Factoring Humanity (35 page)

The alien ship was in low-Earth orbit—a good thing, too; most of the shuttles couldn’t manage much more. Everyone waited for the big ship to deploy some sort of landing craft, but it never did. Radio messages were exchanged—for the very first time, human beings sent a reply to the Centaurs. The sad truth was that Earth had about twice the surface gravity of the Centaur homeworld. Although the beings aboard the starship—there were 217 individuals on it—had come forty-one trillion kilometers, the last two hundred represented a gulf they could never cross.

Earth’s international space station had grown over the years, but there was no way for the starship to dock with it; the aliens were going to have to space-walk over. They moved their ship until the gap between it and the closest point on the station was about five hundred meters.

Every camera aboard the station and the flotilla of shuttles was trained on the alien ship, and every television set down on the planet was watching the drama unfold; for once, all of humanity was tuned into the same program.

The alien space suits gave no hint of what the creatures within might look like; they were perfectly spherical white bubbles, with robotic arms extending from them, and a mirrored-over viewing strip that ran horizontally just above the sphere’s equator. Five of the aliens left the mothership and were propelled by jets of compressed gas across the gulf toward an open cargo bay on the space station.

There was a possibility that the aliens might not remove their suits even after they reached the station—gravity might not be the only thing that differed between the two worlds. Indeed, it was possible that the aliens had a taboo against showing their physical form to others—that had been suggested more than once when their original radio messages failed to contain any apparent representation of their appearance.

The first of the spheres came into the cargo bay. Its occupant used its jets to dampen most of its forward movement, but it still had to reach out with one multijointed mechanical hand to stop itself against the far bulkhead. Soon the other four spheres were safely motionless inside, too. They floated quietly, evidently waiting. The cargo door began to close behind them, very, very slowly—no threat, no trap; if the aliens wanted to leave, they could easily jet out of the bay before the door finished shutting.

But the spheres did not move, although one of them rotated around to watch the door coming down.

Once the bay was sealed, air was pumped in. The aliens had to have done spectroscopic studies of Earth’s atmosphere as they approached it; they must know that the gases entering the chamber now were the same as those that made up the planet’s air, rather than some attempt to poison them with deadly fumes.

The scientists aboard the station had reasoned that if the alien world had a lower gravity, it probably also had a lower atmospheric pressure. They stopped adding air at about seventy kilopascals.

The aliens seemed to find all this suitable. The robotic arms on one of the spheres folded back on themselves so that they could touch the sphere’s surface. The sphere split in two at its equator, and the hands, which were anchored to the bottom half, lifted away the top part.

Inside was a Centaur.

The actual Centaur looked nothing like its namesake from human mythology. It was jet-black in color, insectile in construction, with giant green eyes and great iridescent wings that unfolded as soon as the being had drifted out of its space suit.

It was absolutely gorgeous.

Soon the other four egglike suits cracked open, disgorging their occupants. Exoskeleton color ranged from solid black through silver, and eye color varied from green through purple through cyan. The unfolding of the wings was apparently the Centaur equivalent of a stretch—no sooner had they been deployed than the beings folded them up again.

A door opened in the cargo bay, and the designated choice for first contact drifted into the room. And who better for that than the person who had first figured out what the Centauri radio signals were meant to convey? Who better than the person who had first detected the presence not just of humanity’s overmind, but of the Centaur overmind as well? Who better than the individual who had mediated the first contact between the overminds, preventing the human one from panicking?

All five aliens turned to look at Heather Davis. She held out her hands, palms up, and smiled at the extraterrestrials. The Centaur who had first opened its suit unfolded its wings again, and with a couple of gentle beats, set itself moving toward her. A backward movement of the wings brought it to a stop about a meter from Heather. She reached out an arm toward the alien, and the alien unfurled a long, thin limb toward her. The limb looked fragile; Heather did nothing more than let it tap against the palm of her hand.

A dozen years ago, the Centaurs had reached out with their radio messages.

Two years ago, their overmind had made contact with the human overmind. Perhaps that had been the more important event, but still, there was something wonderful and poignant and real about the actual touching of hands.

“Welcome to Earth,” said Heather. “I think you’re going to find it a
very
nice place.”

The alien, who couldn’t yet understand English, nonetheless tipped its angular head, as if in acknowledgment.

There were uncountable other humans plugged into Heather’s mind, enjoying it all from her perspective. And, no doubt, all that the aliens were seeing was propagating back through their overmind, across the light-years to Alpha Centauri, where it would be experienced by everyone there.

Doubtless humans would soon be trying to do the Necker transformation into a Centaur’s mind—indeed, some of those riding within Heather might be trying it right now.

She wondered if it would work.

But then again, it didn’t really matter.

Even without that capability, Heather was sure that her species, which at last now deserved its name of humanity, was going to have no trouble seeing the other person’s point of view.

About the Author

Robert J. Sawyer is Canada’s only native-born full-time science-fiction writer. He is the author of nine previous novels, including
The Terminal Experiment,
which won the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award for Best Novel of the Year, and
Starplex,
which was a Nebula and Hugo Award finalist.

Rob’s books are published in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Japan, Poland, Russia, and Spain. He has won an Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada, five Aurora Awards (Canada’s top honor in SF), five Best Novel HOMer Awards voted on by the 30,000 members of the SF&F Literature Forums on CompuServe, the Seiun Award (Japan’s principal SF award),
Le Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire
(France’s top honor in SF), and the
Premio UPC
de Ciencia Ficción,
Spain’s top SF award, and the world’s largest cash prize for SF writing (which was awarded to Rob for a portion of this novel,
Factoring Humanity).

Rob’s other novels include the popular Quintaglio Ascension trilogy
(Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter,
and
Foreigner),
plus
Golden Fleece, End of an Era, Frameshift,
and
Illegal Alien.

Rob lives in Thornhill, Ontario (just north of Toronto), with Carolyn Clink, his wife of fourteen years. Together, they edited the acclaimed Canadian SF anthology
Tesseracts 6.

To find out more about Rob and his fiction, visit his extensive World Wide Web site at www.sfwriter.com.