Analog Science Fiction and Fact - 2014-04

by Penny Publications

  He opened it.

  Blinked.

  "Mr. Feldman?"

  Greg blinked again. But the two Secret Service men were still there, ID budges held up, guns on their belts, dark sunglasses covering their eyes.

  "Erm... yes?"

  "You don't know?"

  "I mean, erm, yes. Yes, that's me."

  The two agents looked him up and down— a little dubiously, it seemed to Greg.

  "The sci-fi writer Greg Feldman?"

  Greg swelled up to his full size. Like a space whale during the mating season. "I prefer the term science fiction," he said. "Or Ess Ef, if you will. Sci-fi is—"

  "We don't care," the agent on the left informed him, helpfully.

  "Yeah," the agent on the right said.

  "You are to come with us," the agent on the left said.

  "Right now," the agent on the right said.

  "But my cats!" Greg Feldman said.

  "Right now," the agent on the left said.

  "Yeah," the agent on the right said.

  "Buffy!" Greg said.

  "Captain Kirk!" Greg said.

  "Hey, I know my rights!" Greg said.

  "You have the right to remain silent," the agent on the left said.

  "Yeah," the agent on the right said.

  "So shut the fuck up," the agent on the left said.

  "Yeah," the agent on the right said.

  And before Greg Feldman could protest they had bundled him out of the house and into the back of their car; taking him, he thought despairingly, the aliens' God knew where.

  3.

  "Aliens?" the rabbi said. His name was David and he was from a Reform shul, which Ari's mother—who came from a hardcore Orthodox family before she married Ari's dad— once described to a friend as Judaism Light when Ari wasn't supposed to be listening.

  Still. What was he supposed to do? He needed someone who understood Judaism. Even Jews didn't understand Judaism! So he went into the first shul he could find and cornered the rabbi, who seemed remarkably unconcerned about the Secret Service agents blocking the door and windows of his study.

  "Aliens," Ari said. "They're kind of meshugeneh but what are you going to do."

  "Send them to see the Pope," the rabbi said. "Those guys in the Vatican are always looking for new recruits."

  "They asked for a Jew."

  "Oy vey is this going to be awkward," the rabbi said.

  "Oy vey?" Ari said. The rabbi smiled. "Too much playing the stereotype?"

  "A bit, yeah," Ari said. "Laying it on a bit thick, rabbi."

  "Aliens, huh?" the rabbi said. "Who'd have thought."

  "They're space whales," Ari said. "Highly advanced. Awesome weaponry. Are you coming or what?"

  "Can I say no?"

  "No."

  "Then what can I say." The rabbi smiled and grabbed his coat. "Let's go," he said.

  4.

  [At this point in the narrative there should be a heart-warming and emotionally manipulative story about a robot, but it was edited out.]

  5.

  Scientology

  6.

  When Greg was a kid he used to be bullied at school, but luckily he had science fiction to help him get through the hard parts.

  He was thinking about that as the Secret Service agents drove him to wherever it was they were driving him to. Thinking about the hard times. The kids who stole his bag. The kids who beat him up. The kids who stuck his head in the toilet bowl and flushed it. The taste of the cold water on his lips. The sound of the swirling. That smell of pee and cleaning fluid. The smell of sweat and fear.

  Then that magical moment when his parents took him to the library. He went past rows and rows of books.

  And then he saw them.

  Like a bright shining light. Like an alien ship appearing out of nowhere in the sky and beaming down on a lonely country road.

  The books. Their covers. All the other books were drab, but not these. They were colourful. They were intoxicating. They had monsters on them. Spaceships! There were strange ghosts and energy creatures and tough men with laser guns rescuing dusky maidens of the spaceways!

  He took home Isaac Asimov's Foundation that day. And his life was changed forever.

  He was still bullied at school. But it no longer mattered so much.

  He knew, deep down inside, that he was special.

  The others were nothing but grunts. Mundanes. They didn't—couldn't— know!

  He learned politics from Heinlein and imagined living in a line-marriage on the moon.

  He fantasised about making love to C'Mell, the beautiful cat-woman of Earthport.

  He was Muad'dib, the prophet, the future galactic emperor, living out his destiny on the sand planet!

  The bullies at school were all robots. He was Elijah Bailey, the detective! He knew the Three Laws of Robotics by heart.

  He was Elric, the albino prince, and he used to polish his sword far too often and his mother began to complain about the washing.

  They got him through the hard time, Asimov and Heinlein and good old Arthur C. They showed him what the future held. His parents bought him a PC and he began using a word processor and he never stopped. He knew he was going to be a writer. Not just any writer either!

  He was going to be a science fiction writer.

  And one day he was going to win something called a Hugo.

  7.

  "The humans are suspicious," Buffy the cat said.

  "The alien whales could spoil our plans," Captain Kirk said and licked his paw delicately. Buffy hissed. "All that blubber," she said. "We could live like kings."

  "A cat may look at a king," Captain Kirk said and laughed a cat laugh. "We must destroy the whaliens before they interfere with our plans for the humans."

  "Our scientists have already made contact with the whaliens," Buffy informed him. "Even now a line of communication exists between us and the alien mainframe."

  "Mainframe?" Kirk said, dubiously. "Do people still say that?"

  "Their big computer, then, okay?"

  "So what, we upload a virus to the, uh—" Kirk coughed up a fur ball. "The alien mainframe?"

  "You have a better idea?"

  "I'm hungry," Kirk said. He curled up on the sofa and yawned, showing sharp teeth. Buffy hissed again, in frustration. "Do you think they're using Macs or PCs?" Kirk said, dreamily. Buffy ignored him. With her telepathic mind-meld device she began to scan for human presences nearby. Humans were weak, pathetic creatures. Soon she would enslave a new one. She just needed it to open the door to the outside. Then all she'd have to do is reach the aliens in their sky-ship.

  Easy.

  She concentrated.

  Feebly, as from far away, she could sense the human minds moving sluggishly on the street outside. Thinking of sex, or shopping, or food. Humans were such simple creatures. She meowed softly and stalked to the door, scratching at the wood.

  There!

  A human mind, more pliable than the others. Dimly she sensed: horny hungry the weather strange about those aliens isn't it hungry like cats like China Mieville street sign door cupcakes like cats—

  Buffy focused. Like cats. Like cats. She meowed. Door. The human mind came closer.

  And now she could hear footsteps.

  She scratched at the door, harder.

  A knock on the door. The human mind, confused, angry— Left cat alone in house must rescue door locked hit it hit it hungry cupcakes alone so alone China Mieville with his top off the cat hit the door hit the door hit the—

  The door burst open. A small woman in a brown dress that didn't suit her stood in the doorway. "Here, kitty kitty!" she said. Buffy snarled. Captain Kirk was still asleep on the sofa. Buffy concentrated and the woman, a confused look on her face, knelt down. Buffy climbed on her arm and made her way to the woman's shoulders. Humans, so the joke went among her kind, was just another word for cat taxi.

  "Let's go," Buffy said, in Cat. The human obeyed. They walked away from the apartme
nt and into the light of the sun outside. Buffy raised her head, stared into a sky where whales floated like clouds.

  She bared her teeth and hissed at the sky.

  8.

  "We'd like to convert," the whalien ambassador said.

  The rabbi stared at it. He and Ari were floating high in the sky in a perfectly ordinary room boosted up on the aliens' anti-grav devices. There were carpets on the floor, a photo of the president on the wall, an office plant, a desk, two chairs. When the rabbi looked out of the open window, though, he couldn't see the ground. Just air, and clouds, and a giant floating space whale with eyes the size of flying saucers.

  "Convert to what?" he said cautiously.

  "We would like," the whalien said, "to become Jews."

  Ari and the rabbi exchanged glances.

  "You want to be Jews?" Ari said.

  "Sure," the whalien ambassador said.

  "That's unusual," the rabbi said dryly.

  "You are the Chosen People," the whalien said. "We were confused with the Mormons, before. And those meshugeh Catholics."

  An expression of pain briefly crossed the rabbi's face. "Where did you learn that word?" he said.

  The whalien, if it could be said to, beamed with alien pride. "We have intensely analysed Yiddish culture!" it said. "Kleizmer! Dzigan and Shumacher! Fiddler on the Roof! Sholem Aleichem! Old Jews Telling Jokes!"

  "Oy," the rabbi said, but quietly.

  "I have tsures coming out of my tuches!" the whalien said.

  "I think I have a headache," the rabbi said.

  "Come on, be a mensch," the whalien said.

  "We have to," Ari said, quietly. "We have a week or they'll destroy the planet. Rabbi, they have big fucking guns! Excuse me."

  "Okay, look," the rabbi said. "Whalien!"

  "Rabbi?"

  "Look, are you sure about this? I mean, we don't really... recruit, you know? You kind of have to be born into it. Whether you like it or not."

  "But you can convert, can't you?" the whalien said.

  "Sure, but... it's a lot of work!" the rabbi said. "Studying! Preparing! Can you even be circumcised?"

  "We have large penises," the whalien informed him, proudly. "We are whales, you know."

  "How come you get whales in space, anyway?" the rabbi said.

  "Whales," the whalien said, "are everywhere."

  "Like Jews," Ari said.

  "We have so much in common!"

  "We'd need a moyel with a really big knife," the rabbi said.

  "We need a plan B," Ari said.

  "I want to visit the Western Wall," the whalien said.

  "The Israelis are so not going to be happy," the rabbi said.

  9.

  A Hugo Award. It stood like a long, thin object used for sexual gratification. It was shaped like a rocket. It was Greg Feldman's ultimate goal. And he had one! He won it for a story about a robot who tries to join a church. One reviewer complained about the "plodding prose, obvious and predictable plot, and shameless and blatant manipulation," but what did Feldman care for reviewers? He had his award, and it kept him warm at night, thought the pointy end also kept him awake sometimes.

  So imagine his shock as the Secret Service guys led him out of the car into an anonymous grey building on the outskirts of Washington D.C., and into a large conference room and...

  And...

  "Greg!" a familiar voice said. "So they got to you, too?"

  It was Phil Cusack.

  Greg slowly looked around the room. A dozen bedraggled individuals stared back at him. They were badly dressed. Their hair was badly cut. They twitched and shifted and their fingers moved constantly as though they itched to scratch some invisible sore. Greg watched them in awe.

  They were the dozen greatest science fiction writers in the world.

  "Phil?" Greg said. "What is going on?"

  "They pulled a Niven on us!" Phil said. "A think tank. Again. The aliens are here, ergo, us SF writers must know how to deal with them."

  "But that doesn't work in real life!" Greg said, horrified. "These aren't... aren't... " he waved his hand vaguely in the air. "The slitherers of Proxima Four!" he said.

  "You're conflating two of my novels," Phil said, "They Came From Proxima Four and—"

  "Whatever!" Greg said. He felt a little hysterical. Usually when it happened he had to go to a quiet place and imagine he was fighting space pirates on Venus until he calmed down. But Secret Service men were blocking the only exit.

  "Sit down," Phil said. "Coffee?"

  "Yes, please."

  He needed coffee the way other people needed air, or love. A writer without coffee was like a Jewish presidential candidate or a Middle Eastern country without WMDs: that is to say, fucked.

  They were all drinking coffee. It didn't matter that the coffee wasn't any good. It was coffee. That was enough. They sat around the room, all twelve of them, like Jesus-less disciples at the Last Kaffeeklatsch.

  "Project Orion," Perry said. Perry was from the guns-and-wife-swapping school of science fiction. Old school. "We light up a bunch of nuclear bombs and send a spacecraft up above the explosions. Get up into orbit, nuke the fuckers' mothership."

  "Dude." The speaker was Marcus Cory, the young, charismatic leader of the young Turks, those who knew all about the Internet, and open source and creative commons and copyright piracy and something called the Singularity. "That's so 1950s"

  "That was when we had real science fiction," Perry said, sneering. "Nothing you'd know anything about, Marcus."

  "Calm down, boys, calm down!" said Rowena di Bruin. Greg watched her in awe. She was a legend in her own lifetime, a wizardess of words, and she even knew how to use Wordpress. "What we could do," she said, warming up to her theme, "is breed a bunch of crazed mink, wire them up to a telepathic signal amplifier and broadcast their insane minds, fuelled by hunger, rage, and desire, directly at the aliens!"

  "The old Mother Hitton routine?" Marcus said. "Please."

  "Well do you have any suggestions?"

  "We could run a worm to enslave zombie computers into a super defence network packet-firing Distributed Denial of Service attacks on the alien mothershi—"

  "I don't even understand the words you are using!" screamed Phil.

  "Old-timer," Marcus said.

  "Young philistine!" Perry said.

  "Boys, please!" di Bruin said.

  "Maybe..." Greg said.

  "Yes, young man?"

  Greg surveyed them all. Excited, nervous, high on caffeine, this was the world they were only ever truly alive in. The world of ideas. At that moment he felt a strange and overwhelming kinship with them. These were his people. His family! He knew them from numerous conventions, award ceremonies, drunken parties, and Internet flame-wars. They were his peers, and they were listening to him, ready to hear his idea. He coughed nervously and said, "What if we just traveled back in time and got blue whales to communicate with the aliens before they arrived on Earth?"

  A series of groans filled the room. "Dude," Marcus said, shaking his head sadly.

  Greg sat back, dejectedly, and helped himself to another cup of coffee.

  It was going to be a long night.

  10.

  There is something truly majestic, Ari thought, about a thousand enormous space whales, floating in the sky above Earth, all singing Baruch Atah Adonai.

  There had been some confusion about the minyan.

  "Ten?" the whalien said. "Only ten?"

  "There must be at least ten," the rabbi said, patiently. "For prayer."

  "We're whales, " the whalien said. "We travel in pods. We always have a minyan."

  "Bully for you," Ari mumbled.

  The rabbi smiled. "You'd be surprised," he said, "how hard it is to find enough people for a minyan, sometimes."

  "Oy but our people have suffered," the whalien said.

  "Don't do that," the rabbi said.

  "Sorry."

  Now they were learning to pray. It was quite a
sight. A thousand space whales floating in the sky praying to God.

  In Hebrew.

  "Jewish space whales?" the rabbi said, quietly. "I'll never hear the end of it."

  "You have to hand it to them," Ari said. "They're nothing if not enthusiastic."

  "Enthusiastic?" the rabbi said. "They're not supposed to be enthusiastic! Who's ever been enthusiastic about being a Jew?"

  "Not me," Ari said.

  "Well, there you go."

  "Did you explain to them that destroying the Earth would be bad?" Ari said.

  The rabbi sighed. "I tried," he said. "They seem quite happy not to destroy us for now."

  "For now... " Ari said, ominously.

  Beyond the window, the whaliens' voices were raised in prayer.

  11.

  "We could destroy their anti-grav devices," Greg said. Everyone stopped and stared at him.

  "With a miniature black hole?"

  "An EMP pulse!"

  "We could detonate a nuclear device—"

  "What is it with you and nuclear bombs!"

  "We could reverse the magnetic poles!"

  "Send up an airship—"

  "Steampunk! No!"

  "Upload a virus to the alien mainf—"

  "Pray."

  "We must use the power of love!"

  "Druids—"

  "Reverse-engineer Area Fifty One technology recovered from the Roswell crash!"

  "People! People!"

  But it was no good. Greg sat back with a sigh. They never stopped. Chattering, muttering, mumbling, gesturing, gulping coffee in between loose syllables, they— never — shut- — up!

  Suddenly, achingly, he missed his cats.

  12.

  Buffy the cat rode the human taxi to the White House.

  The president had two cats.

  Or, rather, the cats had the president of the United States of America.

  They were very fond of him.

  Entering the White House posed no difficulty. Buffy steered the human female through security. The guards had a glazed look in their eyes. The cats had the White House sealed down tight. She made her way to the Oval Office, where the president's cats waited with the president.