“That . . . didn’t really explain anything.”
“No, it didn’t,” George agreed with a nod of its massive purple head. “But if it did, you wouldn’t understand it anyway. So, let’s talk about something else.”
I rubbed my hands along the arms of the chair, feeling my damp palms sliding over the smooth wood. “Why Milwaukee?”
“Oh, it’s the name.”
“The name?”
George nodded. “Just slips off the tongue. Or it would, if I had one.” It opened its mouth wide and leaned forward so I could see. Behind the curved white bar that lined the top and bottom of the space, there was nothing but a smooth lavender cone. It closed its wide maw and sat back. “Truthfully, we wanted a place where the ship would get noticed—no sense parking it over some desert and waiting a month before someone spots it. But we didn’t want to park above some city so big or important that the first thing that would happen would involve a lot of shooting. Milwaukee seemed like a good compromise.”
“Could we hurt you with our weapons?” I asked, feeling like I was taking a chance.
“You could if we let you, but we wouldn’t. So, no.”
“Could a nuclear weapon destroy your ship?”
“Of course. We’re not magic. But again, we wouldn’t let that happen, so . . . don’t worry about it.”
“How can you speak without a tongue?”
“Carefully,” the alien replied. “And also, I think, rather well.”
I paused for a moment, leaning back and feeling the chair’s frame bend with me. George didn’t seem to be upset by my questions about the weapons, but then I had no idea what an upset purple hippo alien looked like. Maybe he was displaying rage and I just wasn’t getting the message. Except . . . I didn’t think so.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Talking to you.”
“I don’t mean you, specifically.” I waved a hand toward the darkness. “I mean all of you. The ship. Why have you come to Earth?”
George blinked its small eyes. “Same answer, more or less. We wanted to talk with you. Except, with not just you, of course. With quite a few people.”
I remembered that there had been at least six boxes in that field in St. Louis, and surely that wasn’t the only place where they had sent out a summons. “How many people did you . . .” I searched for the right word, before finally settling on “Invite?”
“147,162. You’re a bit less than unique, Doc. But hey, you’re still quite rare, so feel good about that.” The alien pointed a thick purple finger my way. “You are special.”
My nervousness and fear were gradually giving way to a sense of frustration. George was giving me responses, but they weren’t really answers. I turned to a different approach. “I’m not an expert,” I said, “but doesn’t first contact between cultures with different levels of technology always end with the less technologically advanced culture being destroyed?”
To my surprise, the answer was both instant and blunt. “It does. It will.”
“You mean . . . you came to destroy us?”
George shook his head, which required him to actually twist his whole body. “Not at all. We’re not here to fight you, Doc. We don’t want your planet or your stuff. If we could meet you without harming you, we would. But you’re right; that’s not the way these things work.” George made a rough, rumbling noise that might have been a sigh. “Even if we leave right now, today, just the fact that so many have seen us, that you know we’re out here, will very likely result in disruptions that deeply alter your society. Sorry about that.”
I tried for a moment to think what must be happening out in the world. People from all around the planet had climbed into boxes and been taken away. There was a ship the size of a city hanging in the winter air over Wisconsin. If people hadn’t already started losing it, they would soon. One of those people would probably be me.
“Aren’t there rules against that sort of thing? Aren’t you supposed to . . . not do that?”
The question brought a fresh attempt at a shrug. “If you mean, do we have something like a ‘Prime Directive,’ a rule against meeting with species that aren’t yet capable of interstellar flight . . .” It paused and spread its heavy arms wide. “The answer should be obvious. We can’t be too picky about that, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“You . . .” I drew in a breath, trying to think of how I could ask this question without sounding rude. Or at least too rude. “You know a lot about us. That’s clear from the popular culture references.”
“True,” said George. “I personally have watched every season of Project Runway and can sing the Gilligan’s Island theme song in three languages.”
I tried not to wince. “So, if you know that much, you probably know our history. Like, the history of what happened when European explorers reached the New World.”
The big alien shifted on its bench. “Let’s take a look,” it said.
George gestured to his right, and when I looked that way, I saw a beach. The image was so clear, so detailed, that it took me a few seconds to realize it was an image and not some kind of doorway opening improbably out onto some remote tropical location. For several seconds after that, I simply stared, slack-jawed, at the incredible tangle of unfamiliar trees, and the miles of untracked, undeveloped, pale sand. “Where is this coming from?” I asked.
“More like when,” said George. “Keep watching.”
The waves pounded against the shore for a few seconds longer. Then there were feet. The feet appeared at one edge of the image, first one pair, then three. The feet were attached to hairy legs, and as the people they were attached to stepped a bit farther down the beach, I could see the ragged, stained bottoms of what looked like kind of odd, quilted leggings. “What . . .” I started, but before I could say anything more, a figure stepped from the forest. She was young, little more than a child, slender, tan, and also naked. Not that I had much time to look at her, because two seconds after she stepped out of the trees, she was stumbling back. At the top of the image, I could see a hand clutching a short, lightly curved sword. The dull metal was slick with blood.
I found myself coming clumsily to my feet, the green-cushioned chair sliding back across the smooth floor. “What was . . . I mean . . .”
All motion on the image suddenly stopped, the waves frozen as they curled above the sand. “That was first contact,” said George. “Or a first contact, anyway. This one was Eleuthera, 1498.”
I just kept staring at the still image. If I looked carefully, I could still see one of the young woman’s legs vanishing into the dense greenery and drops of her blood on their way to the sand. “Is that, or was that, some kind of simulation?”
“No. It was a recording.”
“How can you possibly have a recording of something from over five hundred years ago?” I asked. “Even if you were watching us, how can you have been in just the right place to record that?”
“Sixteen billion cameras,” said George.
“What?”
“Sixteen billion high-capacity recording devices, each one about the size of a grain of dust, scattered over your planet around eleven thousand years ago.” Another almost shrug. “We don’t see everything, but we do see quite a lot.”
For a good thirty seconds, I just stood there and thought about this. The aliens not only knew human history, they knew it better than we did. Better than the most informed human scholar. Cameras scattered around the world with such density that one might be present on a remote beach, with such capacity that they could record centuries of information. It was mind-boggling. They might not know everything, but they would certainly be able to answer questions that had baffled historians since . . . history. In fact, they knew—
“Hey, if you’ve got all this recorded, then you must know what really happened when . . .”
>
George cut me off with a wave of a big hand. “You know that thing I said about answering any question?”
“Yes.”
“I lied,” it said. “Because I’m not answering that one.”
“You don’t even know what I’m going to ask.”
“Does it involve guys wearing sandals and living some time ago? Say in the Middle East?”
“No,” I said. Then after a moment: “All right, yes. It does.”
“Not answering,” George repeated. “At least, not now.”
“Okay.” I looked around for my chair, turned it toward George, and sat down again. “But the thing before, that horror show on the beach, you understand why that kind of thing has me scared.”
“Of course.”
“It always goes like that,” I said. “Or, something like that. Even when it’s less bloody.”
“You are not wrong. Contact situations have uniformly resulted in nearly complete destruction of the technologically disadvantaged society.” The edge of humor that had seemed to tint George’s voice since it first spoke out of the darkness had abruptly disappeared. “This one will be no different. When we leave, you will be irrevocably changed. Even if we do nothing more, even if you never see us again, the . . . waves from this day will almost certainly help to rip apart your society.” It gestured to the side, and I saw that the image of the beach was there again. This time, there were two small ships on the horizon, crossing slowly in front of a furiously blue sky. “You’ve seen the sails,” said George. “You know the others are there. That alone is a blow that few civilizations can survive. Even if we don’t shoot you. Or enslave you. Or take all your land. Or eat you . . . this is going to be hard on you.”
I ran a hand over my face, and to my surprise, it came away wet. “Then . . . you are here to destroy us. Only you did it without firing a shot.”
George rose slowly to its big flat feet and took a step away from its chair. “You’re not wrong,” it said. “But you’re also not completely right. Our coming here will almost certainly destroy you, but we came here to save you.”
As the alien took another step forward, I couldn’t help but lean away. I reached behind me with one hand and found the edge of the gray box. “That . . . doesn’t make any sense.”
George stopped, and both its ears gave a twitch. For the first time I noticed a kind of musky, damp leather smell in the air. “Unfortunately, it makes the only sense.” Its big mouth had done a fair job of imitating a smile before, but now it did an even more convincing job on a frown. “Your civilization—not just what you call America, or Western civilization, but the whole enterprise that human beings have constructed since the glaciers receded eleven thousand years ago, is coming to an end.”
“Because you’re killing us,” I said, more than a note of anger entering my tone.
George gave another body-twisting shake of his head. “Because you are.”
“But . . .”
“In the very near future. Your civilization will collapse under its own weight. Under the force of the stress you’ve created on your environment and the failure of institutions that you’ve pushed to the limit. You’ve had a good run, but it’s nearly over.” It thumped its two heavy hands together in an expression that looked very much like frustration. “You asked why we had come when we knew it would cause you harm. This is why. We came, because harm was already coming. Our visiting you will accelerate that collapse, and we’re sorry about that. But the collapse is coming anyway.”
“But . . . if your technology is so much better . . . could you help us?” I struggled back to my feet and almost fell over the green-cushioned chair. “You could tell us what to do. You could save us.”
George shook both hands over its head. “We are saving you. That’s what I’m telling you.”
The combination of confusion and relief almost buckled my knees. “You’re saving us?”
“No. We’re saving you, Doc. You. Samuel David Harold Fetherstonhaugh.”
“Me?” My voice cracked, turning the word into something close to a screech.
The alien waved a hand at me. “Sit down, please. Let me try to explain.” With that, George stepped heavily back to its own chair and settled again, the alien’s thick legs straddling the bench.
I stood a moment longer, breathing heavily. Then I sat down, gripping tightly to the arms of the chair, never looking away from the purple being across from me. “You came to save me.”
“Yes. You and a few thousand others, yes.”
“A few?” I said. “But . . . you said you’d invited 147,000 and . . . something.”
“147,162.” George gave a slow nod. “But while we’ve been talking, quite a number have reached a decision.”
“What decision?”
“About whether they’ll come with us.” He spread his big hands again. “You might have guessed it by now, Doc, but that’s the question. The one question I have for you.”
I had the impression again that there was something else out there in the darkness. Other shapes moving around me. “You want me to come with you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s our way of saving you. And this time, I don’t just mean you personally, but you, all of you.” It gestured at the image still hanging in the air on its right, where the tiny ships could just be glimpsed in the distance. “You’ve already seen that we’ve recorded your history. We’ve done the same with your art. We have your music and your images and your writing. But that’s not you.” It paused for a moment, leaning its big-chinned face my way. “We need you.”
By then, I felt so twisted around, I could only repeat its words. “You need me.”
“Yes,” said George. “Because that’s how you save us.” There was a long pause, during which there came another of those rumbling sighs. Then with a sweep of George’s hand the image hanging in the air beside it became a view of Earth that sped rapidly away, and away, and away until any sign of the planet was lost in a swirl of stars. “We know you, but we are not you. Not human. What we’re offering you is a chance to be a part of something larger than yourselves. To weave what it means to be human into what it means to be a thousand other things.”
I thought for a moment, but the only question I could think to ask was the one I had asked so many times already. “Why?”
“Because,” said the alien, “that’s the only real way that civilizations survive. They go on by being . . . a note in the symphony. A leaf on the tree.”
“But,” I said, “if we do that, we won’t be us anymore. Not the way we were before.”
It nodded again. “You will not be the same. But that’s the choice that every civilization faces eventually. You can embrace a diversity where you’re part of a larger picture, or hold fast to what you see as purity . . . and die alone.” It pointed at the cloud of stars in the image, which was still growing and growing as the apparent camera moved ever farther from Earth. “Maintaining an unchanging culture is the most destructive form of nostalgia.”
George abruptly stopped, and that frighteningly huge smile returned to its face as it held out a three-fingered hand my way. “Come with me if you want to live.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “And if I don’t?”
Semi-shrug. “Climb in the box and go home.”
“Where I tell them what?”
“Anything you want. Tell them everything we said.” George rocked on its bench, causing the board to creak again. “That woman you met before coming here? The woman from the playing field?”
“Yes?”
“She made her decision quite quickly. She’s already back and talking to the FBI. A lot of people around the world are doing something similar.”
“But . . . won’t that make a difference? I mean, if everyone knows what you said, won’t that help? Maybe we can
still stop things from falling apart.”
“You would think so,” said George. “That’s not our experience, but hey, maybe it will. We’re not perfect. We know your history, but we can’t be one hundred percent certain of your future. Maybe our coming here really will save the whole ugly mess.”
“You think that’s possible?”
“No.” He leaned toward me even more. “Come with us, Doc.”
“And do what?”
“This,” he said. “Think of this as a job interview, although you’ve already got the job if you want it. This is what we do.”
“Who is we?”
“A coalition of almost eleven thousand civilizations from over four thousand species lucky enough to be found before they had the chance to off themselves. A million billion people who sat in that chair and answered yes when they were asked this question.” George stopped, and this time the smile was somehow softer. “Well, not literally that chair. Not all of us would fit.”
Then I sat for a long time. Several minutes at least. George didn’t try to hurry me as I thought through everything that had happened, everything that had been said. “This isn’t first contact,” I said. “It’s last contact.”
“That’s true,” said George. “Though, actually, I’m sure this isn’t the last time we’ll be visiting Earth.”
“It’s not?”
“Not at all. A planet like this . . . there’s another billion years where it could turn out new civilizations. I’m sure we’ll be back this way in ten thousand years, or a hundred, to make the same offer to someone else. They might even be human.” The alien looked at me with its small dark eyes. “But they won’t be you, Doc. We’ve already saved everything we can of your people. Including you, if you’ll come.”
“And all that will be left of us is some scrap of our culture spread into a bigger culture, like . . . an intergalactic Taco Bell.”
George exploded in a series of uh, uh, uh sounds so loud it made me jump in my chair. A few seconds passed before it settled down enough to reply. “First of all, we’re just in this one galaxy. Second, don’t knock the Bell, Doc. They give good value for the dollar.”
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