Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (13 page)

‘Maybe they know more about the theory than we do,’ said Myrion. ‘Or they have a different one.’

Freedom sighed. ‘I’ll concede that.’

‘So it’s possible the aliens interfered with us in some way?’ asked Gabe, clutching for answers. ‘Is there any way of finding out for certain?’

‘I hate to say this, but... I don’t think so.’ It obviously hurt Freedom to admit her ignorance. ‘If they’re sufficiently advanced, they could do anything they wanted without us knowing.’

‘But
why?
Why would they try to kill us in the middle of a jump, then not finish the job when they had the chance? It doesn’t make sense.’ Gabe looked as though he was about to hit the desk, a sure sign he was feeling cornered. ‘And why the hell won’t they
talk
to us?’

I rushed in to forestall a bad scene. ‘I think we’re getting ourselves a little overwrought. Perhaps we should take a step back and look at this from another angle.’

‘Oh, yes?’ sneered Andre. ‘What exactly do you suggest?’

‘Try and see it from the aliens’ point of view. They might be as puzzled as we are.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Steve.

‘Well, they’ve approached us twice now - three times, if you count when we came out of hyperspace - and each time they’ve disappeared. Maybe we didn’t respond the way they expected us to. They could be so alien that
our
behaviour is nonsensical to
them,
just as theirs is to us.’

If Freedom resented the theft of her ideas, she didn’t show it. ‘I agree. We mustn’t fall into the trap of interpreting an apparent lack of communication as evidence of hostility. The degree of alienation between them and us could be so great that standard methods of communication will prove to be insufficient.’

‘I could believe that,’ said Sara, ‘if they didn’t look so ...
ordinary.’

‘What if their real appearance is incomprehensible?’ suggested Myrion. ‘The semblance of a flying saucer might be nothing more than an hallucination superimposed by our own minds upon an unacceptable reality.’

‘Good thought.’ I nodded. ‘But the main thing we must always keep in our minds is the fact that, for all their superior technology, they haven’t destroyed us - and they’ve had three chances.’

Gabe looked grateful. ‘Right. If they were hostile, they would have killed us by now. The fact that they followed us here suggests that they still want to make contact. Doesn’t it, Andre?’

The security head said nothing, but I could tell what he was thinking: if a friendly greeting could be misinterpreted as a result of cultural incompatibility, then didn’t the same apply to an act of aggression?

‘Anybody else?’ Gabe looked expectantly around the table. ‘No more gripes? Then that’s it. Back to work. We’ll meet again in twenty-four hours, when Steve can tell us more, and decide then exactly what we’re going to do next.’

Back in my ‘office’, I shut down the security cameras and the bugs, thus isolating myself from the rest of the
Wandering Jew
and from the permanent record. For the first time since I had taken residence in the ship, I was completely unobserved.

Or was I?

Surrounded by distractions, it was hard to concentrate. I needed to be alone for a while, to think for myself. My small personal space was the only quarter of the ship where I could achieve the necessary isolation, and even with the cameras off I still felt crowded, watched.

On one wall, a coloured 3-D chart showed the constellation of Boötis plus a few close neighbours. Our path staggered like a drunkard’s walk through the Herdsman, the Northern Crown and the Serpent’s Head, with the occasional detour to Hercules, the Virgin and the Serpent Bearer. Legendary scenery, an itinerary of archetypes. One flying saucer hardly seemed conspicuous in such auspicious company.

Target stars were numbered in order from one to fifty, with red circles enclosing the ones we had already visited: Xi Boötis, first of all, one of the closest binaries to Sol System, was followed by other ‘notables’ like Arcturus, O-Boötis, Alpha CB, and Omega Herculis. Amongst the unringed systems were: Gamma CB and Epsilon Boötis (Mirak), both binaries; the white supergiants Theta CB and Nu Boötis; Kappa Serpens Caput and Delta Ophiuchis, the only M-type stars on our itinerary; and a seemingly endless number of Giant G and K systems: Beta Boötis, Delta CB, Yale 5601, Beta Herculis, Yale 5535, Rho Serpens, Psi Boötis, Epsilon Ophiuchis and Phi Virgo. Second to last was the system of Lambda Serpens, just thirty-five light years from home, which Freedom hoped would contain an Earth-like world.

We had come so far in such a short time. How could we possibly turn our backs on the rest of the mission? Would it make any difference in the long run if we did?

This was just the beginning of humanity’s exploration of local space. There were thousands of stars within reach of the crossover drive. By leaps of twenty to thirty light years at a time, our sphere of knowledge had begun to expand, and there was no way we could ever turn it back. Exploration had momentum, just like any other social force.

But we were
the first.
No matter how much pressure Andre exerted, Gabe would not capitulate. The mission would continue. And if there were really aliens out here with us, then that was something we would have to learn to live with.

But
were
there aliens? My first theory, that High Command was behind the saucer, seemed unconvincing now. A new one was forming at the back of my mind. I was no longer completely sure that the aliens were a fake.

I needed to see my ideas in a concrete form, to get them out of my head. Calling up a notebook file, I began to scribble notes.

THE STORY SO FAR:

1. Earth is a very powerful high-frequency radio-source, but has only been pumping out signals for two hundred years. This means that, for an alien ship to have detected these signals, it must be somewhere inside a bubble of space two hundred light years in radius with Earth at its centre. Gamma Boötis, our twenty-sixth system, will be the first we encounter of twelve outside this bubble. All the earlier ones are candidates.
   

1. An alien ship inside this bubble will be bombarded by radio and television broadcasts from maybe as far back as the early twentieth century, depending on how distant they are. But it won’t be as simple as them switching on their own TVs and tuning in: they won’t know anything about frequency or amplitude modulations, or wide-band digital transmissions or carrier waves or NTSC formats, and so on. They’ll have to work it all out from scratch before they have something to study.
   

1. Then, of course, there’s interpretation. We’ve never had the opportunity to study a culture from nothing but its transmission media. It might be harder than we think. It might take years. And, if I was an alien, I certainly wouldn’t want to approach another world without first understanding its culture. Earth might be a world of rabid xenophobes. Or our religion might revolve around the ritual sacrifice of unexpected visitors. Or anything.
   

1. There might have been hundreds of visitors inside our bubble of space, but all we need is one. One curious explorer, as Freedom suggested. One to pick up the signals, to be studying them at this very moment. Although it might conceivably be drifting through deep space, it’s probably safe to assume that it will be located near a planetary system. (Where else would you look for developing life?) And it hasn’t had time to approach Earth. (If it had, we would have seen it.) Maybe it’ll leave without doing so, because we’re too aggressive or whatever. But it’s there
   right now
   - and that’s what counts. Studying Earth long-distance.
   

1. OK, now suppose that this alien ship is close enough to Earth to pick up our signals, but no further out than Mu Boötis (where we first saw it). That makes the bubble a little smaller, with a radius of one hundred and eight light years. An alien inside this bubble would be picking up transmissions from the early twentieth century.
   

1. Television, the largest broadcast-medium, is composed of two distinct streams of data: (1) information, and (2) entertainment. The first stream includes news, documentaries, current affairs and educational programs. The second contains sports, sitcoms, game shows and soap operas. Ever since television was invented, the second stream has been more popular - and therefore more substantial.
   

1. As the aliens sift through all this data, they will be attempting to create a psychological model of the way we think, rather than a technological model of what our world is like. They’ll realise that their information could be as much as seventy-five years old (the time it takes a television signal to reach their location at the tardy speed of light). We might have advanced markedly since then, or wiped ourselves out. The only constant in all this info would be the way we
   behave,
   regardless of our level of technology. That’s what the aliens will be after. Their motive will be more than simple curiosity; they’ll be looking for the best way to approach Earth. They don’t want to surprise us so much that we start a war over them.
   

1. If it was a human crew studying Earth, they would be watching the entertainment pretty closely - the soap operas in particular, because these offer a glimpse of what the real world is supposedly like, or how we would like it to be. If these aliens are
   really
   alien, however, they won’t understand the difference between information and entertainment. They might not be able to separate the game shows from the news from the soap operas from the documentaries. They might take it all at face value. All they can do is keep watching and hope that it will eventually make sense.
   

1. Then, one day, the
   Wandering Jew
   appears in their vicinity. With news a few decades out of date, they wouldn’t know about the crossover drive or the revitalised space program. We’d just pop up out of nowhere. Unexpected as it is, they realise that this is the perfect opportunity for them: a shipload of live humans, handed to them on a platter. All they have to do is ensure that we don’t see them and they can watch us to their hearts content. Which they do. And when we leave, they follow us, to continue their studies.
   

1. And what do they find? They find the Adventures of the
   Wandering Jew
   - another soap opera! The more they watch, the more they realise that this soap opera is helping us survive, by bleeding off our pooled tensions in a non-violent way. The soap opera is essential to the continuation of our existence.
   

1. The aliens look at our behaviour and say: ‘Sure, why not? What we have here is a race of psychodramatic beings. They work through their problems by dramatising them, abstracting them from reality. What’s so weird about that? If they want to deal with the real world by apparently circumventing it, then that’s their business. If that’s how they stay sane, more power to them. The Adventures of the
   Wandering Jew
   is just a microcosm of the larger pool of soap operas back on Earth. A soap bubble, if you like, cast aloft on the winds of space.’
   

1. Eventually, another alien says: ‘Then I think that solves our problem. All this time we’ve been watching these people and trying to work out how best to approach them. Well, here’s our chance. Let’s reveal ourselves to these few, and they can tell the others. All we have to do to soften the blow of First Contact is dress up the encounter. We’ll create a phantom flying saucer, just like something out of ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’, and they’ll take it fine. They’ll be able to deal with it, if it appears as part of the soap. When we truly reveal ourselves, later, they’ll be prepared. (And if they send a war-fleet after us, like some of the old films, we’ll have plenty of time to get away ...) Simple, right?’
   

1. So, when the
   Jew
   arrives at the O-Boötis system, it encounters a green flying saucer. The apparition is an archetype behaving in archetypal fashion. We are supposed to interpret this unexpected appearance from the context of our psychodrama and report that we have been contacted by aliens. That the saucer makes no attempt to communicate (apart from simply
   being
   there) is irrelevant; our psychological make-up should allow us to understand the real aliens’ intentions. We should instantly recognise an obvious cue for a change of script.
   

1. But we don’t. We step out of the soap opera and question the authenticity of the vision itself. The aliens have guessed wrong. Their crude behavioural model doesn’t include the possibility of self-reference. They don’t realise that we are acting, and that we know we are acting. The soap opera is just a game with a bonus psychosociological kickback. We write a new soap opera about how the old soap opera seems to be falling apart at the seams.
   

1. But still they persist; they decide, perhaps, that we were genuinely frightened by the illusion’s hostile behaviour. So, when we prepare to leave O-Boötis, the saucer appears again, this time behaving quite differently. Instead of as the conquering invader, it comes as the hesitant passer-by. We are supposed to remain behind to study it, again from the context of the soap opera.
   

1. A second time, we surprise them. We flee through hyperspace, thinking we can lose the pursuing saucer that way.
   

1. The drive explodes, but somehow we arrive anyway. And, when we regain our senses, there’s the saucer again, doggedly determined to enter our fragile bubble of soap without popping it.
   

1. And here am I, trying to work it all out...
   

I saved the file and browsed through it.