Freeze frames by Katharine Kerr

Author:Katharine Kerr [Kerr, Katharine]
Format: epub
Tags: Science fiction, General, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Fiction, Fiction - Science Fiction, Science Fiction - General, Horror, Mothers and daughters
ISBN: 9780812551730
Publisher: New York : TOR, 1995.
Published: 1996-04-28T23:00:00+00:00

NOTHING CAN TRAVEL FASTER THAN LIGHT

Suppose for a moment that back in the early years of the twenty-first century, Leslie had been not perfectly sane, no, but as sane as most people ever are; suppose that she indeed had telepathically contacted alien beings; suppose, in short, that thought can travel faster than light though nothing else can - it’s an old supposition, after all. If Leslie had unwittingly betrayed the human race, the alien beings that she called the Masters would have had to build a battle fleet and supply it for a journey of over seventy earth-years, staff it with Slaves to do the menial work and tend the Masters on board, then send it off blind, as it were, with no information about human weaponry and military structure, because Leslie knew nothing about such.

These putative Masters might assume, as we ourselves tend to assume, that a sapient race with advanced technology in one area will develop advanced technology in all areas. That the Masters have learned to sail between the stars might mean that they can easily conquer what they find there - it’s possible that they believe this, at any rate. On the other hand, their minds might take a more practical turn and realize that no race advances evenly, that all sapient beings nourish most what they love the best.

Along their way, these aliens would have met television and radio signals, faint at first, and disrupted by assorted magnetic fields, mere bits of cryptic information scattered through static like raisins in a loaf of speckled bread. It would be ancient information, most likely from the twentieth century, the last dying ghosts of situation comedies and variety shows, pictures of a queen’s coronation and the testing of atomic bombs, all jumbled together and spoken in languages as yet unknown. It’s likely that the aliens would have made some provision for translating these languages. The mind-contact with Leslie (assuming such existed) would have given them some basic grammar and a beginning vocabulary for American English, as it was spoken in her day.

As the aliens came closer, as they learned to work with human frequencies, the information they would have mined from these veins of electric pulses and waves would first clarify itself, then come pouring into the reception equipment they would have learned to fashion. (We may safely assume that a starfaring race would have a talent for devices. Would the Slaves be trained to do the actual building? Probably.) Imagine the flood of words, music, images, black and white at first, then suddenly brightly coloured - if of course these aliens saw colour as we do, if of course they even thought to tune their equipment to receive colours — a full spate of sitcoms, banal documentaries, MTV, broadcasts from the House of Commons, cooking shows, sports, news, and preachers, mullahs, priests, all exhorting their various faithful within the range of their local stations. We may assume that it’s the news reports that the aliens would treasure

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