Interzone #266 - September-October 2016

by Andy Cox [Ed. ]

  It needed some editing, obviously. Luckily, the journal wouldn’t require it to make actual sense. Mariel chewed the end of her biro and stared out of the window. A gaggle of undergraduates went by, wearing T-shirts printed with children’s cartoon characters. Students were so annoying. They would be made to talk about those T-shirts in class. They would be asked to write two thousand words on the meaning of their T-shirts. Or they could just bloody well stop wearing them.

  ***

  My Alien Jane,

  Your silence is unbearable. What can I do to convey the infinitude of my longing? When I picture your limbs and digits, my fronds dilate and ripple with gaseous eruptions. Forgive me for being crude. I do not know what cultural taboos your people have regarding sexual matters. I only know that I can barely control my suppurating glands.

  If only there were some way we could be together. Please, find a way to let me know you feel the same.

  Your

  Space Lothario x

  ***

  The same song Jane had heard on the radio on her way to work that morning was playing in the canteen at lunchtime. To call it a song was probably overstating matters. It was more like a xylophone having an epileptic fit. The only comprehensible part of it was the piano playing in the chorus, which was jaunty and commercial and no doubt explained the song’s popularity.

  “What is this hideous music?” she asked Mariel.

  “Are you kidding? Get with the program, AJ,” Mariel drawled. “Everyone on the planet has a copy of this. Don’t tell me you’re not grokking the digital music of today.”

  It seemed to Jane that Mariel was doing an impression of the kind of person who said the kind of things that Mariel herself said all the time. Jane wondered what it would be like to be someone who could have a conversation with Mariel without straining some kind of cultural muscle. In a small way, Mariel’s convoluted personality detracted from her sexual appeal – but then she would give out one of her wide easy smiles which redeemed her and made everything better. Even so, Jane still had no idea about the music. Mariel smiled kindly at her, explained that Lang Lang (“At least you’ve heard of him!”) had teamed up with an exomusician to interpret the Transmission patterns as music.

  “And that’s what everyone’s listening to?” Jane was appalled.

  Mariel laughed. “He’s an unashamed populist, but you have to admire him. The man has chutzpah. He can even make alien music sound twinkly.”

  “But what’s an exomusician?”

  “Let’s ask the exolinguist. She’s coming over.”

  The exolinguist was a tall woman with eyes set quite far apart, not as far apart as a bird’s, but quite far. It was hard to look in both her eyes at the same time. Jane noticed that Mariel was giving it a good try. She was staring at the woman, and it was a bit too personal. It was rude, actually.

  “Susan Lorimer,” said the exolinguist, holding out her hand for Jane to shake. It was rather a limp handshake on both sides, Jane thought: the sort of handshake that made people like Mariel think you were a bit pathetic. Had she ever shaken hands with Mariel? Surely she would remember. No doubt Mariel had a very firm grip.

  “Is it safe to eat here?” Susan asked.

  Mariel laughed as though Susan had said something terribly funny. “Oh, you’ll probably live. Avoid anything that looks like it once had a face. Anything in a sealed container is probably fine. Although the yoghurt looks like it’s just about ready to declare itself an intelligent life form and start running faculty meetings.”

  Jane smiled nervously. So Mariel had noticed her eating yoghurt this morning. Damn.

  “I’m looking forward to our meeting,” Susan said to Jane. “I have so many questions to ask about the Transmission. It’s a great opportunity.”

  “I see,” said Jane, staring fixedly into her bowl of cheese salad. It had just occurred to her that a lot of people were interested in the Transmission who didn’t have much reason to be. People who saw it as an ‘opportunity’. Were there people cynical enough to actually try to make money out of this awesome, unique moment in human history? She felt a little bit sick, and suddenly wished that no one knew anything about the Transmission at all, that she had kept it entirely to herself. She looked up from her cheese salad. Susan was watching her, and Mariel was watching Susan, and Jane was suddenly overtaken by a desire to be alone in her office, with the Transmission and a lot of silence.

  “Oh,” said Mariel, turning briefly towards Jane. “If you’re going, could you take these journals with you? I borrowed them from your office, but to be honest I can’t make head or tail of them.”

  Jane didn’t sigh, not outwardly anyway. She picked up the journals. How had this turned from a lunch sort-of-date into her fetching and carrying whilst Mariel wooed the wide-eyed (literally) exolinguist? What the hell was an exolinguist anyway? God, life was confusing. And depressing. And just – really annoying. She left the canteen without looking back.

  ***

  Dear Sirs,

  Re: Extraterrestrial folk metal fusion

  In your article in Issue 546, “Space Music”, your writer overlooks the fact that Lang Lang has taken very many unauthorised liberties with the Transmission data. As I’m sure you’re aware, there is simply no basis for his ‘translation’ and in fact there is no evidence for this approach whatsoever. Whilst I have no objection to creative interpretations, no matter how whimsical, it should be noted that nothing suggests the Transmission is musical in nature. We don’t know what it is. Unscientific interpretations only hinder our ongoing research.

  Professor Jane Lovage

  ***

  Darling AJ,

  How you torment me with your silence! My desire for our incongruous congress rises like the seven moons of Lorimer, from where I write this letter. Just looking at the moons whilst thinking of you makes my vestibular coracles swell and my lugubrious jellies tremble. How can you deny that what’s between us is real? Though separated by space and time and language and thought and biology and physics and some other things, I know that we can overcome all the barriers to our love. Or whatever our equivalent of love is.

  Just thinking that you will one day receive this message makes my membranes quiver.

  Your ever-faithful,

  Space Lothario x

  ***

  Every conversation with an exolinguist turned into a conversation about exolanguage, Mariel discovered. How could it not? It was fascinating watching Susan’s mouth move, forming the alien words. Szuzcs. Iliam. Qupxxo. These offerings mouthed with face twisted, brow narrowed in concentration.

  “Of course, there’s no way of knowing if the aliens had a spoken language at all. They may have communicated by pheromones, or touch. Or by the release of differently textured slime. But the fact that the transmission is geometrical and mathematical shows us that they had an advanced language system that was capable of being represented in abstraction. Unless it isn’t an abstraction. Their language system may not be abstract or arbitrary whatsoever.”

  Susan’s face was animated in conversation. Her eyes, slightly too far apart, were also different shades of green. Mariel found it very difficult not to stare at her. Not only was Susan quite odd looking from the neck upwards, but her conversation was exceptionally unusual. Mariel was charmed.

  “What’s your best guess, Sue?”

  “About the content?” Susan tilted her head and looked up in thought. “Adverts, I’d say. Probably a load of adverts. You know how we’re constantly beaming stuff up into space – telephone calls, film trailers, advertisements? This might end up being the only evidence that we ever existed, that our planet was alive and supported intelligent life. So, yeah. Adverts.”

  “I thought we were beaming up Shakespeare and Bach? And pi and all that.”

  “Well, mostly it’s going to be two for one on all sofas until January, and ‘every little helps’. Future alien exolinguists haven’t got a hope in hell of working us out.”

  “Let me just
get a pen,” Mariel said. She wanted to write some of this down. Surely there would be a way of working this theory into her book. It was just the sort of thing that media studies academics got famous for saying. She might even get onto The Late Review.

  Mariel leaned forward and touched Susan’s knee. “If you want to discuss this further, I’d love to buy you a drink.”

  ***

  Jane focussed on not imagining what Mariel and Susan might be doing in Mariel’s office with the door closed, and instead returned to her own office in Astrophysics, with the comforting bank of computers and printouts and the gurgle of the coffee machine in the corner. She slung Mariel’s pile of borrowed journals on the end of the desk, and noted it was hiding a page of handwritten notes. The writing was neat but the content was almost indecipherable: something about the Transmission being a text without a writer or a reader. It made no sense. Jane screwed it up and chucked it into the wastepaper bin. She turned her attention back to the screen.

  She had already mapped the pattern in three dimensions. That was Jodie Foster’s breakthrough in Contact, and how stupid would she have been not to have tried it. It was the first thing people suggested. But of course it didn’t lead to a major breakthrough. It led to a simple model that Jane could build out of plastic straws from the canteen and bounce from hand to hand whilst she wondered what else might be going on.

  Maybe the mistake had been to call it a Transmission in the first place. That implied that there was someone doing the transmitting – but the area of space where this message had been picked up was so distant, it was certain that the origin was extinct. The pattern was apparently deliberate, but there was no key to its meaning, so that suggested it was never meant to be received by another civilisation. There was something accidental in the quality of it – as though it should never have been picked up at all. Yet at the same time, Jane felt very warmly towards the Transmission. Its familiar bumps and waves scrolling across the computer screen were a kind of comfort. The essential pointlessness of existence was somewhat alleviated by the fact of the Transmission – the idea that something could live on beyond death, beyond extinction. That was why everyone wanted a piece of it, even if they had to buy it in the form of a Lang Lang record. The truth of it, the real meaning of the Transmission, was actually quite bleak, Jane thought. It was an untranslatable message from a long dead planet, and there was quite probably no way of ever finding out what was intended by it. Jane foresaw a long and mildly boring career ahead of her, staring at this same computer image, playing with the same model. She sighed and threw the model into the wastepaper bin, where it sank amongst the yoghurt-smeared notes and that morning’s Guardian.

  Maybe she should write an email to Mariel. She could express how she felt towards her, the terrible, embarrassing longing that was causing her such distraction. No, better to write it on paper, easier to destroy paper. It wasn’t as if she was going to send it, after all. What would be the point? There was too much that separated them – background, age, culture. Mariel was Media Studies and Jane was Science. Jane was the endless void of space and time, whereas Mariel was Taylor Swift’s feminist credentials and a Twitter storm. They were barely living on the same planet at all.

  Dear Mariel, in the course of our recent conversations I have had certain physical reactions to your presence which I think I should describe to you … I … there is a chemical reaction that occurs when you smile at me. I ... no. Your physical being causes a series of neurological impulses to occur in my brain. This is not very romantic. Sometimes I imagine striding over to you and just kissing you. I like your ears. And other things about you. I know there is so much that separates us and what am I doing, this is stupid—

  She screwed up the piece of paper and threw it into the wastepaper bin, on top of Mariel’s notes and the geometrical model made of straws, which balanced on top of the screwed up newspaper cutting, and the morning’s embarrassing yoghurt, which was rapidly – very rapidly – beginning to fizz and turn into gaseous slime. It was better to give up now, Jane thought, and save herself a broken heart. This was never going to work.

  ***

  Susan Lorimer was nervous about knocking on Professor Lovage’s door. She was fairly sure that Lovage thought of her as an opportunist of the worst kind. It would be difficult to explain exactly what value she was adding to the Transmission project, with her notions of alien language systems that Mariel Hewitt was already picking apart to turn into post-modern cultural theory. It had been tricky to get away from Mariel, and as a result she was a few minutes late for this meeting, which she was fairly sure that Professor Lovage had completely forgotten about anyway.

  When she entered the office, the Professor was sitting with her head in her hands, watching the pattern on the screen in front of her. She was very beautiful. The way her long neck arched gently as she sighed was quite delightful. Susan took a deep breath and was about to speak when she noticed something glowing in the corner of the room. The metal wastepaper bin was gleaming white and as Susan watched, it glowed even brighter. The metal edges were so hot they had begun to melt, and a small fire had broken out in the heart of the bin.

  “Professor Lovage!”

  Jane Lovage jumped up from her seat. She glanced down, saw the wastepaper bin that looked about to set the whole lab on fire, and held a hand up to Susan. “Stay calm,” she said. “Go to the nearest fire exit, alerting others on your way. Once at the designated safe area, call 999.” She stepped across to the door, reached around Susan and grabbed a fire extinguisher.

  “No, look,” said Susan. Impressed as she was with Professor Lovage’s meticulous approach to fire hazard, there was something even more impressive happening inside the wastepaper bin. She peered over, close enough to feel heat on her face, and then a strange pulling at her flesh. She felt her breath escaping her, spiralling down into the centre of the bin. The bin was throbbing with light and heat, and at its heart, a deep black void had formed, sucking the contents of the bin and Susan’s breath down into its maw. It was the blackest black Susan had ever seen, a hole through space into more space: deeper space, deeper time.

  Professor Lovage roughly pushed Susan aside, and sprayed white foam over the bin for several long seconds. Somehow she had found time to put on a pair of lab goggles over her glasses.

  Susan struggled to catch her breath. “You didn’t see it, did you?”

  Professor Lovage shot her a quizzical look from under the thick plastic lenses. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know,” said Susan. “Perhaps…perhaps I didn’t see it either.”

  Professor Lovage shook her head. “I’d appreciate it if you’d come back another time. I’d like to get on with some work, and there’ll be a lot of paperwork to complete about this small but worrying fire incident, and I’m already rather overwhelmed.” She smiled at Susan, a smile that wasn’t a smile, was more the face someone makes when she’s on the verge of tears. And Susan, sensing that she had somehow got this very wrong and missed her moment by a wide mark, tried to speak but could not speak. When Professor Lovage turned away, she whispered goodbye and made a reluctant retreat.

  ***

  My darling Alien Jane,

  Our love may be impossible but it is the only thing I am living for. I dream of you (or whatever my equivalent of dreaming is) all the time. Time itself is nothing compared to the tentacular desire I feel for you. One day we’ll meet and you’ll dry all my disgorged sebum.

  Until that day, I will dream of taking you in my arms and kissing you, or whatever my equivalent of kissing is.

  Eternally yours,

  Space Lothario x

  ***

  Georgina Bruce is a writer and teacher based in Edinburgh. This is the third story she has had published in Interzone. She recently contributed the extremely well-received ‘White Rabbit’ to Black Static, and she has a story – ‘The Art Lovers’ – forthcoming in Crimewave 13: Bad Light. She is currently writing a novel.

  SIDEWA
YS

  RAY CLULEY

  illustrated by Richard Wagner

  Captain Sam Harding was a great pilot, a patriot, and a very close friend, so when I tell you I’m glad he died, know that I don’t say it lightly. He augered in on November 4th, 1951, leaving behind a beautiful wife plus one. Sandra eventually remarried, and the child Sam never met grew up to be a good man, like his father. Tom was just a few months in Sandra’s belly the day Sam came staggering out of that wreck like some flaming scarecrow in a field of fire. Sandy named the boy Tom because of how I was always there for her but says it was something she and Sam had already discussed. I don’t know. I’m still not sure how Sam would feel about it now. When he made me promise to take care of his family if ever anything happened, I don’t think he meant for me to marry his wife and raise his kid like my own.

  Sam was a great husband, by all accounts. I believe it, and as his usual drinking partner I can testify to some of that assessment. He had an appreciation for the opposite sex, sure, but he never strayed. And he could have, very easily. He was a pilot, for Christ’s sake, and I haven’t met a lady yet who doesn’t go for a man in uniform. Never failed for me. And Sam was no ordinary pilot, either. Captain Harding was a test pilot for the United States Air Force, risking his life – and ultimately giving it – for the good of his country.

  Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t he. Well, that’s how he was. Maybe God snatched him back when he realised. Maybe Sam flew too close to Heaven and caught the big man’s attention. That’s what I used to tell Junior when he asked about his real daddy.