damselfish

There was a kerfluffle over the romantic interests in Mass Effect 3-- as in, "where are the straight people?" Gay people in space are simply not believable. When it's pointed out that we're talking about a universe in which you can romance aliens, fly at faster-than-light speeds, save musical telepathic space spiders, fight a bunch of sentient machines, and all that stuff, our dear heterosexuality crusaders say that this is not at all hypocritical. "Science fiction of course has things that are not possible, but the whole point of sci-fi is that is is meant to be 'imaginary but more or less plausible'. Good fiction has to feel 'realistic'" and "How is it kind of gross? I've always wanted Bioware to be realistic when it comes to romance options, to have some straight, some bi, some same sex only - that's the way the real world works. I know that's not going to happen because Bioware likes to go down the 'everyone is bi' path so we can all romance whoever we please and play the game the way we want but it does annoy me :-/"

It made me wonder about science-fiction tropes. FTL is not too fanciful to suspend disbelief for, but gay people are. It made me wonder if their ideas of FTL were related to the statistical probability of the proportion of queer characters to straight.

Would this mean a ship full of queers would go faster?

The universe was full of all sorts of not unusual things, such as: aliens, spaceships, massive floating cities suspended on the morning dew which coalesced from the ruins of thousand year old alien civilizations, and near lightspeed travel.

What the universe did not have: gay people.

Or rather, what the universe did not believe it had, but as is the way of things, the universe, in its vast infinity, doesn’t remember what it stored away, much like you don’t remember how that old love letter from the captain of the high school football team ended up at the bottom of your drawer where your husband could find it.

And, in the way of the strictly theoretical, these two were related. As they inevitably would be.

Martha didn’t know much about light speed, or care. It was a finite limit, and one that didn’t apply to a police captain anyway. It applied to things like spaceships and aliens and scientists, and she was not any of those things.

But she was a lesbian, and she didn’t know that her existence was improbable. She wouldn’t know for another ten minutes.

Her motorcycle idled as she pulled up to the park fence. She was off, but when was a cop ever really off? Mike had mentioned seeing something strange in the park-- the communists, he guessed, because to him it was always the bums, for every suspicious thing. Them or the homeless or maybe kids, but this was absolutely, 100% the fault of the communists.

It was an old park, a sprawling once-estate for the rich and famous that had gone to the city instead of divvied up by taxes. As a gift.

The crowns of the trees were warped around the opening of a soccer field, as if a hurricane had come through and bent the branches permanently.

There was a spaceship in the middle of it.

It wasn’t a real spaceship, because if it were real, the park would be crawling with people. The FBI. NASA. The news. Everyone, really, would be looking at the spaceship. But they weren’t because it wasn’t real.

She parked her bike at the old wooden fence and jumped over to stalk toward the spaceship. Probably those university kids. Something. A bunch of clever kids who were filming this to post later. She made her way over the grass, wet with the afternoon’s rain. It soaked up her jeans and mud squelched beneath her sneakers.

She made it halfway to the soccer field before one of the trees shivered and loosed a shower of water from its branches.

It smelled like copper.

“Oh, shit,” said the branches. “Uhm. Uh. Lady! Sorry.”

“Jeeze, you idiots,” said another voice which was not the branches, and an arm was around her waist and steering her toward the a spot by the bleachers. “Don’t mind Janie and Txlicew. We can... unfortunately I think those grease stains have already set given your body temperature. Are you feverish or is this just human?”

Martha planted her feet squarely on the ground and turned to look at the man attempting to lead her toward the spaceship.

He was man-shaped, but he didn’t look anything like a man. The bare forearm against hers was cold. He had dark eyes, depthless, an embarrassed expression when he met her gaze. “I guess that is nosy of me,” he allowed.

“You’re not from the uni.”

“No.”

“You’re an alien.”

“I suppose you could say that,” he agreed, silkily. “But what brings you here, Miss....”

“Marty.” No. “Martha.” Better. “Captain McGill.”

The alien beamed at her. “Fantastic! I am also a captain. But that does not explain why you’re here. The shield generators should still be functioning, so there’s no reason you should have seen it. Dreadfully inconvenient if you did. We don’t exist, you know.”

“Yes you do, you’re right in front of me.” There was nothing on the books about dealing with aliens, and Martha was left to her instincts. Which were not, per se, bad instincts. They were reasonable.

“Yes and no.”

Martha reached up and flicked him on the forehead. Her nail struck a spark against the armored scale above his eyebrows, and the park rang with a soft chiming.

“Ow? What was that for?”

“You exist, QED.”

“Shhhh! Not so loud. They’ll hear you.”

“Who?”

“Them. Oh, it won’t be for millions of years, but they will, they’ll be listening. They’re always listening. Agents of Occam’s Razor. They can’t see our ship, but they can hear you.” He frowned then, and gave her a hard look. “If they haven’t already. Do you live alone, Marty?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

He plucked a single white cat hair off her t-shirt. “Might I wager a guess?”

“No. No you may not. You can’t park there, Captain Alien. Now I want to know what Janie and... the other guy dumped out that... window or whatever.”

“Sorry. Happens every time we dump the lubricant for the rationality core.”

Martha blinked. “The what?”

“It starts gumming up, you know? But it leaves the core exposed and it makes people suspicious, like they can feel the irrationality seeping out of the coolant. Nonsense of course, unless someone forgot to fix the insulation on the tanks.”

A pair of eyes that had been peering out from the door in the spaceship-- glowing baleful red-- glanced sharply at the floor and backed away, out of sight.

“Figures. Sorry about that. We’ll be off your planet by morning. I can compensate you for the clothes, what do you use on your planet? Credits? Tsch!ma? Diamonds? Lots of civilizations enjoy a good diamond now and again, we could compress some for you. How does six pounds sound?”

Martha opened her mouth and closed it again at the idea of six pounds of diamonds. “Why do you compress them?”

“The refractive quotient is perfect for our drive.”

“...Your spaceship is powered by... sparkles?”

“Your vehicle is powered by controlled explosions caused by a liquid distilled down from long-dead animals. I should go and make sure that the insulation tanks are fixed. Come with me and I’ll see about payment. It’s a wonderful thing meeting you, Marty.”

“I’m... flattered? Why me?”

“Well,” he said, frowning. “You see. It’s complicated.”

She trailed after him into the spaceship. She shouldn’t have, but she did. Because it was there, and she would never live it down if she saw a real life spaceship and didn’t go inside. There were other aliens inside, and not a one of them looked like the captain, but they all looked at her curiously as the captain led her down a corridor. “By?”

“The fact that our coming into contact is a statistical improbability-- possibly an impossibility, because the likelihood is so small the very fact of your existence is eclipsed by the odds against it.”

“Because I’m human?”

He looked at his comrades, then her. “Well. No. Actually. You see. Your planet’s existence and the existence of other planets like it that gave rise to other sentient species that all look relatively similar? That’s nothing. A statistical inevitability. But we’d never reach them because there’s no way to break the lightspeed barrier. Not without doing something else impossible.” He ducked through a door that was the same height as a standard door on Earth. Because he was right. Except for being blue or having four arms or an odd number of eyes, all the aliens Martha saw were, in fact, quite like people.

What were the odds, she wondered? She glanced around the circular room, with its walls panelled with gleaming metal broken by lines that glowed with liquid neon. A pedestal stood in the center of the room. “Like?”

He waved a hand dismissively, filling the tube on the pedestal with what looked like charcoal. “Like crewing a ship with a bunch of queers.”

“Excuse me? What does that have to do with anything?”

“That’s just it. We have a probability drive, because it all comes down to the math. The barrier is a finite limit, and your odds of breaking it become exponentially smaller the closer you come to it. See, everything that we come up with that is likely to break the limit at the outset actually decreases as you get closer and becomes more and more rubbish. You need something vanishingly rare to exceed the limit. Something improbable.”

“I was never any good at math.”

“Quite all right. I don’t much like it myself. You might want to look away.” A series of rings floated up around the tube, spinning and throwing off flashes of light. The subsequent flash nearly blinded her, and left her ears ringing.

“What does this have to do with...” her voice dropped, “gay people?”

“Oh, you see. It’s easy to believe in spaceships and aliens. I’m sure you did, as a kid. But the plausibility of putting gays in space? Did you ever imagine that?”

“It... does seem... hard to believe,” Martha allowed. It was something she had never given any thought to. But neither was the six pound diamond floating on top of the pedestal.

“Precisely! The universe agrees. There are no gays in space. And so the probability drive throws out the numbers at the universe and confuses it for just long enough for our ship to slip past the barrier and attain faster-than-light travel. By the time the universe realizes what we’ve done, we’ve arrived.”

“Are you saying the universe is conscious? And that it’s homophobic?”

“No! I would never suggest that. Only that it’s so implausible as to not be believable and the universe is divine in its rationality.” He pulled the diamond free and offered it to her, taking only a moment to buff out a perceived imperfection on its faceted surface.

“What do you do with it, then? With this spaceship?”

“Oh, we’re pirates, mostly.”

“I’m a cop.”

“Yes, well, that is the way it would go. I assure you we will not go easily.”

“I’m off-duty.”

“How convenient.”

Martha took the diamond and turned it over in her hands. “What else do you have out there? If this is how much a pair of jeans costs.”

“Well. There are a lot of pretty women, if that’s what you mean, but they are absolutely not gay. Most of them do like cats, though. And diamonds the size of planets.”

Martha thought it over. “Sounds like lady’s night at the salsa club.”

“It is exactly like that.”

And that is why there are no gay people in space. They are moving away from you at an increasing rate, and like the light from a star, you will only see their image thousands, millions, or billions of years after they have moved on.