"They wouldn't," said the Xenopsychologist. "Humans put Hitler in charge of a country, so we must have considered him a preeminent legalist of his age. And it wouldn't occur to the Babyeaters that Adolf Hitler might be regarded by humans as a bad guy just because he turned segments of his society into lampshades - they have a custom against that nowadays, but they don't really see it as evil. If Hitler thought that gays had defected against the norm, and tried to exterminate them, that looks to a Babyeater like an honest mistake -" The Xenopsychologist looked around the table. "All right, I'll stop there. But the Babyeaters don't look back on their history and see obvious villains in positions of power - certainly not after the dawn of science. Any politician who got to the point of being labeled
"bad" would be killed and eaten. The Babyeaters don't seem to have had humanity's coordination problems. Or they're just more rational voters. Take your pick."
Akon was resting his head in his hands. "You know," Akon said, "I thought about composing a message like this to the Babyeaters. It was a stupid thought, but I kept turning it over in my mind.
Trying to think about how I might persuade them that eating babies was... not a good thing."
The Xenopsychologist grimaced. "The aliens seem to be even more given to rationalization than we are - which is maybe why their society isn't so rigid as to actually fall apart - but I don't think you could twist them far enough around to believe that eating babies was not a babyeating thing."
"And by the same token," Akon said, "I don't think they're particularly likely to persuade us that eating babies is good." He sighed. "Should we just mark the message as spam?"
" One of us should read it, at least," said the Ship's Confessor. "They composed their argument honestly and in all good will. Humanity also has epistemic standards of honor to uphold."
"Yes," said the Master. "I don't quite understand the Babyeater standards of literature, my lord, but I can tell that this text conforms to their style of... not exactly poetry, but... they tried to make it aesthetic as well as persuasive." The Master's eyes flickered, back and forth. "I think they even made some parts constant in the total number of light pulses per argumentative unit, like human prosody, hoping that our translator would turn it into a human poem. And... as near as I can judge such things, this took a lot of effort. I wouldn't be surprised to find that everyone on that ship was staying up all night working on it."
"Babyeaters don't sleep," said the Engineer sotto vocce.
"Anyway," said the Master. "If we don't fire on the alien ship - I mean, if this work is ever carried back to the Babyeater civilization - I suspect the aliens will consider this one of their great historical works of literature, like Hamlet or Fate/stay night -"
The Lady Sensory cleared her throat. She was pale, and trembling.
With a sudden black premonition of doom like a training session in Unrestrained Pessimism, Akon
guessed what she would say.
The Lady Sensory said, in an unsteady voice, "My lords, a third ship has jumped into this system. Not Babyeater, not human."
(3/8) The Super Happy People
The holo showed a triangle marked with three glowing dots, the human ship and the Babyeater ship and the newcomers. Then the holo zoomed in, to show -
- the most grotesque spaceship that Akon had ever seen, like a blob festooned with tentacles festooned with acne festooned with small hairs. Slowly, the tentacles of the ship waved, as if in a gentle breeze; and the acne on the tentacles pulsated, as if preparing to burst. It was a fractal of ugliness, disgusting at every level of self-similarity.
"Do the aliens have deflectors up?" said Akon.
"My lord," said Lady Sensory, "they don't have any shields raised. The nova ashes' radiation doesn't seem to bother them. Whatever material their ship is made from, it's just taking the beating."
A silence fell around the table.
"All right," said the Lord Programmer, " that's impressive."
The Lady Sensory jerked, like someone had just slapped her. "We - we just got a signal from them in human-standard format, content encoding marked as Modern English text, followed by a holo -"
" What? " said Akon. "We haven't transmitted anything to them, how could they possibly -"
"Um," said the Ship's Engineer. "What if these aliens really do have, um, 'big angelic powers'?"
"No," said the Ship's Confessor. His hood tilted slightly, as if in wry humor. "It is only history repeating itself."
"History repeating itself?" said the Master of Fandom. "You mean that the ship is from an alternate Everett branch of Earth, or that they somehow independently developed ship-to-ship communication protocols exactly similar to our -"
"No, you dolt," said the Lord Programmer, "he means that the Babyeaters sent the new aliens a massive data dump, just like they sent us. Only this time, the Babyeater data dump included all the data that we sent the Babyeaters. Then the new aliens ran an automatic translation program, like the one we used."
"You gave it away," said the Confessor. There was a slight laugh in his voice. "You should have let them figure it out on their own. One so rarely encounters the apparently supernatural, these days."
Akon shook his head, "Confessor, we don't have time for - never mind. Sensory, show the text message."
The Lady Sensory twitched a finger and -
HOORAY!
WE ARE SO GLAD TO MEET YOU!
THIS IS THE SHIP "PLAY GAMES FOR LOTS OF FUN"
(OPERATED BY CHARGED PARTICLE FINANCIAL FIRMS)
WE LOVE YOU AND WE WANT YOU TO BE SUPER HAPPY.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO HAVE SEX?
Slowly, elaborately, Akon's head dropped to the table with a dull thud. "Why couldn't we have been alone in the universe?"
"No, wait," said the Xenopsychologist, " this makes sense."
The Master of Fandom nodded. "Seems quite straightforward."
"Do enlighten," came a muffled tone from where Akon's head rested on the table.
The Xenopsychologist shrugged. "Evolutionarily speaking, reproduction is probably the single best guess for an activity that an evolved intelligence would find pleasurable. When you look at it from that perspective, my lords, my lady, their message makes perfect sense - it's a universal friendly greeting, like the Pioneer engraving."
Akon didn't raise his head. "I wonder what these aliens do," he said through his shielding arms,
"molest kittens?"
"My lord..." said the Ship's Confessor. Gentle the tone, but the meaning was very clear.
Akon sighed and straightened up. "You said their message included a holo, right? Let's see it."
The main screen turned on.
There was a moment of silence, and then a strange liquid sound as, in unison, everyone around the
table gasped in shock, even the Ship's Confessor.
For a time after that, no one spoke. They were just... watching.
"Wow," said the Lady Sensory finally. "That's actually... kind of... hot."
Akon tore his eyes away from the writhing human female form, the writhing human male form, and the writhing alien tentacles. "But..." Akon said. "But why is she pregnant?"
"A better question," said the Lord Programmer, "would be, why are the two of them reciting multiplication tables?" He glanced around. "What, none of you can read lips?"
"Um..." said the Xenopsychologist. "Okay, I've got to admit, I can't even begin to imagine why -"