First contact, p.10
First Contact, page 10
“Okay, fine. Let’s say I said that,” she said.
“I would say join my next conference call with Rabbi Herschel, because the last time we spoke, I left him pondering much the same question.”
“I can’t win, can I?” she said.
“There is no victory in discussion, only deeper understanding of our own positions. By reconciling this apparent confusion over the use of language we find a shared clarity, thus we move ever closer to harmony.”
“You clearly haven’t seen social media lately,” Serene said. “Confusion abounds, clarity’s moved out, and harmony has gone into witness protection.”
Before the ambassador could reply, a yellow light flashed on his desk. “Ah, and sadly, I must go. Against my advice, someone informed the U.S. president of what was really being stored in Area 51. He is threatening to reveal what he knows unless we give him a spaceship. He wants to call it Space Force One.”
“What are you going to tell him?”
“That I would be happy to discuss it with him in person as soon as the pandemic is over.”
“You’re buying time, you mean,” she said.
“It is how human politicians have treated me for longer than I care to remember,” Johann said. “Oh, and your dinosaur lacks feathers.” The hologram vanished.
“How did he see? I’m sure he didn’t turn around,” Serene said. She moved the dinosaur so it was in front of the projector, just in case Johann or Greta called while she was out. She picked up the toy jail, and went back to work.
Disposing of the fossilising remains of the archaeologists’ last meal on Earth had taken her a whole week. Now she was tidying away the half-finished research, cataloguing as she went. Abi had prioritised the projects based on their own academic prejudices, so archaeology had taken priority over sociology. With the specimens from the sapiens’ migration to Australia now safely stored away, it was time to begin cataloguing what Abi had described as populist gimmickry.
She returned the toy jail to the table in the sociology lab where she’d found it before setting up the cameras, one on each side.
No technology was allowed on Earth that was more than two generations in advance of what could be created by sapiens. Since sapiens and towani had massively different life expectancies and calendars, the length of a generation could easily be stretched to whatever the ambassador wished to approve, but that didn’t mean it could always be afforded.
The cameras had come from a junk room in a Valley museum, but they were old enough to have been put on display. They’d been sent to Earth in the not-so-subtle hope it would encourage researchers to send samples off-planet for examination. Since that wasn’t possible with the quarantine, she would use the cameras to create a three-dimensional digital rendering with which the academics could attempt to complete their work.
As she watched the status bar fill to completion, she couldn’t help wondering why any academic had wanted a toy jail, and so checked the brief sent by Abi. The answer was to be found in the original grant proposal. The toy was marketed to children aged four to ten, and the researcher wanted to know how a four-year-old could be so familiar with the concept of a jailbreak they would want to re-create it in their play.
At midday, she stopped for lunch. Theoretically, it was pizza. There were agricultural worlds within the Valley. Traditionally, the sooval competed for valour through the size of their harvest. Thousands of years later, there was still an echo of farming in their athletic musical contests. The multi-species settlers on Sifid had devoted each of the planet’s one hundred island-continents to a single specific crop, while the kelp farms and coral beds on the planet Dillith formed an intricate pattern said to tell the story of creation itself. The towani were different. Their abducted ancestors had been hunter-gatherers. During their enslavement, sustenance had come from machines. When they’d settled on the first planet they named Towan, their goal had been to learn how to build spaceships of their own so they could search for their ancestral home. Having no history, or knowledge, of agriculture, they had kept their enslavers’ food machines working out of necessity.
When their fleet eventually fled the now-toxic Towan I, the first species they’d met had been the sharp-toothed and sharper-tongued jajan, to whom they outsourced agricultural production. After a brief war, a similar treaty was struck with the sooval and so, still, there had been no need for the towani to learn how to sow. The first empire grew. The trade links became more complex. When they failed, famine followed war, and reaped the end of that empire. Grim necessity forced the survivors to re-embrace the half-forgotten printing technology of their dark past. Ever since the discovery of Earth, and the shipment of seeds off-world, many of the faithful grew a strawberry plant or a potted thyme, but most people still got their calories from meals that had been printed one molecule at a time.
Dishes were pre-programmed. The recipes, which Serene was fervently trying to convince everyone should be called the sauce code, came from the trendiest corner of the capital. No chef, anywhere in the galaxy, wanted to copy when they could interpret, so the code they’d written for pizza had a purple base, a yellow sauce, and an impossibly bright blue cheese. At least it was circular.
Since her only option for a view was a two-kilometre-long tunnel, she ate in front of a book, a twist-ridden mystery so engaging she nearly forgot what she was eating. Packing the rest for a mid-afternoon snack, she picked up her glasses, and checked her mail for the first time since the morning.
There was a message from her mother. “Your father has caught covid.”
Chapter 11 - The Bitter Reality of Only Being Human
“You can’t visit your father,” Greta said. “How would you get to Ireland? If you drove, how many hundreds of people would you come in contact with? If you flew, how many passengers would also be on the plane? Where would you quarantine when you arrived? Who would care for you if you caught the virus?”
“I could take your saucer,” Serene said.
“And who would fly it?” Greta asked. “I can’t uphold our law with one hand and break it with the other.”
“Sometimes this feels like a prison,” Serene said.
“You can always leave,” Greta said. “The emergency escape is at the far end of the tunnel. But if you leave, you would still be subject to the laws of Germany, Ireland, and all the nations through which you would need to travel.”
“No, I know. That’s not what I meant,” Serene said.
“Then let me put it another way,” Greta said. “You shouldn’t leave. And nor should I. Long ago, your father and I realised our love would have to come second to our work. I want to see him, too, to be by his side, just to tell him how much I do love him, but I can’t. You can’t. For me, this is just the latest in a long list of painful separations, but after each of those, we were reunited, as we shall be again, as you shall be again.”
Serene bit her lip, quelling the growing ball of rage. Despite being adopted, she’d definitely inherited a tendency towards fury from her father. At times like this, logic became jumbled before it reached her mouth and so she ended up making the wrong point. “Why don’t we fly over and collect him? Da should be upstairs in the clinic, getting proper treatment from proper doctors, not lying in some random lake-house in rural Cork.”
“Celeste is well equipped to look after him,” Greta said. “She has seen many plagues and pandemics.”
“But she’s not a doctor,” Serene said. “Dad should be here.”
“He can’t be,” Greta said. “It wouldn’t be safe for the prophet.”
“Gramps? But the clinic has an isolation bay.”
“Not Johann, not the ambassador, and not your grandfather. I am referring to the Last Prophet,” Greta said.
“They’re the same person,” Serene said.
“Yes and no,” Greta said. “An ambassador is easily replaced, but if the prophet dies now, before first contact has officially taken place, the prophecy will be incomplete, and thus he can’t have been the prophet. Do you see? This would bring great upheaval to the Valley. Perhaps even a civil war, and at a time when our cold war with the Voytay is beginning to warm.”
“I know you don’t believe in any of that prophecy stuff,” Serene said.
“Billions of sentient beings do,” Greta said. “And in that belief is the future safety of the Valley, and of the entire human species, sapiens and towani alike. Your father was vaccinated against the Red Plague years ago. Despite that, he caught covid. It is possible that our vaccine isn’t as effective for sapiens, or that it is not effective enough. Until we know, the risks are simply too great. You’ve seen the histories of the Red Plague?”
“Sure. Billions died, including the entire imperial family, leaving the Committee of Regents in charge of the Third Empire.”
“It was some time ago, but the damage wrought by the regents remains an open wound in the heart of our society. It would be nothing compared to the turmoil if the Last Prophet were to die here on Earth. Your father knows this. It is at the core of all he has done.”
“Tell me about it,” Serene said, bitterly. The conversation had got away from her again, and this time, she knew she’d never catch up. “I better get to work.”
“I’m here any time you want to talk,” Greta said.
Serene ended the call. “What are you looking at?” she said, addressing the toy dinosaur. Aping her aboveground cousins, she’d taken to making her calls from behind a desk. She’d assumed the purpose of such a rigidly formal pose was to increase her focus, gravitas, and concision. It hadn’t. “I know what I want to say, but the words never come out right. You know what the problem is, Rex? The towani treat us like kids because we’re not twenty in their calendar. But this is Earth. I’m not towani, but I’m not really sapiens. I’m stuck halfway between. And you’re just a lump of plastic, and Tempest isn’t here.”
She swung the chair around, so as to end the one-sided conversation before it dragged her into a deeper depression.
“Blah,” she muttered. “Blah, blah, blah.” For once, yelling the ironically hilarious towani swearword didn’t make her smile. So, instead, she went to work.
Next on her list of janitorial tasks was a stock-take of the supplies and equipment for field trips.
The lead scientist, Abi, by reason of seniority in every sense of the word, had claimed the labs closest to the elevators, and so to the facilities above. To keep far away from their blistering disparagement, the sociologists had taken shelter in the labs at the other end of the tunnel. The anthropologists, linguists, and elite artists occupied the buffer zone between. Beyond the sociologists were the storerooms. Serene found herself continuing down to the tunnel’s very end, and to the elevator which led up to the nature reserve. She’d used the emergency exit many times, and so had everyone in the embassy. For some, a night-time hike was a chance to see more wild greenery than existed on the entirety of Towan III. For the faithful, it was an opportunity to walk the same hills as their sacred ancestors. For her, it was a place of spring walks, summer picnics, autumn campfires, and snowball fights.
“Not today,” she said, turned on her heel, and brought up her job-list. “Let’s see… okay, everything in this storeroom is for fieldwork, and hasn’t been used in… oh, decades.”
She double-checked the dates before re-reading the list more carefully. Camo-hoods, beacons, signal jammers, portable power supplies; the list went on, but it was collectively used to prevent detection of a semi-permanent excavation site by a stray sapiens. None of it had been inspected in a decade, or used since the 1990s.
The storeroom was narrow, deep, and tall, with rows of cabinets along one side and with drawers on the other. With the topmost drawer nearly three metres up, she’d need a ladder to reach it. There should have been a ladder in the room, and she found it in an archaeology store, ten chambers down.
Each drawer and cabinet had a digital tag. As her gaze settled on the tag, the contents appeared on her lenses. The first should be, and were, camo-hoods. This primitive cloaking technology could obscure the wearer’s features, but not their heat signature, making the hoods next to useless in combat. They weren’t much more use on Earth. Instead of making a towani’s head look like a sapiens, it made them look like monsters.
Curious to see what it would do to a sapiens face, she took off her glasses, pulled on a hood, and looked up at the room’s security camera. When she put her glasses back on, and tried to pull up the camera’s feed, she found the system was offline and had been for years. She pulled out a drawer, propped her glasses on it, and set them to record before pulling the hood back on.
“Yep, monstrous,” she said as she checked the image. She added a quick note: What two months without Tempi has done to me, and sent it to her father. She grinned, then panicked, and decided she better add some context. Stock-taking camo-hoods.
The master record said there should be thirty hoods. She counted ten and found the rest in the next two cabinets along.
“Check, tick, done,” she said, and decided she needed some company so turned on the radio, but the local call-in show was interviewing people stranded from their families by the pandemic. That cut too close to her own reality, so she switched to a music station.
The next drawer contained behind-the-ear translators from the very earliest days of first contact. Since then, a software update had been written for the towani who used implants, and for the glasses and visors used by those who were more religious. On her file, Abi had added a note to send the translators upstairs for issuing to humans after first contact. She checked they were all there, then took them out into the corridor; she’d carry them down to the elevator at day’s end.
The cabinet opposite contained cold-weather clothing that really should have been cleaned before it was put away. She closed the door hurriedly and sent a message to Greta asking for permission to mark them for destruction. The label on the next door said it should contain two emergency beacons, issued to teams of field workers who might need immediate extraction. When she opened the cabinet, she found Spock staring right back at her.
Two Spocks, one Chewbacca, an E.T., a Lieutenant Uhura, a Hulk, and a Dalek, all still in their packaging. Signed packaging, too.
She checked the door again, but the sign definitely read beacons, while her list didn’t mention collectible figurines, or any possible synonym thereof. She pulled up a different file. The beacons had last been used in 1992. The signature on the older Spock clearly, and boldly, read Leonard Nimoy. The squiggle on the other was illogically indecipherable, but the first word began with a Z, and the second with a Q. A moment’s accessing of the Earth-internet told her that had to be Zachary Quinto, and he didn’t play Spock until 2009.
She sighed. Clearly, these had been misfiled by an anthropologist as a prank on Abi, meaning she’d have to go through every cabinet in every storeroom until she found the beacons. At least she knew what she’d be doing for the next month.
The edge of her lenses flashed yellow as a message came in. All thoughts of the cabinet were forgotten as she saw it was from her father. He’d sent her a photograph of a pair of robins sitting atop opposite fences on either side of a small square of wildflower-lawn. Below was the simple message: Even the birds are social distancing.
Chapter 12 - Blue Cheese, White Bone
Serene tilted the lamp so as to give the pizza’s fluorescent blue cheese an even unhealthier shine, took a photo, and sent it to her father with the message: Introducing the latest diet: one look, and you lose your appetite. Of course, now she’d made the pizza, she actually had to eat it. She’d unenthusiastically nibbled her way through a quarter of a slice when she got a reply: a photo of a bowl of plain grey porridge and the words want to swap?
She grinned. Dad was getting better. She’d called him yesterday, but he found it too difficult to talk. No matter, he was getting better.
She folded the rest of the pizza into a sandwich, and was packing it into a box for her lunch when her screen flashed yellow with another incoming call, this one a holo.
“Hey, Gramps,” she said, as the ambassador appeared on the desk. “Everything okay?”
“Time will tell,” Johann said. “Have you heard of a root beer float?”
“I’m not sure,” she said.
“It’s ice cream dropped into a carbonated beverage flavoured with a root called sarsaparilla. President Carter recommended I try it when we last met. I never quite found the time until now. Individually, the components are pleasant, but the combination is deeply unsettling. He insisted it was quite popular, but I wondered if it was another of his jokes.”
“Did you try asking the internet?”
“The sapiens living in the United States insist it’s a genuine pleasure, while everyone else on this planet is convinced they are playing a prank.”
“Hang on,” Serene said, checking the Earth-internet herself. “It says Jimmy Carter is still alive. You should call him and ask.”
“But if it is a national prank being played on the world, he’ll lie and say it’s not. Thus, how do I ascertain the truth? It is an interesting logical dilemma.”
“I’m guessing it’s kinda quiet upstairs,” Serene said. “Wait, hang on. Are you getting deliveries of ice cream?”
“We had an essential delivery, yes, to which I added ice cream, but purely for the sake of this diplomatic experiment. It is that delivery I wished to discuss with you.”
“You’re sending me ice cream?”
“I am, and that’s not all,” Johann said. “Tempest is back in system. Someone released the news that they were making a pilgrimage to Lillani. This caused other pilgrims to ask how the shrine’s guardians could guarantee there was no risk of infection. Facing a public relations disaster, Tempest was asked to defer their devotions for another year.”
