Cauldron

PROLOGUE Cherry Hill, New Jersey. December 16, 2185.

The call came, as such things always seemed to, in the middle of the night. “Jason?” Lucy’s voice on the other end. Tense. Excited. But she was trying to sound professional. Unemotional.

Jason Hutchins’s first thought was that Lucy’s mother had suffered another breakdown. The woman was apparently given to nervous collapses, and the family always called Lucy. Teresa, also awakened by the call, raised an arm in protest, then pulled a pillow over her head. “Yes, Lucy? What’s the problem?”

“We have a hit!”

That brought him fully alert.

It had happened before. Periodically they got a signal that had set off alarms. Usually it vanished within minutes and was never heard again. Occasionally, it was a human transmission bouncing around. Never during the two and a half centuries of the search had they gotten a legitimate strike. A demonstrably artificial transmission that could be confirmed. Not once. And he knew as he rolled out of bed, as he grumbled to Teresa that no there wasn’t a problem, that he’d be back in an hour or so, he knew that this would be no different.

It was at times like this, when he conceded that SETI was essentially a religious exercise, that it took a leap of faith to sit down each day in front of the screens and pretend something might actually happen, that he wondered why he hadn’t looked for a career that would provide at least the opportunity for an occasional breakthrough. Whole generations of true believers had manned the radio telescopes, some in orbit, some on the back side of the moon, a few on mountaintops, waiting for the transmission that never came. They joked about it. Waiting for Godot. I know when it happens, I’ll be at lunch.

“I do it for the money,” he told people when they asked.

A lot had changed since the early days of the project. The technology, of course, had improved exponentially. There were starships now. It was possible to go out and actually look at the worlds orbiting Alpha Centauri and 36 Ophiuchi and other reasonably nearby stars. We knew now that life existed elsewhere, even that intelligent life had flourished in a few places. But only one extant technological world was known, and that was a savage place, its nation-states constantly at war, too busy exhausting their natural resources and killing on a massive scale to advance beyond an early-twentieth-century level.

So yes, there were other places. Or at least there was one other place. And we knew there had been others. But they were in ruins, lost in time, and the evidence suggested that once you entered an industrial phase, you began a countdown and survived only a few more centuries.

But maybe not. Maybe somewhere out there, there was the kind of place you read about in novels. A place that had stabilized its environment, that had conquered its own worst instincts, and gone on to create a true civilization.

He wore a resigned smile as he left the house. It was a clear, moonless night. The skies were brighter, less polluted, than they had been when he was young. They were beginning to win that battle, at least. And, if there were still occasional armed arguments between local warlords, they’d gotten through the era of big wars and rampant terrorism.

With starflight, the future looked promising. He wondered what his daughter, Prissy, who’d still be young at the dawn of the new century, would live to see. Maybe one day she’d shake the mandible of a genuine alien. Or visit a black hole. At the moment, anything seemed possible.

He climbed into the flyer. “Where to, Jason?” it asked.

Lucy was so excited when he walked in she could barely contain herself. “It’s still coming, Jason,” she said.

“What are we listening to tonight?” He’d been gone several days, at a conference, and had lost track of the schedule.

“Sigma 2711,” she said. It was an old class-G located out beyond NCG6440, roughly halfway to the galactic core. Fourteen thousand light-years. If it turned out to be legitimate, it wasn’t going to be somebody with whom they could hold a conversation.

Lucy was a postdoc, from Princeton. She was energetic, driven, maybe a little too enthusiastic. Marcel Cormley, her mentor, didn’t approve of her assignment to the Drake Center. She was too talented to waste her time on what he perceived as a crank operation. He hadn’t said that to Hutchins’s face, of course, but he’d made no secret to his colleagues about his feelings. Hutchins wasn’t entirely sure he was wrong. Moreover, he suspected Lucy had come to the Center primarily because Cormley had opposed it. However that might be, she had thrown herself into the work, and he could ask no more than that. In fact, enthusiasm was probably a drawback in a field that, generation after generation, showed no results. Still, she was getting experience in astronomical fundamentals.

“Does it still look good, Tommy?” he asked the AI.

Tommy, who was named for Thomas Petrocelli, the designer of the first officially designated AI, took a moment to consider. “This one might be a genuine hit,” he said.

“Let me see it.” Jason sat down in front of a monitor.

“It repeats every seventeen minutes and eleven seconds,” said Lucy. Light bars flickered across the screen. “The sequence is simple.” Four. Then two clusters of four. Then four clusters. Then four clusters of eight. And eight of eight.

“It keeps doubling,” he said.

“Up to 256. Then it runs backward.”

“Okay. What else is there?”

“You get about two minutes of the pattern. Then it goes away, and we get this.” A long, apparently arbitrary, sequence began. He watched it for several minutes before turning aside. “Tommy,” he said, “are we making any progress?”

“It has markers. But ask me later.”

Lucy stood off to one side, her gaze tracking between him and the AI’s speaker. She looked as if she were praying. Yes, Lord, let it be so. She was blond, a bit on the heavy side, although she never seemed to lack for boyfriends. They were always picking her up and dropping her off.

Jason pushed back in his chair. He wasn’t going to allow himself to believe it was actually happening. Not after all this time. It couldn’t just drop in his lap like this. It had to be a system bug. Or a hoax.

Lucy, apparently finished with her entreaties to the spiritual world, returned to her chair, pressed her hands together, and stared at the screen. “I wonder what they’re saying.”

Jason looked around for coffee. Lucy used only soft drinks, so there was none available.

She read his mind, had the grace to look guilty, but said nothing. Had the evening been quiet, she’d have offered to make it.

He sat down in front of one of the displays and brought up Sigma 2711. It was seven billion years old, give or take a few hundred million. Maybe a quarter more massive than the sun. At fourteen thousand light-years, it was far beyond the range of the superluminals. But there was evidence of a planetary system, though nothing had been sighted directly.

If the transmission got a confirmation, he could probably arrange to have the Van Entel take a look. The giant telescope would have no problem picking up planets at Sigma, if they existed.

“What do you think, Jason?” she asked.

The first streaks of gray were appearing in the east. “It’s possible,” he said. “Tommy, get me somebody at Kitt Peak.”

Lucy broke into a huge smile, the kind that says Do with me as you will, my life is complete. “And they told me,” she said, “nothing ever happens over here.”

“Kitt Peak,” said a woman’s voice. She seemed oddly cheerful, considering the hour.

“This is Jason Hutchins,” he said. “At Drake. We need confirmation on a signal.”

“You got a hot one, Jason?” He recognized Ginny Madison on the other end. They’d been together at Moonbase once, long ago.

“Hi, Ginny. Yes. We have a possible. I’d be grateful if you’d check it for us.”

“Give me the numbers.”

“I have a partial translation,” said Tommy.

“On-screen.”

“Much of the text is an instructional segment, providing clues how to penetrate the message.”

“Okay.”

“Here are the opening lines.”

“I took the liberty of substituting the name of their star. And, of course, I did some interpolation.”

“Thank you, Tommy.”

“Considering their desire to strike up a conversation, it’s unlikely they expected their message to be received so far away. This was probably aimed at a nearby system.”

“Yeah. I expect so.”

“Jason,” said Lucy, “what do you make of the last line?”

“‘Blink your lights’?”

“Yes.”

“Metaphorical. If you can’t answer, wave.” He stared at the screen. “The frequency: I assume it’s 1662.”

“On the button.” The first hydroxyl line. It was where they’d always expected it would happen. The ideal frequency.

Ginny was back within the hour. “Looks legitimate,” she said. “As far as we can tell. We’ve got confirmations through Lowell and Packer. We also ran it through ComData. They say it’s not ours, and we can’t find a bounce.” Another broad smile. “I think you’ve got one, Jason. Congratulations.”

Word got around quickly. People began calling minutes after Ginny had confirmed. Has it really happened? Congratulations. What have you got? We hear you’ve been able to read some of it? These were the same people who’d passed him politely in the astronomical corridors, tolerating him, the guy whose imagination had run past his common sense, who’d wasted what might have been a promising career hunting for the LGMs that even the starships couldn’t find.

But he was well beyond starship country now.

Within a few hours Tommy had more of the text. It included a physical description of the senders. They had four limbs and stood upright, but they were leaner than humans. Their heads were insectile, with large oval eyes. Bat ears rose off the skull, and they had antennas. No sign of an olfactory system. No indication of an expression, or even if the face was capable of one. “Are the features flexible?” he asked Tommy. It was an odd question, but he couldn’t resist.

“Information not provided, Jason.”

“How big are they?”

“No way to know. We share no measurement system.”

That brought Lucy into the conversation. “You’re saying they could be an inch tall?”

“It’s possible.”

Jason propped his head on his hands and stared at the image. “Judging from the relative size of the eyes, it looks as if they live in a darker environment than we do.”

“Not necessarily,” said Tommy. “The smaller a creature is, the larger its eyes should be relative to body size. They have to be big enough to gather a minimum amount of light.”

There was more. Details of the home world: broad seas, vast vegetative entanglements, which eventually got translated as jungles.

And shining cities. They seemed to be either along coastlines or bordering rivers.

“There are large sections of the transmission I still cannot read,” said Tommy. “Some aspects of the arrangement suggest they may be sound patterns. Speeches, perhaps.”

“Or music,” said Lucy.

“It is possible.”

“Translate that,” she continued, “and you could have a hell of a concert.”

Descriptions of architecture. Jason got the impression the aliens were big on architecture.

Accounts of cropped fields, purpose unknown, possibly intended as vegetative art.

“They’re poetic,” said Lucy.

“You think? Simply because they like to design buildings and grow flowers?”

“That, too.”

“What else?”

“Mostly, that they’re putting a bottle out into the dark.”

Jason called home to tell Teresa the news. She congratulated him and carried on about what a wonderful night it was, but the enthusiasm had a false note. She didn’t really grasp the significance of the event. She was happy because he was happy. Well, it was okay. He hadn’t married her for her brains. She was a charmer, and she tried to be a good wife, so he really couldn’t ask more than that.

Just before dawn, the transmission stopped. It was over.

By then all sorts of people had begun showing up. His own staff of off-duty watchstanders. The people who had for years not noticed that the Drake Center even existed: Barkley and Lansing from Yale, Evans from Holloway, Peterson and Chokai from Lowell, DiPietro from LaSalle. By midmorning the press had arrived, followed by a gaggle of politicians. Everybody became part of the celebration.

Jason broke out the champagne that had, metaphorically, been on ice for two and a half centuries and ordered more sent over from the Quality Liquor Store in the Plaza Mall. He held an impromptu press conference. One of the media types pinned the name Sigmas on the creatures, and that became their official designation.

After she’d gotten Prissy off to school, Teresa showed up, too, along with her cousin Alice. She was clearly delighted by the attention her husband was getting, and she sat for hours enjoying the warm glow of reflected celebrity. It was, in many ways, the happiest moment of his life.

Years later, when he looked back on that day, after the Sigmas had faded into history, it wasn’t the call in the night that stood out in his memory, nor Tommy’s comment, “This one might be a genuine hit,” nor even the message itself: “Greetings to our (unknown) across the (unknown).” It wasn’t even Ginny’s confirmation. “We can’t find a bounce.” It was Prissy, when she got home from school, where she’d already heard the news. It was odd: Nine years old, and she understood what her mother had missed.

“Daddy, are you going to send a message back?” she’d asked. He was home by then, exhausted, but planning to change clothes and return to the Center.

“No,” he said. “They’re too far away, love.”

“Even to just talk to them? They sent us a message. Why can’t we send one back?”

“Do you know about the pharaohs?” he asked.

“In Egypt?” Her dark eyes clouded with puzzlement. What did pharaohs have to do with anything? She was a beautiful child. Armed with her mother’s looks. But she had his brain. She’d be a heartbreaker one day.

“Yes. Do you know how long ago that was? King Tut and all that?”

She thought about it. “A long time,” she said.

“Thousands of years.”

“Yes. Why can’t we talk to the Sigmas?”

“Because they’re not there anymore,” he said. “They’re dead a long time ago. They were dead long before there were pharaohs.”

She looked baffled. “The people who sent the message died before there were pharaohs?”

“Yes. I don’t think there’s much question about that. But they weren’t really people.”

“I don’t understand. If they died that long ago, how could they send us a message?”

“It took a long time for the message to get here.”

Her dark eyes got very round. “I think it’s sad that we can’t say hello back to them.”

“I do, too, sweetheart,” he said. He looked at her and thought how she had touched ultimate truth. “They’re starting to build very fast ships. Maybe one day you’ll be able to go look.”