SERIOUS GAPS IN INTELLECT
Lunar day 252
T minus 22 hours to evacuation
Once word got out that we were leaving Moon Base Alpha, school was canceled for the day. The adults all realized that we kids wouldn’t be able to concentrate on our classes—and that we could be better used helping with the evacuation procedures.
It didn’t take long to pack our own things for evacuation, but prepping the rest of MBA was a great deal of work. Lots of delicate scientific equipment had to be carefully packed, while other experiments had to be configured to continue running while we were gone. Since the second wave of rockets would only be a week behind the first, we also had to begin prepping all the remaining equipment for “hibernation mode,” and there was a great deal of equipment: evaporators, rehydrators, air-circulation systems, maintenance robots. Most of us had our hands full helping out.
Meanwhile, Roddy Marquez was spending his last day on the moon the way he’d spent every one of the 251 days before it: playing veeyar games. Now that we didn’t have school, the rec room was wide open.
Although I was worried about the depleted oxygen, overall I was happier than I’d been in weeks. Months, maybe. I had been expecting to spend another twenty-eight months on the moon. Now, in only a day, I would be leaving. Suddenly, all the things that had made life miserable on the moon didn’t seem so bad, because I wouldn’t have to experience them much longer. My lunch of rehydrated pepperoni calzone may have been lousy, but at least it was probably my last lunch of rehydrated pepperoni calzone. A visit to the space toilet was far less awful knowing that I would only have to visit it a few more times.
Assuming the evacuation went off properly.
I had lived on the moon long enough to know that things there rarely worked out exactly as planned. I could only hope that this would be an exception, that the rockets would arrive on time, that there wouldn’t be any malfunctions, and that nothing would get worse with our air supply before we left.
I had just polished off that hopefully-the-last pepperoni calzone when Zan appeared. I was in the mess hall, putting my garbage in the recycler for what was almost the last time.
Zan instantly gleaned that I was in a far better mood than usual from reading my emotions. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“We’re evacuating the moon tomorrow,” I told her, doing my best not to say it out loud.
“Why?” Zan asked, understandably surprised.
I glanced around the mess hall, which was a bigger hive of activity than usual. “Let’s talk about this in my residence,” I said. I could see Violet helping my parents in the science pod, so I figured our room would be peaceful for once.
“All right,” Zan said.
I quickly dumped my used food packets in the recycler, then hurried through the base to our room, and told Zan everything I knew about the evacuation along the way.
“I can’t believe you’re going,” she said, once I’d closed the door behind us. “This must be quite a present for your birthday.” While she sounded happy, there was something I couldn’t quite read beneath the surface. The interface of our emotions went both ways when we were in contact, although I wasn’t quite as adept at reading hers as she was at reading mine.
“Is something wrong?” I asked her.
“It’s nothing to be concerned about. You might not have enjoyed being here, but this moon base is special to me. It is the only place I have ever communicated with humans.”
“But that doesn’t mean you can’t contact me when I’m back on earth, right?”
“I have had contact with life on earth before.”
“Hold on. I thought Dr. Holtz was the first human you ever spoke to.”
“Who said I could only speak to humans?”
I sat down on an InflatiCube, surprised. “You’ve communicated with life that wasn’t human?”
“There are millions of different life forms on earth, Dashiell.”
“Yes, but most of them aren’t very good at conversation.”
“That’s true,” Zan admitted. “However, I felt it was worth trying to understand them when weighing the fate of your planet. After all, their lives hang in the balance too. I don’t talk to them, exactly, but I can experience what they do.”
“And what do they experience?”
“It varies. Your elephants and dolphins have an astonishing array of emotions. In fact, they feel some things even more strongly than you do. Whereas a wildebeest doesn’t seem to have much on its mind except grass.”
“You’ve been inside the mind of a wildebeest?”
“Yes. And moose and honeybees and tiger sharks and sea otters and dozens of other animals. I must admit, the otters were quite fun.”
“Did the animals understand what you were?”
“Even less than you do.”
Something about that statement struck me as a bit insulting. “Zan, are you saying that I don’t understand what you are?”
“That’s correct.”
“Well, that’s not my fault! You’ve barely told me anything about yourself!”
“I know. And as I promised you, I am going to try to rectify that. That’s why I have come to you again today.”
“Really?” My annoyance quickly gave way to excitement.
Zan sensed this. “However, I have to warn you, I still won’t be able to answer everything you want to know about me.”
“Why not?”
“Because you won’t understand it.”
“You can’t even try?”
“It wouldn’t be worth our time.”
I wondered if I should feel insulted by this, too. “Is this because I haven’t been able to figure out how to transmit my thoughts the way you do?”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“What do you mean?”
Zan sat down across from me and looked directly into my eyes. Her eyes were so blue I almost felt lost in them. “Have you ever heard of Fermi’s paradox?”
“Sure. The idea is that if there are hundreds of millions of planets in our galaxy, then the probability is that at least one of them should have intelligent life. So Fermi wondered why we hadn’t heard from anyone yet.” This was the sort of thing that got discussed quite often at mealtimes at MBA. Obviously, I had a whole new perspective on it lately.
“Exactly. Dr. Holtz told me about it. The truth is, there are actually billions of planets in our galaxy, and thousands of them have intelligent life. So I suppose the question for you is: Why have none of us contacted you until now?”
“When we first met, you said that was because you didn’t know we were around until recently. That you hadn’t noticed us yet.”
“That wasn’t quite honest of me. The truth is, many alien civilizations have known about you for much of the past thousand years. In fact, some of them even tried to contact you. But you couldn’t comprehend them.”
“Why not?”
“Because our civilizations are far too advanced compared to yours. Imagine a colony of ants trying to understand what a rocket ship is.”
I definitely felt insulted now. “And humans are the ants in this scenario?”
“Please don’t take offense. We know you are smarter than ants are. But compared to us . . .”
“We’re as dumb as ants.”
“Let’s just say that you’re operating on a different plane of understanding from ours. So when attempts to contact you were made, you didn’t have any idea what they were.”
“Maybe that was the case a few thousand years ago. But we’re smarter now. I mean, I understand you.”
“Yes, but . . . that has less to do with your species getting smarter than, well . . .” Zan shifted uncomfortably. “I have figured out how to communicate on your level.”
“You mean you’ve figured out how to talk down to us? Like humans figuring out how to communicate with ants?”
“Yes.”
I frowned at this, disturbed by the thought of being so dumb. “Is that why the other civilizations aren’t so concerned about whether or not we wipe ourselves out? Because we’re just like a bunch of ants to them?”
Zan dodged my question. Instead she said, “You wanted answers, Dashiell. This is part of the reason I have been hesitant to share them with you. If this conversation is disturbing to you, we can stop it.”
“No!” I said, more sharply than I’d expected. I took a moment to gather my thoughts. “It’s just a lot to get my head around.”
“I expected as much. And you are better prepared for it than most people would be. Even though Dr. Holtz was excited to reveal my existence, he had some grave concerns about how humanity would handle it.”
“Not as grave as Garth Grisan,” I said sourly. Garth had killed Dr. Holtz to keep Zan’s existence a secret.
“Oh, Dr. Holtz had many of the same worries as Garth,” Zan replied. “That’s why he didn’t want to tell the entire earth at once. He felt that the revelation could have a dangerous effect.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” I said. “Not if you came in peace.”
“Dr. Holtz told me a story once. The tale of a tribe in your Amazon rain forest that didn’t encounter the rest of civilization until relatively recently. They were what you would think of as primitive: only a few hundred people with Stone Age technology. However, since they didn’t know about the rest of the world, they thought they were the pinnacle of human achievement.
“One day, two Western explorers stumbled into their village. The tribesmen recognized that the explorers had different technology than they did, but they still considered the men far inferior to them. After all, the tribe was far better suited to its habitat than the explorers were, and the explorers needed all sorts of silly clothing and gadgets to survive. The explorers offered to take some of the tribesmen to see their civilization, and the two bravest tribesmen agreed. So they went off down the river. The tribesmen expected that everyone they encountered would be lesser than they were. Within a few hours, they had traveled farther than anyone from the tribe had ever gone before in their history.
“In a day’s time, they reached a small town, and the tribesmen were startled to see that this town had far more people than they even knew had existed on earth. They were overwhelmed by everything the townspeople had: so much food, so many boats, so much technology. And then they came to a larger town, and a larger town, and a larger town, until, eventually, they arrived at the great city at the mouth of the Amazon, with millions of people and skyscrapers and cars and ships the size of mountains. By this time, the poor tribesmen were catatonic with shock. Because their entire view of the world had been overturned. They had gone from being the most important, advanced people on earth to an insignificant, irrelevant little group. It was a tremendous blow to their mental states—and they never recovered from it. One died within a few weeks, while the other went insane.”
I thought about that for a while. “That might not happen with us. Humanity has prepared itself for the possibility of alien life. Lots of the world is excited about it.”
“I have seen what you have imagined alien life to be. The spaceships and creatures of your movies and TV shows. As you know, I have found those ridiculous. But I haven’t quite let you know how ridiculous. The spaceships you envision are merely rudimentary modifications to your airplanes. To travel from planet to planet requires technology you aren’t even close to understanding. It requires spacecraft that would, well . . . blow your minds.”
“And you can’t even try to explain this to us?”
“Not really.”
“But you actually have this technology? You can travel between planets at warp speed and stuff like that?”
“There are some civilizations that have mastered interplanetary travel. Although, once again, it doesn’t work with warp speed or anything like you have imagined.”
I noticed that she hadn’t quite answered my question. “Can your civilization do it?”
“Our technology is not quite as advanced as some civilizations’, but we understand the concepts behind interplanetary travel. However, it would be ludicrous for us to attempt such a thing. We couldn’t possibly travel anywhere else.”
“Why not?”
“Because my species isn’t terrestrial.”
I took a moment to process that, failing to hide my surprise. “You live in water?”
“Yes. Just as most life on your own planet does. In fact, on both our planets, life first evolved in the water. On my planet, it just so happened that the most intelligent life forms stayed there.”
“So you can’t build spaceships because they would need to hold all the water,” I concluded. “And that’s too great a weight to fly with. Plus, if you got to a planet without water, you wouldn’t be able to get around.”
“That’s correct. Luckily, we evolved some adaptations to our aquatic environment that gave us other ways to travel across space. For example, we needed to develop another way to communicate besides voice, and that eventually led to our telepathic abilities.”
I was glad I was sitting down. I was so amazed by all these revelations, my knees had gone wobbly. It had never occurred to me that there might be a hyperintelligent aquatic species on some other planet. “So, are you like some sort of really smart fish?”
Zan smiled, amused, then said, “Perhaps I should just show you what I look like.”
“You mean it?” I asked excitedly. “Right now?”
“I think the time has come,” Zan replied.
And then she changed.
One moment, she was a human being. The next, she wasn’t.
I admit, I had been slightly worried that she would turn out to be some sort of hideous sea creature. A lot of aquatic life on earth is disturbing to look at: anglerfish, hagfish, wolf eels, sea cucumbers. But Zan wasn’t anything like that.
She was like nothing I had ever imagined.
In the most basic sense, she was like an enormous jellyfish, but there were major differences. For starters, her skin—or whatever her surface was called—was a gorgeous color that was completely new to me, a kind of luminescent pink, like the color of a sky during a sunset, only better. From within the large bulb that would be the body of a jellyfish, there was a glow that seemed to indicate an immense brain at work inside, while all around the bulb were hundreds of little blue dots. Since these were the same color as Zan’s eyes when she showed herself to me, I figured that they were her eyes now as well, although they obviously weren’t anything like my eyes. A dozen long, tubelike tentacles extended from her body.
She wavered in the air in front of me, as though she was bobbing in water that I couldn’t see, her tentacles and body rippling.
She was definitely alien, absolutely nothing like a human being at all—or any of the humanoid beings that showed up in all our movies. And yet . . .
“Zan,” I said. “You’re beautiful.”
Zan’s color shifted to a crimson red. “Thank you,” she said, actually sounding flattered. “Would you like me to stay this way . . . or would it be easier if I returned to human form?”
“No offense, but human form would be easier.”
“I understand.” Zan was instantly human again. “How’s this?”
“Better,” I said, although this was a slight lie. It was now hard not to think of Zan as some sort of enormous gelatinous polyp. “Thanks for showing me your real form.”
“I’m glad you liked it. I expect you must have many questions.”
“Yes.” In fact, I had so many, I had almost no idea where to start. “Are you carbon-based? Like life on earth?”
“I am. And so is most of life in the universe. Although beyond that, our bodies are constructed quite differently.”
“So those tentacle things. Are those arms?”
“Yes. Although we can also use them to sense the world in various ways. And we eat through them.”
“How?”
“We catch food and then absorb it through special organs. It is far more efficient than your need to shift food from your hands to your mouths in order to consume it.”
“What do you eat?”
“Aquatic creatures. I suspect you would find them disgusting. The truth is, we don’t make as big a deal out of eating as you humans do. Cooking is one of the things I find so fascinating about your culture.”
“If you evolved the ability to communicate telepathically, do you think that’s why I can’t do it?”
“But you did do it, Dashiell. When you appeared to Riley back on earth.”
“Yes, but you were kind of helping me then, weren’t you? I could feel you inside my head when it happened.”
“I was there with you, but you were the one who jumped. I will admit, I was skeptical that you could do it until that moment. I am not anymore. You have the power to do it again.”
“Then why can’t I?”
“Well, it’s not easy. Even for me. And I suspect that, to do it with any regularity, you will need to train your mind to work in a very different way than it’s used to.”
“Is this one of those things that’s going to be way too complicated for an ant like me to understand?”
“You’re not an ant. But yes, it might be too complicated. There are things that evolve besides our bodies. Ways of thinking evolve too. Ways of understanding the universe. For example, you see a limited part of the color spectrum and hear a limited part of the aural spectrum, but other animals can see colors that you can’t or hear sounds that you can’t.”
“Like how bees can see infrared and dogs can hear high notes?”
“Exactly. And those limitations shape your perspective of the world. Well, there are other, more complicated forms of perception too. Like your concept of distance.”
I cocked my head, trying to understand. “You mean different species can perceive distance differently?”
“Yes. And what you think of as a massive distance between two planets may not appear the same to a different creature.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“There was a time when people would have said that Einstein’s theory of relativity didn’t make any sense. And a time before that when people thought it was heresy to say that the earth revolved around the sun. Right now, you have barely begun to scratch the surface of what the universe is truly like. Although some human scientists are beginning to theorize that what I am saying about distance might be true. Including at least one scientist on your moon base.”
“Who?”
“Dr. Brahmaputra-Marquez. She is really quite brilliant.”
And yet she still married Dr. Marquez, I thought. “So your planet really isn’t hundreds of light years away?”
“Well, it still takes hundreds of years for light to travel from one to the other, but that is only one way to perceive distance. Has it ever occurred to you that our conversations take place without any gaps in time even though we are on different planets?”
I winced, feeling like an idiot. Because it hadn’t occurred to me. When I spoke to people back on earth over the ComLinks, there was always a slight delay in transmission, because it took a few seconds for the sound to cover the distance to the moon. But this had never happened when I talked to Zan, even though we were light years apart. “I guess I figured thought moved faster than light or something.”
“No. It can simply travel in ways that light can’t.”
I rubbed my temples. My head was starting to throb. Talking to Zan was always mentally taxing, but the complexity of this conversation was taking an additional toll on me.
“Are you all right, Dashiell?”
“Yes. I’m just trying to comprehend everything.”
“It may take time.”
“Right,” I agreed, although I was wondering if I would ever understand this, even if I had the rest of my life to do it. “This secret that you have that could save humanity. . . . Is there a chance that, even if you tell me what it is, humanity won’t understand it?”
“I suppose. Although I have faith in you, Dashiell.”
“Does that mean you’re going to share it?”
Zan pursed her lips. “I’m afraid I still haven’t decided.”
I was about to press her on the issue, but before I could, Violet walked into the room. She froze upon seeing me, surprised.
“Hey,” I said. “Could you give me a little privacy? I was about to call Riley. . . .”
“No, you weren’t,” Violet said matter-of-factly. “I know you’re talking to Zan.”
I sighed. A few weeks before, Violet had caught me talking to Zan, so I’d had to pretend that I had an imaginary friend. “I’m not,” I argued. “Zan doesn’t exist.”
“Sure she does,” Violet said. “I can see her.” Then, to my surprise, she looked right at Zan and said, “Hi!”
After which, to my even greater surprise, Zan looked right back at her and said, “Hello, Violet. It’s nice to see you again.”