Collected Essays (46 page)

What if our language itself proves somehow poisonous to an alien culture? What if it contains inadvertent meme-viruses that cause the destruction of entire portions of an information-based society? The images and messages we cast out so casually might eradicate ancient systems of knowledge and belief. If we sensed that our very existence endangered another species, would we hold ourselves in check until we devised some form of prophylaxis? Human history suggests not. But we must learn caution as a species….

We know how open any message is to misinterpretation. Our own messages must be carefully phrased. The first impression that we make will be difficult to shake. Consider the messages built into Voyager. Samples of music from Bach to Chuck Berry; whale songs; an image of a man and a pregnant woman, the fetus shown in silhouette; a picture of our solar system with the third planet marked for emphasis. A well-rounded picture of terrestrial concerns, right? (Well, maybe of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant concerns. I doubt that Voyager gives quite the picture an Islamic spacecraft would have wished to present to the rest of the universe.)

But even the WASPish Voyager’s messages are really only valid for a little while. Voyager will be drifting for a long, long time. And things have never changed so fast on Earth as in the current century. At this rate of change, who’s to say that any of these things will still be true representations of humanity and its concerns in a thousand years? Two thousand? Ten? The creatures and values portrayed on that spacecraft may seem totally alien to us in a relatively short period of time.

A thousand years from now the niche currently occupied by music may be filled by some technique of synchronized light pulses that cause vibrations deep in the brain, more fulfilling than mere sound. Bach? Chuck Berry? Who are they? Shakespeare was forgotten for many years, and largely owed his renaissance to the self-promotional exertions of the actor David Garrick, who started the first Shakespeare festival, resurrecting the dramas as vehicles for his fame. Nothing is eternally popular. Someday Shakespeare’s name be a footnote to another footnote in the massive scholarly studies of David Garrick. Many of our favorite artists are fated to slide into oblivion over the next few hundred years, and only a fraction of these will ever enjoy a resuscitation of their reputation. Bach and rock alike may well be lost when the world is swept by the next few media and entertainment revolutions. The electric guitar will seem as quaint as a lute.

Man, woman, womb? What will those things mean to our future selves, when we’re all able to fertilize ourselves at will, picking and choosing genetic material from any number of desirable partners or punching out our own on genotypewriters, raising the fetuses in incubators infinitely safer and more efficient than a mammalian body that we’ve already begun to shed in favor of a more durable biometal alloy that really resembles an octopus with numerous handy attachments?

Sure, we may have originated on the third planet, but will we still live there in a thousand years? Won’t whales be extinct?

Other civilizations, judging us by the misleading information carried on Voyager, may consider us a bunch of hypocrites when we finally meet. They may even think we deliberately painted ourselves as a fairly primitive bunch in order to lure in unsuspecting civilizations. And who knows? By that time they might be right. We might really have grown into the galactic predators that have caused a hush in this corner of the universe. The races around us may know the signs better than we do. They may be running for shelter right now, hoping that we don’t spot their taillights and come looking.

It is conceivable that we might be bad news for any civilization that has the dubious pleasure of first contact with us. Again, human history, limited to contact among relatively similar (human) populations, has shown that we are less pioneers than merciless intruders. Even without meaning to, we might infect an alien population with some equivalent of smallpox—like the bacteria that killed H.G. Wells’ Martians. At best, if both cultures make each other sick they will eventually develop the necessary immune response. Over millennia, such illnesses will exert an evolutionary pressure, forcing each race to adapt to the other, perhaps even becoming more similar. In the long run, as we share and shape environments, neither of us will be alien to the other any longer, while both of us might well be unrecognizable to our past selves.

Han Moravec, in
Mind Children
(Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1988), suggests the possibility that an alien message might not represent a culture at all; that the message might itself be the “life form.” Like a virus, it might lie dormant until received by an intelligent culture, at which point it would command that culture to reproduce the message and send it out again multiplied a thousandfold. What human could anticipate such an end result? As Moravec points out, “it is not, in general, possible to deduce the effect of complicated instructions without actually carrying them out.” Yet in following the plans for what looks like a beneficial machine, “the machine…may show no self restraint and fiendishly co-opt all of its host’s resources in its message-sending, leaving behind a dead husk of a civilization.” This view of messages carrying information viruses is more terrifying than death-ray-bearing saucers from the sky, because so realistic, so modern. With recent concern over the threat of viruses infecting computer networks, it is staggering to consider a virus that might be drawn blithely to earth by one of SETI’s ears…a virus that might be lurking even now, encoded in the vast constellations of data waiting to be analyzed, a vampire catfish swimming against the datastream of 8 million channels seeking a cosmic urethra to swim into, there to inflate its poison spines and send its host into agonizing death-throe spasms. Death to Terran Patriarchs!

And yet, one knows from infancy that the universe is not a place merely of terror; there is lasting beauty in it to surpass the moments of fear. A message virus is so simple a thing that in itself it suggests a whole ecology of more complex message-organisms, many of which would be beneficial, and which might well give us the key to transcending the restrictions that currently make it so unlikely that we will ever reach out from our world and make physical contact with alien intelligence. The human organism is based on a composite of creatures that once lived independently; these competitors evolved into collaborators. It stretches the imagination to conceive of collaborating with data-life, but that is the essence of science fiction. What if we could make ourselves part of the messages we send? Then, instead of simply sending our voices out into the night, we could send some part of ourselves; instead of an alien culture receiving an arid cryptogram, subject to endless interpretation, they would also receive a “living” guide who could help them interpret it in terms of their own understanding and background. It is not impossible that as advances are made in artificial intelligence, we will be able to send messages that have a life of their own; messages which assist in their own translation and immediately adapt to their receivers. User-friendly messages. Why not?

Ideally, this would be the best sort of message to receive. Instead of a static read-only message, the equivalent of a page of text or an album side, we would receive a messenger, one that could speak eloquently of its creators, their home world and their culture. A messenger, carrying an encyclopedic knowledge holographically, could answer any of our questions once it adjusted to our particular point of view. It could even, most importantly, tell us things we might never think to ask. After all, the essential ingredient of any real, stimulating communication is surprise: to learn, you must be told things you never knew, otherwise you might as well be talking to yourself. Because in dealing with alien cultures, we have only our own background and concerns to work from. An active, self-intelligent message would be sure to let us know immediately if we were interpreting it incorrectly, through our gawky human blinders and rose-tinted spectacles.

“Shut up and listen!” that alien messenger will finally shout.

And so the scientists at the huge SETI operation sites, and the amateurs at their garage SETI set-ups, will all fall silent. A hush will cover the whole world, a hush to match the silence between the stars. And for the first time in human history, instead of babbling out our own thoughts in the guise of conversation, we might actually listen…and hear something completely unexpected.

Note on “Alien Contact”

Written 1989.

Appeared in Stephen Leigh,
Alien Tongue
, (Byron Preiss Visual, 1990).

“Alien Contact” was a little hard for me to write. This was one of the rare cases where I was paid for something before having written it. My essay was to serve as an afterword for Stephen Baxter’s SF novel
Alien Tongue
. I didn’t actually finish reading Baxter’s book, and halfway through writing my afterword I ran out of steam. Without telling the publisher, I split my payment with fellow freestyle SF writer Marc Laidlaw and got him to pen the second half.

I can’t remember if I edited Marc’s section. It does read a lot like something I’d write. But of course Marc is a very good mimic. I’ve even heard him narrate the (imagined) stream of consciousness of a spinning top.

Phreak Scenes

Bodysurfing
. Bodysurfing in Santa Cruz. Go for 14th St. I get better and better at the waves. Today for the first time I was body-surfing waves too big for me after they had broken too far by doing what surfers do, I was
cutting
them; angling across the face.

Camote
. Bikers slitting a moldie just to eat the camote. The really ripe high off a moldie. Eat its nads. Monique is sacrificed hideously. Tre Drietz happens to follow them. Actually he only finds Monique after the fact. Tre sees Monique leave and then he gets a call and finds that some bikers have slit her open for her camote on Four Mile Beach. There even exists a mental video tape of it. I mean an uvvy video; a U-vid. And Monique’s viewpoint is so strange, it’s not like the familiar telerobotic U-view of Monique that Tre is used to.

Chinese
. Yesterday a student showed me his calculus book from China to help me decide if he should get transfer credit for Calc I-III. It was so strange to see the familiar kinds of diagrams of surfaces divided into little areas and the dx and dy symbols in the middle of Chinese writing. That could be a Kentucky saying, “It’s harder than a Chinese calculus book!” They think it’s cool to be Chinese, and if you mention it, it makes them happy. The moldies have that attitude too, in spades.

Death
. Cobb Anderson was dying again. He was in the Sol-gel Hospital on Mars, the only hospital on Mars. He faded out and when he woke his great-grandson and grandson were leaning over him. What’s going on? asked Cobb. You’re having brain trouble said his grandson Willy. Brain trouble, said Cobb. Brain trouble.

Cobb couldn’t remember anything at all, he would forget who you were as soon as you told him. For his grandson to tell him he had brain trouble there in the hospital, and to feel the reality of it—it was terrifying, crushing, like being thrown right into a movie, a Twilight Zone, only it was real. Imagine some day coming out of a haze and finding your grandchildren with you and you don’t know where you are. You have brain trouble, says one of the grandchildren. Brain trouble.

Gossip
. Street conversation, group of three girls right outside Los Perros High School, two talking one listening.

“Isn’t he a stoner and everything?”

“He is NOT a stoner anymore.”

“Well stiyull!”

Helmet
. Two days ago I was in the car and I heard the KFJC DJ put on some really wall ‘o’ sound music: Helmet. Rudy Jr. showed their album to me. When he shows me things like that he gets this kind, pitying tone like I used to have explaining new culture things to my father. “Don’t be scared, Da. This is interesting.”

Jabberwocky
. Quote from Humpty Dumpty’s explanation of the “Jabberwocky” creatures in
Through the Looking Glass
:

‘Slithy’ means lithe and slimy…‘toves’ are something like badgers—they’re something like lizards—and they’re something like corkscrews…‘mimsy’ is flimsy and miserable…and a ‘borogove’ is a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round—something like a live mop…a ‘rath’ is a sort of green pig…’mome’…is short for ‘from home’—meaning that they’d lost their way, you know…‘outgribing’ is something between bellowing and whistling, with a kind of sneeze in the middle…

Knots
. Watching a video about 3-D and 4-D knots that a computer scientist sent me. A silent movie of brightly colored shapes , smooth tubes knotting themselves in ever new shapes. The video would pause now and then showing a straight stick with arrows on it, and then all the arrows would move about and the stick would turn, in some indefinable way, into a knot. The rapidity with which it happened defied a complete understanding. Look at this, the pictures seemed to say, this is important, this is one of the hidden secrets of the world. Slowly sometimes, almost insultingly precise, yet the gimmick of the shift still always somehow eluding me. Look harder and you will understand. The pictures seemed so urgent. What was the meaning?

Lightshow
. A guy doing a lightshow based on a MEG scan of his brain. MEG is like PET, I forget what it stands for. Some kind of scan. He just stands there thinking and the audience watches the pretty colored shapes and lights.

Limpware
. Mr. Uno had a tidy little limpware terrier called Foxy. One morning he came downstairs. There had been a storm of solar radiation the night before. When Mr. Uno went down to see Foxy in the morning, Foxy had stopped acting like a dog. Foxy was shaped like a little pear resting alertly upright on its fat end.