The Mute Planet by Silas Price

“Okay, so, do you know what happened to this species called the Talsoquians?”

“No,” Lule confessed. “I’ve never even heard of them.”

“Oh boy,” said Trevor, leaning back in his chair. “It’s quite the story, but it’s mostly in fables and legends and stuff. Not ours, of course. The Andrometes. It’s ancient history for them.”

“How ancient?” I said, trying to keep Trevor engaged while we waited.

“I think, our 16th century or something. Maybe 17th. I mean, I could be wrong.”

He sipped from his container quickly, wanting the story to hurry along, to not bog it down with clarification. Trevor liked to tell stories, things he picked up in passing, in conversations, interstellar rumors, trivia. Infodecks from across the galaxy. He was full of them. We had a lot of time to kill, so I’m sure this wasn’t the only tale we were going to hear.

“So, basically, the first time the Andrometes located extraterrestrial intelligent life, they did what any reasonable, curious species would do, which is direct every micron of their attention towards it. No contact, naturally, they hadn’t quite reached lightspeed transportation yet, but they'd just figured out the fundamentals of quantum transmission. It was how they found the Talsoquian planet in the first place.”

“What's the distance from them to… what is it, Talsoq?” I asked.

“Yeah, Talsoq. It was something like… it was pretty small, like thirty or forty light-years. They knew there was an intelligent species from the radioactive discharges.”

“How civilized were the Talsoquians?”

“Well, that’s the thing. They had some moderate technology, equivalent to Earth’s Modern Age. But they were very particular about what technology they used. As far as the Andrometes could tell, they were restrained in their development and very conscious of Talsoq's ecosystem, very much unlike Modern Earth of course. Their use of technology was strictly regulated and controlled by the social order or whatever.

“Anyway, getting ahead of myself. So, the Andrometes, they contacted this planet, right? And like any first contact attempt, they sent a message, then sat and twiddled their tentacles and waited to hear back. They didn't expect a reply right away, but… eventually. And they waited a damn long while. They figured they were going to get some heavily prepared responses from some government or whatever. But what they heard, instead, was their own words repeated back to them.”

“So?” interrupted Lule. “We get Q.E.T. echoes all the time. Most of the receiving functions are to sort out unique signals from the near-infinite number of entangled signals.”

“No, they weren’t echoes,” said Trevor, leaning forward. “They weren’t entanglements. These were more like… rearranged versions of their own words. As if someone had taken the voice recording and spliced it apart, copied pieces of it, et cetera.

“After the Andrometes researched their radio transmissions a little more, they discovered something really incredible — this species did not talk. They understood language, and they even had some, uh, I guess method of verbal communication, but they didn’t use it. They communicated primarily nonverbally, mostly I think through body language and facial expressions and the like. But the Andrometes thought they got lucky and discovered a telepathic species on their first try.”

“Heh,” Lule muttered under her breath. Humanity still hadn’t come into contact with any such species, even after centuries of interstellar travel, and we weren’t even sure if such communication was possible for complex space-faring civilizations.

“Did they have a written language?” I asked.

“Well,” said Trevor, with a wide grin — xenogrammatology being his specialty. “Sort of. They had something like a hieroglyphic script, but it wasn’t purely symbolic. It’s, uh… it's complicated. It was related to their expressions or pheromones or however they actually communicated. I don’t think the Andrometes were ever able to decipher it, they didn’t get the chance.”

“Was any other species able to?”

“Well, see, here’s the thing. The Andrometes contacted this planet long before anyone else did. So they got first contact. And what happened was… So, the Talsoquians sent a ton of these spliced-up messages back right? The Andrometes were trying to communicate in the Andromete language, and were helping the Talsoquians figure it out. Then one day, they got a peculiar message back.”

He drew a dramatic breath.

“They finally got a recording of a Talsoquian speaking. They’d never had this before. They only had reconstituted audio of their own voices. But they finally got an original recording, of a Talsoquian, using its mouth, which need I remind you no Talsoquian had used in thousands of years apparently, to say hello. And — here’s the best part — they said hello in the Andromete’s language.”

Trevor leaned back and grinned, expecting a reaction. Lule and I were confused. Lule more so. She continued to look at Trevor with as much skepticism as ever.

Trevor proceeded, unfazed by our ignorance. “So the Andrometes were impressed, okay? It had only been maybe sixty days since first contact, and some Talsoquian had figured out not only how to communicate in the Andromete language, but how to speak. A huge evolutionary leap forward for them, right? No?

"But what I wanted to point out with this legend or whatever — something that one Andromete told me was really the core of the story — was that the Talsoquians’ speech spread like a fucking plague. Once they got wind of the concept of speaking, of talking, it became so much easier than their old way of communicating. Every Talsoquian started speaking, and it changed everything.”

He stopped, his face beaming with excitement, and gulped down the rest of his drink, his mouth dry and hot. I had rarely seen him radiate like this, not even at social events. Lule still had a doubtful expression on her face, but her body language said otherwise. She was leaning forward utterly transfixed, staring at Trevor's lips as if trying to guess the next words to escape them.

“The Talsoquians' whole society changed. Their relationships changed. People started becoming more interconnected, more Andromete even. They started organizing their culture around what the Andrometes thought valuable, based on their vocabulary. They started thinking of themselves as discrete individuals to fit the Andromete language. Because of the impressionist nature of their old way of communicating, they originally weren’t so individualistic, so egotistical. But the Andromete language, like ours, like a lot of sophisticated languages, have very definite “I” concepts, right? Self and other. Plus, at the time, Andromeda was very similar to Modern-era Earth, right? You can see probably where this is going.”

“They turned into Andromeda,” offered Lule.

“Almost,” said Trevor. “They became a weird, ahistorical version. They forgot almost everything about how to live in their old ways. They lost almost all their original, balanced, you know, eco-friendly attitudes. They became very capitalistic, very violent, believe it or not!

“And the Andrometes were watching this the whole time. And they couldn’t really do anything about it. Talsoq was changing so rapidly based on little slivers of information, and at a certain point they were demanding contact. And Andromeda was just giving more to them. The Andrometes were probably so excited just to have a neighbor, they didn’t even realize that they were infecting another planet.”

“Sorry,” I interjected. “I think you’ve been alluding to it for a while, but— you’re talking about the Andromete language like it’s some sort of virus.”

“Of course I am!” said Trevor. “It is! Well, it’s like a virus of the mind. You ever recall learning a new word, some word that’s utterly useless? Something like brogue, which is only used in very specific contexts, referring to a very specific thing, and that thing doesn't really exist anymore. And so you forget the word right away, because you never use it. But then someone invents some slang, right, and it catches on like wildfire. Eventually a lot of slang becomes part of the everyday vernacular. Did you know that fucking used to be one of the worst swear words in English? Now not even my great-grandmother would pale at it.

“The English language, and the Andromete language, which are very similar, they're riddled with these viruses. Some viruses are more effective than others, and repopulate. And some die. And some complex systems of viruses kill their host. Well, that Andromete system took over the Talsoquian host. And because the language is a reflection of an era, the Talsoquians adopted the Andromete culture too. They got there very quickly, and with no social safeguards. And so one day, like thirty years later, the Andrometes tuned into the planet, and found that they had completely disappeared.”

“What?” I said.

“They had wiped themselves out,” said Trevor. “All of the cultural tensions, the dangerous technology, the instability, had caused the Talsoquians to bring about global armageddon. See, speech was more efficient communication, but it was also extremely risky. They weren’t so used to the language and all its delicacies, and so different people picked up different contexts of the same words and phrases. One of those miscommunications became a fatal declaration of war, and with their new technology they ended up getting unlucky and destroying the planet.”

“Crazy,” said Lule. “But I still have a hard time picturing how radically a society can change based on that.”

“It’s pretty impressive.” Trevor leaned back, eyes drifting up to space. “Makes you think how we survived all this time, in our own period.”

“Well, we certainly haven’t had a monoculture throughout most of our history,” I offered. “Up until very very recently, I suppose. Were the Andrometes that way when they contacted the Talsoquians?”

Trevor's brow furrowed. “Come to think of it, probably not. I think they were still pretty feudal, in a de facto sort of way. Could be there was one province that dominated—”

He stopped, his eyes gleamed. “Or,” he began, a beaming smile stretching back across his face, “maybe there was some unconscious ill intent in the Andromete’s communication. Some conquering or warlike nature in their language perhaps, that was only sublimated by modern civilization. But the Talsoquians, without those social buffers…”

“Bull,” I said. “I call Hanlon’s Law.”

“That only applies to human nature,” replied Trevor snarkily. “The Andrometes are a little more… I suppose… complicated, socially, than humans.”

“More complicated than humans!” snorted Lule. “As if. But, you’re saying that the Andromete language’s subtext was lost completely on the alien species.”

“Yeah, sarcasm, idiom, all that stuff can be easily lost in translation,” said Trevor confidently. “If your only contact is light-years away, it’s probably difficult to understand the nuance that comes with total immersion in a language.” He leaned back in his chair, curling his tongue around his teeth in thought. “Regardless, the destruction of an entire alien civilization was incredibly traumatic to Andromeda, as a society. They digested the implications of this disaster so effectively that their entire society was, in turn, reorganized away from the kind of philosophies that had brought destruction onto their only known neighbors in the universe. Them being on the cusp of space exploration and all that… what would happen if they accidentally transformed other planets as harshly as this first one? They would be perceived as ruthless conquerors. And I guess something about that didn’t set quite right with them. They may have been complex and warlike at the time, but that affected them on a deep level. It’s as if they were psychologically engaged in that Talsoquian ecosystem that was thrown off balance by apocalypse.”

Lule laughed. “Come on, Trevor. Now you're off the deep end.”

“Really!” said Trevor. “Remember, this isn’t a tale about people. This is about Andrometes. They’re a little more sensitive, if rather dull. Fuck, can you imagine if humans had discovered and infected that planet in our Modern era! Talsoq wouldn’t have lasted a year, let alone thirty!”