Otherness (14 page)

I sense their excitement. He is half-blind with desire. She by anticipation.

They are unaware of our approach.

At a secluded cliffside he sets the brake and turns to her. She teases him playfully, in ways meant to enflame. There is no ambiguity.

We circle behind, enjoying such simple, honest lusts. Backing away, we dip over the cliff, then cruise along its face until directly below them.

We turn on all our pulsing glows to make our craft its gaudiest!

We start to rise.

No one will believe their story. But more than one kind of seed will have been sown tonight.

"There's a saying that applies here. 'Absence of evidence is not evidence for absence.' While Project SETI hasn't logged any verified signals from the few stars we've looked at, that doesn't prove nobody's out there!

". . . Yeah, sure. The same could apply to UFOs, if you insist.

"But while SETI has to sift a vast cosmos for radio sources—a real case of hunting needles in haystacks—it's harder to explain the absence of decent evidence for flying saucers on Earth. It's a small planet, after all. If ETs have been mucking around here as long for as some folks say, isn't it funny they never dropped any clear-cut alien artifacts for us to examine? Say, the Martian equivalent of a Coke bottle?"

We are flying over eastern Canada on key-patrol . . . creating temporary, microscopic singularities in random houses to swallow wallets, car keys, homework assignments. Meanwhile some of us reach out to invade the dreams of sleeping men and women, those most susceptible.

Gryffinloch plays the radio talk show in the background as we work. We laugh as this idiotic scientist talks of "alien artifacts."

Such stupid assumptions! We do not make things of hard, unyielding matter! I have never held a Coke bottle. Even those human babes we steal, to raise as our own, find painful the latent heat in glass and metal, which were forged in flame.

Men have built their proud new civilization around such things. But why, when they had us? Can iron nourish as we do? We deal in a different heat. Ours inflames the heart.

"Yes, yes. . . . For those of you who don't read the
Enquirer
, this caller's asking my opinion of one of the most famous UFO tales—about a ship that supposedly crashed in New Mexico, right after World War II. 'They' have been clandestinely studying the wreckage in a hangar at an air-force base in Dayton for forty years, right?

"Now, isn't that news to just boil the blood of honest citizens? There goes the big bad government, keeping secrets from us again!

"But wait, suppose we do have remnants of some super-duper, alien warp-drive scout ship from Algerdeberon Eleventeen. Do
you
see any technologies pouring out of Ohio that look like they came from outer space? I mean, besides supermarket checkout scanners—I'll grant you those.

"Come on, would our balance of payments be in the shape it's in if . . .

". . . Oh yes? It's being kept top secret? Okay, here's a second question. Just who do you suppose has been discreetly studying the wreckage all this time?

". . . Government engineers. Uh-huh. Have you ever
met
an engineer, pal? They're not faceless drones like in stupid some secret-agent movie. At least most aren't. They're intelligent Americans like you and me, with wives and husbands and kids.

"How many thousands of people would've worked on that alien ship since forty-eight? Picture these retired coots, playing golf, puttering in the garage, running Rotary fundraisers . . . . and all this time repressing the urge to blab the story of the century?

"All of 'em? In
today
's America? Come on, friend. Let's put aside this Hangar Eighteen crap and get back to UFOs, where at least there's something worth arguing about!"

I yearn to swoop down and give this talk-show scientist a taste of "proof." I will curdle the milk on his doorstep and give him nightmares. I'll play havoc with his utilities. I will . . .

I'll do nothing. I don't wish to see this golden ship evaporate like dew on a summer's morn. Our numbers are too small and Fyrfalcon has decreed—we must show ourselves only to receptive ones, whose minds can still be molded in the old ways.

I look up at the moon's stark, cratered landscape. Our home of refuge, of exile. Even there, they followed us, these New Men. An ectoplasmic vapor is all that remains where some of our kind once tried putting fright to their explorers. We learned a hard lesson then—that astronauts are not like argonauts of old.

Their eyes were filled with that mad,
skeptical
glow, and none can stand before it.

"This is Professor Joe Perez, sitting in for Talkback Larry. You're on the air.

"Yes? Uh huh? . . . Well folks, seems our next caller wants to talk about so-called Ancient Visitors. I'm game. Let's pick apart those 'gods' and their fabulous chariots.

"Ooh, they taught ancient Egyptians to build pyramids! And golly, they had some of my own ancestors scratch stick figures on a stony plateau in Peru! To help spaceships find landing pads, right? I guess the notion's barely plausible, till you ask . . . why?

"Why would anyone want such ridiculous 'landing pads,' when they could've had much better? Why not open a small trade college and teach our ancestors to pour
cement
? A few electronics classes and we could've made arc lamps and radar to guide their saucers through anything from rain to locusts!

". . . What? They were here to help us? Well thanks a lot, you alien gods you! Thanks for neglecting to mention flush toilets, printing presses, democracy, or the germ theory of disease! Or ecology, leaving us to ruin half the planet before finally catching on! Hell, if someone had just shown us how to make simple glass
lenses
, we could've done the rest. How much ignorance and misery we'd have escaped!

"You'd credit human innovations like architecture and poetry, physics and empathy, to aliens? . . . Really? . . . Well I say you insult our poor foremothers and dads, who crawled from the muck, battling superstition and ignorance every step of the way, until we may at last be ready to clean up our act and look the universe in the eye. No, friend. If there were ancient astronauts, we owe them nada, zip, nothing!

". . . What's that? . . . Well the same to you, pal . . . No, forget it. I don't want to talk to you anymore. Go worship silly, meddlesome star-gods if you want to. Next caller, please."

Although we barely understand its principles, we approve of this innovation, radio. It is like the ancient campfire, friendly to gossip and tall tales.

But tonight this fellow vexes me. His voice plucks the air-streams, sharper than glass, more searing than iron. He asks why we did not teach
useful
things, back when humans were as children in our hands! Ungrateful wretch. What are baubles such as lenses, compared to what we once gave men? Vividness! Mystery! Terror! Make one night seem to last a hundred years, and what cared some poor peasant about mere plagues or pestilence?

We must fight this madness before the new thinking takes humans beyond our reach.

Before they learn to do without us entirely.

Our captain is too cautious. I slip away in a smaller boat to find a lonely traveler on a deserted road. My light dazzles him as I weave hallucinated voyages to distant worlds. He eagerly studies the "star map" I show him, and memorizes certain trite expressions, convinced they are secrets of the universe. No need for originality. We've fed believers similar platitudes since long before there was a New Age media to help spread them.

Worship fills his eyes as I pull away. It is a good night, filled with the old magic. As in other days, I scurry on, seeding the green world with badly needed mysteries.

We'll fight this plague which robs men of their birthright. We shall satisfy their inmost hunger.

And ours.

". . . No, it's all right, Ma'am. We can stay with UFOs. The evening's a washout anyway.

"Still, let me surprise you and say that, as a scientist, I can't claim UFOs are absolutely disproved. I accept the unlikely possibility something weird is going on. Maybe there
are
queer beasties out there who swoop down to rattle signposts and cause power blackouts. Maybe they do kidnap people and take them on joyrides through the cosmos.

"But then, out of all those who claim to have met star beings, why has no one ever announced anything they learned from the encounter that was simultaneously true and unambiguous, and that science didn't already know?"

I rejoin our great skyboat as it skims a silvery trail over this place we once called home. Now the planet throngs with bustling, earnest,
craving
humanity. Craving, if they just knew, what we used to give their ancestors. What we'd give again, if they allowed it.

Allowed it
? My thoughts shame me. What right have worms to "allow" anything?

There was a time when men averted their eyes and shivered in fear. Now the planet's night face spreads a glow of city lights. Forests swarm with campers and explorers armed with cameras. It seems ages since we heard from our cousins, in Earth's hidden places, the mountains and deep lochs. Long ago they fled before men's modern eyes, or were annihilated.

It makes me wonder—could it be that humans are angry with us for some reason?

"But there's a second, even better answer to this whole UFO business.

"Let's admit a slim chance some of these case histories might actually be sightings of little silvery guys riding spaceships. My reply? We can still rule out contact with Intelligent Life!

"
Look at their behavior
! Buzzing truck drivers, mutilating farm animals, trampling corn fields, kidnapping people to stick needles in their brains . . . is this any way for intelligent beings to act?"

I never heard it put quite that way before.

Perhaps some of you, subconsciously,
are
a bit upset with us.

But we do it for your own good.

"Worst of all, if these UFO guys really do exist—they're refusing to make contact!

". . . What? You say they're afraid of us? We, who barely made it to our measly little moon, and couldn't go back now if we tried?
We
frighten star aliens? Right. And I'm terrified of turtles in the zoo!"

But we do fear you, sage of science. Your premises are skewed. I would teach you. But if I tried, you'd burn me where I stand.

"Tell you what, caller. Let's try an experiment. You assume these ET fellows are pretty smart, yes? In fact, they're probably picking up my voice at this moment. After all this time, guys that clever must have a handle on our language, right?

"Great. Then I'll quit talking to my human audience for a minute, and turn instead to those eavesdroppers in the sky.

"Hello, you little green guys, listening to my voice in your fancy ships! I'm gonna lay a challenge on you now. Get out your space pencils, 'cause I'm about to tell you how to get in touch with the most qualified people on the planet for making first contact with star visitors. People who have all the right qualifications, reputations, and government connections, and who have been dreaming all their lives of holding conversations with other life forms.

"Ready? Good. Now first off, I want you to dial up the World Space Foundation, in Pasadena California. You can get their number by dialing directory assistance through any of our communications satellites . . . surely you're smart enough to handle that? Our technology's child's play, right? Here's a little hint—the area code is 1—818, and directory information is 555-1212. The foundation, along with the Planetary Society, helps fund some of the best SETI research, now that a few grandstanding senators have managed to cut off all federal funding for the program. The search involves scanning the heavens for beacons from distant extraterrestrial civilizations, and they usually don't like having their name associated with UFOs, but I'm sure they'll drop everything if you prove you really are visitors from some faraway star.

Now
proof
is an important part of this. So for you humans listening in right now, please don't bother these good folks . . . unless you want to join as members of the foundation, and help them in their fine work. Still, I guess there'll be a few jerks out there who will phone in anyway, thinking it's really clever and original to dial up and pretend they're E.T. So identify yourselves when you call, then briefly describe to the foundation staff a demonstration you'll perform in the sky, the following night!

"Your demo should be visible from Pasadena, California, at ten P.M. on a clear night, and be of clearly extraterrestrial origin. You might turn one of the moon's craters purple, or something likewise gaudy.

"If you do pull off something impressively 'alien,' you can bet we'll be waiting by the phone the next day for your follow-up call!"

Such effrontery! Never has one of these mad, new-style humans taunted us so brazenly. Out of wrath, we get carried away in our work. Half the cattle are destroyed and the rest driven to frothing panic before Fyrfalcon calls a halt. We stare down at no typical mutilation. The rancher who owns this herd won't be awed or frightened by our visit, but furious.