The woman addressed him, asking, “And what will you do, O man of war?”
“We’ll fight.”
The man laughed.
The woman smiled, saying, “We have seen your species before, but you have progressed rapidly. Whereas once, you roamed the grasslands in search of prey, now you revel in the luxuries of technology. You fabricate heroics, conjuring up fantasies of victory against any intrusion from the stars. You could not so much as have scratched one of our ships had we not been bound to observe. We were caught unawares. We overestimated your social cohesion and desire for harmony. We will not make that mistake again.”
“She’s right,” Bower said. “This isn’t Hollywood. There’s no Hail-Mary play to be made. This isn’t some movie where we can scrounge up a nuclear warhead from somewhere, smuggle it into the heart of the ship, and still escape in time for supper with the President. We’re like a nest of ants taking on a battleship.
“And besides, our ability to wage war is not what has set us apart from the other animals, it’s our ability to think, to reason.”
As those words left her lips, she spotted a subtle, almost imperceptible change in the demeanor of their phantom hosts. They weren’t real; she knew that. They were programmed; they had to be. They were virtual representations of the alien congress, conversing with the two of them in a more natural form. Although they were apparitions, they represented the alien position.
When they’d first spoken, there was disagreement between them. The man was more forthright, while the woman had appealed to reason as a motive to spare humanity. Without intending to, Bower had touched on that same point, and from the glitch in their response, that had struck a raw nerve.
“You’re afraid,” Bower said. “You’re afraid of what we might become, of how we might one day threaten you among the stars… Please, don’t act out of fear. If you do, you’re no better than them.”
‘Them’ had been the term Bower had unconsciously settled upon, not us. Without realizing it, she had inadvertently transformed this debate into a three-party discussion, distinguishing both herself and Elvis from the rest of humanity and the destruction of the floaters. She hadn’t accepted her position as defendant in their court.
From their silence, Bower sensed the aliens accepted her position, and that must have complicated the situation further, as that one, small word, them, implied humanity was not a cohesive group. If the alien edict didn’t apply to Bower and Elvis, then there were others that could equally claim exemption, those that also detested the acts of violence unleashed upon the floaters.
“Fear is the enemy of reason,” Bower said. “You must have seen that. Your pilots, those we named Stella, they must have told you about us, that we too were afraid, and yet fear need not rule over reason.
“When I first stood before Stella I was afraid, but I chose not to act out of fear. Standing there in that darkened prison, I was shaking, trembling, but I could not hurt her. Together, we reached out to each other and overcame our fears.”
Neither the man nor woman replied. The man opened his lips but seemed to halt in the middle of a word, as though something was caught in his throat.
There has to be more to this, Bower thought. Although she felt as though she was speaking to two individuals, she was acutely aware the alien congress sat out there somewhere in the darkness, tens of thousands of them watching her, listening to her words. Perhaps they were divided into two camps, represented by the two humanoid apparitions she saw before her. They differed. They weren’t in agreement. She could exploit this.
“As an intelligent species, we are much closer to you than you think,” she said, talking not to the figures before her, but to the audience at large. To emphasize her point, she broke eye contact and turned as she spoke, ignoring the seemingly angelic representations before them and speaking directly to the extraterrestrial congress hidden in the darkness. “We may not speak the same language. We may not share the same mannerisms, but we share one thing, reason.”
The two futuristic representations of humanity stood still, but not as she or Elvis would. They were frozen, nothing more than mannequins in the wax works, statues in a museum. Bower knew she had the alien congress flustered.
“We can learn. That is what has allowed us to ascend above the other animals that inhabit our world. Yes, we’ve made mistakes, but our strength comes not from force of arms, it comes from recognizing those mistakes and having the willingness to change.”
Bower continued to ignore these futuristic doppelgängers, but out of the corner of her eye she could see they had remained stationary, as though they were storefront dummies modeling clothing. Although there was no outward activity, she felt confident she’d unleashed a flurry of discussion behind the scenes. Doubts were rising. She had to exploit that uncertainty.
“We have struggled with the same dilemmas as you now face. For us, it was eugenics, whether to be selective with breeding, whether to sterilize our fellows based on race, class or creed so as to consciously shape the future of our species, but reason prevailed. Reason demanded equality. We have made mistakes, but reason is self-correcting.”
Bower shook her head as the realization sank home.
“Look at me,” she said, gesturing with her arms held wide, looking down at the dark skin on her forearms and the back of her hands. “I am a black woman. I am everything that was feared.
“Less than two hundred orbits have passed since my ancestors were freed from slavery. Barely a hundred orbits have passed since women of any color were granted the most basic of rights, that of the right to vote and be heard as individuals. And yet just over fifty orbits ago, I could not have sat on a bus next to a white man like Elvis, and all because of a layer of pigmentation that sits no more than a millimeter beneath my skin.”
Bower breathed deeply, composing herself, surprised by the upswell of emotion within. She forced herself to go on.
“And yet these orbits have come and gone and we have changed. We have moved on. Those that were once despised are now heroes, and not because they fought in a physical battle, because they stood for what was right.”
Bower wasn’t too sure how well her point communicated. Would these creatures even know what a bus was? Would they have access to the historical records that would explain the life of Rosa Parks? Would they at least recognize the principle?
“Barely five hundred orbits ago,” she continued, using their terminology. “We thought Earth was the center of this vast universe. We thought stars were but a pinprick of light, smaller than a grain of sand, and yet slowly we have learned to expand our thinking to match reality.”
“When I was a child,” Elvis said, stepping softly into the discussion, “I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
“Yes, yes,” Bower replied, turning to Elvis, surprised by his insight.
“Hey, Southern Baptist upbringing. It’s got to be good for something, right?”
Bower smiled, shaking her head. She turned to address the darkness yet again. “And we’re still in our adolescence, still in our infancy, but we’re learning to put away the toys. Science has allowed us to become adults.”
The two humanoid figures faded into the darkness, but that didn’t deter Bower.
“I understand why you came here. I understand why you feel we must change, but we need time to grow up. For too long, we’ve valued the wrong things. We’ve valued gold and diamonds, but perhaps it has taken your visit to our small planet to show us where the true riches lie.
“You crossed the countless miles of interstellar space not to plunder our world for minerals, not to take our water or our wealth, but to sample the greatest treasure in the universe, to explore life. And I see that now, I understand there is no more precious commodity than the life that surrounds us. From the smallest microbe to the largest mammal, life commands reverence.