by John Scalzi
Gwedif sensed my discomfort. “Sorry about this,” he said. “I should have gotten us a transport so that you could sit. But I thought you might want to experience a little of the ship on the way to the communion room.”
“It’s all right,” I said, looking around. The corridors appeared carved out of the rock of the asteroid, and didn’t have ornamentation of any sort, like the hangar we had just been in. I mentioned this to Gwedif.
“You’re right,” he said. “The Yherajk have never been much for visuals. While we see quite well by your standards, it’s not our primary sense to the world, like it is to you. But the walls here have scent guides, which function in the same manner. And this isn’t to say we have no artistic impulses. Later on, when we tour the ship, I’ll take you to our art gallery. We have some tivis there which are really quite nice.”
“What are tivis?” I asked.
Gwedif stopped for a second, suddenly enough that I braked myself, reflexively straightening up and bumping my head in the process. “I’m trying to think if there’s a human analogue, and I’m not coming up with one,” Gwedif said. “I guess the closest words in English to what they are would be ‘Smell Paintings, ’ but that’s not quite right, either. Oh, well,” he started off again, “you’ll get it when you see them—or more accurately, smell them.” I hurried off after him.
A few more corridors, and then we stopped outside a door. “Here we are,” Gwedif said. “Now, Carl, nearly every Yherajk who is on the ship is in here now. I want to know if you’re prepared.”
“I think I can wrap my mind around it,” I said.
“I’m not talking about that,” Gwedif said. “I just wanted to make sure your nose plugs are secure. It’s pretty stinky in there.”
“I feel like my nose is filled with cement,” I said.
“Okay. Let’s go in, then.” He extended a tendril to the door. At his touch, it opened inward.
Two things struck me immediately as we stepped through. The first was that the Yherajk tradition of visual monotony continued unabated—the room consisted of an unadorned dome over a large circular floor that sloped downward to where a small central dais jutted up modestly, itself unadorned. On the floor, large clumps of Yherajk assembled here and there, pretty much like humans do before a meeting gets down to business.
The second thing was that even through my nose plugs, the smell of the room slammed into me like a rocket in the chest. It was as if someone had fermented an entire horse stable. It was unbelievably strong. I leaned back against the wall.
“You all right?” Gwedif asked.
“I think I’m getting a buzz from the smell,” I said. “And not in a good way.”
“It’s because everyone’s talking at the moment. It’ll get better when we start the meeting and everyone shuts up,” he said. “For now, just take deep breaths.”
In the middle distance, a Yherajk broke from the clump and approached us. It briefly touched Gwedif—I was beginning to think this was their way of greeting or saluting each other—and then extended a tendril at me. I looked at Gwedif.
“Carl, this is Uake,” Gwedif said. “Uake is the Ionar’s ientcio —our leader in both ship’s operations and social interactions. A captain and a priest. He welcomes you and hopes that you have had an interesting visit so far. He’d like to shake your hand.”
I extended my hand, let Uake’s tentacle envelop it, and shook. “Thank you, ientcio. It has been a very interesting visit, and I thank you for allowing me the honor to make the visit to begin with.” I directed my comments directly to Uake, assuming Gwedif would translate, without prompting.
He did. “I’ve passed the message on and added my own comment that we should start the meeting soon, before you pass out from the fumes. To you, Uake says that the honor is ours, that you would visit. To me, he says that if we will accompany him to the dais, we will begin the meeting and get the rabble under control. Shall we?”
Uake, Gwedif and I walked through the crowd to the dais. As we arrived, three Yherajk also arrived, carrying a block of something, and set it on the dais.
“I thought you might like to have something to sit on,” Gwedif said. “We don’t have any chairs, but this should work just as well.” I thanked him and took my seat. Uake took up a position on the far side of the dais from me, and Gwedif sat between us.
Some signal scent must have gone up, because the Yherajk on the floor broke up their clumps and encircled the dais, forming concentric rings. The room became noticeably less smelly; everyone must have shut up.
“The ientcio is about to begin his speech,” Gwedif said. “He has asked me once again to translate for him so that you will understand what is being said. The translation will not be exact, I’m afraid—Uake will be using a lot of High Speech, which we use to quickly pass along large amounts of information. But I’ll be able to give you the gist of it. If you have any questions, let me know—our talking isn’t going to disturb the speech.” He fell silent for a few minutes and then started speaking again, starting and stopping as Uake made his statements.
“The ientcio welcomes all to the meeting, with the hope that this moment of our journey finds them all well and at peace with themselves. He asks us all to look back on that moment, over seventy years ago now—your years—when the first faint signals of intelligence from this world were picked up by our scientific arrays, and the confusion, turmoil, joy and fear that those signals, first sound, then picture, brought to our race.
“He asks us also to remember the day when this ship began its journey to this place, our people’s emissary to a people so strange and unlike ourselves. The ship was to serve two purposes: to learn about those people, to find if they could be communicated with; and if they could, then to make contact, with the hope of joining our two peoples in friendship and comity.
“The ientcio now recounts the difficulties of the journey—its length, both in distance and time, a number of accidents that diminished the number of the crew and caused damage to the ship, and the mutiny attempt that resulted in the soul death of Echwar, our first ientcio, and the loss of a tenth of the crew. This recounting is made to remind us even in this moment of happiness that we must not lose sight of all that this journey has required of us.
“Now, the ientcio says, our journey comes to the cusp, in which we learn if our efforts form a memory epic for all Yherajk, to be told in the days when our race is old and the stars red with age, or if they disappear into darkness. We have made contact with one of the humans, one who we believe will be wise, and whose actions will determine our path. It is difficult to assign our fates to the will of one who is not one of us, but that is the way of such encounters as these—though we prepare for the moment, the moment itself is not a thing we can control.”
Tom, I was dumbfounded by what I was hearing. These creatures had traveled across the stars, over unimaginable distances. And if what I was hearing was correct, the success or failure of their trip was being placed into my hands. It was a burden that I didn’t want or even frankly that I understood. I asked Gwedif if I was comprehending correctly what was being said.
“Oh, yes,” Gwedif said. “Your actions in this meeting will determine what happens to us and to our journey. It’s something that we’ve known for a long time, and something that is characteristic of the Yherajk—the surrender of control in the hope that the moment germinates into something greater. This is that moment.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, becoming angry. “I didn’t come up here to play God for you. You’re asking me to do something I don’t know that I can do. I don’t even know what it is that you want me to do, much less if I can do it. I feel like I’ve been tricked.”
Gwedif sprouted a tentacle and placed it on my hand. “Carl,” he said, “you’re not being asked to play God. Your part is about to be explained. If you refuse it, then we go back home, and our people plan a new way to try to contact your people. That’s all. We’re not going to launch our ship into the sun if we fail—
the drama you hear is part of the formal nature of High Speech. You’ve been around me enough to know we don’t usually talk like that. But we do need your perspective on this. You know your people like we could never know them. We need to see through you whether we can make contact with humans here and now. Do you understand a little better now?”
I nodded.
“All right,” Gwedif said. “The ientcio is speaking to you now. He formally welcomes you to the Ionar, wishes you happiness at this moment in your journey, and presents to you the host of the ship, the crew of the Ionar, and hopes that you will acknowledge them thusly.”
“How do I do that?” I asked.
“Got me,” Gwedif said. “No human’s ever done it before. Try waving, and I’ll wing the speechifying.”
I stood and waved. Two thousand Yherajk sprouted tentacles and waved back.
“I have said that you acknowledge the host of the ship and wish them happiness at this moment of the journey,” Gwedif said. “It’s more or less the correct response and doesn’t commit you to anything further. Was that all right?”
“Yes,” I said, sitting back down.
“Good,” Gwedif said. “Uake is now speaking to you about the journey, and what we have learned of your people through your radio and television transmissions. What he’s saying is completely untranslatable due to the complexity of the High Speech structures he is using, but the upshot of it is that while your transmissions point to a rich and fascinating culture, we also have found them contradictory and confusing at the same time. There is no structure to your planet’s transmissions into space.”
“Well, it’s television, you know,” I said. “It’s meant to be understood by humans and not intended for anyone else. You’re just getting the leakage. I do believe that we have a scientific program that is beaming messages for alien cultures into outer space, but that’s the only thing that’s intended for nonhuman audiences.”
“The ientcio wishes to inform you that we have indeed received those messages from SETI and have found them … amusing is probably the best word. Television is much more interesting.”
It was a good thing Carl Sagan wasn’t alive to hear those words. Gwedif continued. “The ientcio says that we have found that we have been able to learn something of you from television and radio. Some of us, and I am obviously being referred to here, have learned English, and have begun to piece together something of a world and cultural history of your planet.
“But we have become aware that we have been quite unable to make a clear distinction between what is factual and what is fictional—what represents your true culture and what constitutes your imaginings. We understand the distinction, for example, between your news reports and your entertainment programs. But we lack the context to tell which is the exaggeration of the other. This is a source of frustration for us—to the Yherajk, you can at times seem to be a culture of pathological liars, unable yourselves to tell the difference between truth and falsity. You can see how that can make us nervous to initiate contact. We need someone to help us create a context, so we can separate the truth from the lies and make an accurate reckoning of the status of your planet.
“This is of specific interest to us as it relates to your planet’s tendencies towards the idea of alien contact. The SETI program implies that your planet is actively seeking contact with other peoples, but your entertainments show you to be hostile to the idea, full of the fear that the peoples you encounter will try to subjugate your planet. Moreover, when you do show aliens as friendly or benevolent, they tend to be humanoid in appearance. When they are hostile or violent, they tend to appear like us. Obviously, this is very worrying.”
“I think you are underestimating the influence of special effects budgets on that particular question,” I said.
“The ientcio agrees that this might be the case,” Gwedif said. “Again it comes to a question of context and knowledge of the culture. He hopes that now you may understand our predicament.
“You are one of the most powerful men in the industry that creates the programs that are beamed off of your planet, and have become so because of your character and intelligence. You are in a unique position to help us understand the distinctions between what is real and what is fanciful, between the things that your planet hopes for and the things that your planet fears. It is his hope, and he wishes to stress, the hope of every Yherajk on this ship, that you would be able to help us in our efforts to understand your people, to give us a grounding in the reality of humanity that only a human can.”
I blinked. “Is that it? You want advice?”
“For starters,” Gwedif said.
“Well, of course I’ll help you with that any way I can,” I said. “But I don’t know how much help that will be. You understand that even humans don’t understand humanity most of the time. I could tell you everything I know, but it would only be my opinion. And it would take years to get it all down at that.”
“The ientcio understands that you are just one man among billions. Nevertheless, of those billions, you are one whose skills and mind lend themselves most favorably to our needs. As for taking years to know what you know—” Gwedif stopped for a moment, seemed to collect himself.
“As for taking years,” he continued, “we have another way.”
Tom did Joshua ever tell you how the Yherajk reproduce? No? Well, I’m not too surprised about that; it’s an immensely personal event. On the cell level, all Yherajk are the same—massive colonies of asexually reproducing, single-celled organisms. But their experiences are different and unique to each Yherajk. Think of them as a race of identical twins, sharing the same genetic information but obviously separate people, divided by their individual experiences.
When humans learned about genetics, they began arguing whether people are the way they are due to genetics or environment; what our genes are versus our experiences. With the Yherajk, this isn’t even a debate—since they’re all the same genetically, who they are is all about experiences. Personality is all.
Yherajk personalities are remarkable things. For example, once they are formed, they can be transferred. Their personalities don’t have to stay in a particular body. That personality and set of experiences can go from one body to another—if, for example, that body were dying of disease or something else of that nature. Yherajk do a much simplified version of this when they transmit information; a single Yherajk can go off and have a set of experiences, and when it comes back, it connects with an entire group and “downloads” its memories to the whole group. Then all the Yherajk there know what that one knew.
But it requires physical contact and takes a great deal of time. The Yherajk High Speech, which is an even more simplified version of this, performs the same function by encoding a concept as an aromatic molecule, which is then set aloft and automatically decoded by the Yherajk who come in contact with it. It’d be like having an entire memory created in your head simply by someone saying a word. Fascinating stuff, Tom.
In Yherajk reproduction, the personalities do something else entirely—they meld with another personality. The Yherajk join together into one mass, and, rather than simply transferring information or even a “soul” from one body to another, the individual souls interact over the entire mass of their combined body. Some portions of one personality end up being dominant, and other portions from the other personality end up being dominant.
After those personality traits are figured out, the mass splits into two parts. One of those parts splits again and becomes the original Yherajk that had melded, with its own personality traits and memory intact, but physically smaller than it was before. The other part is an entirely new personality: it has the memories and intellect of its parents, but it comes with a brand new “soul,” if you will, made of the new, melded personality, and it’s ready to go—there’s no childhood, per se, with the Yherajk.
This melding isn’t easy—it requires the Yherajk in question to surrender its will and allow another entity, a
nother soul, to mingle freely with its own. This other soul surrenders to you and you to it—complete communion. But with the ultimate risk: a Yherajk’s defenses are down—the other Yherajk, if it has been insincere in the joining, can attack the other’s personality and destroy it, replacing it totally with its own. This is a “soul death,” and causing it to happen is the worst crime a Yherajk can commit against another Yherajk. A large part of the reluctance of the Yherajk to speak about their reproduction comes from its potential to change in an instant from an act of perfect union to one of the ultimate rape.
But it’s rare—far more rare than murder is with us. Most of the time, it is a joyous experience—and apparently better for them than sex is for us.
The interesting thing is that while nearly all reproductions occur between two Yherajk, there is no theoretical barrier to having the melding occur between three, four, or even more. It’s vastly more complicated, and it takes longer for the personality traits to suss out, but it can be done. Gwedif told me that one of the great memory epics of the Yherajk involved an exploring colony, under siege from attackers, who all melded together in the desperate hope of birthing a hero who could save them from destruction. The colony numbered four hundred. It worked—of course. Otherwise it wouldn’t be an epic. For millennia, partially out of respect for the epic, that had been the record.
The ientcio of the Ionar was planning to break that record. He proposed two thousand—the entire crew of the Ionar. And one human as well.
“I’m not following you,” I said to Gwedif, after he translated the ientcio’s proposal.
“The ientcio implores you to meld with us,” Gwedif said. “Pool your knowledge with ours and help us birth a new Yherajk—one that has an intimate understanding of humanity, who can help us learn, quickly, easily, whether our two people can be joined in friendship. It would be a great gift—and you would be remembered not only as our first human friend, but also a parent, the most important parent, of the greatest Yherajk in our race’s long history. As he will be—one that two thousand of us have surrendered our wills to create. It is a powerful event.”
