Worst Contact

by Hank Davis

  As usual, Amsterdam needed working bodies—anybody—to shovel fill and hold back the rising sea, so we dropped over half there. Tibet agreed to take about a quarter for prisoner swaps with NAGAN in Libya. Theirs would not be a happy life, but at least it would be a life. And the other quarter we ended up freezing and orbiting, hoping for better days. There was a glitch with a pod of about three hundred, and for a time the night sky over the Pacific archipelago was lit by African meteors. There were reports on the Link that some even made it through the atmosphere and splashed, iridescent, into the sea.

  Then the first wagon full of the dead came up. Each body was carefully beheaded. The next wagon contained severed heads—whether they belonged to the bodies or not, we didn’t try to ascertain. And so they alternated, another and another, until we shut the lift down manually, and lost all contact with the central continent.

  I had just stepped off a rimshot, and was on my way to my office in the Third Dictate Magistracy when I saw my first alien. I thought for an instant that it was a breach in the hull and I prepared myself for death. But there was no sucking wind, and, as my heart stilled, the geist approached me. It was like a floating nanoscreen, but it was as amorphous as a giant amoeba. It seemed to be infinitely deep when looked at head-on, but when you passed it, there were no sides, and when you turned around to look at it, it was gone. In fact, you could walk through it from behind and feel nothing, then turn around, and there it would be. For me, they had no discernible smell, although others had reported a faint stench, or the tang of ionized air. Inside the geists were colors, textures and—

  Humans. Your friends and relatives. And these friends and relatives would talk to you. But all a little wrong. Your mother was young, perhaps, but she wore clothes that were in fashion now. Or your friend from childhood might be an old man. Or she might be a three-year-old who could barely speak. These images, these visages, shifted constantly. Each would say a word, several words, and then the channel would change, the frequency shift, and another would take their place. In this way, the aliens spoke to us in our native languages. Since their selection was limited, it was, unfortunately, a speech riddled with clichés and catch-phrases, yet meant with completely serious intent.

  For the first few people with whom the geists spoke, the experience was unsettling, and it drove at least one man to insanity. Most people could not get used to it at all. Getting over the emotional response to the visages, the voices, was the difficult part. And the way to do that was to realize that the aliens absolutely did not comprehend or care about the tide of feelings their method of communication unleashed in listeners.

  As for me, the adjustment was minimal. It is not, I like to think, that I have no feelings, just that I had no family and few friends. The geist that I first met used the history teacher from DePaul University who was also my academic advisor and mentor as its first image, alternated with a prostitute from Bangkok (where I am originally from) with whom I’d thought I was in love, and my brother, whose face I only knew from some damaged sculptagraphs. For a moment I was startled, for I thought it was, instead, a reflection of me.

  “Hello, Haliman Yorasi,” said Dr. Myers. “We were informed that you will make significant contributions to—”

  “—some people who are coming tomorrow—” spoke Mala, my beautiful, doomed fancy of youth.

  “—to a meeting to make a deal with the whites,” my brother said.

  “The whites?” I asked, surprised by my brother’s resemblance to me and his words.

  “Excuse me, I misspoke,” Dr. Myers replied. “I should have said, ‘the geists.’ Ourselves, I mean.”

  I will spare you a description of the alternations henceforth, but, as I say, they ceased to have much meaning for me after a few similar discussions, and I began to think of the alien itself as the speaker who addressed me.

  “I’m sorry, but you must be mistaken,” I said.

  The geist said nothing for a long moment, and, as I thought it was done speaking with me, I made to go on my way, but as I took a step, it moved backward with me, and stayed in front of me. As I later discovered, I could move briskly down a hall and the geist would match my every move.

  “Are you not on the Ethics Committee of the Interlocking Finance Directorate?” asked the geist.

  “Well. Yes,” I replied. I stopped walking, out of respect, but of course this meant nothing to the geist. “But that committee is not of much importance. In fact, I don’t believe we ever met. . . .”

  “Unless we are very much mistaken, and certainly that is not the case, the Ethics Committee has the hot potato in this regard and will make initial policy.”

  I considered what the geist said. Its statement did follow the unofficial axiom of all public service positions. As my mentor, Dr. Myers used to tell me—

  “Even in space, shit flows downhill,” said Myers-geist.

  “Well, what can I do for you? Should we find a more convenient place to talk?”

  “Sorry, my dear?”

  “Some place private?”

  “Are you planning to lie?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then here is fine.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.” Since we were in a cylindrical hallway, there was no convenient corner to step into. I did stand somewhat to the side of the corridor, although the exchange drew curious glances from all who passed by.

  “We wish to ease the business process along by whatever means necessary, and in that regard we would like to grease the wheels at this point as regards your participation.”

  “Come again?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I mean, it is common, even customary, for Kokopelli officials to supplement their service income with various gratuities and unofficial fees, but I had never been approached in so blatant a manner. And then the geist went even further.

  “Here is a bribe.” For a brief instant, the amoeba expanded, filled the entire hallway. And then, it contracted, as a pricked muscle will in reflex. Directly in front of the geist, and between it and myself, a disk appeared—a metallic disk. It fell to the floor, bounced against the molefoam carpeting, and settled at my feet.

  “My dear, er, friend, I don’t know what to say. This is highly unusual.”

  “But heartfelt,” said the geist.

  “What, I say, what is your name?”

  There was another pause. This time I stood my ground and waited the geist out.

  “You may call me The Dwingeloo Time and Life Company,” said the geist. “It is a pleasure doing business with you, Haliman Yorasi.”

  And with that, the geist blinked out of my existence. I picked up the metallic disk, and went about my duties.

  * * *

  Dwingeloo, as most humans were destined to learn, was our own name for a galaxy in the Milky Way’s local cluster. About ten million light-years from here, it is obscured by the dust and gas at our galaxy’s center, and only visible by radio telescope. It was discovered two centuries ago using such a telescope located at Dwingeloo in the old Netherlands. The aliens were “from” Dwingeloo only in a manner of speaking—in the same way you and I are “from” the Pangaeia supercontinent.

  The Secretary and General Board of Trade had a great many problems on its hands at the particular moment the geists chose to show up, and, as some of us were shortly to surmise, the geists had planned it this way. There was fighting in the East Rim, where the Broker Guild had their strongest support from the free traders and the franchise networks. Although we were kept from officially confirming this, it was a de facto civil war. Strange how humanity had been waiting centuries for contact with another sentient species, and when they came we relegated them to a third-tier committee in the provisional government of a space station.

  But the geists chose us—Kokopelli Station—as their contact point. Nobody really knew why, and I heard through the grapevine that the Secretary grew quite incensed when he learned that he couldn’t pass this particular problem along to some o
ther potentate. Not that anyone on Earth was in a better condition to welcome the aliens.

  After my encounter with my first geist, I spent a grueling day at the office, mopping up the African operation. I took a rimshot home to the Brown and Green District, where I lived. It was a nice neighborhood; the apartments had good views and there were parks and good people, most of whom were middle managers and professionals, like myself. What we lacked in great culture, we made up for with an effective local government—I was a council member—and relative safety, when compared with both the richer and poorer districts.

  My apartment was spare by any standards, I must admit. I ordered up dinner—pasta with alfredo sauce—and sat down in the living room to join the Link. In the evenings I liked to lie back and let the couch massage me while I caught up with the day’s polling and news. The metallic disk that the alien had given me was in my pocket and as I reclined, I felt it cool against my thigh. I know it sounds strange, but events had overtaken me, and I had completely forgotten about the disk.

  I took it from my pocket. The disk was the size of a large coin, and gold, with a silvery tint when held to the light. One side was utterly smooth. It had virtually no thickness. I turned it over. There were two indentations on the other side, like two crescent moons, or two thumbnail prints, each turned with their curving sides toward one another and toward the center of the disk. I ran my finger over the marks.

  What could the alien have been thinking? Even if the disk were pure platinum, it would not be worth enough to influence a major policy decision. In fact, I could take the pettiness of the bribe as an insult, were I so inclined. Perhaps there was more to the disk—some inactivated nano, or interior circuitry. I twisted on it slightly, to see if there were any give to it—

  —I was drinking orange juice, while Bina got ready for work. She had to go in early today to prepare to present a paper in conference, and she’d awakened jittery and frightened. We’d made love while I was half-unconscious, and she seemed to draw my calm and untroubled sleep into herself, even as it left me and I awoke to her skin and kisses and sighs. Now she was humming softly as she clasped her bra and moistened her brown skin with lotion—

  Stunned, I let go my pressure on the disk—and the world returned. What startled me was not the realism of the vision I’d had. The nano ensconced in my head, in practically everyone’s head, could interact with the Link feed and provide as real an experience as one could want. There were madmen and criminals who were perpetually linked and never knew. But this vision was different. It took me a moment to realize why.

  Memories.

  Feelings that were mine, but feelings that I’d never had before. Associations, likes, dislikes that were true—as true as any I had in this, my other life. The vision was real. As real as here and now. As true as life. And love. There was a woman named Bina whom I loved with all my heart.

  I twisted the disk back to that vision.

  We lived in a small space—smaller than my apartment in the Brown and Green—but still on Kokopelli Station. There were more people living up-cable, thousands and thousands more. Still, this was just a trickle of refugees compared with the billions who had died below. Earth was horribly worse, and it was then that I realized I was seeing the future.

  The squabbles and wars of the present had played themselves out and we’d done it, we’d ruined the planet. The seas were biohazard cauldrons, seething with an ecology of war viruses. The land was haunted by nanoplasms, the primal form that life had taken, been reduced to. Sea and land were at war—over nothing, any longer—just a meaningless perpetual struggle between viral life and nano algorithms caught in a perpetual loop. Those who crafted the weaponry were dead.

  A few million humans survived on the coasts, in the land between the warring elements. They were temporarily immune to the nano, but none could say for how long, since the nano evolved, its sole purpose finding ways to beat back the living, zombie sea—and, incidentally, to remake whatever people remained into a substance that could not wield a gun and could not think to use one.

  Yet I found myself completely, unshakably content. Kokopelli was safe. We had severed all but one cablelift, and created defenses that kept the muck below at bay. In fact, Bina had been one of those responsible for our salvation. I didn’t understand how it worked, and I didn’t want to. I had my job and I had my love.

  She was unlike me in so many ways—impetuous, severe with herself, angry at the world. When we first met, I was a kind of respite for her, a sanctuary. She’d spent ten years in a hurtful marriage to a theoretical physicist who grew jealous and sought to limit her work when she began to eclipse him. In many ways, I was her reaction against that man. But I didn’t care. And, in time, she grew to depend upon me in other ways. Grew, Bina herself said, as a vine.

  “You are like a trellis to me, Haliman,” Bina told me. “You seem ordinary enough—”

  “I am,” I said.

  “Yes, you are then. But you are constant. I wind around you and through you”—here she placed a finger to my lips, touched the sides of my face with her cool, brown hands—“I would collapse into a tangled mess without you. You’re always there, beneath every thought I have.”

  And I depended upon her. Before Bina, I had had only my job, and the faint satisfaction of doing adequate work in a difficult situation. Now there was waking up to her caress in the morning, feeling her absence all day long as a sweet bitterness that evening would wash away—and there were the nights.

  Bina brought her day home with her—her frustrations, her triumphs—and transformed them into passion. She looked somewhat like the fantasy of my youth, the Bangkok prostitute, and so there was always something salacious, something forbidden about entering her, even wanting her. I could not grow bored.

  Yet there was so much more. Bina held nothing back, neither her mind nor her heart. She led me to such places as I would never have found on my own, or with anyone else. Places, feelings—I cannot say, cannot explain.

  She emerged from the bedroom wearing only pants and a bra, glistening still from the lotion she’d applied.

  “Do you think the paper will go well?” she asked me. This was a ritual, but she never tired of it.

  “Didn’t the last one go well?”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice small, her eyes sparkling. “Because you said it would, it did.”

  I put down my orange juice, pulled her to me. The fragrance of lotion, and beneath that, the faint trace of young leaves in spring, Bina’s natural smell.

  “Well then,” I said, “I declare that you will do extraordinarily well today, better than you ever have before.” I kissed the curve of her stomach, rubbed my stubbly face against her side. This tickled her, and she laughed, and then kept on laughing after I’d stopped, until I’d pulled her into my lap and kissed her. After a moment, she kissed back, hard and deep. She nibbled on my neck.

  “Bina, you wanted to go in early. . . .”

  “No.” She pulled open my shirt and kissed a shoulder.

  “Yes, you said so last night.”

  “I was too sleepy to know what I was saying.”

  “I think you were wide awake.”

  But we had passed the point of reason. Her hands were on my chest, on my pants. I unclasped her bra and suckled at her breasts.

  We stumbled together to our little bedroom, folded down the bed, and fell on it, and upon each other. As we made love, as I nudged and rubbed into the curves and spaces of her body, the leafy, budding smell rose from her, more and more intense. On Kokopelli, there were no seasons, but every time we made love it was the spring—the spring that would never come again. It was always the same, yet always new and growing, living forth. We redeemed what we could of Earth’s life. I spent myself in her like the April rain; she came around me with the swelling bloom of May.

  After this, my day at work was a pale shadow existence, and coming home meant coming back to life.

  Or emptiness. I untwisted the disk and was al
one in my apartment. I’d never known how lonely I was until this moment, and now there was no way I could ever forget. I could never forget Bina.

  I’m afraid I quite neglected my job over the next few shifts. There was much extra work to do, too, and I risked having my subordinates claim much of the credit and overstep me in advancement. When this had occurred before, it irked me considerably. I’d lain awake tallying my mistakes and resolving never to let such a thing happen again. Now I did not care whether I were promoted or not. For the first time in years, I worked only my required hours. I spent all my leisure time in the vision provided by the disk. Of course I questioned this, thinking that I was under the influence of some sort of drug or brainwashing. But there was no coercion, no longing that was not wholly my own natural desire.

  And I knew that if the aliens demanded the disk back, I could and would give it to them. I had not forgotten my place or the position I was in. If they had thought to buy me with such a gift, they had miscalculated. Using the disk—living in that world—concentrated and enhanced my judgment. I felt a whole man when I was in the vision, and the effect lingered, for a while at least, when I was not. I resolved, however, to make as much use of the disk as possible, so that I could always remember, should they reclaim it.

  In due time, the Ethics Committee on which I sat convened to listen to the geists’ proposal. We met on the other side of the station, and I had to take a rimshot around half the perimeter to get there. There was only one Link analyst outside the meeting, and he contented himself with asking us to respond to the latest poll results concerning the aliens. Since nobody really knew what the geists wanted, the numbers meant little, and I said as much.