Congres

Back in the day the United States used have a word for a group of people meeting to provide a layer of government, it was called Congress, and they owned the word as if there was not other meaning.

It means something different now.

Since they came.

There were only three of them, crammed into their tin can looking spaceship, in fact we used to call it “the Baked Bean Tin” and that was funny, until we got a look inside.

BBC writers would have had a field day, well, field trip if they could; M C Escher fans would have told you he was on to something.  Physicists would have said there was new physics.  It would have thrown the Standard Model out the window.

But we didn’t get in for years.

So that tin-can sat there, four crude legs and a ladder, lowered by hand.  Well, hand, they don’t have hands.

What they have is a roiling, constantly moving set of horror tentacles set from some central body that we can barely see.  Vanta-black can take a back seat on this one.  The seem to move by rolling and they have no particular orientation, when they are still as they get, not rolling around the landscape, they just sit there twisting and moving endlessly.  We think they’ve got some sort of vision comparable to ours, but hearing is beyond them, not in our range anyhow.  Wherever they’re from, our frequency range doesn’t matter to them.

Took us seven months to discover to they talk to each other via radio, some where around the eighty-six-megahertz range, FM.  Yes, that’s just below what we’re just ending analogue broadcasts on, so naturally no-one was looking for that.

So, for seven months we talked by text.  They’re highly intelligent, obviously, they’re from beyond the confines of our solar system, of course they’re intelligent.  So, they did an analysis of our broadcast languages, turns out we’ve broadcast a lot more than we think, by taking some obscure languages they picked up in World War Two.  The expanding sphere of radiation that we emit should have just about precluded picking up those signals, but they got a clue and followed the trail of signal, because they could, at greater than lightspeed.

Their ship was talking to them the whole time, via radio.  Of course it was, because they’re intelligent and they have some sort of AI to run the ship, because as it turns out they can’t pilot it on their own.

And one would think that if we’re talking by text we’d be talking in a common language.

No.

Because we didn’t transmit much text and they wouldn’t have understood it anyhow, because you need dialogue for true understanding, otherwise one might mistake a few scratches in a rock for a representation of a whole language.  No, they translated what they heard into text of their own making, which we spent five months trying to interpret.

It was fruitless, for five, long, months.

Then someone suggested that they were talking something obscure.  Navajo.  Heard Navajo, rendered as alien text on a whiteboard in the middle of a field in Somerset.

The army got bored and went away.

The groupies went away.

Just a bunch of a scientists and linguists, they’re scientists too, but point is, specialists, left in a field which the farmer had to come and mow because the damn grass was getting in the way.

They mowed their bit by spinning around and sharpening their appendages.  And raked it.

So, anyway, Navajo.  So, all talk was of war and strategic decisions, if we could have understood it, and when we did we all got a bit nervous until they jumbled up the words to make the point.  So, this subset of an obscure language hardly anyone spoke any more, speaking only about war, that was our communication medium.

Month seven.

Some Ham Radio clown came and sat in the field.  The aliens had just about made it known that they didn’t like people being excluded, by the expedient of gently dismantling every exclusionary barrier, including the gate to the field and we’d got used to the sheep roaming in and out and people coming and going out of curiosity.  Mostly people found it so boring that they left.  Only the linguistic enthusiasts stayed.

Most everyone said it was like watching a powerpoint presentation most of the time.  And to be fair, it was.

We found out they weren’t keen on the US, because they just took everything out of their field and placed it in the next field instead.  It didn’t seem to matter what size it was, they just picked it up and moved it, squishily rolling under it until their objective was achieved.

They understood commerce, and demonstrated this by terrifying the farmer.  He wasn’t a stupid man by any means, but they turned up on his doorstep, more or less dragged him to the field and paid him rent by pointing to their mess and handing him a ruby the size of a large man’s clenched fist.

We’d got the idea they were peaceful at this time, and we couldn’t stop them anyhow, so we just observed.  It was more data.

Every day a phalanx of reports showed up, and every day they went away again, because no-one could understand anything.

The farmer got counselling for his instant celebrity and wealth.

This clown with the Ham Radio.

He came along and sat down in the back of his car and started fidgeting about, and three days into his little camping he made a broadcast.  We didn’t connect the dots at first, but we did see the aliens all startle by sticking out every tentacle on their round bodies and bouncing high up in the air, coming down and sticking into the grass.

Greg worked it out, because he switched his equipment off and came running over while the three retired to their tin-can.  He explained what he had done, so we were simultaneously mad as balls and euphoric.

The three didn’t bother trying to write things, they just went and got the radio and pointed at it.  And got between it and Greg.  They didn’t like the broadcast at all.

Turns out that that all we had to do was broadcast, at a very small amount of power, in Navajo and we could talk to them.  The chaps the Americans sent were very impressed.  They were all old, of course no-one even a grandchild of the participants of WW2 were alive, so the language had been preserved by enthusiasts from the old tribes.

The very small amount of power thing was important.  One of them was “deaf” from then on.  The other two spent a lot of time trying to make sure that it was stimulated, but the roiling movement stopped, and a lot of the time it would just sit there like a blob, doing nothing.  The occasional writing explained that it was unable to hear and that life wasn’t worth living.

We depressed an alien by deafening it.  Greg wasn’t allowed near the radio at all.

The other two weren’t quite as bright after that either.

We found out that they operate in threes and only threes, bonded for life, essentially the same creature, broadcasting constantly as their congress, as they called it, operated to provide specialist functions of their intelligence.  They couldn’t be more than a few light seconds away before it because painful to communicate, and being out of contact was not to be thought of.

While not a single creature, they naturally bonded after birth with some others on the same frequency.  One of the results of this discovery was that we’re not, as a species, as a planet, compatible with them.  We use all the frequencies they do to make a cacophony that would deafen every one of them.  If we had landed on their planet we’d probably have wiped out the entire species.

They don’t know how their ship operates, they don’t have the right frequency, so they can’t talk to others of their kind to find out.  Sections of their society are stratified by who can hear whom, some same variation ensure that not everyone is isolated, so if they had just tuned up to eighty-seven megahertz they all have been deaf the minute they landed and exited the ship.  They didn’t expect us to be doing what we do.

As for what they want, it was pure curiosity.  The ship picked up a transmission and came to see who was transmitting.  We’re rather reckless it seems.

They can’t stay.  They’re the only ones who could stay, but they have to warn their people that other people use radio waves to much about with.  The fastest thing in space is a pony, so they have to pony up, like the old west before telegraph.

Their ship was only about three feet high, so they invited a drone in to get a look, because we can’t fit in the door.  That’s when we truly learned about their strange inner space.  We can’t understand it right now, but it’s new physics.  They get about by having a full awareness of their surrounding, usually, but one of them wasn’t talking, so they told us that they’d have to stay in basically a broom cupboard the whole trip back.

We apologised.

They said that no apology was necessary, things were bound to go wrong when dealing with aliens.

We said that we were grateful for their understanding.

They said that they were diplomats, they barely understood anything, except that things could go wrong.

At least that’s what we think they said.

They left us gifts.

A huge star map listing species who are spacefaring and those who are not.

A complaint form to the Galactic Council.  As a non-star-faring species we’re allowed to complain about being interfered with.

A boxed set of their longest running soap opera.  They say that it’s probably the best way of understanding them.

We gave them the scripts to Star Wars and Star Trek.  They wouldn’t take anything electronic.

They took some stuffed animals from the gift shop, including some unflattering representations of themselves.  We discovered at this point they had a sense of humour.

The little tin-can lifted off, silently and without fuss for perhaps a thousand feet, then a long stream of flame came out of it so very fiercely that we thought it had blown up, and then they were gone.

So, aliens came and we learned that the universe is full of life, but we can only see into the distant past, so we don’t see it.

The first ones to visit can’t live with us at all, but one day we’ll be able to talk to them again.

Hawking was right, we should stop broadcasting, because not only are we deafening people, but not all species out there are benign.

Some aliens like peanut butter.

They call themselves, “The Congress” and the name fits.  We did some damage, and I think, we got lucky.