Edward M. Lerner - By The Rules

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First published in Analog, 06 2003

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies

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If one were to mathematically analyze the timing of major life decisions, not that my interests run to

quantitative studies, I theorize one would find a statistically significant clustering at multiple-of-five

birthdays. (If Dad heard that prediction, he would, without missing a beat, ask if I was referring to

integral multiples of five. You can imagine what a trial my childhood was.) The speculation comes to mind

because this all began on my twenty-fifth birthday. A quarter century: it had struck me more as a

substantive fraction of a lifetime gone than as a cause for celebration.

My friends, however, were of a different mind.

At State U., even in the Soc. department, a Taco Bell run was considered a multicultural experience. I'd

ranted about the local ethnocentrism often enough, so I was delighted and touched when my friends

surprised me with a Japanese night out. We're all impoverished grad students, so here “out” meant

gathering in one of their apartments. How ironic was it that one of the few times they were game to try

something not remotely hunk of corn-fed Midwestern beef, they picked my least favorite cuisine? The

sushi wasn't a problem, however, as there was plenty ofsaki with which to swig down the raw eel and

yellowfin and squid, not to mention several items I didn't recognize and decided not to ask about.

How different things might have been if only I'd masked the food withwasabi mustard instead of the rice

wine.

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Everyone had brought foodstuffs in my honor, so I had to sample it all. Japanese etiquette, my hostess

gleefully informed me, required downing each cup ofsaki in one swallow—and she owned water

tumblers, not delicate ceramic cups. By my third California roll, I was feeling no pain. Halfway through

my gastronomic survey, I was improvising paeans to diversity. No one even tried to match drinks with

the birthday boy, but we all got pretty damn mellow.

What came next seemed like a profound idea at the time:very multicultural soc. I remember plopping

myself down in front of a computer, and the gales of laughter as I almost toppled off the chair. I

remember guffaws at my typos and boisterous negotiations over wording. After a ceremonious clinking,

but rather more like clanking, of cheap glassware, I recall clickingsend to dispatch our masterpiece. Lost

in an alcoholic fog, however, was the exact topic of our enthusiasm.

The project about which we had all been so enthusiastic was only a vague recollection when I awakened

the next day, head throbbing and tongue furred. My only clear memory beyond dissolving raw fish in

alcohol was the sadly dead-on caricature on my birthday cake: the head of a young Woody Allen on a

tall and gangly frame. The phrase Ichabod Cranium flashed through my mind—I could only hopethat

thought had gone unarticulated.

Someone had brought me home, gotten me undressed and into bed. My bedroom faces west; the

sunlight streaming through a gap between my drapes showed it was late afternoon. If the punishment fit

the crime, I hadreally enjoyed my party. I was pondering the wisdom of getting up when a

roadrunner-like “me-meep” made my skull resonate. Email.

I stumbled past my PC on my way to the bathroom. The subject line of the newest message brought a

shock of memory. It was a reply. “Please, no,” I croaked.

Please is not always the magic word. It appeared that theJournal of Emergent Sociology was facing a

last-minute delay in the delivery of an invited paper, and so had a hole to fill in the upcoming quarterly

issue. They couldn't promise publication, of course, but would look favorably upon a timely submission

along the lines of my overnight emailed proposal.

I scrolled down the message to see just what I'd suggested in my drunken stupor. Reading, my stomach

lurched.

* * * *

My father hoards speech as if words were being rationed for some war effort, a miserliness that manifests

itself both in vocabulary and brevity. As to the former, I'll offer only an example. I knew the wordvehicle

before car, plane, or boat. How odd is that? As for the latter, there's a reason my sister refers to Dad as

Professor Cryptic.

Before and since my teenage years, I've found his economy annoying, but it gave rise to what, entirely in

hindsight, I recognize as a valuable aid to my ability to reason abstractly. My own spendthriftness of

utterance (and any social skills I may have) I learned from my mother.

“Brian. Rule One,” Dad would call parsimoniously, without glancing up from his newspaper. I was left to

translate for my uninformed friends: if it shakes the house, don't do it. Rule One actually made a lot of

sense for little boys. It had no loopholes.

Rule Two, which is what had me reminiscing about childhood regulations, had been pretty much ignored

at the recent party. Thinkbefore you do things. Rule Two was promulgated long before I was of an age

to drink, so Dad had never derived the obvious corollary: avoid important decisions while drunk and

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unable to think. (He would surely have shortened that. “Don't drink and think,” sounds about right.)

The paper I'd envisioned, in thatsaki -sodden stupor, involved those whose interests werereally

multicultural. As in: enticed by cultures that weren't even human. I'd somehow been egged on in my

drunken state to propose a sociological analysis of UFO, pardon the judgmental expression, nuts. There

were more than enough Internet chat rooms in which such people congregated for me to easily do a

study. The problem wasn't a lack of raw data, but the probable consequences of publication. The mind

reeled at how such a paper would be received by my fellow academics. Yes, a few sociological papers

did exist about UFOs and, excuse me while I throw up, Ufologists ... but those were by safely tenured

faculty. My thesis advisor slash mentor was not yet tenured; my highest priority was not being laughed

out of renewal of my paltry fellowship.

Retracting my proposal could only draw more unwelcome attention to myself. Plan B, once panic

receded, was the old switcheroo. I'd produce a paper that, while nominally consistent with my mercifully

brief emailed abstract (how desperatewere they for material?), was largely off the UFO topic. I'd

reference the nuts, I decided, far less for what they believed than as a population across which to study

the dissemination of ideas. My spirits lifted as the paper took form in my mind's bloodshot eye: stolid,

stilted, unassailably academic and unremittingly boring—as removed as could be from the sensationalism

implied by the drunken abstract. With luck, the full paper would be rejected. Even without luck, I was

going for something wholly forgettable.

My field and my passion is discourse analysis, a perspective at the intersection of literary studies, history,

and traditional sociology. (Dad once made mention of roadkill at said intersection, but I refuse to go

there.) The little-green-men believers were as valid a population as any for the study of vocabulary

propagation and transformation. That is, I could extract trends and patterns in metaphors, themes, and

figures of speech, then extrapolate to the social forces causing and caused by that imagery. Or I could go

all simple and mechanical (and, truth be told, more safely dull). That would place the prospective paper in

the entirely traditional and non-controversial sociological mainstream of content analysis: categorizing the

topics within the text samples.

A few nights spent lurking in chat rooms yielded plenty of themes to be examined. Skinny gray men, it

turned out, rather than little green ones. Evolutionary convergence, to explain ET's humanoid appearance.

Alien secrecy. Government cover-ups, usually involving men in black. (Why always men? Sexism among

Ufologists could be another paper. I sternly dismissed that thought as an avoidable distraction.) Flying

saucers: disk-shaped vehicles, when posturing to sound objective. Solid light—can you say oxymoronic?

The ever-popular, if hard to justify, abduction claims. Ridicule factor, a self-fulfilling rationalization for the

paucity of credible evidence. Luminous energy display. Arguments among proponents of saucer-borne

beings, interdimensional entities, and time travelers.

Harder to process than the patent silliness were the scattered occurrences of logic.

One reason I was thinking of my parents, I knew, was the too-long unacknowledged happy-birthday

recording they'd left on my answering machine. Admitting to myself that there was another explanation, I

dialed my father's office.

I'm more than a little bit murky about the types of physics. I didn't know if what Dad did had any bearing

on my problem—but I couldn't say that it didn't, or if that which I was pondering related to the even

more abstruse arcana he collected on his own time. After a few pleasantries, I cleared my throat. “Say,

Dad, are you familiar with Drake's Equation?”

“Drake's Equation,” repeated Dad. His manner toggled to pedantic mode within two syllables. “A model

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for approximating the number of technological civilizations in the galaxy. You estimate the stars in the

galaxy, the fraction of those stars with planets, the fraction of those planets giving rise to life, and so on.

You make up most of the numbers, so the equation ‘proves’ whatever you want about the prevalence of

communicating ETs.”

The chat-room denizens who had struck me as most thoughtful used, with what degree of justification, I

could not say, values that predicted interstellar contact was entirely implausible. “And Fermi's Paradox?”

“Who are you really, and what have you done with my son?”

I repressed mild irritation; Dad had every reason to be surprised by my questions. “Do you know?”

“Yes.”

What I took to be pencil-on-desktop tapping noises emphasized the pause at the far end of the line. He

was no doubt stymied by the futility of drawing me a picture. It hadn't taken me long, growing up, to

crack the code of, “This will take pencil and paper.” It meant: here comes more information than I would

ever want to know (or could hope to process). Pencil and paper also had going for them, at least in the

eyes of Professor Cryptic, that whole picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words thing.

Eventually, Dad found his tongue. “The galaxy is a big place, so it seems improbable Earth has the only

technological civilization. Now, assume there are others. Spacefaring aliens would colonize nearby solar

systems. In time, those settlements would mature to repeat the cycle. The numbers you invent this time

deal with how quickly the colonists fill their new homes and the speed of starships. The values you pick

don't much matter. In a few million years, a cosmological eyeblink, any such aliens fill the galaxy. So,

asked Fermi, where are they?”

“Cleveland?”

“I taught you well,” Dad chuckled. “Brian, why these questions?”

My answer, if incomplete, was truthful: researching the propagation of vocabulary in certain chat rooms.

I had, in fact, already web-surfed my way to definitions of the terms about which I'd asked Dad. What I

had not known was whether the sites at which I found my answers were just a less overt sort of crackpot

destination. The hidden agenda of my call was to hear if a serious ‘hard’ scientist took these ideas

seriously. On the one hand, he knew the terms; on the other hand, the sarcasm had been awfully broad.

“So tell me, Dad, what do you think?”

“About whether there are aliens? UFOs?”

“Uh huh.”

“Insufficient information.” Another prolonged pause. “You?”

“I'm studying Ufologists, Dad, not UFOs.” Amid a diatribe about the study of objects the existence of

whose subject matter had never been demonstrated, I took satisfaction at the success of my deflection.

Had I been pinned down on the subject my own beliefs, I could not, for the life of me, guess what I

would have at that moment said.

* * * *

“ ‘Discourse Analysis of a Self-Selecting Subculture,’ scene 1, take 4,” I emoted more than dictated into

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