A Question to the Disbelieved
by Jeff King
part 1
“Imagine,” Mrs. Marjorie Platt overheard Mr. Tweedle say breathlessly to his fourth-grade class as she passed his room on her rounds, “your words could be sent across space, thousands of light-years in an instant, to be read by a Dorian child in one of their schools!”
When the school had first announced that it had been selected to send one of the transmissions to Earth’s so-called sister planet Dor that year, the students had buzzed with excitement; Marjorie had just rolled her eyes. Four decades of Dor-talk had not, it seemed, run people’s obsessions dry. A new line of Dor-inspired fashion had sprouted up this year; a new film adaptation of the contact event was being released next year; and now it was all the students could talk about at the school where Marjorie worked as “food services coordinator.”
Marjorie’s problem with Dor did not arise from interplanetary xenophobia. It arose from disbelief. She had felt it ever since that fateful night a generation earlier when she had stood in the doorway of her living room, still dressed in her prom dress, her date sitting next to her father on the other side of the room, and all of them watching the screen on the wall as the President made his announcement:
“Together with our partners around the globe, we have confirmed not only the existence of extraterrestrial life, but of a civilization: Dor, a planet on the other side of the Milky Way, with creatures and people of its own. Like us, the people of Dor have also been looking for life in the universe. We have found each other.”
Her father — a man she had never known to express any emotion, let alone be moved — wept openly, mumbling about his love of space travel as a boy. Her date suddenly and absurdly started applauding. Her mother was hugging her sister and both of them just kept whispering with enraptured voices, “I can’t believe it!”
Marjorie actually couldn’t believe it.
She had never been particularly skeptical. Santa Claus was a part of Christmases until she was at least six or seven. When Marjorie had moved out, she brought the Gideon’s Bible with her to keep with the other classics. She sometimes found herself avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk.
With Dor, though, it had been different. She immediately felt deep down that something was wrong. She perceived a lack of candor in the President’s speech and was shocked that her family members didn’t also see it. In the months and years that followed the President’s announcement, as the 24-hour news cycle and film industry and vlogosphere became all Dor, all the time, she grew more and more troubled by its enthusiastic acceptance by people everywhere.
“I think we should ask them what colors are like on Dor,” said an eager fifth-grader with ears that were perpendicular to the rest of his head. An older girl at the next table, sitting a bit closer to where Marjorie was standing sentinel over the cafeteria, rolled her eyes and said, “They asked that question already, dummy. Everyone knows that.”
“What did they say?” The boy answered, his mouth full of sandwich.
The girl just shrugged.
Marjorie knew that the girl was right. For a long time, she had been combing through the online Dorpedia almost daily. She’d made a habit of scanning through the questions and responses and touring forums for those who were wanting to understand the truth about Dor. Apparently, Dorians could perceive a wider color spectrum than humans. Their sun was also older than Earth’s, which affected the kinds of colors they could see. It was an elegant answer, even Marjorie could admit that. But all of the answers in the world couldn’t ultimately convince her that this wasn’t the greatest swindle that the world had ever seen.
A comment on one of the less-mainstream forums had described her sentiments well: “It seems awfully convenient that an alien race suddenly appeared out of nowhere just at the moment humanity was barreling towards a final war.”
It was a profoundly true statement. Things could hardly have been worse at the time. Russia and China were joining forces with a number of African and South American states. The EU and US had been strengthening their agreements. Borders were closing. Arms were being amassed. And then, as if out of nowhere: The Peace of Dor. Perfect timing! A message telling the people of Earth that they were not alone. A hope that made squabbling over ideology and land seem small. The imaginations of billions lit up.
Of course, it wasn’t that Marjorie was opposed to this. She was grateful for peace. But she had always felt this was peace based on a lie.
“But Marjorie,” Mr. Tweedle had said to her one day shortly after he started at the school, “you really think that all the world leaders would somehow ‘fall’ for something like this? Surely, they all have their own experts on hand. Scientists? Researchers? Could this have lasted this long if it was all a fraud?”
Marjorie was terrible at debating, so she just said, as she often did, “Well, the science seems pretty iffy to me.”
Mr. Tweedle looked like he was working hard not to make a face. “It’s quantum entanglement, Marjorie. They’ve been doing it for years.”
Marjorie cleared her throat, nervously, and continued, “They have a vested interest in making peace, but this allows them to save face. And it allows them to push their agenda on the rest of the world.”
Mr. Tweedle shook his head at this and walked away. They had tended to avoid each other in the hallways ever since.
He may have thought Marjorie was a loner or a wingnut, but she wasn’t. She had a wonderful family. Her husband, Andy, was as supportive as anyone might have wanted. Together, they had raised four children, three of whom still visited regularly with their own small families. The fourth, Aaron, had passed away.
She and her friends, Ellen, Rose, and others, would arrange get-togethers with each other, often on a weekly basis. They gossiped about goings-on in the neighborhood and never discussed the Planet Dor in Marjorie’s presence. Many of them had learned to avoid this subject the hard way.
Marjorie also had a job that she loved. Most years, she would walk down the halls, listening to the girls cheering as they met with their friends each morning as if it were the first time in a month that they had seen one another. Or she would watch a game of soccer forming on a distant field. Where did they get that ball? she might wonder. Or she would help some kid who had forgotten his locker code for the umpteenth time. She would see young romances flicker in and out among the fifth- and sixth-graders, frustrated teachers carrying maxed-out photocopy cards back and forth between rooms, or the occasional first-grade kid with a red face and wet pants rushing to the bathroom. “I’ll get a mop,” she’d say with a smile.
This year, it was all different.
Instead, most mornings the girls would stand around in a large group interspersed with the soccer kids, including one holding the ball with his hands. That’s not allowed, Marjorie would say to herself. All of them would be talking about the transmission, what they should say, what had been said in the past. One kid — the locker kid — would have his phone out and be searching the wiki for his friends. Even the kids with wet pants had seemed to have lost their embarrassment. They were just trying to get back to class as fast as they could to keep up with the conversation about Dor. “Do you need a mop?” Marjorie would ask, bewildered. The kid would zoom by her without answering.
The transmission needed to be prepared by the end of September, which was a relief. Hopefully, the Dor-talk would taper off for the rest of the year. She had a sneaking suspicion, though, that the children would simply turn their attention to wondering what message they would get when the Dorian response was received nine months later.
“What do you eat?”
“Is it cold?”
“Do you go to church?”
“How did you discover Earth?”
Marjorie had overheard these questions and a dozen more during the lunch break one day, each one popping up from the chaotic hum in the cafeteria by virtue of its cadence and the rushed “Okay, how about this?” that preceded it.
She sighed and thought: Question 1, Already answered. Question 2, Yes, they say it is cold although they don’t know if they experience climate in the same way we do. Question 3, Not a bad question. Question 4, Have your teachers taught you nothing?
Some days, she would imagine herself giving in to the hype and simply going along with it. She would be very good at coming up with questions, she thought. The children, who she always expected were somewhat ambivalent about her existence, would really have been impressed if she had started marshalling her knowledge of Dor. She’d even written some questions down. Real stumpers:
“What do you think happens when people die?”
“Who cares for the sick among you?”
“Why is there suffering in the world?”
She had read these to her husband one night while they were in bed, and he had simply said without looking up, “I don’t think they’re meant to be philosophical, dear.”
* * *
Marjorie was washing dishes in the cafeteria kitchen a couple weeks into the term. The students were in their classes for the afternoon. It was her favorite time of day, and her favorite kind of quiet hung like a sort of mist, drifting upwards from children not yet antsy to go home, but tired from the work and play and food of the preceding hours.
The sound of a door slamming shattered the calm. She almost dropped the mixing bowl she was drying. The noise was followed by two equally loud voices, growing louder as they passed the door at the back of the kitchen and then fainter once more. She shook her head with annoyance and would have gone back to drying had she not overheard:
“The form for the Dor transmission will be available later today, Charles.” It was the school secretary speaking. She was walking with the Principal.
Intrigued, Marjorie gently put down the mixing bowl and slipped out to follow at a distance. The secretary and Principal Charles had turned down another hallway in the direction of the teacher’s lounge.
“And then I just type in the message and send it... to Dor?” Principal Charles whispered.
Marjorie could not see her. From the brief silence, she could imagine the secretary staring at him in disbelief. “No, of course not. You type in the message, digitally sign the appropriate forms, submit, and then it goes to the folks at the U.N. who will go over it again, see if the message is appropriate or going to cause a war, convert it to whatever it is they use to send it via the quantum messaging portal, and then they’ll send it. Actually, there’s probably some PR that happens in there, too. Most of this was in the letter they sent, Charles, which, I might add, I left on your desk.”
They went into the teacher’s lounge, Principal Charles mumbling an excuse. Marjorie walked back to the kitchen deep in thought. It sounded more complex than she had realized. Although she hadn’t been as naive as the Principal to think that they would simply be forwarding an email to some otherworldly address, she hadn’t realized that there would be signatures and letters from the U.N. and all the rest.
Of course, she reflected, there would need to be all of that and more, especially if it’s just an elaborate global hoax. The secretary had put it exactly, if unwittingly, right when she had said the part about “some PR that happens in there, too”: if anything, that was the most important part of all.
Then again, for world peace, why not just leave it? What was the term she’d read somewhere? “Bread and circuses”? The people crave these things, so why not just give it to them? Principal Charles and some of the other teachers and staff had extra duties because of it, the kids that she typically loved to be around talked about it incessantly, and she found that her friends had been less interested in getting together these days because of her negativity on the subject. Weren’t these small prices to pay for peace?
Yet surely there was also something to be said for truth. This, in fact, was the thing that annoyed and angered her the most about the whole thing. She had never gone to university. Having children in her early twenties and then rearing them had interrupted any plans she might have had. Nevertheless, she had taken Latin in high school and knew that the motto of the very elementary school she was in at present was Veritas Vincit, Truth Conquers. Was peace more important than truth? It was a question that preoccupied her.
She’d been reminded of this recently in the form of an email from one of the listservs she followed. She had first discovered DorHoax-L five or six years ago. Its other members were mostly middle-aged women like herself but also professors, tradespeople, and even some teenagers. Save the occasional advertisement for a conference or bit of spam, it was typically quiet throughout the year. Every September, though, it exploded as the world ramped up for its great annual transmission to Dor, and then again every June, as the world waited expectantly for the response from their sister planet.
Recently, Marjorie had noticed a comment from a new email address — not one of the regulars, but a lurker, like her.
“Dor claims another victim. My daughter has told me that my husband and I are no longer welcome in her house because of my beliefs about Dor. I never talk about it with her, never bring it up in front of their kids, and my husband doesn’t even agree with me, but it doesn’t matter. She wants me to either believe or be gone. My husband was furious with me — I’m nervous he’ll leave me over it. But can I just pretend? She won’t even agree to the possibility that it all might be made up.”
Marjorie read the message with tears and thought of her late son, Aaron. Dor claims another victim. A victim of the dark underside of the world’s cosmic enthusiasm, perhaps. The sacrifice required to maintain the secret. Not that she thought anyone had murdered Aaron. An opened bottle of pills and the note they’d found with him had mostly — not entirely, but mostly — cleared that up for her. But the atmosphere in which he had lived for so many months before that had worn on him.
Marjorie would have blamed herself for all of it — and usually, in the quietest part of the night, as she lay awake in the dark with her husband rumbling unconscious beside her, she still did — had it not been for the turn in Aaron that had happened midway through that year. Initially, she had been delighted. He was starting to look into Dor for himself. He was reading some of the forums and books that she had cited to him off and on over the years. He never told her he was doing this, but she would see the books under his bed and once she had caught him on a forum website before he noticed her and quickly clicked away. The fighting had quieted down around that time.
But then, he had died. Another victim of Dor. The note he left was full of love but also despair. She wondered if he had simply discovered the lie that lay at the bottom of the world’s peace, but instead of being motivated as she was, he’d rolled over. She couldn’t know.
The mother’s comment on the listserv had moved her. She had lost a child over Dor, too. Something needed to be done.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Jeff King
