Lost Souls

by David Barber

When Jerome returned home, there were mining whales out in the bay. Siren Point was just down the coast, a great underwater throat that sang the homing calls bred into the whales. After years in the deep ocean extracting trace elements, the whales were being herded back for culling.

It was the year his wife died, the summer he excavated the ruined christer temple, when the Spacers came back, as impatient as their machines, bringing the aliens with them.

* * *

The Spacer sat and fretted, toying with leaves plucked from the garden. He had wasted whole days here. No one seemed to know where this Jerome was, no one seemed to know anything.

With a thrill of disgust, he saw his fingers were stained green, and unnoticed by more of the tweaked conies that infested the garden had crowded round him. He clapped his hands, but the creatures only hobbled back a pace or two, chewing thoughtfully.

Perched at the end of a long swathe of charred plants, his vehicle was keeping watch and, as if the Spacer had finally paid enough tedium into some cosmic account, his ship alerted him.

“Wait,” he called, scrambling to his feet and hurrying to catch up with Jerome.

The Earther turned round, an angry bearded face, barrel chest, big belly. The Spacer’s reflexes were still in downtime default; he didn’t even see the punch coming. Jerome was a big man, but unpractised in violence. The Spacer sprawled backwards, more in surprise than the force of the clumsy blow.

Frantically, he signalled his craft to hold fire. “An alien wants to meet you,” he shouted, as the door of the Earther’s house puckered shut in his face. “An alien.”

Inside, Jerome rubbed his knuckles. Even the purity of outrage was tarnished. What did the casual destruction of his wife’s garden matter now? The house waited in silence until he ordered the door open again.

“My ship could have killed you,” the Spacer began. Bafflement creased his long pale face.

He was bony like all his kind, and even stooped resentfully under gravity, a head taller than Jerome. Silvery droplets adorned his clothing and more gleaming teardrops swung from his ears. He dripped like a bather rising from quicksilver.

“The aliens might look human,” the Spacer was saying, as he followed Jerome about the house, ducking through doorways always too low, “but they’re not. Don’t forget that. They act superior, but they never even got off-planet.”

The Spacer lowered his voice, as if to confide something important. “And they have this thing about guilt.”

Jerome interrupted. “What is it you want?”

The Spacer fingered his cheek. “They asked about human history, so we brought them back here to Earth.”

Those waiting in orbit murmured in his ear, and he held out a gleaming pearl. “The alien is on its way. You need to wear this.”

“Just a recorder,” he added when Jerome ignored it.

Another Spacer vehicle tore across the sky with a thunder that itched in Jerome’s bones.

“He’s not going for it,” the Spacer muttered. Again he touched the bruise beginning to swell beneath his eye.

* * *

“You are the historyman?”

“Historian, yes.”

The creature looked human, though its sallow face was plagued by tics and twitches. Jerome leaned away from the corruption on its breath.

“Profession of past. Regaining lost facts. Spacers think it worthless when the future and past are not the same.” The Spacer shrugged indifferently, silver beads clicking.

Before the Spacer left, Jerome tried to catch his eye, but he was listening to voices. With the expression of a nagged spouse, the man took coloured capsules from a pouch and swallowed them dry, his immune system no longer tolerating the planet of his forebears, an alien here himself.

While Jerome prepared a meal, the alien sat in silence, head sometimes shaking as if troubled by seismic doubts.

“Can you eat this?” Jerome asked.

“Protein. Carbohydrate. Fats. I can eat what you eat.”

Later, Jerome unpacked finds excavated from his dig at the christer temple. He showed the alien a broken knife. STAINLESS ST said the ancient writing on it.

“Stainless has a number of connotations,” he explained. “Purity or innocence. The blade may have been used in rituals. Their religion dwelt on blood and sacrifice.”

The alien hefted the treasure in its hand.

Encouraged, Jerome continued. “ST was shorthand for Saint. A Saint—”

“Spacers also use metal,” interrupted the alien. “Such an esoteric technology. Incredible that your ancestors based a civilization on it.”

For a moment there was silence between them.

“You seem so human,” said Jerome. “How can that be?”

“We come from very different worlds. But the Spacers have machines that download something of our minds into human bodies. A difficult mix. Too much of us and they failed; insufficient, and we could not be trusted.” The alien shrugged, an entirely human gesture. “Our kind cannot bear very much guilt. The Spacers provided these bodies. The guilt is theirs.”

If the Spacer were here, Jerome would have told him he wanted nothing to do with all this, but then the creature began to sway, its feeble grip on the world loosening.

When its eyes fluttered open again, Jerome’s face loomed over it like a moon. It was not the first time this flesh had failed, but the Spacers always repaired it.

It clutched at Jerome. “I have dreams. What does it mean to dream?”

Such a helpless monster. Jerome cradled it as he would any wounded thing.

* * *

The alien trailed Jerome round the ruins of the christer temple, peering into the trenches Jerome had laboured all that summer to excavate.

“The worshippers were from an age of crisis and violence,” Jerome was saying. “Yet who can say what their flawed natures made possible?” He explained how his kind had long ago engineered themselves free of the past’s ailments, and how it seemed they might have gone too far. He was not the only scholar to suspect something had gone out of human history.

“You dig at random with hand tools,” said the alien. “With Spacer technology, you need not rely on chance finds.”

Moodily, Jerome left his cramped pod to the creature and improvised a bed outdoors. He tossed and turned until after midnight, when he saw the stars ripple overhead, as if an unseen stone thrown into dark waters was spreading circles. It was the Spacer star drive, craft arriving or departing, forcing their urgency upon the laws of physics.

Weariness smuggled him away, and in the dream his wife shook her head in exasperation. How can it judge you, Jerome? What can an alien possibly know about human history?

But Jerome knew. Just shovelling soil and relying on lucky finds.

His wife was working in the garden, even though the house watered the plants and gene-tweaked conies ate the weeds. Their squabbles about it had become a habit, meaning something else.

She stood up, favouring the ache in her back and pulled off her gloves. “Now stop being so childish.”

“I’m sorry the Spacers burned your garden,” he wanted to say. “All that work wasted.”

Again she despaired of him. “But it wasn’t wasted, Jerome.” She shook her head and he was obscurely comforted.

* * *

Jerome woke early and, as he stamped life back into stiff legs, he stumbled over the crouching alien. There was blood on its lips. Dangling from its hand was the limp body of a cony.

“Protein. Carbohydrate. Fats,” it explained. “There is no guilt. It was not sentient.”

Later, the alien sought him out. “Spacers interface with their AI’s. Perhaps it is their religion, but they would not speak of it.”

Jerome grunted, not much interested in the doings of Spacers.

“And you, Jerome, what do you believe?”

For a while he did not answer. The old religions of the book had long ago given way to pharmacology cults and Near Death Travellers; his wife had been a Gaian Reformist. He believed none of it.

* * *

In its previous life, the creature recalled seeing messengers, waiting to be consumed by the Most Guilty as it tasted their chemical news, blissful in their utter innocence. The creature’s own duty had been made clear: to discover the meaning concealed in humankind’s machines, to find what drove their brief, furious lives, to assume the guilt of becoming one of them.

These humans deluded themselves, yet how else could they bear it? At least this Jerome did not share their illusions. It was as certain as it could be. Jerome must decide the fate of his kind.

“The Spacers spoke to us by radio.” The creature’s hands fluttered vaguely. “A sense used by our ancestors. Practiced by some as a devotional exercise.”

For a moment, the instincts of phantom flesh urged it to turn upstream, to drink sensations borne on cold methane currents. Its own kind had evolved on a gas giant. Most life does. An ancient biology developing over aeons. Nothing like humankind’s frenetic scramble into sentience.

“We had not imagined such technology,” it said dizzily. “Who knows how far this science of theirs can take them?”

Jerome shook his head. “But surely there must be ancient races, races so advanced that—”

“More ancient yes, but those who survive death have different goals. You would not understand.”

A concept difficult to explain in human speech, an obligation, often manifested in apotheosis, a whole race in a single day, in a single hour. Lacking souls, humans had invented themselves instead. Not knowing how they would react, the aliens had concealed this from the Spacers.

“There are infinite permutations of the neural code, Jerome, vast and unexplored landscapes. We glory in the fact that consciousness is not one thing, even that your kind disperses on death.”

There was a dreamy smile on its face. “God is the totality of consciousness, Jerome. We are building God, evolving God. God is yet to be.”

* * *

Jerome knew his wife would have chided him. “Death is a Gaian necessity,” she would have said. “How could a story that went on forever have any meaning?”

He wanted to tell his wife about the Fermi Paradox. How the reason we had never met spacefarers was because they saw no point in it. They were only passing through, on their way to something immeasurably greater.

Jerome debated what to tell the Spacers. If they ever learned humankind was trapped in the nursery, who would say no to them and their dangerous toys?

Before he could decide, the Spacers hurried onwards, taking the aliens with them. He was unsure what his wife would have thought of that. Lately, he had stopped dreaming of her.

* * *

The poisoning of the whale sounder at Siren Point was news for a time, but Jerome admitted nothing.

There was talk of regrowing it, though no one ever did and, without homing songs, whales no longer returned to the killing pens, living and dying in the deep oceans instead, serving no purpose but their own. If it made any difference to them, Jerome would never know.

Like so much else, like the secrets of the living and the voices of the dead, whale mining, too, passed into history.