Nebula Awards Showcase 54

by Nibedita Sen

  There was no falling back on the classic trope of taking Foom to meet with world leaders. It wouldn’t be able to perceive them. Whether it was foie gras or prime rib, a fast-food cheeseburger or a cup of insta-noodles, antibiotics or cholesterol-lowering meds, there wasn’t a president or king or diplomat on the planet that wouldn’t appear dark to the alien. And even if they deliberately purged themselves as I had unwittingly done, if they ate my grandmother’s soup or dined on fish caught and cooked by their own hand, still the things they placed the most value on, computers and air conditioning and cars and smartphones and hospitals and organ transplants and electrical grids and highway infrastructure and missile defense systems, all the things we’d accomplished as we moved from the agrarian world through the Industrial Age, past the Atomic Age and into the current Information Age, all of it was dark. Unlife.

  While these thoughts poured through my brain, Foom stood still as a statue. It didn’t breathe. Had it been breathing before?

  “Your vocabulary improved after we . . . touched,” I said.

  “We shared,” it replied. “I acquired more of your language, more sophisticated concepts, the patterns of your cognitive processes and decision making heuristics. I have a much fuller comprehension of humanity as a result. Thank you.”

  “You said ‘share.’ What did I gain in return?”

  “Insight.” It smiled, lips parting wide enough to show me that it didn’t have teeth. “Your previous world view was built upon numerous philosophies you believe to be universally true. I have shown you that while such beliefs may hold true at the local level, at a truly universal level there is only the Rule of Three. You’re working through the ramifications of this even now.”

  Popular culture was wrong. Foom wasn’t here to end war or share cures for all known diseases. It said it wouldn’t be here long. Anything that was going to be gleaned from it while it was on Earth would happen in a very short window of time. There would never be any US ambassadors or diplomats here. Nor any Chinese officials. There was only my grandmother, blind Mrs. Liu, some children who’d learn how to make floating, illuminated grass, parents who had no idea their kids had made alien contact, and me. More realistically, I was on my own.

  • • •

  “I have been exploring your solar system for most of a century,” Foom said.

  “Why?”

  “Cataloging.” Foom led me down to the riverbank. A giant pearl sat in the water not ten meters away. “You would call me a completist. Visiting each and every one of Jupiter’s moons alone took more than a decade. Some were truly majestic. Which is not to say your own moon is not interesting, but I am still processing what I learned there. It was my penultimate destination in this system. I saved your world for last.”

  We stepped into the river and were quickly engulfed above our waists. The water was cold but the current not especially swift.

  “Did you find life anywhere else in our solar system?”

  “Life, yes, but nothing alive that was also self-aware and sapient as you are. And I found death, too. But only on your world is there unlife. Your pardon, can you swim?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I would have you step inside my home but the river bottom drops away deeper before we will quite reach it.”

  “Yes, I can swim.”

  “Very good. Let us do so now.”

  And so we swam. As we drew closer I could see the pearl did not rest upon the bottom of the river, but floated partially submerged. Before we reached it, Foom dove down a meter or so and swam straight into the curve of the pearl. It passed within without a ripple. Closing my eyes, I followed.

  I didn’t hit anything and a few moments after I should have struck the side I opened my eyes and swam up for air. I broke the water’s surface and found myself somehow inside the giant pearl. The nacre of the inner walls glowed, revealing a curving ramp that wound up the middle, opening onto ledges and alcoves above. Foom had already reached the ramp and climbed out of the water, waiting for me on a low bench extruded from the inner wall.

  Foom was an alien. It had come to Earth from the stars, which meant that I was inside its spaceship.

  “Explain something to me, please,” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “This is your home?”

  “It is.”

  “But it’s also a vessel, right? It’s how you traveled to my world.”

  “Yes, your understanding is true.”

  I shook my head and followed him from the water. “I don’t think it is. How can a vessel that travels between stars not violate the Rule of Three?”

  “Because I made it myself.”

  “How is that possible? Sure, you say you’ve been in this system a century so you’re longer lived than my kind, but how could one person make something as complex as a spaceship by themselves?”

  “It’s my home. Who else would make my home?”

  “But how?”

  It waved me to the bench, the twin thumbs of its hand wiggling in an odd gesture. “Yours is not the first dark world I have visited. Everything you know of technology exists in the dark. Your people have breached your atmosphere, even stood upon your moon, by means of this technology, and spread unlife along the way. I cannot perceive such vehicles directly, or the people I assume traveled within them, only the darkness they define. You force your technology to shackle the universe to do your bidding, rather than work with those same forces to express themselves in ways of mutual benefit.”

  I waved at the gleaming surface all around us. “I don’t understand.”

  “Do you understand beer?” Foom asked.

  “Beer?”

  “A beverage. The children brought me some. It is . . . refreshing.”

  “I know what beer is.”

  “Do you know how to make it?”

  “What?”

  “The ingredients. The process.”

  I flashed back on my sophomore year at university and the roommate who turned his half of our dorm room into a brewing den. “Um, grain, barley I think . . . and hops . . .”

  “So you simply bring together barley and hops and you have beer?”

  “What? No, you have to ferment it.”

  “How?”

  “Uhh, you heat and crack the grain, then you mash it, which means soaking the grains in hot water so the sugars come out.”

  “Why do the sugars do that?”

  “I don’t know. Enzymes? My chemistry isn’t very good.”

  “Then what?”

  “You pour off the hot water with all the sugars, then you add the hops and you boil everything. You cool it and filter it, and then you add yeast which turns the sugar into alcohol. That also releases carbon dioxide, which is why it has bubbles. And you get beer.”

  “Do you enjoy beer?” Foom asked.

  I couldn’t help but grin. “I do, sure. Most people do.”

  “If you had never seen beer, never tasted or smelled it, had no knowledge of it, do you believe you could look at the components, the barley and hops and yeast and water, and see the thing they could become?”

  What kind of a question was that? Beer was . . . beer. It was omnipresent, had always existed, hadn’t it? But thousands of years ago, maybe not. Someone must have discovered fermentation, airborne yeast landing in a rain barrel that had some rotten fruit in it or some such. Maybe something like that had happened many, many times before someone took a swig that led to the first hangover.

  “No, I guess not.”

  “It is a natural process. To brew beer you work with the substances of nature, following their own paths. In the case of beer those parts are external, but even so the Rule of Three is present at every step. I created my home in much the same way, though perhaps more directed. An internal pathway.”

  It held out its hand before me, pressing the tips of its thumbs together. A tiny whitish drop formed where they touched. It grew into a small bead.

  “You asked before about the thing I taught t
he children that made the grass float. This is like that, but more so. Whereas they taught the grass to change its nature, I have taught myself to change mine. Like barley and hops giving way to something unimaginable until it occurs, so too did I create my home.”

  The bead had grown to the size of a fat pearl, grayish and iridescent. Foom parted its thumbs and the newly created pearl hung in the air. At a flick of its fingers it floated up then down then twice around its head before coming to rest upon my hand.

  “How . . . ?”

  “It is like your beer. A miracle until you know the way. To be fair, this is a small thing. It would take you at least a year of practice to make one as large as my home.”

  “You’re kidding, right? You’re saying I could do this?”

  Foom reached out for my hand again, pressing the new-formed pearl against my palm. “Surely there are things your people do that are not all dark, things of wonder like your language and beer. These are precious and I hope to experience more of them, but in truth what interests me more is art.”

  “Art?”

  “Every sapient people manifest their culture, producing records of who they are. Such art transcends mere language, often outliving the organisms that produced it. I hope to encounter some in this narrow slice of your world untouched by unlife. This is why I have come.”

  • • •

  I returned to my grandmother’s home late in the afternoon trading my western clothes for a simple shirt and trousers that had belonged to my grandfather, lying untouched for longer than I’d been alive. Both were short on me. Decades earlier my grandmother had acquired the cloth from another neighbor and then sewn them herself, making me the third in the chain of possession and thus acceptable under the Rule of Three. I ate a dinner prepared by her hand from food she had grown herself. I slept better that night than I had in years, probably the result of my exertions hauling water up for my grandmother and applying myself to chores that at her age went undone until some neighboring teen was sent over to help. I dreamed that the dark was leaving me, replaced by nutrients that met the alien’s rule, or sweated out of my body in service to exertion that served that same rule. And I dreamed of beer, appreciating it as I never had before.

  Foom had been unacquainted with beer before meeting the children. It had immediately grasped the process of water and sugar being transformed to alcohol and carbon dioxide, but fermentation itself was new, a miracle. And clearly, it wanted more miracles. So much of the world’s food had converted over to manufactured production. Even naturally grown products were transformed. Something as simple as corn was not left alone but converted into high fructose corn syrup, an additive that by alien standards darkened everything it touched. But surely other natural processes remained. Bees still made honey and wax. Milk and rennet produced cheese. Foom would regard any of these as miracles, and what knowledge might it offer in trade?

  I returned to the river in the morning. No children awaited me, though whether they’d taken the day off or Foom had sent them away I couldn’t say. The alien swam from its pearl home and clambered onto the shore, naked as the day before.

  “There is less of the dark about you,” it said. “Do you feel it?”

  “I suppose I do. I’ve been thinking about that, and about our conversation in your home yesterday. I have a proposition for you.”

  “What specifically? We spoke of many things.”

  “Trade. I could show you things, like the making of beer. What kinds of things could you show me in turn?”

  Foom’s face broke out in a wide toothless smile. “I would teach you new ways to view your world, and skills with which to experience it.”

  “What would that mean, pragmatically? Are you talking about ending disease? A stop to aging? Space travel?”

  “Yes, all these things are possible, but I will expect a fair accounting, an introduction to processes untouched by the dark, such as the creation of beer. Or better still, some example of art, if it is to be found here.”

  “I think I can make that happen. What do you know of batik?”

  • • •

  With no small portion of apprehension, I persuaded Foom to return with me to my grandmother’s home. She’d finished her work with the indigo yesterday and was carving designs into cloth in preparation for dyeing. She met us at the door with more of my late grandfather’s clothing.

  “You are a funny man,” she said. “And I am an old woman. But you are no child wearing your innocence instead of clothing. If you wish to come into my house you will put something on. Or you can go away. I don’t care which.”

  I flinched. I hadn’t expected any of this, and my imagination flared with the horror that generations of diplomats would have experienced at my grandmother’s handling of the first alien to visit the Earth.

  Foom didn’t so much as blink—could it blink?

  “Of course, Grandmother. Your generosity honors me.” It turned its back to her, much as it had seen me do when the children had presented me with shorts to wear yesterday, and donned the ancient trousers and shirt. The faded colors accentuated its pale skin but my grandmother was satisfied. She welcomed us into her home, taking a seat at her worktable and gesturing for us to watch her as she picked up a small knife and dipped it into a tiny pot of boiling wax. I’d seen her do this a hundred times. My mother had learned to do it as a child and practiced the technique well into her teens until a social program had sent her to school, ultimately leading her to meet my father.

  “What is she doing,” asked Foom.

  By this point my grandmother appeared to be attacking a large white cloth stretched before her, the blade of her knife imparting a delicate pattern of wax where it touched.

  “This is batik,” I said. “The style dates back more than a thousand years, back when nothing on this planet was dark.”

  Foom nodded with approval. “Unlife has never touched it. But what is it?”

  “Art. She is creating a pattern on the cloth with the wax.”

  “And the art is the interplay of the wax and the cloth? It tells a story?”

  “Not exactly. The wax is temporary. It gets melted off.”

  “So this is ephemeral art? The art is the memory of the pattern of where the wax previously had been?”

  “No, something else entirely. When she has completed the pattern in wax, the cloth will be boiled in an indigo dye.” I directed his attention to the pot of leaves that would soon produce the dye.

  “The white cloth will become blue,” Foom said. “But you said it will be boiled? Surely the wax cannot endure. The intricate patterns lost.”

  “The wax is lost, yes, and deliberately so. But before that happens, it will have blocked the dye from staining that portion of the cloth. Where it had been, the cloth will still be white—”

  “And the pattern preserved!” Foom practically shouted. “Do you have examples of this? Please, I must see.”

  This was my mother’s family’s calling. Generations had spent their entire lives weaving cloth, making indigo dye, and designing the most astonishing batik patterns. Some of the greatest art of the Miao people had been created in homes like this, saved up week upon week and carted over the mountains from tiny villages into the towns and cities where time and progress existed, where commerce replaced barter, where unlife had developed and spread.

  My grandmother was an artist—though she would have scolded me to be called such—with decade upon decade of experience and expertise. A buyer in distant Shanghai sent an agent twice a year, buying up everything she’d created for a fraction of its true worth. But there was little my grandmother needed or wanted. A few chickens, seed for her garden, a whetstone to sharpen her knives once in a great while. Some money too, but she never touched it, letting it accrue in an account to pay for my mother to fly in once a year for a visit or to be spent on scholarships for the village children who opted to leave this life behind and attend school in the distant city.

  While my grandmother sat engr
ossed in her work, I led Foom to the trunk at the back of the room. I hadn’t been here in years, but there was nowhere else for her to keep her finished work. I lifted the lid and revealed what I can only describe as vast tapestries of her art.

  Silently asking permission, the alien took them out of the trunk one by one, unfolding them and holding them at arms’ length. The designs were flawless, intricate, breathtaking. Some were fanciful, birds and fish and scenes of nature. Others were purely abstract, complex patterns that predated Mandelbrot’s awareness of fractals but spoke to the same geometric subdivisions going smaller and smaller. Each was a piece of perfection.

  “This,” said Foom, “this is what I hoped to find. This is all from one.”

  “From one?”

  “One source, one origin. The cloth, the dye, the vision. All from her.”

  “Right,” I said. “Your Rule of Three. So, she could give one of these to someone else and it wouldn’t go dark?”

  “No, it could pass to yet another’s hands and still not be dark.”

  “Would you like one? Something to decorate your home?”

  “Such a treasure?” Foom’s voice dropped to a whisper, not that my grandmother had given any indication of hearing him before. “She would gift me with such a thing?”

  “If I asked politely,” I said. “Especially if I explain that you have come from so very far for just such a thing as she’s made and already forgotten about in this trunk.”

  “That would be wondrous,” it said. “But, might I ask some more? Is it possible she might share her knowledge, teach me to do this batik myself?”