The Filter Trap (40 page)

‘That was a guess,’ Jill thought.

“Yes, like you, we have no choice but to cling to hope,” one of the tall ones reminded her. “But the bearantulas went to great effort to come back. Under such harsh treatment and centuries of cloning genetic degradation our kind was not evolving and adapting to Tau’Goagh, but dying. They were dying too, unable to remediate the increasing pollution that affected even their DNA. They would not have come here if there weren’t more of us to . . . harvest.”

Though it was about an alien race, Jill shuddered at the use of the term to describe conscription into slavery, abuse, and certain death.

“You said they are dying. From what we’ve seen their planet is unsustainable,” Amanda said. “What if they didn’t come here for you at all?”

They paused again, censoring something.

“We have no choice but to hope,” they repeated.

The rest of the journey was punctuated by an anxious silence. The humans worried the technological civilization, glimpsed in the memory of the ship on the surface, had perished when the bearantulas invaded the first time. They might be rushing headlong into a graveyard. No wonder the passages were dark.

Chapter 3

The humans all wondered if they’d traded one agent of doom for another, riding on the backs of giants through complete darkness, their thoughts bare to the aliens that bore them. The agitation of their hosts became apparent. Small pieces of dissatisfaction slipped through to interrupt the human paranoia. Neither species evolved to censor thoughts, the tall ones likely found it as difficult to keep their chattering about the humans from the humans as the humans found it impossible to stop their innate anxiety.

After more twists and turns the cycle of distrust broke, albeit temporarily. Faint flickers of light somewhere far below seeped into the tunnels. Metallic material complimented the original stone hollows at deeper levels, a sign that a technologically advanced civilization inhabited the pyramids once, if not still.

The tall ones changed their mental approach. They were broadcasting their search for other minds so widely and strongly that they infiltrated the humans’ weak perception. As the illumination of the passageways increased, so did their scope. What once barely fit the width of five tall ones expanded to halls and connecting branches. Though hewn from some native bedrock deep underground, a warmth crept into their minds, allaying a comfort which should have felt just as alien to the humans as the holding cells on the bearantula ship. Though the workings of the gray matter between the two species was very different, both valued homecomings with a similar reaction, and that feeling was too close to the heart for the tall ones to censor, not that they had any need to anyway.

Jill speculated that, if anything, the homecoming feeling might be a psychological tool to control her kind. Define common emotions and then flood the “lessor” human minds with them. The human propensity for acting on love, desire and hate could be a disability if other minds could pull the strings. For now, unarmed and practically naked, deep below the surface of an alien planet, dependent on technology from
another
alien race just to breathe, there was little to be gained from such suspicion. Or was that thought, too, planted by the tall ones?

At last a reply, a warm welcome in every sense of the word, arrived in every mind. The tall ones picked up the pace and in moments they arrived at a soaring underground amphitheater where more than twenty thousand of their kind gathered to greet them. The barrage of images facing the tall ones must have felt rejuvenating, but the humans were overwhelmed.

An elaborately ornamented tall one at the center of a large dais gestured for them to come forward. Yet before the humans could obey, the underground city returned to darkness.

The humans woke in a bright room with a ceiling that curved upward beyond view. Light shone down through a ceiling of kaleidoscopic mirrors reflecting a natural light source from high above in the jungle.

“This is the greenhouse,” a tall one spoke to their minds. “We thought it may be more comfortable for your senses.”

“You guessed right,” Amanda said, sitting up with the rest of them.

Strange plants with strange fruits surrounded the humans. Each plant ached upwards to feel the light from the overhead shaft.

“Eat what you like,” the mind-tongue said, looking at them with caring eyes. Taller, thinner, and clearly a female, her eyes glazed to an artificial black, covered with a thin eyelid when navigating the shafts of sunlight.

“What should we call you?” Jill asked.

The tall one paused, parsing the question. Jill shuddered as the tall one entered her mind, searching for her intended meaning.

“My name is Jill!” she shouted, pointing at herself. “Yours?”

“Ah, your . . .
uniqueness
,” the tall one understood. “I have no name, as you’d describe it.”

“Because none of you can talk?” Lee asked indignantly.

“Your guides on the surface did not communicate with their mouths?” the tall one asked in their minds.

The humans shook their heads. “They didn’t have any.”

“Then they, too, experienced the atrophying of vocal modulation. I hope they have also kept our ‘names,’ as you call them.”

“You just said you don’t have names,” Lee reminded her.

“True, we do not. What we do have is our individual thought patterns, which can be felt in an instant, but cannot be written. We understand the concept of a name, just as you understand the concept of love, but you have no simple name for the unique love felt in one of a billion unique relationships, do you?”

She smiled. “You all understand love, I see. Your thoughts went immediately to the ones that give you joy, and after seeing all of them, I can assure you none of them could be described with the same word.”

“But, how do you see an entire person’s life in an instant?” Lee protested.

“Let me show you,” she said, before broadcasting her mind’s pattern.

The human minds were overrun with simultaneous feelings, thoughts, emotions, and all other substrate data that an individual animal may soak up in the course of living. Memories of love for a mother mashed with the smell of flowers in the rain-room. Pain from a broken foot mingled with neurons firing in familiar avenues, creating a stronger signature with each thought.

To the tall ones, this information deciphered an identity as easily as a human could identify a face, the tiniest of individual features merging to form a distinct pattern. Many of the humans began to scream, though not aware of it. The information entering their minds was too alien and too complex to parse.

“I am sorry,” she said as she stopped projecting.

“Ever heard of TMI?” Lee said.

“T . . .” the tall one parsed the others, registering the acronym in their minds as they heard it for the real phrase. She laughed. “You must have small minds indeed, a limited storage capacity.”

“Hey!” Lee said, registering it as an insult.

“I did not mean to offend, Lieutenant Lee Green. My species, too, was like you once. The ability to share information is not the same as using it wisely. On that we may not differ so much, I think. In some ways your limited brains may have given you an advantage or two.

“But for us, there is no such thing as
too much information
. We approach communication not by limiting and refining, but by painting with broad brushes—to borrow a beautiful human metaphor Jill provided just now—and parsing others’ minds for our own needs. You too have used others as information storage, the major asking a private to remember how to use a piece of equipment, for example. For us, we do not have to ask, we simply have to find the mind holding the information we seek, for it is all laid bare for us to choose from.”

“Have you no shame?” Amanda asked. “No privacy? There are certain things I would not wish to share.”

“What would a peaceful people need of privacy? If everyone is an open book—thank you for that interesting expression, Kam—there is no need for what you call shame.”

“Yet you are hiding something,” Lee questioned. “We all felt it.”

The tall one paused, unsure how to answer.

“Happy
we
can’t read
your
thoughts now, aren’t you?” Lee prodded.

“Lieutenant!” Amanda snapped. “We are guests, and until we have any reason to suspect otherwise, we shall appreciate our host’s generosity.”

The tall one put her hand up to both women.

“A simple misunderstanding. There is much you have yet to learn of our culture. I saw what you wish to hide, Lee. I assure you there would be no shame in such feelings in our culture. The shame is that it must remain a secret in yours.”

The other humans looked at Lee, wondering what her secret was.

“I understand your culture values shared secrets, Lee Green, and so I will keep yours. Though I’m afraid I cannot keep it from my own people. Do not worry, though, it is one more bit of information in a large cache that they can access about all of you. We will know all your secrets soon.”

A human’s intonation could have belied sinister meaning in the statement. The images of the words flashing in their minds said nothing more. She’d tamped down what she sent, leaving nothing more meaningful than the literal English characters floating in their brains. She was right though, they
were
ignorant of this new culture, but was that harmful? Maybe the aliens had more to fear than the humans did.

“Have you come to teach us of your culture?” Jill asked.

The tall one broadcast a feeling of delight to them all, an alien nonverbal chuckle. “No, but I may try.”

She closed another set of eyelids and curled her mouth into a circle, focusing her mental energy.

“Be careful what you wish for, Doc,” Amanda warned.

The tall one flooded their minds with memories of ancestors. Primitive people, a postindustrial society, clouded their tropical world with pollution. In simplifying the puzzled method of communication, the humans more easily saw that a piece was missing. Obfuscation apparent, the humans wondered what was too dangerous to share.

Given the same opportunity, would humans willingly share memories of the Holocaust? The Inquisition? The Crusades? Much better to encounter a species hiding collective shame than unfamiliar with the need for it.

They shared their environmental struggles with the humans, a commonality all three planets in the system shared. In a tongue long since excised from the planet, furious debates between the tall lords of power kept any solutions from fruiting over the quagmire of pollution. Until, finally, a breakthrough not from polity, but from technology. In the midst of the cancers both literal and figurative that plagued the browning planet, a select few developed the tools for psychic inference.

At first the method was crude, a way to stimulate brain cells via electrical nodes on the head. The fad died quickly when users discovered the process enabled latent abilities. Further generations opened minds to the past and collaborated for a better future with enhanced telepathy via genetic manipulation. Telepathy, something once deemed supernatural on Earth, was merely a way to send and receive electromagnetic waves within the body. The right organs only had to be enhanced and perfected, built into the reproductive genes passed on to children with successively larger brains.

Within two generations the ability to speak without moving lips was as natural for the tall ones as walking. In time, the ability to speak the old fashioned way died a natural death, relieved of purpose by the infinitely faster and more colorful method at their disposal.

The powers keeping planetary health at bay were exposed and expunged; driven out in a single generation, replaced by lovers of ecology. The images, stored as first person memories, crystallized, clearer than any the tall ones previously shared.

The skies cleared too; the trees grew tall and green again, joined by flying craft, ebbing larger and faster every year. The tall ones had conquered their environmentally destructive nature before venturing into space, a difference between them and the humans. Otherwise, the space race felt familiar. The ships even looked similar, rockets launched from peninsular pads, linking communications of the tall ones all over their world.

Unlike humans, the planet cooperated early; the race to space on this planet fueled not by fear of future power struggles, but love of discovery. The scientists’ hearts grew for the tall ones, wishing their own planet could share this unity; even after the Event the Earth still remained fractured.

The soldiers knew better. Something happened after this period of peace. That much was obvious from their abandonment of the forest. The air the tall ones worked so hard to clean belonged to the flying cats and the trees now.

Maybe sensing the question, the tall one answered it. At her species’ technological height, the planet was rocked to darkness in a frighteningly familiar turn. Communications disrupted, the satellites of the world, both natural and machine, suddenly silenced. Billions of minds screamed out for each other, cut off and afraid. Everyone in space lost to a void, something incomprehensible to their species, millions perishing at once.