EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL FOLK METAL FUSION
A lesbian love triangle, transmissions from outer space, and the semiotics of yoghurt are explored in this short story from 2015
HELLO my dear subscribers! I’m writing to you from my den of European iniquity, aka my lengthy writing retreat. I’m here until the end of January, writing fiction. This means that the memoir is currently on hold until further notice. Instead of memoir, I’ll be posting some short stories from the Brief History of Lies desk. It may be that what I offer to paying subscribers will change over the coming months, as this substack wrestles with other things, such as my need to make an actual living in the real world. I am figuring it out. As always, you are free to come and go as you please without my say so, but if you do have any questions about your subscription (or just want to say hi), get in touch. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this science fiction comedy campus romance!
EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL FOLK METAL FUSION
Professor Jane Lovage imagined that she might walk into the Astrophysics building, free her hair from its neat bun, and shake it loose in gingerish waves over her shoulders. She might slip off her corduroy business jacket and twirl it around her head a few times before slinging it into a corner (missing any vital pieces of lab equipment in its path, of course) then she might stride – yes, stride – through a throng of mesmerised spectators, stride right up to Mariel Hewitt – and kiss her. In Jane’s imagination, Mariel would be dazzled by this unexpected display of sexual glamour. Professor Jane! But… but you’re beautiful! And of course, Mariel would swoon into her kiss. The much-hyped kissing with tongues that was all the rage these days.
What a daft idea, really. And not the sort of thing that would impress Mariel Hewitt, at all. These naïve romantic scenarios might be popular amongst Jane’s colleagues in Astrophysics, but Mariel Hewitt was Media Studies. She probably wrote papers that deconstructed the trope of ‘sexy/professor’ and analysed its place in the context of feminist critiques of academia. Mariel was a woman of the modern world. And Jane was from outer space. Not literally. Well yes, literally, in one sense: in the sense that everyone is, sort of. But she wasn’t an alien. She was emphatic about that.
So the fact that the media had dubbed her Alien Jane bothered her a lot. Especially this morning, when it had appeared on the front page of the Guardian: ALIEN JANE’S “TRANSMISSION” IS EVIDENCE OF INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE. Everyone Jane knew read the Guardian. Everyone. There was absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Mariel Hewitt read the Guardian. The tabloids were less of a worry, though their headlines were even more ridiculous: ALIEN JANE’S TEXT MESSAGES FROM OUTER SPACE. Or her students’ favourite: REVEALED: ALIEN JANE’S TORRID NIGHTS WITH SPACE LOTHARIO!
There was a lot of dumbing things down and making things up – the real story was a lot less... sexy. Yes, the Transmission had been picked up by Jane; and yes, it had clearly been broadcast from another, long dead, planet; and yes again, it looked like pretty convincing proof of intelligent life in the universe. But as stunning as that story should have been without embellishment, the Transmission was, at heart, just a line of code. It wasn’t even an especially good-looking line of code. Jane herself wasn’t that photogenic, either, certainly not enough for the tabloids to pursue the ‘sexy professor’ angle. The nickname had stuck, though. She was Alien Jane now, and there was nothing she could do about it.
She managed to walk through the lobby of the Astrophysics building without stripping, and made it to her office with all her buttons fastened and hair in place. That day’s Guardian went straight into the wastepaper pin next to her desk. She sighed. Maybe the emptiness she felt was hunger. In the tiny office refrigerator was an apricot yoghurt that didn’t do anything too alarming when she peeled back the foil lid, so she decided to call it breakfast. She was about to eat it when Mariel Hewitt barged into the room and plonked herself on the chair opposite Jane’s desk. Jane instantly felt dishevelled, and mortified to be caught with a spoonful of yoghurt gripped in her hand. Of all things to eat in front of Mariel, yoghurt seemed the most pedestrian, the least punk. It marked Jane out as a woman of little substance. She threw the pot into the wastepaper bin. Slimy yellow streaks splattered over the Guardian headline.
“Those arseholes in Modern Languages,” Mariel said. “They’ve only gone and found an exolinguist. I mean, what bollocks.”
Jane nodded, and hoped that was enough to make it look as though she knew what Mariel was talking about.
Mariel grimaced. “Bloody linguists. What are you doing for lunch? Would you like to brave the canteen with me? I’ll tell you what Baudrillard said about extra-terrestrial intelligent life forms.” She tucked her hair behind her very shapely ears and grinned. “If you can possibly stand it. You’ve probably had enough of non-scientists hanging around here.”
“I’m free at twelve o’clock,” said Jane. “It’s a date.”
Only of course it wasn’t a date. Well, not in that sense. Not in the sense of two people with bodies trying to work out if the bodies should interact in intimate proximity to one another. Not in that sense, at all.
Dear Alien Jane,
My longing for you can only be described as sexually transgressive. My biology urges me to perform certain acts which would perhaps be considered morally questionable by your species’ standards, and I can’t deny that this is part of the excitement. Our sexual union is all I can think about, although I have no way of knowing if we are sexually compatible or even physically capable of achieving congress. All I know is that the more I think about it, the more my tentacles unfurl and ooze with slime. If you feel the same way, please, please let me know.
Your own
Space Lothario x
According to the Guardian, the Transmission consisted of music, poetry, and rules for trigonometry.
“The works of the greatest alien poets and musicians, comparable to Shakespeare, Mozart, and the Beatles, are being beamed at the Earth in a sequence of code. The code repeats every two minutes, and so far there has been no variation. Astrophysics professor Jane Lovage, popularly known as Alien Jane, says that the transmission is evidence of intelligent life in the cosmos. ‘It wants to communicate with us. It has something important to say,’ Professor Lovage stated.”
Mariel wondered if Alien Jane really had stated that. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing she’d state. Not that Mariel knew anything about Alien Jane, or the Transmission, or science in general. What Mariel knew about was Media Studies. Since the news had broken about the Transmission, she'd been hanging around the Astrophysics building, hoping for some kind of inside scoop. She’d been spending time with Alien Jane, but all she could glean so far was that the Transmission was some kind of temporal-geometric pattern, which was almost certainly deliberate, and which was being beamed at the earth from a distant planet that was so far away in space and time that it no longer existed. Alien Jane reminded Mariel of Jodie Foster in Contact, only not quite as good looking.
Mariel thought a lot about how the planet beaming this message no longer existed, long since burned up by the death of its sun. The author of the Transmission was dead, as were the author’s children and grandchildren and great grandchildren and their descendants, not to mention everyone they had ever loved, or whatever their equivalent of love was, along with everywhere they had ever lived and every place they had ever seen with whatever their equivalent of eyes was. Maybe they saw with the backs of their knees, or whatever their equivalent of knees was. The Transmission was therefore of great and compelling interest to the Media Studies department, and to Mariel personally.
Mariel cancelled her afternoon lecture and spent the next two hours in her office making notes for an article which she planned to flog to a major journal. Damn it, maybe it could even be a book. Maybe this was the breakthrough she needed to launch her career on a global scale.
The message, which has no point of origin, no discernible content, and which cannot be decoded, can therefore be thought of as the ultimate fiction: it is entirely open to the reader’s interpretation. It demands a level of engagement which is so extreme that the reader must in fact literally become the writer of the message. However, in order to become the writer of this particular message, the reader must be utterly annihilated. Not only must she attempt to inhabit the extinguished alien psychology, but she must do so in the knowledge that, should her attempt be successful, she would logically exterminate herself as writer. This is a text which, by its very nature, creates an infinite and intellectually fatal paradox.
It needed some editing, obviously. Mariel chewed the end of her biro and stared out of the window. A gaggle of undergraduates went by, wearing T-shirts printed with children’s cartoon characters. They would be made to talk about those T-shirts in class. They would be asked to write two thousand words on the meaning of their T-shirts. Or they could just bloody well stop wearing them.
My Alien Jane,
Your silence is unbearable. What can I do to convey the infinitude of my longing? When I picture your limbs and digits, my fronds dilate and ripple with gaseous eruptions. Forgive me for being crude. I do not know what cultural taboos your people have regarding sexual matters. I only know that I can barely control my suppurating glands.
If only there were some way we could be together. Please, find a way to let me know you feel the same.
Your
Space Lothario x
The same song Jane had heard on the radio on her way to work that morning was playing in the canteen at lunchtime. To call it a song was probably overstating matters. It was more like a xylophone having an epileptic fit. The only comprehensible part of it was the piano playing in the chorus, which was jaunty and commercial and no doubt explained the song’s popularity.
“What is this hideous music?” She asked Mariel.
“Are you kidding? Get with the program, AJ,” Mariel drawled. “Everyone on the planet has a copy of this. Don’t tell me you're not grokking the digital music of today.”
It seemed to Jane that Mariel was doing an impression of the kind of person who said the kind of things that Mariel herself said all the time. Jane wondered what it would be like to be someone who could have a conversation with Mariel without straining some kind of cultural muscle. In a small way, Mariel’s convoluted personality detracted from her sexual appeal – but then she would give out one of her wide easy smiles which redeemed her and made everything better. Even so, Jane still had no idea about the music. Mariel smiled kindly at her, and explained that Lang Lang (“At least you’ve heard of him!”) had teamed up with an exomusician to interpret the Transmission patterns as music.
“And that’s what everyone’s listening to?” Jane was appalled.
Mariel laughed. “He’s an unashamed populist, but you have to admire him. The man has chutzpah. He can even make alien music sound twinkly.”
“But what’s an exomusician?”
“Let’s ask the exolinguist. She’s coming over.”
The exolinguist was a tall woman with eyes set quite far apart, not as far apart as a bird’s, but quite far. It was hard to look in both her eyes at the same time. Jane noticed that Mariel was giving it a good try. She was staring at the woman, and it was a bit too personal. It was rude.
“Susan Lorimer,” said the exolinguist, holding out her hand for Jane to shake. It was rather a limp handshake on both sides, Jane thought: the sort of handshake that made people like Mariel think you were a bit pathetic. Had she ever shaken hands with Mariel? Surely she would remember. No doubt Mariel had a very firm grip.
“Is it safe to eat here?” Susan asked.
Mariel laughed as though Susan had said something terribly funny. “Oh, you’ll probably live. Avoid anything that looks like it once had a face. Anything in a sealed container is probably fine. Although the yoghurt looks like it’s just about ready to declare itself an intelligent life form and start running faculty meetings.”
Jane smiled nervously. So Mariel had noticed her eating yoghurt this morning.
“I’m looking forward to our meeting,” Susan said to Jane. “I have so many questions to ask about the Transmission. It’s a great opportunity.”
“I see,” said Jane, staring fixedly into her bowl of cheese salad. It had suddenly occurred to her that a lot of people were interested in the Transmission who didn’t have much reason to be. Were there people cynical enough to actually try to make money out of this awesome, unique moment in human history? She felt a little bit sick, and suddenly wished that no one knew anything about the Transmission at all, that she had kept it entirely to herself. She looked up from her cheese salad. Susan was watching her, and Mariel was watching Susan, and Jane was overtaken by a desire to be alone in her office, with the Transmission and a lot of silence.
“Oh,” said Mariel, turning briefly towards Jane. “If you’re going, could you take these journals with you? I borrowed them from your office, but to be honest I can’t make head or tail of them.”
Jane didn’t sigh. What would be the point? She picked up the pile of journals. How had this turned from a lunch date into her fetching and carrying whilst Mariel wooed the wide-eyed (literally) exolinguist? What the hell was an exolinguist, anyway? God, life was depressing. She left the canteen without looking back.
Dear Sirs,
Re: Extra-terrestrial folk metal fusion
I must take issue with your article in Issue 546, “Space Music.” Your writer overlooks the fact that Lang Lang has taken very many unauthorised liberties with the Transmission data. As I’m sure you’re aware, there is simply no basis for his ‘translation’ and in fact there is no evidence for this approach whatsoever. Nothing suggests that the Transmission is musical in nature. We don’t know what it is. Unscientific interpretations only hinder our ongoing investigations and research.
Professor Jane Lovage
Darling AJ,
How you torment me with your silence! My desire for our incongruous congress rises like the seven moons of Lorimer, from where I write this letter. Just looking at the moons whilst thinking of you makes my vestibular coracles swell and my lugubrious jellies tremble. How can you deny that what’s between us is real? Though separated by space and time and language and thought and biology and physics and some other things, I know that we can overcome all the barriers to our love. Or whatever our equivalent of love is.
Just knowing that you will one day receive this message makes my membranes quiver.
Your ever-faithful,
Space Lothario x
Every conversation with an exolinguist turned into a conversation about exolanguage, Mariel discovered. How could it not? It was fascinating watching Susan’s mouth move, forming the alien words. Szuzcs. Iliam. Qupxxo. These offerings mouthed with face twisted, eyes narrowed in concentration.
“Of course, these are just guesses. There’s no way of knowing if the aliens had a spoken language at all. They may have communicated by pheromones, or touch. Or by the release of differently textured slime. But the fact that the transmission is geometrical and mathematical shows us that they had an advanced language system that was capable of being represented in abstraction. Unless it isn’t an abstraction. Their language system may not be abstract or arbitrary whatsoever.”
Susan’s face was animated in conversation. Her eyes, still slightly too far apart, were also different shades of green. Mariel found it very difficult not to stare at her. Not only was Susan quite odd-looking from the neck upwards, but her conversation was exceptionally unusual. Mariel was charmed.
“What’s your best guess, Suze?”
“About the content?” Susan tilted her head and looked up in thought. “Adverts, I’d say. Probably a load of adverts. You know how we’re constantly beaming stuff up into space – telephone calls, film trailers, advertisements? This might end up being the only evidence that we ever existed, that our planet was alive and supported intelligent life.”
“I thought we were beaming up Shakespeare and Bach? And pi and all that.”
“Well, mostly it’s going to be two for one on all sofas until January, and ‘every little helps’. Future alien exolinguists haven’t got a hope in hell of working us out.”
“Let me just get a pen,” Mariel said. She wanted to write some of this down. Surely there would be a way of working this theory into her book. It was just the sort of thing that media studies academics got famous for saying. She might even get onto The Late Review.
Mariel leaned forward and touched Susan’s knee. “If you want to discuss this further, I’d love to buy you a drink.”
Jane focussed on not imagining what Mariel and Susan might be doing in Mariel’s office with the door closed, and instead returned to her own office in Astrophysics, with the comforting bank of computers and print outs and the gurgle of the coffee machine in the corner. She slung Mariel’s pile of borrowed journals on the end of the desk, and noted it was hiding a page of handwritten notes. The writing was neat but the content was almost indecipherable: something about the Transmission being a text without a writer or a reader. It made no sense. Jane screwed it up and chucked it into the wastepaper bin. She turned her attention back to the screen.
She had already mapped the pattern in three dimensions. That was Jodie Foster's breakthrough in Contact, and how stupid would she have been not to have tried it. It was the first thing people suggested. But of course it didn’t lead to a major breakthrough. It led to a complicated model that Jane could build out of plastic straws from the canteen and bounce from hand to hand whilst she wondered what else might be going on.
Maybe the mistake had been to call it a Transmission in the first place. That implied that there was someone doing the transmitting – but the area of space where this message had been picked up was so distant, it was certain that the origin was extinct. The pattern was apparently deliberate, but there was no key to its meaning, so that suggested it was never meant to be received by another civilisation. There was something accidental in the quality of it – as though it should never have been picked up at all. Yet at the same time, Jane felt very warmly towards the Transmission. Its familiar bumps and waves scrolling across the computer screen were a kind of comfort. The essential pointlessness of existence was somewhat alleviated by the fact of the Transmission – that was why everyone wanted a piece of it, even if they had to buy it in the form of a Lang Lang record. The truth of it, the real meaning of the Transmission, was quite bleak, Jane thought. It was an untranslatable message from a long dead planet, and there was no way of ever finding out what was intended by it. Jane foresaw a long and mildly boring career ahead of her, staring at this same computer image, playing with the same model. She sighed and threw the model into the wastepaper bin.
Maybe she should write an email to Mariel. She could express how she felt towards her, the terrible, embarrassing longing that was causing her such distraction. No, better to write it on paper, easier to destroy paper. It wasn’t as if she was going to send it, after all. What would be the point? There was too much that separated them – background, age, culture. Mariel was Media Studies and Jane was Science. Jane was the endless void of space and time, whereas Mariel was Taylor Swift’s feminist credentials and a Twitter storm. They were barely living on the same planet at all.
Dear Mariel, in the course of our recent conversations I have had certain physical reactions to your presence which I think I should describe to you… I… there is a chemical reaction that occurs when you smile at me. I. Your physical being causes a series of neurological impulses to occur in my brain. This is not very romantic. Sometimes I imagine striding over to you and just kissing you. I like your ears. And other things about you. I know there is so much that separates us and what am I doing, this is stupid –
She screwed up the piece of paper and threw it into the wastepaper bin, on top of Mariel’s notes and the geometrical model made of straws, which balanced on top of the screwed up newspaper, and the morning’s embarrassing yoghurt, which was rapidly – very rapidly – beginning to fizz and turn into gaseous slime. It was better to give up now, Jane thought, and save herself a broken heart. This was never going to work.
Susan Lorimer was nervous about knocking on Professor Lovage’s door. She was fairly sure that Lovage thought of her as an opportunist of the worst kind. It would be difficult to explain exactly what value she was adding to the Transmission project, with her notions of alien language systems that Mariel Hewitt was already picking apart to turn into post-modern cultural theory. It had been tricky to get away from Mariel, and as a result she was a few minutes late for this meeting, which she was fairly sure that Professor Lovage had completely forgotten about anyway.
When she entered the office, the Professor was sitting with her head in her hands, watching the pattern on the screen in front of her. She was very beautiful. The way her long neck arched gently as she sighed was quite delightful. Susan took a deep breath and was about to speak when she noticed something glowing in the corner of the room. The metal wastepaper bin was gleaming white and as Susan watched, it glowed even brighter. The metal edges were so hot they had begun to melt, and a small fire had broken out in the heart of the bin.
“Professor Lovage!”
Jane Lovage jumped up from her seat. She glanced down, saw the burning wastepaper bin, and held a hand up to Susan. “Stay calm,” she said. “Go to the nearest fire exit, alerting others on your way. Once at the designated safe area, call 999.” She stepped across to the door, reached around Susan and grabbed a fire extinguisher.
“No, look,” said Susan. Impressed as she was with Professor Lovage’s meticulous approach to fire hazard, there was something even more impressive happening inside the wastepaper bin. She peered over, close enough to feel heat on her face, and then a strange pulling at her flesh. The bin was throbbing with light and heat, and in the centre, a deep black void had formed, sucking the contents of the bin down into its maw. It was the blackest black Susan had ever seen, a hole through space into more space: deeper space, deeper time.
Professor Lovage pushed Susan aside and sprayed white foam over the bin for several long seconds. Somehow she had found time to put on a pair of lab goggles over her glasses.
“But… you didn’t see it, did you?”
Professor Lovage shot her a quizzical look from under the thick plastic lenses. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” said Susan. “Something strange, that’s all.”
Professor Lovage shook her head. “I’d appreciate it if you’d come back another time. I’m quite busy, and there’ll be a lot of paperwork to complete about this small but worrying fire incident.” She smiled at Susan, a smile that wasn’t a smile, but more like the face someone makes when she’s on the verge of tears. And Susan, sensing that she had somehow got this very wrong and missed her moment by a wide mark - by a whole universe, even - tried to speak but could not get any words out. When Professor Lovage turned away, Susan made a reluctant retreat. She closed the lab door behind her and whispered, “Goodbye, wonderful Alien Jane.”
My darling Alien Jane,
Our love may be impossible but it is the only thing I am living for. I dream of you (or whatever my equivalent of dreaming is) all the time. Time itself is nothing compared to the tentacular desire I feel for you. One day we’ll meet and you’ll dry all my disgorged sebum.
Until that day, I will dream of taking you in my arms and kissing you, or whatever my equivalent of kissing is.
Eternally yours,
Space Lothario x
The End (?)
Can’t agree with Wendy more— absolutely going to look closer at waste basket!
Heck yeah— if anyone would have a WH in the waste basket it’s Georgina Bruce!
Feeling quite blessed to have found Your writing
Really enjoyed this love triangle with a twist, Georgina. And I'll check my waste basket for wormholes from now on.