Analog SFF, January-February 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I slid my Perrier back into the holder and waited.

  “But now,” he went on, “there's this new series of yours. Plucky human explorers and entrepreneurs finding their way in a galaxy full of diverse species with diverse motivations. Carving out trading niches, forming tentative alliances; sometimes coming out ahead, sometimes not.” He finally turned back to peer at me over his whiskered snout. “What do you think, Jack? Are you the only Optimistic Skeptic in Hollywood? Is anybody going to pick up your new show?"

  I snorted. “Hollywood doesn't care what I believe. It's viewers that matter."

  He grinned again.

  I finally caught on. “This is why you invited me here tonight? You want to back my series?"

  The otter just kept staring at me, his eyes blank as two brown marbles. “You still haven't asked. This is the first time you've ever been alone with one of us. Don't you want to ask why we've come to Earth?"

  The conversation was spinning past me like a merry-go-round. I grabbed the latest passing horse and tried to hold on.

  “And if I ask, I suppose you'll tell me the truth?"

  He shrugged, the shoulders of his three forelegs breaking the surface of the water. Which, it occurred to me, was about as credible a response as he could give to that sort of question.

  When the otters first showed up in Earth orbit, they came with a plausible story. The nearest members of galactic civilization had picked up our early radio and television broadcasts, deciphered them. After a couple of decades the otters, chosen for their relative similarities to humans, were dispatched to contact us—to study our world and report back on our suitability for admission to polite interstellar society.

  Like I said, plausible. But then, what else would you expect from creatures who'd been listening in on a century of our radio and television broadcasts?

  “Come on,” said the otter. “Just ask me."

  “Fine.” I shifted my position so that a pair of the tub's jets massaged my shoulder blades. Then I stared back into those eerie eyes. “Why did you come to Earth?"

  He leaned against the tub's side. He regarded me for a moment. Finally, in a very serious voice, he said, "Babylon 5."

  For at least five seconds his expression remained impassive. Then he broke into a hoof-mouthed grin.

  Disgusted, I reached for my Perrier.

  “No, no,” he protested, waving two of his paws at me. “I'm serious! Four years of loose ends and unresolved character arcs, and then what do they do? Take the final season to cable! Can you imagine how frustrating that was for me?” He spread his paws wide in supplication. “Visiting Earth was my only option."

  I didn't really want to waste more time on this, but he had annoyed me. “You couldn't have watched it on the BBC?"

  “Channel 4,” he corrected. He shook his head. “The last season was delayed."

  “Australia, then."

  “Wrong hemisphere. Our ship was approaching from the other direction."

  “Fine.” I toasted him with my bottle. “You crossed countless parsecs of cold vacuum to rent a DVD. Whatever."

  He chittered. “Don't be like that. Look—on the trip here we each took responsibility for monitoring and summarizing different genres from the incoming broadcast stream. One of us handled news, for example. Somebody else covered drama."

  “Let me guess. You did science fiction."

  “Exactly. You can learn a lot about a species from its dreams and nightmares."

  Despite myself, I was starting to suspect that he really was being honest now—no matter how uselessly. “What else did you monitor, besides sci-fi?"

  “Horror films. Fantasy series. Political campaign ads."

  Assuming he was still telling the truth, I wondered how much further he would go. “Okay,” I said, “now that we've established your personal motivation for landing on my planet, how about your people's collective purpose? And I hope you won't claim that you all came To Serve Man."

  His snout dipped beneath the bubbly water's surface, then tilted upward to geyser an elongated mouthful of water vertically into the air, in what I took to be delight. “No, Jack—you won't find any cookbooks on our ship."

  “You've read that story!"

  “Story?” He shook his head. "Twilight Zone." He paused then and helped himself to another walnut. He chewed noisily as his eyelids slid halfway shut; he seemed to be studying me. He gave a little nod, finally, and said, “We've been telling the truth. Our team is here to study your world and report back, and to prepare humanity for joining the galactic community."

  Disappointed with his pat response, I let my head fall back against the tub's edge. Above me most of the sky had gone deep blue; the horizon still glowed indigo and purple.

  But there was something about what he had just said. “Prepare us?” I asked. “You mean by explaining how your society works? By giving us new technology?"

  He nodded. “Adding to humanity's knowledge is the first phase of preparation, yes."

  A shiver passed up my spine that had nothing to do with hot tub jets. Maybe the Isolationists had it right, after all.

  “There's a second phase?"

  He tossed a walnut into the air, caught it in his mouth. “Let's talk about angels,” he said.

  After all the deals I'd negotiated in my career, I knew non-nonchalance when I heard it. We had finally arrived at the actual starting point of tonight's discussion.

  I thought back to his earlier comment. “'Destructive,'” I quoted. “Isn't that what you called them?"

  He shook his head. “It's the concept of angels that's destructive. I mean your current pop-culture version of angels—creatures lesser than God, but greater than man. Beings who are almost perfectly moral and good. It's a very old meme, one that's infected most human religions. In some it emerges in the form of supernatural beings; in others you can see it in the original humans themselves, before a fall from grace."

  He ducked his snout for a swallow of water, then continued. “As a mere human, obviously you could never measure up to God, whether in knowledge, wisdom, power, or patience. But angels, they're not God. People compare themselves to angels all the time—and always come up short. I should have been more forgiving! you berate yourself: I should have been more like an angel. I knew it was wrong, but I couldn't help myself! Unlike an angel."

  He was reminding me of a religious show I'd surfed past a few nights earlier. “An angel? Or do you mean a saint?"

  His snout lifted, as if he were sniffing my words. “Saints! Even better! What's a saint, after all? A rare human who achieves angelic stature. In many of your religions, when a saint dies he even ascends to heaven, to serve God directly—he literally becomes an angel."

  “So what's wrong with that? The saint provides an example for the rest of us, a model."

  “Ah, but how many can ever match that model? And what do you tell yourself when you fail, as you're virtually guaranteed to do every time you're tested? I should have behaved better—well, I guess I'm no saint! It doesn't take many times to prove to yourself that saints, like angels, are simply a different breed from you. And then, unless you are truly unusual, you quite logically give up. You settle for being fairly moral. For trying reasonably hard. You feel guilt over past mistakes, but it doesn't occur to you to try and rectify them. After all, it's not like you're some sort of saint."

  I frowned. “So you're saying—what? That our moral development is stunted because we can imagine something better to strive toward? That doesn't make any sense at all."

  He let himself slide off the bench into the water, where he just floated near the bottom for several seconds. Why had he invited me here, really? Did he want me to air his bizarre argument in my show?

  Shaking off the water as he retook his position, he asked, “Have you ever seen the movie Lord of the Flies? The story of how, in the absence of external forces, humans will inevitably revert to their innate savagery and evil?"

  I nodded, wondering where he was hea
ded now.

  He slapped the water with his paw, hard, splashing us both. “That's exactly backwards!” He sounded genuinely angry, his voice squeaking up an octave by the end of his sentence. “It's the precise opposite of your actual phylogeny!"

  “Our what?"

  He lowered his snout to look directly at me. “Your development as a species. The history of each of your cultures. And the process that you, as individuals, repeat in your personal development.” He dropped his mouth to the water's surface and blew bubbles for a few seconds, apparently collecting his thoughts. Then he looked up again. “The message of movies like that is that humans will always be failed angels. But you're not! You're actually incredibly successful. But not angels—you're incredibly successful apes! Apes who all by yourselves—without any guidance from either benevolent gods or sponsoring aliens—figured out language and agriculture and metal-working and love and morality and vaudeville. If Lord of the Flies told the real story of your species, it would show a shipwreck of illiterate savages struggling together to survive, then going on to invent epic poetry and art deco."

  “Also beating their children. And occasionally massacring each other."

  “Yes, yes, of course! You're evolving monkeys! What do you expect? Not everyone progresses at the same rate. For every forward step there are other steps backwards, or sideways—at the individual level, random influences will always dominate. But, as a species, look how far you've come!"

  I didn't know what to say. I lifted my water bottle to my lips, but at some point I'd apparently finished its contents, or accidentally spilled them into the tub.

  I studied him, this hyper-advanced space alien come to prepare my world for entrance into the greater galactic community. He lolled before me in the deepening darkness, half floating, two of his short arms pressed against the side of the tub. His snout pointed directly at me, nose twitching and head still pushed forward by the vehemence of his argument. Beads of water speckled his slick fur.

  I said, “So humanity is, what, the galactic poster child for self-actualization?"

  His head tipped back, and he chittered loud and long. “Hardly,” he said, his voice as unaffected by his still-chirping laughter as it had been by his earlier walnut-crunching. “How do you suppose any sentient species develops?” He shook his head, and then settled back into stillness. Once more he gazed at me over his long snout. “Unfortunately,” he said, “the development of your particular species seems to have gotten stuck. Its moral development, I mean."

  It took me a few seconds to work that out. Then I said, “You're talking about angels again."

  He nodded. “In your present condition, we can't recommend allowing your species out of this solar system."

  “What?!” Now I was angry. “As long as humanity is stuck on angels, we're not morally mature enough to join your society? We're not good enough for you?” I pushed myself upright on the slippery bench, so that I was looking downward toward his sprawled form. “That's what you're saying?"

  He held up a paw. “To the contrary,” he said, slowly shaking his head. “It's we who aren't ready for you."

  I stared.

  “Look at your Utopians,” he said. “They've already cast my people as the messengers of the gods, bringing light and hope to the world. Can you imagine what will happen to them once your species starts interacting with the rest of the galaxy? They'll be the worst kind of suckers, patsies to the first fast-talking amoeba that gets its pseudopods on them. Before you know it they'll group themselves into feuding cults, each crazily loyal to its own alien race of perfect beings. Next step: interstellar Crusades—with all the rest of us caught in the crossfire.

  “Or,” he continued, “how about the Isolationists? To them we're false angels. They reject our offered technology, our culture. No thanks, they tell us. We'll stick to the human way. So where does that lead? Either to a dead-end existence stuck on your birth planet, or else to an independent human space empire. The first would be unfortunate for humanity—not really a problem, though, for the rest of us. But a growing, antagonistic human dominion? Eventually you'll collide with the rest of the galaxy. At first the conflicts will be economic, which is disruptive enough. But sooner or later, guaranteed, we're talking out-and-out war."

  The sky had grown quite dark by now. It pressed down on me, as if someone was trying to smother the Earth with an immense pillow.

  “You're not just guessing, are you?” I asked. “We're not the first race you've encountered that believed in something like angels."

  He sighed. “If your people don't get past this meme soon, there's going to be a fleet of big, ugly warships embargoing your planet."

  I stared at him. “Embargoing...?"

  “Oh, you'll still be able to launch Earth-orbiting satellites. But manned flight beyond your atmosphere—that will be discouraged. Quite, ah, rigorously discouraged."

  I pictured spacecraft exploding and falling ablaze back to Earth; the images left me chilled despite the heat of the water in which I sat. This would be humanity's fate? To remain forever imprisoned on our one small world, while throughout the rest of the galaxy other civilizations flourished and grew?

  His face held no expression that I could read. If your people don't get past this meme soon, he'd said.

  I asked, “What's soon?"

  He shrugged. “Not up to me. Twenty-five years, maybe? Fifty, tops."

  I couldn't speak. Fifty years to change our race's basic understanding of human nature. Or else.

  Once again he seemed to appreciate the thought behind my expression. “Actually, that's plenty of time. Once every human truly understands how much humanity has already accomplished all on its own, how all of your ethics are the product of massive, ongoing self-improvement rather than a fall from unattainable grace, the rest will come quickly. Utopianism and Isolationism will both lose their meaning; humanity will recognize itself as simply the new kid among a galaxy of peers."

  For a second he had me. But then I shook my head. “Great. So you put out a press release. You get people like me to spread the word. Then poof—the entire world changes its fundamental beliefs. Uh-huh."

  He splashed some water onto his upper chest and started combing through the fur with his paw. “Some of your psychotherapists have a term, radical acceptance. Patients have to accept themselves as they truly are, not as they wish they were. Really, deeply, completely accept their actual nature. Once they've done that, it's remarkable how quickly they can finally alter longstanding dysfunctional behaviors."

  “So that's your Phase Two? We bombard the world with anti-angel, pro-monkey propaganda until everyone achieves this ‘radical acceptance'?"

  He paused in his grooming. “Propaganda?” He cocked his head, as if he were surprised by my question. “No, Jack. Our techniques of memetic engineering have progressed a little further than that. I'm not talking about some media campaign."

  “Then what? And then why the hell have you been telling me all of this, if you're not asking me to help broadcast your message?"

  “Ah.” His snout bobbed up and down. “My apologies for any confusion.” He dipped his head to take a mouthful of water, which he proceeded to gargle for a few seconds before swallowing. “I invited you here tonight because your new pilot indicated to me that you are someone who has already, if incompletely, come to accept humanity's true nature. Which qualifies you as a subject for the initial field testing of our memetic treatment. Safety and dosage trials, you understand."

  By now the only thing that could astound me was my earlier belief that I somehow had the slightest control over tonight's conversation.

  “A subject,” I repeated.

  He nodded. “Once we've established the proper dose and ensure there are no side effects, we'll be ready to fully deploy the treatment. We figure two years for complete coverage. Not specifically for the deployment itself, you understand. But my people have ethical constraints—we must take as much time as needed to ensure that all subjects
are fully informed. As I've done with you this evening."

  I thought about it. “And the alternative to your treatment is a planetary embargo?"

  He nodded again.

  Maybe he was just toying with me, making up this entire story of warships and self-esteem treatments merely to be entertained by my reactions. Maybe in another minute an otter camera crew would jump out from under the hot tub and welcome me to Pan-Galactic Candid Camera.

  But my gut said that he was telling the truth. And you don't last as many years in this business as I have without a perceptive gut.

  Even if it were all true, though, why should I be the otters’ guinea pig? What did the ultimate future of humanity matter to me? But that question answered itself; I hadn't produced a historical, or even a Western, for years—deep down, it had never been humanity's past that fired my imagination.

  I took a deep breath, let it out. “Okay,” I told the otter. “I'll do it. Do you want me to sign something?"

  His head tilted to one side. “Excuse me?"

  “You know, like in the hospital. Informed consent before a procedure, right?"

  He stared at me for a few seconds. “Consent?” He shook his head, bemused. "Before a procedure?"

  My eyes went wide. Wildly I scanned my surroundings. “You mean you've already—!” It was too dark to see more than a foot beyond the tub in any direction. “This treatment, how...?"

  Calmly, he pointed to the bubbling surface of the tub's water. “Actually,” he said, “you're soaking in it."

  Horrified, I lifted a handful of the water into the air, let it pour from my palm. And then—like the terrified ape I was—I leapt out of the tub, landing half-crouched on the cool grass. I scrabbled for my towel, began frantically rubbing at my torso.

  I was shivering something fierce, and not just because of the cold breeze that blew in from the ocean.