Contact across the Solar System

"Horrible things that we can't avoid"

After a few more days of traveling, the Aurora reached Venus and docked in Saanalokam's spaceport. After going on a tour of the city, Cristina and her entourage soon got down to business.

She delivered a speech in a park there, dressed in that blue pantsuit, and wearing a necklace with "CRISTINA" on it.

After expressing gratitude to her hosts for bringing her to Saanalokam, she asked rhetorically "Who am I? Who is this Earthling who was invited to speak to all of you?". She then introduced herself while transmitting pictures from her laptop to a big screen behind her. She showed maps and pictures of where she lived and pictures of her and her family and fellow students and fellow workers and fellow Congresspeople and Congressional staffers. She described how she was born in a medium-sized town in southern Mexico and how at the age of ten her family moved to Los Angeles in hopes of a better life. She did well in school and college, but she had trouble finding a good job, and she ended up working in a beauty salon for a while. She was also an activist for a variety of causes, and that led her to run for Congress.

She described looking at Venus through a telescope when a child. Venus had phases like the Moon. It was not just a light in the sky but a world, like the Earth and the Moon. And now she was standing on it.

Then she said "I wish I could only talk about nice things, but there are horrible things that we can't avoid. Humanity has a horrible history of war and violence and nastiness and greed and rape and exploitation and so many bad things. I understand that many people of the Solar System Community do not like the idea of contacting us Earth people because of our horrible record."

"Here is just one little bit of it. Some of this horrible history is written in my genes and in the genes of very many other people. It is an oversimplification to describe the conquest of Latin America as European men coming over, killing the Native men, and marrying the Native women. But often not much, even though many Native men did survive in several places. My mitochondria are all Native - they are inherited from one's mother - and though I don't have a Y chromosome, my male relatives do, and they are all European."

"There is a lot of similar history going much farther back, on both sides of my ancestry."

"All you good people of the Solar System Community, please don't be too hard on us people of planet Earth," she pleaded. "We care about our families. We care about our friends. We care about each other. We care about doing a good job in our work. We care about our relationship with reality. We care about learning about the Universe around us, and learning about ourselves. We care about making life better for each other. Or at least many of us do many of these things. Or try to."

"There is another issue that I should bring up, because I was involved it for some time. I'm talking about the anti-espionage movement. This movement is a movement of the people of my world that opposes contact with the Solar System Community, or at least demands a full accounting of how much the SSC has spied on the people of my world."

"Yes, I was in that movement. I fully confess it. I took part in it. I was in it because when I realized that the SSC's residents had telepathy, I felt very horribly violated. It was like being raped, but much much much worse. It was the worst kind of violation that I could imagine. The SSC people could see what I was thinking, what I was feeling, even what my consciousness was, that elusive 'I'. While having no idea of who they might be and when they might be doing it. So I got involved in that movement."

She then described her involvement with it and her leaving it. "It was a gradual thing. It wasn't some sudden realization that the SSC was super great and I was missing out on some great thing by opposing contact with it. It was a gradual growth, bit by bit." She then described that would-be terrorist attack in Switzerland, her admiration of Japan's independence from Western colonizers, and her meeting Kalna on the beach of Catalina Island. "Yes, she read my mind. That was the best way to show her how I felt about mind reading."

"And here I am."

Then she said "Hey Founders, are you there? If you've been following my speech, I hope you'll pay attention. I know that we must seem like ants to you, but I hope that you will listen to what I have to say."

Everybody was startled, even Mike, who knew that she had considered what to ask Orthon about the Founders.

"Founders, O Founders, why did you make the SSC such advanced societies and leave us Earth people to wallow in mud? Seriously. Our history has been so horrible."

"You have said very little to the SSC people and nothing to the Earth people, so I don't hold much hope of your responding to me. But if you were to do so, I'd be very grateful."

"Have you been involved in our emergence from earlier species? Did you genetically engineer us into existence? I've talked to some geneticists, and they can't find any obvious evidence of genetic engineering in our genomes. One of them said that we are full of unfixed bugs." She laughed. "Also that our genomes aren't very well organized." She laughed again.

She looked at her notes and she said "Why do we need vitamins? Essential amino acids? Essential fatty acids? I remember someone describing how some bacteria can live on just about any organic carbon source. Common bacteria, he added. Bacteria like gut bacteria. Most of that deficiency is shared with the rest of the animal kingdom, so it's not just about us. Still, why didn't the Founders fix it?"

"There are oodles of weird things that I could discuss, so I'll mention only a few. Why has humanity had so much of a history of men treating women so terribly? I can understand how women may seem less capable than men in some ways, and I can understand that women are more essential to making future generations than men are, but why as less than full human beings and not with the respect that many men give their younger brothers?"

"Another thing is women's appearance vs. men's appearance, Why do women do more to beautify themselves than men do? At least on average. I remember being interested in birds for a while as a kid, and it's mostly the male birds that are the more colorful of the two." She checked her notes again. "I later found out that this is understandable as sexual selection. So why are we the other way around?"

"My detractors like to attack me for working in a beauty salon, but I feel no regrets about that. None. So I'm living evidence of that oddity, and very happy living evidence of it."

"So you Founders, are you the ones who created this oddity? If you weren't, then do you have any idea of what might have caused it? Some weird sexual selection?"

"Yet another thing. Why do we like to wear clothes? We wear a lot more than might seem necessary. Especially since our Paleolithic ancestors didn't wear much at all in warm weather. But when we learned how to make lots of clothes, we started wearing lots of clothes, even in very warm weather. Don't get me wrong. I love clothes. I've done a lot of photo shoots for fashion magazines and I don't regret a bit of it. But why do I do so?"

She paused. "I think I've done enough nagging the Founders." She then answered a lot of questions about herself, her career, her world, and the anti-espionagers. "Some of them now hate me like crazy. They call me a sellout, a traitor, a quisling, a Benedict Arnold, you name it. Some of them talk about how they expect the SSC to make me their provincial governor of planet Earth."