Analog SFF, April 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  By heading to the cafeteria, we experimentally verified that this was not the case. I had grabbed a heap of cardboard-flavored chili and a quivering tower of blue jelly, while Shakir did not fare so well with his lo mein and piece of guava pie. Perhaps when designing the meals, the chefs thought the Beast was not the telescope, but who they were supposed to be feeding.

  We sat alone at our table while another group of astronomers were gathered around something I could not see. Shakir and I pulled out our papers, discussing the order in which we would view our four systems.

  "You know,” he said at last, “this is the first time we've worked together on something."

  "Keep that between us,” I said. “I don't want my reputation ruined."

  He smiled. “I told you extrasolar Earths were more interesting than hot Jupiters."

  "Shut up."

  Groans erupted from the group. I rose from my seat and tapped the tall one on the shoulder. She turned to me, and I saw the source of their attention: the very small monitor of a palmtop displaying zigzag lines of black and white static.

  "Catching the latest cosmic microwave background radiation?” I asked.

  The astronomer stared at me down her long nose and flipped a length of curls over her shoulder. “You're the ones from Toronto, aren't you?” From the tone in her voice, she might as well have been asking if we were from a pigsty.

  I glanced at her nametag. “At least we're not from Newfoundland. What're you watching?"

  A few of them moved back so that Shakir and I could join in and get a good look at the palmtop.

  "Every telescope in working order on Earth, around Earth, on the Moon and Mars is now pointed toward the alien-inhabited exoplanet in the EPH1889 system, naturally,” she said. “And I've clearance with several of those.” She put emphasis on this as if this made her more important than all the other astronomers around her. “We're watching live images as the Shirt tries to pick up signals in the television frequency from that very planet."

  The Shirt was the SHRT—Sawyer Hogg Radio Telescope.

  I stared at the static. Nothing was happening, and just as I turned to leave, someone gasped and was shushed.

  The static had become an image of two aliens in conversation. I held my breath and absorbed everything before my eyes. The aliens were brown-skinned humanoids, with all the appropriate limbs and features and eyes etcetera that we had; only their foreheads were high and ridged. Both aliens had mangy black hair to their shoulders. Black suits were their chosen attire, with some sort of chain mail belt slung diagonally across their shoulders and torsos. They stood in a beige, well-lit room in front of metallic panels on which several yellow and red LEDs flashed.

  "Turn it up,” one of the astronomers said.

  The aliens spoke to one another in a harsh, halting language that I did not recognize as any on Earth. A pair of doors slid open then, and in walked a third humanoid. He was shorter, bald and might have resembled any ordinary white-skinned human wearing a red and black spandex bodysuit. A triangular swoosh-shaped metal pin was fastened over his left breast. In fact, except for the peculiar clothing I saw nothing alien about him.

  Static overcame the scene and everyone in the cafeteria started cursing the palmtop.

  "Hey!” Shakir said. “That's the best part of the episode. The Klingons were just about to capture Patrick Stewart."

  "Who is Patrick Stewart and what do they want to cling on to him?” I asked.

  "He was the star of a late-twentieth-century series called Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which he played the captain of a spaceship that explores the galaxy. Those ‘aliens’ were just humans in makeup."

  "So the extraterrestrials are pirating our campy science fiction shows."

  "It isn't campy."

  "A prank.” The Newfie sniffed with distaste. “It has to be. I cannot accept that was truly the Shirt's transmission."

  Eleven a.m.: Despite the complete mess in my cell, I was unable to sleep that morning. I tossed and threw my blankets off the bed, staring up at the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram stuck to the ceiling, feeling that somehow I had missed something. The pinholes nagged at me. I needed to get a new poster when I returned to Toronto.

  Eight p.m.: Shakir and I went over our plan of attack once more together, and decided to look at our four exoplanets in order of the age of their stars, starting with the youngest. We would only take the spectra of the larger of the two extrasolar Earths, not having time for much else. Those were the ones most likely to have life. I was tired from little sleep, but the sheer adrenalin pushed me through. The hour of the BST was almost upon us.

  Nine p.m.: “You have the coordinates, the information, everything ready?” I asked him as we took our seats at the BST's control computer. Our area, for visiting astronomers, was sectioned off from the main control room. Though we could see it from the glass, they would not be able to overhear us.

  "Of course I do,” he said.

  "I got the reading material.” I set down my pile of Post-It-note-marked textbooks on atmospheric physics and astronomy. I had come prepared to reference anything that might come up. Who knew what other chemicals aliens might produce?

  "All right,” I said, “first the system TOB1546 with the T Tauri-type star. I don't expect aliens on this one.” T Tauris were young and violent stars, known for ejecting spurts of radiation into their systems. Both the youth of the system and the radiation were good reasons to doubt that they harbored life. “Well, aliens like us, anyway."

  Shakir handed me the keyboard. “You take this one."

  The BST's control program was familiar to me because I had been given practice sessions since we arrived at the Beast's headquarters yesterday. It was a simple matter of giving the Beast the proper coordinates and deciding on what type of exposures to take. I typed in the orders quickly. Though the coordinates required some adjustment and the first spectra did not turn out so well, in a matter of a few minutes I got it working.

  With Ingrid's help before I left Toronto, we had been sure to verse ourselves well in the signatures of certain anthropogenic compounds in the blackbody spectra, and I saw none in TOB1546's extrasolar Earth.

  "Mostly hydrogen and helium, two to one ratio,” I said. “Pretty pedestrian stuff. Makes sense that the primordial atmosphere of a terrestrial planet would resemble that of its sun. Next.” I passed him the keyboard.

  The second system was that of a main sequence star, though one a few billion years younger than our sun. Calmer and older than the T Tauri, but still too young to support evolution as we knew it.

  I was correct. This planet's atmosphere was mainly water vapor, carbon, and sulphur dioxide.

  "Like the composition of volcano vomit,” I said, turning open the appropriate page in an atmospheric text.

  "Bu no life still,” he said. “Your turn."

  "No, you take this one too.” I thumbed through the book a little more to be sure.

  "I can't believe this,” he said. “Mei giving up a turn at the controls?"

  "I'll just take the last one,” I said, “the system with the main sequence star that's about to go red giant, SWH1942. Now that'll be interesting."

  Our third solar system had a star that was just a hundred million years younger than our sun.

  "If any of our four systems have aliens,” he said, “it should be this one."

  He took the blackbody spectra, and we immediately began to flip through my atmospheric books to do a quick in situ analysis of the absorption lines. We saw water vapor and carbon dioxide and tantalizing traces of ozone, but nothing that could be described as anthropogenic.

  Earth's atmosphere was composed mostly of diatomic oxygen and nitrogen, both of which were unreactive species and hard to see in absorption lines. Ozone, however, was the product of ultraviolet rays striking diatomic oxygen. Where there was ozone there was probably diatomic oxygen, and where there was diatomic oxygen there were probably:

  "Plants,” Shakir said.

&nbs
p; "We can't be sure,” I said. “I need to show these to Ingrid, maybe even a biologist or two."

  "Earth's is the only stable atmosphere in our solar system that has more oxygen than carbon dioxide,” he said. “Why is that? Because of plants.” He grinned widely. “We've found our own aliens. Not industrialized, intelligent aliens. Brainless, plantlike things, but we have them!"

  "Or they're smarter than us,” I said. “Perhaps they're industrialized, but don't crap in their atmosphere like we do. Great, so now you and I will go down in history as the second people to discover extraterrestrial life."

  "But our aliens are better than the CFC makers on EPH1889. Our aliens are environmentally conscious and they don't pirate our television."

  Suddenly, I remembered the pinholes in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram over my bed and it all made sense. “Many theories say that our sun was once a T Tauri star in its youth,” I found myself saying, pulse quickening, “and during that period the Earth's primordial atmosphere was made of hydrogen and helium before it all got blown away by the young sun's radiation. Then it was replaced by a second atmosphere spewed out from the Earth's interior. The suns in our five systems trace the evolution of our sun.” I seized his shoulder. “Shit. The aliens are us."

  "How?"

  "Those aren't other planets, but ours in the past, somehow, snapshots in time. They watch our classic television, pollute with our old chemicals, and their sun's younger.” I pointed to the T Tauri system TOB1546 with a shaking finger. “Primordial Earth, I'm sure of it.” I move my finger over the second system. “Earth before life begins.” And the third. “Time of the dinosaurs. As for EPH1889? Late twentieth century, maybe early twenty-first depending on how long your cling-on show aired."

  "Are you sure?” His eyes widened. “This defies everything: string theory, high-energy physics, the whole of astrophysics! Is this from exotic worm holes, cosmic mirrors, what?"

  "Yeah, something like that.” Reading over those cosmological papers before I had left Toronto was turning out to be useful after all. “You know how the universe is folded in on itself, that it isn't flat in space? Well, what if time isn't flat either? We could be observing the echoes of warped time that turn all of space into a crystal ball. It'd return images of ourselves at certain points in space."

  "But we're no Einsteins,” he said.

  "No, we're Michelson and Morley. Damn! There could be more systems out there than these five. There could be thousands, mapping out the entire course of our history to us like insects trapped in amber."

  "We've seen the past,” he said, drawing back. “Just SWH1942 left. Their star is about to inflate into a red giant. That solar system, our solar system, is dying."

  "Humans mightn't even be left on Earth!” I cried. “They could've moved to the dwarf planets to prepare for the doom, or escaped to another solar system. It's billions of years from now; we better have mastered interstellar travel. Maybe there're still stragglers left on Earth, and the Sun's about to eat them."

  "Should we even dare to peek into the future and see what it holds for humanity?” he asked.

  "Sure,” I said, punching in the coordinates. “Let's take a look."

  Copyright © 2010 S.L. Nickerson

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  Novelette: THE ROBOTS’ GIRL by Brenda Cooper

  Technology can satisfy many human needs, but can it satisfy all?

  The door's silent slide still surprised me, even after Aliss and I'd been moving boxes into our new garage and piling them in unruly heaps for two days. Hair stuck to my neck as sweat ran down the small of my back and the backs of my knees. Our real estate agent had told me it never got hot here, but apparently she lied about the weather as easily as she lied about the closing costs. So we were too broke for household help and hot from humping boxes. But we were here.

  Home.

  And done working for the evening.

  I gathered up a cold beer from the gleaming fridge, which opened and closed for me the same way the front door did, eerily quiet and efficient. I'd grown up with doors you opened and closed with human muscle. My last house had been built green when that meant saving energy instead of producing it. Trust humanity not to waste anything free when you can use a lot of it.

  The high ceilings and three tall stories made the house seem like it yearned to join the cedar and fir forest. It made me feel like a pretender. We'd bought here, across the lake from Seattle, with returns from a few good investments and a dead aunt. The sliding door opened for me (of course). It allowed me outside onto a deck that glowed honey-colored in a late afternoon sunbath. No matter how pretty the deck and the house and the forest around us, the woman on the deck was prettier than all of it. Aliss'd caught her dark hair up in a ponytail that cascaded almost to her waist, thick as my wrist both top and bottom. Sweat shined her olive skin, and she smelled like work and coffee and the rich red syrah she held in her right hand. She pointed at the neighbors, a good three house-lengths away from us. “In five minutes, I've seen two humanoid bots over there."

  "So they're rich. Maybe we can borrow one for gardening.” Not that I minded gardening; dirty nails felt good.

  "There's another one."

  The curiosity in her voice demanded I stop and look. A silver-skinned female form bent over a row of bright yellow ceramic flowerpots on the deck outside the three-story house, plucking dead pink and purple flower-heads from a profusion of living color, dropping her finds into a bucket as silver as her hands. I sucked down half the beer, watching. Counting. Three bots. One outside. Two or three little ones moving around the house, the ones that didn't look like people. Families in our newly acquired income bracket might have one of the big humanoid ones, but only if they needed a nanny more than flashy cars or designer clothes. Maybe a handful of robovacs and robodisposers and robowashers, like the ones sitting on a pallet in our garage right now.

  "I haven't seen any people,” Aliss mused.

  "Maybe they work."

  Her eyes stayed narrow, her jaw tight and jumping a little back by her ear, and she rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet. I knew what that meant. “Guess we're taking a walk."

  "Got to meet the neighbors, right?"

  I'd actually been thinking about sliding into the hot tub naked and having another beer. But this was our first house together, and I wanted her to be happy. “Let's go introduce ourselves."

  Our driveway gave under our feet, the heat drawing up a hint of its origin as old tires, but not so much it overwhelmed the loamy forest dirt spiced with cedar. Aliss and I turned onto the road, hand in hand. Meeting the neighbors started to feel like a picket fence, like something my mom would do. We turned off the road onto their driveway.

  Red light lasered across our bare shins. “Stop now."

  Aliss drew in a sharp breath and squeezed my hand before letting it go and freezing in place.

  "State your business.” I followed the voice to a spot about fifteen feet in front of me and about knee-high. The guardbot was the same pebbly dark color as the driveway, cylindrical, with more than two feet, and not standing still, which is what kept me from counting feet. This bot was neither pretty nor humanoid. In fact, a bright blue circle with a red target stickered in its side screamed weapons.

  I talked soft to it. “We're the new neighbors. We came to introduce ourselves."

  Its voice sounded cheerfully forced, like a slightly tinny villain in a superhero movie. “Aliss Johnson and Paul Dina. Twenty-seven and twenty-eight, respectively. You have been here for precisely sixty-seven hours..."

  I waved it silent before it got around to checking our bank balance and running us off entirely. “So, then you know we're harmless. We'd like to meet your owners."

  "They are not home."

  Aliss still hadn't moved, but she asked it, “When will they come back?"

  It turned a full 360, as if someone else might have snuck up behind it, and then said, “Please back up until you are off the property line.
"

  We backed, all the nice warm fuzziness of being in a new home turned sideways. After we'd turned away from the house and the bot, my back itched behind my heart. I whispered in Aliss's ear, “Not very nice neighbors."

  She grunted, her brow furrowed.

  "Maybe we should jump in the hot tub."

  She gave me a pouty, unhappy look. “They were watching us."

  I didn't remind her she'd been watching them. I just hugged her close, still whispering, “This is our first night here. Let's enjoy it."

  She stopped me right there in the middle of the road, at the edge of our own property line, and nuzzled my neck. When she looked up at me, the slight distraction in her gaze told me I wouldn't have all of her attention easily. I made a silent vow to figure out a way to get it all and started my devious plot by sliding my hand down the small of her back and pulling her close into me. We walked home with our hips brushing each other.

  The next morning, warmth from her attention still lingered in the relaxed set of my shoulders and the way my limbs splayed across the bed like rubber. Birds sang so loudly they might have been recorded. I tried to separate them, figure out how many species must be outside.

  "Honey?” she called. With some reluctance I opened my eyes to find Aliss standing on the small deck outside the bedroom, one of my shirts her only clothing. Fog enveloped the treetops outside our third-story window, tinting the morning ghostly white and gray. “Will you come here?"

  Since she was wearing my shirt, I pulled on my jeans and joined her, drinking in a deep whiff of us smelling like each other. Although we couldn't see the house from any of our windows, the deck had a nearly direct view into the robot-house's kitchen, the fog and one thin tree-trunk the only obstructions. Three silvery figures moved about inside a square of light that shone all the more brightly for the fog.

  I put a hand on Aliss's shoulder, leaning into her. “Since robots don't need food, there must be people there."

  "Don't you see her?"

  I squinted. At the table, a girl sat sideways to us, spooning something from her bowl into her mouth. She wore a white polo shirt and brown shorts, and her blond hair was curled back artfully behind her ears and tied with a gold bow. She belonged in a commercial. Across from her, one of the robots appeared to be holding an animated conversation with her.