Page 15 - Extraterrestrials, Foreign and Domestic

The Cosmic Bore

telephoto lens. The pictures showed a smooth persimmon-shaped
contraption about fifty meters in diameter. It had no viewports,
leading analysts to the conclusion that it had no sighted occupants.
Its material composition and internal structure baffled these same
experts, who had gathered in New York City under the aegis of
the United Nations.
Days of desperation followed. Governments swayed and
toppled. Rioting in the squalid ghettoes and fashionable suburbs
of several capitals was brutally squelched. Then the message was
deciphered, translated into sound and image—the sound, English
and a dozen other major languages; the image, a very clear video
signal. Despite the familiar medium, the intent of the transmission
was obscure. Another group of authorities was assembled, this
time a blue-ribbon panel of anthropologists, psychologists, and
historians. After two weeks of intense and exhausting research and
brain-storming, they published their report. News of their findings
spread—not as rapidly as prior to the jamming blackout, but soon
the name of Valgus Varus was known throughout the world.
According to the official account of the noxious broadcast, the
spacecraft had but a single function: to find intelligent (therefore
receptive) life elsewhere in spacetime and proclaim to it the
greatness of one Valgus Varus, supreme ruler of a world called
Unog. That planet, in all likelihood, had long since disappeared,
given the rest of the story, either burnt to a crisp, its ashes blown
across intergalactic space by the gale force of a supernova, or
crushed into nothingness by the collapse of the galaxy in which it
had evolved to the point of producing its own version of
civilization.
Unog’s previous rulers had undoubtedly considered themselves
supreme, as well; but Valgus Varus had put them to the test. He
was a barbarian from the provinces, a roughhewn character
unfamiliar with the niceties of the mandarins running their world
from an isolated fortress. A rather strict class structure kept the
old elite apart from its benighted subjects, to its ultimate
detriment. Science and its technological spinoffs had provided the
ancien regime with enough raw power and refined amusements to
blind it to any minor insurgency originating in the hinterlands. But
Valgus Varus, with a small contingent of confederates recruited

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