The Boat of a Million Years

by Poul Anderson

  He flushed. “Not on my account, please. I don’t want pity.”

  “No, but you deserve more consideration than you’ve gotten.”

  “Sex isn’t that big a thing, after all.”

  “A sound philosophy,” Macandal said, “but not too easy to put in practice when you aren’t a saint and your body never grows older. How well I know. We can’t have you racking yourself apart, Gnaeus. If I—“ She drew breath, then smiled. “We had some pretty good times in the past, you and I, didn’t we? It was long ago, but I’ve not forgotten.”

  He stared. A minute passed before he could stammer, “You, you don’t really in-mean that. It is sweet of you, but no, really, not necessary.”

  Calm had come upon her. “Don’t think ‘mercy hump.’ I like you. Well, no hurry. Best we take our time and see how things develop. Lord knows we have plenty of time, and if we haven’t learned a little patience by now, we might.as well open the airlocks. I mean all of us aboard.”

  After a moment: “Too bad, isn’t it, that this tremendous quest of ours hasn’t made us worthy of itself. We’re the same limited, foolish, mixed-up, ridiculous primitives we always were. Today’s Earth people wouldn’t have our problems. But it is we, not they, who’ve gone out here.”

  Pytheas flew onward. Another three and a half years passed inside the hull before the universe broke through, like a storm wave crashing over the rail of a Grecian ship.

  20

  It came as suddenly, through the musical robotic voice: “Attention! Attention! Instruments detect anomalous neutrino input. It appears to be coded.”

  Hanno cried aloud, a seafaring oath not heard these past three millennia, and sprang from his bunk. “Light,” he ordered. Illumination filled the room. It glowed amber in Svoboda’s hair, the warmest color between the walls.

  “From Earth?” she gasped, sitting straight. “Did they build a transmitter?”

  He shivered. “I should think Pytheas would recognize—”

  The answer interrupted him: “The direction of origin is becoming clear, somewhat forward of us, broadcast rather than beamcast. Modulation is of pulse, amplitude, and spin. I am still engaged in observation and analysis, to determine the velocity of the source and compensate for Doppler shift and time dilation. At present the pattern appears mathematically simple.”

  “Yeah, start by making us aware it’s artificial.” Hanno’s finger stabbed the intercom touchdisc. “Has everybody heard? Meet in the saloon. I’ll report to you there as soon as possible.” Needlessly—or was it?—he reached for his clothes. “Want to come, Svoboda?”

  Her grin was a hunter’s. “Try and stop me.”

  Perhaps it was equally superfluous to seek the command room. It might even be unwise, to wait there amidst the terrible glory in the viewscreens. Too easily could that daunt the spirit and numb the mind. But sitting hand in hand, watching the numbers and graphic displays the ship generated for them, was like keeping a grip on a reality that otherwise would blow away into emptiness.

  “Have you learned more?” Svoboda must ask.

  “Give the computer a chance,” Hanno tried to laugh. “It’s only had a few minutes.”

  “Every minute for us is—how much outside? An hour? How many millions of kilometers laid behind us?”

  “I detect a similar source, much weaker but strengthening,” the ship told them. “It is on the opposite side of our projected course.”

  Hanno stared a while into distorted heaven before he said slowly, “Yes, I think I understand. They know how we’re headed, more or less, and have sent ... messengers ... to intercept us. However, of course they can’t tell exactly— several different destinations may have looked possible to them, nor could they foresee factors like the boost we’d use—so they sent a number of messengers, pretty widely distributed, to lie radiating in the zone, or zones, we’d probably pass through.”

  “They?” Svoboda asked.

  “The Others. The aliens. Whoever and whatever they are. We’ve found a starfaring civilization at last. Or it’s found us.”

  Her own gaze went outward, gone rapt. “They will rendezvous with us?”

  He shook his head. “Not quite, I think. Given all the uncertainties, and the distances, and the long, unpredictable time out here till we might arrive—they’d not dispatch living crews. Those must be low-mass, high-thrust robot craft, maybe made for this one purpose.”

  She was silent half a minute. When she spoke, it sounded almost annoyed. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Why, it’s obvious,” he answered, surprised. “The radiation from our powerplant ran well ahead of us only during the first year, till we got close to light speed. That wouldn’t give them nearly enough warning, if they set out to meet us when they picked it up. They can’t live close by, or we’d have detected them from the Solar System.”

  “Obvious, or smug?” she challenged. “How much do we know? We have barely begun our first tiny venture into deep space. How long have they been exploring? Thousands of years? Millions? What have they discovered, what can they do?”

  His smile twisted. “I’m sorry. This is no moment to cast a shadow on.” He sighed. “But I’ve met a great many dreams over the centuries, and most of them turned out to be no more than that. It’s been quite some time since our physicists decided they’d found all the laws of nature, all the possibilities and impossibilities.” He lifted a hand. “I realize that’s a proposition that can never be proven. But the likelihood has come to seem very high, hasn’t it? I’d love to learn the aliens own magic carpets flitting faster than tight; but I don’t expect to.”

  Reluctantly, she nodded. “At least, we roust reason on the basis of what we do know. I suspect that’s far less than you think, but— What shall we do?”

  “Respond.”

  “Of course! But how? I mean, we’re slowing down, but we’re still near light speed. By the tune the, tile machine, any of those machines up ahead receives our signal, won’t we be past it? Won’t its answer take ... years to overtake us?”

  He squeezed her hand. “Smart girl. You always were.” To the ship: “We want to establish contact as soon as may be. What do you advise?”

  The answer jarred them both into bolt uprightness. “That is contingent. The transmission has changed character. It has become considerably more complex.”

  “You, you mean they know we’re here? Where are they, anyway?”

  “I am refining those figures as I obtain more parallax. The nearest source is approximately a light-year off our path, approximately twice that distance vectorially.”

  “Baal! Then they can detect us instantly?”

  “No. No, wait, Hanno.” Svoboda’s words came a little unsteadily, but fast. “That needn’t be. Suppose the broadcast is automatic, a cycle. First a simple alert signal, then the message, then the alert signal again, over and over. The message alone—we might not have recognized it for what it is, supposed it was just some natural thing.”

  “When I first acquired it,” Pytheas volunteered, “I assumed it was a fluctuation in the background noise, conceivably of interest to astrophysicists but irrelevant to this mission. It was Dopplered and otherwise warped out of identifiability. The low-information transmission that succeeded it made clear that here is no random flux. It also provided unambiguous data by which the warp functions could be determined. I am now compensating for them and thus reconstructing the message proper.”

  Hanno sagged back. “How often have they done this,” he whispered, “with how many others?”

  “The reconstruction is not yet perfect, but it continually improves as additional data come in,” Pytheas went on. “Since the cycle is short, in shipboard time, I should soon have good definition. The message itself must be fairly brief, with high redundancy, although I anticipate high resolution as well. This is a visual mapping.”

  Darkness brimmed in a screen. Suddenly it was full of tiny light-points, uncountably numerous. Their blumness dissipated, they sharpened,
minute by minute. Colors appeared in them, and with that help eyes began to make out three-dimensional shapes, self-recurrent in infinite complexity.

  “Prime numbers define a coordinate space,” said the ship. “Digital impulses identify points within it, which hi turn are members of fractal sets. Those functions should provide images, but the proper combinations must be found empirically. My mathematical component is running the search. When something intelligible emerges, that should give clues to obtaining further refinement and eventually extracting the entire content.”

  “Well,” said Svoboda dazedly, “if the computers on Earth could design you in a single year—”

  Hanno at her side, she waited. The unrolling dance of curves and surfaces flowed together. A picture grew into being. It was of stars.

  21

  The six around the saloon table looked sharply around when the two entered. Coffee and remnants of food bespoke what hours had passed; more so did haggardness and tension. “Well,” Patulcius snapped, “about time!”

  “Hush,” Macandal murmured. “They’ve come as soon as they could.” Her glance added: An immortal ought to have more patience. But it has been hard, waiting.

  Hanno and Svoboda benched themselves oppositely at the doorward end. “You’re right,” the Phoenician said. “Getting a clear, complete message and deciding what it means took this long.”

  “We do apologize, however,” Svoboda added. “We should have given you ... progress reports. We didn’t think to, didn’t realize how time was passing. There was never any, oh, revelation, any exact moment when we knew.” Weariness weighted her smile. “I’m ravenous. What’s available immediately?”

  “You sit still, honey,” Macandal said, rising. “I’ve got sandwiches already made. Figured this would be a long session.”

  Aliyat’s look followed her eut, as if to ask: Has she, in our snared bewilderment, gone back to her Old South, or simply to her old caring?

  “She’d better bring me some too, or you’ll have a fight on your hands and halfway up your arms,” Hanno said to Svoboda. The jape rattled from nerves drawn wire-thin.

  “All right,” Wanderer demanded, “what is the news?”

  “Corinne’s entitled to hear from the start,” Svoboda replied.

  His fingers clutched the table edge. The nails whitened. “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  She reached to stroke a hand. “You merely forgot. We’re beyond dqrselves, every one of us.”

  “Well, Corinne isn’t fond of technical details,” Hanno said. “I can start with those. And, uh, with apologies to those of you who aren’t either. I’m no scientist myself, you know, so this will be short.”

  Macandal returned while he was sketching the theory of the communication. Besides food on a tray, she bore a fresh pot of coffee and a bottle of brandy. “Celebration,” she laughed. “I hope!”

  The fragrances were like blossoms in spring. “Yes, yes,” Svoboda exulted. “The discovery of the ages.”

  “Theirs more than ours,” Hanno said. “The aliens’, I mean. But we have to decide what to do about it.”

  Tu Shan leaned forward, elbows on table, heavy shoulders hunched. “Well, what is the situation?” he asked lev-elly enough.

  “We’re receiving the same message, repeated and repeated,” Hanno told them while he ate and gulped. “It’s from two sources, one closer to our path than the other. Quite likely there are more that we haven’t come in range of. If we continue on our present track, we may pick them up. The nearest is a couple of light-years from us. It appears to be on station relative to a line drawn between Sol and Phaeacia’s sun, roughly the path we’re following. Pytheas says that’s easy to do; just keep yourself from orbiting away. As I was saying while you were out, Corinne, everything suggests that the aliens sent robots to sit broadcasting continuously. A little antimatter would provide ample power for centuries.”

  “The message is pictorial,” Wanderer interjected.

  “Well, graphic,” Hanno proceeded. “You’ll all see it later. Often, no doubt, trying to squeeze extra meaning out of it. I suspect you’ll fail. No real images, just several ... diagrams, maps, representations. Transmission to a ship traveling at Einsteinian speed, a changing speed at that, must be a tough problem, especially when the aliens can’t know what our capabilities are for receiving and decoding— or how we think, or much of anything about us. Detailed pictures might be impossible for us to untangle. Evidently they composed the simplest, least ambiguous message that might serve. I would, in their place.”

  “But what is their place?” Yukiko wondered.

  Hanno chose to take her literally. “I’m coming to that. What we got, first, was a lot of light-points in three-dimensional space. Then little bars appeared next to three of them. Then we got those three points in succession—it must be same ones—each by itself with the bar enlarged so we could see vertical lines on it. Then the view returned to the light-points in general, with a red line between two of those that are marked. Finally another line appeared, from about two-thirds along the first one, offside to the third marked tight-point.

  “That’s all. Each exposure lasts about a minute. The sequence finishes and starts over. After sixteen cycles, it becomes a plain series of flashes, that could just as well be rendered by dots and dashes in sound waves. This goes on for the same total time, after which we return to the graphics. And so on, over and over.”

  Hanno sat back. He grinned a bit. “What do you make of h?”

  “That isn’t fair,” Patulcius complained.

  “No, don’t be a tease,” Aliyat agreed.

  “Hold on.” Macandal’s eyes shone darkly bright. “It’s worthwhile making us guess. Bring more minds to bear on the problem.”

  “The ship’s mind must already have solved it,” Patulcius said.

  “Nevertheless— Lord, let’s have a little fun. I think those fight-points stand for stars, a map of this neighborhood in the galaxy. One of the three special ones has got to be Sol, the other Phaeacia Sun, and the third—where the aliens are!”

  ... “Right.” Wanderer’s tone quivered with an equal excitement. “The bars, are they spectrograms?”

  “Brilliant, you two,” Svoboda said happily.

  Wanderer shook his head. “Naw, it’s pretty obvious, though I do look forward to actually seeing it. A sending from the Others—”

  Hanno nodded. “Pytheas ran through the astronomy database and confirmed those identifications,” he related. “The third was hardest, because the three-dimensional representation is on such a small scale. But by expanding the fractals as well as searching the records— Anyhow, it turns out to be a star on our port quarter, if I may speak two-dimensionally. About thirty degrees off our course and about three hundred fifty light-years from our present position. It’s type G seven, not as bright as Sol but not too unlike.” He paused. “It’s still less unlike that star in Pegasus, the one we believe may be the home of the nearest high-tech civilization to us, more than a thousand light-years.”

  “Then they have come this far,” Yukiko said in awe.

  “If they are from that civilization, if it is a civilization,” Svoboda reminded. “We know nothing, nothing.”

  “What powers have they, that they know about us?”

  “We’ve tried to guess, we two,” Hanno said. He drew breath. “Listen. Think. They—that third star—is about four hundred thirty light-years from Sol. That means it’s within the radio sphere of Earth. For a while, starting in the twentieth century, Earth was the brightest radio object in the Solar System, outshining Sol in that band. That was interrupted, you remember, and afterward people developed communications that didn’t clutter the spectrum so grossly; but the old wave front is still expanding. Even beyond Star Three, it’s still detectable if you have instruments as good as ours, which the aliens certainly do.

  “Very well. However they got to Star Three, they soon found that Sol had a brilliant radio companion. Nobody has spotted that at Pegasi, the Moth
er Star, assuming that is where the aliens originated. It’s too distant; nothing from us will reach it for centuries. So the, uh, colonists or visitors at Three are on their own.

  “Now take things from their viewpoint. In due course, Sol ought to be sending out ships too, if it hasn’t already begun. It will be especially interested in contacting the nearest neighbor high-tech civilization it can identify, Mother Star’s. The aliens could send robots to lie along the general path between those two. Our robots bound that way are smart and versatile. They would, at the least, beam word back to Earth. You recall they’re equipped to do that from space, as we aren’t, because they don’t boost all the while; tune touches them less than us. Unfortunately, I think, they must already have gone too far to acquire the signal—which indicates the aliens have not been at Three extremely long.

  “There is another good possibility for the aliens. Sol folk should also be especially interested in stars like their own. Phaeacia Sun is that sort, and it lies in the same general, attractive direction as Mother Star. It’s much the nearest to Sol that fits both requirements. So the aliens sent robots to lie along that path too. We’ve encountered those.”

  Silence closed down, eyes dropped in thought or stared at walls, until Aliyat said, “But robots went ahead of us to Phaeacia. Why haven’t they reported anything about this?”

  “Maybe the messenger craft hadn’t gotten here when they passed by,” Patulcius said. “We don’t know when the messengers arrived.” He pondered. “Except that it must have been less than—four hundred thirty years ago, did you say, Hanno? Otherwise the aliens could have had robots at Sol by now.”

  “Maybe they do.” Aliyat shivered. “We’ve been gone a long time.”

  “I doubt it,” said Wanderer. “That would be one hell of a coincidence.”