The Xenological Society is Book 2 in the Xenological series. Find Book 1, The Xenological War, on Amazon.
Synopsis: Things are slow at the Diplomatic Corps, when Smith, Lika, and Goshan are called off-world for a rescue mission. A special team from the Xenological Society has gone missing on a strange world dominated by a pre-interstellar species known as the Thorph. But all is not what it seems as the team finds out that the Thorph are in possession of technology they should not have, something that another, highly mysterious and dangerous race known as the Shaders desperately want.
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The Xenological Society
Founded in 2061 by Vanchar Fenn, the Xenological Society is devoted to the study of alien species including their languages, customs, technology, biology, psychology, and sociology. The society includes mathematicians, engineers, biologists, botanists, geologists, paleontologists, archaeologists, and linguists among others. Election to membership is considered a great honor recognizing personal achievements in the field of xenology.
The Xenological Society is an Explorer’s Club as well as a scientific organization. Its members frequently visit alien worlds on discovery missions. Usually these visits are in collaboration with host species. It is rumored, however, that the society also carries out covert missions employing elaborate mechanisms to avoid detection. It is also rumored that alien species carry out their own covert missions to Earth as well. Several species, notably the Shaders, possess invisibility technology far in advance of humans and would have no trouble avoiding terrestrial sensor networks. Indeed, conspiracy theorists have accused the Xenological Society of facilitating alien species to spy on Earth’s inhabitants.
Other theorists insist that the society hides evidence of pre-first contact visits. “Evidence” such as alien artifacts purportedly discovered buried near ancient human habitations or monuments such as the Egyptian, Mayan, or Aztec pyramids, the prevalence of “UFOs” in medieval and Renaissance art, and reports during the 20th century such as abductions and crash landings of alien vessels (with the Roswell incident of 1947 being the most famous) are commonly cited.
Another frequent claim is that the XS is far older that its official 2061 founding date. Such theories purport that, rather than being its founder, Vanchar Fenn was simply one of a long line of Presidents of the society going back hundreds of years and that he was simply the first to make the society known to the public after he helped initiate First Contact.
The XS has dismissed these theories as nonsense.
Despite its commitment to open scientific dialogue about the nature of alien species and our relationship with them, the XS remains a secretive body, partly because its covert operations might alarm or enrage alien species if they were publicized, and partly because some of the relics in its possession are rumored to be highly dangerous and knowledge about them must be kept under tight control. Although the XS regularly loans out parts of its valuable collection of alien artifacts to museums, universities, and government labs, it is rumored to harbor a hidden collection of alien weapons and volatile technologies, possibly even deadly plagues or poisons, capable of sterilizing an entire planet or destroying a star. The XS firmly denies that anything in its possession is so deadly or powerful, and, although it does study alien microbes, these studies are done on its remote station on the Moon. It points out that the Moon station is adjacent to a much larger government research complex that contains the last vestiges of the deadliest killers in human history including smallpox, malaria, and HIV and that not one of the microbes in XS possession has ever killed a person (being adapted to alien physiology not humans). As for other kinds of weapons or poisons, the XS suggests that people are being “overly imaginative” and, while some items in its collection are weapons, none is capable of destroying anything as large as a star or planet, and that if it were to receive such an item it would immediately hand it over to the government.
The Tolan Smith Incident
Several attempts have been made to break into the Society’s main headquarters in New York City where its secret collection is rumored to be held. None of these attempts have been successful. The most notable such incident is that of a young professor and former member of the society, Dr. Tolan Smith, who was caught attempting to compromise a high security vault — -
Lika Townsend was intent on her screen when I came up behind her.
“What are you writing?” I said.
Lika jumped and shut the screen off. She turned in her chair and said, “do you practice sneaking up on people or is that a natural talent, Goshan?”
I looked at her face part smirk and part relief. Clearly I was not the person she feared I would be. A strand of mousy brown hair fell over her face as she spoke. She had naturally full red lips and a heart shaped face, wide liquid brown eyes, and a rosy complexion. Her body was slender and toned from spending most of her free time out in the woods or competing in triathlons and other grueling sports. In the months we had worked as trainees under Smith as part of his elite diplomatic team, we had fallen into a comfortable working friendship. She had made it clear from the beginning not to expect our relationship to become anything more.
“I hover a fraction of a centimeter above the ground,” I joked.
She looked at my feet and said, “It’s true you aren’t very grounded.”
“Ouch,” I said. Wanting to change the subject, I said, “so you were writing about Smith?”
“You saw that?” she said.
“I only saw his name. Did he ask you to edit his encyclopedia entry again?”
There was a war between Smith, our egocentric but brilliant boss, and the public over his online persona. He insisted that anything negative said about him on the interstellar networks was “politically motivated” and ought to be removed. He frequently tasked Lika or me to replace anything online that offended him with his own hagiography as long as it could be edited anonymously. Our entries seldom lasted more than a few days before they reverted to the original, less flattering descriptions.
“Heh, no, I was actually working on a piece about his involvement with the Xenological Society.”
“Isn’t Smith a member? Or could he not intimidate anybody enough to sponsor him?”
“No, he was a member,” she said, looking at the door that connected our office to Smith’s as if he might burst in at any moment.
“Was?”
She sighed and tapped at the two meter wide ovoid, 3D touch screen. “Read,” she commanded, pointing to the subheading that said “The Tolan Smith Incident”.
I leaned forward over her shoulder and read. My jaw fell. “He broke into their headquarters?”
I was familiar with XSHQ as it was known because my grandfather, Vanchar Fenn, being the founder, had had an office there. My mother had taken me to see him there a few times as a child, and he had once given me a tour. I was only four or five at the time. The only part I remembered was a kind of alien candy where one got inside a bubble of it and allowed oneself to be coated with it, the object being to lick it off something like a baby kitten emerging from her birth sack. In my childhood exuberance, I had managed to get ahold of one while my grandfather wasn’t looking and popped it into my mouth. Realizing how awful it tasted, I tried to spit it out when it exploded all over me. I still remember his chagrin as he returned me to my mother with a candy coating and the long night trying to scrub candy out of hard to reach places.
“Uh huh,” she nodded. “And look at this:” She scrolled to the next page and started to read:
“His break-in attempt became legend within the Society. Leaders of the XS, however, claimed that only Smith’s access to the building, as a member, allowed him to study the security systems sufficiently to discover their weaknesses and make it down to the vault. Following the incident, Smith was expelled from the society. Because of the sensitive nature of the break-in, however, XS arranged for Smith not to be prosecuted as long as he remained away from their headquarters. Barred from academia and the collections he was studying at the time, Smith entered the “xeno” branch of the government diplomatic corps where he remains to this day.”
She turned to me. “That’s how he ended up here and not as some tenured professor lording over a gaggle of grad students.”
She was right. Smith was by all accounts a difficult man, only his brilliance kept him from getting fired. The combination made him ideal for the cloistered life of the academic. This explained how he had ended up here putting out diplomatic fires with aliens instead of writing papers about them, a job which would have required far less contact with people.
She pointed back to the screen. “Now here’s where it gets interesting.”
I peered over her shoulder.
“Neither he nor the society,” she read, “has ever revealed what he was trying to steal. News stories at the time speculated that Smith was trying to abscond with a valuable object he could sell to a wealthy collector, and XS encouraged these speculations. Those who know Smith well, however, say that money could not have been his objective. Dr. Cynthia Smith, his ex-wife, has said in regards to the break-in that ‘he probably just wanted to show he could do it’ but claims not to know any more about it. Smith has remained silent on the break-in since his expulsion hearing and will not answer questions about it. Those who have tried to interview him about the incident have all met with rude and even menacing responses. Thus, it remains shrouded in mystery.’”
She looked at the screen again stabbing at it with her index finger. “He was married, Goshan! Married!”
Smith had never mentioned having been married. In fact, he never said anything about his personal life. He was distant, an enigma.
“And they broke up over this,” she continued. “It sounds like whatever he was after must have been worth a lot.”
“How did you find out about this?” I asked.
“When I was editing those articles for him, a lot of the original articles referred to this incident. He wanted those references erased.”
“So, you are trying to create more of them? Who are you working for again?” I said with a chuckle.
She rounded on me with a determined look that wiped the smile off my face. “Goshan,” she turned to look at the door connecting our office to his and lowered her voice, leaning forward. I leaned forward as well, my face inches from hers so that her breath tickled my face. “Tolan’s smart, but his pride gets in his way. He broke into that building for a reason. He sacrificed a lot to do it too. He may want to forget about it but that doesn’t mean it should be forgotten.”
“What do you suggest?” I said.
“We have to figure out what he was trying to do.” She looked thoughtful. “Maybe if we could track down his ex-wife or, better yet, you could ask one of your grandfather’s friends for some inside info.”
“Or we could ask Smith!” I said.
“No, he wouldn’t tell us anything,” she said, failing to detect my sarcasm.
Knowing Lika as well as I did, I knew that when she resolved something, it was impossible to change her mind. In this case, we were playing with fire too with the potential to elicit both Smith’s ire and that of the Xenological Society, both of whom wanted this information kept quiet. I’m not sure which I feared more. The most Smith could do to me was yell at me and then fire me. What the XS could do to me, I could only imagine.
Lika’s desire to help Smith, I felt, was misguided. She had an almost religious devotion to Smith, which was not mutual. Smith was notoriously irritable and condescending towards everyone around him which made his relationships few and difficult. Those without the good sense to avoid his company tended to need him because they wanted career advancement like me or because he got things done, which was why the diplomatic corps continued to employ him. Lika, for all her intelligence, went far beyond that. She looked up to him and wanted him to feel proud of her accomplishments, as if he were some sort of surrogate parent. I often felt that Lika’s devotion came from a deep need to be abused. It was also my opinion that Smith deserved the messes he made of his life without Lika or anyone else trying to “help” him reconcile with his past mistakes. If he wanted to erase his past, so be it. I kept my opinions to myself though because Lika would have none of it, and I knew it.
I was about to ask what she planned to do with the article when she abruptly shut off her screen. She was staring over my shoulder.
I hadn’t heard the door open because of our talking. From behind me, I heard Smith say, “stop the chitchat and get ready to leave. There’s been an incident.”
Get the next installment of this serial novel on 12 October 2021.