the stranger’s build myself, as I told you. He looks like a crystal to me—modules ranged in a three-dimensional rectangular array.”

  “What do you think that means?”

  “Comes from a world where they’ve discovered radio.”

  Wad broke the connection; Daw grinned but found he didn’t much blame him for it.

  Daw wondered what Gladiator’s bionic correlation program would say about Gladiator herself. Perhaps liken her to the armor of a caddis-fly larva—an empty cylinder of odds and ends. Caddis-fly armor exploded. The interior of his helmet held the familiar smells of fine lubricating oil, sweat, and the goo he sometimes used on his hair; he kicked down and the soles of his boots clinked home on the hull of the bridge module.

  Above him and around him Gladiator flung her shining threads, the stars a dust of ice seen through the interstices, the connecting tubes like spider web—half-glittering, half-drowned in inky shadow.

  Still ten thousand miles off, the other ship was, under the immense lasers Gladiator directed toward it, another star; but one that winked and twinkled as its structure surged and twisted to the urgings of accelerations long departed.

  A hatch at Daw’s feet opened and a metal-clad figure he knew to be Helen Youngmeadow rose, caught his hand, and stood beside him. Like his own, her faceplate was set for full transparency; her beautiful face, thus naked to the darkness of a billion suns, seemed to him to hold a hideous vulnerability. In his earphones her voice asked: “Do you know this is the first time I’ve been out? It’s lovely.”

  “Yes,” Daw said.

  “And all this is Gladiator; she doesn’t seem this big when she talks to me in our cabin. Could you show me which one it is? I’m lost.”

  “Which module?” From his utility belt Daw took a silver rod, then locked the articulations of his suit arm so that he could aim it like a missile projector with the fine adjustment controls. In the clean emptiness no beam showed, but a module miles down the gossamer cylinder of the ship flashed with the light.