The Answer

         It first made its appearance next to my bedroom window, inside the room, with the moonlight rippling over the planes of its surface as the curtain fluttered in the breeze. Initially I thought it was a machine, but the moonlight sweeping across it revealed in moments of tantalizing clarity that it was a creature, black and hard like an insect’s shell, without eyes, ears mouth or antennae. It was hideous for this reason, but also repellant like the paintings of dinosaurs that fly or creep or swim.
         I spoke to it and immediately felt foolish, as I would feel speaking to Zeus in Spanish. In the darkness I could not tell whether it acknowledged me, or for that matter, whether it was standing or rather hovering. It emitted absolutely no sound — no mechanical clicks or whirrs, nor any biological noises such as respiration or the rumble of digestion.
         I live in a spacious house on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, a house I inherited from a generation that believed in large families. Around the house are a few acres of vacant scrub, and here and there an industrial plant — a brickyard or a factory from which emanate sparks from welding and the odor of paint.
         Why had it appeared in such a remote, obscure corner of a great metropolis, and to me, a retired professor of ancient languages? What did it want, if indeed “want” is even a category in its mental life?
         Then it was gone. It left no trace of its visit, no smell or tracks or secretion.
         I wondered if I had invented it, the way children create imaginary friends. I am lonely, never having married, never having had children, and once I had retired I ceased seeing people on a daily basis, and fewer and fewer people made the effort to drive out here to visit me, and I felt less and less like journeying into the city, where I knew no one and so stood frozen like a deer in headlights as masses of people swarmed around me.
         I was shaken. The many empty rooms I rarely visited suddenly seemed by their very vacancy to be attracting these things. I did not want to go about the corridors, opening doors one by one, dreading what I might see.
         It was a material object, so it must have arisen from whatever world it came from, but not the earth. No matter how bizarre life on earth is — the bacteria thriving in volcanic vents under the sea, or glowing, transparent creatures in the depths of the oceans, or the strangest insects in the Amazon, or for that matter, even the creatures reconstructed from fossils, there is always a recognizable design of body type, a symmetry, a system for ingesting nutrients, eliminating waste, sensing the environment, and for reproducing. But what I saw that night was a visitant from another world. I could not even determine whether it was organic or mechanical, or some combination of both. What was inside it? Was its exterior produced by a biological process, the way we grow teeth or a lobster its chiton? Did it know death?
         I thought it must be ancient. After all, it took 3.5 billion years to produce us, the intelligent apes, and we have just emerged from the Stone Age at that. And how did it get here? The distances in space are so huge that even at the speed of light...
         The next time it appeared — and I only became aware of it by a blackness on the periphery of my vision — was in my study. I slowly turned toward it and felt a shiver run down my spine. I turned down the light for I could not bear to look at its shape, floating above the floor, with the ease and silence of a balloon. It occurred to me that I might only be incidental to its interest or mission. Perhaps it was taking in my presence as it took in the existence of the desk and bookshelves, the carpet and the lamps. Was it a probe relaying information to some headquarters for analysis?
         Although I was unnerved and disgusted, I could not stand having it just look over my shoulder, as it were, as I lived my life. I decided I had nothing to lose by trying to communicate with it. My bookshelves are filled with books on epigraphy and writing systems, from hieroglyphs to cuneiform to Chinese characters. I took out a sheet of paper and wrote the five cardinal vowels and the various diphthongs formed by combining them. I wrote [a] and pronounced it, then [e], then [i] and so on. I did the same for the consonants, matching them in their voiceless ([s]) and voiced ([z]) pairs. The page was filled with a neat grid of all the speech sounds of Spanish. I pronounced each sound alone and in a sample word.
         I drew a picture of a table and said “table”. I even drew the wave patterns for each vowel, hoping to convey the fact that we communicate by sending sound waves through the atmosphere. Surely wave patterns would be a universal concept. I gained a greater admiration for the patience and skill of Helen Keller’s teacher, Anne Sullivan.
         No response whatsoever. No sign of having attended to my lesson, no sign of interest. Just silence from this black object floating above the floor. I say black, but I don’t know how to describe its color, which seemed somehow indeterminate, a dark color that absorbed all light and reflected back a hue both dark and subtly variable. I could not give the color a name.
         My computer screen came to life and said “table”. A row of jagged lines with some sections more compressed than others shot across the screen, like lines on a seismograph. Other words followed.
         I typed “The book is on the table” and pointed to a closed book next to the computer.
The computer spoke, a little too loud as if to a person hard of hearing, “The book is on the table.”
         I demonstrated questions, clauses, transitive and intransitive verbs, pronouns, adverbs, participles and every syntactic pattern I could think of. It learned as fast as I could type.
         “Who are you?” I typed.
         No answer. It was as if it had absorbed this lesson, then become bored, its mind wandering off to other details of the environment. I wondered if the situation were like that of, say, a geologist from a great city who was stuck in a backward town while he analyzed soil samples.
         I asked where it was from and why it was here. Nothing but a blank screen and silence.
         I am by nature a verbal person with little or no talent for numbers and mathematics. I felt this deficiency keenly, and aided by a natural curiosity about the world we find ourselves in, I avidly read every layman’s textbook on science I could find, especially those on astronomy and cosmology.
         Recently I had found a richly illustrated volume on the history of life and had come across a drawing that made a deep impression on me. It was titled “How the platypus sees the world”. But sight was not much involved; instead, the platypus has 40,000 electric sensors on its bill. The drawing showed projecting from the platypus’s bill a huge, invisible bulb, represented by intersecting lines, like longitude and latitude on a misshapen globe. This is how the platypus navigates through the muddy waters of Australia.
         And not long ago I had seen a lecture on television by a psychologist who studies the effect of the earth’s electromagnetic field on the human brain. He said brains emit photons amounting to about one Joule per lifetime. Even with a total of seven billion Joules for every brain in the world’s population, the electromagnetic field could easily store all this information. If we knew how, we could read everyone’s thoughts. The lecturer said it might explain a well-known and much studied phenomenon. A daughter may awake in the middle of the night feeling that something terrible has happened to her mother hundreds of kilometers away. She phones and finds out her mother has just had a heart attack. It may be, he said, that since the mother and daughter share a great deal of genetic material, their brains are structurally similar, and thus attuned to one another’s broadcast thoughts.
         Therefore, it seemed to me that as objects move through an electromagnet field they generate electricity, just as the huge moon Io produces a flux tube of energy that reaches down to the surface of Jupiter as it sweeps through the planet’s powerful magnetic field. Each object, depending on its size, shape, speed and material, would create a unique signature, as do the patterns of compressions in air that signal words in human language.
         I picked up from my desk a heavy magnet that I use as a paper clip holder. I held it up not far from the thing whose dark surfaces slowly boiled like the surface of Neptune. I moved a letter opener across it.
         The computer screen instantly flickered into life. A series of waves raced across a blue background. It did the same when I passed other objects across the magnet, a paper clip, a pen, even non-metallic objects, like a book and glass dish, in the hope that somehow the way they disturbed the magnetic field would register.
         It was way ahead of me. Each electromagnetic pattern, in a truncated form, was juxtaposed to a picture of the object, much as printed words to pictures in a children’s dictionary.
         This made my flesh creep. I felt dizzy for a moment, fighting on the one hand the desire to flee to a time and place before it had come into my life, and on the other hand, a frisson of excitement at having made the first communication with an alien intelligence. Perhaps today this scene would be repeated over and over as others stumbled upon this means of communication. Or was I the only one? If so, it is certainly an irony that this history-changing event should befall a man who more or less consciously chose a reclusive life and who is ambivalent about human companionship.
         I typed a question, hoping it would automatically be translated into a series of electromagnetic waves that constituted its language.
         “What is the cure for cancer?”
         “Cancer can be cured by controlling the cell mechanisms that govern the life cycle of cells, specifically the p57 tumor suppressor gene...”
         Then the message halted, and a question appeared:
         “What is Aqua-Net?”
         In the middle of giving the cure for cancer it asks about a hairspray! It must have detected the spray can in my bathroom cabinet, a relic from a woman’s visit God knows how many years ago, which I had never gotten around to throwing out.
         But I sensed it was not the product itself, which could not possibly be more alien and useless, but the metaphor in the brand name. It was asking why this product was not called “hairspray”.
         I wanted to clear this up fast so that it would continue to elaborate on the cure for cancer.
         I typed, “An aerosol polymer sprayed on hair to keep it in a certain style even in windy conditions. ‘Aqua’ is Latin for ‘water’, an ingredient, and ‘net’ because the polymers act in the same way as a fine hair net. ‘Net’ is a metaphor, as in, for example, ‘Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’”
         The screen remained blank.
         After waiting a while I typed, “Please continue describing the cure for cancer.”
         A bar of sunlight shining through the part in the curtains slowly drifted across the screen during the afternoon hours, as indifferent and unhurried as Foucault’s pendulum knocking over pegs one by one as the earth rotates beneath it.
         Its size must have very little relation to its capacity for knowledge and intelligence, anymore than the ever increasing capacity of computer chips has to their size. If I had a mind like that, one that held the mysteries of the universe, and its history, and probably a zoology of extraterrestrial lifeforms, how would I “feel” about communicating with an ape that a blink of an eye ago was living in a cave? How ugly we must seem to it, how slow and stupid, and especially how violent — a world of mass graves and bloody explosions. I am certain most people would have blasted it with a shotgun or handgun as soon as they saw it.
         With my apish mind, I cannot find the right words to communicate with it. How can I presume that words such as “like”, “desire”, “love” mean anything to it? We evolved these words because we have pleasure centers in the brain to encourage behavior that would increase our chances of survival. We are mammals, therefore emotional. We are driven by hormones, most especially in sex and aggression. We experience sexual jealousy. It must be well beyond that. Can I speak of “interest” in something, “curiosity”, “boredom”? Is it mystical, part of a network of like objects? What does it do with all that knowledge and power? Does it exist as a hermit or explorer or as a citizen of an empire? Can the population and knowledge and power of an advanced civilization be contained in this one object? I cannot imagine what to say to it. Is it a stranger to humor? Most likely it has no need for such a defense mechanism. Very little of its early evolutionary stages must be left, perhaps only in vestigial form, the rest having been eliminated by engineering.
         I tried one more question.
         “The rate of expansion of the universe is increasing. The stars and their planets, in fact whole galaxies, are receding from one another at a greater and greater speed. The distances between the stars will continue to grow. With time the stars will one after another deplete their fuel and become cooling cinders in a vast emptiness. How will you cope with this future?”
         The answer came back rather quickly:
         “There is no technological solution to this process. It is already underway.”
         It did not elaborate beyond this terse statement of its limitation. It expressed no sorrow, no hope, no longing, no curse, no resignation. If only for a time I could experience what goes on inside that hideous exterior.
         This, then, must be the future of all civilization, of all intelligent life. If through some miracle we were to survive for, say, one million years of peace, avoiding comets and asteroids, mass extinction caused by catastrophic releases of methane from the tundra and the oceans, or an ice-age we could not shelter from, or a period of solar instability or a blast of radiation from a supernova, either one of which would sterilize the earth, not to mention destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons — if we managed to build a million-year-old civilization, solving all our social problems and overcoming our apish nature, would we evolve a utopia? What would we do with our time? Perhaps colonize other planets? Would we still be human enough to sink into despair, or even resignation? Would we care? Would we still have emotions then?
         I could think of nothing more to say to it, nothing to ask it, and as if sensing this it disappeared from my life. There was never one report on TV about anyone in the world experiencing such a visitation.
         The light industries around me continued to produce sparks and shape metal. Trucks and freight trains brought raw materials and took away finished products. The mail came every day — mostly bills and ads, with an occasional postcard — and now and then a friend wandered in. I cooked dinner, we drank and enjoyed conversation, and then the visitor left in the morning for Buenos Aires on the early train.
         We would have a quick breakfast of coffee and brioche in a café near the station. I could never bring myself to relate my days with whatever it was, that object beyond all comprehension. I wanted to talk about it, but even the most intelligent, sensitive person would thrash about for a reassuring explanation — I was delusional, a victim of being alone too much, or that I was speaking metaphorically (I shall never see metaphors in the same light!) — anything to restore the familiar order of things. Besides, I who have always lived by La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes, know that amour-proper can take on an appalling array of guises, yet, though I am a nobody on the fringe of civilization, something extraordinary happened to me, for reasons that I cannot begin to fathom. I was chosen to see behind the mask.
         The question now is how to live with this knowledge for what is left of my life.
© Robert L. Fisher, 2011