The Pilots of Borealis

by David Nabhan

  “If you’d rather not accept my next comments as both my citizen’s declaration and an official ‘imminent danger’ warning, then just consider it the first. But I don’t intend to appear before any secret meetings of the Council, Dr. Stanislaus. What I have to say is going to be said here and now.” The Surgeon General seemed to be physically knocked back by the words, and leaned in his chair. The rest of the councilors too sucked in their cheeks at the audacity.

  “Then you’re dismissed, Clinton Rittener.”

  Rittener demurred, twice more, quoting the law, emphasizing the importance of his remarks. Stanislaus stood his ground, and invited him to step away from the witness’ podium—twice more.

  That was supposed to be that, and it was—sort of.

  The irritated grumbling that had punctuated the crowd now metastasized—and quickly. “What’s going on? He’s not being allowed to speak?!” The outraged queries started coming fast, furious, and loudly. The pilots weren’t saying anything. They were too incensed to speak, now standing and sending incredulous stares down at the councilors. Before he turned to address his fellow citizens, he told Stanislaus that the die was cast, delivering the battle cry in Latin, as he had before so many other clashes: “Alea jacta est.” The rest he said in his second language, in perfect New English, to the eager crowd on their feet, and pressing forward.

  “Citizens of Borealis, I do have an imminent danger warning to convey. If the Council won’t hear it, I’ll deliver it to the citizenry instead.” That’s as far as he got when the Council—although stunned at the astonishingly rude challenge to its authority—regained its composure quickly enough.

  Stanislaus took to his feet, brought the gavel down, twice, while calling out in a loud, disagreeable voice. “Mr. Rittener . . . Mr. Rittener . . . You are excused!”

  Clinton turned to answer him but the words were drowned out by a quickly building roar of disapproval that swept from behind him and crashed on the councilors’ dais. Two events occurred now simultaneously. Admiral Albrecht, beyond restraint at this point, barked an order to the bailiffs to remove Clinton Rittener. Five rows up, Alexandrine, an old-timer in the Field, a grizzled engineer and helium-3 rocketeer, at almost the exact same moment gave an emotional cry. “My nephew was at Valerian-3! By God, he’ll be allowed to give his citizen’s oration!” Those two conflicting projectiles, “Remove him!” and “He’ll speak!” crashed together in the crowd’s midst, setting off a chain reaction which rippled through the assembly. The collective decision was made instantly, and an angry human wave surged over the banisters and through the aisle barricades, surrounding Rittener on all sides. The pilots who led the assault seemed to have blood in their eyes, so different from the look of reluctance on the faces of the bailiffs, whose tardy reactions now put the matter in another realm altogether. Before weapons were drawn and a full-scale riot touched off, Breonia, the grand dame of Borealis, brought back sanity and decorum, and snuffed out the fuse. She scolded both sides, insisting that the citizenry retreat, demanding order, and charging the bailiffs to stand down.

  Breonia’s people had originally come from the Caribbean side of Costa Rica—from its Garifuna community—and she spoke both Spanish and New English with a delightfully pleasing accent. “Cuando menos piensa!” she started in Spanish, and then finished the thought in the patois English heard in Jamaica. “Cree! My goodness, but how quickly things often happen when you least expect them! Stand down!”

  She silently caused her orders to be obeyed, glowering at any in attendance not ready yet to heed her lawful command, using her baleful countenance to subdue and pacify the unruly. While she waited for the proper comportment to be restored, she gave Rittener a long, silent look, and then addressed her fellow councilors with an honest query.

  “The law entitles him to speak; that’s simple enough, isn’t it?” That she followed with an open admission. “There’s the obvious concern among some councilors here, myself included, that Mr. Rittener might be preparing to allude to something classified.” She paused with her head down for a moment and then faced her peers. “I’ve asked myself if the time for secrecy has passed.” She scrambled slightly the old English proverb, “and if he’s going to be putting the cat out of the bag, whether I should vote to let him speak anyway.”

  While Breonia and the other councilors were ruminating about this issue in front of them, only Diana was speaking. The amanuensis had never seen anything happen like this before and was certain that the councilors would be thankful for the panoply of information she was graphing out for them on her giant holographic console, whilst quoting the pertinent statutes concerning classified information.

  “Shut up, Diana,” Breonia said calmly, and then turned to Rittener.

  “You have information about a matter that poses an imminent danger to Borealis, young man?” she asked Rittener plainly.

  “I do,” he answered just as plainly.

  “Very well, I vote to allow him to speak, and demand a vote all around.” There it was; as simple as that.

  As the councilors deliberated and voted, Rittener caught sight of Nerissa. She had attended too, after all, with the other pilots. She was avoiding his eyes, he thought at first, but that wasn’t the case, he could see now. He realized she was staring at someone in particular with that downcast look. She was frowning at her uncle who had just voted—“no.” How odd, he thought, that she should have the power to capture his attention at such a moment, and much more strange that it should please him too.

  It was six to five—to allow Rittener to speak. Three of the hawks were so enraged and disgusted by the vote that they decamped en masse. That changed little though. Clinton Rittener gave his citizen’s oration, and invoked the safety clause—at the same time for the remainder of the Borelian Council, his fellow citizens in open session, the rest of the city via their amanuenses, and out into space and most importantly to the Terran Ring, by spies too stunned at the ease by which the news came.

  Nerissa was listening intently too.

  IT IS UNKNOWN FROM whence it came or how many eons it drifted in proximity to Sol’s environs in the somewhat boring outskirts of one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. After many thousands of years of coasting and silently listening, a signal was finally perceived, a signal and reception for which it was built: the first radio transmissions ever propagated by humanity. How it propelled itself toward the system from which the radio transmissions came is also unknown for certain, although it was a means not only beyond human engineering but barely dreamed of as yet. It merged unobtrusively within the trillions of comets and frozen detritus swirling in slow motion at the absolute limits of the Sun’s gravity, arriving at its destination within the Oort Cloud. It focused its beacon on the obvious source of the electromagnetic signals, the third planet from the G-type, main sequence star a light year away, and began hailing. It had been hailing non-stop for many, many years—and finally had been answered.

  The “Object,” as it was called by the few who knew of its existence, had been broadcasting in a medium that had only recently been discovered to exist. The detection of this medium alone was enough to set physicists back on their heels. But if it weren’t enough to discover a new type of neutrino, j-neutrinos—so infinitesimally small and ethereal, yet particles so staggeringly profuse—the real shock was that no sooner was a giant j-neutrino receptor brought on line on Luna then the astoundingly powerful drumbeat was heard loud and clear, coming from the Oort Cloud. The moment was at hand, stunned researchers realized, the scene imagined for centuries now reality. It pushed the subject of j-neutrinos not only out of the spotlight but right off the stage. These newly discovered subatomic particles, whether or not part of the answers to questions about dark matter and whether the universe were closed or open, were now one thing and nothing else: the vehicle that brought the first and long-awaited extraterrestrial message to human ears.

  The greatest dialogue that could ever be shared was opened—with intelligences about wh
om nothing was known at first. Nothing mattered, even to include the clues of highly advanced information the Object was sending, so much as the earth-shaking, history-changing fact that a real salutation had been received—from alien minds. How they reasoned, what they thought and wished to convey, where they were from, or even more basically, how they counted and whether they had four, five, six, or more senses—everything had to be prised from the transmissions. They were cleverly constructed, packed with encoded information within concealed layers of data, which was interlaced and dovetailed with more obvious layers. One of the first things discovered about them was that they counted and did their math in base-11, unlike our base-10 system. The initial message made that clear in a number of ways. As with everything else nestled within the messages, the number was shouted straight out and also intelligently embedded.

  The opening transmission, the original hail from the Oort Cloud, Borealis answered with a carefully measured and patterned burst of one hundred and forty four j-neutrino pulses directed at the Object. The scientists couldn’t hold their breaths that long while they waited for a response; the Oort Cloud was too far away. The light-lag back and forth was two years, a duration of the greatest nail-biting and head-scratching in human history. During the long wait the message was received over and over. It was 3.35 minutes long—200.8663092 seconds long to be more exact. It was repeated again and again, with a 3.35-minute pause between rounds. The Fibonacci sequence was being beamed at the Earth system, dashed out in j-neutrino pulses—the first eleven digits of the sequence anyway—from one to eighty-nine.

  One, added to itself, makes two. Two, added to the prior number—one—makes three. Three, added to the previous integer, two, in the sequence before it, makes five. So the pattern goes. The Fibonacci sequence is found everywhere in Nature, from the growth pattern of plants, to the geometry of shells, to the shape of spiral galaxies—and was found to be the very first message beamed to mankind from another race of sentient beings. And so the Borelians beamed their response at the Object, the digits of the sequence itself composed of the golden ratio, phi, which separated the next number in the series, the construct being infused with the ideal of all structures, forms and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, the mathematical essence of perfection. Yet, there was more imbedded than just the Fibonacci sequence. Scientists discovered this by attacking the transmission from every possible angle using every possible algorithm. Human acumen was sufficient to the task of searching out basic “yardsticks” hidden in the message.

  Hydrogen was the key to unlocking other clues. This simplest of elements is by far the most abundant in the universe. Hydrogen is everywhere. It’s the matter being fused in the cores of stars. Hydrogen is the yin to oxygen’s yang in every drop of water in every ocean on every planet and moon. Great nebulas of the gas, many times the size of the Solar System, stretch across every section of the galaxy, sending out hydrogen’s natural microwave emanations, radio waves attuned to 1420 megahertz. Hydrogen’s signature, across the universe, everywhere, is a pulse of electromagnetic radiation moving outward at the speed of light and with the waves cresting 1,420,405,800 times per second. Since Earth’s seconds would have meant nothing to the Object’s builders, Borelian scientists juxtaposed countless possible combinations—one of which was the duration of the message with the wavelength and frequency of hydrogen. The first lock on the first door was opened. At almost one and a half billion cycles per second, in 200.8663092 seconds a hydrogen “clock” would have clicked off 285,311,670,000 ticks. This wasn’t as random a number as one might think at first glance. It was eleven to the eleventh power—exactly. Theoreticians were numb with delight and satisfaction. Not only was the mathematic base of the Object’s creators inferred, here was independent corroboration—independent, indeed!—of one of the central “crossroads integers” in the 11th dimensional matrix-vectors they insisted explained the universe at the Plank level—ten spatial directions with an eleventh temporal bearing, time itself.

  Two years after Borealis beamed its response—sending one hundred and forty four j-neutrino bursts, the next Fibonacci number—the transmission ceased briefly, then restarted. This time the Object was broadcasting its tutorial, satisfied that it had a bona fide listener. Borealis frantically pressed into service every single one of the newest, fastest quantum computers at its disposal in order to interpret the messages, throwing all other research into an immediate moratorium. That wasn’t all though. It put itself into motion, losing its orbital mooring in the Oort Cloud and falling toward the Inner Solar System. The Sun’s feeble gravitational pull at these distant regions, a light year from its surface, was far too weak to be accelerating the Object to the velocity it reached. Borealis watched close to utter disbelief as it attained 99.999 percent of the speed of light by the time it crossed the Solar System’s heliopause on its way—obviously, it seemed to flabbergasted observers— to the Moon, and Borealis.

  How such speed could be realized was, of course, of great interest to Borealis. The tutorial seemed to indicate a space-drive powered by quantum fluctuations in the vacuum itself. The tiny ripples in the froth of the fabric of the universe were the result of infinitesimal explosions of matter and antimatter virtual particles that came into being and then annihilated each other. This bizarre background of existence on the Plank level was an antique discovery—the Casimir effect, from the middle of the 20th century. The advanced physics of the race that constructed the Object could access the smallest reaches of space-time itself and play amazing games with the laws at the heart of everything, temporarily thwarting even the bosons in the Higgs Field that gave their vessels—and everything else in the universe—mass. They’d learned to manipulate space in eleven dimensional vectors in such a way that their crafts moved through areas rendered temporarily devoid of the normal rules for inertia and mass. They didn’t break either Newton’s or Einstein’s bylaws; they simply manipulated them so that their ships—seemingly without mass insofar as Nature were concerned—could cruise through sections of space which suspended the standard demands required for building up light speed.

  It wasn’t so easy for Clinton Rittener to tell the whole story, even stripped of details. The narration was interrupted many times. The citizens of Borealis, at first thunderstruck and rendered speechless, quickly came around with dozens of questions they called out to the Council, to Rittener, and quite understandably, to no one in particular. One of the councilors himself, the most garrulous and talkative Stephanangelo, was casting back and forth of his fellow adjudicators, wearing a puzzled, hurt, and angry look. “Was I the only one not informed of this?” By the looks on the other councilors’ faces it was embarrassingly apparent that this gossipy, voluble Italian, a liberal today but a conservative yesterday and who knows what tomorrow, had outrageously—and illegally—been left out of the loop. No one bothered to answer him. “What about that, Diana?” Stephanangelo asked.

  “Shut up, Diana,” Breonia said again quite calmly.

  The Borelian Council’s State Amanuensis hadn’t opened her virtual mouth since being ordered to shut it the first time. Diana had to ignore the face Stephanangelo made and the accompanying pained bleating; Rittener found it comical, but had politely stifled the smirk. But now the electronic palpitations that were wracking Diana—recording the details of a meeting during which the minutiae of the highest-classified esoterica was bandied about openly—gave her an aspect her programmers never imagined her using. Asked a question by one councilor and told not to answer by another, programmed to maintain state secrets as one of her primal functions, and yet posting these pernicious data entries in her banks at the same time, well, if such an entity as an amanuensis could look confused, Diana did. She wore the same expression she might have displayed as when the hero Orion caught her off guard—only this time as if he’d brought Jason and all the Argonauts with him to peek at her while exposed bathing. That did bring a little smirk to life, a little levity that felt like a tonic to him right now.
Just as his lips turned up he glanced at Nerissa again. She wasn’t looking at her uncle now, or anyone else; she was staring straight back at him. Without thinking, automatically, he shrugged a little and crinkled his brow, as if to say, “Well?”

  Stanislaus was banging his gavel, for once with gusto, with necessity. He was shouting for the boisterous assembly to return to their places, and for order to be reinstated. When the last unruly citizen was shown to his seat and decorum restored, the sole remaining hawk addressed Rittener.

  There was a “Philip” on Borealis, of course. Here he was: the lantern-jawed, ruggedly handsome, sixty-year-old corporate dynamo of the Borelian helium-3 market. He was labeled a hawk by most, but possessed quite an opinion of himself, one too grand to fit into any one word. When Admiral Albrecht and the others stormed out they didn’t seem the least surprised that Philip not only hadn’t followed suit, but made it clear immediately that he’d be led around like that just as soon as water froze at noon in the Field. This councilor didn’t mince words at all.

  “Clinton Rittener, time is going to tell whether what you’ve already said is going to be sufficient to warrant your arrest. You can be assured that is being investigated as we speak. You understand that, of course, do you not?” He said it so plainly, seemingly without bearing ill will, not as a threat—even though that’s exactly what it was. Rittener’s nods told him that he did, so he went on. “You insisted on invoking the ‘imminent danger’ clause of Settlement Times codes.” Philip put both hands up as if requesting aid. “I’ve heard nothing of the danger of which you wish to apprise the Council.”

  There was always a slight chance that Borealis could have pulled it off—without coming to blows with the Terran Ring. The odds now on that possibility were becoming astronomical. On the plus side, here was a relatively small target, so far away, radio silent, and broadcasting in the most arcane, hardly believable, just discovered medium. The hope was that Borealis could physically seize the Object before any other party were aware of it, or at least before any other effort could be mounted. The coup had to be attempted at least. Here was the future of the entire Solar System, the next great step for mankind, a shortcut to who knows how many centuries or millennia into the future.