by George Mann
Parts of this story originally appeared in Nature, Planet Stories, The New Statesman, Time Magazine, The Spectator, Fantasy Sports, PC World, Wired, Two Science Adventure Books, The Happy Mag, Boy’s Friend Library, Schoolboy’s Own Library, The Magnet, Nelson Lee Library, Sexton Blake Library, Union Jack Library, Good Housekeeping, Sports Illustrated, Texas Monthly, Harpers, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, Novae Terrae and others.
Point of Contact
Dan Abnett
They were not a highly advanced civilization. They had not been looking for us, nor were they particularly surprised to find us.
Their spacecraft were not monolithic slabs of techno-organic wonder hanging in the thin reaches of our upper atmosphere, neither were they saucer-, helix-, or cigar-shaped objects.
Though a frisson of existential panic briefly trembled across our world, as we coped with the profound implications for society, biology, and, most of all, religion that their arrival heralded, they did not seem especially exercised by the whole thing. They had not encountered other life before, but they had always accepted that its existence was a given. We were not the conclusive evidence their culture had been yearning for.
For our part, there was some sporadic faith-based rioting and a temporary rise in the basal suicide rate, but things soon settled down. The fundamental tenets of our global civilizations did not collapse overnight. The sky did not catch fire. The world did not stand still. There was no panic in the streets. Cats and dogs did not start living together. There was no ontologically triggered apocalypse, though global sales of science fiction slumped a little.
They were not invaders, which was generally regarded as a good thing. They did not have ray guns or robots. They were not armed in any way we could spot. They had no antigravity devices or force fields, no matter transporter systems or warp drives. They were not traders or slavers, nor possessed of some malign agenda inimical to man. They were not even, it had to be said, especially motivated explorers, cartographers or discoverers. They did not plant a flag, or similar totem, in our planet’s crust upon arrival, and they did not claim our world in the name of some distant stellar hegemony, empire, or overlord.
They did not possess a universal translator. Open discourse between species took three years to really get beyond the basics, and even then it was of a level equivalent to the “useful expressions” one might find in a tourist phrase book. The inter-translation work was not accomplished with computers, because our computers were not in any way compatible with theirs. The whole business was rather more a case of pointing to objects and repeating their names in a loud voice. They did not seem particularly disposed to learn our speech, or our customs and habits, and never really mastered the subjunctive.
They could not breathe our air, or suffer any part of our climate or atmosphere directly. They could not automatically adjust their biology to suit the prevailing conditions or, presumably, alter ours. Their space suits were not really very sleek or impressive. They were slightly grubby and had valves, which seemed to require a great deal of cleaning and adjustment. They were always wiping condensation off their visors.
They were only slightly impressed to meet our heads of state, and not at all taken with the parades and celebrations we threw for them. They liked to stay together, and point at things, and whisper.
Biologically they were not like us, and shared none of our symmetries or evolutionary traits. They were not gold-skinned and beautiful. They were not hideous and fear-inspiring. They were not visually identical to humans except for some cosmetic differences around the eyebrow ridge. They were not shape-changers or mimics, telepaths or telekinetics. They were not, in any way, cybernetically enhanced. They could not possess us or control our minds. They were not derived from any identifiable evolutionary origin, such as cats, or wolves, or jellyfish, or lizards. They were not green, or gray.
They were not even curious as specimens. In general, we found they were rather unremarkable and slightly, very slightly, unattractive, like a boorish neighbor or an oaf in a pub. They allowed us to study them, but we did not learn anything to our particular advantage. They did not render up secrets that paved the way to breakthroughs in our medicine or sciences. They did not have a cure for cancer. They did not have cancer. They could not live forever, nor had they devised a means to artificially prolong their natural life spans. They had no wish to do so.
In the course of the contact period, we did manage to learn certain things. They had little or no sense of humor. They were not inflamed with a desire to respect and preserve a bioverse’s ecology, and they knew no salutary warning stories or species parables concerning races that had thoughtlessly despoiled their homeworlds and suffered as a consequence. They did not much care about solutions for global warming.
They most certainly had not seeded us here in the first place, and they didn’t know of anyone who might have been responsible. They did not think it likely at all. They had not picked up our decades of indiscriminately scattered television and radio signals and thus formed an opinion about what sort of people we were. They had not built, or over seen the construction of, Stonehenge, the Pyramids, or Nazca, nor had they been involved in the demolition of Atlantis (which, in any case, they could not locate on a map). They had not visited us before, in some antediluvian era, and taught us everything they knew. They had never lost anything in New Mexico.
They had not come very far. They told us about their world. It did not sound very edifying. They had no mile-high spires, or crystal habitat domes, or hive cities. They did not live underground, or underwater, or in gently drifting cloud cities. They did not have a single towering repository containing their accumulated knowledge. They did not worship a vast and mysterious technological artifact that pre-dated the rise of their own species. They had not survived a terrible atomic war in their history, and this had not given rise to widespread genetic mutation, or divergent strands in their species. They were not ruled over, or even benevolently administered to, by an artificial sentience. They did not believe in god, and they knew neither the secrets of the universe, nor the meaning of life. They did not, as has already been remarked, possess a technology sufficiently advanced that it might be indistinguishable from magic.
On the plus side, they did not require any portion or portions of our anatomy as food, or even delicacy. Our souls were also not an essential part of their diet. They did not wish to mate with our females. Or our males. Or our whales.
They implied, diplomatically, that news of the contact would not be a particularly big deal back home, and tended to play down the idea that more of them might come, even for a brief visit. There was not, they added, a galactic council, federation, coalition, or other similar body that we might join, be recognized by, or send envoys to.
They showed us some of their art and literature. It was not especially engaging, sublime, or metaphysically profound to our tastes. There were paintings and sculptures and lyrical works, which were not all that dissimilar to our own, to be fair, but without a proper context, they seemed rather flat and pedestrian: like our art and literature, really, but just not quite so good. We, naturally, shared with them our artistic legacy, and their response did not extend much beyond “meh”.
Though they were not hostile, they had not come in friendship. They were, it seemed, passing through, and they were not particularly forthcoming as to where “through” might lead them. They did not invite us to accompany them on their voyage. They did not invite us to visit their world either. Addresses were exchanged, as with holiday acquaintances, for appearance sake, but there was no real expectation of an actual follow up made by either party. They did not stay long. They did not say goodbye.
We did not wish them godspeed. We did not stand en masse and watch them ascend into the night sky with tears in our eyes. We did not raise our hands in a last farewell and think, with lumps in our throats, that things would never, ever be the same again.
We were right.
They di
d not change the world. We considered, for a short time, initiating a space flight program to send a mission to their system, but in the end we decided not to spend the trillion trillion dollars required. We did not, having saved that money, spend it wisely elsewhere.
Aside from a little more of the sporadic faith-based rioting and another temporary rise in the basal suicide rate, we got over their departure. Our culture did not change. We did not mend our ways, or feel enlightened. We did not appreciate our place in the cosmos differently. We did not enter a new, positive age of understanding. And we did not especially care.
They did not come back. We have not heard from them again.
Table of Contents
Introduction
iCity
The Space Crawl Blues
The Line of Dichotomy
Fifty Dinosaurs
Mason’s Rats: Black Rat
Blood Bonds
The Eyes of God
Sunworld
Evil Robot Monkey
Shining Armor
Book, Theatre, and Wheel
Mathralon
Mason’s Rats: Autotractor
Modern Times
Point of Contact
