“You know,” he continued, “there could have been more good stuff in there, but there were just too many submissions coming in. If only there had been fewer people in the pool, we could have read a lot more before we gave up.”
He spoke quite a bit more—some interesting, some rambling, some downright incomprehensible—and you can view the archive recording for the rest, if you want. But that little bit had already hatched the idea in my head.
I returned to Christea with my degrees, and sent employment queries to several publishers. Only K&T was hiring for an actual in-office job, as I’d had at Holburn, and was satisfyingly Christean, so I took the position. Del Bradden became the newest assistant editor (in-person degrees and internships actually do mean something on a resumé—no starting as an editorial assistant for me).
I established myself and learned more about the company. Not wanting to seem too eager or eccentric, I waited through three personnel reviews (all stellar, I might add) before presenting my idea to Mr. Burke.
“An odd request, Del,” Mr. Burke commented when I asked to be allowed to open things up to un-mediated ’texts. Thankfully, he was first-generation Christean, like my father, and still thought like a pioneer. To make the idea more appealing, I offered to do the reading on my own time (though I’d be compensated if I actually found anything publishable). It was agreed.
A subroutine was written into our sorting algorithm. Un-mediated ’texts would be sent to my comp for review, rather than rejected outright. And we quietly started letting people know they could submit to us this way, though I still received my usual share of mediated works for reading at the office.
The mediators weren’t thrilled by our new policy, and threatened to stop submitting, but as we were a small Christean house, it was a useless threat. A few mediators made a point of telling us that certain top titles would have come to K&T if not for our policy, but Mr. Burke knew better. He made a point of reading each one of those, and was convinced he wouldn’t have published them anyway.
Luckily for me, Mr. Ramos had been correct about the pool size. Most Christeans are still pretty much your rugged pioneer types rather than would-be authors. So we weren’t inundated with Christean ’texts.
Once we published Raschon’s Starseeker and my project was better publicized, submissions from the other colonies increased. Nothing from Earth, but what Homer would want to be published by a colonial?
I opened the file attached to “Dr.” Aly’wanshus’ message, and settled back to listen to the good doc’s novel.
The most amazing sound issued from my speakers. It wasn’t amazing in that it was sweet and melodic like no music could ever be. Nor could I say I’d never heard its like before, because I certainly had. I’d heard it while taking a history course at university; a course that covered the discovery of each of the colony worlds and included audio/ visual details of the few alien races we had encountered.
This was the sound of the speaking voice of an Aaul’inah.
The Aaul’inah are a secretive race. The exploration ship Chicago had discovered the planet Aaul’in, which lies not far from the mid-colonies. But they were turned away by the Aaul’inah when they tried to enter the atmosphere. No human has landed there since.
We did manage to finally communicate with them, after a small Aaul’inah ship crashed on Hurst while scouting the colony. The one survivor had a translation device with which they were monitoring our communications. We managed to reverse-engineer it, and could finally speak with them—not perfectly, but sufficiently.
Theirs is a flowing, tonal language, that sounds much like musical instruments. And it has a musical structure to it that goes beyond anything humans can produce. I’m told linguists believe that the language hides many layers of meaning in the subaudible bands that we cannot comprehend.
Whatever else, it is exceedingly beautiful to the human ear.
I stopped the playback, and looked back at the query. “Office of Alien Studies.” I recalled my father telling me a few years before that the collegium had been thinking about offering a position to an Aaul’inah, but didn’t recall him saying that it had happened.
I clicked over to the collegium’s linguistics bank, and linked myself into the Aaul’inah translation matrix. Then, I opened the file again, experiencing a brief pause while the files connected.
When the story began, I was initially distracted by how the translation matrix took what was essentially a grand operatic performance and turned it into a piece of prose. Wonderful prose that would still need some small editing to be publishable in English.
That quickly became a secondary thought, because what I was hearing was the most fantastic story of interdimensional adventure I had ever come across in my short lifetime of reading and publishing science fiction.
The next nine days were agony.
I’d asked my father to check on “Dr.” Aly’wanshus for me. All he reported was that Alien Studies had offered to sponsor an exchange program with Aaul’in. When the reply came, this “Doctor” said that his people would never agree to permit a human on their world. However, he would come to Christea in a personal research effort to see if his people could coexist and intermingle with humans. He had apparently arrived two years ago.
Finally, the second message arrived.
<dbra.ktp.chr.ColNet>
Mr. Del Bradden
Science Fiction Editor
K&T Publishers
16 Elray Circle
Landfall CHRISTEA
Dear Mr. Bradden:
I hope you have had time to listen to my novel. I look forward to hearing your response. Please contact me within the next three days at vjin.pse.chr.ColNet.
Sincerely,
“Dr.” Aly’wanshus
I was hitting the reply key before I’d even finished reading the first sentence.
<vjin.pse.chr.ColNet>
“Dr.” Aly’wanshus
Dear “Dr.” Aly’wanshus:
I am very pleased that you have contacted me again. I have, in fact, listened to your novel. It is quite unique in my experience, and I would very much like to meet with you to discuss it. Would you be free to meet with me at my office tomorrow?
I greatly look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Del Bradden
The reply came back just as swiftly.
Dear Mr. Bradden:
It would not be prudent for us to meet where others might easily observe us. Can we please meet tomorrow in the rooms where I am lodging? Perhaps about 1100 hours. The proprietor here is a discreet woman. Directions are attached.
Sincerely,
“Dr.” Aly’wanshus
<File Attachment: Direct.scr>
Ever mysterious. But not a meeting I wanted to decline.
I arrived at the boarding house near the Landing Ground a few minutes early. It was the usual sort of place where travelers could settle in for a day or two before catching their ship. Quaint yet pleasant.
The door was open, but I knocked and entered when a voice told me to do so.
There was a small desk in the corner of the parlor just off the entry hall, and the woman there appeared to be shopping BuyNet for towels. She looked up at me.
“You must be here to meet the Doctor,” she stated.
“How’d you know?” I asked with a smile.
“No bags. Not dressed for travel.” She smiled, “And he left me a note that he was expecting a visitor about now. His room is the third on the left, top of the stairs.” She turned back to her comp.
I started toward the stairs.
“May I ask you something?”