by Nick Gevers
“Just trying to figure out the best way to tell it,” he said.
“Starting at the beginning’s good.”
“I was born. I grew up. I went into space.” He closed his eyes.
“You are really the most annoying—”
“Don’t be so impatient.” He opened his eyes and peered out the window to see where they were. “NASA planned the mission to the asteroid when there was no budget for Mars. Doesn’t matter which asteroid. You wouldn’t know anyway. We hadn’t paid much attention to it, but it was in a near-Earth orbit. So we took the opportunity and went. Routine mission so far.”
He paused, and Maddie prompted, “And you walked on it.”
“Euphemism. You couldn’t properly walk anywhere on it. It was too small and had no gravity. It was like standing on the surface of a giant stone potato. I had a tether to the excursion module—I wasn’t going anywhere.”
Maddie listened without interrupting as he described space from the vantage point of a small asteroid. In her imagination she saw the deep, cold blackness studded with unwavering stars, the regular flare of the sun as the asteroid rolled in its orbit. Earth was a small, bright dot in the distance.
“Weren’t you afraid?”
He turned his scrawny neck and stared at her. “The astronaut who’s never afraid is a liar or a liability. The one who lets his fear rule is a disaster.”
“Tell me about seeing the aliens.”
“National World Enquirer said that. Not me.”
He took a moment, then continued. “I’d been on the asteroid for almost the full time for EVA, and the shuttle’s commander radioed to remind me. Then a sudden burst of light blinded me—and a strong carrier wave knocked out my headset.”
He fell silent again.
“Go on,” she prompted. “What was it like?”
“The worst pain you can imagine. Like being a T-bone steak plopped onto the hot grill and not being able to get off. Like all your skin is scorched and peeling. Like being knocked out by a high-voltage wire. Like having your eyelids ripped off and being forced to watch a nuclear explosion. Like going blind and stark raving mad at the same time.”
That explained his blotchy skin, she thought: radiation burns. The long outburst seemed to have tired him again. He rested his head on the seat-back and went to sleep.
At least, she hoped he was only sleeping.
The sun was setting as they entered the outskirts of Palm Springs, a fuzzy red beach ball sinking into hazy waves of low- lying smog. Maddie was tired from driving in heavy traffic. Sam had slept most of the way. Now he woke and struggled upright.
“You want to eat something?” she asked as they passed a coffee shop.
“No. Go on through the city.”
“How much farther are we going?” The Tesla was new enough to have an efficient fuel cell system, but there was still a limit on how far it could go without a recharge. Since she’d never had the chance to drive it this far, she had no idea what that limit was. The battery’s indicator bars remained in the safe zone, but for how much longer?
“Just outside the city, you’re going to make a left.”
And then what? She kept the thought to herself because he obviously wouldn’t answer anyway. She gazed at the people strolling from boutiques where golden light spilled out onto the sidewalk to restaurants whose banners pronounced them award-winning. Maddie retracted her window and the car filled with the aroma of barbecue and garlic and the faint sounds of music. Her stomach rumbled.
“Oblivious,” Sam said. “All of them. It’s going right through them and they’re oblivious!”
“What?”
“You too. And me. And worst of all, NASA and SETI. Turn left at the next light.”
The lights and sounds of Palm Springs fell away as they took the narrow dirt road across the desert floor rising slowly toward the nearby hills. The sky was filled with misty rose and lavender light, and the tops of the Little San Bernardinos looked as if they’d been draped in glowing chiffon.
“Pull off here.”
Tiredness flooded through her. This was without question the stupidest thing she’d done in her life. Sam scrambled out of the car without help, yanking the duffel bag behind him. In the twilight, he looked spidery and strange, like an alien himself. She yawned and reached to turn off the engine.
“Leave it running,” he said. “I need a power supply.”
He rummaged through the bag, pulling objects out and setting them down on the sand. She got out of the car.
“Here.” He handed her a pair of field glasses. “You might as well look at the stars while I’m getting set up.”
She took the glasses out of their case. She could see Venus in the west already, and other pinpricks of light were beginning to show against the rapidly darkening sky. Her father had taught her to recognize the major constellations and nebula clusters and most of the minor ones too.
“Easier at night,” Sam said.
“What is?”
“Listening.”
Did he mean the kind of signals SETI was listening for? That would be dumb, she thought; the stars were there even when we didn’t see them. “What difference does darkness make to messages coming from way across the universe?”
“I meant for us!” he said testily. “Fewer distractions.”
Arms folded tightly across her chest, Maddie stepped away from the car. The sky glittered overhead but she’d lost interest. The desert night was already much cooler than the day and if they stayed here too long she’d regret not bringing a jacket. Somewhere in the hills, a coyote yipped. A large bird flew past her on silent wings.
“Look,” he said suddenly.
On a flat-topped boulder he’d set up the contents of the duffel bag. She saw a small oscilloscope with the regular undulation of a carrier wave passing over its screen. Beside it was something that looked like a really old cell phone, bulky, with an antenna poking out; cables ran between them and a metal box, also small. He was really nuts if he thought that contraption was going to capture alien signals. Daddy had taken the family on a vacation trip to see the Allen Array in Northern California; it looked nothing like that.
“You forgot to bring a dish!” Her voice added its own snaking wave to the screen.
The coyote gave a full- throated howl this time and was joined by another. The lines on the oscilloscope jumped into peaks and valleys. He bent over the rig he’d assembled, cocking his ear and turning dials. The night air filled with the eerie whale song he’d played for her in the car. An owl hooted. The screen became a jumble of snaking lines.
“I don’t get it.”
“You need a symphony. At least—” He hesitated as if trying to find the words to explain a difficult concept to a kindergartner. “You need to learn how to listen to a symphony. Too bad you didn’t bring your flute.”
She jumped as if he’d poked her. “I think I might have—it’s still in my shoulder bag.”
He nodded. “Get it.”
No point in arguing with him. She found her flute in the car and put it to her lips. The instrument added its own line to the undulating patterns of the oscilloscope.
“A symphony not made up of our instruments,” he said.
In the dark, his eyes glittered like the stars. She glanced up. Somewhere, in all that magnificent light show, there were other intelligent beings. She believed that, even though scientists like her father had spent more than seven decades trying to capture a message from just one, and failing absolutely. But what Sam was trying to do wasn’t science.
“You saying that whales could help SETI listen for alien signals?”
“Don’t be stupid!” the old man scolded. “Sentient creatures that’ve been on this planet maybe longer than we have. What might they know? Trees too. Thousand-year-old sequoias—centuries to process the hormonal messages in their cells! And creosote bushes—there’s a budding hive mind for you! Ravens and crows. Even coyotes. We don’t have the first idea how to listen to th
e intelligence on our own planet, yet we think we’d recognize an alien message if it hit us!”
A light breeze came up, carrying the scent of wild sage. She shivered. Fine sand particles coated her face.
“We’re never going to get the message until we understand that the voice of the universe is a symphony,” Sam said. He turned away from her and stared up at the brilliant tapestry of the desert sky. “Doesn’t mean the message isn’t there. But right now we’re searching for the flute part all by itself.”
“My father says—”
“We have to learn how to get more out of the carrier wave. Background radiation of the universe. Whatever scientists want to call it.”
Mad, she thought. Totally mad. “Well, I’m not a scientist, so why me?”
“No!” he shouted at her. “I can’t read it yet—nobody can! But somebody has to understand what the problem is, or we’ll never even work on it!”
She gazed at the oscilloscope again. The coyotes were singing, a whole pack by the sound of it. The owl hooted from the arms of a nearby cottonwood. The oscilloscope was alive with their combined voices. She didn’t know enough to say Sam was wrong, but she knew stranger things had turned out to be true.
“They’re out there,” he said quietly. “But I’ve run out of time to find a better apprentice.”
Glancing at him in surprise, she saw he was bent over his weird contraption again. She lifted her face to the stars and was immediately bombarded by a huge cold light that overwhelmed her optical nerves. She shrieked.
Sam chuckled. “Just the full moon rising.”
She was trembling uncontrollably. “We have to get back.”
“I’m done, anyway,” he said. “You were just my last chance.”
He started packing his things back into the duffel bag, slowly as if the effort exhausted him. She got into the driver’s seat. Fine volunteer she was, she thought; she didn’t even offer to help him into the car. All she could think of was starting the heater. She heard the old man stumble into the passenger seat and close the car door, sighing with pain, or sadness perhaps. She listened for the familiar click of the seat web locking into place. Then she thought of something.
“It was the messages that hit you, wasn’t it, on that asteroid? Even though you couldn’t understand them, they were there?”
He didn’t reply.
Yawning, she touched the heater’s sensor. Nothing happened. She glanced at the battery gauge.
Zero bars.
“Umm, Sam? I think we’re stuck.”
He seemed to have gone to sleep already.
Well, what difference did it make? she thought. She was already in trouble for driving out here. But it was cold in the car without the heater and she started to worry. How low did the night temperature drop in August? She looked over at the skinny old man, slumped in his seat. Too cold for him, in any case.
Wasn’t there an old ratty blanket in the Tesla’s trunk? She’d thrown it in there after Junior Class Day at the beach and didn’t remember taking it out again. She got out of the car and raised the trunk lid. Yes. She shook sand out of it, smelling the faint trace of ocean as she did so. Maybe there’d been whales passing by, far out in the water, that day she’d played volleyball with her friends. Whales making up songs that humans didn’t understand.
An awful lot that humans didn’t understand!
She draped the gritty blanket around the old man’s shoulders, and he muttered in his sleep. No way she was going to get any sleep. It was going to be a long night till someone came to rescue them. The coyotes were still singing; she could hear them—nearer now—even with the windows closed. Weird to think of the noises animals made as music, but then maybe they thought the sounds humans made were weird too.
And maybe Sam was right and the universe was streaming with messages we didn’t know how to listen to just yet.
On impulse, she reached into the back seat and retrieved her flute. She cracked the window, letting the coyotes’ song enter, and put the flute to her lips to join them.
She heard Sam sigh, and glanced over at him. He seemed to be smiling in his sleep.
The sheriffs her father summoned found her at dawn by tracking the Tesla’s GPS. She woke to the sound of a helicopter’s rotors beating the desert air. She was cold, hungry, otherwise unharmed.
Sam Ferenzi wasn’t so lucky. Or maybe that’s what he’d wanted from the start, she thought, as the sheriff’s paramedics loaded her into the chopper for the flight home. Dying like a shriveled up insect in a hospice bed after you’ve been into space and experienced the tsunami of alien communication, even if you can’t understand a word of it and nobody believes you: she could understand how he might’ve felt. Going in his sleep was a mercy.
She watched the medics carrying Sam’s body, reverently. He’d found the clue to a puzzle her father would give anything to solve.
“What were you doing out there?” one of the paramedics asked.
“Just stargazing,” she said. It was only a half lie.
The paramedic handed her a juice box as the chopper lifted off the desert floor. The sun flooded in through the east-facing port. A star, only one among billions in the known universe. A symphony of star voices that someday somebody was going to learn how to hear. Somebody who loved both the stars and music.
She drifted off to sleep, thinking of what that might mean for her future.
Graffiti in the Library of Babel
David Langford
“There seems to be no difference at all between the message of maximum content (or maximum ambiguity) and the message of zero content (noise).”
—John Sladek, “The Communicants”
As it turned out, they had no sense of drama. They failed to descend in shiny flying discs, or even to fill some little-used frequency with a tantalizing stutter of sequenced primes. No: they came with spray cans and felt-tips, scrawling their grubby little tags across our heritage.
Or as an apologetic TotLib intern first broke the news: “Sir, someone’s done something nasty all over Jane Austen.”
The Total Library project is named in homage to Kurd Lasswitz’s thought experiment “Die Universal Bibliothek,” which inspired a famous story by Jorge Luis Borges. Another influence is the “World Brain” concept proposed by H. G. Wells. Assembling the totality of world literature and knowledge should allow a rich degree of cross-referencing and interdisciplinary . . .
Ceri Evans looked up from the brochure. Even in this white office that smelled of top management, she could never resist a straight line: “Why, congratulations, Professor. I think you may have invented the Internet!”
“Doctor, not Professor, and I do not use the title,” said Ngombi with well-simulated patience. “Call me Joseph. The essential point of TotLib is that we are isolated from the net. No trolls, no hackers, none of what that Manson book called sleazo inputs. Controlled rather than chaotic cross-referencing.”
“But still you seem to have these taggers?”
“Congratulations, Doctor Evans! I think you may have just deduced the contents of my original email to you.”
“All right. All square.” Ceri held up one thin hand in mock surrender. “We’ll leave the posh titles for the medics. Now tell me: why is this a problem in what I do, which is a far-out region of information theory, rather than plain data security?”
“Believe me, data security we know about. Hackers and student pranksters have been rather exhaustively ruled out. As it has been said, ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’ ”
“ ‘Holmes, this is marvelous,’ ” said Ceri dutifully.
“‘Meretricious,’ said he.” Joseph grinned. “We are a literary team here.”
Ceri felt a sudden contrarian urge not to be literary. “Maybe we should cut to the chase. There’s only one logical reason to call me in. You suspect the Library is under attack through the kind of acausal channel I’ve discussed in my more specula
tive papers? A concept, I should remind you, that got me an IgNobel Prize and a long denunciation in The Skeptic because everyone knows it’s utter lunacy. Every Einstein-worshipping physicist, at least.”
A shrug. “‘Once you eliminate the impossible . . .’ And I’m not a physicist. Come and see.” He was so very large and very black. Ceri found herself wondering whether his white-on-white decor was deliberate contrast.
The taggers had spattered their marks across the digital texts of TotLib: short bursts of characters that made no particular sense but clearly belonged to the same family, like some ideogram repeated with slight variations along the shopping mall, through the car park and across the sides of subway carriages. Along Jane Austen, through Shakespeare and underground to deface Jack Kerouac and the Beats. After half an hour of onscreen examples Ceri felt the familiar eye glaze of overdosing on conceptual art.
“The tags,” she said cautiously, “never appear within words?” This is a test. Do not be afraid of the obvious.
“We decided all by ourselves to call them tags.” The faint smile indicated that Joseph was still in a mood for point-scoring.
“Okay. I see.” She didn’t, but in a moment it came. “Not just graffiti but mark-up, like HTML or XML tags. Emphasis marks. You think they’re not so much defacing the texts as going through them with a highlighter. Boldface on, It is a truth universally acknowledged, boldface off.”
“Congratulations! It took our people several days to reach that point.”
Ceri drummed her fingers irritably against the TotLib workstation. “The point seems to be that it’s already been reached. So why me?”
“I saw a need for someone who can deal with the implications. If this tagging is coming in through your acausal channels—and we truly cannot trace any conventional route—and if that New Scientist piece on you was not too impossibly dumbed down . . .”