Existence

by David Brin

  DR. SPEARPATH: It’s called “pinging.” The famous WOW signal may have been a brief ping.

  PROFESSOR NOOZONE: So right, mon. Simple calculations show—this approach use less than a millionth the energy of those garish beacons SETI looks for.

  T’ink about it. If both teacher and de pupil be sifting the sky by hopping aroun’ with narrow beams, what dem odds that both the looker and transmitter will face each other, at exactly the same moment, iwa? That’s quattie, my ol’ girl-fren! Soon come, we won’t get anywhere!

  MARCIA KHATAMI: What kind of search strategy would be better?

  PROFESSOR NOOZONE: Searchers like Hannah assume we can seek narrowly while ET broadcasts broadly. It make more sense to seek broadly for mas-ET’s narrow messages.

  DR. SPEARPATH: That method would need hundreds of radio telescopes, spread across the world, in order to cover the sky. Might I ask our showman “scientist,” who’d pay for such a vast array?

  PROFESSOR NOOZONE: (laughs) Hundreds? Oh my, thousands! So? Make dem cheap, bashy an’ trivial to use by lots of amateur science-bredren an’ sistren, corned-up all over this lovely globe! Each backyard dish will then patrol just one livicated strip of sky. Ah sey one. Networked, these home-units make the greatest telescope looking in all directions at once! Letting us spot brief signals from far civilizations … assuming upfull-wise aliens exist. But there also be an important, bashy-awesome side benefit.

  MARCIA KHATAMI: What is that, Professor?

  PROFESSOR NOOZONE: Why … making it so-much harder for any badulu thing or any bakra tief to sneak up on us! Picture a planet where millions of amateurs have patient, robotic antennae in de backyards, gazing out. A stoosh network with no central control.

  Want a benefit? No more creep-a-silly fables about badbwoy UFOs, bringin’ baldhead, ginnal phantoms to vank on good folks! No more UFO obeah stories? Bless up pon that! (laughs)

  MARCIA KHATAMI: Well, Dr. Spearpath? What do you say about this notion, that we should replace the big, fancy telescopes run by your institute, with a worldwide network of amateur-owned dishes covering all the sky, all the time?

  DR. SPEARPATH: Amusing. Our friends at the SETI League are trying to set up something like that. Too bad Profnoo’s scenario is based on one shaky assumption.

  MARCIA KHATAMI: What assumption, Doctor?

  DR. SPEARPATH: That advanced technological extraterrestrial civilizations will care about things like economics. Or “efficiency”!

  PROFESSOR NOOZONE: Cha! It be no matter how advanced they are! Laws of physics rule. Even if they have a gorgon-big civilization, way-up at Kardashev Stage Three—able to utilize the full-up power of a galaxy! Even so, they’ll have priorities to balance. Whatever dem technology, dem will want to choose methods that accomplish goals without wasted …

  DR. SPEARPATH: “Efficiency” is a contemporary notion, assuming that society consists of diverse interest groups, each with conflicting priorities. Today, the poor have less influence than the rich, but they still have some. Under these conditions, I agree, even the mighty must negotiate and balance goals, satisfying as many as possible. But your assumption that this applies elsewhere is spatio-temporal chauvinism! Not even all human civilizations were like that. I can think of several that engaged in gigantic projects, without any care about efficiency.

  MARCIA KHATAMI: Give us an example, Doctor?

  DR. SPEARPATH: Sure. Ancient Egypt. When they built the pyramids in a pattern that mimicked the constellation Orion, their prodigious size sent a visual message—both through time and to the god-observers they thought to dwell above—saying “Look! We’re intelligent and we’re here!”

  PROFESSOR NOOZONE: That “Orion theory” is disputed—

  DR. SPEARPATH: True. What’s not disputed is this. The Old Kingdom pharaohs poured monumental resources into the effort, without heed to “conflicting interests.” They simply did the biggest, most noticeable thing possible.

  MARCIA KHATAMI: So … if I am following you … and I hope that I am not … it seems you’re saying … that your SETI search strategy expects to find prodigious beacons, transmitted continuously and in all directions … altruistically … by civilizations that don’t feel any need to do it efficiently … because they …

  PROFESSOR NOOZONE:… because they practice some superadvanced equivalent of tyranny. A universal downpression?… or slavery?

  Yeyewata. My eyes fill wit’ tears as I say … wicked.… You caught me in a lapse of imagination this time, Hannah. I-and-I truly never thought of that before.

  15.

  ARTIFACT

  “There’s a leak.”

  Not a phrase that any astronaut likes to hear. Not in space, where precious air might spill away in seconds. Or during reentry, when the same gases turn from friend to fiery foe—searing, etching, and screaming just beyond your fragile heat shield, seeking a way in.

  But no, Gerald knew that Akana Hideoshi meant another kind of leak. One that bureaucrats took even more seriously. The brigadier’s grimace flickered and rippled on a flat viewscreen, despite heavy image enhancement, with her crackling words barely audible over a deafening roar, as the tiny capsule bore Gerald homeward. Still, her vexation came through, loud and clear.

  “Somebody tattled about our little find. Rumors have taken off, in all ten estates. During the last hour, I’ve had calls from five senators, four tribunes, a dozen news agencies, and God knows how many top-rated amazones…”

  Her face wavered onscreen, almost vanishing as the return craft bucked and rattled, turning its sharp nose for a cross-range correction.

  “We’ve narrowed … possibilities down to a blabbermouth … at Marshall, a possible lurker daemon in … NASA-Havana mainframe … and that zillionaire tourist you folks were hosting up there. Now that’s gratitu…”

  Akana’s image now crackled away completely, disappearing under static, as the capsule stole ai-resources from communication and transferred them to navigation. Still, in the old days, there would be no contact at all, during this phase of descent, when ionized flame surrounded you like the halo of a righteous saint. Or the nimbus of a falling angel.

  Or a starry messenger, bearing something luminous and tantalizing. A harbinger of good news, perhaps. Or bad.

  Violating several rules, he had taken the Artifact from its foam case, to hold on his lap like an infant during this wild ride. From the moment the hatch closed, sealing his departure from the station, and all through a sequence of short impulses that pushed the return capsule onto its homeward path, he kept turning the glossy cylinder in gloved hands, inspecting it from many angles, applying every augmented sense available to his spacesuit. Each glint and complex glimmer was recorded—though what it all meant …

  Anyway, studying this thing beat the alternative—listening to superheated plasma whine and howl as it began scraping the capsule’s skin. Never a favorite part of this job—entrusting his life to a “reentry vehicle” that had been inflated from a two meter cube, and that weighed little more than he did. Astronauts used to rate higher-class accommodations. But, then, astronauts used to be heroes.

  Abruptly, the general’s voice and image returned.

  “… summoned to the White House! And what can I say? That we’ve recorded a hundred and twenty previously unknown alphabets and symbolic systems? And glimpsed a few dozen tantalizing, hazy globes, that might be other worlds? That shadowy figures keep rising toward the surface and then sinking again, like the cryptic answers in a toy eight ball?”

  “Well, yes, you could start with all that,” he mumbled, knowing that his words went nowhere. Only a ground-based laser could punch through the ionization shell. For now, communication was one-way.

  As it was, so far, with the Artifact. For days, he and Saleh had presented it with a long series of “SETI messages,” prepared by enthusiasts across six decades, ranging from simple, mathematical pulse codes all the way to animated slide shows, cleverly designed to illustrate laws of scale. Laws of physics and c
hemistry. Laws of nature and laws of humanity. Frustrated by the murky response—a swirl of ambiguous symbologies—they had moved on to basic tutorial programs. The kind made for children learning a second language …

  … when, abruptly, a command came for Gerald to come down. To bring the object home for study in proper facilities.

  Fine, terrific. Except for the accompanying gag order.

  Ganesh had complained: “There are international protocols on this very subject. There must be open sharing of all discoveries that might deal with life and intelligence beyond the Earth. It is a treaty.”

  To which a NASA attorney replied—“There is no obligation to go public with a hoax.”

  Which it could be, after all. There was even a betting pool, among the members of General Hideoshi’s team. Top wager? That Carlos Ventana, the Peruvian industrialist, living aboard the station as a paid guest, might have smuggled the thing in his private luggage and somehow released it overboard, for Gerald to “discover.” Ventana certainly had access to world-class gimmickry, and was well-known for a puckish personality.

  But no. The Artifact couldn’t have simply been tossed overboard. Its glitter had been on debris monitors for months, orbiting more than a thousand klicks higher, where only the tether-grabber could reach. A hoax? Maybe. But someone else, with bountiful ingenuity and prodigious resources, would have to sneak the thing into a steep trajectory, in some unknown way. Maybe years ago.

  “We’ve done a simulation, using one of the big mainds at Plexco,” Akana continued, when the static let up briefly. “So far, the object has displayed two traits that can’t be mimicked with known technology—the lack of a clear power source … and that layered optical effect. The illusion of infinite depth from any angle. If it weren’t for that…”

  Akana’s voice crackled away for the last time as Gerald’s reentry capsule passed through MDL—maximum dynamical load—an especially gut-wrenching phase. Just to his left, on a nearby data display, the capsule’s ai blithely recalculated a low-but-significant chance of catastrophic failure. Better, far better, to seek distraction. With his teeth rattling, Gerald subvocalized a command.

  “Music! Theme based on something by Elfman. Free-improv modulo, matching tempo to ambient sonic rhythms.”

  A blare of horns and thumping of percussion suddenly pealed forth, interwoven with wild violin sweeps, taken from the composer’s 2025 theme score of Mars Needs Women, but ai-libbed in order to crescendo with the capsule’s reverberations. You could only do this with a few human composers. Anyway, if you have to live for a while inside a beating drum.…

  That helped a bit, letting Gerald turn his attention away from the hot plasma, centimeters from his head, and back onto the Artifact in his lap. An array of swirling vortices appeared to descend into its milky depths, underlapping and dividing endlessly into a quasi-fractal abyss.

  Could this really be a messenger from some alien civilization? Gerald had always pictured first-contact happening the way it did in movies and virts—via some spectacular starship, with enigmatic beings stepping down a ramp … or else through a less lurid, but still exciting blip on some radio telescope’s detector screen.

  “Actually,” Saleh had explained at one point, “this method always seemed a lot more likely to many of us.”

  When Gerald and Ganesh asked him to, the Malaysian astronaut let his body float horizontal, and explained. “About forty years ago, two New Jersey physicists, Rose and Wright, calculated that it would generally be cheaper for advanced civilizations to send messages in the form of physical tablets, inscribed with vast amounts of information, than beaming radio to faraway planets.”

  “How can that be?” Ganesh protested. “Radio waves have no mass. They travel at lightspeed. But a physical object needs vast energy input, just to reach a tenth of that velocity. And it takes much longer to arrive.”

  “That only matters if time is an issue—say, if you want a two way conversation,” Saleh had replied. “But suppose distance precludes that. Or you just want to send lots of information one-way, say as a gift? Then message bottles have big advantages.”

  “Like what?”

  “Total energy expended, for example. Radiation spreads out as it travels through space, diluting the signal below detection levels unless the beam is both powerful and coherent to begin with. Wright and Rose calculated that just beaming a brief radio signal strong enough to be detected ten thousand light-years away would take a million billion times as much energy as shooting the same data, embedded in coded bits upon a little pellet.”

  “Assuming you don’t care when it arrives.”

  “Oh but the physical message is better even with regard to time! Sure, it arrives later. But if it’s targeted right, to be captured by the destination star system, it might linger in orbit for centuries, even eons, long after any radio message passed onward to oblivion. Picture such a message tablet, silently orbiting on and on, waiting for the day that someone happens along to read what it has to say. Greetings from a distant race.”

  “You’re talking about the lurker scenario,” Gerald had commented. “It’s been discussed for almost a century. Machines waiting out there for the Earth to develop life forms capable of—”

  “I would’t exactly call the Wright-Rose message-tablet a ‘machine.’ And the word ‘lurk’ has an active, even malevolent connotation. What we’re talking about is a yoohoo memo, inscribed on a tiny lump of matter. Come on. What harm could something so passive and innocent possibly do?”

  Only now, Gerald pondered Saleh’s explanation for this object on his lap. His suit instruments got no more response than Ganesh managed to provoke aboard the station, drawing sporadic bursts of mysterious symbology. Prompting brief glimpses of enigmatic globes, or hints of shrouded figures—sometimes approaching in groups of two or three—only to fade again, dissolving into a fog.

  And yet, this time there was some difference. A warmth, now that the cylinder lay on his thigh, rather than a cool workbench. Even more interesting, patterns seemed to gather under the portion that he gripped with his gloved hand. As the reentry capsule juttered and shook, meeting higher pressure air, he clutched the Artifact tightly—

  —and saw what seemed like technicolor pressure waves ripple round where he clasped. They appeared to pulse with urgent purpose, as if plucking at his fingers, attempting to peel something away.

  Peel away what? My grip?

  Or the glove?

  How long did he stare, getting lost in patterns, abandoning both fear and time? Seconds? Minutes? One, at most two … enough to bridge the worst part of reentry. The fearsome bronco ride eased, no longer rattling Gerald’s joints and teeth, letting them unclench at last. Fluorescent flames receded from the narrow window …

  The drogue parachute fired free with a pop, followed by a thud that jerked his seat straps …

  … and where there had been starry blackness, then fierce flame, he now saw blue of sky. And status displays shone optimistic green.

  But those weren’t the colors drawing him now. Rather, he kept his gaze upon the glistening thing that he had hooked and pulled in from the depths of space.

  Or was he hooked, instead?

  It’s heat and touch sensitive, Gerald noted. But not in ways we tried on the bench. One thing we left out—

  Clutching the Artifact with both knees, he fumbled, using the fingers of his right hand to release the wrist catch on his left glove, letting a rising sense of excitement draw him toward yet another violation of rules. What he had in mind wasn’t kosher. Direct, personal contact could lead to contamination. Always a concern with samples recovered from space.

  Except.

  In moments, the main chute would deploy. Then—with luck—a VSTOL recovery bird would appear, to snag him out of the air for the brief trip to NASA Marti Space Center, in Havana. Whereupon, who knew when there would ever be another chance?

  This is not professional, a part of him chided, as he contemplated his bare left hand.r />
  True enough. But I haven’t felt “professional” in years.

  Bare fingertips hovered over the translucent surface, causing ripples to flow, as if preparing to meet him at the point of contact. Whatever lay within … it somehow knew. It sensed the nearness of living flesh.

  What if it really is alien? And dangerous?

  He couldn’t help suddenly imagining the oblong ovoid—gripped between his thighs—as something out of science fiction. A cuckoo’s egg. Perhaps a Trojan horse. “Contamination” could work both ways. Might it be a terrible mistake to touch the thing?

  And if the tech people think that way, in Havana, it might never be tried. They could study it for decades behind glass, without ever getting around to this one, simple test.

  Another sudden jolt bounced his little craft as the main parasail popped from its canister, rapidly unfolding and then auto-warping in order to steer the descent. His little capsule began swaying to a jaunty rhythm, as one less failure mode lay between Gerald and terra firma. The crazed gyrations of Mars Needs Women gave way to more stately, steady, and moralistic passages, from the score of Batman.

  Was the ai trying to say something? About responsibility?

  All right then. Let’s have a compromise.

  “Akana Hideoshi,” he said, adding a tooth click for TRANSMIT.

  It didn’t take long for her face to reappear, this time free of static, filling a quarter of the tiny cabin, in holographic detail.

  “Sorry about that, Gerald. There’s been a distraction. Some rich doofus crashed his suborbital phallus, not far from here. Had to fend off demands from his lawyer, his mother, and a whole aristo-bestiary, that we drop everything and search for the trillie-clown.”

  She tossed off a derisive shrug.

  “Okay then. You’re on target. The osprey will snag you in…”

  Akana blinked, finally taking in the sight of Gerald, with his hand poised over the Artifact on his lap.

  “Wait a second. What do you think you’re … Now just hold on there, Gerald. Don’t do anything you’ll…”