7
if you can hear me
I must be careful now. I have such plots—
Such war plots, peace plots, love plots—every side;
I cannot go into the bloodless land
Among the whimpering ghosts.
—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “Time and the Witch Vivien”
Given the astronomical travel distances involved, the decision regarding what to do about the incoming generation ship was not overwhelmingly time-sensitive, so Danilaw gave his people as much time to argue it out as they wanted. He’d rather repent a reasoned and considered decision than a hasty one. In the former case, he could comfort himself that whatever had gone wrong had been by lack of foresight rather than haste or carelessness.
The discussion ranged along predictable paths and, other than occasionally restraining Captain Amanda’s passion for the topic of the awfulness of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, Danilaw did not intervene. He sat at ease, watching, considering, waiting to see what the expression of disparate viewpoints might trigger as an eventual gestalt or compromise position.
Outside the observation blisters, dodecapodes came and went, the majority displaying their default swirls of violet, lavender, and black. Danilaw had never been able to tell most of them apart except by size, but there was one particularly large critter with a scar along the underside of two arms that he recognized as a frequent visitor. It pressed close to the right-side blister as if listening at a door, its beak scraping poly. Danilaw entertained himself imagining what it might make of the conversation.
The ping light on his infothing brought him back from his attempts at right-brain creative problem solving. A glance at the summary of contents told him the situation was still developing along the projected lines. He glanced at Captain Amanda, but apparently, now that he had been brought into the loop, he was being given priority information; her device lay quiet and devoid of signals.
Danilaw cleared his throat. Around the table, conversation quieted, and his cabinet directed their attention to him. Trying not to feel like he was pronouncing words he’d be hearing repeated back on news programs and documentaries for the rest of his life, he said, “We’re receiving a radio transmission.”
Somewhere out there, archaic technology was spinning out of dormancy. Technicians or Gain’s recruited hobbyists were hovering over fragile antennae and instrumentation, breaths held, hands instinctively—protectively—outstretched as if cupping the air around a toddler taking her first steps.
Jesse lifted his head. “Answer them.”
Captain Amanda glanced at him with a scientist’s patience. “We can’t, not immediately. Lightspeed lag, remember? Can we see it, Premier?”
Danilaw keyed his infothing to display. An image flickered into view. It showed two—people; Danilaw corrected himself before he could think of them as creatures. They were something like people, anyway—upright, bipedal, with eyes and nose and mouth in the familiar biologically convenient arrangement, two ears on either side of a primate head with a flat muzzle and a domed skull. They wore clothes, and they had hair, and—
—that was where the resemblance ended.
Danilaw suspected, from the size dimorphism, that he was looking at a male and a female. They were so thin, so attenuated, that it was hard to be sure.
And they were blue.
The smaller of the two—possibly the female, as seemed near universal in placental mammals where males were, organically speaking, more expendable—stood in the front, although Danilaw was not sure whether her action was in defense of the larger one or a display of dominance. And perhaps it was overhasty to call her blue, exactly, because her hair was brown and straight, and the irises of her deep-set eyes were a perfectly pretty shade of hazel. Her thinness could have been explained as the result of short rations for a long time, though she seemed superficially healthy. It was hard to be certain, however, because her skin—which would have been strikingly pale even if the blood-tint showing through its lightly pigmented translucence was a familiar, comfortable pink—had a distinctly cyanotic hue. Her lips were blue-lavender, the tongue with which she wet them—nervously or in anticipation—liver purple, the corners of her eyes a faint aqua. Her chest was remarkably deep; the rib cage belonged on a biped two and a half times her size.
The larger one, at her shoulder like a lieutenant or a bodyguard, was equally thin. Bones projected over his sunken cheeks, the flesh spare and parchment-thin and flushed with aquamarine. Danilaw could see blue veins spidering across his neck and collarbones below the open collar of a white shirt of seamless construction. The alien’s hair, long and loose, glowed white with the light behind it. His eyes glowed too, through the irises, cobalt as a young star.
Danilaw could have stared much longer, but the smaller spoke, and her voice was indeed a woman’s. The words were familiar, the sounds and rhythms echoing lyrics in hundreds of songs that Danilaw knew intimately. English, and not too much changed from its twentieth-century cadences. She had a light, strong voice, more confident than Danilaw would have expected given her apparent age, and she spoke as one accustomed to wielding authority.
She said, “Greetings, if you can hear me. I am Captain Perceval Conn of the Jacob’s Ladder. My First Mate, Tristen Conn, stands beside me. We have come far in a damaged world, and I say these things not knowing if you will understand me or if you will even have the technology to hear. If you cannot mark my words, I harbor hopes that my tone and unmartial appearance will convince you that our intent is peaceful. I suppose otherwise we shall simply have to pray.
“We navigated for this system believing it uninhabited, but my Angel has uncovered evidence that other vessels from Earth reached it before we did. You have the previous claim, and we acknowledge that. Yet, in the name of charity, we beg assistance.
“Our lives are in your hands.
“We will await your reply on every channel. Thank you for listening.”
She glanced at her First Mate—Tristen, she’d called him—and he shook his head slightly. Nothing to add, Danilaw presumed. The transmission ended. There was a moment of silence, and then it began to loop, flickering live from the beginning.
Danilaw took a breath. “That,” he said, “is going to be interesting.”
Captain Amanda let it play through completely once more, leaning forward in her intentness. Then she passed a palm over the light and paused it. She translated from memory—accurately, as far as Danilaw could tell—while Jesse and Gain frowned and nodded, occasionally trading speaking glances.
“Well,” Gain said. “I guess that’s pretty unambiguous. How on earth are we going to make it work—I mean, taking them in?”
Captain Amanda, who had been staring at her hands since she finished speaking, looked up. “That’s illegal engineering. Those aren’t even human beings anymore.”
“Unsurprising that they would have gone that way.” Danilaw poured himself more water. “The crew and passengers of the Jacob’s Ladder were made up of a neo-Evolutionist cult. They believed that trials and tribulations strengthened the species, forced it to adapt.”
“Are made up,” Captain Amanda said. “Do believe.”
“Possibly do believe.” Jesse set down his infothing. “It’s been a long time for them too. Is it even illegal engineering if it’s legal in their society?”
Gain said, “Jesse is right. We must be careful of cultural relativism.”
Captain Amanda’s tone remained uncompromising. “Criminals or not, we still can’t let them on-planet without scrubbing their genes. Which, from the look of them—”
“We’ll table that for later discussion,” Danilaw said, making a note in the minutes for a reminder. “Other points of discussion?”
“Angel,” Gain said. “She said that? Her angel told her something? A mythological creature spoke to her?”
“Well, that’s what the word meant a thousand years ago,” Captain Amanda said. “In this context, I’m assuming she means some sort of majordomo or servant. That’s speculation, but based on what we know of the cultural antecedents of the sophipaths who sought refuge on the colony ship, I would guess that that might be a term they use for the Captain’s servants—since angels were the servants of God.”
Danilaw watched Jesse’s nose wrinkle and felt empathy. It was uncomfortable to consider such hierarchical distinctions, but it was also an important reminder that the crew and passengers of the Jacob’s Ladder had traveled across a gulf of distance and experience that seemed insurmountable. If he allowed them to land, there would be cultural conflicts. Some of them might escalate into violence—a concept that unsettled him as deeply as contemplating unleashing a few thousand (or perhaps a few hundred thousand) rampaging invaders on his intricately carbon-balanced and socially engineered colony world.
As an Administrator, Danilaw had viewed historical documents that most citizens were not subjected to, and he had vivid and visceral memories of the violent images associated with those documents. Public beheadings, state-mandated torture, maimings in war, violence—perhaps most horribly—between family members and spouses.
What might seem quaint and yet disturbing when it appeared in a folk song was absolutely horrific in old flat-page photographs or—worse—“film” reels. The art and entertainments of the ancients had been full of carnage, and while Danilaw found it difficult to comprehend, he also found it a rich source of inspiration and catharsis. Human beings had been so animal, so at the mercy of their inheritance of endlessly reworked evolutionary hand-me-downs, until so very recently.
And here those atavistic hominids were again, like monsters out of time, returned to haunt him.
Judging by the stricken faces of his Administrative Council, Danilaw was not the only person thinking so. Gain traded glances with Amanda, and Jesse seemed enmeshed in some sudden, vitally important, research project for whole seconds as he got his expression—and his emotions—under control.
When he looked up, though, his eyes were clear and his brow serene.
There was no talk of refusing sanctuary, nor would there be. While Danilaw, with his historical perspective, could imagine scenarios where turning away refugees would be the only possible choice, no matter how tragic, you would have to be unrightminded to consider it beyond the option stage under the current circumstances. “I wish they’d told us their numbers.”
“It is probably,” Captain Amanda said, with a bright flash of smile, “their first time doing this, too.”
Speaking in tones of quiet reason, Jesse said, “We need to consider the worst-case scenario.” He swallowed, as if the words had gotten stuck in his throat.
“Care to illustrate?” Gain asked, facilitating whatever it was Jesse was working himself up to saying.
Jesse wouldn’t notice, but Danilaw gave Gain a little grateful smile.
Jesse said, “There used to be traveling charlatans, people who moved from town to town promising miracle cures for a variety of ailments. They’d provide a series of fake ‘proofs’ of the efficacy of their products, and then they’d ‘sell’ the patent medicines and move on. They charged money for these treatments—scrip that could be exchanged anywhere else for goods or services.”
Danilaw had a sickening sense that he knew how this would come out. “And then what was in the bottle? Cold tea?”
Jesse shook his head. “Oftentimes, the patent medicines contained harmful substances. Mercury, arsenic, lead, radium. But by the time people started to get sick, the medicine man had moved on, and he’d taken the money with him.”
Gain sat back in her chair. “That’s barbaric. And these were just normal people, not Kleptocrats?”
“That’s the point,” Jesse said. “They were all Kleptocrats—some more successful than others. That’s what unrightminded people are like. They will trade future suffering for gratification now. They’re hierarchical, and they don’t care how badly they hurt somebody if they get something out of it.”
“And that’s what we’re up against?” Gain said.
Captain Amanda nodded. “There’s a whole shipload of them, headed right at us.”