Xenophobia (34 page)

The man ignored him, saying, “We have come many times before, sampling your world, observing progress.”

“Before?” Bower asked. “When?”

The woman answered. “By your reckoning, this would be measured with a frequency of millions of orbits. But never before have we seen such domination of the biosphere by a single species. You number in excess of seven billion. Each year, your births outweigh deaths by seventy million, causing your ranks to swell even further. Such increase is not sustainable, not without consequence. And so, you have achieved a hundred times the biomass of any large animal species we have previously encountered.”

The man’s voice was harsh, as though he were speaking out of bitterness.

“You have humbled nature. You have removed the natural checks on growth, but you have done so with reckless abandon, without regard for your planet and the diversity of life around you. You have lost sight of your place in nature.”

“So you’re going to interfere,” Bower said, piecing the threads of logic together.

She moved closer to Elvis. He responded, taking her hand in his. There was something eerie about their encounter with these tall humanoids, something surreal. Touch grounded her to reality. It was silly really, and yet both of them seemed to relish the touch of each other’s hand.

“We seek to restore balance,” the mysterious man replied.

“How?” Elvis asked. It was a good question, but Bower figured she already knew the answer inherent in this prophetic vision. She let go of Elvis and stepped forward within the light. Reaching out, she touched at the tall man standing before her. As she expected, her hand passed harmlessly through his ethereal image.

“We will not hurt you,” the woman said. “We mean only to remove the bias.”

“You’re going to destroy mankind,” Elvis said.

“Not destroy,” the woman responded. “Enhance.”

“But don’t you see?” Bower protested. “This is precisely what they were afraid of, this is why they lashed out at you. If you do this, you’re vindicating their madness.”

The two humanoids were silent.

“I don’t understand,” Elvis said, turning to Bower. “What are they going to do?”

“They’re not going to wipe out humanity,” Bower replied. “They’re going to change us, to transform us into this.”

“But why?” Elvis asked. “What would that accomplish?”

The woman replied, “Because the root of your irrational behavior is instinctive, inherited over thousands of generations. We will remove the source of your fear, your predication to violence, your irrational tendencies. We will lift the veil from your eyes.”

Bower understood. She looked at Elvis as she said, “They mean to fast-forward
Homo sapiens
to a time where these primal urges, these absolutist tendencies have mellowed.”

“Is that not what your religions ask of you?” the woman asked. “Peace on Earth?”

“He wouldn’t understand,” the man added, scorn carrying in his voice. “He is a warrior, a man of war, nothing but a brute beast.”

Elvis flinched, and Bower pulled on his arm, preventing him from stepping forward.

“Who the hell are you to sit in judgment of us?” Elvis cried, the veins in his neck standing out.

“Who are you?” the man asked in reply, raising his eyebrows. “Who gave you the right to abuse the evolutionary pedigree of almost four thousand million revolutions around this star? Who gave you the right to systematically decimate a planetary life system? You plunder and squander this planet for your own selfish ends with no regard for life.”

“You are stewards,” the woman continued in a notably calmer voice. “That is all. You are passing through, not staying. Your lives are fleeting. Your concern should be to extend the life of your planet into the future, not to exploit all you can now.”

“How long do you think Earth will survive under your reign?” the man asked. “Honestly? In the last hundred orbits, you’ve strip-mined the planet, tearing down forests, decimating ocean stocks, polluting the land and sea. How far will you go? How long will you persist at the expense of life? Another one or two hundred orbits? And then what? Then you’ll leave this planet a husk, an empty shell.”

“But you don’t know that,” Bower protested. “You don’t know where we will be in two hundred years. You’re assuming we won’t change, but you’re wrong.

“If you’ve visited our planet several times over millions of years then you must have seen tremendous change, not just in the species that roam Earth but in the very shape and position of the continents, the ice ages and dry spells. You must know that life is not static.”

Bower was driving her mind to grasp their perspective, to see her world from their point of view and hopefully find a weakness in their argument.

“Two hundred orbits is nothing,” she suggested. “For an interstellar species that catalogs worlds over millions of our years, a mere two hundred years is a blip on the radar. What if you’d turned up two hundred years ago? What if you’d seen us when horses pulled our farmer’s carts to the markets and trading ships sailed with the wind? What would your estimation of us have been then? Would you have drawn the same conclusion?”

Neither of the apparitions offered a reply.

“If you would not have condemned us then, how can you judge us now when you know not what will become of us? You might be able to simulate our evolution, but you cannot simulate our culture, our growth, our learning.”

“We will save you from yourselves,” the man said.

“You don’t even know if your intervention will work?” Bower protested. “By intervening, you could upset the balance and make things worse.”

“We won’t let you do this,” Elvis said, his lips drawn tight.

The woman addressed him, asking, “And what will you do, O man of war?”

“We’ll fight.”

The man laughed.

The woman smiled, saying, “We have seen your species before, but you have progressed rapidly. Whereas once, you roamed the grasslands in search of prey, now you revel in the luxuries of technology. You fabricate heroics, conjuring up fantasies of victory against any intrusion from the stars. You could not so much as have scratched one of our ships had we not been bound to observe. We were caught unawares. We overestimated your social cohesion and desire for harmony. We will not make that mistake again.”

“She’s right,” Bower said. “This isn’t Hollywood. There’s no Hail-Mary play to be made. This isn’t some movie where we can scrounge up a nuclear warhead from somewhere, smuggle it into the heart of the ship, and still escape in time for supper with the President. We’re like a nest of ants taking on a battleship.

“And besides, our ability to wage war is not what has set us apart from the other animals, it’s our ability to think, to reason.”

As those words left her lips, she spotted a subtle, almost imperceptible change in the demeanor of their phantom hosts. They weren’t real; she knew that. They were programmed; they had to be. They were virtual representations of the alien congress, conversing with the two of them in a more natural form. Although they were apparitions, they represented the alien position.

When they’d first spoken, there was disagreement between them. The man was more forthright, while the woman had appealed to reason as a motive to spare humanity. Without intending to, Bower had touched on that same point, and from the glitch in their response, that had struck a raw nerve.

“You’re afraid,” Bower said. “You’re afraid of what we might become, of how we might one day threaten you among the stars ... Please, don’t act out of fear. If you do, you’re no better than them.”

‘Them’ had been the term Bower had unconsciously settled upon, not us. Without realizing it, she had inadvertently transformed this debate into a three-party discussion, distinguishing both herself and Elvis from the rest of humanity and the destruction of the floaters. She hadn’t accepted her position as defendant in their court.

From their silence, Bower sensed the aliens accepted her position, and that must have complicated the situation further, as that one, small word, them, implied humanity was not a cohesive group. If the alien edict didn’t apply to Bower and Elvis, then there were others that could equally claim exemption, those that also detested the acts of violence unleashed upon the floaters.

“Fear is the enemy of reason,” Bower said. “You must have seen that. Your pilots, those we named Stella, they must have told you about us, that we too were afraid, and yet fear need not rule over reason.

“When I first stood before Stella I was afraid, but I chose not to act out of fear. Standing there in that darkened prison, I was shaking, trembling, but I could not hurt her. Together, we reached out to each other and overcame our fears.”

Neither the man nor woman replied. The man opened his lips but seemed to halt in the middle of a word, as though something was caught in his throat.

There has to be more to this, Bower thought. Although she felt as though she was speaking to two individuals, she was acutely aware the alien congress sat out there somewhere in the darkness, tens of thousands of them watching her, listening to her words. Perhaps they were divided into two camps, represented by the two humanoid apparitions she saw before her. They differed. They weren’t in agreement. She could exploit this.

“As an intelligent species, we are much closer to you than you think,” she said, talking not to the figures before her, but to the audience at large. To emphasize her point, she broke eye contact and turned as she spoke, ignoring the seemingly angelic representations before them and speaking directly to the extraterrestrial congress hidden in the darkness. “We may not speak the same language. We may not share the same mannerisms, but we share one thing, reason.”

The two futuristic representations of humanity stood still, but not as she or Elvis would. They were frozen, nothing more than mannequins in the wax works, statues in a museum. Bower knew she had the alien congress flustered.

“We can learn. That is what has allowed us to ascend above the other animals that inhabit our world. Yes, we’ve made mistakes, but our strength comes not from force of arms, it comes from recognizing those mistakes and having the willingness to change.”

Bower continued to ignore these futuristic doppelgängers, but out of the corner of her eye she could see they had remained stationary, as though they were storefront dummies modeling clothing. Although there was no outward activity, she felt confident she’d unleashed a flurry of discussion behind the scenes. Doubts were rising. She had to exploit that uncertainty.

“We have struggled with the same dilemmas as you now face. For us, it was eugenics, whether to be selective with breeding, whether to sterilize our fellows based on race, class or creed so as to consciously shape the future of our species, but reason prevailed. Reason demanded equality. We have made mistakes, but reason is self-correcting.”

Bower shook her head as the realization sank home.

“Look at me,” she said, gesturing with her arms held wide, looking down at the dark skin on her forearms and the back of her hands. “I am a black woman. I am everything that was feared.

“Less than two hundred orbits have passed since my ancestors were freed from slavery. Barely a hundred orbits have passed since women of any color were granted the most basic of rights, that of the right to vote and be heard as individuals. And yet just over fifty orbits ago, I could not have sat on a bus next to a white man like Elvis, and all because of a layer of pigmentation that sits no more than a millimeter beneath my skin.”

Bower breathed deeply, composing herself, surprised by the upswell of emotion within. She forced herself to go on.

“And yet these orbits have come and gone and we have changed. We have moved on. Those that were once despised are now heroes, and not because they fought in a physical battle, because they stood for what was right.”

Bower wasn’t too sure how well her point communicated. Would these creatures even know what a bus was? Would they have access to the historical records that would explain the life of Rosa Parks? Would they at least recognize the principle?

“Barely five hundred orbits ago,” she continued, using their terminology. “We thought Earth was the center of this vast universe. We thought stars were but a pinprick of light, smaller than a grain of sand, and yet slowly we have learned to expand our thinking to match reality.”

“When I was a child,” Elvis said, stepping softly into the discussion, “I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

“Yes, yes,” Bower replied, turning to Elvis, surprised by his insight.

“Hey, Southern Baptist upbringing. It’s got to be good for something, right?”

Bower smiled, shaking her head. She turned to address the darkness yet again. “And we’re still in our adolescence, still in our infancy, but we’re learning to put away the toys. Science has allowed us to become adults.”

The two humanoid figures faded into the darkness, but that didn’t deter Bower.

“I understand why you came here. I understand why you feel we must change, but we need time to grow up. For too long, we’ve valued the wrong things. We’ve valued gold and diamonds, but perhaps it has taken your visit to our small planet to show us where the true riches lie.

“You crossed the countless miles of interstellar space not to plunder our world for minerals, not to take our water or our wealth, but to sample the greatest treasure in the universe, to explore life. And I see that now, I understand there is no more precious commodity than the life that surrounds us. From the smallest microbe to the largest mammal, life commands reverence.

“I don’t know how you mean to bring about this biological change to humanity, whether it is by means of some DNA-altering virus or by tampering with our ecology, but I implore you to see reason.”

Bower could feel Elvis shaking. His hand trembled in hers, but not out of anger, and perhaps not out of fear either. She felt it too, it was the awe, the intimidation of the moment.

“Put yourself in our shoes,” she continued, wondering how well such an idiom would translate. “What if it was your adolescence that was stolen from you? What if some other alien intelligence fast-tracked your progress to the stars? What if they robbed you of the chance to learn for yourself?”