11
ADRIAN UND DIE AUTORITÄT
ADRIAN CASSERLY-BERRY DIDN’T like snow. He didn’t like dogs, tea with sugar, people who did crafts as hobbies, or people who chose to be bald.
Since childhood, he had kept a list of things he disliked. He started on the back cover of his science notebook, and once that filled up, he bought a separate notebook during school supplies sales and continued his private list of dread.
He didn’t see himself as a terribly negative person. He kept this list because no one else listened to him, and the notebook was an excellent listener. When he was part of a group, whether in school, Cub Scouts, or church, no one took Adrian’s opinion into account. If the kids got a choice to make, they never chose Adrian’s preference. Even when Adrian was on the majority’s side, somehow the decision would go the other way.
The summer he was sixteen, before his junior year of high school, his father found his notebook of things he disliked. He had told him that Adrian shouldn’t define himself in the negative. Maybe write some positive things down instead? Then he had gone into the kitchen to make an appointment with a psychologist. Dr. Woods.
That night, his father went on the list.
Dr. Woods was an old white man. He was very thin, with wisps of gray hair combed over a shiny pate. Dr. Woods told Adrian the same thing his dad had said about thinking positively, but charged them one hundred dollars for the advice (his dad had told him how much it had cost). Dr. Woods did suggest that he find something new and positive in his life to focus on.
Adrian tried to point out he did have positive things on the list, like, “I liked the look on Mark’s stupid face when he got caught cheating on the Bio test.”
“Schadenfreude is not considered a positive thing, overall,” Dr. Woods had said, frowning.
“Shaden what?” the sixteen-year-old Adrian had said.
“It’s a German word. It means ‘happiness at the misfortune of others.’ It’s the pleasure you get when someone you don’t like gets in trouble at school. I take it you don’t like Mark?”
Adrian had gone blank, saying nothing.
Dr. Woods looked up sharply when he didn’t answer. “Adrian. Did you hear me?”
“One word means that whole feeling?” Adrian asked, still staring into space.
“Yes, the German language is quite good at that. But do you understand what I’m trying to say about schadenfreude?”
“Sure,” Adrian had answered. For the rest of the session, he answered the doctor’s questions in single syllables. He didn’t argue when the doctor pulled his notebook out of his hands and started to read his lists and comment on how the negative aspects were hurting Adrian.
Adrian didn’t care anymore. Something had broken open in his world, hatching like a baby bird, its beak open to be fed.
He had been putting off learning a language in school. He wasn’t interested in hard work and was a strong C student. Besides, no one listened to him when he spoke English; why learn a new way people could ignore him? But he needed two classes of a language to graduate, and his high school years were running out. He’d been signed up for French class—it was the first on the language list, so he had picked that. But the day after his appointment with Dr. Woods, he contacted the high school to ask them to transfer him to German. He’d never acted this passionately about anything in school before, so the bemused guidance counselor allowed it.
German fascinated him. One word could hold so much meaning. It was beautiful, almost magical.
When school started in the fall, he threw himself into German with a passion that astonished his father, his teachers, and even himself. After a few weeks of sprinting ahead in the lessons, he complained to his German teacher that he was interested in the other languages, but the school wouldn’t allow him to take more than one. Frau Becker thought for a moment and then said all the languages had clubs that met after school. She was going to suggest he join the German club, but he could check the others out, too.
He joined them all.
The other kids didn’t really warm to him, but they couldn’t kick him out. He took all the books they were reading for class and then got his own language guides online. When he started to excel in every single foreign language, they hated him more. But he didn’t care. It had taken sixteen years for him to find a true love.
Unfortunately, colleges weren’t interested in a mediocre student who had found only one academic passion, and found it late at that. Despite being a virtual savant in languages, he was still a terrible student in the other classes he barely paid attention to. (He had been translating his schoolwork into other languages instead of actually doing the work. Language teachers had been impressed. Science teachers, less so.)
When the college rejections started coming in, his rage at authority figures returned and he started a new list of dread. To amuse himself, he made this one in his own private language.
Two years of actually applying himself in community college helped him transfer to the local state school to finish undergrad, and then he shocked everyone when he got into grad school for linguistics at Duke. That led to a job teaching back at UNC-Asheville, where he was introduced to the cold world of academic politics.
The concept of politics fascinated him: it required wielding language like a weapon, something he loved. Unfortunately he didn’t excel at it because he had to understand and at least pretend to care about the people he was working with, and he wasn’t good at personal manipulation. So after a few tries at playing politics to get ahead, he retreated to his inner world of languages, teaching when he had to, developing his third private language. Tenure eluded him because he couldn’t play the politics game; he had developed a reputation as an unpleasant hermit.
No one cared that he was a hermit who could talk to over half the world’s population. If only they’d listen.
One of the few things he found pleasure in—which, frankly, had shocked him—was poetry. He discovered it was another way of playing with words, and reading poetry in other languages became even more enlightening. He didn’t have a knack for poetry, but he did enjoy wordplay and puns. All he wanted was to be alone and revel in other languages, work on his third custom-made secret language, and find puns that spanned as many languages as possible.
To the dismay of UNC-Asheville leaders, it was their unpleasant hermit linguistics professor who made it into the history books when First Contact happened.
A pair of aliens—now known as the Gurudev Tracy and the Phantasmagore Sapphire—had landed their ship in a clearing off Blue Ridge Parkway, bypassing American airspace alert systems effortlessly. Adrian came across the ship, a sleek Phantasmagore shuttle with mirrored plating, when he was hiking. His mind was on Turkish verb conjugation, and he nearly bumped into the ship. He fell back and stared, his mind shorting out as it tried to process what he saw.
A hatch opened and the first alien—the first known alien, anyway—stepped out of the shuttle.
She was a short Gurudev, with yellow bark-like skin, and was wrapped in layers of cloth, giving her the illusion of a much more substantial body. She began speaking to him, and it was so startling to hear words he didn’t immediately just know that he missed it.
He shook his head and said, “I’m sorry, can you please repeat that?”
She cocked her head at him, an odd movement for her many-jointed neck that nearly made him wince as he imagined his own head moving that way. She began speaking again, and he listened closely. She spoke in sentences that started clipped and ended almost lyrically. He was fascinated. He lost his fear and wanted to just listen to her talk forever. Understanding her was a linguistic challenge, something exciting. He hadn’t been challenged by languages since undergrad.
The two of them tried carefully to communicate, but neither seemed to be getting through to the other. With mounting frustration, Adrian realized that this historical event was bigger than him. He would have to involve the authorities.
He resisted the thought immediately. This find was his. This diplomat—and her pilot, whom he met later—were his to find, and so they were his to reveal to the world, if he could only figure out how to communicate. Without ego, he knew that he was one of the best-equipped people in the world to converse with the aliens, and he didn’t want to lose that chance.
Maybe the alien didn’t want to meet more humans. Maybe she wanted resources, or her spaceship had broken down. Maybe she just wanted to talk to him about something. Maybe he wouldn’t have to tell anyone about this.
But who was he fooling? Aliens wouldn’t come to Earth with the goal to meet with a linguistics professor. This was a chance meeting. He wasn’t special.
Authority. Autorité. Údarás. Ùghdarras. And of course his old friend, German. Die Autorität. Whatever language it was, it sounded ugly. He pulled out his phone and tried to search for “what to do if you have a first contact situation.”
The Gurudev got excited, speaking rapidly. She motioned for the phone and he reluctantly gave it to her. He didn’t like anyone seeing his phone, but this alien knew nothing of Earth or humans, so she couldn’t read his deepest thoughts or the lists he still kept.
She studied the phone, poked at the screen a few times, then disappeared into her shuttle.
“Hey, wait,” he said, and moved forward. The hatch didn’t close, and the ship didn’t power up. Was she coming back out? He wanted to follow her, but the idea of being spirited away by aliens wasn’t as romantic as going to an alien planet of his own volition.
The shuttle didn’t move, but she didn’t reappear, so Adrian sat down for a lack of anything better to do. He waited about five minutes, and then she emerged. She handed over his very warm, but apparently unharmed, phone.
“Thanks for giving it back,” he said, and she responded in her own language, looking him in the eye.
“I can’t understand you, sorry,” he said. “I wish you could understand me.”
She spoke briefly again and appeared to wait for him to do something. She didn’t gesture with her branch-like arms or anything, and he had never been more aware of how much humans used body language to communicate.
“Should I keep talking, then?” he asked. She answered with the same syllables. “I don’t get it. This is so frustrating. I wish you could hold up fingers or something.”
She raised her hand and splayed her very long digits.
“Well, shit,” he muttered. “One finger?” She displayed one, folding the others up, showing off her many joints. “All of them?” Her hand splayed its fingers again.
“All right, we’re down to basics for communication. Hold one finger for yes, two for no,” he said, thinking fast. “You can understand me, right?”
One finger.
He wanted to ask how; he wanted to ask why; he wanted to ask why she was here. But he wasn’t going to get far unless he could think up some yes-no questions.
“Are you here to hurt us?”
Two fingers.
“Take over or enslave the planet?”
Two fingers.
That was a relief. “Are you here to find us? Humans? A First Contact kind of thing?”
One finger.
“Are you here to strip our planet of resources?”
She spoke again, the syllables coming too quickly for him to parse them. He got the sense he had offended her. She raised two fingers.
“Who—no, hang on. Yes-no questions.” This question felt like ash in his mouth. He twisted his lips, trying to get the words out. “Do you—do you need to see someone in authority?”
One finger.
Goddammit.
WHAT FOLLOWED WERE calls to the police, and when they didn’t believe him, calls to the FBI, who also didn’t believe him. Desperate to keep the aliens from being blown to pieces by a hillbilly with a shotgun, Adrian called the local paper, which he considered authority-adjacent. They sent a bored junior reporter out to the woods. Very shortly after, she called for a photographer to meet her.
Both journalists won the Pulitzer Prize later that year.
Once it was breaking news online, the authorities finally took him seriously. First, the local politicians and police came to the woods. Adrian tried to be a translator, but once they understood that the aliens could now answer yes-no questions, he was no longer needed.
The authorities took his special find away from him.
He was still a little bit special, for a few weeks. News outlets around the world contacted him for quotes, but then he was targeted by Internet conspiracy theorists, his personal information was leaked, and the harassment kept him offline and made him get a new cell number.
Since he had gone offline, it took the authorities several days to find him, eventually coming to his house. He answered the door warily but was utterly shocked when he was informed that Earth needed a diplomat, and he was the only one the aliens would accept.
Someone had finally paid attention to him, and it just took an alien spacecraft landing for it to happen.
SOON AFTER HIS background check (which he warned would be quite boring reading for whatever desk cop had the misfortune to do so), he learned about the translation bug that had made the aliens understand him once they had access to language databases. He met with the scientists who were studying the alien tech and agreed to be the first test subject. After studying the human auditory system, the aliens decided that the bug they used for the Gurudev would work for humans.
Adrian passed out from the pain, which took a few days to ease. The bug was connected to his auditory nerve, and he was hailed as a hero by the aliens and could finally understand them.
When the New York Times interviewed him about it, he said it felt as if he had spent his life trying to build a ladder to a roof but then found someone had built an elevator on the other side of the building. He had worked hard to learn languages, and his reward was never having to think about them ever again. It was definitely bittersweet, but finally—finally—understanding the alien visitors was worth it.
Earth wasn’t happy about their new “friends” not helping them reach the stars or visit their space station, but when the aliens invited Adrian to spend some time meeting other diplomats on the space station Eternity, he agreed in an instant.
The evening before his first trip to Eternity, he had an unexpected visitor drop by his apartment.
He had light brown skin and was about sixty years old, bald, and taller and fitter than Adrian. He wore an army dress uniform and introduced himself as Lieutenant General Maxwell.
He removed his hat and held it in his hands, not sitting until Adrian invited him to take his easy chair. He was polite almost to a fault, and Adrian started to warm to him. People rarely treated him so respectfully. Even the humans who had agreed to make him ambassador treated him like a redneck cousin they were worried would embarrass them at a fancy dinner.
“The United States is grateful to you for stepping into this difficult position. Leaving your home to live in a foreign territory that no one has ever been to is a huge sacrifice.”
“Okay,” Adrian said hesitantly. No one had phrased it like that before. “Thanks?”
Maxwell nodded. “But I’m sure you understand that the government has diplomats that they would have preferred to send, considering the difference in diplomatic training and experience between you and other terrestrial ambassadors.”
Adrian’s face heated up. “I know that. They make it known in no uncertain terms. But I’ve been going through training.”
“You have, but you are still untested. And you’re entering a diplomatic arena that is a black hole—we don’t even know how dangerous it is, and once we find out the danger, it will likely be too late. One misstep could get us involved in an intergalactic war. And we are not yet prepared for that.”
“They also told me this,” Adrian said, his voice tight. This guy, this general, sat holding his hat in his hand, still looking cool and not as if he had just flat-out told Adrian that he didn’t expect him to do the job he had been assigned. “Where are you going with this? Because if you just came here to insult me . . .”
Maxwell raised a hand, showing his palm to stop Adrian. “Not at all, Ambassador.”
He used that title on purpose to make me feel better. But it did.
“I am here to convey the appreciation of the US government, and to go over your responsibilities with you.”
“I told you, I’ve already been through this training,” he said.
“For the benefit of the public and our new alien friends, yes.” Maxwell leaned forward as if to make sure no one could hear them in the otherwise empty apartment. “But there are some . . . private goals we hope you will strive for in your unique place as the only human aboard a station of aliens who could pose a great risk to humanity.”
Adrian listened carefully, and started a new list.