Space

WHAT?

He sighed.

It had taken him forty years to get here from Alpha Centauri — including around six months of subjective time as he had coasted between various inner systems and Saddle Point gateways. System after system, world after world. Six months as he had tried to get to know the Gaijin, and they to know him.

It seemed very important to them that they understood how he saw the universe, what motivated him. As for himself, he knew that understanding was going to be the only way humans were ever going to deal with these strangers from the sky.

But it was hard.

Cassiopeia would never have picked out that peninsula’s chance resemblance to Florida. Even if some mapping routine had done it for her, he supposed, it would have meant nothing, save as an example of convergent processes in geology. The Gaijin sought patterns, of course — it was hard to imagine a science that did not include elements of pattern recognition, of correlation and trend analysis — but they were not distracted by them, like humans.

No doubt this was simply a product of differing evolutionary origins. The Gaijin had evolved in the stately stillness of deep space, where there was, in general, time to think things through; humans had evolved in fast-moving, crowded environments where it paid to be able to gaze into the shadows of a tree, a complex visual environment of dapples and stripes, and pick out the tiger fast.

But the end result was that he simply could not communicate to Cassiopeia why it pleased him to pick out an analog of Florida off the shore of some unnamed continent, on a planet light-years from Earth.

Cassiopeia was still waiting for a reply.

“Never mind,” he said. He opaqued the membrane and began his routine for sleep.

Talking to aliens:

It didn’t help that he didn’t really have any idea who, or what, he was talking to.

He had no idea how complex an individual Gaijin was. Was Cassiopeia equivalent to a car, a bacterium, a person, something more?

And the question might have no meaning, of course. Just because he communicated with a discrete entity he called Cassiopeia, it didn’t mean there had to be anything like a corresponding person behind his projection. Maybe he was talking to a limb, or a hand, or a digit of some greater organism — a superbeing, or some looser Internet of minds.

Still, he had found places to start. His first point of contact had been navigation.

Both he and Cassiopeia were finite, discrete creatures embedded in a wider universe. And that universe split into obvious categories — space, stars, worlds, you, me. It had been straightforward to agree on a set of labels for Sol, Earth, and the nearby stars — even if that wasn’t the custom of the Gaijin. They thought of each star as a point on a dynamic four-dimensional map, defined not by a name but by its orientation compared to some local origin of coordinates. So their label for Sol was something like “Get to Alpha Centauri and hang a left for four light-years”… except that Alpha Centauri, the local center of Gaijin operations, was itself defined by an orientation compared to another, more remote origin of coordinates — and so on, recursively back, until you reached the ultimate origin: the starting point, the home world of the Gaijin.

And this recursive web of directions and labeling was, of course, subject to constant change, as the stars slid through the sky, changing their orientations to each other.

It was a system of thinking that was logical, and obviously useful for a species who had evolved to navigate among the stars — a lot more so than the Earthbound human habit of seeking patterns in the random lamps of the sky, patterns called constellations, that shifted because of perspective if you moved more than a couple of light-years from Earth. But it was a system that was far beyond the capacity of any human mind to absorb.

Another point of contact: You. Me. One. Two. In this universe, it seemed, it was impossible not to learn to count.

Malenfant’s math extended — shakily — as far as differential calculus, the basic tool mathematicians used to model reality. It did appear that Cassiopeia thought of the world in similar terms. Of course, Cassiopeia’s mathematical models were smarter than any human’s. The key to such modeling was to pick out the right abstractions from a complex background: close enough to reality to give meaningful answers, not so detailed they overwhelmed the calculations. For the Gaijin, the boundaries of abstraction and simplification were much farther back than any human’s, her models much richer.

And there were more fundamental differences. Cassiopeia seemed much smarter at solving the equations than Malenfant, or any human. He managed to set out for her the equations of fluid mechanics, one of his specialties at college, and she seemed to understand them qualitatively: She could immediately see how these equations, which in themselves merely described how scraps of flowing water interacted with each other, implied phenomena like turbulence and laminar flow, implications it had taken humans years — using sophisticated mathematical and computational tools — to tease out.

Could Cassiopeia look at the equations of relativity and see an implied universe of stars and planets and black holes? Could she look at the equations of quantum mechanics and see the intricate chemistry of living things?

Of course, that increased smartness must lead to a qualitative jump in understanding. A chimp didn’t think about things more simply than Malenfant did; it couldn’t grasp some of his concepts at all. There were clearly areas where Cassiopeia was simply working above Malenfant’s wretched head.

Cassiopeia had spent time trying to teach him about a phenomenon just a little beyond his own horizon — as chaos theory might have been to an engineer of, say, the 1950s. It was something to do with the emergence of complexity. The Gaijin seemed able to see how complexity, even life, naturally emerged from the simplest of beginnings: not fundamental physical laws, but something even deeper than that — as far as he could make out, the essential mathematical logic that underlay all things. Human scientists had a glimmering of this. His own DNA somehow contained, in its few billion bases, enough information to generate a brain of three trillion connections…

But for the Gaijin this principle went farther. It was like being given a table of prime numbers and being able to deduce atoms and stars and people as a necessary consequence of the existence of the primes. And since prime numbers, of course, existed everywhere, it followed there was life and people, humans and Gaijin, everywhere there could be.

Life sprouting everywhere, like weeds in the cracks of a pavement. It was a remarkable, chilling thought.

“Take me to your home,” he’d said one day.

Cassiopeia’s choice of a human label for her remote home was “Zero-zero-zero-zero,” the great sky map’s origin of coordinates.

I AM THE SUCCESSOR OF A REPLICANT CHAIN THAT EMERGED THERE, she’d said. She was descended from emigrants? Not exactly, because she’d continued. I RETAIN RECORDS OF ZERO-ZERO-ZERO-ZERO. Memories? Did each Gaijin come to awareness with copies of the memories of those who bore her — or constructed her? Were they, then, her memories, or a mere copy? IT IS POSSIBLE TO TRANSLATE TO ZERO-ZERO-ZERO-ZERO. THERE IS NO PURPOSE.

“I’d like to see it.”

THERE ARE RECORDS THAT—

“Your records only show me your world through your eyes. If we’re ever going to understand each other, you have to let me see for myself.”

There was a long hesitation after that.

FINALLY, she’d said then.

“What?”

THERE ARE MANY PLACES TO SEE. MANY WORLDS. BEFORE ZERO-ZERO-ZERO-ZERO.

“I understand. One day…”

ONE DAY.

But not today, Malenfant thought, as he opened his eyes to the light of a foreign Sun. Not today. Today, we are both far from home.

Cassiopeia provided him with an environment suit — a loosely cut coverall of what felt like a high-grade plastic. It had no zippers; he learned to seal it up by passing his thumb along the open seams. He lifted a hoodlike helmet over his head. There was a clear faceplate, a slightly opaque filter near his mouth.

There was no independent air supply, just one layer of fabric. The whole thing jarred with Malenfant’s intuition of the protection he would need to walk on an alien world. But Cassiopeia assured him it would be enough. And besides, the only alternative was his battered shuttle EMU suit, still with him, crammed into a corner of the lander, his only possession, long past its operational lifetime.

“Open the door. Please.”

The lander door dilated away. The world beyond was green and black.

The lander’s cabin floor was almost flush with the ground, and he stepped out, pace by pace, testing his suit. Gravity was a little more than Earth normal, comfortingly familiar, and the air pressure just a little higher than Earth’s sea level.

First impressions:

He was alone in an open forest, like park land. There were objects that were recognizably trees, about the size of Earth trees, and what appeared to be grass under his feet. Above his head a Sun sailed through a sky littered with high wispy cirrus clouds.

He closed his eyes. He could hear the soft hiss of wind over the grass, and a distant piping, for all the world like a bird’s song, and when he breathed in he filled his lungs with cool, crisp air.

It might have been Earth.

But when he opened his eyes, he saw a sky that was a lurid yellow-green. It was like a haze of industrial smog. The vegetation was a very deep green, almost black.

And he could smell chlorine.

His filter removed all but a trace of the chlorine compounds that polluted the atmosphere — including phosgene, toxic stuff humans had once used to slaughter each other. If not for his suit, this friendly looking world would soon kill him.

Chlorine: That was the big difference here. Most of Earth’s chlorine was locked up in the oceans, in the form of a stable chloride ion. This world seemed to have started out as roughly Earthlike. But something, one small detail, had been different: Here, something had pumped all that chlorine into the air.

He walked forward, over grass that crushed softly under his feet.

He reached a narrow valley, a rushing brook. There was a stand of trees nearby. The bed of the little stream was just a soft muddy clay, no sign of any rocks. The water was colorless, clear. He knelt down, stiffly, and dipped his fingers into the water. It was cold, its pressure gentle against his gloved hands.

WARNING. SOLUTION OF HYDROGEN CHLORIDE. HYPOCHLORIC ACID.

He snatched back his fingers. Like a swimming pool, he thought: Chlorine plus water gave a solution of acid and bleach. The weathering of any rocks here must be ferocious; no wonder only clays survived.

He straightened up to inspect a tree. He touched branches, leaves, a trunk, even a blossom. But to his gloved fingers the leaves felt slippery, soapy.

From a hollow in the tree trunk, at about his eye level, a small face peered out: the size and shape of a mouse’s, perhaps, but with a central mouth, three eyes arranged symmetrically around