from Beta Cygni. That’s an awfully long way! Your craft is clearly very large ... are there many of you inside?
Many of us. All of us. The totality of us.
This was a worry: had they come to conquer and colonise? Why would they pilot an ark, packed with their entire population? Or was this an obscure alien-joke? Presumably it was. Who knew what passed for a sense of humour, amongst the Cygnics? And how many was ‘all’? Did they only mean they had brought their brightest and best, for this first contact? But the deeper human worry was: why come
at all
? To this technologically backward cul-de-sac, in the out-of-the-way western spiral arm of the galaxy. Why had they travelled to this unspecial place?
Humanity said: we are happy to welcome you, but naturally we are a little apprehensive as well.
Multicellular life. Particellular life. It’ll do the crack! crack! like a heart attack! Come to us—
What?
Come to us—Come come to us—
Really? You’re inviting us
to you
?
Come come come to us—
There was no missing the craft: a huge device with a friable boundary, or perhaps a fractal boundary, and the approximate shape of four connected oblate spheres. It had decelerated spectacularly into the Oort cloud, such that every sensing device and observational algorithm in Earth had been drawn to it.
—
come to us and we’ll be waiting. We’ve seen all your television and your cloud-images, and the data that rushes and rushes and rushes, so be assured we will not hurt you. Us? Hurt
you
? Pull the other one.
English, the experts agreed, only because that language had had such a historic prominence in televisual and early internet culture. They must have picked up transmission, and come to investigate. A surprising thing: ‘as if’, to quote Eva Tsvetaeva, ‘Europeans had somehow heard about some sand-fleas living on Bondi Beach and had travelled all the way around the world to meet with them. Why would they? They had the
whole cosmos
to explore! Why should they have the remotest interest in a tiny blue-white planet orbiting an insignificant star in a lesser prong of the western spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy? But here they were, so there had to be a reason. Maybe they are entomologists. Maybe they just happened across us. Maybe they have a thing for insignificant life forms.
Why have you come to visit us? Why us? We’re an insignificant, primitive civilisation by Galactic standards—surely we are! We don’t even have faster-than-light technologies!
We debated a long time about whether to come and visit you.
But despite further questions the aliens were consistently unforthcoming about their motivations. They were similarly opaque about the nature or extent of that
we
, or the precisely manner by which the
debating
took place. ‘Are they communists, or fascists?’ asked Lidija Cho ‘Are they democrats or anarchists? By what logic, if any, do they orchestrate their societies? We just don’t know.’
Did the question of coming to visit such an insignificant, technologically backward species as homo sapiens really require
long debate
? Come, or don’t come—what did it matter?
Naturally, many suspected a trap. Many thought the
Leibniz
would never return.
Why not come
closer in
? Why do they loiter out in the Oort-distances, when their technology is so far advanced over ours, and would make the trip so much easier. We tried inviting them. ‘We have scientific bases on Mars, and on our own moon, and various inhabited craft in space, mostly in Earth orbit. But if you are worried about scaring us, or over-awing us, or even damaging us you could still come to the orbit—let’s say—of Jupiter, and still have many billions of kilometres of naked space by way of quarantine between you and us. That way the Leibniz, launched and fuelled and on its way, would rendezvous with you in weeks, rather than in a year.
No reply.
Humanity said: you can understand how eager we are to meet! Perhaps the passage of
Many of us. All of us. The totality of us.
This was a worry: had they come to conquer and colonise? Why would they pilot an ark, packed with their entire population? Or was this an obscure alien-joke? Presumably it was. Who knew what passed for a sense of humour, amongst the Cygnics? And how many was ‘all’? Did they only mean they had brought their brightest and best, for this first contact? But the deeper human worry was: why come
at all
? To this technologically backward cul-de-sac, in the out-of-the-way western spiral arm of the galaxy. Why had they travelled to this unspecial place?
Humanity said: we are happy to welcome you, but naturally we are a little apprehensive as well.
Multicellular life. Particellular life. It’ll do the crack! crack! like a heart attack! Come to us—
What?
Come to us—Come come to us—
Really? You’re inviting us
to you
?
Come come come to us—
There was no missing the craft: a huge device with a friable boundary, or perhaps a fractal boundary, and the approximate shape of four connected oblate spheres. It had decelerated spectacularly into the Oort cloud, such that every sensing device and observational algorithm in Earth had been drawn to it.
—
come to us and we’ll be waiting. We’ve seen all your television and your cloud-images, and the data that rushes and rushes and rushes, so be assured we will not hurt you. Us? Hurt
you
? Pull the other one.
English, the experts agreed, only because that language had had such a historic prominence in televisual and early internet culture. They must have picked up transmission, and come to investigate. A surprising thing: ‘as if’, to quote Eva Tsvetaeva, ‘Europeans had somehow heard about some sand-fleas living on Bondi Beach and had travelled all the way around the world to meet with them. Why would they? They had the
whole cosmos
to explore! Why should they have the remotest interest in a tiny blue-white planet orbiting an insignificant star in a lesser prong of the western spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy? But here they were, so there had to be a reason. Maybe they are entomologists. Maybe they just happened across us. Maybe they have a thing for insignificant life forms.
Why have you come to visit us? Why us? We’re an insignificant, primitive civilisation by Galactic standards—surely we are! We don’t even have faster-than-light technologies!
We debated a long time about whether to come and visit you.
But despite further questions the aliens were consistently unforthcoming about their motivations. They were similarly opaque about the nature or extent of that
we
, or the precisely manner by which the
debating
took place. ‘Are they communists, or fascists?’ asked Lidija Cho ‘Are they democrats or anarchists? By what logic, if any, do they orchestrate their societies? We just don’t know.’
Did the question of coming to visit such an insignificant, technologically backward species as homo sapiens really require
long debate
? Come, or don’t come—what did it matter?
Naturally, many suspected a trap. Many thought the
Leibniz
would never return.
Why not come
closer in
? Why do they loiter out in the Oort-distances, when their technology is so far advanced over ours, and would make the trip so much easier. We tried inviting them. ‘We have scientific bases on Mars, and on our own moon, and various inhabited craft in space, mostly in Earth orbit. But if you are worried about scaring us, or over-awing us, or even damaging us you could still come to the orbit—let’s say—of Jupiter, and still have many billions of kilometres of naked space by way of quarantine between you and us. That way the Leibniz, launched and fuelled and on its way, would rendezvous with you in weeks, rather than in a year.
No reply.
Humanity said: you can understand how eager we are to meet! Perhaps the passage of
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