A.R.Yngve
ALIEN BEACH

Chapter Thirty-Five

DAY 162

"Good morning, and welcome to our live Sirian Departure special feature, which will last all evening.

"As you can see on these recent satellite images taken from Earth orbit, the Sirian lander ship is now heading back toward its mothership, near Mars. In a matter of days, our friendly visitors will steer their course for some other star.

"It is unlikely that mankind will hear from the amphibian people in many years to come; space is without end and our galaxy holds billions of stars. No more transmissions to Earth have been sent from the amphibians after the departure of their lander."

"Yet, we have been given memories and wisdom to last for ages, and the parting message inscribed on the blue monolith on Alien Beach.

"The native owners of Alien Beach have agreed to let the island keep its new name, and are expected to reap huge profits from the expected waves of tourists on pilgrimage to the site. Chief Fongafale, who holds formal ownership of Alien Beach, has told our reporter he will restrict visitor quotas to a minimum, to spare the archipelago from over-pollution and exploitation.

"The U.N. Security Council has stationed a permanent peace-keeping force in the area to uphold law and order as the stream of pilgrims increases - cult tragedies will not be repeated in the future.

"Only now, in the Sirians' absence, people start to realize the visitors' deep and lasting impact on culture, language, religion, and science. It is already proving to last longer than expected. The early excesses of the suicidal cults is being replaced by a more thoughtful approach to ancestor worship.

"The trend of recent years to only hold up the faults of previous generations, is making way for a greater respect for the past, without which neither of us would exist.

"Our attitudes to clothing are changing, perhaps permanently; in the tropical and subtropical regions, more and more people are taking to wear no clothes except jackets to carry their personal belongings.

"State and private funding of space exploration is now being boosted in a way not seen since the race to the Moon. Related sciences, such as the study of controlled fusion and high-energy states, are also receiving generous grants.

"A new generation of students, who previously might have spurned science and technology as dull and soulless subjects, are now expressing a newfound link between science and the spiritual world. Music classes are more and more being mixed with science classes.

"To help us understand these profound changes, we have with us Carl Sayers live from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, with his longtime collaborator and wife, Eve Andru. Also, from Cairo, we have direct contact with Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Lazar Mahfouz. And also with us, from London, are Andrea McClintock and Bishop Edmund Soto. They have all graciously offered CNN the time to answer some of our questions.

"Thank you for being with us, Mr. Sayers. May I personally congratulate you for your great effort with the ECT."

"Thank you. The honor belongs to my colleagues of the team as well, and the team of amphibians, bless them all."

"Well - they have taken off, to wherever they're heading next... do you think we'll ever hear from them again?"

"I think we will. In an infinite universe, anything is possible... Eve?"

"I agree. Future generations will depend on what we decide now. It's not over."

"What will you do now, Mr. Sayers? It's being widely speculated that you'll receive the next Nobel Peace Prize."

"It's not important. Sure, it's going to be hard to wind down... going through all the data that we gathered during our year will take the rest of my life. It's going to be great. But I will gradually leave the workload to younger people, and spend more time with my family. I've had offers to host a remake of my old cosmology TV series."

"What about the rumors of your ill health? Are you still suffering from cancer?"

"It never really went away. I'll have to keep fighting it, but I have a long experience of doing that by now."

"What about you, Mr. Mahfouz - will you wind down your lecturing schedule now, or keep on working?"

"I'd rather die working, while sharing my experiences from Alien Beach, than face obscurity. My family will, I'm afraid, feel a little neglected but... I hope they understand."

"Bishop Soto? What lies ahead for you?"

"I haven't yet decided if I should retire completely from my duties, in order to devote all my time on writing down my experiences. Not an easy decision, you see, and made more complicated, because... Now the public wants to see me, reach out and touch me, in a way that I haven't experienced before. A certain religious confusion has arisen about my status. Some people seem to expect me to represent a kind of extraterrestrial religiosity - and that's something I was never meant to do. Which might force me to resign from my post, either voluntarily or by higher decision. Andrea?"

"My plans... yes, I will certainly keep working, and do all I can to inspire younger generations. I have a duty to the public now, I can't just isolate myself the way I used to. I... I have seen how others think, and I'll never feel alone again. The Sirians have my deepest gratitude."

"So... what came out of this visit? Who learned the most, they or us? Was this contact a success, Mr. Sayers?... Mr. Sayers?"

"The contact was a wonderful, glorious, inspiring, breathtaking failure. It can only inspire us to better ourselves. Therefore, it was of enormous value. Like Eve says, it's not over."

"Thank you, both - and good luck."

"Thank you."

"Thank you."

"Those members of the ECT who have not yet optioned retirement, are expected to remain occupied with analyzing data they gathered during the contact. A handful of them have chosen to stay in the archipelago to study changes in the wildlife, and to make sure no alien microorganisms are spreading from Alien Beach.

Among them are Ann Meadboure, Mats Jonsson, and Takeru Otomo, who all have declined comments. They are regularly assisted by visiting expeditions from the scientific community, but get to spend most of their time on their own... until the pilgrimage route opens later this year."

DAY 220

"Look!"

Ann pointed up into the night sky, past the flickering red point that was Mars. A new star was being lit.

It was the Sirian solar-sail, slowly turning its reflecting side to face the Sun and Earth at once. The Sun's light was reflected across a thousand-kilometer wide, extremely thin metal foil, so that the pressure of radiation could push the sail out of the Solar System. This new "star" was not nearly strong enough to light up the Earth, but it outshone the other stars and competed with the Moon in brightness.

Mats and Ann stood and admired the bright star for a long while, thinking of the beings who were in it - the passengers who were on their way to their moving homeworld, somewhere out there.

"Where's the soldier?" asked Mats. "I'll go find him."

"Don't," Ann told him, holding him back. She knew where the soldier was, and didn't want to disturb him; he had been spending the last few days and nights in the deserted lagoon.

The soldier opened his eyes -

He was back in his old high-school classroom - sitting down by his bench - and across the room, at the teacher's desk, stood the soldier's old homeroom teacher. The man's profession was mathematics, and he was a middle-aged man with a slight overbite in a melancholy, lined face.

"Son," said the math teacher. He had never used the title 'soldier' - enlistment had come years after high school. "I called you over here for a serious talk. About how to overcome your difficulties."

Now the soldier recalled the entire situation - that awkward, humiliating talk with the homeroom teacher, way back when he was an overeager, curious teenager who asked weird questions.

He knew in advance what would happen. This was the day he had tried to forget for the rest of his life - the day when he had decided he was not thinking right...

"You interrupted class again today," the teacher said, more like a stating of facts than an accusation - yet the soldier felt his neck flush with embarrassment. "I told you then, that you shouldn't ask such questions. If you don't admit that, how are you going to pass the tests this year?"

The soldier protested lamely, amazed at how squeaky and unbalanced his voice sounded - he was talking like a teenager again.

"But this could mean something, Teach. If you'd just help me think this through, I might get it out of my head."

Already the soldier saw that the protest was ill-phrased, half admitting that he shouldn't have made the question at all. Why was he doing this?

The teacher smiled his agreement. "If it'll help you, sure. What was your question again?"

"What's one divided by zero?"

"You can't say that."

"But I just said it."

"I mean, you're not allowed to make that question."

"Why?"

"There is no answer to it - the equation is pointless."

"You mean mathematicians have tried to figure out the answer, and failed?"

"No... look at it this way. There is an infinite upon infinite number of possible mathematical statements one can make. A number of them are useful to describe the real world, such as..."

He wrote on the blackboard with his chalk piece:

1 + 1 = 2 (TRUE)

"A very large set of all possible statements are logically false, such as..."

1 + 1 = 3 (FALSE)

"And so you can make false statements, but they're not useful as a tool to understand the world. See? That's why you flunk your tests."

"But I was asking about this special equation: one divided by zero. How do you know this 'statement' is as useless as 'one plus one equals three'?"

"Let's sort this out once and for all. 'One' can stand for just about anything in the real world - say, 'one apple,' 'one electron,' or 'one universe'. It doesn't matter which, as long as it is 'one' something. 'Zero,' on the other hand, can't be used to represent a thing - because it stands for nothing at all. Therefore the setup serves no point. It's a joke on mathematics."

The soldier said: "Suppose there was a use for that kind of setup. If one really needed to describe the relation between... something and nothing in mathematical terms?"

"So you assume this equation will reveal the relation between something and nothing. Let's try to find some answers for..."

1 / 0 = ?

The soldier replied: "I figured there could be several possible answers... for instance, 'infinity'."

"Aha," the teacher said, "but if you take..."

6 / 3 = 2

"From that you will get..."

2 x 3 = 6

"So if you say the answer is 'infinity,' you would get..."

1 / 0 = infinity

infinity x 0 = 1 (FALSE)

"See? The answer is false. Zero times infinity is still just zero, not one."

"But how do you know that?"

"The question should not be made. Besides, even if your answers to the equation were taken as valid, it would prove nothing."

"Why?"

"Because the 'zero' in the equation cannot correspond to anything in the real world."

"Why shouldn't you be able to use the 'zero' to represent something?"

"It's pointless to talk about non-existence as if it were a thing!"

"But if we can't use the concept of 'non-existent,' then how are we supposed to know what 'existent' means. You can't have 'yes' without 'no,' 'true' without 'false'."

"That's philosophy, not mathematics. I don't teach ontology in my class. Look, I only want to help you - your other grades are not that bad, but - you mustn't sit and dream in class. Just concentrate on the curriculum, and you'll make it into college... make it in life. Let's shake on it. Okay?"

The teacher extended his hand - its palm covered with white chalk-dust - and gave the soldier a suave "let's-be-pals" face. It all happened again, like before... the soldier would shake hands, make his promise and would spend the rest of his life in a downhill slide of wrongful choices, aborted careers and failed relations.

Teach only wanted to help. He was right, he had to be. The soldier moved to shake the teacher's dry, white hand...

He froze. Something was different from the way he remembered the event.

This time around, the teacher he saw was himself a defeated man, the melancholy in his face tinged with bitterness. Disappointment and frustrated dreams oozed from every pore and line of the man's face.

The soldier hadn't seen it so clearly then, only felt a vague doubt. Only now did he realize how deeply this small defeat had wounded him. He stood up from his chair and faced the teacher, whose hand had frozen still.

"Why?" he said out loud. "Why did I let you scare me into thinking I was stupid? Why did I chicken out on this day? I remember it all now. You made me promise - no, that's wrong - I made myself promise never to ask such questions again. What was I so afraid of, that I willingly shut off a part of my own mind?"

"What are you talking about?" said the teacher, voice oddly neutral.

"There was nothing wrong in asking a question, just because the answer wasn't pre-printed in the books! You were afraid of my question, because it forced you to actually think instead of repeating old memories! It's you who didn't make it in life - and you wanted to drag me down with me!"

"What are you talking about?"

"Ancestor - I don't know your real name - it's you who brought me back, isn't it? Thank you for having helped me see. This was the moment in my spacetime continuum you saw, from your vantage-point outside time and space. You saw the promise I showed - but I betrayed it, just for fear of falling. I'm not afraid anymore. I will pursue the unanswered questions to wherever they lead - even if they should lead nowhere."

"Nowhere is," said the teacher, but his mouth didn't move.

"Teach" had become a ventriloquist's doll.

Someone was operating his speech clumsily: "Energy in direction... to your vector of smaller representation... weak link in the wave function..."

But the words had rhythm, and music.

"A beautiful wave like my own - 'five, six, seven, eight nine ten, I love you' - like the part in my wave function that is bifurcated into the Ancestor continuum - 'some kind of happiness is measured out in miles' - but also goes in other direction difficult to align with direction along the time vector - 'why don't we sing this song all together' - you like me the first Ancestor in the direction of your choice - 'look at me!' - the music plays differently in different directions -"

The music -

The soldier shut his eyes, and opened them.

He was at the beach again, rising from the warm blue-green waves, treading the ground under his long, flat feet. Ann was there and saw him; she was wearing a vest full of pockets, carrying diving equipment in a backpack. Her sun-bleached hair fluttered in the evening breeze, as she walked up to the strange figure that stood in the foaming surf.

She came close enough to touch, and saw what he had become.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"My land-name is -"

(To ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS)

(previous chapter)