The president's cats were named Betsy and Paddington.
"Report," Buffy said. She had a high rank in the cats' secret organisation.
"We believe we have found a solution," Betsy and Paddington said, in unison. They were highly evolved cats, incorporating advanced technology (reverse engineered in Area 51 from alien technology found in the Roswell crash) into the cats' already highly evolved telepathic abilities.
"Which is?"
"The whales are converting to the human religion of Judaism," the two cats said. "This was deemed preferable to several alternatives of more... zealous, human religions. We do have several Buddhist monks on stand-by, though. Just in case."
Buffy nodded.
"And so?" she said.
And so...
13.
"But it's too late to save the rabbi!" Ari said. The whales roared with whalien laughter. "I love Old Jews Telling Jokes," the whalien ambassador, whose Hebrew name was Moshe, said.
"Take my wife—please!"
The whaliens roared with laughter again. "But you don't have a wife, Ari," the whalien ambassador said. Ari looked down. "Well, no," he said. "Work, you know, and... "
"Mormons can have many wives," the whalien said, helpfully. "But you don't even have one. You don't even have a girlfriend."
"Maybe we should have been Mormons after all," another whalien said.
"As Rabbi Akiva said... " the whalien ambassador said, enigmatically. It was a very Jewish thing to say.
"Look," the rabbi said. He pinched the bridge of his nose. He had a headache coming on and, for some reason, he kept thinking about cat food. "You can't just convert. To be a Jew," he said, warming up to his theme, "you have to suffer."
"Suffer?" the whalien ambassador said. "Have the Jewish people not suffered enough?"
"You must go on an exodus!" the rabbi said. There was a strange taste of cat food under his tongue. It was not unpleasant. "You must go wander the desert for forty years!"
"The desert?"
"Space! Space is a desert!"
"We could be space Jews!" the whalien said.
"Erm, sure," the rabbi said.
"And I would be Moses, leading my people to the promised land!"
"Sure, sure."
"Thank you, rabbi!"
"Hey," the rabbi said. "It's my pleasure."
"We must suffer!" "Like Tevye!"
"Like Yentl!"
"Like Golda Meir!"
"Whatever," the rabbi said.
He looked at Ari, who shrugged. It seemed to have gone off better than either of them had expected. "What can you do, right?" Ari said.
The rabbi shook his head. "Jews," he said.
14.
Buffy went back to her human's apartment. Captain Kirk was still asleep on the couch. Buffy curled up on the couch and pressed the button on the remote control. The television came alive. It was showing the final images of the departing whaliens. Buffy sighed contentedly and began to lick herself clean.
15.
Have you ever seen the flight of a thousand whales gliding through space, moving in one wide circle as they dance the hora?
16.
"Well that went better than expected," the president of the United States said.
17.
A year later Greg Feldman won another Hugo for a short story in which sentient cats were scheming to take over the world.
As he faced the audience of his peers and the sound of clapping hands and cheers, and that faint smell of farts wafting fragrantly up at the podium from the assembled hordes, and clutching his award, Greg Feldman was truly the happiest man in the world.
* * *
First Contact: Moms Rule
Probability Zero Diane Turnshek | 501 words
Nerves would be my undoing. I hurried down the corridor as fast as my tight skirt would allow to the first meeting with the Breen, the rule-making, no-risk-taking alien race. They had already found our methods of setting up a first-contact meeting vaguely repulsive, if I understood their translations correctly. The rule, they had informed us haughtily, is that first contact must happen between two beings of intermediate status who exchange gifts specifically tailored to the individuals involved. And more rules: gifts must not cost more than the salary the individual receives in one-tenth of a solar revolution. That rule seemed so random, but I agreed.
As a mom many times over, I'm an old hand at picking gifts. The Breen delegate was female. With the committee's approval, I picked a sample of musical recordings, a coupon for maid service, and platinum and diamond jewelry... at which point my salary had to be quadrupled so that my gifts fell within the stated monetary parameters.
I maneuvered my gift-wrapped packages through the doorway and into the TV studio. Another rule of theirs: a first contact recording must be distributed in real time over a medium covering the whole population. We figured TV was the best we could do at the current time. Maybe with future Breen trades... who knows what technology they had that would make TV seem primitive— everyone was counting on me.
The Breen delegate was hovering offstage, looking much like the piles of pictures we'd seen. Big, green, tentacled. On a sound cue, we both climbed the stairs, meeting on the dais. Their rule: we had to arrive at the exact same time. The alien looked right at me, I think, then chirped a short welcome speech in Breen and again in passable English. I spoke my greeting, then turned on a recording and lip-synched to the chirps.
"So far, so good," I thought. I wondered if she was as nervous as I was. My counterpart extended her pseudo-pods with two gifts. I handed mine off to her, and then glanced at what she was holding out for me. Until that moment, I hadn't even considered that I might actually like the gifts. From her left side, she passed me a sculpture. It was a miniaturization—an incredible work of art—depicting this very moment. I reached to take it, and then jerked back when I noticed the statue of me reaching to take the sub-miniaturized statue of me reaching for the... and so on down to microscopic levels, I imagined.
I didn't notice that she had presented her second gift simultaneously, but I saw it all happen in the miniaturization as her second gift for me tumbled to the studio floor.
One second, stunned beyond belief.
Two seconds, I glanced down and saw a couple of scones, my favorite food, lying on the floor.
Three seconds—I grabbed the scones and brushed them off while giving a milestone smile to the camera. Before the five seconds were up, I clearly declared to the world and beyond, "Five Second Rule."
* * *
Alien Dimensions: The Universe Next Door
Science Fact Edward M. Lerner | 4299 words
Earth, Heaven, and Hell. The levels of Dante's Inferno. Faerie lands entered from enchanted forests and haunted ruins, by magic spells or through the back of a miraculous wardrobe. Oz, somewhere over the rainbow. Wonderland at the bottom of a rabbit hole and a mirror world behind the looking glass.
The very expression, other planes of existence, evokes a Flat Earth perspective.
Once upon a time (irony intended), to banish tales of other realities from science fiction seemed, well, scientific. Only writers of SF have consistently begged to differ. In this article we'll review several not-quite-Earth venues. We'll touch upon a few illustrations—culled from many possible examples—of how the genre has made use of such settings.1
Why? Because the longer physicists examine the universe, the more meaningful becomes the notion of other, hidden places. And, as we shall see, the scientific assault on our intuitive sense of reality isn't limited to physics.
Other realms: in the beginning
Early natural philosophers (before that unfortunate detour through geocentricism) derived a cosmology in which the Sun and the Earth—and a massive body to counterbalance the Earth—circled the center of the Universe. They called that other world Antichton (literally, anti-Earth).2
A not-too-different world, forever hidden by the Sun from Earth's view, is the central tenet of the O
ther Side novels of Paul Capon, the Chronicles of Gor novels of John Norman, and the classic SF movie Journey to the Far Side of the Sun. An untenable tenet, as it happens— even before space probes roaming the Solar System could see "behind" the Sun.
Imagine that the Sun did block Earth's view of its twin planet. That would not negate the twin world's gravitational influence! Just as Neptune was revealed by its perturbative effects on the orbits of the known planets, so a Counter-Earth would have announced its existence by its influence on nearby planets.
Sort-of alternate worlds
So that's a "no" for any Counter-Earths.
Changing authorial hats for a few paragraphs to my fiction beanie, that's a shame. An almost-Earth is such an apt venue for parodies and ironies, satires and utopias, what-if tales and musings about what is real. Dystopias alas, are all too believably set on this Earth.
(That isn't to say a just-next-door fictional world must be Earth-like. Place an alien milieu a step away, rather in orbit around another star, and avoid lots of story-slowing travel time.)
So what, in the age of space probes and a theory of gravity, is an author to do?
Look inward? That's where many a Philip K. Dick story finds its alternate reality. Dick's novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch invokes other realities through drugs. His story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," twice the basis of movies named Total Recall, provides the appearance of other realities through memory alteration.
Or just shrug off the problem. That's how alternate histories handle it.
Analog regular Harry Turtledove is a master of alternate history, as in (for example) his Atlantis series.3 What if, millions of years ago, Earth's geological processes had created a continent between Europe and the Americas?
Alternate histories are, without question, speculative fiction. But is a story of alternate history science fiction? If a story explores or depends upon a scientific notion—such as the climatic and biological implications of a mid-Atlantic continent—that case can certainly be made.4
And if not? In How Few Remain, the opening novel of the Southern Victory series, Turtledove offers an alternate history in which a Union soldier didn't happen upon a mislaid copy of Robert E. Lee's plan for the Battle of Antietam. (That's the Battle of Sharpsburg, if you are of a Southern persuasion.) Geopolitics would doubtless have unfolded differently if the South had successfully asserted its independence, but the argument is less compelling that this storyline is science fiction.
Parallel Earths
Do you find the alternate-history approach a bit too "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain"? Are realities that exist only in a character's head too Dallas ("It was all a dream") for your taste? Then let's take a step in another direction.
Where? To a place coexistent with Earth and, at the same time, somehow apart. Out of phase (whatever that means). A short distance into some hitherto unrecognized dimension. Hidden, in one way or another, from our everyday senses.
As in Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, whose opening novel, Hominids, appeared herein (January—April 2002 issues). On Sawyer's parallel Earth, beings like Neanderthals hold sway.
And once we have imagined one such place, it's no great stretch to suppose several.
Would you like a story limited to a handful of worlds? Consider Michael P. Kube-McDowell's Alternities. If you prefer more worlds (but few of them viable, the rest having been ravaged by failed attempts to master world-jumping technology), step up to Keith Laumer's Imperium novels. And if you want to go whole hog? Try an endless continuum, each world varying imperceptibly from its nearest neighbors. As Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter portray reality in their novel The Long Earth (the first of a new series). As H. Beam Piper set many stories in the continuum he dubbed paratime.5
In what way are these domains any less magical than, say, the demon dimensions of the Buffyverse?6 I'm glad you asked.
Quantum mechanics to the rescue
Quantum mechanics is the physical theory that mathematically describes the behavior of matter and energy at very small scales. Since QM's earliest stages, nearly a century ago, the theory has marched from success to success. Your tablet computer, e-reader, smart phone, WiFi router—the entire cornucopia of modern electronics—all exploit the equations of QM.
What QM fails to do is explain anything.
The theory is inherently probabilistic. Its math never says, as an example, where an electron is. Instead, QM lets us calculate how likely we are to find that electron here (or there, or somewhere else). Of course, when we ascertain an electron's position, it isn't here and there and somewhere else—it's in a particular spot.
And so, from the very beginning, the greatest minds in physics argued over the meaning of the mathematics. As Albert Einstein famously said, questioning QM's randomness, "God doesn't play dice with the world."7 A half-century later, physics Nobelist Richard Feynman said, "I think it's safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics."
And today? Physicists continue to differ. Thirty-three experts at the "Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality" conference in 2011 were surveyed about the correct interpretation of QM. No interpretation received a majority vote. "I have no preferred interpretation" received a 12% vote. 8,9
Those results are fairly shocking for a theory dating back to the 1920s, a theory that underpins most of this era's most advanced technology.
Skipping the math, we'll go straight to the QM interpretation that, in the aforementioned survey, drew 18% of the expert votes. To wit: we merely perceive that the troublesome electron ends up at just one among its possible endpoints. How so? Because rather than choose, even randomly, the Universe has split into many! Across all the (spawned) universes, some (spawned) electron has gone to every permissible location.
That is: I observe a particular outcome in one universe; another me, in another universe, sees another outcome.
Physicists call this physical characterization of quantum mechanics the Many Worlds Interpretation.
Imagine universes splitting off whenever any subatomic particle might exhibit more than a single behavior. Imagine each of those very similar universes, a mere instant later, spawning its own set of universes. Imagine them splitting...
Sure sounds like the paratime continuum.
Time for time travel
Are you committed to a belief in cause and effect and a fan of time-travel stories? Then a splitting off (or an otherwise parallel) Universe is just the thing. Goodbye, grandfather paradox.10
James P. Hogan combined time travel with universe-hopping in just this way in his sort-of World War II novel The Proteus Operation. Harry Turtledove did much the same in his sort-of Civil War novel ( not part of the Southern Victory series), The Guns of the South.
Got the world(s) on a string
As though quantum mechanics and its Many Worlds Interpretation weren't mind-bending enough, here's another scientific possibility.
String theory is an emergent branch of physics as confounding as quantum mechanics.11 QM theorists understand elementary particles as dimensionless points. String theorists describe the same particles as vibrational modes of strings so tiny as to be indistinguishable—even by our most advanced instruments—from points.
To date, no experiment has been devised to support string theory over the more established quantum mechanics. Some physicists find the mathematical elegance of string theory compelling; other physicists consider string theory's divorce from experiment quite problematical.
Moreover, string theory, in the singular, is the umbrella term for a vast array of mathematical theories, each variant of which purports to describe reality. At most, one variant does.
So why deal with string theory at all? If you're curious, bear with me for another few paragraphs. Otherwise, jump to the next section break.
Einstein's theory of general relativity provides a (so far) f lawless description of the large-scale structures and behaviors of the physical universe, gov
erned by gravity. Quantum mechanics describes the very different behavior of the exceedingly small, at a scale in which gravity seldom matters. A foundational conflict within modern physics is that these two theories make wildly incompatible assumptions about the nature of reality.
More specifically, the equations of general relativity assume that space-time is continuous. In quantum mechanics, matter and energy come in discrete, indivisible chunks called quanta. The QM worldview is inherently discontinuous. GR is deterministic. QM is probabilistic.
Quantum mechanics and general relativity just don't mesh—and string theory may bridge the conceptual gap.
For reasons well beyond the scope of this essay, a mathematically consistent string theory that quantizes gravity requires extra dimensions. As string theory has developed, the required number of dimensions has grown to 11.
Our human senses perceive three spatial dimensions and the passage of time. Relativity theories, special and general, repackage those into four-dimensional space-time. But 11 dimensions? If the Universe has so many, why don't we perceive them?
Spaghettiland
Imagine a lone strand of spaghetti stretched out on a tabletop. The farther you are from the table, the thinner that strand looks, until—to your eyes—the spaghetti becomes a line segment: one-dimensional. Now imagine a tiny, pasta-loving bug crossing over the strand. To that bug, the strand is a cylindrical surface. The bug, moving perpendicularly to the axis of the cylinder, is experiencing a second dimension hidden by distance from your eyes. Physicists describe a dimension curled up on itself like that as compactified.
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