Analog SFF, January-February 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “We've got three weeks."

  “That's plenty of time. You can extinguish a simple phobia in three sessions, if you need to. One, sometimes, with the right VR programming."

  “If you can do this with VR, why did I drag my snake along on a starship? Him and a cooler full of frozen rats, which I took in place of the books listed on my allotment form, thank you."

  “Because the recordings of the VR sessions aren't erasable."

  “I thought you were the only one who got to see those,” said Tess. “You know, make sure no one's having fantasies about running around with an axe or something."

  I shook my head. “They've got people looking over my shoulder, trust me. After all, it would be pretty embarrassing if the mission shrink cracked up and nobody noticed."

  “Or froze up and couldn't talk to the people we came fifty-four light years to see?"

  “Yeah. Or that."

  * * * *

  Dolphins have names. Not the ones we give them, but patterns of radar-click that they use to identify each other. No one's been able to figure out a language, but they can at least get as far as “Hey you.” So the buttons by the pool at Ming Chu Oceanic Research said “Lucy” and “Desi” and “Gibson,” but when you pressed one the underwater speakers put out a string of whistle-pop-squeaks that we'd recorded off of the kids. I pressed Lucy's button and two more buttons that lit up the symbols for “bring” and “ball.” One of the silver-gray shapes circling in the water broke away from the others and made a beeline for the beach ball that was floating at the far side. I loved the graceful way she lifted it between beak and forehead and sleeked toward me, perfectly adapted to her environment. Ten feet from the poolside she lifted her front half out of the water, making circles with her tail to keep herself vertical. It was a trick you saw a lot in tourist shows, but as far as we could tell, she'd taught herself—for the simple reason that when she crashed down, the spray would drench whoever was in striking distance.

  “Not again, Lucy, no!” I moaned as she tossed the ball onto no-longer-so-dry land. She popped her head up wearing that eternal delphine grin, waiting for her reward. “Oh, all right. But we've really got to teach you a symbol for ‘don't.'” I gave her a handful of herring from the fish bucket and tossed the ball away, earning for my generosity a second splash with her tail as she headed back to play catch with the other two. I turned to enter the trial data into the computer. I couldn't imagine how they used to do dolphin work when they had to keep records on paper—maybe they just remembered everything until they got away from the water. I used the mouse to highlight the next line of the spreadsheet, but when I started to type, I realized nothing from the keyboard was getting through.

  “Bloody hell. Okay, kids, take a break."

  I stalked all the way to the tech shop, but took a deep breath before I went in. “Jeff, you know how you swore to me that the new casing was waterproof? Can you explain that to the computer, please?"

  “Oh, hey, Dr. Klein. These folks were looking for you.” Jeff sounded like his usual laid-back self, but kept glancing at the three men standing stiffly by his desk. I could see why. “These folks” were, I kid you not, Men in Black. The dark glasses, I'll admit, were pretty sensible in southern Florida—the suits not so much. I had an immediate urge to introduce them to Lucy.

  “Dr. Serafina Klein?” The tallest one held out his hand, and I shook it. He had a firm grip, very practiced, like a grant-writer or a used car salesman. “I'm Mr. Smith, and these are my associates Mr. Jones and Mr. Siegfried."

  I blinked. “Siegfried?"

  He was shorter than Smith and Jones, and very blond. In a perfect deadpan, he told me, “All the good names were taken."

  “I can understand that,” I said. “At Ellis Island they were handing out Klein like it was going out of style.” No smile—these guys had faces as frozen as the dolphins—but I thought I detected a hint of humor in the tilt of the blond's head.

  Smith cleared his throat. “We'd like you to come with us, please, Dr. Klein."

  Peace protests when I was a kid. Petitions in college, too busy for anything else. No work more classified than some personality tests I'd helped write up for NASA. An ex-boyfriend had put me on the mailing list for an anarchist bookstore once, but they'd gone out of business years ago.

  Jones must have caught a hint of what I was thinking. “You're not in any trouble, ma'am. Actually, we need you for some consulting work."

  “Consulting work?” I repeated. Mentally, I kicked myself. Usually I at least tried to sound like a woman with a Ph.D.

  “Nothing we can discuss further here."

  They had a big black Ford that looked like it was probably also named Smith. I eased into the back seat and tried to settle myself in some way that didn't involve leaning against my wet clothing. After we drove for a few minutes, I asked. “So, can you tell me where we're going, or is it classified?"

  Siegfried jerked his chin at Jones, who was driving. “It's so secret, he doesn't even know."

  Smith sighed. “Virginia."

  “Virginia! But I'm not packed! And my work doesn't know ... and Zawadi!"

  “You'll get a toothbrush, the lab will be informed, and someone will feed your parrot. This is extremely urgent."

  We drove on, and I worried.

  * * * *

  We didn't actually, thank God, take the car all the way north. After a couple of hours we transferred to a helicopter, and then I got to feel even more like I was in a movie, and even more worried. None of the suits would tell me anything about this mysterious consulting job, although after a while Siegfried starting chatting with me about classic science fiction, which distracted me nicely. I was laughing at his explanation of FBI triffid control techniques (by the tenor of which I gathered that he was not FBI) when we finally landed.

  The cluster of buildings around us was nondescript, but looked like it had been occupied for a while. There were a few more suits around and a lot of scientific types hurrying from place to place. Some of them were wearing actual lab coats, but most of them were wearing jeans and t-shirts. You could tell the specialty of lots of them because their shirts had obscure academic jokes on them. “And God said (long equation that I don't understand because I'm a psychologist), and there was light.” That sort of thing. Everyone had these grins on their faces. They were all running around looking like they'd just come from a perfect first date.

  “Have these people invented soma or something?” I asked Siegfried.

  He still didn't smile, but I could tell it was an effort. “You'll see."

  The office that they brought me into was more academia than government. The walls were lined with bookshelves, filled mostly with journals. I saw a set of Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine, which was where my NASA work had come out, and a pile of recent Animal Behavior on the floor. There was an old poster from a Godzilla movie, framed next to the desk. A tiny Spanish woman with black hair bound in a severe bun looked up as I came in.

  “Dr. Klein, Dr. Estevan.” My escorts faded to the back of the room as soon as Smith introduced us, but they didn't leave. I actually had met Zoe Estevan at a little space psychology conference in Kentucky, but it had been while I was a grad student, and I didn't expect she remembered me.

  “I've been looking over your curriculum vitae,” she said. “It's quite eclectic."

  “My interests are broad.” I tried not to fidget. I wasn't on the job market anymore, and didn't have to defend my “lack of focus” to anyone.

  “Master's in clinical, another master's and a doctorate in experimental, publications mostly in animal behavior but a steady record of collaborations in space psychology. You're probably very tired of being told that it all looks pretty unrelated."

  “I suppose it does,” I said stiffly. I had indeed heard that more times than I cared to count, and I wished she would get to the point.

  “I want you to take a look at this.” She turned her flat-screen monitor around and showe
d me what looked like a bar graph with a whole lot of bars shifting constantly.

  “It looks like the SETI screensaver that I've got at home, but less ... embellished.” The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence had been doing its initial analyses on private computers for years now. Estevan was smirking. “It's not the SETI graphic, of course. That's just what it looks like."

  She pressed a key, and the bars became more of a pattern, steady and regular. Another press and the picture switched to a flow of 0s and 1s that transformed to black and white squares that scrolled up the screen in a radiated circle, then a Fibonacci sequence, then a set of primes...

  “It's not,” I repeated. “It's something else. Something that we're sending out?"

  Estevan shook her head. “You had it right the first time. This is a SETI signal that came in four months ago."

  “Oh my God.” I heard the rush of blood in my ears, felt my heart pounding and my palms sweating. I realized I was crying and wiped at my eyes with shaking hands. “Oh my God. All my life..."

  “I was right, then. Your studies haven't been random at all."

  I shook my head. “I don't think anyone realized. There hasn't exactly been a lot of demand. I just decided if anyone ever came looking for a ... for a xenopsychologist, I ought to figure out what they'd want, and meanwhile I'd work with dolphins or something.” I took the tissue that Estevan handed me. “Thank you. Excuse me. I'll be all right in a moment. I'll be absolutely fine."

  “It's okay. We've all been through this part.” That smile I'd seen everywhere outside crept onto her face. “It's pretty incredible."

  “Why hasn't this...” I glanced back at the suits behind me and shivered. “Are they going to tell people?"

  She nodded vigorously. “Absolutely. The problem is how and what."

  From behind me Siegfried added, “The problem is when."

  “He means ‘when’ the signal is from, not ‘when’ do we tell people,” explained Estevan.

  My brain was beginning to come back online. “It's a SETI signal, so it has to be at least a few years old. Probably quite a few. I know the nearest stars were looked at years ago. I remember checking that out the fifth time I read a first-contact novel where they'd only just gotten around to Alpha Centauri in 2010 or so."

  “This one's about fifty-four light-years away. And as soon as we received it we sent off the whole Arecibo sequence in their direction—they'll get that in a half-century or so. But after this message gets through establishing common principles, it starts sending through new information. Directions. Circuit diagrams."

  My breath caught in my throat. “For what? Starships?” I stopped myself from babbling—I was not going to make an idiot of myself wondering about cancer cures and disintegrator rays.

  That grin again. “We're still trying to put that one together. But the first set of instructions was for a communication device. It works through some sort of ... well, I'm told it's related to quantum teleportation, but pretty far afield from what we've been looking at on Earth. Christoffels can give you half an hour on the physics of the thing without pausing for breath, and then you'll understand it about as well as I do.” She took a pause for a breath of her own. “We knew what we had after a couple of days, which is why we didn't go public then. It took two and a half months to build, and then we spent six weeks establishing a basic vocabulary, getting terms across ... The short version is that we've been talking with the Skaan in real-time for the past three days."

  * * * *

  I spent three days of my own, poring over the transcripts. The Skaan were certainly alien—attested to by pages of frustrated exchange in which they tried to explain, or understand, mysteriously vital cultural points (I personally think the discussion of mating customs is right up there with Plato's dialogues). Overriding the frustration, though, was the sense that they were trying to understand. Our two species shared in the kinship of sapient curiosity and in the joy of speaking with an intelligence other than their own. That had always been my frustration with dolphins, with bonobos, with parrots. In the end, all they wanted to know about humans was what they needed to do in order to be fed. They never asked questions.

  Finally, I sat down to my first real-time conversation with a Skaan. The exchanges were text only, both sides having realized early on that translation of print was easier and faster than translation of spoken language with all its individual variation. Lower bandwidth, too—and I'd been given to understand that the ansible was pretty expensive to operate.

  Breathless, I typed: [Hello. My name is Serafina Klein.] Would “xenopsychologist” translate? I knew we were still working on vocabulary, and kludging the grammar by having a live person straighten it out at both ends. [I study Human psychology, but I have also trained to study non-Humans. I have waited a long time and am very happy to begin.]

  I sat a minute, feeling the dopey grin on my face, imagining my words turned to electronic bits, hurled through the relay across the void, reformatted at the other end, reordered and conjugated by the Skaan linguist, and read by my counterpart. Then the process would be reversed. If anything comprehensible made it through that, it would be a miracle—but one that had been repeated hundreds of times in the last few days. I caught myself bouncing in my chair as the cursor blinked and moved.

  [Hello. I bear the name Feese and am held by Aath and Quenshee. I also study the patterns of thought in all things that may bear sapience. I bear joy now, speaking with one who carries new patterns. Will you share in patience?]

  Just before you open birthday presents, when you're little, there's the magic that anything could be hidden in front of you. I hadn't felt that way in years, but here it was again—only better. I blinked away tears while I typed. [I will share in patience and joy.] What to open first? [Let's start with what Human psychologists think of as the basis for patterns of thought. Tell me about the senses that you perceive the world with.]

  [The most important are vision and light-shadow-heat. These interact and are often named as a single sense.] The words continued to flow, and I took notes, and asked questions, and gave Feese my own Intro Psych sensation and perception lecture. I would not have wished to be doing anything else, anywhere else, for any price.

  * * * *

  Ten days in, I really wished that we were receiving visuals. I didn't even need motion. All I wanted was a neural diagram, the kind that you can get printed on a ten-dollar t-shirt if the brain you want sketched is human. Skaan brains, like ours, consisted of two hemispheres in whatever passed for a head—but Feese said they also had ganglia in the equivalent of their fingers, which did some of the initial processing before passing signals further up. These were somehow interconnected with each other, and I was beginning to suspect from some hints Feese had dropped that this made it easier for them to recover from brain damage. If I'd had a diagram, figuring the whole business out would have been so much easier. I grinned to myself as my own attempts at a model became increasingly covered with scribbles and cross-outs.

  Unfortunately, I wasn't permitted to spend all my time on the Skaan. The other part of my job was to observe the human end of the interaction, trying to catch trouble before it started and being available if someone dumped it in my lap. Two weeks of ecstasy will wear people out almost as much as, say, two weeks of worrying about dissertation orals. I'd already dealt with one elderly biochemist who refused to get on the ansible for two days after the revelation that the Skaan scientific community was female-dominated, and two not-so-elderly research assistants who'd refused to talk to him after that. There had been a couple of Skaan names that dropped off the communications roster around the same time. I hadn't made any explanations to Feese, and she hadn't made any to me. Assuming I wasn't anthropomorphizing, I sympathized with the desire not to air dirty laundry.

  I tried another sketch of possible neural network organization. Would this one work? It would depend on how efficient conduction was along the axons ... another thing to ask Feese on our next date. />
  There was a knock on the doorframe.

  “C'mon in. Siegfried, hi!” The third of my men in black, while not directly involved in the ansible work, had been doing some analysis on the transcripts—I think mostly because he had the time and wanted to. He waved jauntily enough, but then came in and sat hunched over in my armchair, arms crossed, looking at the floor. A moment later he straightened, meeting my gaze. Then his eyes dropped back to his hands. He shifted in his seat while I waited.

  “What's going on?” I asked, as gently as I could. I had him pegged for either trying not to strangle one of the aforementioned elderly scientists, or for trying to work up the nerve to ask me out.

  “What do we think we're doing here?” The words burst out, as though he had been saving them up. “How can we think it's all right to talk to them?"

  I was disappointed, but kept my therapist face on. I wouldn't have guessed that Siegfried was repressing xenophobia. It was a natural enough response, I supposed. As much as we try to hold it down, fear of the Other goes pretty deep in the human psyche. “Why wouldn't it be all right to talk to them?"

  More fidgeting. “Serafina, you know what I do for a living. I mean, you don't, actually, but you can guess the sort of things I've seen. Humans do things to each other, things that seem necessary, and maybe for us, for now, they are necessary.” I nodded encouragingly, and he went on. “We're still in the sandbox, hitting other kids over the head with shovels. How can we think we're worth talking to? What are they going to learn from us? How to be stupid? We aren't ready for this!"

  Okay. Not xenophobia after all. Instead, I had a case of low self-esteem, writ large. I felt relieved and a little guilty about it. “I do know what your work is, more or less. Can you tell me why you went into it?"

  His lips quirked. “College ROTC and a lot of coincidences."

  “That's all?"

  “Well ... I guess it seemed like a ... noble thing. Serve my country and all that. Serve the world."

  “And you've beendoing that, right? Not everything you've seen has been bad.” I was on safe ground there, I figured, given the last few days.