The Sunborn (25 page)

“Earthside advises me not. Say is too low, very low frequency, for these high power levels.”

“Then it goes in the mystery bin.”

“I already sent to the Wiseguy compiler. Maybe someday it will tell us something, huh?” He leaned back in his flex-seat and grinned, so that she could see him down the gangway. “Before we retire, maybe even.”

This was a standing joke between them. They would never retire unless the world ran out of mysteries, and out here that was quite unlikely. She grinned back. “Wrong. I have a big file processing right now. Remember, I sent your questions on? SETI Institute ran their Wiseguy, cross-compared with our data, and finally coughed up.”

“I don’t believe!”

“Come look.” About time to peek at the processing, anyway. Her curiosity was as hungry as his.

They had reviewed Wiseguy’s capabilities, read through its mediated talks with the zand, the crawlies of Pluto. A spectacular discovery, the zand, Julia had to admit. A sentient species! Even more exciting, to
talk
with them. Her and Viktor’s long years of slow, difficult work on Mars had not produced anything like the same result. The Marsmat was still an enigma; many still doubted if it was self-aware.

Not that they had been just studying old data on the way out.
High Flyer
was outfitted with big phased-array antennas, to study the bow shock region. Their most intriguing work had been those electromagnetic maps Viktor had been developing.

And now he and Earthside were using Viktor’s work to discern whether there were coded messages coming in from the bow shock region. Shanna’s crew had picked up some hints; it was
High Flyer
’s job to sift through the sea of data, try to crack the meaning.

“Program is smart,” Viktor said. “Thinks can find words, connections.”

Julia blinked. She could not follow the spray of data on Viktor’s working screen. But then she looked closer and thought about how they had labored over similar problems, struggling to fathom the Marsmat.

The software—Wiseguy the semi-AI, plus elaborate metalinguistic codes—had been cobbled together Earthside. It followed on detailed theories of how language builds up from basic mental architecture. For decades the linguists had used the primates as a model, but in the last few decades they had extended it to dolphins and whales.

It turned out that whale song was elaborate, beautiful—and simple. The first whale song deciphered had the structural complexity of grand opera, but the message (like most opera plots, and that was no coincidence) was,
I’m horny, I’m horny, I’m horny.
Later code work unfolded the intricate whale ways of broadcasting I’m
over this way!
and Food
here.
And, of course,
Danger!
There were other tribal messages, too, but none that could not be expressed in a sentence. Nature did not always produce sophisticated dialogue.

But why should that Earthly experience apply to the extreme low-frequency emissions from out here? The old Voyager probes had first noted the noisy spectrum, but nobody thought it was more than plasma waves, the local weather.
Proserpina
had captured more for detailed analysis. Thousands of Earthside analysts had sweated over those, and
High Flyer’s
better data. Viktor had been handling the elaborate merging of all this, and now…

Now there was a new angle to the process. Viktor pointed it out, and she saw it suddenly, after minutes of scrutiny. Structure leaped out of the flow. The incoming digital streams broke into constellations that resembled words in their numerical architecture.

“And they are! So the Earthside tech types say.” Julia finished her explanation to a blinking Viktor. “
Our
words. English!”

“Is impossible.”

She grinned and put on her mock-gruff Russian accent. “Is not.”

“Must be error.”

“Unless whoever’s sending this has heard us first, and they’re replying.”

“At ten kilohertz? No one uses frequencies that low. Waveforms are huge!”

“Oh?”

“
Da!
Even early radio, Marconi, he used only hundreds of kilo-hertz—pretty big waveforms already.” He stopped, eyes widening with a sudden idea. “Must calculate wavelengths.” He scribbled on his slate, frowned, and scratched his short, salt-and-pepper beard. “Ummmm… Marconi could use those frequencies because he was using really big antennas. Right.”

“Right how?”

“
Da
—made of chicken wire, they were, strung between houses, like early Russian pioneers in radio—

She chuckled. “Who discovered it all first, along with the telephone and laughing gas—yeah, I’ve heard. Point is, my earnest darling?”

“That Marconi’s antennas had to be at least a fraction of the size of the wavelengths he used. Or else they couldn’t radiate very much—or receive much, either.”

“That was the best he could do?”

“
Da
—and this is the best
they
can do.”

“Who?” Julia was thinking about antennas, which she had worked with for decades but had taken for granted.

“The whoever that sent these signals at frequencies of ten kilohertz. Maybe they picked up our transmissions—God help us! Maybe all our radio and TV for the last century. But can’t reply at those frequencies. Because, see, at normal radio wavelengths, we’re talking antennas maybe a meter in size. Way too small for them. Instead, they go for ten kilohertz—because that’s a wavelength they can manage.”

She blinked. “Not a joke, right?”

“Nope. Divide the speed of light by the frequency to get the wavelength and therefore the antenna size. Old stereo systems had three speakers: the smallest, the tweeter, for high-pitched sounds; the big woofer was for bass notes—down to low-frequency rumbles.”

Most of this was new to her, but she got the principle. “The thing that sent us these messages—the ones the Wiseguy codes are grinding away at right now—is—”

He grinned. “Really big woofer—at least thirty kilometers across. Aliens are giants.”

S
HANNA SETTLED DOWN INTO
her smart couch and went through the setup protocols. Showtime!

Every time she went on watch, Shanna knew she was born to do this. From the beginning of this long mission she had found her hours on watch the most exciting she had ever known. Even after years on the mission, whose goals had veered radically as they learned more, her pulse raced when she went on duty. Being captain helped.

Telepresence duty was the absolute best. Boldly exploring, while sipping aromatic Colombian. In the 3-D environment she saw the Pluto landscape in sharp detail merely by turning her head. No sensation of movement, or of cold, but sounds came aplenty: the slow sigh of breezes, the crawler’s clanking, the crunch of ice, a crisp fizz of vapor boiling off, which was a lot like bacon frying.

It had been weeks since she had actually been on the surface, and that was the crash. So this was the next best thing: phony Pluto. Digital discovery. Earthside was superworried about safety after that crash—the Chicken Little culture was quite frustrating. Politicians actually said, about every activity, even exploration, that safety was always the number one consideration.

Imagine human history if we had always felt that way,
she thought. If it kept on like this at ISA, nobody on
Proserpina
might ever get to go back down to the surface. Come billions of kilometers and stop a few hundred klicks short…crazy.

She peered at the landscape steadily, letting detail sharpen. Stark shadows cut across the dirty gray plain, and the sun was a glaring point. Under Charon’s gloomy crescent the thin methane atmosphere scattered little light. Darkly twisted, tortured sculptures jutted from the ice sheet. The slow-motion weather here had worked on them for eons on the somber, sleeping plain. The moon loomed huge and ominous above a sharp horizon.

It held a certain austere beauty, but the mere landscape told nothing of its incredible cold. They had been drawn here by the unexplained growing warmth of this place—yet “warmth” was the wrong word. That grim, dismal view was only 120 degrees above absolute zero. Compared with Pluto’s temperature measured Earthside back in the twencen, a brisk 42 absolute, this was Florida. A moment’s exposure would not merely freeze her; it would snap her bones into confetti from thermal stresses.

Yet here life stirred. Incredibly. She had been down there twice, and it was still hard to believe.

Life on Pluto. Amazing enough by itself. Not just the simple legged forms that crawled and walked these bitter, barren hills
—
recent discoveries, thanks to telepresence, letting her drive the crawler from orbit. Or the flyers, angular or bulbous. No
—
there were others who descended from the sky, those from even farther out, beyond Pluto: the Darksider machines.

Nobody, not even the most extreme exobiologists, could have guessed.

Shanna resisted a morbid feeling: that the fragments of crumpled metal she and Jordin had picked up, mingled with those ice chunks, were actually scraps of…well, flesh.

By now she knew better. Not flesh, but once living—if machines could truly live, even very smart machines like the Darksiders. But emotion yields slowly to reason; she still thought of the Darksiders as autonomous intelligences. Even after their captive onboard turned out to be a robot of sorts, able to carry out instructions well but incapable of original action.

She inched her crawler forward. Working in a comfy work pod, directing the crawler with telepresence gloves, she had to be careful not to alarm her prey. Ahead, the gunmetal-blue, oblong Darksider didn’t seem to notice. Maybe it was recovering from its landing. Or playing possum.

Remember, you’re the new kid out here. Maybe we don’t know all that lurks in these shadows. You might look like an intriguing new kind of lunch.

She moved her hands in their command gloves and made the crawler grind forward another meter, crunching ice. Her low crawler was creeping on treads up to the Darksider at a shadowy angle. In the incredible cold here slow was always a good idea. Parts froze up without notice. Circuitry went dead, and even an emergency warm-up couldn’t revive it. When the crawler stopped or pivoted, she sent a surge of electricity through it just to keep it warm. Moving here had an ominous, ponderous feel that got on her nerves.

Another sluggish move, then a wait. The Darksider didn’t seem to mind.

Scavenging for Darksider remains had turned out to be easier than skystone hunting. Earthside wanted more parts, to better understand the different Darksider designs. Skystones, a rather poetic name for the rain of incoming meteors. She had come to like the whispery acoustic language of the zand, and their name fit, a combination of “zany” and “grand.” They were both, speaking in long, wispy chords that skated great distances through the thin nitrogen-methane air. Chilled words, pealing out with a rolling rhythm that reminded her of whale song. But unlike the whales, this time she caught what the zand were saying.

This was yet another wonder, but one human-made. Wiseguy had picked “skystones” as more expressive than English’s “meteors.” And indeed, the incoming rocks did not flare in the chilly “air” here, just slammed into the ice, carrying fresh Darksiders—from where? Their captive Darksider would not say; perhaps its narrow intelligence did not know.

“Got the target?” Jordin asked over comm.

“Dead on. Big one, looks like parabolic antennas sticking out of the carapace.”

“Let me know, huh?” His tone was edgy. “I’m on this watch, too, y’know? It’s not nice to just say nothing, leave me hanging here.”

“I’ll try being nicer if you’ll try being smarter.”

“Hey, just because I screwed up capturing that pair of Darksiders—”

“Okay, okay.” She should be keeping peace, but he was sometimes irksome. And he
had
messed up the last telepresence run. “I’m just watching it for now.”

“Oh. I’ll get on the spectral scan.”

“Actually I thought you were napping.”

In his lately familiar miffed tone he shot back, “I’m checking your every step.”

“Don’t need a babysitter, y’know,” she said. “Catch up on your sleep.”

“That an order, Captain?” Jordin said stiffly, with a subtone of derision to boot.

Yep, I’m still captain, and that’s what’s bugging him.
“Sure. Nod off all you want. Earthside won’t know.”

“Might just do that.”

Actually he was right. They had all been working so hard, for so long, that four days ago Earthside told her to institute mandatory days off. Nobody was going to honor that, she could tell right now. They all loved this vast, strange problem set before them. The shadowy mysteries kept them going.

Jordin signed off, though it would be just like him to keep his headphones on as he slept, just in case. She couldn’t seem to strike the right notes with him these days. She knew she was getting a bit snappish, but no wonder. The approach of
High Flyer
was stirring anxieties old and new. And this long mission was rubbing personalities against each other. Plus some unusual stresses…

Dear old Dad had come through for her, right—but as Axelrod the Great, wielding his legendary deal-making magic. They’d had a lot of conversations the last few days—one-way at a time, of course, given the huge distances.

“I’m gonna have to burn a lot of chits to keep you as captain,” Axelrod’s concerned face had said. “It’s going to take promises, and I’ll have to make good on them. Remember what we talked about before—plenty of people want Darksider tech. They’re betting it’ll blow away any robots we’ve got here.”

Meaning, of course, that the Consortium was betting. Even though this was an ISA mission. “Well,” she’d replied, “as captain I’m your best bet to get anything at all from this mission.”

His answer hours later had infuriated her. “Y’know, honey,
High Flyer
can get us Darksiders, if necessary.”

Lucky for tape delay; her first reaction would’ve been a disaster. Something on the lines of “The Mars Couple? Over the hill, Dad.” Finally she’d settled for “It might be tricky for the Consortium to get around ISA’s claims of first discovery. Ask your battalions of lawyers. But if I back up your claim, as the Consortium’s rep on this mission all along, it’ll be a lot easier. Daddy dear.”