“Wait… for what?” Anna was doubtful. “For the planet to produce space travelers? But, the temporal coincidence is incredible! To launch this thing, timed so it arrived only a few thousand years before we made it into space? How could they have known?”
Bin marveled how these skilled people grasped so much, so quickly. Even allowing for all of their fancy tools and aids. It was a privilege, just to be in such company.
Paul pressed his disagreement. “Anyway, how do we know there was anything special about the time they chose? Maybe these stone-things have been arriving at a steady rate, all across the last billion years, filling the solar system by now! We never surveyed the asteroid belt for objects anywhere near this small. That astronaut only happened to snag one that drifted into visible reach-”
“It’s still an appalling coincidence,” Anna persisted. “There has to be-”
“Comrades, please,” Professor Yang Shenxiu urged, raising his eyes briefly from his own work station. “Something is happening.”
The glitter of Earth had begun resolving itself into a dot, and then a ball, flecked with clouds and glinting seas. Only now, the storytelling image turned and zoomed in upon the star-traveling pellet. Once again, the little box at its front end opened, the sail re-emerging.
“At long last, the goal lay in sight,
Now to approach gently and find a perch,
To focus, study, and appraise,
Then to sleep again and wait.
Until a time of claiming,
When allures are certain. Ready…”
Only, this time, something went wrong. As the sail came out of its box, amid a glitter of sharp reflections, several of the lines abruptly snapped! One corner of the vast, luminous sheet dimpled inward. More lines crossed each other the wrong way. Bin blinked, feeling his gut clench as the sail rapidly fouled and collapsed, its slender cables knotted, spoiled.
“Evidently, something went badly wrong at the last minute,” Paul commented, unnecessarily.
Bin found he could barely breathe from tension, watching a drama that had unfolded many millennia ago. He felt sympathy for the worldstone. To have traveled so far, and come so near success, only for all plans to unravel. Yang Shenxiu recited ideograms conveying Courier’s sense of tragedy and dashed hope.
“Failure! Luck evades us,
While this globe reaches out,
To cast my fate.”
Bin glanced at the scholar, who seemed far away in time and space, his eyes glittering with soft laser reflections cast by his helper apparatus. Of course, the alien entity’s florid vocabulary must have come from its long era spent with early humans, many centuries ago, in more poetical days.
“Will Earth embrace me
– in a fiery clutch?
Or will she fling me outward,
Tumbling forever-
– in cold and empty space?”
Unable to maneuver even a little, the pellet let go of its uselessly clotted sail as the planet loomed close, swinging by, once… twice… three times… and several more… From Paul’s commentary, it seemed that some kind of safety margin was eroding with each orbital passage. Doom drew closer.
Then it came-the final plunge.
“So, it will be fire.
Plummeting amid heat and pain,
Destined for extinction…”
Starting with deceptive softness, flames of atmospheric entry soon crackled around the image, accompanied by a roar that seemed almost wrathful. Bin realized, with a sharp intake of breath, that it would be just like the Zheng He expedition. He felt an agonized pang, as any Chinese person would…
… till new characters floated to jitter by the image-story in brushstrokes of tentative hope.
“Then, once again,
Fate changed its mind.”
The grand voyage might have ended then, in waters covering three-quarters of the globe, an epic journey climaxing in burial under some muddy bottom. Or impacting almost anywhere on land, to shatter and explode.
Instead, as they watched the egg-artifact ride a shallow trail of flame-shedding speed and scattering clouds-there loomed ahead a white-capped mountainside! It struck the pinnacle along one snowy flank, jetting white spumes skyward and ricocheting on a shallow arc… then, rapidly, another angled blow, and another…
… till the ovoid finally tumbled to rest, smoldering, on the fringes of a highland glacier.
Heat, quenched by cold, melted an impression, much like a nest. Whereupon, soon after arriving in a gaudy blaze, the pellet from space seemed to fade-barely visible-into the icy surface.
Bin had to blink away tears. Wow. That beat any of the telenet dramas Mei Ling made him watch.
Meanwhile, archaic-looking ideograms continued flowing across the worldstone. Yang Shenxiu was silent, as distracted and transfixed as any of them. So Bin glanced at some modern Chinese characters that formed in the corner of his right eye. A rougher, less lyrical translation, offered by his own aissistant.
“This was not the normal mission.
Nor any planned program.”
For once, none of the smart people said a thing, joining Bin in silence as spot-sampled snapshots seemed to leap countless seasons, innumerable years. The glacier underwent a time-sped series of transition flickers, at first growing and flowing down a starkly lifeless valley, carrying the stone along, sometimes burying it in white layers. Then (Bin guessed) more centuries passed as the ice river gradually thinned and receded, until retreating whiteness departed completely, leaving the alien envoy-probe stranded, passive and helpless, upon a stony moraine.
“But the makers left allowance,
For eventualities unexpected.”
Appearing to give chase, grasses climbed the mountain, just behind the retiring ice wall. Soon, tendrils of forest followed, amid rippling, seasonal waves of wildflowers. Then time seemed to put on the brakes, slowing down. Single trees stayed in place, the sun’s transit decelerated, unnervingly, from stop-action blur to a flicker, all the way down to the torpid movement of a shadow, on a single day.
Bin swayed in reaction, as if some speedy vehicle screeched to a sudden halt. Bubbles of bile rose in his throat. Still, he couldn’t stop watching, or even blink…
… as two of the shadows moved closer…
… converging on a pair of legs-clad in leather breeches and cross-laced moccasins-entering the field of view in short, careful steps.
Then came a human hand, stained with soot. Soon joined by its partner-fingernails grimy with caked mud and ocher. Reaching down to touch.
Suppose we encounter those star-alien bredren an’ sistren, an’ nothing bad arises. Ya mon, it could happen.
Despite the long-sad list of ways that “First Contacts” went wrong on Earth-between human cultures, or when animal species first meet in nature-our encounter with ET may turn out right.
So look here, assume it ain’t Babylon, out there. No one is trying to be nasty space-zutopong, or out to vank de competition with bad-bwoy bizness. No super wanga-gut seeks to devour everything in sight, or convert us to their galactic jihad. No deliberate or accidental viruses carried on those shiny beacons.
Further, say de advanced sistren an’ bredren out there have solved so-many problems that vex us. That don’t mean relax! For even among the civilized, life be dangerous if you don’t know the rules.