If humans are looking for a connection with a nonhuman intelligence, what more can they ask for than that?
Every parrot has a unique call that it uses to identify itself; biologists refer to this as the parrot’s “contact call.”
In 1974, astronomers used Arecibo to broadcast a message into outer space intended to demonstrate human intelligence. That was humanity’s contact call.
In the wild, parrots address each other by name. One bird imitates another’s contact call to get the other bird’s attention.
If humans ever detect the Arecibo message being sent back to Earth, they will know someone is trying to get their attention.
Parrots are vocal learners: we can learn to make new sounds after we’ve heard them. It’s an ability that few animals possess. A dog may understand dozens of commands, but it will never do anything but bark.
Humans are vocal learners too. We have that in common. So humans and parrots share a special relationship with sound. We don’t simply cry out. We pronounce. We enunciate.
Perhaps that’s why humans built Arecibo the way they did. A receiver doesn’t have to be a transmitter, but Arecibo is both. It’s an ear for listening, and a mouth for speaking.
Humans have lived alongside parrots for thousands of years, and only recently have they considered the possibility that we might be intelligent.
I suppose I can’t blame them. We parrots used to think humans weren’t very bright. It’s hard to make sense of behavior that’s so different from your own.
But parrots are more similar to humans than any extraterrestrial species will be, and humans can observe us up close; they can look us in the eye. How do they expect to recognize an alien intelligence if all they can do is eavesdrop from a hundred light-years away?
It’s no coincidence that “aspiration” means both hope and the act of breathing.
When we speak, we use the breath in our lungs to give our thoughts a physical form. The sounds we make are simultaneously our intentions and our life force.
I speak, therefore I am. Vocal learners, like parrots and humans, are perhaps the only ones who fully comprehend the truth of this.
There’s a pleasure that comes with shaping sounds with your mouth. It’s so primal and visceral that throughout their history, humans have considered the activity a pathway to the divine.
Pythagorean mystics believed that vowels represented the music of the spheres, and chanted to draw power from them.
Pentecostal Christians believe that when they speak in tongues, they’re speaking the language used by angels in Heaven.
Brahmin Hindus believe that by reciting mantras, they’re strengthening the building blocks of reality.
Only a species of vocal learners would ascribe such importance to sound in their mythologies. We parrots can appreciate that.
According to Hindu mythology, the universe was created with a sound: “Om.” It’s a syllable that contains within it everything that ever was and everything that will be.
When the Arecibo telescope is pointed at the space between stars, it hears a faint hum.
Astronomers call that the “cosmic microwave background.” It’s the residual radiation of the Big Bang, the explosion that created the universe fourteen billion years ago.
But you can also think of it as a barely audible reverberation of that original “Om.” That syllable was so resonant that the night sky will keep vibrating for as long as the universe exists.
When Arecibo is not listening to anything else, it hears the voice of creation.
We Puerto Rican parrots have our own myths. They’re simpler than human mythology, but I think humans would take pleasure from them.
Alas, our myths are being lost as my species dies out. I doubt the humans will have deciphered our language before we’re gone.
So the extinction of my species doesn’t just mean the loss of a group of birds. It’s also the disappearance of our language, our rituals, our traditions. It’s the silencing of our voice.
Human activity has brought my kind to the brink of extinction, but I don’t blame them for it. They didn’t do it maliciously. They just weren’t paying attention.
And humans create such beautiful myths; what imaginations they have. Perhaps that’s why their aspirations are so immense. Look at Arecibo. Any species that can build such a thing must have greatness within it.
My species probably won’t be here for much longer; it’s likely that we’ll die before our time and join the Great Silence. But before we go, we are sending a message to humanity. We just hope the telescope at Arecibo will enable them to hear it.
The message is this:
You be good. I love you.
X
Contributors’ Notes
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All the Birds in the Sky (2016). Her fiction and journalism have appeared in Tor.com, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, and dozens of anthologies. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award. She was a founding editor of the science fiction blog io9 and organizes the Writers With Drinks reading series.
• I’ve always had a hard time balancing absurdism and personal, emotional storytelling. This is probably the biggest thing I struggle with as an author. And when I was first invited to contribute a story to an anthology of video game stories, Press Start to Play, I gravitated toward the absurd angle—games offer a chance to talk about our relationship with, and dependence on, technology, and they speak directly to the weirdness of our pop culture fantasies. So I spent months wrestling with a sprawling tale of social collapse, AI uprising, and bizarre games. The deeper I got into this weird post-cyberpunk scenario, the less of a center the story seemed to have. There were just too many threads to pull at, and no central skein to hold on to. It wasn’t until I was shamefully late for my deadline that I finally had the courage to throw out that whole exercise in gratuitous strangeness and start over, with a much simpler story that drew on my own experience of having a loved one with dementia. The resulting story is still totally absurd—but, I hope, more in the way that the inescapable tragedies of real life are always absurd and logic-defying.
Dale Bailey is the author of The End of the End of Everything: Stories, The Subterranean Season, and five other books. He lives with his family in Hickory, North Carolina.
• “Lightning Jack’s Last Ride” began as a title, nothing more. I spent a long time trying to sort out what it might belong to before I stumbled across Baby Face Nelson in some article or other, which got me thinking about the outlaw mystique Nelson shared with so many of his fellow Public Enemies—Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, Ma Barker, and John Dillinger, among others. Murderous villains every one, but to a Depression-era America starved for heroes, they had a certain glamorous appeal. And while I had fun inventing a new outlaw age and a rogues’ gallery to inhabit it, it was the tension between the killer and his charisma that gave the story impetus. Gus might attest that Jack doesn’t have a bone of true malice in his body—Gus might even believe it—but the truth is, Jack is a stone-cold killer. The question is why we might ever think otherwise.
Ted Chiang is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. His fiction has won four Hugo, four Nebula, and four Locus Awards. His collection Stories of Your Life and Others has appeared in ten languages and was recently reissued by Vintage Books. He lives near Seattle, Washington.
• There are actually two pieces titled “The Great Silence,” only one of which can fit in this anthology. This requires a little explanation.
Back in 2011, I was a participant in a conference called Bridge the Gap, whose purpose was to promote dialogue between the arts and the sciences. One of the other participants was Jennifer Allora, half of the artist duo Allora & Calzadilla. I was completely unfamiliar with the kind of art they created—hybrids of performance art, sculpture, and sound—but I was fascin
ated by Jennifer’s explanation of the ideas they were engaged with.
In 2014 Jennifer got in touch with me about the possibility of collaborating with her and her partner, Guillermo. They wanted to create a multiscreen video installation about anthropomorphism, technology, and the connections between the human and nonhuman worlds. Their plan was to juxtapose footage of the radio telescope in Arecibo with footage of the endangered Puerto Rican parrots that live in a nearby forest, and they asked if I would write subtitle text that would appear on a third screen, a fable told from the point of view of one of the parrots, “a form of interspecies translation.” I was hesitant, not only because I had no experience with video art, but also because fables aren’t what I usually write. But after they showed me a little preliminary footage, I decided to give it a try, and in the following weeks we exchanged thoughts on topics like glossolalia and the extinction of languages.
The resulting video installation, titled The Great Silence, was shown at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum as part of an exhibition of Allora & Calzadilla’s work. I have to admit that when I saw the finished work, I regretted a decision I had made earlier. Jennifer and Guillermo had previously invited me to visit the Arecibo Observatory myself, but I had declined because I didn’t think it was necessary for me to write the text. Seeing footage of Arecibo on a wall-size screen, I wished I had said yes.
In 2015 Jennifer and Guillermo were asked to contribute to a special issue of the art journal e-flux as part of the 56th Venice Biennale, and they suggested publishing the text from our collaboration. I hadn’t written the text to stand alone, but it turned out to work pretty well even when removed from its intended context. That was how “The Great Silence,” the short story, came to be.
Seth Dickinson is the author of The Traitor Baru Cormorant and a lot of short stories. He studied racial bias in police shootings, wrote much of the lore for Bungie Studios’ Destiny, and helped develop the open-source space opera Blue Planet. He teaches at the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers. If he were an animal, he would be a cockatoo.
• We all want to survive, but not at any cost, right? Some tactics are abominable—plunder, infanticide, torture. We’d rather die than resort to atrocity. But what if someone else makes an awful choice, survives, thrives, and inherits the universe? What if, in the long run, everyone and everything will tend to sacrifice their values in the name of competitive edge, because it’s that or go extinct?
As we gain more technological control over our own bodies and minds, we also gain the ability to shave away more of ourselves in the pursuit of advantage.
This is a story about how much we might sacrifice to go on. Three lovers armed with a doomsday weapon must decide whether to exterminate an elegant mutilation of the human condition . . . and whether their own very human flaws make the choice impossible.
“Three Bodies at Mitanni” was deeply inspired by Peter Watts’s Blindsight. Readers interested in the fears that drive the story might want to Google up a case of parallel evolution called “Meditations on Moloch.”
Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times–bestselling author of the young adult novels Aerie and Magonia, the historical fantasy Queen of Kings, the memoir The Year of Yes, and the novella The End of the Sentence (with Kat Howard). With Neil Gaiman, she is the editor of the young adult monster anthology Unnatural Creatures. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards and anthologized in many best-of-the-year collections. The Mere Wife, a novel-length adaptation of Beowulf, is forthcoming in 2017.
• I bought a crocodile in the Catskills. The crocodile dealer only took cash, and so I slipped her a wad of bills I’d earned making up stories. It was basically my last money on earth. I was a year out of a marriage, and in the sort of dark place everyone who’s ever bought a deacquisitioned Victorian museum diorama element has ever been in. I tripped over this taxidermy under a tarp and knew my life would be healed if only I had a crocodile. My crocodile is nearly eight feet long. I live in New York City. This was the purchase of a batshit person. I called my journalist best friend to help me hang the crocodile. We blithely drilled almost entirely through the fuse box in my apartment and then praised heaven we had not been electrocuted. The drywall defied us. The crocodile was astonishingly heavy. I put in an emergency call to my friend the accordionist, who took one look at our wrongful methods (we were drilling blind, through crocodile feet) and diagrammed a new notion, that of hanging my crocodile with chains. We did that. It took three of us, swearing and spitting all the while. I told the Internet about the hanging of the crocodile. People, in particular the poet Matthew Zapruder, insisted this ought to be a Borgesian story. I wrote said story for two years. During those years, the world remained in ever-increasing war, my best friend the journalist died suddenly and randomly on assignment, and I walked the streets of New York weeping for weeks, attracting a mob of men who followed behind me insisting that I smile, as though my expression were their only magical hope for happiness. I went dark some more. I tried to fathom the world by analyzing all of its details. Somewhere in there, I read the torture memos. Somewhere else, I realized that all I ever wrote about was ferocious resurrection, underestimated women, vengeance and mercy. I decided I didn’t care if that was all I ever wrote about. I sold “The Thirteen Mercies” to C. C. Finlay at F&SF, and for him I tore it up and reassembled it again. It’s about bad magic, good magic, unfair mortality, dangerous old women, following wrong orders, and trying to figure out what mercy means. But underneath, it’s all about crocodile hanging and those who help you do it.
S. L. Huang has a degree in mathematics from MIT, which she now uses to write an eccentric novel series about a superpowered mercenary mathematician. The series started with her debut novel, Zero Sum Game, and the fourth book was published this year with the fifth upcoming. Her short fiction can be found at Strange Horizons, The Book Smugglers, and Daily Science Fiction, among others. She currently lives in Tokyo, where she’s on the lookout for a place to race motorcycles.
• I never intended to publish this story. I wrote it for catharsis during treatment for my second cancer, then later sent it to a friend and said, “Do you think this is submittable?” and she said yes. Every piece of this story is an aspect of my own health experience refracted through a science fiction lens, and in that way, it’s the most personal story I’ve ever written.
But the most important part of it, to me, is that this story was also very much a reaction against every other story about cancer I saw growing up. My first cancer happened when I was twelve, and it has continually frustrated me how media represents cancer as some sort of noble, beautiful tragedy that exists to teach people important lessons about the meaning of life. It’s not. It’s real, it sucks, and it has an impact—but not a one-dimensional one. Above all else, I wanted this story to be honest about that. I wanted to write a cancer story in which nobody dies, in which nothing is noble or enlightening . . . and in which, afterward, the world moves on. Because in the end, that’s all I’m striving for myself: moving on.
Adam Johnson is the author most recently of Fortune Smiles, winner of the 2015 National Book Award and the Story Prize. He is also the author of The Orphan Master’s Son, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the California Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other previous books are Emporium, a short story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us. He is the Phil and Penny Knight Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco with his wife and children.
Kij Johnson has won three Nebulas and the Hugo, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards. Her most recent books are The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe and the short story collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees. She received her MFA from North Carolina State University in 2012. In the past, she has worked in publishing, comics, trading-card and role-playing games, and tech. Currently she is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Univers
ity of Kansas and the associate director for the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction.
• I try never to do the same thing twice: always a new voice, a new mode. That said, there are some things I turn to again and again. I write consistently about animals, as creature, metaphor, stand-in, symbol. I write a lot about loneliness, the gaps between people and whether they can be bridged. I also seem to be incapable of playing with form; even conventional narrative is for me a game, to see what I can do with it. Finally, I love impossibilities that might (or might not) be possible. “The Apartment Dweller’s Bestiary” started as a single entry, but I realized that there was a lot that could be said in the intersection of these recurring elements. Strangely distanced as it is, it’s also very personal.
Will Kaufman received an MA in English from UC Davis and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Utah, and attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. His stories have appeared in a number of journals, including The Collagist, PANK, Unstuck, Lightspeed Magazine, 3:AM, and Unlikely Story. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife and their hopes for the future. You can find him online at kaufmanwrites.com.
• This story is a direct result of the six weeks I spent at the Clarion Workshop in 2013. The form and style is definitely a response to the pressures and inspirations of Clarion.
For my little fairy tale, I started from the idea that the division between the community and the individual is naturally an elided thing, and with the notion that what we presume to be private is not. For me, the warning of this sort of story has never been “be careful what you wish for,” but rather to never forget that your desires never affect you alone—and neither do your punishments.
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