Authors: Adam Roberts
We can, but they are not very forthcoming. Or they answer with chatter and chaff. Or they hum and hoom like ents. Or—
The
Leibniz
was hastily refitted with extra fuel (tanks and blocks), and beefed up acceleration couches. Then it ignited a long burn and began its curving passage out to meet the aliens. The whole world watched. Ange Mlinko watched too, of course. That should have been me, on board there, she thought to herself.
Alicia came to visit. I don’t like you being all alone in this big house, she said.
—But I
like
to be alone.
—I know, said Alicia, you like to be alone. I don’t like you liking being alone. What if you had an accident? All alone here. You might hurt yourself.
—If I were with somebody else,
they
might hurt me.
—Don’t they test you people for paranoia? (
You people
meant: pilots.)
—How little I crave, Ange started to say. But, with a short sigh, she gave up on the sentiment.
—People like to be around people, said Alicia, speaking seriously. That’s just how people
are
.
—I’m people too, said Ange Mlinko. And I don’t like that. I’ll tell you something else: people are seldom as missed as they like to think.
Alicia made her mouth into a ~. You’re not the first divorcée to go through a misanthropic phase, you know. Once you start dating again, your cold-shouldering of humankind will thaw. Then you can wastebin your inner Scrooge, and reboot your smile.
Ange didn’t say so, but her preference for solitude had nothing to do with her divorce, now three years behind her. The problem with the marriage had not been anything ferocious or oppressive or unbearable; it had been, precisely, its
blandness
. She had chosen a husband who did not interfere with her aversion to human intimacy, and this was both his appeal and, of course, the ground of her eventual disaffection. Not the sex. She had never minded the sex, perhaps because she had never seen it as especially intimate; or to put it more precisely, she had always found that its intimacy was of a banal, somatic kind that did not disturb her. Alicia’s theory was that she had never had the
right
kind of sex, the sort that ruffles the mind as much as it gratifies the body. It was true she had never had that kind of sex. But if she were honest, she disbelieved such things ever happened, except amongst the self-deluding. There were people in the world, of course, who possessed the knack for talking themselves into a mode of hysteria, who could fool themselves into really believing that the earth moved. She wasn’t one of those people. The earth didn’t move for her. She moved from the earth.
Eppur si muove
. Of course silence is a more intense experience than moans and gasps and grunts.
—And I don’t want to hear about you growing up with four noisy siblings, said Alicia. Five kids is not even that large a family! Time was, when families of twelve were normal.
—Since you don’t want to hear about it, said Ange, with asperity, I shall not talk about it.
The two friends were silent for a while, and Alicia drank her spritzer, and ate an olive from the plate, and stared through the window at the sunlit garden. It’s very lovely and what’s the word?
—I don’t know what the word is.
—Pristine. Neat. Is it a person, or a robot?
—You mean, gardening? The latter.
—It’s very nice. And then, after a pause: I’m sorry you’re not on the
Leibniz
. I know you’re disappointed. But look on the bright side! If these Cygnic aliens are as horrible as all the rumours say, none of that crew will ever see home again.
That didn’t bother Ange. Death frightened her not at all. What worried her was not death but the dead; which is to say what worried her was their overwhelming multitudinousness. If death is extinction she would be happy. For after all, there is something individual, something cleanly specific about extinction. Her worry was that she would somehow she
wouldn’t
die, but would find herself in a cavernous chamber containing all the outnumbering dead doomed to spend eternity in that hell of other people the old philosophers fretted about. And wasn’t there something true about that, too? It is the individual who dies, after all; just as it is the group—the species, the genes—that live on. Immortality is a mass event, and if you would flee the clamorous, overheated urgency of the great crowd then you can only, really, take solace in your own existential oblivion. A crowd flowed over Luna bridge. A crowd is a foule.
Her animus against her fellow creatures was not rational, precisely, although it sometimes took a quasi-scientific form. This was how she thought of it, when she brought it consciously into her mind (something she did not often do): the weight of numbers is ruinous. The topography of the Earth is collapsing under the pressure even as humanity hurried to lunaform and areoform new landscapes. The petri dish is foaming with bacteria, has gobbled the disc of nutrient jelly to a sliver, and is still consuming it, although starvation must necessarily follow. When she was younger, before her marriage, Ange had been quite active in a Netherlands-based Ehrlich group, agitating for much more aggressive population control. It was not enough, she thought, to flatten the rising curve; human numbers had to be actively reduced. But the group eventually fractured: some stayed true to the group’s original Pimentelist beliefs; some insisted more radical Francipettian strategies were needful, and a small group declaring that mass terrorist action was needed. The bickering depressed and alienated Ange; she distanced herself from her former friends, and moved to a different country.
All of that had happened a long time ago, now, on the far side of seven years of married life, a union that despite being untraumatic had been filled to the brim with ruin. To the
brim
. On the rare occasions she thought of her husband now, she saw in her mind’s-eye only a flank of cheek, dotted with black stubble; his D-shaped nose in profile, his eye caught by something away in the distance, something that wasn’t, ultimately, her at all.
Alicia, speaking with what she fondly thought of as insight, told Ange what her problem was. You have trouble
empathising
with other people, she said. That’s why you like Mars so much. It’s so under
pop
ulated. Ange Mlinko thought this wrong on both counts. For, one thing she
didn’t
much like Mars—the deserts might be void of human life, but nobody ever went outside the pressurised homesteads, and
they
were high with the reek of population. And at any rate, it seemed to her that her problem was not a lack of empathy, but rather an
excess
of that debilitating human emotion. When she walked amongst a crowd of people, she felt the presence of each and every one. Most humans blanked the individuals, saw only the crowd. She seemed to lack the heartlessness to do that.
Anyway: because she could hardly sit around watching the live feed from the
Leibniz
, and driving herself mad with what might have been—and because large single-occupancy houses with immaculately maintained gardens don’t come cheap in this, our overcrowded world—she went back to work. She flew a dozen shuttle runs up-and-down, landing in a slowmo gout of dust in the deadeye middle of Copernicus’ crater.
Then she took a contract for a Mars flight, a two month there-and-back. Delivering barnacles, no less. Great slabs of barnacles, to be seeded into half a dozen lakes and—whatnot, not-what, stabilise, or add texture, or begin to filter out particulates, or something. It was a three-crew job, and her colleagues were: an elderly man called Maurice Sleight and a young woman called Ostriker. The launch was busy, of course, and then she had to pilot a flight liaison with a chunk of ice: Ange could concentrate on doing her job and forget everything else. Then there was a hitch; their iceblock, though tagged with the appropriate codes, turned out to be not their iceblock at all. They had located it quickly, grappled it without difficulty and had decanted only a small percentage, but then there was a lot of angry chatter on the feed that threatened a lawsuit. So they had to put it back in the orbit in which they found it, and it was an awkward manoeuvre decoupling, and setting it in a clean orbit. And then they had to burn more fuel than Ange liked lining themselves up with the proper ice-piece. Maurice scowled. Ostriker said: it’s all idiotic, such a waste of time ... ice is ice. Why couldn’t we just swap? But that wasn’t the way it worked; and so Ostriker and Maurice began over again decanting the slush into the tanks, and Ange made sure the proper remittances were sent off to claim compensation from the tagging company—it had been their foul-up, after all, not theirs; and even if the claimable amount was small, better that they cover it.
—It’s good, said Maurice, in his sepulchral voice. This way, we get the unluck out of the way early.
He was referring to the widespread fliers’ superstition: that each trip into space was allotted one piece of unluck by the Fates. It might happen early in the voyage or late, it might be trivial or catastrophic, but it would come. To suffer a minor glitch early on was, accordingly, a good thing. Ange nodded, and got on with her work. She doubted that a miscataloging incident counted as the voyage’s unluck, although she would be happy if it did. Indeed, she had a curious relationship to superstition. As a rational and self-contained individual she understood it was all nonsense, of course. Yet it was more than simply the cultural inertia of generations of pilots and shipcrew that made her follow the traditions to the letter. She sometimes wondered if individuals such as she, the ungregarious, the loners, were more likely to be superstitious than other people. The sociable individual at least had the crowd as a buffer between themselves and the unyielding, pitiless indifference of the universe: friends, family, lovers, acquaintances. The locust in the middle of its folding aerial blanket of fellow beings. But the loner had to rely on herself to develop such mental strategies as might bolster her mind against the dark.
At any rate, whilst never doubting that it was a trivial matter of confirmation bias, Ange nonetheless observed that each of her voyages was structured around one major moment of unluck, small or large.
The correct ice was loaded at last, and they were set. So, with a last roll around the Earth they inserted themselves and made their way to Mars. Once they were in plain flight, they had nothing but spare time. Maurice withdrew to his cabin to meditate. Ange didn’t like to question the particularity of his religious observation, but he was evidently devout. Ostriker, on the other hand, showed distressing signs of wanting to be Ange’s friend, and loitered about her as she went through her routines, and gabble and chatted.
—The latest communication from the Cygnics is that, apparently, they’re not from Cygnus after all. So we’re not supposed to call them
that
anymore.
—Really, said Ange, coolly.
—But they won’t say where they
are
from! Why do you think they’re so evasive?
—I’ve really no idea.
—They’re up to something. They must be! I heard that in addition to the Leibniz, UE Strike sent a stealth ship, heavily armed. Shadowing them the whole way. Do
you
think we can trust them? The aliens?
—I don’t know,’ said Ange, giving her words as unambiguous an inflected as she could manage so as to communicate
I don’t care
.
—We’re not special, was Ostriker’s opinion. The fact that these aliens are here proves that the cosmos is
teeming
with life. Teeming! They would hardly have stumbled across us, otherwise—tucked away in this inconsequential branch of a spiral arm. Alien life must be
swarming
all over the galaxy. The fact that we haven’t come across them until now, all that Fermi-so-called-paradox, was just bad luck. Or good luck!
—Mm, said Ange.
Ostriker laughed.
—But as to why they’re being so coy: waiting out in the Oort cloud! I
mean
! Who knows? If they travel all the way here, from Cygnus, or from some star hundreds of light years
more
distant
behind
Cygnus, or from wherever they came from ... why stop out there? It’ll take the
Leibniz
a year to get there! That’s just rude. Or stupid. Ostriker opened her eyes wide. Do you think
that’s
it? Maybe they’re stupid! Maybe we think they’re super-intelligent, but they’re actually sub-normal for their species!
—The Leibniz is halfway there, now, Ange pointed out. Only six months to go.
—I know. Exciting, though? Yes, yes, yes. I guess we’ll get some answers when the
Leibniz
gets there. Hey, Ange! I was in-plugged earlier, checking the newswebs, and I happened across a manifold of possible for the
Leibniz
crew—including
your
name! Wow. Wow!
—Yes, Ange conceded, wearily. But the longlist was hundreds of possibles long.
—Still! I didn’t realise I was flying with such a
celebrity
.
Ostriker’s laugh was a horrible sound, a tortuous friction in the air. Ange hated her laugh more than anything else about her.
Oh, how depressing it was: the prospect of two months in close quarters with this woman. Ange withdrew herself into herself as far as she could. She began to wish she had pretended to have religiously meditative duties, like Maurice; but it was too late for that now. Nor could she bring herself to grasp the nettle and actually pick a fight with Ostriker. One blazing row, to be followed by blissful weeks of resentful silence. Ange thought about it, and even tried out possible lines in her mind, but she could never summon the courage actually to pick the fight. And this was despite many moments of provocation from her crewmate.
—Those people agitating for massive population reduction, Ostriker said, as the three of them drank coffee together (Maurice at the end of his shift, Ostriker at the beginning of hers). They’re so stupid!
—How so? said Ange.
—Of
course
they’re idiots! We need
more
people, not less!