FILLET OF MAN

by

Eliot Fintushel

 

he blue boys call me "Jello."  I don't mind; at least I'm clean (which is more than you can say.)  The blue boys have a lot to teach us and not much time to do it in.  So if I have to be the one to be ragged, I figure it's worth it.

Don't bother to thank me.  Don't feel sorry for me either.  And I won't feel sorry for you.  No matter what we do, in twenty-eight years there'll be half as much to feel sorry about, n'est-ce pas?  

 

emember when the primes first hit Arecibo, the Hubble, and the lunar VLA?  The CETI crowd was ecstatic.  Humanity was being ushered into intergalactic society, and coming at that moment of history, it seemed like a reward for Right Living.

The turn of the century had brought a close to the cold war and an end to the international munitions racket.  The scattered, genocidal ethnic clashes following the death of the Soviet Union had subsided at last, and for the first time in living memory, investment in the environment outstripped military budgets worldwide.

The ozone numbers were sloping less sharply; it became good business to be good citizens.   And when dead end munitions money gave place to moneymaking money for real goods and services, even the rain forest devastation turned around.  It's so much easier to be civil and civic minded when everybody has enough to eat and no one's in anybody's cross hairs.

I was beginning to be proud of being human.  Maybe all that horror and mess had just been Earth's middle age crisis.  Sure, we had made mistakes, big ones--Nobody could deny that--but we had come through it, most of us, still thinking and feeling.  Now the otherworldlings were coming to shake our hands, throwing their series of primes at us like Hawaiians tossing leis to the tourists.

"They're the same.  The sequence is the same, no matter what number base you choose--binary, decimal, duodecimal--a prime is a prime.  It's a transgalactic, inter-species 'Come on in!  The water's fine.'"  I knew that.  The learned professor was just babbling on, elated, as we went into lunar orbit.

"Look, doc," I said.  "There's our boys.  Visual contact."

"A-OK," he said.  I tried not to laugh.

The blue boys had proposed this rendezvous.  They had come a long way and didn't want to rush into anything.  Nor did we.  We had come a long way too, though not in parsecs; maybe we could teach them a thing or two.  Maybe they still had wars and pollution where they came from.  I, for one, was ready to share what I knew.

Their vessel made no sense to me whatever.  It looked like a topologist's diagram of an exploded torus.  How could there be room in there for anybody, and if there were room, how could they stand up?  Or if they could stand up, how could they sit down?  Flood it, and a colony of brine shrimp could barely make a life within that figure.  But the blue boys knew their primes.

I asked the professor to notify them of our intention to set down near their spaceship.  He performed the proper calculations, consulting the tables he'd compiled over squinty-eyed months of sciatica and tinnitus, nose to the computer screen, ear to the radio.

"Well, what do they say?  Can we start landing?"

He looked perplexed.  "No," he said.  "They don't want us to land."

"What do you mean, they don't want us?  This has all been arranged.  This was their suggestion."

The professor scratched his head.  He did things like that.  He made high pitched sounds in the back of his throat when he was nervous, too.  He sounded like a rusted shutter hinge on a blustery day.  "They're apologizing now.  They're saying they can't let us near them."

"Why the hell not?"

"We're . . . we're unclean."

"Unclean??"

"Well, I think that's it.  I think they're saying we're . . . unclean.  You know, as they've been saying from the start, they can't communicate well through words.  They need physical contact."

"I've tried that line," I said.  "It only worked once, and I was sorry it did."  We had a while to think then, as we cruised around the dark side.  When we came in sight of their ship again, I asked the professor to put their signals through the trans-sim, so I could hear them directly.

"It's inaccurate," he protested.

"Nothing personal, doc," I said.  "Please."

He adjusted the voice settings and connected cable from the radio.  The available technology was far in advance of what we had aboard ship; the professor didn't trust trans-sim and so discouraged investment in it.  As a result, the blue boys' voice was Satchmo, and the syntax was occasionally Stengel.

When I said, "Whaddaya mean, 'unclean'?" they said, "Sorry, but if you're not in the market for death, why window shop?"

"What death?" I said.  "We got no wars.  We're saving the trees.  We're on top of the ozone thing."  The professor was nodding and flashing me the thumbs up.  I winked.  "Let us teach you what we know.  Besides, I thought this was all set up."

"Sorry.  You looked more good from less close.  How could we know?"

"Know what?"

"We were only just now able to take a measurement, when you got kissing close."

"I told you not to use this thing," the doc said.  "'Kissing close'!"

"Measure what?" I said.

"Strontium 90."  So that was it!  The sins of the fathers!  Like every human on planet Earth, a small percentage of the calcium in our bones had been replaced by Strontium 90.  Nuclear testing had stopped, Chernobyl was past, no more nuclear power plants were being licensed, but there was a skeleton in our closet--and isotopes in our skeletons, half-life twenty-eight years.

"Sorry!" they said.  "We can't risk it, and we can't wait till you reach safe levels.  Our fuel supply is limited.  Do you happen to know anything about the intelligent life forms in the Andromeda Galaxy?  Are they radioactive like you?"

"Wait a minute," I said.  "Isn't there anything we can do here?  Any way we can get together?"

"Well . . . ," they said, and I said, "Yes."  I didn't have to think about it.  They sent up the boning crew in lead-lined suits, with glove boxes, and it didn't even hurt.  Now, there's a technology for you.  

 

hey tell me things by the way they touch me.  I ooze freely inside the exploded doughnut of their craft, like a liquefied caterpillar in its chrysalis.  Only, my metamorphosis was backwards, I guess.

I trust you are making good use of my transmissions.  When I return, you won't rag me too terribly for my . . . enhanced ductility, will you?  I'll explain all their mysteries then, when the blue boys leave, but I'll have to touch you to do it . . .

There!  That's the second time I've used that line.  I hope I won't be sorry.