The Sparrow (12 page)

Judging him, Sofia changed keys and then the tempo as well. His eyes narrowed slightly but he started the second verse in the minor key she was using, following her lead. Pleased that he'd understood her intent, holding his eyes with hers, she began to sing a different song, in counterpoint.

She had a grainy contralto and the voices were gorgeous together, despite or perhaps because of the oddity of a male taking the higher notes, and for a little while there was no other sound in the world than the song Emilio Sandoz and Sofia Mendes sang.

Jimmy looked sick with envy. Anne moved behind him, bending over the sofa to put her thin, strong arms around his big shoulders and rest her head next to his. When she felt the rigidity give way, she tightened her embrace briefly and let him go, straightening up and standing quietly as the song went on. Ladino, she thought, recognizing elements of Spanish and Hebrew. Sofia's song was a Sephardic variation on the Spanish tune, perhaps.

Anne looked at George and saw him come to his own conclusion, suspecting the outcome, but not from the music, only from a feeling of inevitability about these two people. And then her silent analysis fell away and she listened, trying not to shiver, as the two songs diverged and interwove until, at the very end, the harmony and counterpoint resolved: lyrics and melodies and voices coming together, across the centuries, to a single word and note.

Tearing her eyes away from Emilio's face, Anne led the chorus of praise, restoring a fragile equilibrium. Jimmy did his best, but ten minutes later he made excuses about having work to catch up on and, calling out his good-byes, headed for the door. This was the cue for a general exodus, as though all of them needed to put space between themselves and a kind of intimacy no one had planned or anticipated. Anne hesitated, feeling that as hostess she should wait until Emilio and Sofia left as well. But it was taking them a few minutes to get organized, so she covered herself with a plausible excuse and followed Jimmy out the door.

He was more than halfway to the plaza when Anne caught up with him in the dark. The neighborhood was quiet, although there were snatches of music coming in with the sea breeze from La Perla, where things went on later. Hearing her footsteps, he turned, and she stopped two stairs upward of him, so she could look him in the eye. It wasn't cold but Jimmy was shaking, a gigantic Raggedy Andy doll with his spiraling yarnlike hair, mouth drawn up in his silly crescent smile.

"Do you suppose suicide is a viable option?" he joked lamely. Anne didn't dignify that with a reply, but her eyes were compassionate. "Why didn't you stop me sooner when I was playing? I don't know if I can stand to be in the same time zone with her after tonight," he moaned. "God, she must think I'm a complete idiot. But, Jesus, Anne," he cried out quietly, "he's a priest! Okay, okay, he's a really good-looking priest, not a big ugly Mick with shit for brains—"

Anne stopped him with a finger on his lips. She could think of dozens of things to say: that nobody can make anyone else love them, that half the world's misery was wanting someone who didn't want you, that unavailability was a powerful aphrodisiac, that Jimmy was a sweet, intelligent, dear man— None of it would help. She joined him on his step, laid her head against his chest and put her arms around him, marveling again at the sheer size of the boy.

"Jesus, Anne," he whispered above her. "He's a priest. It isn't fair."

"No, my darling, it never is," she assured him. "It never, ever is."

T
HAT TIME OF
night, it was less than an hour's drive back to Arecibo. By the time he pulled into the apartment parking lot, Jimmy was done crying and almost past the desire to get drunk, which he'd rejected as too dramatic a response to the situation. Sofia had never given him any encouragement. The whole thing had been a fantasy, and that was that. And really, what did he know about Emilio? Priests were just men, Eileen Quinn had always reminded him when he'd come home from school full of hero worship and awe. Ordination doesn't make you a saint. And anyway, in other religions, priests married and had children.

Shit, he thought. It was just a song. I've got them married, with kids! It's none of my business.

But he couldn't get the sound of them together out of his mind. It was like watching … Sleep was out of the question. He tried a few pages of the book he was reading but ended up tossing it across the room, unable to concentrate. He rooted around in the cupboards and wished he'd taken Anne up on her offer when she asked him if he wanted to take some leftovers home with him. Finally, he decided to make good on the excuse he'd used to leave early and connected with the dish system. He opened the SETI log, picking up where he'd left off with Sofia on Friday afternoon, deciding to bull his way through the hideously embarrassing prospect of seeing her again by going straight at the topic he'd cover with her on Monday.

A
T
3:57
A.M.
on Sunday, August 3, 2019, James Connor Quinn pulled off his headset and sat back in his chair, sweating and sucking air, sure now, but hardly able to believe what he alone in all his world knew.

"Jesus Christ," Jimmy breathed, meeting the future by turning to the ancient past. "Holy Mother of God."

He rubbed his eyes and combed his fingers through his tangled, scribbly hair and sat, staring blankly, for a few moments longer. Then he called Anne.

11

ARECIBO, PUERTO RICO:
AUGUST 3, 2019

"Y
OU'RE JOKING,
" A
NNE
whispered. "Sweet pea, if you have called me at four o'clock in the goddamned morning and this isn't for real—"

"I'm serious."

"Have you told anyone else yet?"

"No. You're the first. My mother will kill me, but you're who I wanted to tell." Anne, standing naked in the dark, smiled and sent a mental apology to Mrs. Quinn. She heard Jimmy's urgent voice again. "Wake George up and get him on the VR net. I'm going to call Emilio and Sofia, too."

Anne didn't say anything, but Jimmy understood her silence. "It was the song that did it. I couldn't stop thinking about it and when I looked at the signal, it just reminded me of music. I figured if it was music, I'd recognize it and then I could figure out where it was coming from. So I washed it through a digital sound program. Anne, it's like nothing I've ever heard before."

"Jimmy, are you certain it's not just some kind of music you're not familiar with—South Ossetian or Norwegian or something? I mean, it's a big world."

"Anne, I just spent three hours verifying and checking and trying to disprove and it is really, truly, absolutely not local. It's not a bounce, it's not a pirate station, it's not drug ships, it's not military. It is ET and I got a confirm from Goldstone's files, but nobody there has looked at it yet. It's music, Anne, and it's ET and you know what else?"

"Jesus, Jimmy, don't tease! What?"

"They're neighbors. We're picking up an amazingly loud party near Alpha Centauri. They're only about four light years from here. That's practically next door."

"Holy shit. Wow. Jimmy, shouldn't you tell somebody official?"

"Not yet. Right this minute, it's mine. I want my friends to know first. So for crying out loud, wake George the hell up and get on the net."

"No, listen. If this is real, then virtual reality isn't good enough. I want real reality. Tell Emilio to come here to the house. We'll swing by to pick up Sofia and then go on up to the dish. We'll be on the road in, say, twenty-five minutes. We should be there by—" She found she couldn't add. Her mind just went blank. God. Music. Four light years away.

"About six o'clock," Jimmy supplied. "Okay, I'll be there. And Anne?"

"Yeah, I know, bring food. We'll hit Señor Donut's on the way."

"No. Well, that, too. But—thanks. That's what I wanted to say. For last night."

"Hey, if news like this is the thanks I get for giving you a hug, you are entirely welcome, darling boy. We'll see you in a couple of hours. And Jimmy? Congratulations. This is fantastic."

I
T WAS A
clear chilly morning, the light still pale, when the Edwardses and their passengers pulled in. Jimmy's little Ford was the only car in the dish parking lot besides the guard's. "Private tour, Mr. Edwards?" he asked as they signed in.

"No, there's something Jimmy Quinn wanted to show us and we figured it was better to come by when the place isn't busy," George said. Anne, smiling innocently, handed the guard a couple of donuts on the way by.

Awake all night, Jimmy was bleary-eyed but too strung up on his nerves to notice he was tired. As they squeezed into his little cubicle, he grabbed the donut Anne held out to him and ate it in two bites, setting up the playback while he chewed.

It was vocal, mainly. There was a percussive underlayment and possibly wind instruments as well, but it was hard to tell about that—there was still a lot of noise, although Jimmy had already filtered some out. And it was unquestionably alien. The timbre of the voices, the harmonics were simply different, in some way that Jimmy couldn't describe in words. "I can display sound signatures that would show the differences between their voices and ours graphically," he told them, "the way you can see that a violin sounds different from a trumpet. I don't know how to say it."

"I know it's not scientific, but you can just tell," Anne agreed, shrugging. "It's like you could tell Aretha Franklin's voice from anyone else's, from a single note. It's just
different
."

At first, they simply listened to the fragment of music over and over, each time groaning as the signal fell off to static just as the music began to build to something wonderful. Then, after the third hearing, Anne said, "Okay. What can we tell about them? They sing in groups, and there is a lead singer. So they have a social organization. Can we assume they breathe air because their music can be heard like this?"

"We can assume they have some kind of atmosphere that propagates sound waves," George said, "but not necessarily anything we could breathe."

"So they've got something like lungs and mouths and they can control expelled air, or whatever it is they breathe," Anne listed.

"And they can hear, or there'd be no point to singing, right?" said Jimmy
_.

"The language doesn't sound tonal to me," Emilio said, "but it's difficult to tell when people are singing. There is a sentence structure. There are consonants and vowels and something in the throat, like glottal stops." It didn't occur to him to wonder if they had throats. "Jimmy, may I hear it again, please?"

Jimmy replayed it. Sitting at the edge of the group, almost in the hallway just beyond Jimmy's little space, Sofia watched Sandoz, seeing in action the process she had abstracted while working for the Jesuits in Cleveland. He was already beginning to mouth a little of it, picking up phrases sung by the chorus, trying out phonemes. Without a word, she handed him her notebook and stylus. "I could learn this, I think," he said to no one in particular, distracted, half-convinced already. He began making notes. "Jimmy, may I?" Jimmy rolled his chair out of the way and let Emilio take the console.

"Jim, have you changed the frequency much?" George asked. "Is this what it really sounds like, or is it more like insects chirping or whales singing in real time?"

"No, as near as I can figure, this is what it sounds like. Of course, it would depend on the density of their atmosphere," Jimmy told him. He thought for a while. "Well. They've got radio. That implies vacuum tubes at least, right?"

"No," George disagreed. "Vacuum tubes were actually kind of a fluke. You could just as easily go straight to solid state. But they would have to understand electricity." There was a short pause, everyone chewing on the ideas, the only sound that of the music as Emilio slowed it down and repeated sections, correcting his notes. "And chemistry, for sure," George continued. "They'd have to know something about metals and nonmetals, conductors. Microphones need carbon or some kind of variable resistor. Batteries—zinc and lead."

"A theory of wave propagation," Jimmy said. "Radio implies a lot."

"Mass communications," Anne suggested. "And a segment of the population with the leisure to sit around thinking up wave theories. So: probably a stratified society with economic divisions."

"Metallurgy," Jimmy said. "You wouldn't start with radio, right? You'd work metal for other stuff first. Jewelry, weapons, metal tools."

"All possible," George said. He laughed and shook his head, still stunned. "Well, chalk one up for the Principle of Mediocrity, boys and girls." Sofia raised her brows in question, so George explained. "That's the idea that Earth is nothing special, DNA is a pretty easy molecule to make and life is fairly abundant in the universe."

"My goodness," Anne sighed, "what a fall. We thought we were the center of the universe and now look! Just another bunch of sentients. Hohum." Her face changed and she leaned over to hug Emilio with wicked glee. "Whom do you suppose God loves best, Father? Ooh, there's a nasty little idea. Sentient rivalries! Think of the theology, Emilio!"

Emilio, who had played the music again and again, catching more of it each time, finding a pattern or two, suddenly sat very still. But before he could say anything, Anne spoke up again. "Jim, you said this was Alpha Centauri. What's the system like?"

"Pretty complicated. Three suns. A yellow one that's a lot like Sol and two others, red and orange. People have thought for years that the system was a good candidate for having planets. But it isn't easy to sort things out when you've got three stars to contend with, so I guess it never seemed worth the effort. Jeez, it's going to be a hot prospect now."

The discussion went on for some time, with George, Anne and Jimmy extrapolating, deducing and arguing. Emilio, thoughtful, went back to the music again, playing it through softly once more, but then he turned the playback off.

Sofia alone had neither comment on the music itself nor any speculation about the singers, but when the talk finally slowed to a halt, she asked, "Mr. Quinn, how did you decide to run the signal through an audio output?"

In the excitement, Jimmy had forgotten the embarrassment of the previous evening, and now he was feeling too good to care. "Well, there was all the music last night," he said evenly. "And when I was in school, I had a part-time job cleaning up old recordings from a Soviet archive for digitizing. The signal just looked like music to me. So I decided to give it a try."

"It would be fair to say that you used your intuition."

"I guess so. It was a hunch."

"Would another astronomer have known what a musical signal looks like and come to the same conclusion?"

"Hard to say. Probably. Sure—somebody would have thought of it eventually. "

"Would it ever have occurred to you, do you think, to suggest to me that the AI system wash all signals through an audio output to screen for transmissions such as this?"

"Only to eliminate them as ETs," Jimmy admitted. "See, we always expected a string of primes, some kind of mathematical sequence. I think I'd have suggested that anything that looked like music was definitely not ET. Remember? Yesterday?" He yawned enormously and stood to stretch, which required Anne to duck out of his way and George to move into a corner. "Day before yesterday, now. I sort of recognized that the signal was music then, so I assumed it was local. If I'd been sure it was ET, I might never have considered music. I don't know why but I always thought it was either music or ET, but not both."

"Yes. Odd, isn't it. That would have been my assumption as well," she said without emotion, but she was twisting the metal bracelet around and around. Triple time. She'd be perhaps thirty-seven or thirty-eight. Not forever. Hubris, to have made the wager. "Mr. Quinn, your job is secure. My system would not have picked this up. I will recommend that the project be scaled back. I can automate the request-and-return segments of the work. And coordination of scheduling. That could be finished in one or two months."

"We could go, couldn't we … if we wanted to?" Emilio said in the silence that followed her remarks. "I mean, there'd be a way to get there, if we decided to try."

The others looked at him blankly, still thinking about Sofia's unenviable position.

"We could use a meteor—no, an asteroid, yes?" he corrected himself, looking directly at Sofia. "It wouldn't be any worse than the little wooden ships people used to cross the Atlantic in the 1500s."

At first, only Sofia saw what he was driving at. "Yes," she said, glad to be distracted by him for once. "The asteroids aren't bad, really. The miners' quarters can be rather comfortable—"

"Yeah, sure," George said. "You've already got the mass-drivers grafted on and the lifepod in place. Get a big enough asteroid and you could just keep feeding slag into the engines. We do it now on a small scale to bring the rocks into Earth orbit from the asteroid belt. I thought years ago that you could go as far as you wanted, if you got a big enough rock. There just wasn't any reason to leave the solar system."

"Until now," Emilio said.

"Until now," George agreed.

"Did I miss something?" Anne said. "Asteroids?"

But George was starting to laugh and Emilio looked positively beatific. "Sofia," George said, "tell Anne about that contract you had—"

"—with Ohbayashi," Sofia finished for him. She looked at Anne and then the others, and gave a small astonished laugh before saying, "It was just before working with Dr. Sandoz in Cleveland. I did an expert system for Ohbayashi's asteroid mining division. They specified an AI program that could take into account the cost of remote assaying and the costs of capturing an asteroid, mining and refining the minerals in space, versus the projected market values of the product at delivery, Earthside. Very little intuition involved, except projecting future metals prices," she said wryly. "You're right, Dr. Sandoz. A partially mined asteroid could be used as a vehicle."

Emilio, who had been leaning forward and watching her carefully as she spoke, clapped once and sat back in his chair, smiling broadly.

"But it would take four years, wouldn't it?" Anne objected.

"Four years isn't so bad," Emilio said.

"Whoa," Jimmy said, looking at Sofia and Sandoz. "Okay, first off, it's four point
three
and it's
light
years, not plain solar years. Even a third of a light year is a nontrivial distance. And anyway, that's the time it takes for light and radio waves to travel the distance, not a ship. It would take a ship a lot longer … but even so …" he said, starting to think about it now.