Authors: Jack McDonald Burnett
Humanity’s first impression was on the scale between discomfort and revulsion. Scientists noted the Basalite’s radial symmetry: three equal parts, relating to one another by rotation around a center. On Earth, nature had produced this symmetry by way of some sea creatures and flowers. One prominent scientist, canny enough to make himself available quickly for live interviews, coined the term
Pelorian
to describe the alien. It came from the word to describe the aberration when a plant which normally produces bilaterally symmetrical flowers instead produces a radially symmetrical one. Within hours,
Basalite
had been replaced in Earth’s lexicon by
Pelorian
. (Conn’s
triune
never really caught on.) It only added to the momentum that
peloria
is also Greek for
monster
.
Public opinion of the aliens, positive in the weeks after the meeting on the moon, and particularly Conn’s rescue, began to turn.
Conn and Daniels were back in the air. At least they were flying first class. Ten hours from Moscow to New York, followed by five and a half from New York to San Francisco, would have been unbearable in coach.
They were leaving Russia as empty-handed as they’d left China. But at least they were leaving. If Conn never set foot on Russian soil again, she would count her blessings.
She and Daniels watched the feeds’ coverage of the pictures and video of the Pelorian spacewalk. Daniels was repulsed enough that Conn told him he was being a little boy. Conn was merely fascinated. And disappointed nobody was calling them Basalites or triunes anymore.
“I wonder if they can roll on their outstretched arms, like a wheel,” Daniels said. Conn could picture it, and she swatted him, laughing despite herself.
“Excuse me,” said an older woman who had stopped in the aisle beside Conn’s seat. She was trim and pretty, with emerald green eyes and a smoky voice. “You’re Conn Garrow, right?”
“Yes, I am,” Conn said as brightly as she could manage. “You know, we’re on vacation, though, and we only have a little more time alone...I’m sure you understand?”
“Scott Daniels,” Daniels said, reaching across Conn to offer his hand. Conn rolled her eyes. Soon, all of first class was hearing Conn hold forth on the Pelorians: no, she’d never seen one before today. No, they were kind and gentle, not even remotely monsters. Yes, they do look strange, but she was sure human beings all looked strange to the Basalites.
“Should we call them Basalites or Pelorians? The feeds are all calling them Pelorians.”
“Basalite is like
Earthling
, and Pelorian is like
human
,” Conn said. “Either one should be OK. Also, I don’t think they care.”
Conn supposed all this was preferable to being in custody in Moscow, although that should never have gotten as far as it did. Not only were she and Daniels internationally known moon walkers, they were also diplomats: maybe not officially, in Conn’s case, but nobody was in the mood to argue the finer points of diplomatic immunity in the face of the fiasco that was their arrest. While the US consulate dithered, a Russian at a higher pay grade at the Federal Security Service facility where they were being held got wind of the arrests, and had them released to head off a potential international incident. It wasn’t even clear why they had been arrested in the first place. Conn was sure it was because Daniels had told Gene Pepelyaev that they knew what China had given up in exchange for nitrogen power. And she resented having to go through that ordeal because Daniels liked to run his mouth.
When the passengers finally left Conn alone, she slept six hours straight. She woke with pain in her neck and shoulder from sleeping in an airplane seat, but she felt refreshed. She mentally restarted her internal flight clock: it was now a two-hour flight to New York, then a five-and-a-half-hour flight to San Francisco. That was manageable.
So it was in an improved frame of mind that she got up and retrieved her carry-on at LaGuardia Airport. She felt a gravitational pull from her bed at home, even though it was still all the way across the continent.
Five and a half hours
, she assured herself.
I’m going home
. Customs first, but it wasn’t helpful to think that way. Just the five-and-a-half-hour flight ahead.
Daniels, unshakable and immune to weariness and jet lag up to that point, looked worn out himself. Conn caught his eye, and he smiled—but Conn could tell it was forced. She felt a perverse satisfaction that it was all finally catching up to him.
Her renewed cheerfulness persisted to the end of the ramp off the plane. There, a man and a woman were waiting for them. The woman was Deputy Director Raich of the CIA.
January, 2035
Conn and Daniels were escorted to customs, and then separated. Conn was conveyed to a small, bare interview room. She put her head in her hands and tried not to cry from exhaustion and frustration.
Perfect time to question somebody
, she mused.
I’m not exactly my sharpest
. The effect only got worse as she waited about half an hour for anybody to join her. She wrote off the possibility of catching her flight to San Francisco.
Finally, a man in an off-the-rack suit came in with what looked like a thick file in his hands. Conn knew that whole file couldn’t be about her. The man was early thirties at the oldest, with a chubby, dimpled face under shaggy blond hair. He looked to be in exceptional shape, as best Conn could tell.
“What’s that?” Conn asked him.
“Your file,” he said.
“No, it’s not,” Conn said.
“With as often as you’re in the feeds? You better believe it.”
“And you print it all out, do you?”
“I’m old fashioned.”
Conn stretched. “You should try Memorly.”
“Can’t. I get addicted. If I print everything out, I won’t save absolutely everything like I would in an m-file.”
Conn sighed. “I don’t have anything to declare,” she said. She had decided to use that line when somebody first came in, but she’d forgotten. She really wasn’t her sharpest—exhausted, jet lagged, benumbed.
“I’m Harold Fraser. I’m with the CIA. I have to ask you a few questions.”
“ID?”
“Pardon?”
“Do you have ID?”
He looked at her quizzically. “Did the people who brought you here not show you ID?”
“Well, yeah.”
“And you think someone off the street snuck in here just to talk to you?”
“Surely, Harold, you have ID on you. Why are you being so difficult? Something to hide?”
He dug out his wallet and held his CIA ID up for her to examine. She didn’t actually care.
“I need you to translate something for me,” Harold said.
“Basalese?”
“Yes.”
“Ask Daniels. He’s one of yours.”
“Don’t worry about Daniels. Put this on.” He brandished a slim pair of headphones. Conn was tired and pissed off enough to talk back, but she didn’t want to do anything which would actually extend this ordeal. She put on the headphones.
Fraser gestured to the camera up the wall opposite Conn. Someone on the other side of it started a recording. Conn heard a clear, crisp snippet of Basalese. “What is this?”
“This is a phrase the Basalites say whenever they’re visiting or visited by a world leader. You know, ‘As they say on my home world, blah blah blah.’”
“And they don’t tell you what it means afterward?”
“They give what they say is the translation. I want to know what you think they’re saying.”
“I offer you my hand, my heart and my mind,” Conn said.
“Right,” Fraser said. “That’s what they say it means. OK. Here’s another one.” Gesture to the camera.
“I can barely hear it.”
“We did our best. Can you tell what they’re saying?”
“Context?”
“I don’t want to give you that, at least at first.”
“It sounds like this was recorded without their knowledge.”
“Can you tell what they’re saying?”
“Look. I’m really not interested in Spy vs. Spy bullshit. Daniels is a federal government employee, and he can translate this just as easily as I can.”
“You’ve spent far more time with the Basalites than he has.”
“Speaking English, mostly.”
“We’ll get Daniels’s opinion, too. Can you please tell me what they’re saying?”
“It’s complicated,” Conn said. “I don’t mean what they’re talking about is complicated, I mean we only learned the very basic structure of their language.”
“But you have the vocabulary.”
“Yeah, but. It’s hard to explain. You know how
bring
and
brought
don’t sound like the same thing? Every verb in Basalese is like that. There’s no rule—that we know—that says how to conjugate any verb you run into, you just have to know the definitions of all the words related to
bring
. So they taught us the definition of
bring
, and they taught us the definition of
brought
, but just the definitions—we didn’t learn how to conjugate
bring;
as far as we know you don’t. If we want to say
brought
, we have to think about what word of theirs means the past tense of
bring
. It may only take a second to remember, but if you have to take an extra second every third or fourth word...Make sense?”
“No, you lost me. But you should have enough to tell me basically what they’re saying, yeah?”
Conn sighed. “One is saying ‘the pressure field power with nitrogen artificial climate is because col’
—
I mean, ‘warm.’ The other is saying ‘a thing one relies for life...does not desire crush as with...’ a word I don’t know.”
“Because it’s past tense, like
brought
?”
“No, listen to me. We know past tenses, we just...Never mind. The last word, in context, sounds to me like a proper name.”
“Their names all have translations, I thought.”
“Brand name, maybe. Like a product. Or, I might just not be able to make it out on this terrible recording. You know, if you people had shown up at my office and asked for my help, I would be giving you this same information, but I wouldn’t be pissed off about it.”
“One more.” Conn rolled her eyes, but concentrated.
“That one’s even worse.”
“Can you tell what they’re saying?”
“‘We give in exchange for...essence.’ Play it one more time? ‘Essence devotion eternal death shield’—er—‘protect.’”
“Eternal death shield?”
“Calm yourself, sheriff. I think
essence
might have been closer to
life
. They give devotion in exchange for eternal life and/or a shield from death. I think.”
“Does that sound alarming to you?”
“No more than Catholic mass did, growing up. You said one more. Does that mean we’re done?”
“You have a flight to catch. I think I have everything I need.”
Conn checked her watch. “I think I can kiss my flight goodbye, thanks. I’m not up to running all the way to the other terminal.”
“We’ve held the flight for you.”
Conn was stunned. “I take back everything I’ve thought about you.”
She met Daniels outside customs. She was inclined to hurry, so as to not keep the crew and passengers waiting too long, but Daniels was as easygoing as ever.
“They make you translate some Basalese?” he asked her. She said they had, but she didn’t know why. “It was odd. The stuff I translated, at least, it didn’t have any relevance. I mean, I could be wrong and one of the things was important, but everything together, it was obvious they were unrelated.”
Conn was looking on the bright side: if the feds hadn’t made their flight wait, they would have had to hustle from customs to it. Even if they hadn’t been detained. She found she was grateful for the leisurely pace.
When they arrived at their departure gate, their flight had left.
The Pelorian video made Glenn Bowman a great deal of money and got him a ton more followers. The man had been saying for years that the moon shower brought monsters into the world, and that we would find them when we went to the moon. When the first-contact alien looked like Buzz Aldrin, and the Basalites’ cohort of twentieth century avatars made the rounds of the world’s capitals, events had conspired to make Bowman irrelevant.
Boy, was he back.
The general public started to hear his commercials on the radio, then started to see them in the feeds. They heard about his rallies, for hundreds at a time, then thousands, in cities across America.
“I believe we have brought upon this nation the condemnation of our creator. Whoever you believe that to be,” he said, in ads and at rallies. “Voices were trying to tell the world that the so-called moon shower was an augur of evil.” By
voices
, of course, he meant his. “Voices warned that the so-called Pelorians were not what they seemed. We chose to ignore those voices. Now, we count the cost: there are monsters on our moon. In our space. On our land. We have welcomed evil into our home.” Projected behind Bowman at rallies—and in many public advertisements—there were shots of Basalite avatars, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, Sri Aurobindo, Marilyn Monroe, Chiang Kaishek...the shots shuddered and were accompanied by alien, creepy sound effects, meant to suggest there were monsters underneath these disguises.
Conn knew it didn’t work that way, and that was among the reasons why she didn’t take Glenn Bowman seriously.
Soon, she would wish that she had.
February, 2035
At first, Conn and Dyna-Tech didn’t have much public relations work to do for the Pelorians: they rode the wave of positive opinion from her rescue into their tour of world capitals, where they shined as popular twentieth-century figures. Reception varied from country to country, but worldwide, it was a good estimate that 80 percent of people had a positive view of the aliens, or at least their avatars.
After humankind got its first look at a Pelorian, though, Conn knew she was going to have to hunker down and work some marketing magic. For the first time, she had to go out and ask for interviews, ostensibly about her moon trip and the future of her company without Peo. She was still front-of-mind enough that most everyone she asked was happy to accommodate her. She used every opportunity to say good things about the Pelorians: how kind, gentle, and indeed considerate they were to interact with us with avatars instead of as themselves, knowing how we would react.