by Mike Resnick
As for myself, I exuded poisons of a toxicity I had never before attained, embracing and melting the flesh of the Creator while at the same time ripping out meters of veins with my clawed hands, like pulling tree roots out of the soil.
But the Creator was big and tough and hard to kill. He had survived for millions of years under all kinds of unimaginable conditions, and was not going to succumb easily now. Our attacks seemed to be weakening Him, but at the same time we seemed incapable of inflicting a fatal blow. The one-sided battle surged on and on until even our frenzied determination and strength faded and demanded a pause.
All begored, we dropped back from the hulking God and onto the gravelled plain and sought to regain our energies.
That’s when my attention fell on Mewborn.
The puny professor had trundled his Galatea in her barrel over to the butt end of the Creator, and was now trying to position his girlfriend so that the Creator’s manipulators could process her and endow her with shape.
“Give her form!” shouted Mewborn. “Shape her to my dreams!”
But the constantly emerging packages of urschleim, still coming out despite our attacks, prevented Mewborn from affixing his personal bride to the manipulators. He fumbled, dropped Galatea, and then the manipulators had grabbed him!
Surprisingly, the cloacal hands now positioned Mewborn to face the emerging urschleim.
A billet pushed out and over Mewborn’s screaming head, which, engulfed, was silenced, although we could see him vaguely through the urschleim, still open-mouthed.
Then the little human began to fill up with the stuff. Instead of being cast off by the gripping digits, he remained attached and the billets became a continuous flow down his impossibly straining and capacious gullet. More and more emerged and went into him.
But instead of exploding, he began to transform and swell within his stretching urschleim cocoon, as we watched in stupefaction.
Only when Mewborn had assumed the dimensions of our adjacent spacecraft did I realize what was happening. And just then the old Creator spoke with a confirming voice, full of relief and exaltation.
“I pass the torch! My job is over, my era ended! Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye! A stop at last…”
The old Creator seemed almost instantly to deflate, like a parachute settling to earth, while Mewborn, the new God, inflated equally as rapidly, just as, long ago, our baby universe had swelled in that special moment after the Big Bang.
The four of us scampered back from the collapsing sack of the old God, from which Mewborn had finally detached himself. His familiar myopic face loomed high above us, looking about with a growing sense of his new powers and stature.
“Kill –” I began, but then found myself frozen in place, as were my comrades.
“You will not discover me to be as pusillanimous as my predecessor,” thundered Mewborn. “He was old and tired. I am young and hearty. I am sending you four back now as my heralds. Let the galaxy rejoice!
“Our big happy family continues to grow!”
Stella by Starlight
Mike Resnick & Robert T. Jeschonek
Okay, so you want to know about Fermi’s Paradox, and that’s certainly a legitimate concern. But to understand it, and especially to know why it isn’t a paradox at all, we’re going to have to start with a girl named Stella.
It was Be Kind to Lumpies Day when Stella Nolan first heard the voice in her head.
She was shuffling down the sidewalk, wrapped in a bulky grey hooded cloak, as a gang of brightly clad revellers whooped and danced around her. Angel-faced, hard-bodied hotties sang and skipped and played grab-ass among the pastel towers and smiling streets, breathing in caffeinated air and laughing out clouds of glitter.
Stella tended not to go out much, of course, but she’d left her tiny bungalow in back-alley Sunshine City to make a trip to the pharmacy. One of her medications had been left out of the delivery that morning, and she couldn’t do without it.
Keeping her head down, she lumbered through the crowd like a garbage scow through a pod of dolphins. The pharmacy was two blocks from home, and she was already halfway there. She was pretty sure she could make it if she just avoided contact and kept moving one foot in front of the other – but, dodging a runaway conga line at the corner, she bumped into a young blonde beauty and knocked her backward.
Flopping out one clumsy arm, Stella caught the blonde and stopped her fall. Then, she pushed her upright and slouched away.
The blonde scampered after her, twittering a blue streak. “You saved me! You’ve got to let me thank you!”
Stella tried to shrug her off and keep moving, but the blonde fluttered around her like a seagull circling a breadcrumb.
“Come on! Can’t you at least be sociable? I mean, it’s a holiday and everything.” With that, the blonde pulled out a leopard-skin kazoo and blew into it, making a rattling, squawking noise.
Again Stella tried sidestepping, again to no avail. She let out an angry grunt, but the blonde didn’t seem to notice.
“Well I’m not gonna let you run off without a peek!” Darting forward, the blonde yanked the hood of Stella’s cloak back off her head.
What came next was no surprise to Stella. The blonde gasped and stumbled back two steps, bumping into other revellers who joined her in gaping and gasping.
All because Stella stood revealed in her grotesque glory, so different from the perfect human specimens dancing around her. One side of her head looked human, complete with one brown eye, part of a nose, and half a mouth. But the other side consisted of a pulsating blob of gelatinous, veiny goo – a cluster of quivering, pink-tinged nodules running from her scalp to the base of her neck.
The rest of her body was the same, though only her head and neck were visible in the bulky cloak. She was half-human, half-something-else, a diseased member of a certain class of people that had come to be known by one particular nickname.
“Lumpy!” The blonde pointed at Stella, looking alarmed... then quickly shifted to an expression of excited delight. “You’re here to join the celebration, aren’t you?”
“Nuhh.” It was the best Stella could manage with a mouth that was only human on the right side. The left was covered by a clear membrane that vibrated and sounded like a snare drum when she talked. “Nuhh slebrashun.”
“Of course that’s why you’re here!” chirped the blonde. “After all, this is your day, isn’t it?”
Stella’s human features and the jelly of her non-human side compressed in a scowl. “Thaw wuz inverdid eggbidnust day.”
“Introverted Exhibitionists Day was yesterday, silly!” The blonde giggled and clapped. “This is Be Kind to Lumpies Day!”
Stella was seized by the overwhelming urge to be somewhere else immediately. She’d known it was an international holiday – damned near every day was an international holiday – but she hadn’t realized it was this holiday.
“Yay!” said a half-naked woman with long jet black hair. “Another Lumpy to play with!”
Stella backed up a step. She’d heard the stories, and she knew what was coming next. “Pliz nuhh.”
“Poor, lonely thing!” shouted a bald man wrapped in multi-coloured yarn.
“Bring her a boyfriend!” The blonde tootled on her kazoo. “The one we found rooting through the trash!”
Someone called from the crowd. “Here he is!”
Looking toward the voice, Stella saw laughing partiers jabbing a bluish blob with crackling silver prods. Unlike Stella, the bloblike creature had no recognizable human features, just the vague outline of a trunk with a bubble on top and flippers that might once have been arms.
Stella tensed, took a breath, and bolted. She knocked over a redheaded woman covered with cake frosting, then ploughed through a clot of soaking wet revellers.
The mouth of an alley opened up on the right, and Stella charged into it. The sound of running footsteps chased after her, then faded as her pursuers fell away. As ungainly as she was, with one normal
leg and one semi-rigid gelatinous appendage, she was still able to outrun them... almost certainly because their non-existent attention spans had already shunted somewhere else.
Suddenly she heard a voice, coming from what seemed to be right on top of her. Heart hammering, she whirled around – but no one was behind her.
Then, she heard it again. “Hello?”
Frantically, she looked all around again, but could see no one.
Yanking the hood up over her head, she decided she could probably get by one more day without that missing med rather than face the revellers again, and she turned toward home.
Stella had just slammed the door of her bungalow and leaned against a wall when she heard it again – the voice from the alley. Only now that she was in a quiet room, no longer in fear for her life, she could hear it more clearly.
“Hello?” A man’s voice, crackling with an overlay of what sounded like radio interference. “Can anyone hear me?”
Stella peeled the hood from her head and looked around. She saw was the same old bungalow with its ratty furniture and wooden floor, all stained with the slimy residue excreted by her gelatinous left side.
The voice spoke up again. “Is anyone receiving this signal? Hello?”
Stella frowned. She’d spoken to voices in her head before, but only in daydreams.
“Yes?” Unlike her diction, her thoughts were unaffected by her physical limitations. “Who is this?”
“Finally!” exclaimed the voice. “I have been signalling for so long!”
“Who is this?” asked Stella.
“A friend from far away.” The voice paused. “Very far away.”
“What should I call you?”
The voice paused. “That is a good question.” It paused again. “Om.” It rhymed with home. “You may call me Om.”
Stella nodded her half-flesh half-goo head. “I am Stella. How are you talking in my head, Om?”
“Think of it as a kind of quantum entanglement,” said Om.
“What is that?”
“My thoughts are linking with your thoughts over a vast distance.”
“How vast?” asked Stella.
“120,000 light-years, give or take,” said Om.
Stella frowned. “So where are you, exactly?”
“On the far side of the galaxy.”
Stella turned her gaze upward, staring at the cobwebbed rafters with her one good eye and the primitive optic receptors sprinkled where her other eye should be. “You’re out there somewhere? In space?”
“Yes,” said Om.
Still looking up, Stella turned in a slow circle. “And how do I know this is true?”
“You’ll have to trust me. But I promise, you will have your proof eventually.”
“But not now?”
“Communicating with you was a big first step,” said Om. “Isn’t it enough for now?”
Stella thought for a moment. “What if I don’t believe you? What if I think this is all just a big hallucination?” She had hallucinated before, but in each of those she had imagined herself to be a normal human girl.
“You would be wrong,” said Om.
“What if I don’t want to communicate?” asked Stella. “Will you go away and leave me alone?”
Om paused. “Is that what you want? To be left alone?”
The answer was obvious. Like all Lumpy orphans she’d been raised in isolation by the state, mostly by remote. At the age of 16, she’d been ‘mainstreamed’ – cut loose to live the best she could on minimal monthly disability payments. She’d found her bungalow then and had lived there ever since, her solitude broken only by social networking on a computer screen and the briefest of contacts with landlords and delivery people.
So, no, she did not want to be left alone. “Why are you doing this? Why are you communicating with me?”
“Because you are special.” Om’s voice trailed off into static, then returned. “So special that I was drawn to you from a galaxy away.”
With that, a burst of interference arose. Stella stumbled two steps across the bungalow and collapsed on the ragged sofa, throwing herself down on her solid right side. The rest of her sloshed down in a slimy heap on the residue-stained cushions.
“Om?” She called his name in her mind, but there was no answer.
The spiral arms of the Milky Way glowed before Stella, sprawling in the blackness of space. Sprawling also in the middle of her bedroom, projected holographically by her computer.
In the silence after Om’s departure, she’d gone straight to her computer and called up the Milky Way image. Slumped on her bed, she gazed up at it, watching the arms turn lazily in the great void.
Flicking holographic controls that hovered in front of her, she searched the Buzznet for whatever she could find on extraterrestrial life. BoilDown (aggregator/summarizer app extraordinaire) told the tale: even with the advances in astronomy of the 22nd century, no one could scare up a trace of an extraterrestrial.
The accepted current wisdom was that humanity was the only sentient species in the galaxy... perhaps the universe. How else to explain the complete lack of evidence of intelligent life out there? Sophisticated minds pointed out that Fermi’s Paradox wasn’t a paradox at all if we were the only sentient race. Unsophisticated minds disagreed, as they had for millennia, but were no closer to coming up with a solution than they had been when the first man crawled out of the slime, developed limbs, stood erect, and got his first look at the night sky.
Om had changed all that, at least for Stella. Humanity wasn’t alone anymore, and neither was she – at least, unless the whole Om experience was a manifestation of her own personal instability.
Cruising through medical forums on the Buzznet, Stella tried to get a read on her mental state. She researched her genetic disorder, too, to see if it might be fuelling the hallucinations.
She didn’t like what she found. According to the online literature, a wide range of sensory hallucinations were typical during the progression of Gendex Syndrome, the syndrome that created the Lumpies – and the online literature agreed about the end result. In time, she would be reduced to a mindless mound of jelly like the ‘lover’ the revellers had turned up in the crowd earlier that day.
Stella brushed her hand and tentacle through the air, dispersing the computer’s vapour holo-matrix. Then, rolling over on her good side, she shivered as dark thoughts overshadowed her.
Wasn’t her life awful enough already? Hadn’t she suffered her share of misery and humiliation, living always apart from human companionship?
If only she could hear Om’s voice again! Maybe it would mean there was hope for her. Maybe it would mean her mind wasn’t on a fast downhill slide to oblivion.
“Om?” Stella thought she heard him in the middle of the night, but it must have been a dream. She sat up in bed, waiting for him to speak again... and nothing came.
It happened again the next day – three times, always with the same outcome. Each time the voice didn’t come she felt more disappointed, and more convinced that Om had only been a figment of her sickly imagination.
After a week, when not even a false alarm interrupted her troubled thoughts, she sank lower still.
After a month, it was as if Om had never spoken to her at all. His voice was gone... though another, much less pleasant voice arose to take its place.
Then came the day, a week later, that Stella was no longer able to afford her tiny bungalow on the minimum stipend the government paid her (primarily, she knew, to stay there and keep out of sight.)
She gathered the grey cloak tightly around her... Not because of the elements, which were always balmy in Sunshine City, but to keep a low profile.
The cloak was the only thing she’d been able to take with her. Off in the distance, a woman screamed with what sounded like sheer terror. Gunshots crackled from another direction – one, two, three – and something exploded even further away. What holiday was it today? She couldn’t remember, but it wasn’t a go
od day to be homeless.
Keeping her head down and hood tight, Stella threaded her way through the crowded streets. Two blocks later, she hurried inside the only safe place she could think of – Saint Theresa’s cathedral – and closed the door behind her.
Scanning the interior of the place, she saw there was no one else present. Someone had paid a visit earlier, though – the crucifix was gone and the altar covered with ashes.
Exhausted, Stella slumped in the darkest corner of the rearmost pew and tried not to think about what to do next. She knew she couldn’t stay here forever, but...
When the tears came, they came hard, gushing out of her like gouts of rain in a tropical storm. She shook with violent sobs, her gelatinous left side sloshing back and forth with each convulsive movement.
Her ears filled with the sound of her own blubbering and sloshing, a deafening song of despair and surrender. That was why she didn’t hear the voice in her head the first time it called out to her. “Stella?”
But the second time it got through to her. “Stella, can you hear me?”
Though she’d gone out of her way to forget that voice, to put it out of her mind, she still recognized it instantly. “Om?”
“Yes!” said Om. “Thank the stars, I’ve found you again!”
Stella couldn’t believe it. She’d completely given up hope, yet there he was, sounding clearer than before. “Where have you been all this time?”
“There was trouble with the transmission,” replied Om. “Something to do with a million-sun solar storm in the core of the galaxy.”
Stella nodded, remembering the static in his first signal to her. “But it’s all clear now?”
“I am only sorry it took so long to get back to you. I enjoyed our first conversation a great deal.”
“Me, too.”
“How have you been?” asked Om. “Your thoughts... I can feel their texture now, with this clearer connection. They seem... agitated.”
