Graham Storrs

Roxx walked unsteadily into the command centre, ducking low to get through the portal.

“Hey, I got it working!” he called, waving a long, jointed limb — an ‘arm’ as he should learn to call it. Fourteen eye-clusters swung around to gawp at him in astonishment — fifteen, if you included the bud growing on Joss’ flank.

“It’s one of them!” someone chirruped and everyone went for their blasters.

“No, no! Wait!” Roxx shouted, aware of the strange croaking sound his voice made. “It’s me, Roxx. I got the metamorphosis booth working. Now we can all disguise ourselves as hum —”

But that was all that Roxx had time for before fourteen bolts of crackling energy sizzled into him, turning his lovely new body into a pile of smoking black goo. Not only Roxx but, as the Vinggans continued to blast away in panic at the spot their metamorphosed compatriot had once occupied, they destroyed most of the portal and part of the surrounding bulkhead too. The smell of burning flesh and plastics was awful.

“Hang on! Hang on!” chirruped Drukk, rippling orange with agitation. “Stop shooting! Stop! Stop!”

Gradually, the panicked Vinggans became aware of Drukk’s chirruping and, one by one, they stopped firing and lowered their weapons. As the last, solitary shot melted a small hole in the deck, all eye-clusters turned to Drukk.

“Er,” he said, hesitating to break the news. “I think we’ve just vaporised the Captain.”

The wreck of the Vinggan space cruiser Vessel of the Spirit sat on a blasted, barren plain. All around it, the charred remains of trees smouldered in the bright moonlight. On the horizon, to the west and north, a red glow was all that could be seen of the bush fire the crash had started nine hours ago. Of the crew of eight and the thirty-five passengers, just fourteen now remained alive — fifteen, if you included Joss’ bud.

“The Great Spirit moves us in strange ways to do Her work,” said Braxx, sliding forward to address them all. Among the Vinggans several muttered, “We are pebbles on Her beach,” and touched their dorsal brain pan in reverence.

“Er, yes, quite,” said Drukk, eyeing them nervously. He always felt nervous around religious types and these Pebbles of the New Dawn guys were just a bit too creepy for his liking. As the last remaining member of the Vessel of the Spirit’s crew, it was up to him now to take charge and do what he could to ensure the survival of his remaining passengers on this strange alien world.

“Right,” he said. “OK.”

They all turned to look at him and he felt sweat beginning to ooze from his ear sacs. The trouble was knowing exactly what they should do next. Captain Roxx had seemed to have some sort of plan — something about using the metamorphosis booth to emulate the local sapients. Maybe that’s what they should do? It was a shame they’d all killed him just then. Embarrassing too. Roxx had been one of the best. Still, everyone was bound to be a bit nervous in the circumstances, what with the crash and all. And it’s not as if you get stranded on an uncharted planet, swarming with dangerous sapients, tens of light-years from the nearest colony, with the infra-space communicator smashed to pieces, every day! It’s no wonder they’d shot him, bursting in here like that, looking so dry and ugly. In fact, it’s a wonder more people hadn’t been shot.

“Well?” asked Braxx.

“Pardon?”

“You seemed about to say something.”

“Oh. Did I? Hmm. Sorry.”

Braxx stared at him for a few, long seconds. Drukk didn’t like that at all. It was a stare that seemed to carry far too little respect and perhaps just a little too much contempt. “No. Wait. That’s right. I was going to say, why don’t we all go and use the metamorphosis booth like the Captain suggested? That way we’ll be able to move around without the local sapients being alarmed by us.”

“The ‘humans’,” murmured Braxx.

“That’s right, the humans.”

Even as they’d hurtled out of infra-space towards this Spirit-forsaken backwater, the ship’s processors had begun listening to the planet’s emissions, interpreting the languages of the local sapients, piecing together whatever knowledge they could glean about the inhabitants, cross-referencing friendly-contact scenarios, survival scenarios and annihilation plans. Within an hour of the crash, the machines had spat out their summaries.

The land-mass they had landed on was known in the local language as ‘Australia’. By searching something called the ‘Internet’, a painfully crude global information repository, the ship was even able to supply maps of the local area. The maps showed few towns and said nothing about the terrain but they indicated the presence of ‘hotels’, ‘beaches’ and ‘tourist trails’. None of this made much sense to the Vinggans and the strangeness of the maps only added to their growing unease.

The local sapients, known as ‘humans’ in the Australian language, were an air-breathing carbon-based form with a single, small head and brain and two of just about everything else. They were mostly hairless but were otherwise horribly ugly. They broke all the known laws of evolution by moving about on just two limbs, teetering around in a constant state of disequilibrium like a planet-wide circus-act. Yet, despite this incredible disadvantage, they were clearly successful and had overpopulated the planet to the point of infestation. Drukk and the Captain had shuddered as they’d read the ship’s findings.

The shuddering only grew worse when they reached the section headed; ‘Recommendations for Action’. Here the ship had written. ‘Activate emergency infra-space beacon and remain cloaked until help arrives. Warning: Contact with the locals is not advisable and in all scenarios will result in the destruction of the crew and passengers.’ They had looked around at the smoking remains of the infra-space antenna and the wreckage of the cloaking control panel and had asked the ship for another option. It had pondered for several more minutes — scary enough in itself — before suggesting they all have a good night’s sleep and try not to worry about it.

“So. Let’s go do it, shall we?” said Drukk snapping out of his reverie. “We need to act quickly. The humans may find us here at any moment.”

No-one showed any sign of rushing off to have their bodies remodelled. In fact, they were all looking at Braxx, waiting for him to speak. Eventually he did. “We are all pebbles on Her beach,” he intoned. “Rolled and buffeted by the tides of life. Worn smooth by the years. Insignificant. Worthless.” There was a general murmur of consent. “We have but one thing that makes us special, one thing that separates us from the dross of the Universe and that is the love of the Great Spirit and the wisdom of Her teachings.”

Isn’t that two things? Drukk thought to himself but he kept his beak shut. Apart from himself, all the other survivors were religious fanatics, part of a mission to a newly colonised world in this bleak sector. The Pebbles of the New Dawn was perhaps the most fanatical of all the Great Spirit’s sects and was zealous in its ceaseless efforts to convert the rough and lawless colonies of the New Vinggan Diaspora.

“What would She want us to do?” Braxx went on. “What can we do now that our mission has failed and our friends in the Space Corps” (here he swivelled his eye-cluster to give Drukk a disdainful glance) “can do nothing to save us?” He slid closer to the group, clearly enjoying being in the limelight. “For the past few hours I have been asking myself these questions and searching the Communion of Souls for guidance from the Great Spirit.” He looked about, theatrically, and the crowd hung on his words. Even Drukk was pretty curious to hear what the old fraud would come up with. “And the Great Spirit guided me and I have been inspired by Her, unworthy as I am even to speak Her name.” Oh get on with it, Drukk thought, finding it hard to keep his patience. The humans, the ship had said, possessed a simple but nevertheless adequately destructive technology and were horribly warlike. “Yes, inspired, I say! For this is the plan that She has revealed to me, the plan that was hidden until now and which is only possible through the divine intervention that brought us here. We have been brought to this planet so that we might convert the humans!”

There was a gasp of shock from the faithful and a cry of “What!?” from Drukk but Braxx just smiled around the room. “It will be Her greatest triumph! The first sub-Vinggan species ever to be brought into the fold. And we will be Her humble instruments.”

There was a stunned silence as they all absorbed this. Drukk felt that a word at this juncture might not go amiss. “Just let me get this straight,” he ventured. “We’ve crash-landed on an uncharted planet. We have no means of escape or of contacting our people. We’ve lost most of the crew and our space-ship is a wreck. All our provisions are ruined. We’ve started a fire big enough to bring half the planet down on us to see what’s going on. Our computer — which, I should mention, was programmed by a bunch of war-crazed psychopaths, and therefore generally recommends annihilating the local sapients, regardless of the situation — is suggesting that we keep our heads down and hope it all goes away. Yet you want us to march out there and start preaching to six billion godless monsters?”

Braxx’s smile did not flicker for a moment. “Drukk, you are a simple man. A man of action. A doer, not a thinker. Whereas I,” the smile broadened, “I am a theologian. Each day I grapple with the great imponderables of the Universe, seeking revelation through communion with the Great Spirit. Ask yourself, Drukk, why would Her High Beneficence strand us here on this mudball? Why would She take so many of Her truest believers and cast them out of the society of their fellows? Why would She lead us to a world where six billion sapients have never heard Her glorious word?” The eyes on his eye-cluster widened enquiringly. “I think you know the answer, don’t you Drukk? I think we all know the answer.”

His acolytes seemed to see the reason in this and were murmuring their agreement when Drukk burst out; “But how? How in the name of the Spirit can you convert a whole planet of aliens? They won’t sit quietly and listen. They’ll blast us to atoms!”

“Ah Drukk, if we knew all the answers, we wouldn’t need the Great Spirit to guide us, would we? Of course, we can’t use the usual methods to achieve mass conversions — carpet bombing from space, mind-altering drugs in the water supplies, advertising campaigns — we sent most of our equipment ahead by freighter. So we’ll just have to do it some other way.”

“Like what?”

“I’ll think of something. Meanwhile, I think you’re right. We should all take on human form. To the metamorphosis booth everybody!”

*

Simultaneity was a concept that humans have got into a horrible tangle about over the years. Blame it on Einstein. He was the first human to bore his friends at dinner parties with all that stuff about the velocity of propagation of an electromagnetic field in a vacuum. It’s tricky stuff. One can imagine he’d get into quite a tizz trying to explain it all and, by desert, he’d be whacking his mates over the head with menu cards rolled into cones saying; “See? Dummkopf! There is no effect outside the cone! Only when the cone hits your great noodle do you feel anything! Ach du liebe Zeit!” Which, of course, would have just left everybody even more puzzled.

What he was on about though was the apparent problem that his discovery of the finite speed of light means the idea of things happening at the same time has got a bit complicated. If something happens on the surface of the Sun, for example, we won’t see it here on Earth for another eight and a bit minutes. To us, it seems like it just happened but to someone sitting on the Sun, well, he’d be long dead anyway, so it wouldn’t matter much to him. Thing is, if you were to fire a gun or something to signal to two other people nearby to start running a race, they’d hear it at the same time and set off . But if one of them was nearby while the other was a hundred and ten million-odd miles away in space, the nearby person would hear it and set off but the space-person (who obviously wouldn’t hear it at all but is probably watching the Earth with a very powerful telescope waiting to catch the flash of the gun going off) wouldn’t get the signal for about ten minutes. That means the person nearby could have run a five minute mile, done a victory lap and had a nice cup of tea with their trainer before the poor space person even knew the race had begun. What’s more, we down here, watching the space person to see how they’re doing wouldn’t see them set off until twenty minutes after the starter gun was fired because the light carrying their image would take a further ten minutes to reach us, and the space racer wouldn’t complete their race until twenty-five minutes after the start!

Which is all very interesting but most space-faring species gave up on multi-planetary sports events millennia ago so it isn’t really that much of an issue. The real problem is trying to understand time, or, rather, timing. Because, once faster-than-light travel started to appear in the Galaxy, simultaneity became a big problem for everybody. After all, if you could fire a starting pistol, fly to the next planet, run the race before your signal even arrived and then fly back to open a bottle champagne and settle down with a few chums at the local observatory in time to watch yourself win, you could end up becoming rather confused about cause and effect.

In fact, the Galactic Cause and Effect Act of 14,456,501,359 BB specifically prohibits obtaining any advantage whatsoever through the use of faster-than-light technologies. This Act was passed by the League of Sentient Species after the infamous invasion of Ballerno IV by the Fradinian Collective, where the Fradinian battle cruisers which devastated and subjugated the Ballernians arrived a full four years before the declaration of war. At the time, sending the declaration of war by laser to Ballerno IV, copied to the LSS headquarters on N’o, constituted a legal declaration of war under existing Galactic legislation. However, since the news of the invasion travelled by faster-than-light ship to the Galactic Legislature on N’o, the Governments of the day had time to draft the Galactic Cause and Effect Act and have it ratified by the necessary majority long before the League of Sentient Species itself received the declaration of war. By then, the Frandinians had already conquered Ballerno IV, apparently quite illegally. The Fradinian Collective was found guilty of improper use of simultaneity to invade a fellow member state of the LSS without due process and was made to pay punitive reparations to the Ballernans.

Of course, that was tens of thousands of years ago and these days most sapients are quite comfortable with the idea that there really isn’t a past and a future worth worrying about. It’s all best seen as one great unfolding present. As the Lalantrans say; “Ride around on a photon and everything is simultaneous.” They think this is a great joke and very clever but no-one else really gets it.

Now consider this. Even as the Vinggans are queuing up outside the metamorphosis booth, a slim, black starship is sliding out of real-space into infra-reality, far, far away along the Bellarno-Hengh Arm of the Galaxy, making a complete mess of even Einstein’s rather tortuous legacy of messed-up simultaneity. For, although it was thousands of light-years closer to the Galactic centre than Earth, it would be arriving here soon, very soon, thousands of years ahead of the light reflected from its sleek, black hull.

From one perspective, the ship was slicing forward through time and the fabric of space-time responded with intense causality shock waves which pummelled onlookers all along its flight-path with causality so intense that almost anything could cause anything—and probably did. From another perspective, the ship had merely slipped into a reality underlying our own in which distance hardly means anything, where entangled sub-atomic particles are still virtually right next to one another, and where a creature in a hurry, a creature with a mission, a creature with cold, steely eyes and a hide of black, armoured scales, could ignore the Lorenz transformations and really get its foot down.