Part 95 (2/2)
Radio astronomers get drunk and speculate about extraterrestrial life ... I'd say ”like anybody else,” but I guess most people don't actually do that. The difference is, we know on a visceral level how prohibitive the distances and timescales are, how cold the math.
We really didn't expect to hear from anybody.
Maybe it's like falling in love. You have to truly stop expecting something to happen before it will.
You talk about things that change the world. Usually, it's in hindsight. Usually you don't notice them when they're happening.
Ah, but sometimes. Sometimes there's no way you could have missed it unless you were in a vegetative state.
It's hard to remember now, but we didn't know, then, what the Echoes were or what they wanted. It could have been a pa.s.sing alien s.h.i.+p, psychological warfare from inbound would-be conquerors (Stephen Hawking would have been vindicated!), or some previously unsuspected cosmological phenomena.
There were new cults; a few suicides. The occasional marriage selfdestructed, and I confess I was naively surprised at the number of people who joined or left religions, apparently at random.
I'd never been much of a joiner, myself.
Six months later, our own voices echoed back to us again. This time it was War of the Worlds and Radio Free Europe.
With those two datapoints, we could figure out where they were, and how far away, and how fast they were moving.
By the third round, n.o.body was surprised to receive the signals of early broadcast television-and some clever souls even filtered the signals and recovered fragments of our own lost history: early live episodes of The Avengers and destroyed episodes of Doctor Who. So much entertainment used to be broadcast, carried over public airwaves that now mostly used for cellular calls and more practical things-where great swaths of them are not simply abandoned.
The idea of a cosmological explanation had always been farfetched. Now it seemed laughable. Somebody was bouncing our own words back to us. A means of communication, certainly ... but a threat or a rea.s.surance? Psychological warfare or reaching out?
How do you know for sure?
It's a little disconcerting to have your cell calls to your place of business interrupted by Jackie Gleason threatening his fictional wife with domestic violence.
Suddenly, after decades of neglect, a new s.p.a.ce race rose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of exploration. Except this time we weren't racing other nation-states, but rather the slow motion tumble of what might turn out to be a hammer from the sky.
They were slowing down. And by the fourth round, we managed to spot their lightsails-their parachutes-and now we could watch as well as hear them come. Hailing them produced more echoes, and as we sent them new, specific signals they stopped reproducing our old ones.
The sources further away from Earth were braking harder; some had paused entirely (not that anything really pauses in s.p.a.ce, but allow me the conceit) and at least one-the initial signal, the strongest Echo-seemed likely to pa.s.s very close indeed. We had a betting pool. My money had it making orbit.
I figured they weren't here to blow up the planet, enslave us, or kidnap our nubile young men away to Mercury. For one thing, if they were hostile, the easiest thing in the world-out of the world-would have been for them to sneak up on us and drop a rock on our heads from orbit, which would pretty much soften up any useful resistance right then and there. Alien invasion movies aren't usually written by physicists. For another thing, sending back our own voices ... it seemed kind of friendly, somehow.
My work friend Carl pointed out that it was something bullies did, too, mocking what you said by repeating it. I looked across a plate of gyros at him and replied, ”They do it in funny voices.”
The constellation of radio sources strung out against the sky seemed to me to be relay stations, signal boosters. I guessed they were sending messages home.
I won the betting pool, which was a strange sensation. Carl, who shares my office and sits at the desk next to mine, knew better than to tease me about it. He'd tried when we were first thrown together, but I think he caught on that I was faking engagement with his jokes.
Rather than being offended, though, he just backed off of them. Carl was a good guy, even if he wasn't funny. I was so young then; it was so amazingly long ago. Sixty-three years: a human's productive lifetime, under pretty good circ.u.mstances.
He was also the guy who thought enough of me to forward me the links to the breaking news articles on China's emergency manned mission to the Echo.
”c.r.a.p,” I said.
”Easy, Courtney,” he responded, without looking up from the rows of numbers scrolling his desktop. ”We've still got their trail to chase back up the sky.”
I was still frowning. He was still looking at me.
He said, ”Look, it's seven. Let's get some dinner and you can vent all you want.”
”Thanks,” I said. ”But I need to work tonight.”
The U.S.A. was outraged, and loudly said so to everyone, whether they would listen or not. But there wasn't much America could do about it, having sacrificed our s.p.a.ce program on the altars of economic necessity and eternal war. I found the prospect of China getting first crack at the Echo frustrating mostly because it meant that my odds of getting near it were exponentially smaller. And if I could have itched-I mean physically itched-with desire ...
But as it turned out, we didn't have to go to the Echo.
The Echo came to us.
It separated into a dozen identical-we later learned-components, which settled themselves near population centers scattered around the globe. China got one; so did India.
It will surprise no one that I read a lot of science fiction. Read and read-one spelling, two p.r.o.nunciations, two tenses. There's a subset of the genre that fans call the ”big dumb object” plot: basically, 2001. Intrepid human explorers meet up with an abandoned alien artifact-a probe, a relic-and have to decide what to make of it.
This wasn't a single big dumb object so much as a web of little ones. I spent some time thinking about it-well, who didn't?-and what I realized was that whoever built it had allowed for the fact that it might make landfall at a world where the sentient life forms had not yet achieved s.p.a.ce flight. If we couldn't come to them, they would have to come to us.
The component that drifted down in New York City wound up at JPL, and a number of xenologists-a new specialty pretty much as of that morning-were invited to examine it.
And so I became one of the vanis.h.i.+ngly small percentage of humans privileged to hold in my hands a disc of metal originated on another world. It was pristine, a perfect circle electroplated with gold, the surface etched with symbols and diagrams I forced myself not to try to interpret, just yet.
Carl leaned over my shoulder. He put his hand on it and gave me an excited squeeze. ”d.a.m.n,” he said. ”It's just like Voyager.”
”I guess good ideas tend to reoccur.” Through the nitrile gloves, I felt the slight irregularities of its surface. ”You don't suppose this one is a phonograph record too?”
To human ears, their voices sound like the layered keening of gulls.
You know who I am because I'm the one who found their star. It's a small, cool red sun about 31.5 light years away.
If you can name something that already belongs to someone else, I named it Hui Zhong, for my grandmother.
We've never actually seen Hui Zhong-it's too small, too cool, and washed out behind a brighter neighbor-but we know where it has to be. Hui Zhong burns at about 3000 degrees Kelvin-half the temperature of Earth's own sun. It's a Population II star, and poor in heavy elements. Its spectrum is recorded on the discs, and so we know that it is a first generation star, one of the early citizens of the thirteen-and-three-quarters billion-year-old universe.
Hui Zhong is nearly immortal. The convective structure of such dwarf stars offers them stability, constant luminosity, and a lifespan in the hundreds of billions of years. Our own Sun, by contrast, is only some four and a half billion years old-and in about that same amount of time, will become a red giant as its nuclear furnaces inevitably begin to fail.
We'll die with it, unless we find someplace else to go.
One of the tracks on the record the Echoes sent us is a voice counting, and one of the diagrams on its surface is of a planet and primary-so we have a sense of their homeworld's...o...b..tal period-a mere fourteen Earth days or so ...
The Echoes, in other words, could have been planning their approach to other civilizations and sending out probes in likely directions for a very, very long time. The probe was a sublight vehicle; we couldn't know exactly how long it had taken us to reach us ... but ”millennia” wasn't out of the question.
We returned the call.
Not as one strong, unified signal, but as an erratic series of blips and dashes-governments and corporations and research inst.i.tutions. There was an X-Prize. Groups and mavericks, answering the stars.
And we kept answering. We've been answering for almost seventy years now. I've gone from hot young Turk to eminence gris in that time, from sought-after expert to forgotten emeritus. For sixty-five of those years, I think I must have been holding my breath. Waiting for the word across the void. Waiting for these people who reached out from their ancient world, circling their ancient, stable star, to hear our reply and start a slow, painstaking dialogue.
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