by Jerry
Bernie, Busky and I met in my private office at the radio station and the alien joined us by showing up on my television screen and then stepping out of it, expanding hologrammatically and occupying a chair. Or it seemed that he did these things. With A’s permission Bernie switched on his tape recorder and the session, not quite a news conference, got under way.
A. was dressed like a normal Earthstyle businessman—conventional suit, shirt, tie, etcetera. As good a disguise as any, I suppose. He spoke unaccented English.
Practically the first words A. said to us bore out Prof’s theory of why the aliens came: “Our being here is more accident than plan. To be candid at the risk of hurting your feelings, our original visit to your planet was a detour in a general exploration trip. Anorthosite brought us. It’s rare not only in your solar system but throughout the galaxy. We knew it existed somewhere but had only theoretical data until our scanners identified anorthosite on your planet and its moon.”
“If it hadn’t been for anorthosite you wouldn’t have stopped?” Bernie asked.
“We’d not have known anorthosite was here except that we received a human signal,” A. said.
“You mean from the Awaiters,” Busky Kimp said.
“No. I speak of a time thousands of years earlier. The signal was that of the young primitive Pirt. It sparked a special symbol in our sentience scanner.”
The string of sibilants surprised us. Obviously Bernie had a reaction similar to mine because he asked: “You scan for sentience?”
“Eternally.”
“You scanned for sentience and got Pirt?”
“We signal for sentience wherever we go in the universe. We’ve even triggered for troglodytes. But mostly on this mission we monitored for minerals. Until we hove to in response to the signal from Pirt we had not been close enough to Earth to detect anorthosite.”
“What kind was it?”
“It was an involuntary signal,” A. went on. “Our scanner registered manifestations of an emerging mind.”
“You got this signal from Pirt when?” Bernie asked. “During the Long Noon? Earlier?”
“Much, much earlier,” A. said. “Eons earlier. Your scientists know that anorthosite has little value in itself. Its real worth is an an indicator, and it indicates the presence of something much rarer—rare here and everywhere in the universe. Anorthosite indicated to us the presence of nordium.”
“Nordium?” Bernie asked.
“We took a sample for analysis and tested it later. Nordium is not one of the architectural underpinnings of the universe but it’s a highly effective catalyst.”
“A catalyst?” Bernie was using a reporter’s trick—slowing a speaker down so his information could be assimilated in manageable chunks, or to get more detail.
“Yes. Your sun’s components require an infusion of nordium to recharge its nuclear core,” A. said. “Otherwise, as is well known, your sun will cool and die in five million years.”
“That’s billion,” Bernie said. “Maybe even a hundred billion. Not million.”
“Billion-schmillion,” A. said with an Earthstyle shrug. “Your time isn’t everybody’s. Five or a hundred, million-billion, it’s all relative. You couldn’t handle the job yourselves so it was up to us to do a little preventive maintenance on Old Sol.”
“And that’s what was happening during the Long Noon,” I said.
“Precisely.”
“It wasn’t one of your ships refueling by drawing on the sun’s energy for its solar batteries?”
“On the contrary,” A. said patiently. “What in fact caused the illusion of the sun remaining at zenith long into the night was a laboratory ship of ours extracting nordium from the Earth and transmitting its essence to the sun, counteracting its entropy . . .”
“Just a second, please.” Bernie flipped to side two of the cassette in his recorder. I was taping everything on the station’s equipment but Bernie wanted his own actuality for the newsroom. “Counteracting the sun’s entropy?” he asked, six seconds later.
“Our entropologist found that nordium was able to reverse the slowdown and at the same time facilitate storage of reserve energy. Thus it became theoretically possible to transfer excess solar energy from your Sol to other suns in the galaxy. And who can say how far this might extend? Perhaps even to the suns of other galaxies.”
I thought of those underground pillars of anorthosite and their Stonehenge-like capstone. I didn’t ask but I wondered if it might even extend to replacing energy sucked into black holes—
Busky put the question for me. “That means now we don’t have to worry about red giants, white dwarfs and black holes,” he said. I figured he was showing off.
“I suppose you could say that now you don’t have to be blue about the event horizon,” A. told him, smiling for the first time. “Not in your time frame, anyway.”
Bernie said: “Could we go back to where you said you were signaling for sentience? That’s intriguing. What about all the other stuff Earth’s put up over the years, hoping we’d be seen or heard? The Arecibo message. That diagram with the fertile naked couple. All that music and the children’s hellos. That spaceborne wampum belt decorated with symbols any genius could understand. Even, maybe, the Great Wall of those inscrutable Chinese.”
“We get signals, all kinds, from all over,” A. said. “Ordinarily your messages would have taken their turn among sapient salaams from here to the happening horizon.”
“Didn’t you hear the Awaiters?”
“We deliberately did not. Our instruments filter out messages of a worshipful nature.”
Busky asked: “Do messages of that kind—let’s call them prayers—reach another destination?”
“No comment.”
Bernie brought him back to Pirt. “But you did respond when Pirt called you, involuntarily, way back then. Why?”
“Sibilants. Something subliminal.”
There was that hissing alliteration again! The alien was frowning as if he hadn’t meant it to be heard. His own sibilants seemed to hint at a fault in the alien armor.
Bernie pressed on: “You mean an appeal by an innocent child of the planet attracted you?”
“It was not the words or the speaker but the speech pattern itself that drew our attention,” the alien said. “We were struck by the primitive way he expressed himself, uttering the first meaningful words spoken by a creature of your planet.”
“So our own Summer Resident is the original talking caveman?”
A. looked embarrassed, he said: “Actually Pirt was scooped up along with our first sample of anorthosite, if I may describe the acquisition in nontechnical terms.”
“Unharmed?” Bernie asked.
“Entirely. We were unable to return him immediately. In the interval we took the opportunity to study the primitive fellow. And he in turn, as time went on, was able to learn much as he studied us.”
“How much time went on?” Bernie asked.
A. gave an Earthstyle shrug.
Bernie persisted: “How long was the interval?”
A. said: “It is difficult to express the passage of time, which is a relative phenomenon at best, in terms that would have meaning to three different cultures—yours, ours and that of a creature from an emergent environment. Pirt’s time sense, for example, was highly undeveloped.” A.’s air of embarrassment clung to him as he continued: “Such were the exigencies of our mission that we redeposited Pirt in a later but approximately equivalent time segment.” A.’s pause gave his statement the significance of a confession.
“He’s too far north for me,” Busky muttered. “What?” Bernie said distractedly.
“An old expression. It means somebody’s too cunning, too canny.”
Bernie grinned: “That might have applied to you once or twice, eh, Busky? Wait a minute—whatever a minute is in tri-cultural terms! Something’s beginning to dawn on me.” He asked A.:
“Are you telling us that from your point of view it made no d
ifference whether you took Pirt back to his cave on the shore of that great inland sea—that millennia-girt, long-gone sea—or dropped him off at some cavelike tenement in Spanish Harlem a few years ago? Of course they’re only our years. Obviously they don’t matter a great deal in your vast scheme of things. Nor does one lost little guy named Pirt. Pirt the forgotten man.”
Bernie’s speech almost had me feeling sorry for Pirt, the Don Juan of the Dawn.
A.’s hologram began to fade. “I must confess we misplaced Pirt for a while,” he said. “For quite a while, by his standards. But he still survives—alone of all his people, unfortunately. But we will make amends, manyfold, because the chapter is the book.” A. was fading fast. “The clod is a continent. The clone is the clan entire. One man is all men.”
He was gone. My television set switched itself off, taking A. with it.
Evidently Bernie thought the scene deserved a more dramatic finish. A curtain line, at least.
“Thank you, John Donne,” he said and clicked off the tape recorder.
((Hello, hello, hello. It’s me, Omniscient Observer, and if you’re counting you will say it is my third appearance before you: Fourth, if you caught my bit part in the Long Noon of Mitchell MacSwan. I felt naked there without my parentheses. But who’s counting, except you who live in a linear way? Actually I last came before you in the guise of A., alien spokesperson, in the transcript of a news conference I both participated in and later edited. Did you recognize me? I was somewhat subdued there, in my first public appearance. The report by MacSwan or O’Neill will have shown that. But inside these identifying double parentheses I’m comfortable. I can be myself again. If you ask why I mention punctuation in this oral-aural medium where my voice distinguishes me from MacSwan I will tell you there is also a written version of these proceedings, for insurance.
((And both versions, as I indicated above, or earlier, have been edited by me. Oh, it’s all right to change things. Sometimes such revision is required to bring order to MacSwan’s untidy discourse. Therefore a swift deletion here, a deft emendation there, a bit of augmentation, and we have a much more manageable work. Don’t you agree? Although I need no precedent you will recall that Mac himself admitted early in his tale that he falsified the geography and the geology—and who knows what else?
((You observe that I address you mostly in the present tense. We historians refer to it as the historical present; it’s a device to transfer past or future events into the now and make them good for all time, so to speak.
((From my point of view it’s like a play, a drama. No matter when a playgoer comes in, the time is now. The events on stage happen in the present and go on happening now. If the audience person returns for another performance, what otherwise is the past—a scene seen, to make myself clear—is still in the present. Furthermore a scene in the last act, seen previously and presumably past, lies in the future.
((I make this explanation to help you understand what I am going to say about the Awaiters—will say—am saying. You need not feel sorry for these pilgrims because they failed to rendezvous with Panacea. To be sure, it’s a pity they mistook our laboratory ship for their spaceliner and Pirt’s Fourth of July rocket for their shuttle. But they need not despair. Spaceships are like trolley cars—another will be along any minute. Well, not any minute. As I have explained, there is more than one theory about the duration of a minute; thy time is not my time. Still, or lo, there is time enow for all in the peculiar circularity of the cosmos. The patience of the Awaiters is to be rewarded, and they are patient; that quality is implicit in the name they chose for themselves. One day they will reach their promised land. In my time frame they reached it long ago.
((I’ll set another scene for you. It needs a different kind of explanation. I have to explain why MacSwan, who heretofore has spoken to you in the first person, is shortly to appear in the third. Oh, I know Faulkner and Hemingway and others have switched points of view, but we’re not dealing here with American lit. What concerns us is why MacSwan is unable to dictate the final segment of his story as he did all previous.
((The explanation has to do with the fact that the universe is expanding, as some astronomers say, or it’s contracting, as others tell us. If it’s expanding, time is moving from past to future—from left to right, so to speak—and you’re comfortable with it that way. But if the universe is contracting, as others declare, time is moving the opposite way—from the future to the past, from right to left. Actually, there are two universes and both theories are correct. Beyond that is the way I, the Omniscient Observer, travel, which is backward or forward in time, at will. This makes it possible for me to look at all things from all points of view and to realize that time is full of wrinkles and paradoxes, as well as blind alleys and dead ends. I’ve advised you to hang loose among these tautologies but obviously you and I, the city man and the farmer, MacSwan and Prof, possibly even the pig, have different views of time. This perhaps is also true of modern Earthman, aliens and even cavemen—especially our friend Pirt. For Hamlet, time was out of joint. Do you see? History is what we make it, and from my special vantage point I now tidy up MacSwan’s awkward account, which he himself is incapable of ending. Listen.
((I the Omniscient Observer, in my role as A. the Alien, was both eyewitness and catalyst when the expanding and
contracting universes met. These cosmic twins coalesced at the time of the Long Noon, then continued on their opposite ways. And there, because the merging was one of time and not space, no physical damage occurred. But there were significant other changes. My ability to look forward and backward simultaneously, fortified by that awesome coupling, most wonderfully juxtaposed my essence with that of the callipygian Snowmobile Rider. I became MacSwan, mate to the temptatious Tally. I am MacSwan, and have hustled the former owner of this body off to halfspace—
(((BREAK BREAK BREAK THIS IS E.E.E. OVERRIDING O.O.
(((Coruscating cosmoses, is he mad? There have been times when 0.0. needed reminding that omniscient does not mean omnipotent, but never before or hence has he tried to insert himself so boldly into the story, much less into the affections of a female of an entirely different species, eliminating her mate along the way! No, omniscience does not license concupiscence. Earlier portions of 0.0.’s account contain inaccuracies which I have permitted because they are inconsequential. I explain that it is my duty as E.E.E., Editor for Ephemeral Eclectica and thus 0.0.’s superior, to verify his copy before it is forwarded. Indeed 0.0. is far from supreme; he is in fact one of our minor functionaries. Just as on most worlds, everybody’s got a boss. This account of 0.0.’s, based largely on MacSwan’s tapes, is one of many examples of ephemera we’ve had from the planet under observation. We call them ephemera eclectica, the category from which I take my title.
(((Many details are preserved for socio-cultural interest, rather than for historical importance. Therefore it does not matter historically, for instance, whether MacSwan and his wife kept their marriage together after her confession that she was in bed with Pirt. That made Mac madder than he let on, I tell you, but the significant fact is that Tally and Mac provided a base of operations for Pirt while he did what he had to do. Pirt, as a senior conservation specialist with special delegated powers, kept an eye on Earth’s sun, which nourishes the one frail but inhabited planet on which all these characters have been disporting, and contributed to a decision on whether and when to replenish that obsolescent orb. That’s what matters and maybe Pirt should be well thanked.
(((To give another example, it is not important except to Tally and Mac that she no longer has migraine; what matters is that she has lost her memory of certain events, as have other Earthpeople. We freely cured her ailment; although it might be considered a trade-off, but she is unaware that any deal has been made. Mac’s memory has grown hazy too, as we have heard, but he still has Tally. Again no bargain was struck; we are a generous and compassionate people, whoever we are.
(((Does it matter who we
are? Are we aliens? Or are we from the far future of Earth—sometimes called Terrestralia? Or did Earthpeople in a future time emigrate and become aliens? And did they—do they—continue to take a benevolent interest in Mother Earth, the Homeland, past, present, future, in its many incarnations? Or is it that we—if we are they—need what Earth’s got, anorthosite-become-nordium? And that we use it to fortify Old Sol, who wastes his rays on several of his planets when he could be shedding his grace elsewhere?
(((Is it not apt that the nutrient for Earth’s sun came not from outside the system but from one of his own planets?
(((And was not Busky Kimp correct in principle when he spoke of the ravens feeding Elijah and comets feeding the sun?
(((And is it not fitting that transplanted Terrestralians have transformed Earth’s sun into a relay station to transmit its surplus energy to that other sun in a similar solar system at the far end of the galaxy?
(((These are the important things, which must take place first. Then other matters are permitted to come out well; those would include such boons as eliminating migraine and resettling that gospel group, Busky Kimp and the Awaiters.
(((Who do I address here and why do I run on so? I can see why 0.0. was so enwrapped in his assignment. It must be the fascination of knowing that what one says becomes part of a record that will be—has been, is being—preserved for all people for all time. Such knowledge is a powerful stimulant to one’s communication centers. So I can condone 0.0.’s verbal excesses and forgive him for having taken the usual scholarly liberties with minor data. I can understand his tampering with time when time failed to flex properly for the characters in his narrative; we don’t often have three-way intersects among people from past, present and penultimate eras. I can appreciate that such a confluence went to 0.0.’s head, affecting his judgment.
(((BUT—in addition to the previously mentioned derelictions by 0.0. there was his unprofessional sin of omission. MacSwan made one last recording in which he asked a number of questions. I do not quarrel with 0.0.’s failure to answer them—but there is no way to excuse my subordinate’s failure to include the tape in this archive. I do not intend to answer MacSwan’s questions in the petty detail he would like, but they are entitled to the space I will give them here. He asked the questions long ago by his reckoning—nearly a year—and it is clear that he has already forgotten them. Nevertheless it should be known that in the fullness and goodness of time—for time is kind, usually—they will have been answered to the satisfaction of the asker, or of those who come after him.
