Fantastic Hope

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  LAST CONTACT

  M. C. SUMNER

  It’s nightmare fuel. Maybe even ultimate nightmare fuel. A huge starship appears, floating silently and impossibly still, casting a shadow over some earthly city. And then . . . nothing good, that’s for sure.

  No matter how the next act plays out, no matter if whatever lives inside the ship goes through the motions of being Just Like Us, while hiding their toothy lizard faces behind masks, or if they move straight to nuking the White House, it’s never good. They’re here for our water. They’re here for our world. They’re here for our women. They’re here to test out their recipe for human au gratin.

  It’s an opening act that for decades has been a subject of both popular entertainment and serious speculation. And everyone seems to agree this whole them-coming-to-us thing is bad. In fact, there were very good reasons to think it cannot be good. Even if they—the big, unknown they—really are good after all.

  So, when everyone woke up on a February morning and found that great triangular form hanging over a snowy Milwaukee, all the little chyrons running across the bottom of the news channels might as well have said, “Wakey wakey, humankind. Your doom has arrived.” And that’s not too far from what some of them did say.

  I hadn’t turned on the television that morning, so I didn’t find out until I was on the bus, the curiously empty bus, where the driver and I seemed to be the only people in St. Louis who hadn’t gotten the word that this was a very good day to sit at home, eat a hearty breakfast, and wait to see just how we were all going to die. When I first saw the wide black spike hovering in the frosty Wisconsin dawn—invisible to radar, but very definitely there—it was about an inch across on the screen of my phone.

  Maybe that was for the best. Nothing seems all that shocking if you can pretty much cover it with your thumb.

  For the rest of my twenty-minute ride, I passed along comments from the news to the bus driver, who, despite there being exactly no one to pick up, insisted on pulling over at each stop, right on schedule. It’s definitely aliens. The ship is about thirty miles across. No one knows what’s keeping it up there. No one has seen what’s inside.

  The driver’s only reply was to repeat the same scatological term each time. Although she did add more h’s and an occasional vowel with each iteration, so that by the time I climbed off the bus in front of the university, the term had become shhhheeeeaait. It might not sound like a deep conversation, but she came remarkably close to capturing my own feelings.

  The winter-brown grass between the pink granite buildings of the campus was not as empty as the bus had been, but many of the students crossing the quad that morning did so with a lot more alacrity than was usually reserved for making a seven thirty calculus class. Despite the cold and a biting wind, I saw several students, and even some of the staff, standing together in groups of two or three, peering together at a phone or tablet. This was one of those moments that demanded to be shared. I suspected that the big screens mounted in the student center and the entry rooms of the residence halls had already become the center of nervous crowds.

  While I wasn’t ready to settle down and watch just yet—at least, not with the first random people I met—as I pushed open the side door to the science building and headed for my office, I was already thinking of where I could go to spend this time being Not Alone. There seemed little doubt that classes would be canceled for the day. Maybe there would be a faculty meeting. Maybe Johanna would come in, and we—

  That was about as far as I got before I saw the man waiting by my office door. He was short, with the kind of long black wool coat a lot of businessmen wore, and the top of a gray suit just visible at the collar, though the effect was a bit ruined by the knit cap tugged down hard on his large head. He saw me approaching, glanced down at a paper in his hand, and looked up at me again.

  “Dr. Fetherstonhaugh?” he said, voicing every syllable carefully.

  “It’s pronounced Fanshaw.”

  The man looked at the paper again. “Really?”

  “Really.” I stopped, fishing in my pocket for my keys. “Can I help you?”

  “My name’s Kelly,” said the man. “You pronounce it Kelly. Only with ‘Detective’ in front of that.” The man held up the paper. “They want you.”

  My fingers squeezed the keys hard enough that the little teeth dug into my skin. “They? Who is they?” I asked, but I was only killing time. The moment he said it, I knew what he meant.

  The man waved the paper vaguely at the ceiling. “Them.”

  Five minutes later we were in an aging Ford headed across town. The man, Detective Kelly, hadn’t put on a siren, if he even had one, but he pushed the old tan sedan with the kind of panicked disregard for both traffic and the law usually reserved for an Uber driver at the end of his shift. “You’re from England, huh?” he asked.

  “Devonshire,” I replied.

  “That in England?”

  “It is.”

  He, thankfully, stopped looking at me and looked at the road, just in time to wrench the car through an intersection, leaving a lot of horns—and undoubtedly cursing—in his wake. “I can tell. Because, you know, your accent.”

  “I’ve been here thirty years,” I replied. “Every time I go home, everyone says I sound like an American.”

  He snorted. “Yeah, well, not to me.” He flung the car around a hard right turn and looked back at me again. “And you’re a scientist.”

  “Yes.”

  “Some kind of expert on aliens?”

  “I’m not sure there is such a thing as an expert on aliens,” I said. “But if there is, I’m not one.”

  He thought about that for a moment and nodded. “Tech then.”

  “Sorry, Detective, but no. To save you more guessing, I’m a paleoichthyologist.”

  That earned me a hard stare as the car plowed on with unchecked speed. “What’s that?”

  “I’m a specialist in extinct forms of fish. In particular, I specialize in Polyodontids.” Before he could ask, I added, “Paddlefish. I’m a specialist in paddlefish.”

  “Paddlefish aren’t extinct.”

  “A lot of them are, actually.”

  He glanced at me, at the road, at me, then the road again. “Why would they want someone who studies dead fish?” At the word they he leaned forward, glancing up at the sky as if the black triangular ship might have appeared above us without our notice. Which, considering how it had slipped up on Milwaukee, seemed possible. “What can that mean?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” I said. “But I suspect it means you have the wrong man.”

  With his right hand, he dug into the pocket of his black coat, produced the paper he had been waving earlier, and flipped it at me. “The messages came to the station from Washington. NSA . . . I think. Maybe FBI.”

  I picked up the wrinkled page, unfolded it, and saw that it did in fact have my name and the location of my office at the top, under what appeared to be some kind of official seal. There was even a black-and-white picture of me, a little grainy, but it explained how Detective Kelly had spotted me coming down the hall. “But it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “No. It does not.”

  “I don’t even have tenure.”

  That earned me another glance as Kelly pulled off the main road into what looked like a residential street. “You know, I’ve never understood what that means.”

  “It’s kind of like . . . never mind. Just . . . why me?”

  “Maybe you can ask them.”

  To my surprise, he didn’t take me to an airport, or a police station, or even to city hall. Instead, he shot down a narrow street, went much too quickly past a sign saying SCHOOL ZONE, then drove right out onto the grass of a football field whose faded stripes were just visible through the winter stubble. Before I could ask where we were going, I saw it. Dead center in the
field, where a school logo might have been, was a set of pale gray boxes, a half dozen of them, each about the size of an old pay phone booth.

  Kelly stopped the car about twenty feet away from the cluster of upright booths. “Okay,” he said. “There you go.”

  I opened the car door, letting cold air swirl in, and slowly put one foot onto the crunchy grass. “Now what?” I asked.

  “That, I don’t know,” said the detective. “Check the paper. It says to find you and bring you here.”

  I checked. It did. Whatever happened now, it seemed that it was up to me.

  As I was climbing out of the car, a second vehicle approached. This one drove up beside the sedan, and in short order produced an attractive woman of about forty, with short brown hair, large brown eyes, and a fixed expression that, if it wasn’t absolute terror, would do until the real thing came along.

  “They got you, too, huh?”

  She managed a nod. “Now what?”

  “I was just about to find out.”

  I approached the nearest box slowly. It looked . . . very much like a box. There were only three sides to it. It was gray on all of them. It was not larger on the inside. It was not full of stars. In fact, there didn’t seem to be anything in the box at all. Anything . . . except. I took a step closer. There was a light. A small light. Another step. It was kind of amethyst colored and pulsating slightly. Slowly. Brighter. Dimmer. Brighter again. It was a little erratic, not regular like a heartbeat. It was almost as if it was beating out some message in Morse code.

  I stepped right to the lip of the nearest box. The little light was at the very back, high up in a corner. There seemed to be something beside it, a few words written in small letters. I could almost make them out. But not quite.

  “Look,” I said, glancing back toward the woman. “I’m going to step inside. Just for a second. If you hear me screaming or something, get back.”

  She hadn’t taken one step away from the car that brought her. “Oh, you don’t need to worry about that,” she replied.

  I stepped into the box, bringing my face up very close as the light flashed dim, dim, bright. “Mind the gap,” read the very small letters. I looked at the phrase for a moment and shook my head. “This whole thing is some kind of joke,” I said, speaking loudly enough for the woman to hear. I turned around to step out. “There’s just . . . just . . .”

  The playing field was gone. Instead I was looking into a very dark space lit by a single circle of light cast by a lamp high, high overhead. There was a sudden loud thudding sound, and it took me a moment to realize it was my heart pounding so hard that it was making my eardrums flutter.

  I pressed into the box, the flat gray wall against my back, and stared out at the darkness. “Hello?” I said, in a voice that was reduced to a hoarse whisper.

  “Hello!” came a booming reply. “Welcome!”

  The voice was deep, smooth. It sounded like the voice that might be used for big-G “God” in a television show. It also, even in just those two words, sounded amused.

  I waited for the voice to say something more. Or for something else to happen, but other than the continued ear-thumping noise of my own heartbeat, there was nothing. I leaned forward a bit, bringing one eye barely beyond the open front of the box so that I could see to the right. Nothing. To the left. Also nothing.

  “Is this . . .” I cleared my throat and started over. “Is this a transporter?”

  “Not the way you’re thinking,” said the voice. “It’s just really quick.”

  “But I am on board the ship.”

  “Yes.”

  “The one over Milwaukee?”

  “Is there another?”

  “Not so far as I know,” I said.

  “Trust me,” said the voice. “That’s the only one.”

  I squinted hard at the darkness. It seemed to me that there was a shape out there, maybe even several, but it could have just been an illusion. The difference between the brightly lit circle in front of the box and the blackness beyond was severe. “This is contact,” I said. “Between humans and aliens.”

  “Yes. That’s what this is.”

  “Why did you . . . That is, why am I here? Why me?”

  “We wanted to talk to you.” The voice didn’t seem quite so loud as it had at first. I didn’t know if that was because it had actually become softer or because I was getting used to it. “Are you going to come out?”

  That required a moment’s thought and a deep breath before I responded. “If I do, can I get back in?”

  “Sure. Why not.”

  “And will it take me back to the . . . back to Earth?”

  “Absolutely. If that’s what you want.”

  There really didn’t seem to be any alternative. I could stay in the box, or I could step out. I had no reason to think that I was any safer inside the box, and every reason to believe that if what was out there in the darkness wanted to do me harm, harm it would do. Still, getting my feet through that door was one of the hardest things I had ever done.

  “There you go,” said the voice. “Now I can officially welcome you aboard.”

  “Umm. Thanks.”

  “All right now,” said the voice. “I’m going to come over there, so don’t scream.”

  I took a half step back, grabbing at the opening of the box. “That’s not exactly reassuring.”

  Something moved in the darkness. Something rather large. A moment later, what looked very much like a bipedal purple hippopotamus stepped from the shadows. It stopped at the edge of the circle of light, about a dozen steps from me, and regarded me with small dark eyes. The hippo impression was strong, but it didn’t look particularly like one of the dancing Disney variety. Instead of a tutu, it was wearing a pale gray jumpsuit that covered all but its broad purple feet and its blunt-fingered hands. It was a good ten feet tall, and it had a heavy, creased chin that instantly reminded me of an alien I had seen before in a film.

  “Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” said the hippo. It raised one hand—a hand that turned out to have only three fingers—and snapped two of them together. “Boom!” it said. Then it uttered a series of uh, uh, uh sounds that were unmistakably a laugh. “Sorry, that was a joke.”

  “You didn’t kill half the universe,” I replied, getting the reference.

  “Naw. More like a third, tops.” More uh, uh, uh. “Sorry.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Another joke.”

  It made a kind of trilling snort. “You get laughs when you can.” The hippo reached to the side and from somewhere produced a kind of bench, which it dragged over and settled on, straddling the narrow centerboard with a heavy leg on either side. It made a gesture to my right. “Take a seat. We may be here awhile.”

  I looked, and there was a chair. It was kind of midcentury modern, with curving arms of pale wood and a lime green cushion caught between them. It most definitely had not been there a moment before. I started to ask how it had gotten there, changed my mind, and pulled the chair close to the opening of the box before I sat. The chair looked very much like something you might buy at Ikea. It was rather comfortable.

  “There,” said the hippo. “So, you’re Samuel David Harold Fetherstonhaugh.” The alien pronounced it properly.

  “Yes,” I said. It shouldn’t have surprised me that the alien knew my name. After all, it had sent the detective to pick me up. But hearing my name come from its not-quite-lips still seemed . . . just weird. “And what should I call you?”

  “Whatever you want. Spock? Klaatu? No?” It shifted a bit on its chair, and the board below it creaked. “Let’s just go with George. George is good.”

  “And are you . . . I mean, do I say ‘he’ or—”

  George did something with its shoulders that might almost have been a shrug. “He, she, it, they. You go with whatever makes you comfortable. Trust me
, I won’t be offended, Doc.” Its little, very hippo-like ears did a flutter. “By the way, I’m going to call you ‘Doc.’ Because all those other names . . .” It waved one blunt hand. “They’re kind of a lot.”

  I was starting to feel like, any second now, I was going to wake up in my house on the south side and start this day over. Only this time, with sanity. But as long as I was here . . . “All right,” I said. “Now what?”

  “Here’s how this is going to go,” said George. “I’m going to sit here and let you ask me questions. As many questions as you want. And when you’re done, I’m going to ask you one question. How about that, huh? Pretty good deal.”

  “What’s the question?” I asked.

  “That,” it said, “is about the only question I’m not going to answer right now. But hang in there. You’ll find out.”

  I sat back in my chair and drew in a deep breath. My heart was still beating quickly, but somewhere in our conversation it had stopped pounding like it was about to break my ribs. “I’m not sure what to ask.”

  “How about how the ship works,” suggested George.

  “How does it work?”

  It smiled. I’m not sure if it was a natural expression for its species, or if the smile was done for my benefit, but the effect was a bit ruined because it revealed a twin set of continuous white ridges that seemed to run from end to end of George’s very wide mouth. “Good question. See, it’s an arc drive. As it turns out, all that string theory stuff the folks in your physics department are talking about . . . You know string theory?”

  “Yes. Or at least, I know of it.”

  “Well, it’s all wrong. There are just four dimensions, like everyone always thought.”

  “How does that—”

  It held up a three-fingered hand. “I’m getting there. See, it turns out you can locally impose additional dimensions, the same kind of curled-up little dimensions those physics guys love. And once you do that, you can kind of bend the bigger dimensions around them. And . . .” It did the almost-shrug again. “Arc drive.”