Anomaly (28 page)

“I don't know what you are or where you are from,” she said, gesturing to the magnificence of the stars stretching across the sky, “but I get the feeling humanity isn’t out of high school yet.”

The plastic man tilted his head slightly, as if appealing for clarification in a curious manner, and Teller marveled at the ability for this creature to perceive the subtleties of the English language. Teller was interested to note that the creature didn't ask Cathy to clarify what a high school was, but rather seemed to be interested in how that concept related to them standing there on this alien world. His demeanor seemed to ask her to explain her point.

“My kid sister,” Cathy began. “She's seventeen. She's the smartest person she's ever met.”

Teller was fascinated to observe the plastic man as he listened to Cathy speak, his brow narrowed as his head turned slightly toward her as though he wanted to catch her every word. He was interested in what she was saying. Teller couldn't help wondering how well concepts like age conveyed to the creature. Did this alien species have distinct stages such as infancy, adolescence and adulthood? Would it relate that to the implicit intent in Cathy mentioning her sister's age?

“She swears like a sailor. She parties, she drinks, she smokes. That's illegal for her age, of course, and defies rationale. She drives my Dad crazy.”

Teller went to put his hand out to stop Cathy, assuming she was bombarding the alien with precepts it couldn't possibly grasp. Teller began to raise his hand when the creature responded to him. The plastic man kept his unblinking eyes on Cathy, while raising his hand slightly toward Teller in a gesture to wait, to let her continue without being interrupted. Teller was stunned.

“So I get it,” Cathy said. “For all the science buffs with their white lab coats and their Ph.Ds, their spreadsheets full of formulas and their incomprehensible graphs, I think I understand what this anomaly is.”

She paused.

“What?” Teller asked, genuinely surprised by her, and not sure who he wanted to answer, Cathy or the creature. A smile appeared on plastic lips.

“Why would anyone smoke in this day and age?” Cathy continued, ignoring him, but Teller could see that wasn’t intentional, she was simply engrossed in her own dawning awareness. “With what we know about cancer and heart disease, why would anyone ever smoke? And yet millions still do. I suspect this is the same, isn't it?”

“Yes, it is,” the plastic man replied.

“I don't get it,” Teller confessed, and for once it felt good to hear the answer and yet still need an explanation.

“The anomaly,” Cathy continued. “It's like graduating from high school, like getting your first job. It's a chance to grow up, a chance to take responsibility, to be an adult. It’s the crossroads we all face in life, to do what we want or what we should.”

“And we're not there yet, are we?” Teller asked rhetorically.

“Your species is in its formative years,” the plastic man continued. “You have much that is admirable, much that has emerged from your scientific exploration, but you still cling to the past.”

“Yeah, tradition is a bit of a comfort blanket,” Cathy replied.

Teller was genuinely surprised by her. Something in the appearance of the plastic man on the desolate rim of a vast, dark canyon had clicked for her. He wasn't sure if it was the radiance of the stars, the similarity to the deserts of Arizona and Nevada, or the man standing before them, but for Cathy, all the pieces had fallen in place. Teller was still coming up to speed.

“We can learn so much from you,” he said.

The creature didn't reply.

“No,” Cathy said after a few seconds, “we can't. We can no more learn from them than my sister can learn from me. There are some things in life you have to live through and learn for yourself. You can't read them in a textbook, you can't watch them on TV, they have to be experienced.”

“She is right,” the plastic man added, facing Teller. “You would seek knowledge, but what you need is wisdom. You would seek to advance, but what you need is to consolidate and renew your species from within.”

“But,” Teller protested.

Cathy turned toward him, saying, “This is what the anomaly has always been about, it's a litmus test, a character evaluation. All that helium and lithium, that was just the trappings of the psych-exam, to see how well we were prepared for the future.”

“Your day will arise,” the plastic man said. “One day you will sail among the stars.”

“But not now,” Teller added.

“No.”

Cathy said, “My kid sister would kill for the family car, but there's no way in hell my Dad's giving it to her, she's just not ready.”

Teller felt crestfallen. She squeezed his hand. Somehow, she could sense his heart break.

“So all this goes nowhere?” he asked.

“Would you give a Ferrari to a sixteen year old?” Cathy replied.

As much as he didn't want to say it, Teller felt compelled to concede, saying, “No.”

“There is much for you to learn,” the plastic man said as the view around them changed. Suddenly, they were in orbit on the dark side of a massive planet. Teller felt as though he were floating as dark clouds swirled in the atmosphere, choking the planet. To his surprise, there was no sensation of falling, more of being suspended, as if they were hanging from a support harness.

Above him, thin wisps of light caught a broad, flat expanse stretching away from the mid-regions of the dark gas giant.

“Is this Saturn?” Teller asked.

The man nodded.

From what he could tell, they were in some kind of elliptical circumpolar orbit. As they swung around into the sunlight, their path intersected with the broad ring of ice flecks. Rays of light lit up the cloud tops on Saturn, casting shadows among the golden swirls.

The plane that marked Saturn's rings stretched out for over a hundred thousand miles, dwarfing them as they passed through the wafer-thin inner ring in the blink of an eye. They had moved out of the shadows and into the reflected glory of the rings as they sparkled in the sunlight.

Their course changed, although as the entire experience was a projection within the anomaly as it sat on Earth Teller felt no change in inertia. The effect was a little disorienting, as the view was so realistic he expected some kind of pull on his body and found himself spreading his legs, reaching for some distant, ethereal ground to brace himself as they sped along the thin, undulating strands of the rings. In the distance, a tiny moon showed up as a crescent catching the light of the Sun.

The rings streaked by beneath them, and Teller found himself torn as to what he should watch. He could see the gentle arc of the distant ice moon, but it was little more than the size of his thumb at arm's length. Beneath him, the rings whizzed by in thin, curving arcs, streaks of light that looked as though they were made of crystal. Behind him, the planet loomed large, catching the full strength of the sun. Eddies rolled through the cloud banks, forming interrelated patterns at the various latitudes stretching up toward the pole. The subtle shades added to the mystique of the massive planet.

“It's astonishing,” Cathy said.

“It sure is,” Teller replied, only just realizing they were still holding hands.

Within minutes, they were orbiting a small icy moon just beyond the rings. Teller recognized it as Enceladus and understood that the rings of Saturn extended even further beyond this moon, but they were so perilously thin and tenuous, he couldn't make them out with his eyes.

Large scars crisscrossed the jagged ice fields below them. It looked as though a swarm of gigantic ice skaters had scratched the surface with their blades, cutting parallel lines into the frozen surface as they darted back and forth around the moon.

From orbit, the turbulent nature of the moon was apparent. Chasms and fractures had been carved through the ice. The northern hemisphere was pockmarked with craters, but the southern regions were surprisingly smooth, with massive fractures separating tectonic ice plates. Patches of fresh ice bled through several parallel stripes in the south, staining the brilliant white ice with aqua blue hues.

“Why this moon?” Teller asked. “Why Enceladus?”

“Because it is here you will mature,” the plastic man replied.

“But,” Teller protested. “Establishing a human presence here will take decades, perhaps the best part of a century. We can barely reach our own moon, let alone one of the moons of Saturn over a billion miles from Earth. What is here for us?”

“Life,” the man replied. “And life changes everything.”

“You have to help us,” Teller pleaded. “Tell us about dark matter, dark energy. Help us understand the quantum world. Is M-theory correct?”

He was blabbering and he knew it, but he felt as though he had to blurt out his concerns. He felt as if he didn't speak now, he'd never get the opportunity again.

“Life,” the alien replied. “That is where you must start.”

“But at best, all there is on Enceladus is microscopic life. We need to learn from intelligent life like yours, not from microbes,” Teller said, feeling he was losing the debate.

“Once you appreciate the simplest of life forms elsewhere, you’ll understand the value of life on your own planet. Once you mature, the cosmos is yours to explore.”

Teller blinked, and found himself standing knee deep in water at the base of a curved muddy bowl. Skyscrapers towered around them. Sirens sounded overhead. Cathy was standing beside him, staring up at the cracked concrete stretching around the rim of this unworldly crater. The road-base and layers of gravel and rock that supported the street above crumbled, tiny rocks and pebbles tumbled down toward them. The sky was blue. Birds flew overhead.

“Wait,” Teller called out. “Come back.” But in the depths of his mind, he knew it was too late. He knew the creature, or construct, or whatever it was had gone as quickly as it had come. There were no shortcuts. Life was more than a quiz-show question/answer session or a multi-choice exam. Teller finally understood, the only worthwhile answers were those humanity found for themselves.

“Hey,” a voice called from above. Finch peered into the bowl left by the anomaly. “They’re here! They’re alive! Quick, somebody get me a rope.”

Cathy waved at Finch.

“Damn, it is good to see you,” Finch yelled.

“It’s good to be seen,” Cathy called back enthusiastically, and Teller understood precisely what she meant. It felt good to be alive.

As a rope was thrown down to them, Teller couldn't help but wonder if there was more than microbes waiting for them on Enceladus, if when they got there they might find a section of ice rotating carelessly through the sky in defiance of gravity, patiently waiting to continue their conversation under more civil terms.

“Do you think this is the end?” Cathy asked, turning to Teller as she grabbed the rope.

“No,” he replied with a smile, feeling a sense of hope and excitement for the future. “This isn’t the end. This is just the beginning.”

The Beginning

Afterword

Thank you for reading Anomaly.

This book had a couple of points of inspiration that I thought I'd discuss in the afterword.

Tor.com published an article asking
where is the brainy, non-violent science fiction?
I thought it was a very good question. Invariably, our stories tend to focus around violent heroes. The exceptions to this rule can be counted on one hand.

We all love John McClane in Die Hard, but is he really a hero? An inspiration? Or is he a throwback to the days where violence solved everything? Violence is the antithesis of civilization. There are times where it is needful, but it is never desirable. So, I wondered, where are the intelligent, thoughtful science fiction heroes? And that thought was the genesis of Anomaly.

Anomaly does have violent scenes. But, like Carl Sagan's novel Contact, they are not perpetuated by the protagonist and, hopefully, violence is not glorified. And so the main character is a bumbling teacher that loves inspiring his kids. We all need heroes like that.

Sagan's Contact was a significant inspiration for this novel, and not just because of its proposed contact with an advanced alien civilization, but for its mastery in stirring up intellectual conflicts and the juxtaposition of religious faith with scientific rationalism. This is something I've tried to capture in the UN debate and the interfaith religious meeting within Anomaly.

Michael Crichton's Sphere was another inspiration. Again, it is a landmark work in terms of the fresh thinking about how an alien intelligence would struggle to communicate with mankind. And so, in honor of Michael Crichton, the shape of the anomaly is a sphere.

The alien craft in Anomaly had to be radically different to anything we'd seen from Hollywood, and I liked the idea that the alien craft could be staring us in the face without anyone realizing quite what it was. To our senses, this particular spacecraft was all but incorporeal. The idea of the anomaly remaining stationary facing its point of origin as the Earth revolved around it was a way of being disruptive, breaking the paradigms of what a spacecraft could be. And it gave the protagonist, David Teller, a point of entry into the story as he figures out that enigma.

How would you communicate with an alien? We can't even effectively communicate with other intelligent species on our own planet, let alone an intelligence from another world. And so, the idea of communicating via the periodic table of elements seemed like a good primer, a good place to start. Certainly, Carl Sagan thought so as well and used hydrogen as the key to deciphering the plaque on the Pioneer spacecraft. I thought it would be plausible for aliens to think along the same lines and use hydrogen to start a conversation with us.

The book cover is part of the plaque on the Pioneer spacecraft, showing the transition states of hydrogen (above the title), the position of our Sun relative to nearby stars (in the center), and the path Pioneer took as it left the solar system is visible at the bottom. Credit for the photo goes to NASA.