Encounter with Tiber [v1.0]

by By Buzz Aldrin

  The rest of the first forty seconds or so showed them deploying a light sail, sailing away from Alpha Centauri with a couple of gravity assists, making their way to the solar system, and descending to Earth. “That map is Suez and the Eastern Med,” Lori exclaimed. “Even though it seems to be upside down, anyone would recognize it!”

  “Yes,” Jiro said, “and if the blinking dot is the landing site, then I guess they landed somewhere in the Jordan Valley.”

  An abrupt cut showed another spacecraft also departing Alpha Centauri. “What do you suppose that one is?” François said. “It just streaked off the screen.”

  The image showing the landing site was repeated; then there were pictures of yet another type of spacecraft departing Earth, and abruptly it cut to three arrows: one pointing straight down at an image of the Moon; the second at a spot on the surface of Mars, near the bottom but at an angle; and the last pointing to the faster-moving inner moon of Mars, Phobos.

  “What do you suppose that means?” Lori said. “It looked like the Moon was upside down, and Phobos was going backward, so I guess they use the bottom of the map for north and the top for south. So they’re saying they went to the south pole of the Moon, to Phobos, and to somewhere near the north pole of Mars?”

  “If an arrow means the same thing to them it does to us,” Chris pointed out. “Maybe they’re talking about something that came from there, or it’s their symbol for where everyone is buried, or where they put the biggest cathedral or their equivalent of the prime meridian.”

  The camera cut again. It showed what appeared to be a simple, squat box with a cylindrical plug in the corner of one side, and a square plug in the center of an adjoining side. Then the screen filled with text—”That really does look like it has to be alien writing,” Peter said. “Directions for how to operate something that’s shaped like that box?”

  “Or how to pray to the sacred box, or how to build the alien version of the clothes washer,” Lori said. “The anthropologists and linguistics people are going to have a great century or two working on all this.”

  The camera cut again to show, one more time, arrows pointing to somewhere on Mars and probably to the south pole of the Moon. Then it showed a sequence of spaceship departures, one after another, nine in all, each followed by a quick designation of a star from pulsar positions, an image of the star’s planetary system in which one planet was marked with an odd symbol, and an arrow pointing to somewhere on a planet. Finally it showed thousands of aliens, some like the ones in the first pictures, descending through huge corridors. Then it showed a flock of spacecraft leaving orbit and repeated the picture of the box.

  “Notice that their world is in orbit around a gas giant?” Jiro said. “My first thought was that that confirmed it, but watch the last shot here.”

  The last shot showed eleven solar systems, ten of them arranged around a central one. Ours was one of them; the central one had a double star, with gas giants circling both of the two stars.

  The larger gas giant circled the larger star, and around that gas giant there was a single moon, marked with a strange twinkling symbol. The smaller gas giant, orbiting the smaller star, was circled by three moons, two in roughly circular orbits and one in a highly elliptical orbit; this last moon was marked with another, different twinkling symbol.

  “Looks like they agree with you, Chris,” François said. “They show a moon in a highly elliptical orbit, around a gas giant, circling Alpha Centauri B.” The picture stopped as abruptly as it had begun.

  “Well, that makes sense,” Lori said. “They put their home system in the center.”

  “Well, if nothing else, that’ll get all the astronomers busy,” Chris said. “And there must be a hundred or more planets and moons between all the systems they depict there. Once we figure out how to read their notation, there’s going to be plenty of names for everyone to put on things.”

  “Hah,” Haldin said gloomily. “There are any number of people out there who can come up with a list of a hundred things they want honored. Their countrymen, their gods, probably their crops. I rescind my previous claim. It’s not going to be decades for the IAU to sort things out, it’s going to be centuries.”

  “Why do you suppose this, uh, alien cartoon isn’t all over the airwaves already?” François asked.

  “Probably because everyone who has thought of doing this with it— which means undoubtedly someone almost everywhere—is hoping to break the alien code before announcing,” Jiro said. “Figuring out that it’s a movie will get you on the air for twenty minutes. Figuring out what the movie says—well, that will put you in the history books for a long, long time.”

  * * * *

  The rest of that last work shift was uneventful, but when everyone arose the next morning, the news from Earth was a mixture of the astonishing and the silly.

  Suddenly every television reporter on Earth wanted to interview every astronomer. And since the preliminary results had overthrown the ideas of so many of them, many astronomers, receiving public attention for the first time in their lives, gasped, stammered, or simply refused to talk.

  Just the existence of planets in the Alpha Centauri system at all had been enough of a shock to many of them, Chris thought. Since the distances between the two stars varied by a factor of three, tidal forces varied by a factor of twenty-seven; debate had swung back and forth for decades about whether this would sweep the system clear of the primordial planetesimals out of which planets accrete (so that there would be nothing there) or prevent them from accreting at all (so that there would be thousands of very small bodies), or cause them to accrete more readily (so that there might be a small number of very large planets). Well, Chris thought, here’s where all the astronomers and planetary scientists get to find out who guessed right. It sure didn’t look good for the two “no planets” theories.

  All that attention focused on the astronomical community had also meant that no action by an astronomer was going to be overlooked. Taking advantage of this, an Italian astronomer, Vincente Auricchio, had. published via the Internet, and then called a press conference just twenty minutes later. Everyone on the ISS took the extra few minutes to watch this one. Auricchio spoke English (the language of the international media ever since BBC Overseas TV and CNN divided the world between them) with just a trace of an accent; it was as if he had spent all his life preparing for a media event.

  “Well,” Auricchio was saying, “I see no reason to pretend to a wholly inappropriate modesty, or to beat around the bush, as you say in English. Western civilization is the greatest civilization the Earth has ever seen, and the West learned to be civilized from Italy, and the Italians learned it from Rome. It is thus no accident that I, a life-long citizen of Rome, have found the key to the alien message; I simply compared the orbits figured by the crew on the International Space Station with the orbits described in the animated message from the Tiberians, and by assuming one was a translation of the other, broke the code of their system of representation. Then I turned to—”

  “Excuse me,” the reporter from the New York Times asked. “You said the message from the—”

  “The Tiberians. The inhabitants of Tiber. Which is the inhabited moon that circles Juno, which circles Alpha Centauri A. As I was saying, by comparing the orbits that were calculated by Terence, Raymond, and Kawaguchi—and I might note that Terence and Raymond each have Italian ancestors, according to their biographies—”

  “And I like Italian food,” Jiro said. Everyone shushed him.

  “—I was able to figure out their system of time notation, hence where those new planets should be and should have been for thousands of years into the past. Now as it happens, the university here at Rome has a quite good system—in my opinion, the best in the world—that preserves a digitized version of virtually all the astronomical photographs taken in the last century and a half. It was therefore very little trouble to call up into my computer all those photos which ought to show those planets and
their moons, if the resolution was high enough; select those with high enough resolution; and by combining these several thousand photos, especially those from the American Hubble Telescope, I was able to show that these few dim white dots, which were always mistaken before for very faint stars at very great distances, were in exactly the right places to be those planets and moons—and here is my list of what I have extracted the sightings of from the record, ladies and gentlemen, the first confirmed observations of planets around Alpha Centauri A and B:

  “Alpha Centauri A’s planet Juno—which seems to be of a mass about two hundred and fifty times that of the Earth, or three-quarters of Jupiter, and orbits its primary at a distance somewhat greater than one astronomical unit;

  “Juno’s moon Tiber, which is in a twenty-six-hour orbit around the giant planet, is just slightly more massive than the Earth, and is clearly designated in the message, as the place from which our alien visitors came or intend to come;

  “Minerva, the gas giant circling Alpha Centauri B at a distance a bit less than an astronomical unit, with a mass of one hundred thirty-eight Earths;

  “Alba Longa, the moon of Minerva on which the transmitter is mounted, about one and a half times as big as Mars, in a highly elliptical orbit;

  “Hercules, a moon of Minerva about the size of Io in our own solar system, in a fairly wide but nearly circular orbit;

  “And Minerva’s nearest moon, the hardest one to see, which I have only about a dozen images of—but more than enough to confirm its existence. This moon I have named Caesar.

  “My assistants will pass out complete packets of information on these new worlds—discovered like so many other new worlds, by a proud Italian—and of course I shall be delighted to answer any questions you may have about my deciphering of the alien message or about the little we can know so far about these new worlds.”

  The Times reporter, a tall, thin man, stepped forward and raised his arm again. With an impatient sigh, Auricchio pointed at him, and the reporter said, “If I may ask, the names you have given these celestial bodies—”

  “Are entirely my right as discoverer. I will not make the mistake of my great compatriot, Columbus, who failed to have the new lands named after himself; it was only sheerest luck that ‘America’ was also an Italian name. I have chosen my names as grand ones from Italian and particularly Roman traditions; that is as it should be. Western science made this discovery possible, and Italy leads the West intellectually, as it has always done. If other nations wish to have planets of their own, they had best hurry and discover them—but I warn you, my assistants and I are already at work on finding the planets of the other solar systems designated by the Tiberian message. Next question, please?”

  The man who rose asked, “It looks like two different species, or maybe three, getting into that rocket ship. Are you sure they are all native to Tiber?”

  “It would not be impossible for one starfaring race to already be acquainted with another,” Auricchio pointed out. “But it’s really too early to tell. For all we know, Tiber was settled from elsewhere and both species are colonists; or they may be one species—after all, an alien visitor would hardly know that a Chihuahua and a Saint Bernard were the same species. Perhaps these are just different races of Tiberians. Next question?”

  The Times reporter raised his voice and half-shouted, “What about the IAU’s declaration yesterday that—”

  “The IAU may go to the devil, and undoubtedly they have the address,” Auricchio said. “I found it, I named it. No gaggle of fuzzy-minded internationalists is going to call my discovery after some stone idol or swaggering dictator. Now let’s have an interesting question.”

  It went on like that, and when it became clear there wouldn’t be much more real news, they turned the television off and got on with the busy routine of the station. Every so often, though, Chris and François, working together on a set of precise gravimetric measurements, would catch each other’s eye, and one or the other would mutter, “If we’d just named it Marianne when we had the chance . . .”

  “Or Nero or Caligula,” Peter would add. “To provide a more balanced view of Rome, you know.”

  The names given by Auricchio stuck; they were easy to remember and pronounce, some version of the names already existed in most of the world’s major languages, and—as Americans and Europeans usually said when they were polled about it—”they just sounded more like names for planets.”

  The IAU put out many press releases reminding people that the new names were unofficial; only the New York Times continued the IAU’s temporary nomenclature of calling the new worlds Alpha Centauri A-I, Alpha Centauri A-I-1, Alpha Centauri B-I, Alpha Centauri B-I-1, Alpha Centauri B-I-2, and Alpha Centauri B-I-3; everyone else said Juno, Tiber, Minerva, Alba Longa, Hercules, and Caesar, just as Auricchio had, and the aliens immediately were dubbed the “Tiberians.”

  Auricchio did not entirely have things his own way, however. About a year later, a diligent Japanese astronomer at Tsukuba demonstrated that there weren’t any pictures from the Hubble Telescope that had little white dots in the places where Auricchio had shown them. Further investigation showed that, stymied by the limits of precision that even the powerful Hubble had to contend with, Auricchio had altered the pictures, adding the images, in order to get “Caesar” into his list of discoveries. He lost his university job, and from then on was only heard of on “where are they now?” programs on television. The single time one of those programs came on in our house, a few years later, my father said a couple of things that he’d have washed my mouth out with soap for, and turned the set off. But even he still called the new worlds by Auricchio’s names. They were just too convenient not to, and besides, everyone else did.

  The message kept coming for seven more months before shutting off for good. During that time it was recorded and rerecorded many times, but it was always the same 16,384 frames—a number which, it was quickly realized, was equal to 214,or 4 x 84—perhaps the equivalent of our 50,000. Teams of experts confirmed Dad’s speculation about the location in terms of pulsars, and the pictures of the aliens themselves were gone over extensively as well. Slowly, though there were still many mysteries, a consensus as to the meaning of the message began to form.

  One way or another it seemed to be addressed to Tiberian colonies. A change of symbol on Alba Longa (the moon orbiting Alpha Centauri B) in the animation apparently denoted the point in the orbit at which the message had been sent. This turned out to be the time when the four most radio-noisy objects in the Alpha Centauri System—the two stars and the two gas giants—were at maximum separation from Alba Longa (if you looked from the viewpoint of the Earth). A symbol at the bottom of the screen appeared to be a counter that increased from 112 to 113 (assuming we were reading their numbers correctly) when the symbol popped up; the same counter was at zero when the animation depicted the launching of the mystery boxes. Thus it seemed to most people to say that the broadcast had been made 112 times since the launching of the boxes to the colonies, and that this was the 113th broadcast.

  The periods of maximum separation occurred irregularly, and some were better than others from a standpoint of radio broadcasting, but the biggest factor in when they occurred was the eighty-year elliptical orbit of A around B. The second biggest factor was the highly elliptical two-and-a-half-year orbit of Alba Longa around Minerva; times of maximum separation could be anywhere from seventy-two to ninety-one years apart when that was factored in, but on the average they would be just over eighty years. Thus if this broadcast was the 113th from that transmitter, it must be about 112 times eighty years since the first broadcast. That put the inception somewhere around 7000 B.C. As more data became available a more exact date would be possible, but “nine thousand years ago” worked pretty well. Apparently the events depicted in the message had been a century or two before the date of the message.

  They had come here, in more than one ship, probably at more than one time, and then for some unaccounta
ble reason, instead of returning home they had gone to the South Pole of the Moon, and to Crater Korolev on Mars. The arrow pointing to Mars clearly designated 73 degrees north latitude; the short flash of a picture that followed it showed a large crater. The only large crater on that line of latitude was Korolev, though it appeared from their picture that Korolev had been less ice-filled at the time of the Tiberian visit than it was now—another mystery as to what had happened on Mars in the intervening years.

  But the mysterious box that had been inexplicable to Chris and the other astronauts on the ISS had become the greatest focus of attention. The first clue as to what it was about had been the strange picture at the lower left, which showed a coil of ten black and ten white dots in a tight spiral, surrounded by ten circles, with an arrow indicating one of them. It had taken only a few days for someone to think of the idea that this might denote an atom; the most common form of the neon atom has a nucleus of ten neutrons and ten protons and is surrounded by shells containing ten electrons. The particular spot marked was one of the outer electrons, and again it did not take long to realize this was the way of specifying a wavelength of light. Electron orbits are quantized, meaning they can only occur at particular energy levels and no others; when an electron is kicked into a higher orbit than its “ground” state, it will eventually return to that ground state by giving up the exact difference in energies between the two orbits; this will be the same for every electron in the same orbit around the same type of nucleus in the universe. And because the energy of the photon it gives off to get rid of the energy is directly proportional to its frequency, to specify a given electron transition within the electron shells of a given atom is to exactly specify the kind of light to be produced (and incidentally to give directions on how to make it).