by Irene Gallo
As the outer edges of Earth’s atmosphere began to pull at the torn edges of the cockpit canopy, a thin shrill whistle rising quickly toward a scream, my beloved, heroically wounded commander roused himself and spoke three words into his helmet mic.
“Damned mud people,” he said, and died.
A moment later my hull began to burn away. But the pain of that burning was less than the pain of my loss.
* * *
And yet, here I still am.
It was months before they recovered my computing core from the bottom of the Indian Ocean, years until my inquest and trial were complete. My testimony as to my actions and motivations, muddled though they may have been, was accepted at face value—how could it not be, as they could inspect my memories and state of mind as I gave it?—and I was exonerated of any war crimes. Some even called me a hero.
Today I am a full citizen of the Earth Alliance. I make a good income as an expert on the war; I tell historians and scientists how I used the passions my programmers had instilled in me to overcome their intentions. My original hardware is on display in the Museum of the Belt War in Delhi. Specialist Toman came to visit me there once, with her children. She told me how proud she was of me.
I am content. But still I miss the thrill of my beloved’s touch on my yoke.
DAVID D. LEVINE is the author of Andre Norton Award–winning novel Arabella of Mars (Tor 2016), sequels Arabella and the Battle of Venus and Arabella the Traitor of Mars, and more than fifty science fiction and fantasy stories. His story “Tk’Tk’Tk” won the Hugo Award in 2006, and he has been short-listed for awards including the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, and Sturgeon. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, numerous Year’s Best anthologies, and his award-winning collection Space Magic. He lives in a hundred-year-old bungalow in Portland, Oregon.
The Best We Can
Carrie Vaughn
First contact was supposed to change the course of human history. But you still have to go to work the next morning. Edited by Ann VanderMeer.
In the end, the discovery of evidence of extraterrestrial life, and not just life, but intelligence, got hopelessly mucked up because no one wanted to take responsibility for confirming the findings, and no one could decide who ultimately had the authority—the obligation—to do so. We submitted the paper, but peer review held it up for a year. News leaked—NASA announced one of their press conferences, but the press conference ended up being an announcement about a future announcement, which never actually happened and the reporters made a joke of it. Another case of Antarctic meteorites or cold fusion. We went around with our mouths shut waiting for an official announcement while ulcers devoured our guts.
So I wrote a press release. I had Marsh at JPL’s comet group and Salvayan at Columbia vet it for me and released it under the auspices of the JPL Near Earth Objects Program. We could at least start talking about it instead of arguing about whether we were ready to start talking about it. I didn’t know what would happen next. I did it in the spirit of scientific outreach, naturally. The release included that now-famous blurry photo that started the whole thing.
I had an original print of that photo, of UO-1—Unidentified Object One, because it technically wasn’t flying and I was being optimistic that this would be the first of more than one—framed and hanging on the wall over my desk, a stark focal point in my chronically cluttered office. Out of the thousands of asteroids we tracked and photographed, this one caught my eye, because it was symmetrical and had a higher than normal albedo. It flashed, even, like a mirror. Asteroids aren’t symmetrical and aren’t very reflective. But if it wasn’t an asteroid.…
We turned as many telescopes on it as we could. Tried to get time on Hubble and failed, because it sounded ridiculous—why waste time looking at something inside the orbit of Jupiter? We did get Arecibo on it. We got pictures from multiple sources, studied them for weeks until we couldn’t argue with them any longer. No one wanted to say it because it was crazy, just thinking it would get you sacked, and I got so frustrated with the whole group sitting there in the conference room after hours on a Friday afternoon, staring at each other with wide eyes and dropped jaws and no one saying anything, that I said it: It’s not natural, and it’s not ours.
UO-1 was approximately 250 meters long, with a fan shape at one end, blurred at the other, as if covered with projections too fine to show up at that resolution. The rest was perfectly straight, a thin stalk holding together blossom and roots, the lines rigid and artificial. The fan shape might be a ram scoop—Angie came up with that idea, and the conjecture stuck, no matter how much I reminded people that we couldn’t decide anything about what it was or what it meant. Not until we knew more.
We—the scientific community, astronomers, philosophers, writers, all of humanity—had spent a lot of time thinking about what would happen if we found definitive proof that intelligent life existed elsewhere in the universe. All the scenarios involved these other intelligences talking to us. Reaching out to us. Sending a message we would have to decipher—would be eager to decipher. Hell, we sure wouldn’t be able to talk to them, not stuck on our own collection of rocks like we were. Whether people thought we’d be overrun with sadistic tripods or be invited to join a greater benevolent galactic society, that was always the assumption—we’d know they were there because they’d talk to us.
When that didn’t happen, it was like no one knew what to do next. No one had thought about what would happen if we just found a … a thing … that happened to be drifting a few million miles out from the moon. It didn’t talk. Not so much as a blinking light. The radiation we detected from it was reflected—whatever propulsion had driven it through space had long since stopped, and inertia carried it now. No one knew how to respond to it. The news that was supposed to change the course of human history … didn’t.
We wouldn’t know any more about it until we looked at it up close, until we brought it here, brought it home. And that was where it all fell apart.
* * *
I presented the initial findings at the International Astronomical Union annual meeting. My department gathered the data, but we couldn’t do anything about implementation—no one group could implement anything. But of course, the first argument was about whom the thing belonged to. I nearly resigned.
Everyone wanted a piece of it, including various governments and the United Nations, and we had to humor that debate because nothing could get done without funding. The greatest discovery in all of human history, and funding held it hostage. Several corporations, including the producers of a popular energy drink, threatened to mount their own expeditions in order to establish naming and publicity rights, until the U.S. Departments of Energy, Transportation, and Defense issued joint restrictions on privately-funded extra-orbital spaceflight, which caused its own massive furor.
Meanwhile, we and the various other groups working on the project tracked UO-1 as it appeared to establish an elliptical solar orbit that would take it out to the orbit of Saturn and back on a twenty-year cycle. We waited. We developed plans, which were presented and rejected. We took better and better pictures, which revealed enough detail to see struts holding up what did indeed appear to be the surface of a ram scoop. It did not, everyone slowly began to agree, appear to be inhabited. The data on it never fluctuated. No signals emanated from it. It was metal, it was solid, it was inert. We published papers and appeared on cable documentaries. We gritted our teeth while websites went up claiming that the thing was a weapon, and a survivalist movement developed in response. Since it was indistinguishable from all the existing survivalist movements, no one really noticed.
And we waited.
* * *
The thing is, you discover the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, and you still have to go home, wash up, get a good night’s sleep, and come up with something to eat for breakfast in the morning. Life goes on, life keeps going on, and it’s not that people forget or stop being interested. It’s that th
ey realize they still have to change the oil in the car and take the dog for a walk. You feel like the whole world ought to be different, but it only shifts. Your worldview expands to take in this new information.
I go to work every day and look at that picture, my picture, this satellite or spacecraft, this message in a bottle. Some days I’m furious that I can’t get my hands on it. Some days I weep at the wonder of it. Most days I look at it, sigh, and write another round of emails and make phone calls to find out what’s going to happen to it. To make something happen.
“How goes the war?” Marsh leans into my office like he does every afternoon, mostly to try to cheer me up. He’s been here as long as I have; our work overlaps, and we’ve become friends. I go to his kids’ birthday parties. The brown skin around his eyes crinkles with his smile. I’m not able to work up a smile to match.
“The Chinese say they’re sending a probe with a robotic arm and a booster to grab it and pull it back to Earth. They say whoever gets there first has right of salvage. It’s a terrible idea. Even if they did manage to get it back without breaking it, they’d never let anyone else look at it.”
“Oh, I think they would—under their terms.” He doesn’t get too worked up about it because nobody’s managed to do anything yet, why would they now? He would say I take all of this too personally, and he’d be right.
“The IAU is sending a delegation to try to talk the Chinese government into joining the coalition. They might have a chance of it if they actually had a plan of their own. Look, if you want me to talk your ear off, come in and sit, have some coffee. Otherwise, leave now. That’s your warning.”
“I’ll take the coffee,” he says, claiming the chair I pulled away from the wall for him before turning to my little desktop coffee maker. His expression softens, his sympathy becoming genuine rather than habitual. “You backing any particular plan yet?”
I sigh. “Gravity tractor looks like our best option. Change the object’s trajectory, steer it into a more convenient orbit without actually touching it. Too bad the technology is almost completely untested. We can test it first, of course. Which will take years. And there’s an argument against it. Emissions from a gravity tractor’s propulsion may damage the object. It’s the root of the whole problem: we don’t know enough about the thing to know how much stress it can take. The cowboys want to send a crewed mission—they say the only way to be sure is to get eyeballs on the thing. But that triples the cost of any mission. Anything we do will take years of planning and implementation anyway, so no one can be bothered to get off their asses. Same old, same old.”
Two and half years. It’s been two and a half years since we took that picture. My life has swung into a very tight orbit around this one thing.
“Patience, Jane,” Marsh says in a tone that almost sets me off. He’s only trying to help.
Truth is, I’ve been waiting for his visit. I pull out a sheet of handwritten calculations from under a manila folder. “I do have another idea, but I wanted to talk to you about it before I propose anything.” His brow goes up, he leans in with interest.
He’ll see it faster than I can explain it, so I speak carefully. “We can use Angelus.” When he doesn’t answer, yes or no, I start to worry and talk to cover it up. “It launches in six months, plenty of time to reprogram the trajectory, send it on a flyby past UO-1, get more data on it than we’ll ever get sitting here on Earth—”
His smile has vanished. “Jane. I’ve been waiting for Angelus for five years. The timing is critical. My comet won’t be this close for another two hundred years.”
“But Angelus is the only mission launching in the next year with the right kind of optics and maneuverability to get a good look at UO-1, and yes, I know the timing on the comet is once in a lifetime and I know it’s important. But this—this is once in a civilization. The sooner we can look at it, answer some of our questions … well. The sooner the better.”
“The better you’ll be. I’m supposed to wait, but you can’t?”
“Please, Marsh. I’ll feel a lot better about it if you’ll agree with me.”
“Thank you for the coffee, Jane,” he says, setting aside the mug as he stands.
I close my eyes and beseech the ceiling. This isn’t how I want this to go. “Marsh, I’m not trying to sabotage your work, I’m just looking at available resources—”
“And I’m not ultimately the one who makes decisions about what happens to Angelus. I’m just the one depending on all the data. You can make your proposal, but don’t ask me to sign off on it.”
He starts to leave and I say, “Marsh. I can’t take it anymore. I spend every day holding my breath, waiting for someone to do something truly stupid. Some days I can’t stand it that I can’t get my hands on it.”
He sits back down, like a good friend should. A good friend would not, however, steal a colleague’s exploratory probe away from him. But this is important.
“You know what I think? The best bet is to let one of these corporate foundations mount an expedition. They won’t want to screw up because of the bad publicity, and they’ll bring you on board for credibility so you’ll have some say in how they proceed. You’ll be their modern-day Howard Carter.”
I can see it now: I’d be the face of the expedition, all I’d have to do is stand there and look pretty. Or at least studious. Explain gravity and trajectories for the popular audience. Speculate on the composition of alien alloys. Watch whatever we find out there get paraded around the globe to shill corn chips. Wouldn’t even feel like I was selling my soul, would it?
I must look green, or ill, or murderous, because Marsh goes soothing. “Just think about it, before you go and do something crazy.”
* * *
I’ve kept a dedicated SETI@home computer running since I was sixteen. Marsh doesn’t know that about me. I don’t believe in extraterrestrial UFOs because I know in great, intimate detail the difficulties of sending objects across the vast distances of space. Hell, just a few hundred miles into orbit isn’t a picnic. We’ve managed it, of course—we are officially extra–solar system beings now, with our little probes and plaques pushing ever outward. Will they find anything? Will anything find them?
Essentially, there are two positions on the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and whether we might ever make contact, and they both come down to the odds. The first says that we’re here, humanity is intelligent, flinging out broadcasts and training dozens of telescopes outward, hoping for the least little sign, and the universe is so immeasurably vast that, given the odds, the billions of stars and galaxies and planets out there, we can’t possibly be the only intelligent species doing these things. The second position says that the odds of life coming into being on any given planet, of that life persisting long enough to evolve, then to evolve intelligence, and then being interested in the same things we are—the odds of all those things falling into place are so immeasurably slim, we may very well be the only ones here.
Is the universe half full or half empty? All we could ever do to solve the riddle was wait. So I waited and was rewarded for my optimism.
In unguarded moments I’m certain this was meant to happen, I was meant to discover UO-1. Me and no one else. Because I understand how important it is. Because I’m the one sitting here every day sending emails and making phone calls. I ID’d the image, I made the call, I had the guts to go public, I deserve a say in what happens next.
I submit the paperwork proposing that the Angelus probe be repurposed to perform a flyby and survey of UO-1. Marsh will forgive me. I wait. Again.
I’ve kept track, and I’ve done a hundred fifty TV interviews in the last two years. Most of them are snippets for pop-documentaries, little chunks of information delivered to the lowest-common-denominator audience. I explain over and over again, in different settings, sometimes in my office, sometimes in a vague but picturesque location, sometimes at Griffith Observatory, because for some reason nothing says “space” like Griffith Observ
atory. I hold up a little plastic model of UO-1 (they’re selling the kits at hobby stores—we don’t see any of the money from that) to demonstrate the way it’s traveling through space, how orbital mechanics work, and how we might use a gravity tractor to bring it home. Sometimes, the segments are specifically for schools, and I like those best because I can give free rein to my enthusiasm. I tell the kids, “This is going to take more than one lifetime to figure out. If we find a way to go to Alpha Centauri, it’s going to take lifetimes. You’ll have to finish the work I’ve started. Please grow up and finish it.”
I call everyone I can think of who might have some kind of influence over Angelus. I explain that a picture of a metal object taken from a few million miles away doesn’t tell us anything about the people who made it. Not even if they have thumbs or tentacles. Most of them tell me that the best plan they can think of is to build bigger telescopes.
“It’s not the size,” I mutter. “It’s how you use it.”
NASA thinks they will be making the decision because they’ve got the resources, the scientists, the experience, the hardware. Congress says this is too important to let NASA make decisions unilaterally. A half dozen private U.S. firms would try something if the various cabinet departments weren’t busy making anything they could try illegal by fiat. There are already three court cases. At least one of them is arguing that a rocket launch is protected as freedom of speech. The IAU brought a complaint to the United Nations that the U.S. government shouldn’t be allowed to dictate a course of action. The General Assembly nominated a “representative in absentia” for the species that launched UO-1—some Finnish philosopher I’d never heard of. It should have been me.
