The Sunspacers Trilogy

by George Zebrowski

  The wind was cool, as usual. She crossed to the main wing, went inside, and took the elevator down into the mountain. The doors opened, and she walked down the corridor and entered the viewing room.

  The place was often empty during late afternoon. It was her favorite time to watch the dancing signal on the big screen.

  But she thought of Alek as she sat down in one of the empty chairs. She would have to make a decision about him and stick to it.

  The signal danced on the screen, loosening and tightening as if being stretched between the ends of the screen, forming jagged triangles, deformed circles, and ovoids. It was an infinite string having a nervous breakdown, crying out silently …

  Lissa got up and went over to one of the work terminals. The console lit up as she sat down. She punched up a review of past approaches to deciphering the signal. She had done so before, each time hoping to see more by standing on the shoulders of those who had worked in this field. The small screen ran the review at the scanning speed to which she had become actually accustomed:

  The earliest efforts to decipher the signal were based on the study of Earth’s dead languages. Researchers looked to see if the signal was being repeated in different ways, hoping to establish at least the possible existence of an interstellar Rosetta stone (the original presented texts in Egyptian hieroglyphic and demotic characters and in Greek side by side, all saying the same thing). No such suggestion of a repetition was found; but even if it had been found, it would have been a small gain, since there is no alien language known to us that could have been used as a guide.

  Lissa ran the text forward past the more familiar material, hoping to find a point she had overlooked:

  SOME RESEARCHERS ASSUMED THAT A MESSAGE FROM AN ADVANCED CIVILIZATION WOULD BE MADE INTENTIONALLY EASY TO DECIPHER, BUT THIS IDEA ALSO PROVED FRUITLESS. EITHER THE POINT OF THE MESSAGE WAS TO SIMPLY ANNOUNCE THE EXISTENCE OF A SENDER, OR THE MESSAGE WAS NOT AIMED AT US OR ANY EMERGING CIVILIZATION. IT WAS A COMMUNICATION ABOVE OUR HEADS, BETWEEN SUPERIOR CULTURES, AND WE HAD PICKED IT UP BY ACCIDENT.

  STILL ANOTHER APPROACH INVOLVED RUNNING ANALYSIS (USING ADVANCED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCES) OF THE MESSAGE ACCORDING TO ALL KNOWN CODES. THIS WAS THE SIMPLEST APPROACH, SINCE COMPUTER MINDS COULD COMPLETE THESE OPERATIONS IN A MATTER OF MINUTES. BUT THE MESSAGE MATCHED NO KNOWN CODES, PAST OR PRESENT. THERE WERE A FEW ACCIDENTAL MATCHINGS, IN WHICH THE MESSAGE SUDDENLY SEEMED TO MAKE A STRANGE KIND OF SENSE, BUT THIS HAD BEEN FORESEEN AND THE RESULTS HAD TO BE DISCOUNTED. THE PICTORIAL APPROACH—ATTEMPTS TO MAKE PICTURES FROM THE MESSAGE—ALSO YIELDED MERELY FORTUITOUS RESULTS. PICTURES EMERGED THAT SEEMED TO MAKE SENSE, BUT WHICH ON CLOSER EXAMINATION WERE SEEN TO BE CLEARLY IMPOSSIBLE. BUT THIS APPROACH IS BEING CONTINUED, SINCE AI MINDS MAY STILL FIND A MATCH SOMEWHERE IN THEIR VAST LIBRARIES OF ASTRONOMICAL RECORDS …

  Lissa ran the material on fast forward, bypassing a mass of illustrative material.

  ANOTHER ATTEMPT WAS MADE FROM THE VIEWPOINT OF EXOBIOLOGY AND ITS BRANCH EXOPSYCHOLOGY. WITH AI ASSISTANCE, COUNTLESS BIOPSYCHOLOGICAL MODELS OF POSSIBLE INTELLIGENT LIFE-FORMS WERE CONSTRUCTED, IN AN OPEN-ENDED RUN, BASED ON THE ASSUMPTION OF EVER-EXPANDING INITIAL CONDITIONS OF EVOLUTION AND BASIC LIFE MATERIALS, WITH A VIEW TO DERIVING NEW LANGUAGE POSSIBILITIES. BUT NO MATCH WITH ANY PART OF THE SIGNAL HAS EVER EMERGED FROM THIS OVERLY AMBITIOUS APPROACH, ALTHOUGH THE ATTEMPT IS STILL CONTINUING. THE CRITICAL OBJECTION TO THIS APPROACH IS THAT WE CAN NEVER HAVE ENOUGH DATA TO MAKE IT WORK, EXCEPT AFTER THE FACT. WE DO NOT KNOW THE SPECIFIC LOCAL PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS THAT WOULD LEAD TO THE EMERGENCE OF AN ALIEN LANGUAGE; SUCH LANGUAGES MUST EMERGE IN BASICALLY UNPREDICTABLE WAYS. INITIAL CONDITIONS AND BASIC LIFE MATERIALS CARRY NO UNIQUE POSSIBILITIES, BUT COME TOGETHER IN AN ENVIRONMENT TO PRODUCE NEW PROPERTIES THAT ARE NOT FORESEEABLE IN THE BASIC MATERIALS. WE COULD NOT PREDICT, FOR EXAMPLE, THE GROWTH OF A NATION’S SOCIAL HISTORY FROM KNOWING HOW COMPLEX MOLECULES COMBINED TO FORM THE FIRST LIVING CREATURES ON EARTH. STILL, THIS APPROACH, ASSISTED BY THE VAST SEARCHING AND RELATIONSHIP-FORMING CAPACITIES OF AI MINDS, MIGHT HELP US GUESS SOMETHING. THERE IS A SLIGHT CHANCE THAT SOME KIND OF CORRELATION MIGHT EMERGE FROM COMPARING OUR PROGRAM RESULTS WITH THE CONTINUING ALIEN MESSAGE.

  Reviewing this material always made Lissa impatient. Even her own ideas had been thought of by someone else:

  ANOTHER APPROACH IS NOT BASED ON DIRECT THOUGHT, BUT ON A LONG-TERM FAMILIARITY WITH ALL THE ABOVE APPROACHES AND THE HOPE THAT SOME INTUITIVE LEAP OR SUDDEN SIMPLIFYING INSIGHT MAY OCCUR IN THE MIND OF A RESEARCHER NOT YET OVERCOME WITH THE WEIGHT OF FAILURE IN THIS FIELD. BUT THIS IS PROPERLY VIEWED AS A LONG SHOT.

  FINALLY, IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOME PART OF THE MESSAGE MAY BE DIRECTED AT US SPECIFICALLY AND THAT THIS WILL BECOME CLEAR TO US IN TIME.

  Lissa sighed as the review ended. She had run her own exploratory queries into each of these approaches, hoping to glimpse some mistake, or something that had been overlooked. But she had Lissa sighed as the review ended. She had run her own exploratory queries into each of these approaches, hoping to glimpse some mistake, or something that had been overlooked. But she had merely repeated what had been tried by countless questioners. The massive record of how human

  beings and Artificial Intelligences had struggled to understand the alien signal, without seeing in it only what they wanted to see, seemed a hopeless jungle of blind alleys. Perhaps only a direct revelation, preferably in some Earth language, would be enough to break the message; but that would be asking for a miracle. She concluded that the best possibility now seemed to be in the area of picture assembly. Somewhere among the millions of star photos and spectrum mappings there might be one that would match one received from processing the signal. Such a match would demonstrate that it was not some chance assembly of information, but a picture that might reveal something, say something so clearly that it would be worth a million words.…

  She looked up at the large screen. The signal continued its endless dance.What are you, she demanded silently. What are you saying? Why play charades with us? Suddenly she yearned to be taken inside an alien mind and shown around. She wanted to see thoughts that were not human but just as good in a very different way. She closed her eyes and imagined those thoughts as winged creatures of light fluttering inside an alien skull.…

  “Lissa?”

  She opened her eyes and saw Dr. Shastri smiling at her.

  “Yes?” she heard herself say in a wavering voice.

  Dr. Shastri sat down in the chair at her right. “You come here often,” he stated, “to commune with our stubborn mystery.”

  “Yes” she repeated.

  “It appears to me,” he continued, “that you may be ready to take the next step.”

  Suddenly she was curious. “What do you mean?”

  He smiled sourly. “You know that this place is a selecting stage, and that more advanced work is being done elsewhere.”

  “Yes,” she said again. “And I know that you don’t just recruit people from here, but from everywhere you can. This place isn’t very important, is it?”

  He looked up at the signal. “Do you really think it’s saying anything?”

  She swallowed hard. “Well.…”

  “I want your honest reaction, what you feel most.”

  Lissa thought again of what her father would say, and in a way he was right. “It isn’t about anything.”

  “Go on.”

  Lissa tensed. “I’m not sure. It’s just a feeling.”

  “Don’t worry, think. Why would they want only to catch our attention?”

  “To accustom us to the idea of their existence.”

  “Yes, you’ve said that before, but there’s more, isn’t there?” His eyes sparkled. “Think carefully.”

  Lissa’s mind leaped. She knew, but held back.

  “You’ve guessed it,” Dr. Shastri said.

  “I have?”

  “It’s not so difficult. Many of us have had the same suspicion for quite a few years. It makes a good test for tho
se who go on to the next stage.”

  Lissa took a deep breath, and she realized that all thoughts of Alek had left her mind. She felt a bit guilty about it.

  “Well?” Dr. Shastri demanded sternly. “What is your insight?”

  “They’ve gotten our attention with this signal, but the real communication is still to come, in some other way.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, that fits with my idea that a signal need not contain a message of any kind. It may be intended to get the receiver to think about why and by whom it’s been sent. Anyway, that’s my idea. Not so good, huh?”

  “It’s very good,” Dr. Shastri replied, crossing his legs. She noticed his gray slacks and old-fashioned jacket. Only his collarless white shirt seemed at all fashionable. “Can you be more specific?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, suddenly feeling stupid.

  “Howelse would they be signaling us?” Dr. Shastri asked insistently. “Assuming, of course, that this is only the preliminary signal.”

  “Well—on another frequency, perhaps through some more advanced means?” She searched for a clue in Dr. Shastri’s leathery face.

  He smiled. “One more step, Miss Lissa Quintana-Green-Wolfe.”

  The answer seemed obvious. Lissa felt disoriented. “But we don’t know how to receive, much less send, tachyons,” she said finally.

  Dr. Shastri laughed. “Of course we do! I’m going to send you where they’re getting ready to do just that, to our advanced listening post out beyond Mars.”

  Lissa’s mind raced. Tachyons, theoretical faster-than-light particles that couldn’t go slower than the speed of light. One might communicate with all parts of the universe very quickly. No need to wait for the slow crawl of light-speed radio waves, by which a simple exchange of hellos between distant civilizations would take decades, centuries, even millions of years. It was one thing to understand the possibility of tachyon communications and something completely different to know that it was about to be tried.

  “Your transfer is not meant to be an honor,” Dr. Shastri added, “but you are excellent raw material and should have this experience.”

  “I’ve only guessed what others have done,” Lissa said, “and you prompted me.”

  “Ah, but you always respond so well. Few students leap ahead as you do. Even very worthy ones are already too conservative, too worried about their scientific careers to speculate creatively. I may be wrong about you in the long run, but you seem to combine thoughtfulness with a wild streak more than any of our students have for some time.”

  “Thank you,” Lissa said, smiling, and for a moment she thought that he might be describing himself, as he had been many years ago.

  “You’ll continue with your routine degree work, of course. The others will do the same here, as well as studying the radio signal.”

  Lissa scowled. “Even if you think there’s nothing to learn from it?”

  He looked at her seriously. “We might be wrong, and this might be the signal, after all. The others will get their education, and they might still discover something. All avenues must be left open.” He laughed again. “Exciting, isn’t it?”

  “But you believe tachyons is the right way to go?” she asked insistently.

  “At least until we get the receiver set and it proves otherwise.”

  “Will we be able to send tachyons out?”

  “Probably. The equipment is just being completed.”

  “Why did it take so long?” Lissa asked. “We’ve known about tachyons since the last century.”

  “Because we had to find a mini-black hole to serve as the trap in the heart of the receiver.”

  Lissa took another deep breath. “And you actually have one?”

  Dr. Shastri nodded. “We found it in a small asteroid that came in from the outer solar system on a long cometary orbit. We were very fortunate.”

  Lissa was silent for a moment. “Is anyone else going from here?”

  “Susan Falleta.”

  “And no one else?”

  “Not immediately. Of course you’ll have to stay to the end of the term. One or two of the others might get a chance later.”

  “I hope they don’t misunderstand,” Lissa said.

  Dr. Shastri got up. “You’ll get a formal transfer letter on your work screen. I have to be going now.” He turned, crossed the large chamber, and left by one of the side exits.

  Lissa looked up at the dancing line on the big screen. Her father had been right all along. The signal was a big fake, in a sense. Then she thought of Alek, realizing that they would be separated when she left for Mars.

  |Go to Table of Contents |

  8

  Alek was waiting in front of her door when she came down the hallway. She smiled as she came up to him.

  “Can I talk to you?” he asked.

  “Sure, come in.” She pressed the plate with her palm, and the door opened.

  The ceiling flowed with light as they went in. Alek again sat in the armchair, and she turned her desk chair around to face him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said painfully.

  “We were both at fault,” she answered immediately. “I didn’t discourage you at all.”

  “You did a little.” He was looking at her longingly with his blue eyes. “You don’t really want to hear what I have to say, do you?”

  Her phone chirped before she could answer. “Excuse me.” She swiveled her chair around to face the desk and opened the audio.

  “Hello?” she asked, leaving the screen dark.

  “Lis, it’s me,” her mother’s voice said. “Something wrong with your screen, or do you have guests?”

  Lissa glanced over her shoulder. Alek was leaving. She waited until the door had slid shut behind him, then opened the visual link. Her mother was smiling.

  “No, I’m quite alone,” Lissa said. One, two, three.

  “Sorry I haven’t called for so long, dear.”

  “That’s okay, I understand,” Lissa replied, thinking about Alek. One, two, three.

  “Nothing new to report here,” Sharon continued after the delay. “I’m still working too hard at the hospital, and your father complains that he doesn’t see enough of me.”

  “Poor Daddy,” Lissa said, and waited.

  “You seem preoccupied, dear.”

  “Just the delay. It makes us all sound a bit brain damaged. Mom, I’ve got something to tell you. They’ve selected me for an advanced program. It’ll begin next term. I’ll be going out to Mars, then to the asteroid Belt. I don’t know all the details yet, but I think it’s an honor to be chosen.”

  The delay went by. Her mother answered very late. “Why, congratulations, dear, but what’s it all about?”

  “I’ll call when I know more, but I think it’s all very secret and restricted.” One, two, three.

  “That’s wonderful,” Sharon said, sounding a bit skeptical.

  “Is Dad there?” Lissa asked. One, two, three.

  “I’m at the hospital, but I think you can call him at home.”

  “Maybe later.”

  “Well, I have to run,” her mother said after a moment, smiling again. “‘Bye, dear.”

  The screen winked off as Lissa got up and rushed to the door. It slid open, and she went out into the corridor. She hurried to Alek’s door and pressed the buzzer.

  The door opened. Alek was in his bathrobe. “I was just about to shower,” he said coldly.

  “Can I come in?” she asked, ignoring the confusion within herself.

  Alek stared at her. She started past him into the room. The knot in his robe slipped as she brushed against him. She stopped and looked up at him, feeling warm. He wasn’t as tall in his bare feet. She took a deep breath as he leaned over suddenly and kissed her. She was surprised as her arms crept into his robe and locked around him. He seemed very different from the person she had been talking to only a few minutes ago. His lips were tender, giving. He put his arm around her and led her inside,
brushing her cheek with kisses. “You liked me also,” he said softly, “but you wouldn’t admit it.” His blue eyes watched her mysteriously. He seemed so friendly, so good, so knowing. How could she have ever been afraid of him?

  She kissed him fiercely. A distant voice insisted that she was losing herself, but she was unafraid, sure that the voice was wrong. Alek was beautiful, and he would also be her best friend.

  Later, she sighed gently and watched his face. His eyes were closed, and he seemed to be looking deeply into himself. She felt his glow, and her own.

  “You make me very happy,” he said after a moment.

  “Same here,” she whispered as he turned on his back next to her.

  “Why were you afraid of me?” he asked after a silence.

  She tensed slightly. “I guess I was afraid that falling in love would distract me from my studies.”

  “And do you still think that?”

  Her skin was beginning to cool. “I don’t know,” she heard herself say, “and right now I don’t much care.”

  She felt his hand in hers, and turned to see his strangeness next to her own. What are we, she wondered. It was all set to be this way, long ago, and she was glad. Then she laughed and kissed him again, deeply and for a long time, remembering that once her mother had told her that people existed to make each other happy, but that too many of them forgot that by the time they grew up.

  She woke up and heard the shower running. Alek was bathing. She listened to the water. Her mind was clear—and different; it seemed to her that she had been dreaming. Making love to Alek had been a dance of some kind, something that had to happen. She stretched, feeling rested and tingly.

  The shower stopped, and an unhappy thought pushed into her mind. If it didn’t work out between Alek and her, then she would be able to leave at term’s end; she had a way out.

  “Hello,” he said as he came out with a towel around his waist.

  She smiled as he sat down and touched her stomach again. Why spoil these moments by telling him? But as she looked at him, she realized that he would probably not be able to go with her when she left, even if he wanted to; she would probably not see him for a long time, perhaps never again.