“A kind of…plasma pipe?”
“Yep. Energy flow pipe, with Pluto-Charon at the far end of the circuit.” Jordin was intrigued, fingers working in his command gloves. He waved in the space before him, and pretty colored displays outlined the flow patterns. Currents arcing in, nose-diving, finally captured by the crusts of the two worlds. The heating effect flared visibly as a dull orange glow in the icy crusts. Filigrees ran under the blue ice sheets, melting the thinnest layers into gossamer vapors. Clouds fumed into the gathering atmospheres.
“Damned odd,” was all Shanna could think to say.
“Not an accident, no way,” Jordin whispered, eyes intent on the constant play of pattern.
“What kind of thing can set up magnetic pipes bigger than planets?”
Jordin shrugged. “I dunno. Earthside is still talking about all this as a whole new kind of biosphere, driven from outside by currents—”
“I’ll say!”
“—but natural. The astrophysicists are playing games with the bow shock region, tying its moving into all this commotion on Pluto.”
She snorted. “That just moves the problem back a step. What made the bow shock boundary move in from 100 AU?”
“You don’t get the game.” Jordin grinned. “Moving the cause into their ballpark means they get to make the pitches. Get the hurry-up funding. Make headlines.”
“So young and already so cynical.”
“You expect scientists to be loftily above it all?”
She nodded grudgingly. “Okay, now you’re starting to sound reasonable. Time to up my medication.”
It took six days for Proserpina to overtake High Flyer. Its exhaust burned diamond-hard against the black. Escape velocity from Pluto was 1.1 km/sec, only a tenth of what it took to escape Earth’s grasp. Orbital speeds were low out here, too. Pluto moved at a paltry 500 m/sec, not a whole lot faster than a jet plane. Out there in the Oort cloud, speeds got even slower. Shanna had a momentary comic picture of herself running to catch up with a planet…
And there it was, a bright dot rushing into the far dark.
High Flyer was a huge thing, like a skyscraper with a big bright rocket flare stuck on one end. Most of it was gray bottles of water blocking the hind drive from the living quarters.
In space geometry is the only guide to size, and even geometry needs a measuring stick. Here the only guide to her eyes was the air lock, the bulky structure a mere small cap near the top third of the craft.
This was a big nuke. And the first fusion rocket of major scale, built for both speed and distance. No mere pod sitting atop a big fuel tank, which in turn fed into the reactor. Of course, the parts had to line up that way, no matter how ornate the subsections got, because the water in the tank shielded the crew up front from the reactor and the plasma plume in the magnetic nozzle.
To even see the plume, High Flyer had a rearview mirror hung amid-ship, out ten meters to the side. The whole stack was in zero g, except the top thick disk, which the crew seldom left. Forty meters in diameter, looking like a dirty angel food cake, it spun lazily around to provide a full Earth g at the outside. There the walls were meter-thick and filled with water for radiation shielding. So were the bow walls, shaped into a Chinese hat with forward viewing sensors. From inside, nobody could eyeball the outside except through electronic feeds.
The whole ship was well over a hundred meters long. Built like a barrel, it rode a blue-white flare that stretched back ten kilometers before fraying into steamy streamers. Plasma fumed and blared along the exhaust length, ions and electrons finding each other at last and reuniting into atoms, spitting out the actinic glare. The blue pencil pointed dead astern, so that at the right angle the whole scene was an exclamation point, with the sun as the dot. Proserpina hauled up within a kilometer, and the two ships fretted over the details of making the transfer.
In the end Shanna won out. Proserpina was cramped and showing wear; and she wanted to see inside the bigger ship. She, Jordin, and two other crew would come across in the shuttle. Part of her wanted to play status games and make them come to her, but her own curiosity won out. She wanted to see what this monster of a ship looked like, and it would indeed be good to get out of the house for a while.
Not that she looked forward to a tech-talk fest. Whenever ship crews got together, there was a lot of talking shop, but out here she could use some simple human contact. Being captain always kept you at a distance from your crew. And the hyperlink to Earth was no substitute for real talk, either. Last week she got a memo that said, “Cascade this to your people and see what the push-back is.” It put her off reading her e-mail for days.
They wedded to the air lock gingerly. The lock was big and bulky, like everything here, with fancy safety bells and whistles. Mass to spare, she thought sourly.
They cycled through, in formation. For Earthside audiences High Flyer was recording every greeting, handshake, joke, and guffaw. They got through it, agreed to turn the cameras off, and Shanna had a moment to assess this Julia Barth, senior woman among astronauts, legendary for a crusty exterior that concealed a sharp intelligence. She stood straight, shoulders back, smaller than Shanna had expected; the great should be larger, to match the reputation. Julia was compact as all astronauts were, maybe a tad stringy. Her face was lined, mouth cocked at an assessing angle, eyes quick. Suntanned, too, from working in the Martian domes. Already, Shanna was sizing her up.
Her husband, Viktor, was quiet and gruff, big and muscular among the slim astronauts, eyes flicking from one face to another as the conversation moved. Equally famous, just as at ease. They both seemed energetic but calm. Maybe the Mars Effect was real. Shanna wondered how they were in bed together…
Everybody knew each other’s profile, had read their books (some ghost-authored, some even eloquent), and they passed through the usual compliments. Shanna knew she would take an industrial-strength makeover to be presentable, but the High Flyer men all told her how great she looked. One, Hiroshi Okada, had gleaming eyes and a mirthful grin. She liked him at once, and not just because his compliments didn’t seem forced.
In cultural profile High Flyer’s crew was like hers. By no accident, most spacers were from North America or Asia. Those were the cultures, mid-twenty-first century, where young people still asked, When can I do X? The Europeans usually said, with dread, How do we stop people from doing X? And X could be just about anything technological. Genetically modified food, screening for future disease risk, opening up the asteroids for mining of scarce metals, living longer through genetic tailoring, beaming microwave power from space, living half-time in virtual villages, sending a beacon signal to the stars.
ISA was mostly backed by Asians and Americans. Euros didn’t go into space—You could die! It would cost a lot!—and were busy shoring up their aging societies with plentiful taxes and fearful politics, eyeing the ever-growing population of Muslims in their midst… Shanna was quite glad to be out here, away from the swamp of Earthside.
They sat around the ship’s pedestal mess table, a polycarbon white circle. An awkward moment. Everybody beamed, glad to see fresh faces, but nobody spoke. An epic moment far from Earth. All sorts of firsts here. How to start? Then Viktor produced, improbably, two bottles of champagne to mark the moment. That loosened everybody even before lips touched liquid.
Sure enough, the first socializing was about the latest Earthside news, most of it just the usual wrangling and angling that passed for politics. That done, like dogs sniffing noses, they relaxed.
Shanna let the chatter run for about half an hour. They all had the zand interpretations, the spotty information on the Pluto biosphere. So they concentrated on reviewing the data, dancing around hypotheses. Viktor reported on his idea that the wavelengths received from farther out meant that the radiators were tens of meters in size, at least. Maybe that’s just their antenna size, Chow-Lin said. Franklin agreed. After all, our antennas are pretty big, too.
But, Viktor countered, the signals ar
e from places where there are no worlds at all. Certainly nothing remotely as large as Pluto. They got into a technical discussion, and momentum flagged. Tit for tat, counters, hedges. Shanna let it run as long as she could bear before saying, abruptly, “What do you make of our…hosts?”
Viktor’s face was veiled as he said, “You think big things make the small Pluto things?”
Wow, he knows how to cut to the chase. “Somebody did,” Shanna said. “We’re not looking at natural evolution here, for sure.”
“Julia thinks so, too,” said Viktor. “She is pretty good biologist. Has intuition.”
Shanna felt a stab of jealousy. Damn, she’s good. How did she come up with it so fast?
Jordin sent her a look she could not decipher. “We haven’t actually discussed all this yet.”
Good old Jordin, undercutting my claim to first discovery, Shanna fumed.
“The antenna-size argument,” Chow-Lin pointed out, “just sets a lower bound. The creatures could be far larger. We’re lots bigger than our eyes.”
Viktor said, “All assuming that the antennas are eyes—I mean, not a technology. Because we see no technology out there, just empty space.”
Julia’s mouth tilted skeptically. “I rather think these zand of yours are not naturally evolved, but how can something bigger than a mountain—maybe the size of continents—make them?”
“Not a clue,” Shanna said. “But they didn’t evolve on Pluto. That’s not a biosphere back there, not a truly integrated system. It’s a base camp, getting by on energy rations.”
“And run by electrical power that comes from way beyond,” Jordin added.
Julia’s wary gaze did not alter. “No chance Pluto’s been running that way for a long time?”
Jordin shook his head. “It looks…well, recent, contrived. The whole planet’s got a narrow pyramid of life, few microbes, just a handful of amino acids—the minimum to make it work.”
“Built by something really strange,” Shanna said.
Viktor said, “So we invoke that rule, the knife something—”
“Ockham’s razor,” Shanna said. She had been reading plenty of philosophy of science; it seemed a good investment, out here amid the truly weird. Plus science fiction, of course—lots of Arthur C. Clarke. “We’ve got two strange things, so maybe one causes the other.”
“Three strange things,” Julia said matter-of-factly. “You got the transmission Earthside sent forty-two hours ago? They’ve decoded that low-frequency stuff that keeps washing over us.”
Shanna raised eyebrows and nodded reluctantly. “I can’t follow it all, but…okay, one more mystery.”
“Getting to be lot of mystery out here,” Viktor observed.
Hiroshi nodded. “I’ve been running codes, along with the Earthside spectral analysis. They’re—the big things—sending stuff in English, that’s certain.”
This was new. There followed an extended discussion of how to decode. Mary Kay said, “That’s my area. Transcendental Grammar, the Earthside cryptanalysts call it.”
Shanna said, “Isn’t that secondary, compared with the basic biology?”
“Not at all, Captain.” Mary Kay’s tone was just civil. How come? Shanna thought. Long-mission syndrome, as Jensen called it? Or do they all just dislike me?
Mary Kay went on in a stiff, I-am-being-professional manner, “Whoever is sending, they don’t use punctuation the same way we do. Commas, periods, semicolons, dashes—they all help organize the relationships between parts of the sentence, yes?” She smiled brightly, as though this was obvious, though Shanna had never thought of it that way before. “Semantic amplifiers, they are, adding precision and complexity to meaning.”
Jordin nodded, backing up his wife. “Increases the information potential of strings of words.”
“The trick,” Shanna said, hiding exasperation, “is to figure out what they are, not just how they talk.”
“Not talk,” Viktor said. “More like writing, by the time we—DIS and its handyman, Wiseguy—get done.”
Shanna said, “Because we can’t hear it?”
“Writing is a million times weaker than speech,” Mary Kay said incisively. “No inflection, tone, smiles, winks, raised eyebrows, hand moves. Got to allow for that.”
Chow-Lin said, “Sort of like a hieroglyph competing with a symphony?”
Mary Kay nodded, and Viktor said skeptically, “You think they have such things?”
Chow-Lin shrugged, an example of what he meant. “There’s plenty in the wave spectrum we can’t decode. Look, I’m kinda reaching here.”
“And I’m getting lost,” Shanna said. “I’m a biologist, not an information theorist. I think in terms of species, biospheres. I want to get down to what kind of creatures these things are.”
Julia said, “Our Wiseguy has been working on their low-frequency transmissions. We can eavesdrop. They call themselves the Beings.”
“Also the Diaphanous,” Hiroshi added precisely.
Shanna narrowed her eyes. “You should have sent this information over.”
Julia smiled. “We wanted to explain in person.”
Shanna said, “Diaphanous? Imagine—what a vocabulary.”
“I had to look it up,” Viktor admitted. “And I’m human. Wiseguy said was good synonym for a whole constellation of meanings.”
Julia smiled at him. “Most of the time.”
“They must’ve been listening to us—to all Earthside—a long time,” Hiroshi said carefully. “It is the only way to explain how it can—”
“How they can,” Jordin interjected.
“Right.” Hiroshi nodded vigorously. “How they can know so much of our language. English, anyway, though there were pieces in German—Ich muss diese Frage verstehen, as I remember. ‘I must understand this question.’”
“Hey, join the club,” Chow-Lin said, which got a laugh all around.
“Maybe they have only one language.” Shanna laughed, too, but made herself stay on the problem. Even though it was risky for a captain to think out loud. But here I’m just one of two. “So they eavesdrop on some Earthside broadcasts and include it all, thinking German is just some English they don’t understand?”
“Um.” Hiroshi thought. “German’s close enough to English, one of the two roots of it. Maybe they can see that. Incorporate the German?”
Viktor blinked. “What a mind.”
“Minds,” Jordin corrected him. “Earthside has gotten clear conversations in every batch. Interplay. Cross talk. We’re overhearing them.”
“But they’re sending to us directly in English, too.” Viktor frowned.
“Earthside has cracked their language,” Jordin said. “Throw a few thousand crypters at it, you get results. We can eavesdrop on them now.”
“I am still amazed that anyone could figure out what so strange a thing was saying,” Viktor said disarmingly. He gazed at Jordin and Mary Kay. “Can explain?”
This brought them a beaming smile. Shanna knew well by now that Jordin was a frustrated professor and would no doubt be a real one someday. For now he was stuck being a mere astronaut. “The key is the chromatic scale. You know, the way notes are arranged on the piano. Our Western do-re-mi is a subset of that. Turns out, people worldwide put extra emphasis on tones that correspond to the notes of the scale. We like doing it. You record people talking, they put more energy into those special notes.”
Julia said, “Really? I never noticed.”
“Nobody does. We think it’s natural. And it is! That’s the breakthrough. Once we found this out, half a century or so ago, everybody thought it was a biological thing. Maybe we as primates heard bird song, invented some crude music, and after that learned to talk. Kept the same scale-note structure, see?”
Shanna had heard all this before, but it was fun to see the others react. Sure, they’d gotten squirts from Earthside about all this, but who had time—or more important, given how badly written most of it was, who had interest—to make their way
through it? The High Flyer crew was enthralled, champagne forgotten, except for Viktor, who sipped automatically. Maybe likes the alcohol a little too much! She would have to remember that. Maybe he was the weak link in High Flyer.
“But for a long time,” Jordin went on earnestly, “the math folks thought the scale itself came from harmonics, the ratio of numbers, all that Pythagorean stuff. Ancient history! Only it turns out to be right. See, the scale gives us pleasant harmony in music. That’s why the twelve-tone garbage back in the twencen was the end of classical music.”
Blank looks all around.
He hurried on. “They forgot the scale! We’re conditioned by evolution to like the harmonics, the basics of music. So do dolphins, whales, birds! All of us.”
Viktor scowled owlishly. “Am losing you.”
“Oh. Sorry. A liking for harmony is apparently a universal—that’s what I deduce from all these waves we’ve been getting. Whatever’s sending them, they’re singing!”
“Can see data?” Viktor looked unconvinced.
They spent half an hour looking at spectra on screens, Jordin and Mary Kay doing most of the talking. Jordin said, “Those intermediate-frequency plasma waves we detected coming out? Turns out there were plenty more picked up on the Deep Space Network—Goldstone and all those others, Parkes in Australia, you know—at least the higher-frequency modes, the upper hybrid ones, the descending helicons that go”—he whistled—“and they all fit. Lotsa data there. Plenty of cross-correlations. One big conclusion. In these ‘Beings’ speech—both the stuff they send us in English and the substuff, the cross talk they’re having with each other—in that speech there is the same spectrum of harmonic emphasis.”
Viktor took another sip of champagne. Nobody said anything. Viktor’s eyes squinted as though he were looking upwind into a gale. “Is meaning?”
Jordin did not take this clue. “That the Beings communicate by a coding system that is like ours.”
In Viktor the light dawned. “So…on that your crew—no, Earth-side—can hear their talk? And Wiseguy deciphers?”
“Yes,” Mary Kay said. “Soon we’ll be able to talk back—through Wiseguy.”
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