The Sunborn (29 page)

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.”

Innocently Viktor said, “Can hear their inner thoughts?”

Jordin blinked. “Those may be the plasma waves we’re getting. Can’t understand them, though.”

Julia said, “Thought isn’t like singing, I suppose?”

Jordin spread his hands. “Guess not—our thoughts aren’t, right? Not mine, anyway.” This got a laugh. He went on, “Maybe the stuff we don’t understand is leakage. From whoever is sending the talk. I dunno.” Vigorous head shake.

“Amazing,” Julia said. “We’ll have to integrate our data with yours, through Wiseguy.”

Shanna let out her breath. It was going to be hard to break in on all this, but she had to get some things straight. “Say, let’s take a break, gang. How about a tour of your ship?”

This was fun, especially watching the ’bots working near the drive systems. Robotics plus nukes were the future.

Cameras tracked the impromptu tour everywhere; the Consortium would wring every dime out of the footage. After an hour of this, when she and Julia were out of view, Shanna said, “You and I have some stuff to discuss. Don’t want to bore everybody. Can we take it into another cabin?”

“We call them rooms,” Julia said slowly. “Seems better, more homey. Uh, of course, let’s.”

They slipped away with a nod to Viktor, who was leading the tour, holding forth as host. Julia led the way through a circular hatch rimmed by pale emerald emergency phosphors.

Shanna followed briskly. They came into a compact compartment she assumed was Julia’s office, though no adornment of the inward-sloping faux-mahogany walls testified to this. There were contour chairs made of something pale effervescent blue and so thin that when she lifted it the 0.38 g field to face Julia, Shanna flung it toward the ceiling—and, startled, let the revolving chair spin with classical slowness into the corner. “Uhhhhh—oops.” She retrieved the chair with one quick swoop of her left arm, flicked on the magnetic anchors, sat—

And wondered how to start. She had fretted for weeks about this moment, but now, actually in Julia’s presence, she marveled. The years had lined that face, but it was still the one Shanna had on her dorm room wall in college. This woman had changed space travel, revolutionized biological studies. Julia didn’t just take part in the first manned mission past the moon but stayed there and made a home, back when astronauts were still hopping up and down from space like it was hot water they couldn’t stand to stay in. Shanna swallowed, and set aside her hero-worship attitude toward Julia.
Face it
—
you want to be like her, the benchmark of greatness. Which means you have to keep hold of your results out here, not let the media feature the Mars Couple every other minute…

The absurd chair gymnastics seemed to break the ice between them. Unplanned, but who knew what the unconscious could do? Shanna had learned to go with the flow of events and surf on it when she could. It was the only wisdom she could pretend to herself that she had actually discovered, instead of just reading about, but maybe it was enough. Anyway—“Let’s talk as captains, eh?”

“I’m actually not captain,” Julia said.

“What? Earthside—”

“I’m in charge of scientific matters. Viktor’s Captain, but he and I are married, so we have split the duties. That’s our style.”

“That’s completely contrary to—”

“Chain of command, I know. We cut a deal with Earthside. Whatever they want to call it, fine.”

Shanna kept her face as impassive as a firm wall against getting irked and losing it. “Because you’re famous, you think you can abuse—”

“Use, not abuse.” Julia leaned on the slim black poly table between them. “Having the Axelrod name must’ve been useful in keeping your captaincy, eh?”

“That was a little matter—”

“Look, we’re 6 billion klicks from Earthside regulations—”

“And you and Viktor,” Shanna spat back, “the oldest crew in the astronaut corps, you’re going to be in charge?”

“Not at all,” Julia said mildly. “Experience does count, seniority might matter—but we have two ships, so we have two captains. As we’re all on the same scientific expedition, we have to agree on methods, results, risks. Viktor and I have more experience than you—”

“On Mars, which is an oven compared with Pluto. Why, we’ve had telepresence crawlers freeze right into the regolith, first day out! Took steam piped from the ship to get it free. I’ve had a lot more experience—”

“Than we have at superlow temperatures, yes.” Julia’s eyes narrowed, her mouth twisted wryly. “But the biggest problem out here, the reason for the gigabucks spent to put us here at top speed, is the bow shock.”

“
If
it’s a threat.” Shanna’s words rapped out. “Earthside weather hasn’t shown any changes—except for the global warming, of course—even though the shock wall has gone from 100 AU to 42 AU in thirty-some years.”

“I know the data, for goodness’ sake! But a hell of a lot of numerical simulations show big effects in the offing. The molecular hydrogen that’s leaking into the inner solar system, it’ll build up and start reacting with the free oxygen in our upper atmosphere.”

“And make water, big deal. Nobody knows—”

“Plenty of energy yield there, that’s the point. Heat up the upper mesosphere, and that drives big changes below. Screws up the stratosphere temperature profile, and pretty quick that heat moves down toward the business end, where
our
weather gets made.”

Shanna sniffed, nose turned up. “I see where you’re going with this. We should be looking mostly at the shock edge, find out what’s driving it. But Pluto is
key
here. That’s what my, our discoveries show. Something’s running all this, and it isn’t stupid.”

“Nobody said the problem wasn’t interconnected.”

“This isn’t about dumb weather!” Shanna tossed her head back, her hair cascading slowly in the low gravity.

“Okay, smart weather, then. Point is, the zand are pretty interesting. You were lucky to have stumbled into first contact with a self-aware species.”