Sometimes you’ve got to be patient.
That’s a lesson, perhaps, of my new short story, “The Weather Out There,” published in Long Now Ideas, the publication of the Long Now Foundation, whose mission is to encourage long-term thinking. It’s also possibly the lesson of the long journey this story had to finding a home. I first drafted this story seven(!!) years ago. That’s a long time to hold a candle for a story, but I really liked it, and so I never quite buried it in the trunk. In the years since it’s been through many revisions and rewrites, ballooning up to 10k words and back down to 3k. Then I pitched it to Long Now, and they took it right away. Of course an organization focused on long-term thinking would be the right place to publish this story about conversations that play out over centuries, messages traveling for decades through the murk of deep space.
This story is set is the Bay Area over a thousand years from now. For a good chunk of that future time, people have been in communication with an alien civilization, the Alsafi, some 19 light-years away. There is no ansible in this story, no FTL, no way around the cosmic speed limit. If you had a question for the aliens, you’d have to wait about 40 years for an answer. It’s a slow conversation, but one that makes humans appreciate their environmental sustainability and organizational/cultural continuity. Until, one day, the Alsafi go silent.
The story follows Ferris, who works on the teams that send messages across the void, recording his thoughts in a journal that comes with his ancient Oakland house. As he tries to puzzle out what happened to the Alsafi, he rekindles a relationship with an old flame, Cassio, and, well, things get complicated.
Here’s an excerpt:
“Say there’s a lighthouse out there.” Cassio waved towards Marin. “It’s going to blink a message at you. What are all the things that have to go right for you to get that message?”
“You have to have line of sight,” I said. “And be looking in the right direction, at the right time. You have to be watching long enough to see the whole message, and you need a good enough memory to remember the pattern. Then you have to know how to decode it.”
“And,” Cass waved expansively, “it can’t be too foggy.”
“We’re pretty good at predicting the weather out there, you know.”
“I’ve never liked that metaphor. Tracking matter a dozen light-years away is nothing like watching for clouds on the horizon. It’s dark, and your model has to look decades ahead based on the thinnest flickers of shadow. Did you know they keep changing the estimates of how much dark matter there is in the universe?”
I did, but something about being there with her, on that beach, stirred a thought I hadn’t had before.
“In the histories the Alsafi used to wonder a lot why they never heard from anyone besides us,” I said. “They’ve always been more bullish about the chances of life in the universe.”
“You think if they got a transmission from someone else, they’d stop talking to us?” Cassio asked.
“A second contact changes everything about The Conversation. Do they tell us about them, or them about us? Whose permission do they need first? Who do they prioritize? It gets complicated.”
“Kind of like us,” Cass said.
She spoke low, barely louder than the surf. We let it hang there for a moment, the chimes of distant drift-ships rolling in and out of the Golden Gate.
“Kind of like us,” I agreed.
Long Now published this alongside reprinting my solarshades.club essay “Space is Dead. Why Do We Keep Writing About It?” This piece proposes that the huge amount of sci-fi written about spaceships, colonies on faraway planets, galactic empires, and daring astronauts might be out of sync with the sluggish or nonexistent progress we’ve made over the last 50 years toward such a spacefaring future. If we want to find out what’s out there in the universe, I argue, we first need to figure. out how to survive here on Earth.
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Andrew Dana Hudson 