Dr alien, p.1
Dr. Alien, page 1
Pure science fiction fun mixed with a sense of wonder
Not terribly far in the future, a highly sophisticated alien species, the Tsf, have set up Trading Posts on Earth. Naturally, humans want to please them in hopes that the Tsf will share their ultra-advanced technology. And an opportunity arises to do just that.
The Tsf have rescued three aliens of three different, previously unknown species on, or in one case near three damaged spaceships. But something psychological appears to be seriously wrong with all three.
When their specialists fail to help these space-shipwrecked beings, the Tsf turn to humans for help.
Dr. Alanso J. Morganson, well-respected psychiatrist, is drafted to travel to a Tsf space station orbiting Earth, where he can examine these three strange, troubled beings and determine what their problems are. And he must propose a treatment plan.
Dr. Morganson knows the task is impossible, and perhaps no one in human history has been so far out of their depth.
But humanity is counting on him. To avoid drowning, “Dr. Alien” had best grab a lifejacket or grow tall enough to find solid land under his feet.
Each Dr. Alien tale builds on the last, culminating with a unique vista on a truly cosmic scale, as well as possibilities for astonishing developments to come.
Doctor Alien
Three Tales
Rajnar Vajra
Doctor Alien
Copyright © 2009, 2010, 2012 Rajnar Vajra
Previously published “Doctor Alien” Analog Jan/Feb 2009
“Doctor Alien’s Five Empty Boxes” Analog Jul/Aug 2010
“Doctor Alien and the Spindles of Infinity” Analog Jan/Feb 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.
The ebook edition of this book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share the ebook edition with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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EBook ISBN: 978-1-68057-268-1
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68057-267-4
Dust Jacket Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68057-269-8
Case Bind Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68057-270-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 021951070
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Cover design by Rajnar Vajra
Cover artwork images by Adobe Stock
Kevin J. Anderson, Art Director
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Contents
Introduction To
Stanley Schmidt
A Doctor Alien Trio
Doctor Alien
Doctor Alien’s Five Empty Boxes
Doctor Alien and the Spindles of Infinity
About the Author
If You Liked …
Dedication
My heartfelt thanks to Doctor Stanley Schmidt, my lifelong friend Gerald S. Beyer, to my agent Christine Cohen, and above all to my wonderful wife for infinite reasons, D.L. Ainsworth.
Introduction To
A Doctor Alien Trilogy
Stanley Schmidt
We’re often told that truth is stranger than fiction, and I usually think there’s a good deal of truth in that. Sometimes, when I’m reading Rajnar Vajra, I’m not so sure—and I mean that in the nicest possible way.
Science fiction is about imagination, but rooted in science; and sometimes writers underestimate just how wide a range of possible realities science allows. Rajnar likes to seek out the boundaries and poke at them to see what happens. He obviously has fun doing it, and so do the readers who go along for the ride. I know I did when I was editing Analog. Whenever I saw a new submission from him, I knew I was in for a treat, but I seldom knew what kind of a treat. His imagination, and the ideas he explored, and the tones of his stories, were all over the map—often surprising, but never dull.
Who else, for example, would imagine a human psychiatrist building a practice on treating a motley assortment of extraterrestrials of species he’d never encountered before? A human psychiatrist treating human patients at least has some idea of what constitutes “normal,” and can view that as a goal of his treatment. But what if he has no idea what is normal for a new kind of patient? (And why would aliens seek out a human to help them, anyway? I won’t answer that, but the answer can be found in these pages.)
I’ve long thought that the “completely incomprehensible alien” is one of the most overworked and least plausible notions in science fiction. There are certain very basic things that any living being must deal with, and most of his/her/its actions are ways of dealing with those needs. If you don’t understand its actions, that’s unlikely to mean there’s no logic to them, or even no logic that human minds can grasp. It’s far more likely that you simply don’t understand the underlying premises—or, in one of our vernaculars, “where the alien is coming from.” If you take the trouble to do so, things will probably make sense.
Dr. Alien’s patients may seem as baffling a lot as any you’ll ever meet, but they make sense on their own terms. I think you’ll enjoy meeting them. And who knows? Maybe truth is more like Rajnar’s fiction than most of us think!
A Doctor Alien Trio
Three Tales by Rajnar Vajra
The initial premise of the Doctor Alien stories is that a human psychiatrist winds up acting as a psychotherapist for three extraordinary extraterrestrial aliens.
So, let’s get to the fun!
But perhaps best not quite yet.
Due to what I call the “Fourth Law of Existential Physics,” which states that “To do anything, it is necessary to do something else first,” we should at least glance at what might make this premise … well, not utterly impossible.
Then we can have fun.
Astronomers believe that something on the order of one septillion star-orbiting planets inhabit the currently observable universe. A septillion can be written as one with twenty-four zeros following it like baby ducks. Some astronomers predict ten times more planets!
The idea that intelligent life only exists on Earth strikes me as so gigantically absurd that it’s only surpassed by the idea of life of any kind only existing on our world. The fact that terrestrial creatures thrive near oceanic hydrothermal vents in 113-degree temperature—Celsius!—shows how flexible and resilient life can be.
But considering the astonishing number of light-years separating extrasolar planets, direct contact between us and extraterrestrial beings, barring some astonishing coincidence, would require a mode of transportation bypassing Einstein’s speed of light traffic restriction, and also some way that intelligent species could find each other in a universe so large that averaging out the total amount of matter in it would result in a sum so minuscule that it could reasonably be rounded down to zero.
So, how do we push Einstein aside even speculatively?
Science fiction writers have offered various possibilities such as traveling in some extra dimension, usually named “hyperspace” or “subspace,” or altering the physics of the spaceship to remove annoying details such as inertia, or my idea of creating an alternative reality around a spaceship allowing it to pass through normal spacetime without interacting with it as certain forms of neutrino are suspected to do.
Perhaps the most likely candidate for offending Einstein is some flavor of teleportation, creating or finding cosmic wormholes that act as dimensional loopholes, permitting a spaceship to directly jump between distant points in our universe.
We don’t know that any of these ideas are impossible, so let’s brush the speed of light restriction aside, adding an appropriate apology.
As to how one intelligent species could find another, say, ten thousand light-years distant? I’ve got an idea although it would require an absurdly advanced technology, a currently undiscovered property of spacetime, and our trusty light speed bypass.
We know that the physical universe shapes our minds. Our experiences of distance, time, weight, direction, color, texture, and almost everything else depend on external input mediated by our senses, which work with only a tiny percentage of the information available. Human vision, for example, registers such a pitiful portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that on a world with truly gifted beings in the visual department, we’d likely be classified as legally blind.
In the end, all we can be aware of is consciousness itself. All else, including data from our most clever instruments, remains at best secondhand information, perceived by the senses evaluating that information, interpreted by our conditioned education, and experienced by … that which experiences all experience.
But is it possible tha t our relationship with the universe works both ways, that our minds directly influence, even in a most trivial way, whatever external reality exists?
If so, it might be possible for some ultra-advanced device to detect, in real time—again sneaking past poor old Einstein—the influence of consciousness on spacetime.
Now that we’ve wriggled past those obstacles, that still leaves another improbability standing between us and the required suspension of disbelief we may need to enjoy our three Doctor Alien tales:
How could any human, however well trained in human psychology, act as a therapist for any extraterrestrial intelligent being? Wouldn’t any such be far too different from us to even begin to comprehend?
Now there, I can offer an answer that might be entirely probable.
Given that these ETs live in the same universe we do, affected by the same basic properties, they might well evolve with enough mental similarities for our therapist to make some educated guesswork. Admittedly, it might require an improbable degree of luck for this guesswork to be useful to troubled extraterrestrials.
So, I may have cheated a bit to provide Doctor Alanso J. Morganson, our protagonist psychiatrist, a bit of extra serendipity. I hope you’ll forgive me for any probability overreach.
Ready?
Let the fun begin!
Doctor Alien
Funny thing about emotions. While they can be blended ten thousand ways, the basic ingredients are so very limited. Example? Fear. In my case, I’m terrified of performing a fairly ordinary human activity: public speaking. And here I was, about to step into a situation outside all human experience, yet I felt exactly the kind of sick fluttering in my stomach I get every time I’m pressured into addressing my fellow psychiatrists at an APA convention.
Of course the door in front of me, the inner portal, opened in the direction I least expected, sliding straight downward into a previously hidden slot in the floor. How much more intimidating, I asked myself, can this get? Then I realized that in this setting, the top wasn’t necessarily the top.
I’d been warned the thermostat here would be set lower than I’d find comfortable—at least my hosts-to-be had conveyed that much—so I wasn’t surprised to find the airlock chilly after it had pressurized and I’d stripped down to my hooded smartsuit; but as that inner door descended, whoa! A shock of coldness slapped my face, numbed my cheeks, made my eyes water, and stuffed my nostrils with tiny icicles. No problem. My smartsuit reacted and buried wires radiated warmth. I patted my chest pocket to make sure the photo of my wife and son hadn’t overpowered the valence zipper and fallen out, gave my vacuum gear tucked into the airlock’s safety netting a longing glance, picked up my case, then cautiously stepped into the alien space station.
Still light as fluff, I tiptoed over the blue “neutral” band acting as a kind of foyer and pushed through a filmy decontamination membrane. I took one step out onto dark, rubbery matting and thud. The large case I’d been toting by its carrying strap was snatched from my hand and hit the floor, hard. I nearly joined it. Normal gravity would’ve been a shock after eight hours of mostly the micro kind and suddenly I weighed half again my weight on Earth, a nice trick since the station wasn’t spinning. The Tsf had been specific for once about the weight increase to expect, but honestly, I hadn’t believed synthetic gravity would feel so genuine. And despite a crash course in Tsf Trader culture, I hadn’t imagined Trader headquarters in our solar system would smell like burnt vanilla beans or be as noisy as a plague of cicadas.
My ignorance wasn’t NASA’s fault. These aliens hadn’t revealed much about this station. And until now, no woman, man, bug, animal, or plant from Earth had ever been invited here into the Parent Ship, although it had been right in our backyard, orbiting the moon for the last three years.
But I sighed with relief because no one greeted me. Among Traders, any welcome visitor was supposed to stroll into a Tsf dwelling as if they owned it. Should one of them have been waiting by the entrance, even holding out a Hawaiian lei, it would’ve meant I wasn’t wanted, conceivably a fatal condition for a human dealing with this species. Unless said human had, say, a loaded bazooka. Some enterprising thieves had learned that the hardest way in a Tsf outlet on Earth.
My case, unscathed, automatically unfolded into a multipurpose acceleration couch, slower than when I’d seen it demoed at the Kennedy Space Center. It began following me like a faithful basset when I ignored the implied invitation and staggered forward.
The room before me was an extremely long and rectangular box, rather tunnel-like and mostly ivory colored, with blue and russet equipment or perhaps furniture laid along the floor in tidy linear patterns, everything fastened in place with bolts that could’ve supported the Golden Gate Bridge. I glanced up. The high ceiling held more equipment in similar patterns and with identical bolts. Interesting, I’d never thought of gravity control as a means to squeeze more use out of a room. Wall panels glowed, casting a bright, faintly pinkish illumination. I hoped my upgraded DM, its icon curled around my right ring finger, was functioning properly and recording every detail; I’d studied pictures of several Earth-side Trading Posts, and they’d looked nothing like this. But then, they’d been set up for human esthetics.
I counted a dozen Tsf fifty yards ahead and was grateful to have a moment to adjust to their appearance before having to interact. They were more grotesque in the flesh than in photographs, which is saying something.
None were taller than me, most several inches shorter, but each took up more floor space due to having ten outer legs plus three central, somewhat hidden ones directly supporting the “gondola” containing their circulatory pump, cranium, and digestive mechanisms. They resembled neither spiders nor octopi. The jointless outer limbs were thin but muscular and descended in a smooth arc. Halfway down each one, a thick bundle of cilia wriggled, reminding me of those fiberoptic threads used for hokey Christmas trees. According to our science gurus, sensory organs tipped the medium-sized hairs while the longest ones were used as hands and fingers. The shortest and most numerous ones, only an inch or so long, made clicking sounds as they changed position, the Tsf way of speaking. I was the only person in the room wearing clothes.
So far everything was going by the book, line by paragraph. Sure enough, I could breathe the air, handle the gravity, and keep my lunch down. My only real problem, aside from anxiety enough for two cowards and the dissociative numbing to be expected in such a surreal situation, was that my mission still made no sense to me. I told myself that more experienced human heads than mine knew what they were doing.
It wasn’t until I’d lumbered halfway to my alien hosts that my confidence in the experts nosedived. They’d told me, with a certainty only possible for people who planned to remain safe at home, that the Tsf would ignore my presence until I initiated conversation, but now most of the medium-length hairs in the room pointed straight at me. And the clicking chatter sped up, evidently, every Tsf talking at once—foolish me, I’d thought they were loud before. Sounded like a thousand car mechanics ratcheting away. Next time, I promised myself, earplugs. Better yet, no next time.
My case-couch nudged the back of my knees, but I still didn’t take the hint. I certainly felt the extra eighty-six pounds I carried right now, but I keep myself very fit, I have to, so I didn’t need the support ... yet. I stopped anyway. My hosts were turning back and forth in place, a dozen slow-motion ballerinas, while their sensory cilia kept themselves aimed at me with the steadiness of telescope clock-drives. My anxiety blasted off without so much as a countdown while my buck-fifty weight made me feel horribly weak. For the first time in my life, I had a visceral sense of what it might be like to be morbidly obese. Which was humbling since I’d treated obese people and had pretended to understand them. But there’s nothing like terror to deflect mere humiliation, and what scared the shame out of me was two Tsf suddenly barreling my way in high-gravity-defying leaps.
