With Other Eyes Read online

  With Other Eyes

  F. Alexander Brejcha

  An alien starship is nearing Earth, but its inhabitants show no interest in communicating with humanity. The only invited visitor to their ship uncovers a shocking reason for the aliens’ lack of curiosity about us.

  With Other Eyes

  by F. Alexander Brejcha

  I.

  Even if I couldn’t see it anymore, I could almost feel the alien space ship hanging expectantly only a few kilometers away from the Hawking space station. The Travelers, as they called themselves, had arrived four days earlier and they were waiting for me—but I wasn’t ready!

  I slammed my fist against the bulkhead in frustration. “Damn it, Lazz! Why can’t I get the hang of using these damned eyes? It’s been week and I can barely tell a doorway from a wall. It only took you a couple of days.”

  A shadow moved across my virtually non-existent vision and I smelled the tantalizing scent of a fresh orange as it was peeled.

  “Relax, Mitch. You’ll get it in time. It was easier for me because I’ve been blind for almost twenty years. I didn’t have a lot of un-learning to do—”

  “I know.” I sighed and repeated his constant litany of reassurance over the past week: “ ‘You only had your eyes removed a few weeks ago, and you’re still trying to focus and see the way you used to’. But it isn’t working!” I complained.

  Lazz slapped me on the shoulder, his voice suddenly muffled. “Wait here. I can see I was right. I had a feeling this might be necessary.”

  With those ominous words, I heard a hiss from the automatic door as he left the room without explaining what ‘this’ was.

  He could at least have left me some of the orange.

  I turned back to the training room for another vain attempt to see the objects Lazz had set up for me. My implanted eye-set was an incredible device; a four-part system actually. It consisted of a controlling computer worn on my belt, a tiny transmitter array I wore on my forehead, and twin receivers implanted in my eye sockets and cosmetically made to approximate the appearance of my own eyes, even turning as reconnected eye muscles simulated natural eye movements. The system used some alien forms of sonar and light receptors to give an approximation of the way the aliens’ vision worked. It was a different version of something Lazz had already been developing as an alternative sight-system for himself and other blind individuals unable to tolerate eye transplants. The aliens had provided input to modify Lazz’s design to meet their criteria.

  But it had proved a lot harder to use than I had expected and I was still almost totally blind—and I was supposed to be able to see with this system when I went onboard the alien ship to make personal contact. The Travelers had insisted on it for some reason. Lazz couldn’t go because I was the one who had decoded the Traveler signals and made first contact, and the aliens only wanted to deal with me. So I could be a “witness” to something. They had continually refused to answer any questions other than technical ones associated with setting up the meeting. They had said that everything would be explained to me and on my return, I could pass on all my knowledge.

  But if I was going to witness anything, I would have to learn to use my new eyes!

  The sound of the door interrupted my useless efforts and I heard Lazz come in. And he wasn’t alone, I realized as I smelled a delicate floral perfume.

  “All right, buddy, I’m tuned in to your frequency again and seeing with your eyes. Now, one more time, focus, this way!”

  I sighed and concentrated. Still, there was nothing there… no, I could just sense a teasingly vague outline that shifted in and out of focus. I tilted my head, fighting to keep the image clear. The perfume was familiar and I wanted to know if I was right.

  “Good! You’re starting to get it,” Lazz encouraged. “Now relax and… imagine you’re a little drunk and looking at something… There, keep that up and you’ll get more detail.”

  Suddenly the outlines sharpened and I saw an incredibly detailed topographical image of…

  “Whoa, Lazz! Who is that!”

  “Janice Wills. Shame on you for not recognizing one of your co-workers.”

  “But she’s naked!”

  “No,” Lazz chuckled. “She’s wearing a bikini, or so she said.” He suddenly sounded doubtful. “Wait a minute, let me break our link and look for myself. After a moment, he spoke up again. “Yup. It must have been designed by Drexler’s of Hollywood, but it’s there. I thought a little positive reinforcement might help you since Janice was kind enough to offer her—”

  “I know what it looks like she’s offering.” I felt my face burn and I was afraid to look closer. “But this from a woman who turned me down when I asked for a date?” And that had taken one hell of an effort. At forty, and widowed only three years earlier after twelve years of marriage, I had been sorely out of practice and feeling guilty over the way I had been attracted to Janice.

  “Gee, I just love to be discussed in the third person,” Janice muttered darkly. “And I’m still ‘involved’ with someone. But our beloved leader has quite a talent for blackmail—”

  “I prefer to think of it as creative persuasion,” Lazz cut in.

  “Blackmail,” Janice repeated firmly. Then she turned back to me.

  “Besides, he can make himself look even more pitiful than you. He’s been pestering me non-stop ever since he thought of this idea and I finally gave in since we’ve removed the last of the hidden media Mini-Casters.” She moved closer, and I felt a light touch on my arm. “But, we really work well together and I just hated seeing you so down in the dumps.” She kissed me lightly on the cheek. “You’re on your own now, Mitch. Good luck.” Then she spun away to pick up a robe she had draped over a chair.

  I struggled to keep her in focus as she slipped it on, and then waved and slipped out the door. Then Lazz grabbed my arm and pulled me back to the exercise table.

  “Okay, buddy. Now that I finally have your attention, let’s try this again!”

  I struggled to focus on the various cones, cubes and pyramids he had put out for me and began describing them. I had not realized how much detail my new ‘eyes’ could yield until now, but as I worked, I started to get the feel for using them and I marvelled at the dizzying depth they gave the room. I had a feeling that with practice I would be able to judge distances with millimetric precision. But Lazz had been right: the eyes did require using a whole different set of muscles.

  I was just getting into it when the overhead speaker buzzed and Commander Elizabeth Josarro’s voice called down.

  “Mitch, we’ve got a problem—”

  “The Travelers are insisting I come over now,” I guessed, interrupting her.

  “How the hell did you know?”

  “It makes sense.” I fought a sudden queasiness. “They were insistent on no official presence at our meeting, and since they’re probably monitoring me the same way Lazz is they know I’m getting the hang of my eyes. And they know no one from the U.N. is on the station at the moment.”

  “True… no one expected you to have a break-through so soon.”

  I grinned. “Blame it on your husband. He’s a good teacher.”

  “How did he… Never mind.” She sighed. “I can only imagine. But it puts us in a bind because the Travelers want you over there NOW!”

  I could only imagine the frantic scrambling going on in Geneva, Houston, and the Cape—and at the eavesdropping Global News headquarters. The U.N. people and the media had been totally rebuffed by the Travelers, and had been asked to leave the station so I could concentrate on learning to use my new eyes. We had thought I would be ready by the time the aliens arrived, but fine-tuning the combination of alien and human design had taken longer than expected, and t
hen I had proved less than adept in learning how to use them. And now, the U.N. observers who had been planning to sneak back up when I went onboard the alien ship were stuck down on Earth until Friday’s SSTO launch, or until a shuttle could be prepped.

  I looked up to ask: “What about my atmosphere suit and supplies?”

  “Everything is already on the Transport. The extra air tanks and supplies for a week are loaded into external-access compartments. We’ll control the Transport from here until they take over to guide you into a pressurized bay. They’ve prepared an environmental chamber for you with our specs, so you should be fine.”

  Conflicting emotions came over me as I thought about the coming days, but before I could say anything, I saw Lazz reach for a wall-com.

  “He can’t go yet, Liza. I’m not finished training him.”

  “They seem to think he’s ready, so he’s going to have to deal with it.”

  “I’m telling you,” Lazz protested. “He’s not ready. He’s starting to get the hang of the eyes, but he needs more time. What’s the harm if I come along? There’s a spare suit, and they’re adjustable. And there are more than enough supplies.”

  “No.” Liza was firm. “The Travelers said he has to come by himself.”

  “Actually,” I corrected her. “They only said that no government representatives were to be along. If they want parity, Lazz really ought to come since he’s right: I’m still not fully trained and I need his help. I can explain his presence without too much trouble.”

  I wasn’t being quite truthful about needing Lazz because it was getting easier and easier to use the electronic eyes now that I had found the right mental buttons. But I owed Lazz for all his help and I knew he was dying to go. The whole time he had been training me, he had been pumping me for information on the Travelers, wistfully admitting he wished he had been the one to make contact. But through a series of coincidences, I had been the lucky one.

  I had been working as an advanced A.I. programming instructor at M.I.T., and I had always been an amateur astronomer and a SETI buff, and in studying newly released deep-space probe data from the Farside monitoring station on the Moon, I had come across some intriguing signals that had seemed to correlate with similar ones from the Arecibo SETI site. Along with other ranges, I had originally been working with data in the 1.42 and 1.65 gigahertz range from Arecibo since the hydrogen and hydroxyl ranges seemed like good potential sign posts for any alien transmissions, and I had found the hint of a pattern. But I had been unable to do anything with it until I had seen the Farside Station data where I had found anomalies at around 15 GHz that seemed to echo the lower frequency ones. They higher frequency signals had not been picked up by Arecibo since the atmosphere interfered with anything over 10 GHz. But unfortunately the data from Farside had been so watered down and disjointed that they were hard to piece together and coordinate with those from Arecibo.

  If it had been mid-semester, everything might have ended there since it was a very weak correlation, but it was summer and I had time on my hands. Too much time in fact, with Ellen gone. Figuring out the meaning of the teasing signals had become a mental challenge to help me keep my mind off the usual summer trips we had always taken. But ironically, in my efforts to hide from memories of Ellen, I had been forced to turn to those same memories to solve the puzzle.

  Ellen had been a linguistics professor at Harvard, and in order to keep up with her, I had made a hobby of language puzzles. From that perspective, the anomalies I had noted had started looking more and more like an encrypted message. Deciphering them had gradually grown from a hobby to a near obsession, and I had finally put in for a leave of absence and applied for a SETI research grant to study the data further.

  With a little help from friends in the right places, I had obtained both the leave and a modest grant to spend time on Hawking to study the raw data coming in from Farside and deep space probes. It was in analyzing those data and combining them in real-time with the Arecibo signals, that I had finally found the complete Traveler message and eventually decoded it. It had become apparent that the signal had been divided up in three parts. My guess had been that all three parts were meant to be coordinated as a test of our problem-solving skills and to see if we were a space-faring race, since part of the signal had only been detectible to space-based observatories.

  My luck in piecing it together must have been frustrating for Lazz. As a SETI buff himself, it would have been equally possible for him to find and decode the signal, had he only been looking in the right frequency ranges. But now I was the one heading for a historic meeting, even if I did want to share it with him.

  The speaker linking us with the control-room had been silent. Liza knew very well how Lazz felt, and she probably agreed with me, personally. But I knew her well enough to know that ultimately she would have to make her decision as station commander, not as Lazz’s wife.

  “I’m sorry, Lazz, but I can’t spare you,” she finally answered. “Mitch, you’ll just have to make the best of it. Aside from the fact that I would probably be hauled up in front of the U.N. General Assembly and publicly lynched for breaking the guidelines they set, I need Lazz here. What if the main processor goes down again? We won’t get the new unit up from the surface until Friday, and I can’t lose two of my best computer jocks.”

  Lazz tried again. “Come on, Liza! Janice knows the system well enough… hell, she’s already been running things solo while I’ve been training Mitch. The new program they developed doubled the throughput.”

  “No.” The line went dead.

  “Shit!” Lazz turned to me, eerily outlined in a sensory halo as our beams intersected.

  I had avoided looking at him too much before because the crossed signals gave me a bit of a headache, but I faced him now and held out my hand.

  “Well, Lazz. I guess it’s goodbye, for now.”

  “That’s what you think!” An extra burst of reflected signal from his teeth lit up as he smiled. “I don’t care what my dear wife says, I’m not letting you go over there alone and fuck up our reputation—”

  “You mean ‘hog all the glory’.”

  “Touché.” The teeth flashed again and he chuckled. For a moment he was quiet, and then he started nodding. “Well, when all else fails… persuasion, usually works. I haven’t used this one since I proposed to her, but I think it’s time to pull out the heavy guns again.”

  The tone of his voice was enough to start me thinking about running for cover.

  I saw him pull out his Braille-pad and his fingers flashed over the tiny seven-button keyboard, the speech feedback set too fast for me to follow. Then he stabbed the ‘send’ chord firmly with a threatening little chuckle. I knew his pocket computer was linked with the station mainframe and I looked around nervously.

  Then I discovered the awful thing he had unleashed.

  It began innocently enough. From all around us, the gentle music of Chinese temple chimes stroked our ears, but then a deep roar began to unfold itself, spreading with visceral power. It was the beginning of his belch-collection. I had never heard it, though I had heard of it, of course. It was legendary on the space station and I knew Liza despised it, but I was discovering that its amplified and omnipotent presence was beyond my wildest imaginings. What beer had spawned such awesome scope? What combination of spiced foods and beverages? And this was only the first in the collection!

  Beginning with an almost sub-audible vibration, it climbed into the audible threshold quickly and then added harmonic frequencies that chilled me. Amazingly enough, the gentle bells remained clear and distinct throughout. But that first blast lasted for hours, it seemed. As it finally faded away, leaving only the innocent chimes, I stared up at the ceiling speaker and shook my head in admiration. Digital recording at its best.

  A weary sigh filtered down from above. “All right, Lazarus. No more. Stay there.”

  Lazz clenched a fist and popped it up in the air, spreading two fingers in victory sign as the s
peaker clicked off. “Yes!” He turned back to me. “I knew that that would do it. She survived the first three when I wouldn’t take no for an answer to my marriage proposal ten years ago, but that was a tough problem for her. After her first shit-for-husband, she was gun-shy.”

  I could literally hear him growling as his whole posture changed, but I was curious: “So after that you terrorized her to get her to marry you?”

  “It was done with love,” Lazz defended. “She needed someone a little bit crazy, and we were meant for each other.” He grinned. “Elizabeth and Lazarus, Liza and Lazz. See?” Then he turned serious. “I had to get her to get her to look at life, and herself, differently. When that freak she had been married to wasn’t drunk and beating her up, or taunting her about her weight, he was a sullen bore who didn’t believe a woman could do anything worthwhile. First she needed to know that she was a wonderful and talented lady, but then she needed to know life isn’t always serious—”

  “Hence the belch recording.” I shook my head.

  “Hey, it worked, didn’t it? And she went from a wimpy glorified clerk to running a space station, with some impressive stops in between. I’d like to think I had a little something to do with that.”

  I laughed. “Okay, maybe. But I’m not sure that was a wise move this time.”

  “Maybe not, but I am going with you,” he pointed out, clapping my shoulder.

  “Not to interrupt this mutual admiration society,” a new voice broke in. Liza had just entered the room and stood by the door, shaking her head. “You two are quite the pair.” She moved in on him and grabbed his shirt. “Okay, hon, you can go. I’ll look the other way—not because of the recording,” she warned. “But because I trust Mitch when he says he can explain it.” She turned to me. “But I’ll warn both of you right now: when the U.N. team gets up here Friday and starts asking questions and screaming in outrage, I’ll know nothing about this. As far as I’ll be concerned, Lazz was a stowaway on the Transport. Got it?”