Cold Eyes (First Contact), page 26
“We look out across the mountains,” she says, “into the eternal night. From there, we can see other stars. We see them drifting past only to repeat in a cycle.”
“They circle around.”
“Yes. This is what told us we’re in orbit, circling our star, always looking at it. To see the universe, we must turn away from our sun.”
“Oh, we struggled with this too,” Dali says. “For us, the sun rises on one side of the planet, travels overhead during the day, and sets on the other side.”
“Your star moves?”
“No, no,” he says, waving his hands. “But for the longest time, we thought it did. Our planet spins. For thousands of years, we thought our planet was stationary and that it was our sun that was moving, but it was an illusion of perspective.”
“Thousands of years?” she asks. “We have heard of your time units, but we don’t understand them. We know of seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, decades and centuries, but the relationship between them is unknown.”
“Okay,” Dali says, bracing himself for something he already knows is going to sound preposterous. He doesn’t want to get distracted. He should steer the conversation back to the samples in the display case, but Dali’s a sucker for a tangent. As longwinded as it may become, he knows they’ll both learn something about each other from the discussion.
Dali says, “It all starts with seconds.” Dali snaps his fingers. Well, he tries to snap his fingers with a regular beat, but no sound comes from his thick gloves. Rose twists in the air, facing his hand as his glove bounces back and forth with fumbling fingers. “Seconds are steady. They’re like a beat. They give us a consistent way of measuring time.”
“Makes sense,” she says, drifting to face him. Her tunic changes color. It’s subtle, but when her team raided the apartment, her clothing was light grey, almost transparent. When he stood before the ruler, it was black. Now, it’s a soft red. The color change distracts him. He’s unsure of the significance, but he pushes himself on.
“Sixty seconds make a minute. Sixty minutes make an hour.”
“Okay, so sixty hours make a day,” she says, continuing his logic.
“Umm, no. Not quite. Twenty-four hours make a day.”
“Oh,” she says. “You’re changing numeric bases in the middle of a day? That’s interesting.”
Interesting isn’t quite the way Dali would describe it. She’s being polite.
After a moment’s awkward silence, Rose asks, “Why do you change numeric bases when measuring time? Sixty makes sense. Sixty is a beautiful number.”
Beautiful? Dali’s not sure if even the original Dali’s ever heard of math being described as beautiful before.
Rose says, “It’s easily divisible by a host of factors—thirty, twenty, fifteen, twelve, ten. And then you get every number from six to one. Why switch to twenty-four? You’re changing your usable factors from fifteen to twelve and two, while five shifts to four? You lose so many other factors. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“No, it doesn’t,” he admits. “Twenty-four hours is all that would fit within a day. A day is basically from one sunrise to the next, although we measure the day from the middle of the night.”
Rose doesn’t seem impressed. “Logically, you should have gone with the exception first, and had twenty-four seconds in a minute. Then you could have sixty minutes in an hour and sixty hours in a day. That would have made time-division much easier.”
“Um. I guess.”
Rose is quiet. Human time-reckoning is annoying her. She repeats his previous statement as a question, wanting some clarification.
“And you measure a day from the middle of the night? In the darkness? When there’s no natural point of reference?”
“Yeah,” Dali says, already knowing what her next question will be.
“How do you know when you’ve reached the middle of the night?”
Dali reaches up and rubs the back of his helmet. He’d like to rub his hair, but he can’t reach. Sheepishly, he says, “I dunno.”
“You don’t know how you reckon time?”
“No.”
Rose is aghast. “And a week?” she asks. Although Dali can’t read alien body language, Rose seems to grimace, apparently realizing the coming explanation isn’t going to make any sense.
“Seven days.”
“Seven? Really?” she asks. “Why use a prime number to define a week? It’s a number with no factors beyond one—and it’s odd. Doesn’t that make it cumbersome to work with?”
“Yep.” Dali is acutely aware how absurd all this sounds.
She asks, “Is it a factor of some other number you use in your date-time nomenclature?”
“I don’t know.”
Rose won’t let go of this point. “Why seven days?” she asks. “Is that how long it takes to orbit your star?”
“Oh, no,” he says. “It takes three hundred and sixty five-ish days.”
“Three hundred and sixty-five? That’s a huge number and it only has two factors: five and seventy-three.”
“I didn’t know that,” Dali says, genuinely surprised by how quickly she can do math in her head.
“Why not have five days in a week instead of seven?” she asks, apparently trying to be helpful. “Then you’d have a nice metric to work with when it comes to calculating years.”
Dali cringes. He dares not mention a working week. That would only confuse her more. He hunches his shoulders, hoping that gesture makes sense where words would fail him. It probably doesn’t.
He says, “Umm, months are worse.”
“Less factors?”
“Less logic.”
“How so?” Rose asks, intrigued.
“Some months have twenty-eight days, others have thirty while some have thirty-one.”
“What?” she asks, sounding incredulous. “There’s no consistency within months?”
“No.”
“But there’s a pattern to them, right?”
“No.”
“So how do weeks fit into months when none of those numbers have a factor of seven?”
“They don’t,” he says, trying not to laugh at human stupidity.
“That’s silly,” she says. “How do you calculate the number of days between any two dates in different months?”
“With great difficulty,” he says. “Honestly, most people don’t. And when I say, most people, I mean all people. We just don’t think that way.”
Rose appears to be on the verge of not asking her next question. She seems to anticipate it’s going to be another infuriatingly illogical answer, but curiosity gets the better of her.
“So months? How many months are there in a year? You’re going to say, twelve, aren’t you? Please. Don’t say, twelve.”
She’s clearly already done the math in her head. Dali grimaces as he says, “Twelve.”
“Yet another different numeric base?”
“Yes.”
She throws her arms wide. “Why not be consistent with your metrics?”
“I don’t know that there’s a reason,” he confesses, feeling dumb on behalf of humanity as a whole. “It’s just the way it’s always been.”
“So the reason is there’s no reason?” Rose undertakes a pirouette, spinning in the air. It must be the alien equivalent of shaking one’s head in disbelief.
“And decades?” she asks. “Centuries?”
“There are ten years to a decade. Ten decades or a hundred years to a century.”
“Ah, another base! You just switch numeric bases on a whim—from sixty to twenty-four to a random mix depending on whether you’re measuring weeks or months or days in a year, and then you switch to base ten for calculations beyond that?”
“Yup.”
“How did you make it to the stars?”
He laughs. “It took us a while.”
Rose taps the glass on the case, pointing at the display of ancient species that led down to floaters. “You were saying something about our superior line?”
Ouch! Yeah, that’s one way to drive the point home. Subtle, Rose. Real subtle.
Dali, though, won’t be deterred. “You didn’t make all this, did you?” he asks, ignoring the display case and gesturing at the vast open temple around them.
Rose is conspicuously quiet.
Dali says, “You have no need for polished floors or steps, and yet you use this place as the seat of all power. Why?”
She taps the glass again, wanting him to answer her question.
Dali continues to ignore her. He’s aware he’s hitting a logical pressure point, and he intends to get answers. “What’s the call of the cycle? The end that brings a new beginning? The cleanse?”
“Religious madness,” she says.
“That built all this?” he asks.
Rose pauses. Dali knows. She’s conflicted. She can hold to the party line and tell him what she’s supposed to, or she can be honest. As tempting as it is to press his point harder, Dali waits, wondering what she’ll decide. At this point, it’s her choice. If she lies, they’ll both know. Rose seems to sense that as her tunic changes color again, rolling through dark green to black and back to red. For someone that loves to talk, the silence is torture, but Dali holds his nerve.
“Our world is old,” she says, and Dali can feel it. She’s being honest. “Older than yours. Our culture, our civilization has thrived in one form or another for fifty million revolutions.”
“Hang on,” Dali says. “I’m gonna have to do some—”
Rose cuts him off. “Two and a half million of your years.”
Dali drops his hands to his knees, crouching within his suit. He needs a moment to appreciate the magnitude of that number. Damn.
“Oh,” he mumbles.
“It’s a long time,” Rose says.
“It’s a lot longer than us,” Dali says, flexing his legs against the oppressive pull of gravity on Bee. “We’ve only been playing with civilization for about ten thousand years—max. Two and a half million years ago, my species didn’t exist.”
“Neither did mine,” she says, which is a frank admission from her. “Not as it does today.”
“Back then,” Dali says, “my ancestors were carving axes from stone and playing with fire for the first time.”
“And all through that time,” Rose says.
“There have been cycles here on Bee,” he says, completing her thought.
She rotates her body forward. Her eyes drift down toward his boots and back level with him. It’s a curious display of body language, one that seems to suggest humility.
Dali says, “One faction arises, then another, then another, right?” taking an educated guess at the complexity of all that’s occurred during that time. On Earth, such a timespan dwarfs human civilization. It took humans ten thousand years to go from harvesting wheat to building pyramids and walking on the Moon. What could be accomplished in two million years of civilization?
“We will bring peace and harmony,” Rose says, only these aren’t her words—they’re those of the king. As there’s no inflection possible through the translation unit or any of the other subtle clues as to her intent, it takes him a second to interpret what she means. This is the official position, but whether it can be achieved, she’s not convinced. If she was, she would have lied rather than tell him the truth.
“I washed ashore on a beach. There was a cave and a—”
“A tribute to the sun.”
“And cave paintings.”
“You saw yourself,” she says.
“Yes.”
“And what did you think?” she asks.
“I got off the bus at the wrong stop,” Dali says, but that’s too cryptic. He follows up with, “It’s not me. It can’t be.”
“Do you believe in prophecy?”
“Me?” Dali asks, pointing at himself in his spacesuit. “No.”
“Me neither,” Rose says. “Or I didn’t.”
“And now?”
“Now, I’m not so sure.”
“Come on. You’re better than this, Rose,” Dali says. “You’re a scientist. Look at the evidence. Form a hypothesis. Test your ideas. It’s not me. It can’t be. It’s a coincidence at best.”
It’s strange to talk to a floating brain with shoulders and arms, especially as her vocalization comes through his radio so there’s no sense of direction accompanying the sound. He’s learning, though, to associate the slight flashes and flickers of shapes running across her skin as accompanying her comments. They give him a glimpse into her thinking. Sometimes, there’s vigor behind them. Other words are accompanied by a rolling swell of stippled colors. This time, though, the shades are muted.
“How do you explain it then?” she asks.
“We see what we want to see. On Earth, people will burn bread—a type of food—and see the face of some ancient prophet in the crazy, scorched fibers. Don’t discount the ability of otherwise intelligent people to chase rainbows.”
“So the white figure?”
“White’s a color of convenience. Your medics use it to ensure they’re clean. White paint shows up best in the shadows. It’s an entirely predictable choice for your cave dwellers.”
“And the helmet?”
“The circle?” Dali says, correcting that point. “The halo? It could be anything. You’d have to ask them. It could simply be a point of distinction, a contrast to everyone else. It could be a gas bladder similar to the one that keeps you afloat.”
“So it’s not you?”
Dali says, “It couldn’t be. It’s a guess. No, it’s a longing. Your civilization is caught in endless cycles. It would be more surprising if there wasn’t a desire to break out. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, perhaps millions of years ago, someone painted that figure because they wanted something more.”
Rose says, “But you are something more.”
“We all want something more,” Dali says. “Intelligence demands more. Being alive demands more, but what we’re looking for isn’t out there somewhere. That’s the curse of intelligence—never being satisfied, always longing for something but not knowing what. To be content. To accept life for what it is rather than trying to make it something it’s not. That’s what we need.”
Rose laughs. It's something that comes across with surprising clarity in his Snoopy cap.
“You’re sure you’re not a prophet?”
“Oh, I’m sure.”
“And these?” she asks, directing the conversation back to the display case.
“These are the lies we tell ourselves,” he says. “That we’re important—more important than others. Each evolutionary branch has hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of variations. There’s no one superior line. Yes, these are your common ancestors, but they’re the ancestors of the sky-whales and trees as well. And yet, this is just one shared attribute. I’ve seen another trait. One that’s even older.”
“Really?”
“The other species. Those in the spire.”
“The bipeds,” she says. “We call them prowlers.”
“You think you’re different,” Dali says. “But you both speak in the same way, with your skin changing shades. I suspect you share a common ancestor, one that predates the oldest one in this case. You’re both intelligent. You both talk in color. You must see that. For all your differences, you’re the same.”
“Are you absolutely sure you’re not a prophet?” she asks, chuckling. “Come. I have something to show you.”
Dali walks on. His steps are sluggish, but his power-frame carries him forward. Rose brings him to a halt by three large glass spheres of increasing size. They’re set on scaffolding several feet off the marble floor. Bundles of cables and pipes wind into various metal boxes beneath the spheres. A set of stairs leads up to the first glass bubble. It’s no bigger than a bathroom. The next is slightly larger. The third is about the size of the main cabin on the Magellan. A swarm of drifters fly around the contraption, examining various parts.
“What’s this?” Dali asks, taking a good look at the pressure tanks and pipes beneath the structure.
“Home.”
“What?”
“There are two sterilization chambers. Beyond that, you’ll find the atmospheric mix and pressure is the same as your suit.”
“I—I can take this off?” Dali says, stuttering. “They told me I couldn’t, that I’d die.”
“The composition of the final chamber has been modeled after the interior of your suit. My team assures me it’s sterile.”
She gestures to the stairs. Dali’s power-walker helps him climb. Metal grating passes beneath his boots. He steps into the first sphere. The curved glass closes behind him. Steam rushes from jets on the ceiling. He holds his arms out, turning slowly, wanting the jets to get into all the folds of his exploration suit. A fine mist beads on his visor.
As he stands there dripping wet, the second sphere opens. Dali walks forward, and another rinse cycle begins. There seems to be some kind of soap or disinfectant in the mix as bubbles form on his arms. After another rinse, a cyclone of air swirls around him, wicking away the water. Finally, the last sphere opens, and he walks onto a floor made from soft, padded foam. His boots sink slightly. Over the course of the three spheres, Dali noticed the pressure around his suit dropping, making it easier to move. Standing within the final sphere, he turns to Rose. She’s floating on the other side of the glass, watching him.
“It’s okay. We wouldn’t hurt you.”
Dali doesn’t have to do this. He could stay in his suit. According to Kari, he should stay in his suit, but the idea of being free, even if only for a short while, is overwhelming. It’s the weight, the sweat, the sense of claustrophobia from his helmet. It’s all too much. He punches commands into his wrist pad computer, powering down his life support. With both gloved hands planted firmly on either side of his helmet, he twists. The locking ring gives. Air hisses around him. Dali raises his helmet, breathing deeply. The air within the habitat is cool, moist, fresh. He pulls off his gloves, removes the power-frame and the backpack, but he leaves the rest of his suit on. Should anything go wrong, he wants to be able to react quickly. Deep down, he knows he’s kidding himself. If there’s a leak or if the structure fails, he’ll be crushed before he can react. Still, it’s comforting to have dropped the life-support unit. He unplugs the hoses and checks the CO2 scrubbers. They’re surprisingly clean.
