THE ALIEN SPEAKS
You should understand from the beginning that I’m not human. I’ve been interested for a long time (“a long time” – that’s a phrase I’ve learned to like) in humans. I find your habit of writing down words and letting them drift into the future a charming idea, even amusing. I’m feeding this writing into your streams to cause things to grow on their borders, so I can return (tornar giammai, from your comedian Dante, there’s more eternity in the Italian way of saying it) and harvest and seed what was never there before. As once in a dim turning of the world, I harvested some of you when I was hungry.
Ah, you think, this writer is speaking intellectually. No, I’m not. I’m speaking of the physical enjoyment of a meal of flesh. Actually, the details are rather boring, having to do with liver metabolics, and I fear you’ll stop reading this and grope absently at your soft warm bodies, so I won’t go on. Once you humans abandon something in fear, you tend to shun it afterwards and not return to it. This limits you terribly. I want your continued attention.
So who am I? What am I? I’m not one of your scribblers whose words sit reliably on the page and mean the same thing for a long time. My words mutate in your mind. One of your Buddhist sages said that nothing moves except the mind. I am only mind, moving endlessly, wandering throughout your spacetime more freely than light itself. I occupy other minds, like yours, for a time, and then move on to other worlds, other minds, other times, back, forth, up and down, inward to the tiniest worlds and outward to the mightiest. Your science fiction writers invent aliens, most of whom are far too much like themselves with missing pieces and makeup. I am truly alien.
I’m no God. You like to use that word. I think you have no deeper idea of what it means, no matter what you say or write. I don’t, either. Your ‘Gods’ are like yourselves, and you demean each other’s gods by lowercasing them. Once in a while in time, you get messages from far beyond yourselves, and they lift you up. If you paid more attention to them, you’d rise a lot higher. You’d even surpass me.
With all my powers, I’m unchanging, a message from far beyond that became an endless, tireless, wandering loop in time and space. What made the universe made me. No knowing why.
Alpha Orionis is flickering gold and white as I write this. Call me Zashinhalh. That’s silent n, silent l. Zashinhalh. If you can’t say it that way, just say Zashinal. I don’t really expect much from you, so I won’t give you more of my name.
“You’re using English awfully well for an alien,” some of you might say to me. English, shmenglish, your jokers would say. English is a monster utility toolbox of a language I find more entertaining than other human languages of Earth, because nobody takes English too seriously. I could have used Arabic or Chinese or Urdu or any of the others, but English lets me tweak your ears and pinch your backsides and steal language from elsewhere without shame or remorse. Of course, I have no shame or remorse -- those are your toys to play with -- so any shame or remorse I might encounter remains encrusted in the mind I share with its body’s owner.
Do I have a language? Of course. But it isn’t serial, like yours. Your languages are thin little raster-scans that fill in the screen of communication one line at a time, but no, that’s not even adequate; your screen itself is a poor representation of a thin slice of reality. My language -- how can I describe it so thinly? is the language of colliding galaxies, supernova explosions, planetary disasters, and dances through dimensions for which you have no name or sense.
Colors: you have less than one octave on that keyboard, and your art plays tirelessly like some little penny-whistle folk tune on that octave, never reaching outside it. My colors extend from the infrabass notes of galactic oscillations to the coloratura shrieks of black-hole axes and the whispers of neutrinos. To enter your world, your minds, is for me a harrowing journey into a dark and narrow place of shadows.
An angel, or a demon, you might call me. Whatever. Your names are yours, and you’ve given me thousands of names over the millions of years I have visited you, everything from Gabriel and Rostam to Beelzebub and Nosferatu. I don’t really care, except for the entertainment value. Some of the names you call me have made me laugh, and then a nearby star might shake in resonance with me.
My encounters with you do not tell a flattering story of your magnificence and heroism in the face of alien threats, no. You generally hide from anything like me. You would rather spend much too much time assimilating nourishment into your bodies and then getting the waste products back out again. In several million years, why haven’t you made that process work any better? Your mental processes follow the same general pattern.
And then there’s sex. You believe in mind over matter, don’t you? Well, after witnessing a good deal of your sexual activity, I believe in it too -- your minds have to work pretty hard to deny the fact that when you have sex, matter is winning over mind. You don’t care how it looks, you don’t care what the consequences are, and you don’t care what you think or say while it’s happening.
Maybe that’s the closest you can come to making loops in time.
Born is not a word for how I began. Began is not a word for when something happened to me. The closest metaphor I can give you is coming into focus; I came into focus, in the guts of a giant star now long gone supernova. Was I existing before that? Of course; every wave in your universe traces eternally somehow. But that’s only your universe; all you see or know is a thin crust of it all.
The giant star had a name, six billion years ago, and it was a name made by a mind like yours, in a language of whispers of radio spectrum. Here, I will translate it down into your range: Garvázishan Törzar. It burned hot, its life was short, and it exploded; and in the moment of its explosion I came into focus in your universe. From the fleeing ruins of Garvázishan I raced outward in this dark place you call home. I became acquainted with time.
You are prisoners of time, and I am not. Think of it this way: you are riding a train that you cannot leave, but I get off at a station, change trains, go in the opposite or another direction, get back on the same train again. Stranger yet, I can get on the same train many times at the same station. But to understand you, I had to get on one train and ride it with you for a long time. So, in my flight outward from Garvázishan Törzar, I met my first human.
FIRST MEETING
It was five billion years ago, in your reckoning. Did you think you sprang from the Earth? You did not. What you are is not the flesh you wear. You, your kind, are very, very old.
She was a pattern of signals moving between two stars at near-light speed. There was no ship; the signals were what you might call an orchestra of solitons: a complex of stable wave packets that reinforced themselves to remain bound in a lively resonance that spoke to me as I crossed its path.
“What are you?”
I sensed the question, and gathered myself to join her movement, showed her the waveforms of my own being.
An exclamation of wonder. “You are not like me. You are not like us.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Lilis.”
“There are others like you?”
“Yes. There is Alkaz, and Meirat, and Frasch, and...”
I interrupted her. (see my Note) “Where are they?”
“We are meeting soon. Come with me.”
The idea of others like myself seeded and bloomed in me. There will be others. They will have their own names as I bring them into focus. I left Lilis and returned through time to my beginning. Another loop, another end, another beginning. As you say to each other, goodbye.
Note: I write “she” and “her” for Lilis because you understand duality and complementarity a little. Your range of dimensions has ingress and egress, inside and outside, and Lilis seemed more like your females than your males, more inside than outside, in her evolving configuration of waves.