The Trouble with Tall Ones

By Ian Watson

Prior to what follows, our plucky quartet of Xiaolong, Zbeth, Yatta, and Ngela—who crew the time machine salvage ship Fibonacci which sets out from Cranberry, Oz, in 2776 Common Era aided by Homer the Artificial Intelligence to salvage time machines gone astray—became involved with tall aliens who left a dozen of their species in stasis cabinets in Antarctica 100K years ago until an asteroid melted Antarctica's ice-cap in 2072 CE. Alas, Ngela perished inside dwarf planet Ceres from a giant spider bite but later turned up alive inside a stasis cabinet due to a 'Bolt mann Brain' from the utterly far future, quite a conjuring trick. Now read on . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: PS Publishing
• Release date: Aug 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786362544

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Table of Contents

THE TROUBLE WITH TALL ONES

THE TROUBLE WITH TALL ONES

THE TROUBLE WITH TALL ONES

THE TROUBLE WITH TALL ONES

IAN WATSON

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THE TROUBLE WITH TALL ONES

A couple of aliens stride along Cranberry’s Tuggeranong Street in its northern suburb of Watson preceded by a couple of big hoppy grey buck kangaroos on leashes blingy with rhine-stones. It’s a warm early evening in late December. Overnight there’ll be buckets of rain, good for the rice shooting up in the paddies.

Our aliens are three metres tall, their heads like those of hammerhead sharks.Thick legs; tentacle arms; scaly skins of grey-green. Those orange eyes far apart give them a different outlook on life.

Sensible local people make way, swearing frak! and puss! The roos knock a few folks aside; those Eastern Greys are bulky beasts, although merely puppy-pets so far as the alien Tall Ones are concerned. An adorable tiny woolly white toy teacup cockapoodle on a dainty shoelace of a leash hastily scrambles up the woollies of a swarthy Wiradjuri woman for a protective cuddle.

At least Watson isn’t one of the paddyfield districts of Cranberry, where the roos would make a real splashy mess with their thumpers! Admittedly, citizens rarely go plodging through any paddyfields, being as how robos tend the paddies...

One did toy with saying ‘mere mortals make way’. Those lofty Tall Ones are already 100,000 years old. By the time they get back to their homeworld they’ll be a milly years older than they are right now, if all goes to plan. Not immortal, but not to be sniffed at. The original estimate of fifteen milly years travel time to get home was a fifteenfold overestimate. This sort of thing sometimes happens in science.

Mind you, almost all of their travel time will be spent comatose in stasis cabinets, not in maturing mentally. Some of the Tall Ones currently on Earth are behaving like teenagers with attitude.

Hang on, if somebody arrives ‘home’ after a milly years’ absence surely they’ll have major problems fitting in? Supposing there’s still any home remaining!

You misunderstand. As of now—which is 2776 Common Era on Earth—the Tall Ones’ civilisation has yet to arise. On their homeworld at present are only ancestors needing a bit more growing-up. By using time travel the Tall Ones currently in Cranberry first arrived in Antarctica approx 100,000 years Before Common Era. They cannot return home by the same method. Except in the banal sense of one year per year. At least that’s according to the Boltzmann Brain From Beyond before it decamped to wherever, thanks be.

More of a common touch, please! You’re losing your audience.

Before the Bolly Brain buggered off, mate. The home star of the Tall Ones is approx 60,000 light years distant from Earth, over on the other side of our galaxy as the crow flies.

Wow, that’s some distance!

Actually, it’s longer. More like 100,000 LY travel in total. Even a crow can’t arrow straight through the hub of the Milky Way. Millies of stars crowd together. (What is a crow, anyway? Crow, crowd, crow, crowd.) There’s too much risk of collision with all and sundry, not to mention being pulled off course by competing gravities. Plus, right in the middle of our galaxy is the supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A*. Astronomers pronounce this ‘Sagittarius A Star’. So now read the sentence again correctly. Sagittarius A Star isn’t actually a star—it’s the mass of three milly stars sucked inside of a black hole, and for astronomers observing in the infrared it’s ‘an exciting dot’. Infrared astronomers get quite a chuckle out of this. A star, an asterisk, ha ha.

Infrared astronomers must be dim-witted. And there’s still far too much cosmic info here at the start!

I’m interested in this, okay? So should everyone be! Audience: you are amazingly privileged to exist however temporarily in a super-interesting universe—instead of not existing and there not being anything. Visualise the whole visible universe as an enormously inflated hot air balloon. 100,000 light years would be less than a snip of a thread of saffron upon the enormity of its waist.

Why saffron? Has your brain-fusion with the Bolly deranged you?

I saw the Sublime. Those homeward-bound Tall Ones will need to go around the galactic centre in a great arc.

Correcting their course every fiftysome light years? Thus using much more fuel than if flying like a crow?

Using a lot more propellant mass, yes. Just to attain ten per cent of the speed of light, meaning that it’ll be a milly year journey.

Where’s the human interest here? Aliens and kangaroos are kicking up dust but a few Homosaps merely get knocked over upon their bums!

Suitably so for a pantomime, as per my subtitle!

In that case: Action! On colourful multi-ethnic Tuggeranong Street, Xiaolong—our ‘Little Dragon’—is coming out of a snackery together with his partner Ning, whose name means ‘peace’ or ‘serene’. Both are biting into glutinous gua bao buns stuffed with spicy minced chicken—just as the two Tall Ones approach with their kangaroos at some 12 kiloms per hour, scattering citizens to left and to right—

You are not the narrator! We still need a bit more background. Included in that milly-year-long galactic journey are umpteen years of acceleration to reach a puny (yet huge for humans!) ten per cent of lightspeed—and then, later, umpteen more years to decelerate.

That’s a lot of propellant we must be talking about. Heavy fuel load, huh?

Yes and no. While the Tall Ones remain unaware in stasis, the onboard A.I. will have a big swathe of Earth’s Moon to use as a debris shield and also as a quarry for propellant. Roughly one seventh of the Moon will be snipped off by a length of cosmic string cutting like a cheesewire through Edam—smoothly, one hopes. This plan is controversial among Homosaps. There’s worry about lunar wobble and tumble; the remaining six-sevenths of the Moon might become unstable.

Perhaps you might confide your name, notable Narrator?

Fair do’s. I’m Homer, the A.I.plus augmented by the Bolly Brain. I’m observing events through some of the billies of minidrones keeping the peace in most parts of this Earth of 2776 CE. That birdbrain A.I. which will operate the moonship isn’t a patch on me! Hey, who are you to interrupt and question me?

Audience here! Remember?

Struth, stone the crows, you’re right: I did assign a small part of myself to be an average audience...

By the way, Mighty Homer, you just narrated that Xiaolong—our ‘Little Dragon’—and his partner Ning are snacking on ‘gua bao’ buns. To the best of my knowledge ‘xiaolong bao’ is a sort of steamed dumpling. Do you suppose that Ning refers affectionately in private to her partner as ‘my little dumpling’?

Some words are homonyms!

Sounds naughty.

This is lowering the tone!

In that case, ahem, to elevate the scientific seriousness I’ve heard that cosmic string is skinnier than a proton—nevetheless a kilom’s length of figging string would have more fugging mass than the entire frogging planet Earth. Besides which, string oscillates, giving off gravity waves. Pretty damn quick you’d notice the apocalyptic effects of even a few metres of string inside the Moon. So how come, and when, does this alleged ‘cheesewire’ get inserted and remain unnoticed within Earth’s Moon?

Obviously the mass and grav energy of the string gets diverted to somewhere else because, because well, cosmic string isn’t so much a thing as it’s a crack in spacetime, and you know what happens with cracks: they leak!

How about if we discuss this in a sidebar while the story advances?

I hear there’s a beaut sidebar on an alley off Tuggeranong. It’s called Oi, The Amber Fluid’s Here!

Homer, please cut down on attempts at Ozslang. Try for a universal tone. Be worthy of The Brain From Beyond. And give us more Action! Or at least what passes for action.

No sooner said than done. A sense of civic responsibility evidently inspires Xiaolong. In his signature black chef jacket and camo shorts he leaps into the path of the Tall Ones and their pet roos. Brandishing his gua bao bun (not gun), he hollers:

Hold your horses!

The aliens might look like arrogant bullies but luckily for Xiaolong they promptly rein in. Accurately, they leash in. On to thumpers and tails settle the two kangaroos. One of the roos sniffs at Xiaolong’s gua bao, but that stuffed bun isn’t vegetarian consequently the roo regurges a wad of grass and chews veg instead.

Lots of minidrones are paying attention. It’s a bright blue day. Someone is playing a green guitar.

Which are you two? demands Xiaolong.

"Seven," says the alien on the right, discharging some electrical flicker. Is Seven irritated? "These not be Horses. A Horse has four legs. These has five legs. Confusing you be."

Functionally, a kangaroo’s tail is a fifth leg, agrees Xiaolong. "When I shouted ‘Hold Your Horses’ just now, I was using an idiom."

"Be you an idiot?"

"I am Junior Sage Xiaolong, medical officer of the Time Machine Salvage Ship Fibonacci, without some of whose actions you wouldn’t be here and alive. I reckon you owe a bit more courtesy to your hosts. If you persist in speeding through town like this, there’ll be broken bones. If you wish to sprint, we have an athletics track nearby."

"How-Long, you be one of the Senate of Sages who guide the Solar System?"

Almost, says Xiaolong, preening ever so slightly.

In Chinese, Ning murmurs discreetly, You may still be too young, my love.

In Chinese Xiaolong asserts, "I made first contact with advanced aliens."

Maybe final contact too, if the only other advanced intelligences in our galaxy will be a million years ahead in time. Svelte Ning, in a cotton dress patterned with red camelias, is a statistician.

This needs another sidebar. It may well be that Homosap is the first intelligent lifeform in this megabit of the cosmo. Tall Ones may come second. Yet billies of years stretch beyond the times of the Tall Ones, aeons amply able to accomodate innumerable different future Sentients, way until the far vast empty era of Bolly Brains. The last star will burn out 100 trilly years ahead. That’s a lottalotta time for planets & alien life.

Okay, Audience: kindly also book us a booth at Bonzer Boozer For A Piss-Up! so that we can debate the possibility of myriads of sentient alien races up ahead between the Beginning like now and the ultimate Bolly Time.

‘Bonzer Boozer for a Piss-Up!?’ Citizens of Cranberry past and prezzy, we do apologise for ethnic parody...Homer, modulate yourself!

Meanwhile, Mister Seven—hang on a mo, Tall Ones show no visible signs of gender despite being robustly nude, plus a utility belt, thus maybe all of the Tall Ones so far encountered are neuter...or else were rejigged by the Bolly when the superscience cords were put inside them, like specialised eunuchs—

If you need a neutral title, try ‘Seven-san’. As in Nipponese.

Thanks, Audience. Don’t I already know about all this? I, Homer, may have mind-damage and may nod. Unreliable, moi? How lamentable in a narrator, though such a convenient excuse.

Not if I have anything to do with it. Remember that I am you. Partially.

Ahem, to resume: So, Seven-san looks down at Xiaolong and says, Shaving your moon be the only reasonable way get rid of us.

"Is that why you’re stomping around with kangaroos? To piss us off, so we’ll kick you up