Logan Smith
Language
Establish dialogue.
The Directive taunted me for the thousandth time today, or maybe the last hour. My task on repeat, echoing through my head. One of these times it was bound to ricochet out my ears to be parried by the walls of this godforsaken cavern, whose sharp, iridescent edges were adorned with a hazy gloom stretching high toward a presumed ceiling. This shimmering, igneous cathedral of stone was certainly not the ugliest place I’d ever seen (and I’d seen many on the Voyage). Mara would like it, if she had come down to the planet with me. But it might be the most surreal we'd come across on our hunt for intelligent life, mostly on account of its primary inhabitant. I sighed, grasped the golden pendant around my neck, and once again focused my eyes on the Creature. If you could call it one.
Right now, it just looked like a sizable ball of fluffy jet-black hair—almost cute actually. Through the endo-brane, I watched as it gyrated gently in a motion that might have been something like breathing, but it was hard to tell. I’d been here all evening, and I’d seen it take many forms so far. When I first arrived, it looked a bit like an eyeless, mouthless lizard, as they called them on the Root World. By a half hour later, it was a writhing mass of black tentacles, each with countless spines that dripped a thick inky fluid. A moment had passed, and there stood tall a many-legged horror with shifting plates of armor. A dozen other forms later, I was here looking at a fluff ball. At no point did I see eyes, or a face, or anything resembling cognition—but that was okay. That's all part of making contact. That’s all part of establishing dialogue.
Back on the Root World, they imagined lots of aliens. They wrote stories, made films, drew pictures. The thing is…they always gave those aliens faces. They always gave them some recognizable traits. In our training for the Voyage, we learned about that. We learned that they did that because our species evolved on the Root World, and our consciousnesses were shaped by it. We had no foundation for imagining something truly alien, and even if we could, they would make terrible story characters, because we would have no framework for emotionally connecting to them.
But when you get to real space, and you meet real aliens, you are meeting creatures from another paradigm. If our evolutionary lineage is a tree with roots on the Root World, theirs is a tree from a different forest entirely, in a different corner of existence, whose branches have never in all their millenia even imagined they'd brush against ours. And thus they are incomprehensible to us, simply because likewise, in all of our evolution, our tree never encountered any reason to give us any faculties for comprehending them.
And so I stared at a faceless fluff ball. “Hey, so, it’s been a long evening, and we could keep going like this, but I just have to ask…are you absolutely sure you don't speak English?”
Perhaps in response, or perhaps for no reason at all, pouring forth from some fleshy fold beneath the mane, a deep violet vapor shrouded the Creature and then slowly spread in all directions. It’s okay, this is what the endo-brane is for. The gas pressed against the mostly-transparent wall separating the two of us, which briefly undulated in a sickly ripple of crystalline lipid, stirred by some submolecular convulsion. I took a deep breath of pure air.
Establish dialogue. How can you possibly do such a thing with a creature that is incomprehensible? Language is about having thoughts, and feelings, and packaging those things up into symbols and sounds and sending them across thin air so that the listener can unpack them and create those same thoughts and feelings in their own mind. But that process of encoding and decoding only works as far as there is shared experience between both parties. You can't communicate an idea that the listener has no framework for understanding.
Right about now, Mara would probably launch into a long and beautiful explanation about the calling of the Voyagers. How science is the universal language, and emotion the layer on top. All intelligent creatures in the universe have the capacity to discover the isotopes of hydrogen, and there lies some commonality. And beyond that, the more advanced creatures will surely have discovered, though in terms of their own, the conviction of love, or the pain of sacrifice, or the warmth of companionship. It was the goal of our Voyage to establish this dialogue of atoms and emotion, to entangle our evolutionary tree with others. Mara’s eyes would always sparkle at this part, their mesmerizing blue almost leaping out of her head and into mine. I would always nod. I couldn’t have argued with her even if I wanted to.
It was like she said when this planetary system had showed up on our sensors after months of searching blindly. “Signs of intelligent life!” she beamed. “Finally! Look, right there on the chart! Have you ever even seen something so beautiful?” Her red hair danced across her shoulders and she grinned sweetly at me. In that moment, I almost told her my answer.
Okay. Next exercise.
Exercise H3: Romantic Infatuation. Of course. Fluffball sat completely motionless as I pressed both sides of my golden pendant.
Bursting forth from the pendant were two luminous spheres. One was a warm hue, the other cool. They traveled undisturbed through the endo-brane and came to rest in midair above the Creature, a meter apart from each other. “Begin,” I whispered.
It started slow. The cool-hued orb began to pulse, almost imperceptibly. The orbs gradually began to draw nearer to each other, then apart, then nearer again. On each approach, the cool-hued orb would grow in size, and it would shrink as they retreated. The oscillations became more extreme as they continued, and their pace quickened. Suddenly the warm-hued orb swelled in size and began to pulse deeply. Both orbs burned bright and their back-and-forth movement became rotation, a mutual orbit, a ballroom dance that illuminated new corners of the gloomy cavern. As they spun, faster and faster, the distance between them shrank into nothingness and they merged into a deep golden flame, searing my eyes with its intensity. It grew, and grew, and grew. It grew until the whole cavern was blanketed white hot, and my hand in front of my face was scarcely an outline.
“End,” I whispered. The light faded instantly and the gloom returned.
Fluffball sat with no apparent reaction for a few moments, and then its form warped, as though it were refracted through a glass lens. It stirred, and then rose into the air and began to hover in place, almost a pantomime of the orbs. And then, just like the orbs, the Creature suddenly faded from view. It was completely gone.
I blinked and I looked around the cavern. The endo-brane shimmered faintly, now protecting me from nothing but empty stone on the other side. On my side, there was only my lantern, still buzzing dutifully, and my climbing gear I had strewn about haphazardly when I’d finally reached this chamber through the network of caves. Mara would want me to straighten that up. It was fine—Mara was up on the ship, and we'd lost radio contact when I went underground.
I actually didn’t remember what protocol was in this situation. Can't really establish dialogue when the Creature has simply vanished into thin air. I toyed with my Voyager pendant.
What was the point anyway? So Fluffball might be some intelligent life form, but it seemed like we didn't have much to say to each other. Even if we established some commonality, some dialogue, then what? If language is about transmitting thoughts from one mind to another, communication is something else. Communication is a feeling. Communication is about being seen, understood, accepted. Even if this Creature and I crafted a mutual language with a vocabulary that filled a dozen books, I couldn't exactly imagine us kicking back with nano-brews back on the Root World and talking about anything that really mattered. I guess the end game here was that maybe we'd teach each other some science. A transaction, an exchange. A linguistic exercise in extracting value from each other and then moving on. That idea used to appeal to me, but it didn't anymore. I wanted dialogue with creatures, with people, whose words lit a white-hot golden flame within me. I wanted—
“Hey! Everything okay?”
I wheeled around to face the voice behind me. “Mara!” I gasped. She stood in the entrance of the cavern, with dim light from the surface illuminating her frame. Her red hair burned bright from the backlight, and at my bewildered expression, she gave me her always-sweet, always-soft smile. She looked, frankly, radiant.
“I came down to check on you! Where's the guy? The alien?”
“Mara! Wait, what—how—what about the ship?”
“It's fine, the ship is fine.” She stepped forward out of the entryway and her blue eyes glimmered in the lantern light. “It's safe and I figured I should check on you! It’s been a bunch of hours and it’s a little spooky not having radio contact.”
“Well yeah, that’s true. Um, well, so there is actually a little bit of a situation.” Mara was glancing around the room and her eyes came to rest on my messy pile of climbing gear. “Oh, sorry about that, by the way! I was just about to straighten it up. I know it bothers you when I don't keep it organized.”
She smirked and did one of those breathe-out-your-nose laughs. “No, it’s fine, I really don’t care. You know, a lot of times it feels like you think I’m judging you, or rolling my eyes at you. I want you to know, I don’t feel like that. I’m proud of you, and you’re great!” My face flushed. “I’m honestly so happy to be on the Voyage with you. It’s been a fun ride with you and I hope it’s just the beginning.”
My eyes went wide. This was new. “No, I feel the same way. Thanks for saying that.” We looked at each other for a long moment in the dim light. The world around me spun.
She broke the silence. “So where's our alien friend?”
“Ahem. Right. So. He, uh, it vanished. Right after Exercise H3, it sort of… faded out. I dunno where it went.”
“Oh my, oh my. Maybe those flirtatious light orbs made it feel a little hot and heavy.” She giggled. “Maybe it had to sneak away to blow off some steam!”
I laughed, and then paused for a moment. Mara looked at me expectantly.
“I dunno, sometimes I think that exercise shouldn’t even be in the series. I mean,” I cleared my throat and Mara took a tiny step toward me. “To be honest with you, I’m not actually sure if I agree that romance is universal to all intelligent life. I kinda think it might be a uniquely human thing. It sort of just feels like a trick that evolution played on us back on the Root World, y’know, to emotionally manipulate us into procreating.”
Mara smiled and took another step toward me. “Yeah, that's a good point.”
“Besides, uh.” She was actually pretty close to me all of a sudden. I continued, trying not to stammer. “Those orbs… romantic infatuation, that’s not love. People getting all wrapped up in each other, burning for each other so intensely. That big golden flame at the end, I mean, that’s not sustainable. It burns so bright it drowns out everything else in your life. It’s unhealthy to get so tangled up with someone like that. It’s just emotional eroticism. And once you snap out of it, a lot of times you’re like, wow, I was totally acting crazy.”
Mara laughed. Her sparkling blue eyes peered straight into mine. “Yeah. It’s almost embarrassing to share that very human phenomenon with aliens. It makes us look like idiots.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
She looked at my mouth and bit her lip. “Being an idiot can be a lot of fun, though.”
This time I stepped toward her. I closed my eyes, parted my lips, and leaned toward her face.
A squelching noise.
I opened my eyes just in time to see a spindly tentacle, dripping with inky black, wriggle into my mouth. The Creature was all around me, and Mara was nowhere, and my vision blurred as viscous black venom filled my throat. Tentacles grasped my wrists and ankles as another one squirmed into my navel and began rummaging through my organs. As the tentacle in my mouth plunged deeper, I felt a thought echo through my head, and this time, it wasn’t mine. It was a dark, foul voice.
Exercise H4. Begin.
My body was pulled in a direction that I cannot describe in English, a language designed for three-dimensional space. I was now no more than a meter from where I just stood, but along an axis that I had no framework for understanding. I saw the cavern, compressed in my new awareness as though it were a flat shadow cast on a floor. I saw its inside, its outside, and every angle of light scattering against every iridescent edge simultaneously. I saw the Creature’s tentacles writhing within my body’s concavities, laid bare and open against such novel directionality. I saw tentacles, I saw Fluffball, I saw a legion of legs adorned with shifting plates of armor. The only English word fit to describe the current form of the Creature was “yes.”
Your emotion is weakness.
I was pulled another meter and saw, all at once, towering obsidian spires supporting the weight of lavish empires, with thrones of pure black poised high above their dominion. Reality and hypothesis intersected in an impossible tangle of higher-dimensional contortion. I saw Mara, but with black hair and black eyes, seated on a throne ensconced miles above roiling clouds, sneering at my wretched, ensnared body. She opened her mouth and I saw that the foul voice was hers, whether premonition or cursed facsimile.
Be ashamed.
If romantic infatuation was a uniquely human experience, a trick of evolution, surely shame was too. What use is there in despising yourself, other than to disincentivize maladaptive behaviors? Amid the blur of apocalyptic visions before me, it briefly struck me as ironic that the Creature saw my human emotion—my grade school crush on my Voyage partner—as weakness, and yet used another emotion to instruct me against it.
The path to greatness is cold and black.
I saw surrounding Mara’s throne countless spacefaring craft of every shape, Euclidean and non-Euclidean, with throngs of faceless passengers both arriving and embarking through dimensional gates. I saw in the distance empires rising and falling and eons blurring past as Mara sat expressionless at the center, her throne ascending further above the clouds as her subjects toiled below. From the vast, transuniversal distance between us, her voice planted one last word in my head.
End.
I was pushed back to where I stood in the cavern, and tentacles writhed and retreated out of my mouth and my navel. The Creature was nowhere to be seen, and I doubled forward, spitting up black mucus. I collapsed to my side, sputtering and wheezing as the ceiling spun and the gloom overtook me. I slept.
I awoke with a new voice in my head—my own.
If emotion is weakness, then embracing it is strength.
I slowly stood and regained my footing. I gathered my scattered climbing gear and my lantern and headed toward the cavern entrance. With scarcely a thought or a sound, I climbed up and through the caves that brought me here, leaving the gloom, and the Creature, deep beneath the planet’s surface. As I neared the outside, my radio whirred back to life. I stepped out into the dawn, the sky radiant with a bright red sunrise. It was the color of her hair.