Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma and Other Stories

by Alex Shvartsman

Nakamura shot the military man a venomous glance. “What my associate meant to say is that we are here to discuss matters of enormous importance. I was assured that the person in charge of your star fleet would hear us out.”

  If the Seelan interpreter understood the nuances of the English language well enough to be insulted, he did not show it. “Commander is not leave the armada,” he sang. “Commander will perceive you through this technology.” He pointed at the cube. “Explain your desire merge with our ships.”

  “An alliance,” said Nakamura. “We seek your help in order to defend this sector of space, and especially your own planet, from a terrible threat.” The diplomat did an excellent job of appearing to address both the interpreter and the cube, making the best of the alien leader’s desire to negotiate by proxy.

  “For almost a decade the human Navy has been forced to defend ourselves and our allies against a powerful and relentless aggressor, a hive species we call the Swarm.”

  This version of history may not be accurate, but it certainly sounds better than the truth, especially when you talk to another alien, thought Jenkins.

  Humans were the original aggressors in this conflict. Some mid-level Navy commander had decided that a few mining worlds controlled by the Swarm were crucial to human expansion in that part of the galaxy and well worth antagonizing the original settlers. He didn’t know at the time that those planets were only a tiny part of a vast interstellar empire controlled by the species that was at least as territorial as the humans. For the first time ever, the Earth Navy came across an enemy they couldn’t push around with ease.

  Things might have still worked themselves out. The Diplomatic Corps, Earth’s second most powerful entity, had become very good at cleaning up the Navy’s messes. The commander responsible for the invasion would have surely been made to fall on the sword for annexing those worlds. He would have been court-martialed and probably handed over to the Swarm, to receive whatever nasty punishment the aliens cared to mete out. The Swarm did not wait for a diplomatic solution. They took back the mining worlds, and conquered several nearby colonies, slaughtering every single human they encountered. This included the hapless Navy commander and his entire fleet. There was no chance of talking it over anymore. Both species were committed to total war.

  Nakamura spoke at length about the bloody conflict, emphasizing the Swarm’s appetite for genocide and laboring to present the humans in the best possible light. She eulogized eloquently several minor species that failed to throw their lot in with the Earth Navy and had been wiped out by the Swarm. She hinted strongly that the same fate would await the Seelan, should they decide to stand alone. She talked and talked, uninterrupted. The Seelan listened patiently, offering no hint as to how they felt about any of it.

  Jenkins, for one, was impressed by the diplomat. Nakamura had a hell of an uphill battle to fight, trying to make allies of the Seelan. Twenty years ago the Navy made a play for Tycho. They were held back by a fleet of the strangest spaceships humans had ever encountered. Each one looked like an ancient dragon gliding gracefully through space, a work of art as much as a vessel. The Seelan possessed two hundred of them, each nearly as powerful as a Navy ship.

  The combined might of the navy could have easily squashed the Seelan, especially back in the pre-war days. However, the prize was deemed not worth the effort and the hardware it would cost to obtain. The Diplomatic Corps sued for peace and quickly extricated the Navy from this conflict—but the Navy strategists never forgot about the dragon ships. They kept meticulous records of their numbers and strength. This information would pay off handsomely now, assuming that Nakamura succeeded in convincing the aliens to fight alongside their one time enemy.

  Eventually, even the verbose Nakamura had to stop talking. When she did, the Seelan remained silent for a few uncomfortable moments. Then the cube emitted a series of squeaks and beeps.

  That doesn’t sound like Seelan speech, thought Jenkins. It’s not even melodic.

  Could it be that the dragon ships were crewed by another species altogether? It didn’t seem likely, as the Navy spy satellites never picked up any evidence of non-Seelan leaving or boarding the elaborate vessels.

  “The Commander seeks wisdom at Hu-man and Swarm armadas. Their counts and inner working,” sang the interpreter.

  However different their psychology, they understand basic strategy, Jenkins noted. A thorough comprehension of the strengths and weaknesses among the opposing sides would certainly play a major role in the Seelan’s decision to commit their forces.

  “Colonel, would you be so kind as to provide our friends with a full tactical briefing?” said Nakamura. “Please be as thorough as possible,” she added in a tone that demanded compliance.

  Colonel Samuels scowled at the idea of sharing classified information so readily, but he did not challenge the diplomat. He motioned for his intelligence officer to come forward.

  The Navy spy put on a presentation that lasted for a better part of an hour. He produced charts and schematics, explaining the relative strengths of human and Swarm vessels, positioning of the nearby battle groups and the projected outcomes of various combat scenarios. Jenkins was no military man, but the picture painted was clear, even to him; the two opposing forces were matched very evenly in this sector, and neither could count on a lot of reinforcements while similar standoffs took place throughout the galaxy. Tycho’s dragon ships could easily tip the balance in favor of the Navy.

  Although the silver cube remained mute, the Seelan themselves were a lot more involved this time around. They talked amongst themselves constantly, and the interpreter peppered the intelligence officer with questions, especially when it came to the design and capabilities of the Navy warships.

  Tycho’s sun set in the west and its reddish hues were replaced by the pale light of two moons by the time the silver cube emitted another string of sounds. Abruptly all of the Seelan clustered together, and a few of them used the carrying sticks to pick up their commander’s communication device.

  “We are not merge,” sang the interpreter curtly before turning to assist the others.

  Everyone was stunned by the sudden verdict. It was Jenkins, whose job had been mainly to listen, that spoke up for the first time since the aliens’ arrival.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “but why not? What did your commander say?”

  The interpreter turned toward him and paused, as though trying to find the right words.

  “Your ships possess no soul,” he finally said. Then he and the other Seelan turned their back on the humans and began the long trek down toward the valley.

  Back aboard the courier ship that ferried the delegation to Tycho, in the small office assigned to him, Jenkins was wishing for something heavy to throw at one of his monitors. He combed the Navy database for every bit of available information on the Seelan and their planet but still could not make heads or tails of the problem.

  The predominant Seelan art forms were abstract painting and, of course, music. Nothing in their cultural heritage hinted at the dragon-like creatures their spaceships were designed to emulate. The intricacy of the ships’ design did not jive with Seelan sensibilities at all. Then there was the “soul” business. Seelan did not appear to have organized religion, or even a concept of the afterlife. Then again, all of Jenkins’ assumptions were based on a minimal amount of research conducted by Navy personnel who had only a passing understanding of anthropology.

  Jenkins was so focused on his work that he did not hear the office door slide open to admit Meredith Nakamura. The diplomat cleared her throat politely to gain Jenkins’ attention.

  “Any progress, Doc? We could really use a bit of good news.”

  “Sorry, nothing yet,” said Jenkins. “I know how important this alliance is to the war effort, and I’m sorry the meeting with the Seelan didn’t go as well as you’d hoped. I’m trying my best to figure it all out, but I have little to go on.”

  “Not as well as I’d hoped for?” laughed Na
kamura. “Doc, your talents are being wasted on bogey psychology. You should write copy for our press releases instead. The meeting was a total disaster. Samuels was so livid he almost had a stroke. If I wasn’t there to keep a lid on him, the Navy might be fighting two wars in this sector by now.”

  Nakamura pulled up a chair and sat down next to Jenkins.

  “I’m going to level with you, Doc. The situation in this sector is worse than our little show and tell back there might have led you to believe. Nearly half the ships are being pulled out tomorrow because they are badly needed elsewhere. The rest will be stuck trying to hold off a superior enemy force with no supply lines and no reinforcements coming.”

  The diplomat looked Jenkins straight in the eye. “The Navy is feeding whoever stays behind into the meat grinder just to slow down the enemy advance by a few days but I don’t think they’ll come up with some way to magically defeat The Swarm in that time. So believe me when I say we desperately need the Seelan’s help, and we need you to figure out how to make that happen.”

  Jenkins nodded, caught off guard by a rare moment of candor from a government official. Like most civilians he long suspected that the war wasn’t going as well as the people in charge would have everyone believe but he hadn’t imagined just how thin the Navy had stretched itself.

  “I’ll do my very best. Honestly though, the information I have to work with stinks. I’d need a team of real scientists—anthropologists, linguists, xenobiologists—to spend a few months on Tycho in order to even begin delving into this problem…”

  Nakamura waved him off.

  “Look, Dr. Jenkins,” she said. “Seeking an alliance with the Seelan has always been a long shot. Bringing you along and expecting you to figure out what makes them tick, even more so. But, as far as I can tell, this is still the best plan we’ve got. So here is the deal. You can have unlimited resources, access to any Navy hardware and the help of every specialist on any human world that you want to talk to. I will personally have any egghead you need drafted into the Navy if that’s what it takes to gain their cooperation. There is only one thing you can’t have, and that is time.”

  Nakamura got up to leave. She paused in the doorway, turned around and added: “Sometime very soon, perhaps even by this time tomorrow, the Swarm will begin an offensive in this sector and people will begin to die. I know you will try your best, Doc, but do remember that as you work.”

  Nakamura was good for everything she promised. Jenkins spent hours consulting with a string of experts. He tasked top-notch cryptologists with decoding the sounds emitted by the Seelan cube and commandeered several satellites to scan and photograph the surface of Tycho. Jenkins worked through the night, keeping himself awake with stimulant pills and copious amounts of coffee. Twenty four hours later half of the Navy ships in the area had left. Twelve hours after that the Swarm onslaught had begun.

  Jenkins found Nakamura a few hours after that.

  “I think I may have figured it out,” Jenkins said. “I’d like your permission to contact the dragon ship armada.”

  Nakamura looked like hell. Like Jenkins, the diplomat hadn’t slept in two days. She was surrounded by a medley of monitors, holoscreens and other communication devices, each constantly demanding her attention. She looked up at Jenkins bleary-eyed.

  “Go for it. At best you’ll talk the Seelan into helping us out. At worst… can’t get any worse anyway, can it now.”

  “We don’t need to convince the Seelan,” replied Jenkins. “We have to convince the dragon ships.”

  Space beyond the asteroid belt of the Cassiopeia system was littered with smoldering metal. Debris from the destroyed human and Swarm vessels intermixed in the vacuum, forming miniature constellations. Bits of spacecraft twisted by explosives and blackened by laser fire emitted a faint glow, making the entire area look like a holographic star chart.

  Commander Estrada was preparing for her last stand. Only six of her fourteen battle cruisers remained spaceworthy, all in varying need of repair. Outnumbered and outgunned, her division held off The Swarm fleet for hours. Eventually the surviving vessels were forced to retreat and take refuge within the asteroid belt. The Swarm took heavy losses as well, but still had nearly twenty combat ready ships. Reports from other divisions painted a very similar picture playing out across dozens of star systems.

  The mission was to slow down the Swarm by whatever means necessary. Estrada and her captains were trained for such a moment. They were willing to sacrifice themselves and their crews to protect humanity. The Swarm was going to take the sector, but they would pay dearly for their victory.

  Estrada gave the order and six Navy ships launched from inside the asteroid belt, racing toward the Swarm fleet positions and certain death. But before they got into range, two dozen alien vessels entered the battlefield.

  Everyone on the bridge watched the monitors, mesmerized by the strangest looking spacecraft they’d ever seen. A flight of dragons was bearing down upon the Swarm. Once within range, they unleashed a furious attack with projectile and energy weapons. Minutes later, the Swarm fleet was retreating at top speed, with dragons in hot pursuit.

  Estrada turned to her long-range communications officer. A huge grin on his face was confirmation enough that theirs was not the only skirmish won by the dragon ships.

  Nakamura filled two very tall glasses with foamy, bubbly liquid.

  “This is the real stuff,” she said proudly. “It comes from one of the last few remaining vineyards in the Champaigne region of France. I’ve been waiting for an occasion worthy of this bottle.”

  Both of them sipped in silence, savoring the rare vintage.

  “So tell me,” said Nakamura, contentedly pushing away an empty glass, “how did you do it?”

  With tremendous pressure off his shoulders, Dr. Jenkins was happy to oblige.

  “I suspected from the start,” he said, “that the Seelan didn’t build the dragon ships. Nothing in their psych profile suggests the sort of creative expression necessary to make a warship into a work of art. The cube was also a clue; the sounds it made were in no way similar to the Seelan language. This was all very circumstantial, mind. I had no actual evidence of another intelligence’s involvement at all.”

  Jenkins reached for the bottle and raised an eyebrow. When Nakamura nodded in assent, he refilled both glasses.

  “It was when the Navy satellites I requested had thoroughly scanned the planet that I found the smoking gun, so to speak. Buried very deep underground, there is a supercomputer that houses the consciousness of an entire species.

  “Turns out, Tycho was home to an advanced race that decided to go post-physical several thousand years ago. They carefully prepared for their singularity event to avoid any possible calamities. They uplifted the Seelan, who were just smart primates at the time, to full intelligence. A species imprinted with loyalty toward their masters, to mind the planet for them.”

  Jenkins took another sip. “They also built a defense fleet, to protect the planet from any outside threats. Each ship is controlled by a consciousness—a soul if you will—of an alien that volunteered to stay behind. They even designed the ships in their own image, to help reinforce the obedience they’d spliced into the Seelan.”

  “You inferred all this from satellite data?” said Nakamura incredulously.

  “Of course not. The dragons told me, after I managed to make direct contact with their armada. Our experts were able to decode some of their language from the cube recordings. Enough to let them know that their secret was out, and to convince them to talk to me.

  “The dragons didn’t like us very much. They found the concept of ships that weren’t controlled by a single animating intelligence alien and even disturbing. From their perspective, humans and the Swarm were both appalling societies, incapable of forming a symbiotic relationship with others. I had to convince them that, unlike the Swarm, humans are an empathic species that are able to co-exist benevolently with less developed beings, the way
dragons do with the Seelan.

  “I showed them pictures of children swimming with the dolphins, people riding and grooming horses, that sort of thing. Once I convinced them that we aren’t monsters, they were willing to help.”

  “Very nicely done, Doc,” said Nakamura. “I can’t swing another Nobel Prize, but there’s definitely a medal in this for you. I do wonder, however, what the dragons will think if they ever decide to dig a little deeper. If they learn that dolphins are nearly extinct because we’ve poisoned the oceans, or that horse meat is considered a delicacy by some humans.”

  Jenkins stared into his glass, offering no reply. The stress and exhaustion of the last few days were finally beginning to catch up with him.

  “Cheer up,” said Nakamura. “You got the job done. It’s perfectly human to gloss over our sins. Everything else,” she saluted Jenkins with her glass and then emptied the rest of it, “is a problem for another day.”

  This story originally appeared in Galactic Creatures, an anthology of science fiction stories about spaceships that look like animals, real or imaginary.

  This was the first time I had been invited to contribute to an anthology, rather than having to fight my way in through open slush. So thank you for that, Elektra Hammond, who has since become a good friend and the regular copy editor on the Unidentified Funny Objects series.

  With the pressure off (or at least reduced) I let my imagination run wild and created a fun, pulpy space opera setting. A sequel to this story, “The Sgovari Stratagem,” is included in the expanded e-book edition of this collection.

  A BRIEF RESPITE FROM ETERNITY

  It was like nothing else in the world. The gentle breeze caressing his skin, the faint sound of rustling leaves, his own heart beating and his lungs drawing in air. After a very long time, Aten was remembering what it was like to be human.

  “It’s so very green,” said Iolanthe. She was admiring the small clearing in front of them, a verdant field of grass sprinkled with flowers. “Why can’t we have colors like this on the ship?”