by Martin Tays
“Sandra.”
Yeah. Stupid story.”
“Not really. And I like it.”
Sandar looked up, surprised. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Nope. It’s distinctive.” He pointed a subtle little warning finger at Doug, who had been about to speak. Doug obligingly put his hand over his mouth. “Okay. Video off. Lights. Full. Can I get you ladies anything to drink?”
Cath hesitated a moment, then shrugged. “Sure, what the hell. Single malt.”
“No problem. Sandar?”
Sandar looked over at Moses. “I’ll just have one of those beers, please.”
Moses nodded. “You got it.” He turned to the room. “And do you think you people can make them someplace to sit?”
By the time he came back with the drinks, the room had been rearranged, and another couple of chairs extruded for them to sit on. Moses handed them their respective drinks and went back to the couch to sit by Ami.
“Okay, then.” He held his half finished beer out to Cath. “To absent friends.”
Cath nodded, clinking appropriately. “To absent friends.”
Doug lifted his glass up. “Let us drink from the skulls of our enemies!”
She stopped with the drink halfway to her lips and turned slowly to look at Doug, then back questioningly at Moses.
He shrugged. “Don’t ever teach that one an historical tidbit.”
“Gotcha.” She took a sip and was surprised at the smoothness.
Moses grinned at the expression on her face. “There’s advantages to being known as a boozehound. Everyone always knows what to get you for Christmas.”
“Like a new liver?”
“Only the more discerning ones.” Moses set his untouched bottle on the table beside him and leaned forward. “Okay. Enough. What’s up, Cath? I know there’s something going on… it’s not as if we parted the most amicable of friends.”
She knocked back the rest of her drink and threw the glass in the corner. The floor obliged and began to slowly consume it.
“True. But when you’re as old as we are you can’t hold grudges. If people did, you’d have been dead a long time ago.”
Moses nodded. “True. An unexpected benefit.”
“Yeah. Now, as I said, I have something you need to listen to. Or rather, she does.” Cath pointed at Sandar, who looked a bit uncomfortable at being the center of attention.
He looked at her closely, then back to Cath. “She doesn’t get out much, does she?”
“Don’t you even think about starting with her, Moses Hamish Dunn.” Cath growled.
Moses shook his head. “I’m not, and you’re right, and I’m sorry. Sandar? Why don’t you tell us your story? It’s okay… we’re all friends, here.”
“Your middle name is Hamish?”
“Shut the fuck up, Doug.”
“Shutting.”
Sandar looked around at the group of people, hesitant. Finally, she began to talk in a quiet tone of voice. “I used to work at Arecibo.”
“Really?” Asked Moses. “What’d you do, there?”
Sandar shrugged. “I spent my days monitoring backup equipment. I spent my nights listening for signals.”
“Ah. You’re a SETI nut.” Moses shook his head. “A lot of people have been listening for signals, Sandar.”
“Yeah. I know.” She looked up. “But I heard one.”
There was a moment of dead silence, then everyone else began speaking at once.
“You’re kidding!?”
“Yes!!”
“FARB!”
Ami looked at Moses sharply. He just shrugged. “Sorry. Came out in the heat of the moment.” He looked around. “Quiet, everyone. Shush. Sandar?”
“Yes?”
“How did you know it was a signal? What was it?”
Instead of answering, she just reached into her pocket and pulled out the datatab. She held it out for Moses to take.
He came over and took it delicately, staring at her and then at the tab. He finally spun around and stuck the tab into the wall console. “Playback.” He uttered in a strained voice.
The room was quiet as the recording played. When it finished, Moses realized there were tears on his cheeks. He was not alone. Ami was staring at Sandar in wonder, eyes wet. Even Leo was crying, though he was vainly trying to hide the fact.
Sher was the first to recover her voice. “That was pi, wasn’t it?” Moses nodded, dazed. She looked at Sandar. “Wow.”
“Yeah.” Moses added absently. “Wow, indeed.” He shook himself visibly, then looked at Sandar. “Thank you. And thank you, too, Cath.”
Cath just nodded.
“But — and here’s the real question, here — why did you need for me to hear that? I mean, it was great. It was tremendous. It was quite probably the most remarkable thing I’ve ever heard. But… why me?”
Cath looked off into the distance, then abruptly stood. She walked over to Moses and looked down at him. Finally, she spoke. “Ever hear of the Cartwheel Project?”
Moses blinked at the sudden change of subject. “Nope. Should I have?”
“Yes. But you were probably drunk.”
Moses nodded. “More than likely. So what is the Cartwheel Project?”
“Was.” She put her hands behind her back and started pacing as she spoke. Moses was amused. She’d often assumed this attitude when lecturing he and Rafe back on the voyage. It had been a hoot to watch her try it in zero g. She reached the end of the room and turned abruptly. “A bit over a hundred years ago, I was involved in a top secret project. A project named Cartwheel.”
“Obviously.”
“Ahem. Right. Okay, it’s like this. We wanted to, no, we needed to explore further than we’d gone before. Right?”
Moses nodded. “Of course.”
“And that would mean longer and longer trips in Endeavour class ships.” Cath held her hands out, far apart. “Ridiculously long trips. Right?”
He nodded again, cautiously.
“So we began designing a faster than light drive.”
Leo started laughing, as did Mattie.
Moses grinned ruefully. “Pull the other one… it’s got bells on.”
“We built one.”
There was a stunned silence. Moses looked over at Leo, who looked incredulous, then back at Cath. He finally looked over at Sandar. “Is she on the level?”
Sandar shrugged and looked back at Cath. It was obviously the first time she’d heard this, too.
He turned back to Cath. “Really?”
“Really. We really built one. We called it a Warp Drive.”
Moses looked at her from under lowered brows. “Oh, please.”
“Not my idea.” Cath had the good grace to look slightly embarrassed. “But an accurate name, none the less. It uses a pseudostring, just like the gates. The difference is the application. When you push the ‘go’ button, it generates a mass in front of the ship sufficient to warp space, and a negative mass behind.”
Moses looked off, scratching his chin. Finally, he looked back to Cath. “How big a mass?”
“Big. Enough to, well…”
“To warp space.” Moses stood and joined Cath in pacing. “Okay, so the string’s in a circle around the ship… a Cartwheel… that’s cute… and you just tweak it fore and aft?”
Cath nodded. “You always were a bright kid. Pity you never made anything of yourself.”
“I’ve always thought that, too.”
Leo interrupted. “But what about causality?”
“Good question.” She turned to look at Leo. “And irrelevant. The ship stays at rest with respect to space. It’s just the space ahead of the ship gets shrunk, and the space behind expa
nded… time stays the same. Do it wrong and you end up with the ship, crew and string inhabiting a very, very tiny singularity. Do it right, though…”
“Do it right,” said Moses, breathlessly, “… and you can get from here to Earth in months.”
“Weeks, actually, probably, though we never tried. It was an unmanned ship. A probe. Brendan…” She glanced up at Moses. “You remember Brendan Myers? Suggested we call it Jason, after the Argonaut. Jason only went under drive once.”
“And?”
She stopped pacing and stuck her hands back in her pockets. “How many planets does Proxima have?”
Moses paused, then cocked an eyebrow at her. “Um… I can’t remember. Twenty? Twenty two?”
Cath shook her head. “Twenty three.”
“Hey.” They all turned to Fiona, who up to now had been silent. “There’s twenty four planets around Proxima Centauri. I remember that distinctly.”
Cath shook her head. “You’re wrong. There were twenty four planets.”
Everyone began speaking at once. Moses held his hands up in the air, waving for silence. Finally, he spoke. “You mean…?”
“You’d be surprised what that much mass moving that fast can do to an orbit. And that’s not the worst part.”
“There’s worse?”
“Yeah.” She grimaced. “Somehow, the interaction with the former outermost planet pranged the autopilot. It never stopped.”
Moses smacked his forehead. “Oh, crap.”
“Bucketloads. Enough crap for everyone involved in the project. We wanted to keep going, but they used the loss of the prototype as an excuse to kill the project. They Cartered it.” She looked around. “Any chance I can get some more of that scotch?”
“Yeah. Think I’ll join you, too. In fact, I think we could all use a drink about now.”
“Excuse me? Excuse me? HELLO?” Cath finally looked over toward Ami. “Um, I’m curious. Where did it go?”
Moses looked at her, startled. Cath laughed. “That’s the sixty four dollar question, dear. It lit out for Sagittarius. If you want to be more specific, when last seen, Jason was headed straight for the Archer’s Armpit. Zeta Sagittarii. Ascella. Eighty nine light years, and we couldn’t have hit it any better if we’d tried. Which we didn’t.”
Sandar dropped her beer.
Moses looked over at her and spoke. “I get the feeling I already know the answer to this question, but… where did the message come from?”
Sandar just sat there, open mouthed. She looked over at Cath in wonder.
Moses turned to look at Cath, an appalled look on his face. Cath just nodded.
“Mary, Mother of God.” Moses was not sure if it was a prayer or a curse.
“You want an argument for human longevity? I saw my great-great-great-great-great grandson being born the other day, then left the hospital and went on a three day toot to celebrate it. I still have no idea where I left my pants.”
Orenthal Clinton, from The Last Circus Barker
“It was the first time I’d visited London, and I made a point of going to Saint Paul’s, just so I could see Nelson’s Crypt. I stood there staring up at it and it struck me: The Right Honorable Admiral Horatio, Lord Nelson was forty seven years old when he defeated the combined French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar, dying heroically in the process.
Forty seven.
I was older than that before I got my first job.”
H. Julius Braddock, from “Around The Worlds On A Budget”
Chapter 9
“One good thing about being young is that you are not experienced enough to know you cannot possibly do the things you are doing.”
Gene Brown
And that’s all you have?!?”
Sam shook her head. “No, Mr. Grace. At that point Doug Brubaker made an inappropriate and not particularly funny joke. He was struck over the head by his companion, Ms. Chu. Repeatedly. Leonardo Verducci then went to the bathroom and left the seat up. This angered his companion, Sherryn Lloyd, who apparently fell into the toilet as a direct result.”
Grace screamed and threw his hands up in the air. “I don’t care. Did anyone say anything else relevant?”
“Not in the apartment, no sir.” Sam was leaning back in her chair, trying to put a little distance between herself and the angered man. “The suggestion was made by Mr. Dunn that they continue the conversation over dinner. On receiving everyone’s agreement, they left for a nearby restaurant.”
“So they did continue the conversation?” Grace leaned in, closing the distance, and continued in a dangerously quiet tone of voice. “And we have no recording of this… why, exactly?”
She shrugged. “Because the restaurant they choose had privacy fields for each table. Before they ordered Ms. Spindowski activated the field, which of course fried the remote.”
“Damn.” He jammed his hands into his pockets and stared moodily at the now dark screen. “You dispatched a fresh remote?”
“Immediately. But even if it hadn’t taken close to a half hour to get there, it could have picked up exactly nothing from inside the field. They’re still there, but there’s no way we can monitor the conversation.” She pointed to the console. “That’s all we have.”
“Two things.” Grace pulled a hand out of his pocket and jabbed a finger into the tech’s face. “One, I don’t want to miss anything else, got it? You will stay here until relieved.”
“Sir…” The tired tech scrubbed her face. “I’ve been at this for twenty two hours.”
“So? You can sleep if you want, but you will listen to any conversation that man has in real time. Get it?”
“Got it.”
“Good.” He held up another finger. “And second, everything you’ve heard is above Top Secret, burn before reading stuff. No one, and I mean no one, gets this info. If they do, I will have your ass.”
She sighed and turned back to her console, muttering “If you’ll let me go home and shower, you can have it now.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing. Sir. Will that be all?”
After a moment, Grace replied. “Yes. That’s all. Let me know the instant you have anything. Carry on.” He spun and stalked out of the room.
There followed a brief but heartfelt monolog concerning Celestine Grace’s anatomy, immediate ancestry, sexual preferences vis à vie goats and his destination in any self-respecting afterlife.
Feeling a little better, Sam turned back to her console and brought up the real time data.
☼
Moses toyed with his coffee cup, watching Cath out of the corner of his eye. Actually, he was watching Cath not watching Sandar. Cath had always been better with machines than with people. Leo was a lot like her in that respect.
They’d kept the conversation light throughout the meal ― as if they were afraid of the subject matter.
Which they were.
He knew they could put it off no longer, though. He cleared his throat, and the strained conversations around him slowly died down. Cath looked at Moses expectantly.
“Okay.” He was looking at Cath as he spoke, but he pitched his voice for the whole group. “Let me see if I can sum up the situation. A hundred years ago, you built a faster than light probe, wound it up, and threw it at a random star.”
Cath shrugged. “Close enough.”
“It sailed through a star system that appears to be inhabited by another intelligent species. One that isn’t human.” He paused, looking off into the distance. “One that isn’t human. Wow.”
“Yeah, yeah, we’re all stunned.” Cath said, making an impatient ‘go ahead’ gesture.
“Sorry. An intelligent species. One that is sufficiently advanced to put together a signaling device and use it within a couple of yea
rs.” He scratched his head. “So why put so much effort into such a short message?”
“Toll charges?”
“Shut up, Doug. We get the message, you make the connection, and… and what, exactly?” He leaned back and looked at her quizzically. “What’s going on, Cath?”
“You’re doing good so far, Moses. Why don’t you tell me?”
He nodded. “Okay. I’m betting it goes something like this. You hate the fact that we’re no longer exploring. As do a lot of us, yes, but you and your friends decided to do something about it.”
Ami looked from Moses to Cath, then back at Moses. “The Endeavour?”
Cath nodded at Ami, but Moses never took his eyes off Cath as he replied. “We know someone’s been keeping her up. We found that out, ourselves. That was you, I assume?”
“Yep. And that reminds me.” Cath glared at Moses. “You drank my cognac, you bastard.”
“Not all of it.” He waved a hand at Ami’s friends. “And I had help.”
“If it’s any consolation…” Leo interjected, “It was very good.” He looked over at Sher. “Wasn’t it?”
Sher hid her face in her hands. Her “I am never getting drunk again…” was slightly muffled. “Or naked.”
“Hey!” Leo sounded worried. “Ever?”
“Never. I will bathe in my clothes.” She looked up at Leo. “Alone, thank you.”
He turned to look at Moses, a stricken expression on his face. “This is all your fault.”
Cath glanced back at Moses, eyebrow cocked. “Are they always this way?”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Pretty much. Thank God we were better behaved when we were their age.”
“You secretly built a full sized drive, didn’t you?” Mattie’s voice cut across the room like a knife.
It was as if the conversation had hit a brick wall. Everyone slowly turned and looked down the table at Mattie, who was staring at Cath intently.
Cath blinked. “Pardon?”