Starplex

Chapter XIV

Keith always enjoyed taking an elevator to the docking bays. The car dropped down to deck thirty-one, the uppermost of the ten decks that made up the central disk. It then began a horizontal journey along one of the four spokes that radiated out from there to the outer edge of the disk. But the spokes were transparent, as were the elevator cab’s walls and floors, and so the passengers were treated to a view looking down on the vast circular ocean. Keith could see the dorsal fins of three dolphins swimming along just below the surface. Agitators in the ocean walls and central shaft produced respectable half-meter waves; dolphins preferred that to a calm sea. The radius of the ocean deck was ninety-five meters; Keith was always staggered by the amount of water contained there. The roof was a real-time hologram of Earth’s sky, with towering white clouds moving against a background of that special shade of blue that always tugged at Keith’s heart.

The elevator finally reached the edge of the ocean and passed through into the prosaic tunnels of the engineering torus. Once it came to the outer edge of the torus, it descended the nine levels to the floor of the docking bays. Keith disembarked, and walked the short distance to the entrance to bay nine. As soon as he entered, he saw Hek, the symbolic-communications specialist, and a slim human named Shahinshah Azmi, the head of the material-sciences department. Between them was a black cube measuring a meter on a side. The cube was resting on a pedestal that brought it up to eye level. Keith walked over to them.

“Good day, sir,” said the ever-polite Azmi, in a flat voice. Keith knew from old movies how musical Indian accents used to be; he missed the rich variety that human voices had had before instantaneous communications had smoothed out all the differences. Azmi gestured at the cube. “We’ve built the time capsule out of graphite composite with a few radioactives added. It’s solid except for the self-repairing hyperspatial sensor, which will lock onto the shortcut, and the starlight-powered ACS system for helping the cube hold position relative to it.”

“And what about the message for the future?” asked Keith.

Hek pointed to one of the cube’s sides. “We’ve incised it into the cube’s faces,” he said, his barking echoing in the bay. “It begins on this side. As you can see, it consists of a series of boxed examples. Two dots plus two dots equals four dots; a question with its answer. The second box, here, has two dots plus two dots, and a symbol. Since any arbitrary symbol would do, we just used the English question mark, but without the separate dot underneath; that might confuse one into thinking it was two symbols rather than one. Anyway, that gives us a question and a symbolic representation of the fact that the answer is missing. The third box shows the question symbol, the symbol I’ve established for ‘equals,’ and four dots, the answer. So that box says, “The answer to the question is four. Do you see?”

Keith nodded.

“Now,” continued Hek, “having established a vocabulary for our dialogue, we can ask our real question.” He waddled around to the opposite side of the cube, which was also incised with markings.

“As you can see,” said Hek, “we have two similar boxes here. The first one has a graphic representation of the shortcut, with a star emerging from it. See that scale mark showing the width of the star, and the series of horizontal and vertical lines beneath? That’s a binary representation of the star’s diameter in units of the box’s width, in case there’s any confusion about what the image represents. And then there’s the equals symbol, and the question symbol. So it says, ‘shortcut with star emerging from it equals what?’ And beneath it is the question symbol, the equals symbol, and a large blank space: “The answer to the above question is…” and a space implying that we want a reply.”

Keith nodded slowly. “Clever. Good work, gentlemen.”

Azmi pointed to one of the cube’s other faces. “On this face, we’ve incised information about the periods and relative positions of fourteen different pulsars. If the shortcut makers in the future—or whoever it is who finds this—have records going back this far in time, they’ll be able to identify the specific year in which the cube was created from that information.”

“Beyond that,” said Hek, “they might also assume, quite reasonably, that the cube had been created shortly after the green star emerged from this shortcut—and presumably they’ll know what date they sent that star back to, as well. In other words, they’ve got two independent ways of determining when to send any reply back to.”

“And this will work?” Keith asked.

“Oh, probably not,” said Azmi, smiling. “It’s just a bottle in the ocean. I don’t seriously expect any results, but I suppose it’s worth a try. Still, as Dr. Magnor has told me, if we don’t get a good explanation, and if we decided the stars are a threat, we can use the Waldahud space-flattening technique to evaporate the shortcuts. Granted, stars may be popping out of thousands of exit points, so we probably can’t do much to stop them. But if they know we have the capability to interfere to some degree, perhaps they’ll provide an explanation rather than have us do that.”

“Very good,” said Keith. “But what will make the cube conspicuous? How can you be sure someone will find it?”

“That’s the hardest part of all,” barked Hek. “There are only a few ways to get something to stand out. One is to make it reflective. But no matter what we make this box out of, it will have to endure perhaps ten billion years of scouring by interstellar dust. Granted, that’s only a few microscopic impacts per century, but the net effect over that much time would be to dull any reflective surface.

“The second possibility we’d considered was to make the time capsule big—so that it’s eye-catching; or heavy—so that it warps spacetime. But the bigger you make it, the more likely it is to be destroyed by a meteor collision.

“The final possibility was to make it loud—you know, by broadcasting a radio signal. But that requires a power source. Of course, right now the green star is close by, and we can use simple solar cells to generate electricity from it, but the star has a respectable proper motion relative to the shortcut. In just a few thousand years, it’ll be a full light-year from here, much too far away to provide significant power. And any internal power source we use would exhaust its fuel, or have most of its radioactives decay to lead, long before the target date.”

Keith nodded. “But you said you were using starlight converted to electricity to power the attitude-control system?”

“Yes. But there’s almost no spare power for a beacon of any sort. We’re just going to have to assume that whoever built the shortcuts will have detectors that will find the cube regardless.”

“And if they don’t?”

Hek moved all four shoulders up and down in a shrug. “If they don’t—well, we’ve hardly lost much by trying.”

“All right,” said Keith. “It looks good to me. Is this a prototype, or the actual time capsule?”

“We’d intended it as just a prototype, but everything came together perfectly,” said Azmi. “I say we might as well go ahead and use this one.”

Keith turned to Hek. “What about you?”

The Waldahud barked once. “I concur.”

“Very well,” said Keith. “How do you propose to launch it?”

“Well, it has nothing but ACS jets,” said Azmi. “And I don’t dare put it out there on its own with those dark-matter creatures swarming around; it would probably get sucked into their gravity. But we’ve already seen that the dark-matter beings have some mobility, so I’m assuming they won’t be in this exact spot forever. I’ve programmed a standard payload carrier to take the cube away from here, but come back in a hundred years and dump it about twenty klicks from the shortcut. After that, the time capsule’s own ACS jets should be able to hold it in place relative to the exit point.”

“Excellent,” said Keith. “Is the launcher ready, too?”

Azmi nodded.

“Can you launch it from down here?”

“Of course.”

“Let’s do so, then.”

The three of them exited the bay, and took a lift up to the docking control room, which had angled windows that overlooked the interior of the cavernous hangar. Azmi took a seat in front of a console and began operating controls. Under his command, a motorized flatbed rolled into the bay, carrying a cylindrical payload carrier. Mechanical arms mated the cube to the clamps on the front of the carrier.

“Depressurizing the bay,” said Azmi.

Shimmering forcefield sheets started to close in from three of the four walls and the floor and ceiling, forcing the air in the bay out through vents in the rear wall. When all the air had been swept up and compressed into tanks, the forcefield sheets collapsed, leaving an interior vacuum.

“Opening space door,” Azmi said, operating another control. The segmented curving outer wall began to slide up into the ceiling. Blackness became visible, but the glare of the bay’s internal lighting washed out the stars.

Azmi touched some more buttons. “Activating time-capsule electronics.” He then tapped a key, initiating a preprogrammed sequence for the tractor-beam emitter mounted on the rear bay wall. The payload carrier lifted off the flatbed, flew over the floor plates, passed the spindly form of a repair skiff that was parked inside the bay, and headed out into space.

“Powering up carrier,” said Azmi. The cylinder’s end lit up with the glow of thrusters, and the contraption rapidly receded from view.

“And that,” said Azmi, “is that.”

“Now what?” asked Keith.

Azmi shrugged. “Now just forget about it. Either this will work, or it won’t—probably won’t.”

Keith nodded. “Excellent work, guys. Thank you. It’s—”

“Rissa to Lansing,” said a voice over the speakers.

Keith looked up. “Open. Hi, Rissa.”

“Hi, hon. We’re ready to take our first whack at communicating with the dark-matter creatures.”

“I’m on my way. Close.” He smiled at Azmi and Hek. “Sometimes, you know, my staff is almost too efficient.”

Keith rode up to the bridge and took his seat in the center of the back row. The holographic bubble was filled not with the normal space view but rather with red circles against a pale white background, a plot of the locations of the dark-matter spheres.

“Okay,” said Rissa. “We’re going to try communicating with the dark-matter beings using radio and visual signals. We’ve deployed a special probe that will do the actual signaling. It’s located about eight light-seconds off the starboard side of the ship; I’m going to operate it by comm laser. Of course, the dark-matter beings may already have detected our presence, but, then again, they may not have. And just in case the dark-matter beings turn out to be the Slammers, or something equally nasty, it seems prudent to have their attention drawn to an expendable probe rather than Starplex itself.”

“ ‘Dark-matter beings,’ ” repeated Keith. “That’s a bit of a mouthful, no? Surely we can come up with a better name for them.”

“How about ‘darkies’?” said Rhombus, helpfully.

Keith cringed. “That’s not a good idea.” He thought for a second, then looked up, grinning. “What about MACHO men?”

Jag rolled all four eyes and made a disgusted bark.

“How does ‘darmats’ sound?” asked Thor.

Rissa nodded. “Darmats it is.” She addressed everyone in the room. “Well, as you all know, Hek has been cataloging the signal groups he’s picked up from the darmats. On the assumption that each group is a word, we’ve identified the single most commonly used one. For the first message, I’m going to send a looping repeat of that word. We assume it’s innocuous—the darmat equivalent of ‘the,’ or some such. Granted, the repetition will convey no meaningful information, but with luck the darmats will recognize it as an attempt to communicate.” She turned to Keith. “Permission to proceed, Director?”

Keith smiled. “Be my guest.”

Rissa touched a control. “Transmitting now.”

Lights flashed on Rhombus’s web. “Well, that certainly did something,” he said. “The conversation level has increased dramatically. All of them talking at once.”

Rissa nodded. “We’re hoping they’ll triangulate on the probe as the source.”

“I’d say they’ve figured it out,” said Thor, a moment later, pointing at the display. Five of the world-sized creatures had begun to move toward the probe.

“Now the tricky part begins,” said Rissa. “We’ve got their attention, but can we communicate with them?”

Keith knew that if anyone could pull it off, it would be his wife, who had been part of the team that had first communicated with the Ibs. That effort had started with a simple exchange of nouns—this pattern of lights meant “table,” that one meant “ground,” and so on. Even then, there had been difficulties. The Ib body was so different from the bipedal human design that for many concepts they had no terms: stand up, run, sit down, chair, clothing, male, female. And because they’d always lived under cloud cover, for countless other ideas—day, night, month, year, constellation—there were no common Ibese words. Meanwhile, the Ibs had been trying to convey concepts that were central to their lives: biological gestalt, all-encompassing vision, and the many metaphorical meanings for roll ahead and roll back.

But that exercise had been a piece of cake compared with communicating with world-sized beings. Indeed, the Ibs had had no trouble understanding that particular metaphor—enjoyable, nonnutritive food being equated with ease—just as humans had no difficulty with the Ibese expression for the same sentiment, “downward slope.” Communicating with aliens as big as Jupiter who might or might not be intelligent, might or might not be able to see, might or might not understand any principle of physics or mathematics, could prove impossible.

“The babble on all two hundred frequencies is continuing,” said Rhombus.

Rissa nodded. “But no way to tell if it’s chatter amongst the spheres, or responses aimed at us.” She touched another button. “I’m going to try again with a loop of a different, almost-as-common darmat word.”

This time, the radio cacophony was halted by one darmat who was apparently shushing the others. And then that darmat repeated a simple, three-word sentence over and over again.

“Time to play a hunch,” said Rissa.

“How so?” asked Keith.

“Well, the first question we would ask in a circumstance such as this would be ‘Who are you?’ ” Hek and I had PHANTOM sample all the darmat words, and devise a signal that followed the apparent rules for valid word construction but had not, as far as we’ve been able to detect, been used by the darmats. We hope they’ll take this signal to be Starplex’s name.”

Rissa broadcast the made-up word several times—and, at last, the first breakthrough: the same sphere that had shushed the others repeated the term back at the probe.

“The rain in Spain,” said Rissa, grinning, “falls mainly on the plain.”

“A thousand pardons,” said Rhombus. “My translator must be broken.”

Rissa was still grinning. “It’s not broken. It’s just that I think she’s got it—I think we’ve made contact.”

Keith gestured at the display. “Which one is talking to us?”

Ropes danced on Rhombus’s console. “That one,” he said as a blue halo appeared around one of the red circles. He operated his console some more. “Here, let me give you a better picture. Now that we’ve got the green star for light, I can get good views of the individual darmats.” The red circle disappeared, replaced with a gray-on-black rendering of the sphere.

“Can you increase the contrast?” asked Keith.

“A pleasure to do so.” The parts of the sphere that had been gray or smoky now showed in a much wider range of intensities, all the way through to pure white.

Keith regarded it. With the enhanced contrast, a pair of vertical white convection lines were visible going from pole to pole, flaring out at the equator. “A cat’s eye,” he said.

Rissa nodded. “It does look like one, doesn’t it?” She touched some controls. “Okay, Cat’s Eye, let’s see how intelligent you are.” A horizontal black bar appeared floating in the holo bubble, about a meter long and fifteen centimeters tall. “That bar represents a series of fusion lamps on the probe,” said Rissa. “The lamps have been turned off since the probe was deployed. Now, watch.” She tapped a key on her console. The black bar turned electric pink for three seconds, went black again for three seconds, turned pink twice in rapid succession, blacked out for another three seconds, then blinked on three times. “When the bar is pink, I’ve got all the fusion lamps on,” said Rissa. “The probe is also broadcasting white radio noise when the lights are on, and silence when they’re off. I’ve set the bridge speakers to the frequency used by Cat’s Eye.”

The speakers were silent, but Keith could see indicators blinking on Rhombus’s panel, showing chatter on some of the other frequencies.

Rissa waited about half a minute, then touched a key. The whole sequence—one blink, two blinks, three blinks—repeated itself.

This time there was an immediate response: three darmat words, which PHANTOM translated over the speakers as three distinctive patterns of bleeps and bloops.

“Well,” said Lianne, “if we’re lucky, that’s darmat talk for one, two, three.”

“Unless,” said Thor, “it’s darmat for ‘what the hell—?’ ”

Rissa smiled, and pushed the same key. The probe winked out one, two, three again, and Cat’s Eye responded with the same three words. “Okay,” said Rissa. “Now for the real test.” She pressed another key, and everyone watched as the indicator bar winked in reverse sequence: three, two, one.

The darmat responded with three words. Keith couldn’t quite tell for sure, but—

“Got it!” crowed Rissa. “Those were the same three words Cat’s Eye said before, but in the opposite order. He understands what we’re saying—and therefore has at least a rudimentary intelligence.” Rissa ran the sequence again, and this time PHANTOM substituted the English words “three, two, one,” in a synthesized male voice with an old-fashioned French accent—apparently that was to be the standard for darmats.

The bridge staff was rapt as Rissa pressed on, learning the Darmat words for the numerals four through one hundred. Neither she nor PHANTOM could detect any kind of repeating pattern in the word construction that would allow one to deduce the base the darmats used for counting; it seemed that each numeral was represented by a word unrelated to all the others. She stopped at one hundred, afraid the darmat would get bored by the game and cease communicating with her at all.

Next came exercises in simple math: two blinks, a six-second pause—double the normal length—two more blinks, another six-second pause, and then four blinks.

Cat’s Eye dutifully provided the words two, two, and four each of the first five times Rissa repeated the sequence, but on the sixth, it finally caught the intended meaning of the prolonged gaps: a six-second gap meant a word was missing in the middle. PHANTOM didn’t wait for Rissa’s confirmation; when Cat’s Eye next spoke, it translated the darmat sentence as “two plus two equals four”—adding the terms for the two operators to the translation database. In short order, Rissa also elicited the darmat words for “minus,” “multiplied by,” “divided by,” “greater than,” and “less”.

“I think,” said Rissa, grinning from ear to ear, “that there’s no doubt that we’re dealing with highly intelligent beings.”

Keith shook his head in wonder as Rissa continued to use mathematics to work out more vocabulary. She soon had the darmat terms for “correct” and “incorrect” (or “yes” and “no”)—which she hoped would also be their terms for “right” and “wrong” in other areas. She then had Rhombus move the probe in specific ways (carefully avoiding splashing the darmat with hot ACS exhaust), and that led to the darmat words for “up,” “down,” “left,” “right,” “in front,” “behind,” “receding,” “approaching,” “turning,” “tumbling,” “circling,” “fast,” “slow,” and more.

By moving the probe in a path right around Cat’s Eye, Rissa was able to get the darmat word for “orbit,” and soon had picked up the words for “star,” “planet,” and “moon,” as well.

By using colored filters on the probe’s fusion lamps, Rissa then elicited the darmat words for various hues. She next broadcast her first simple original sentence, beginning with the arbitrary sign they’d originally assigned to the probe that was Starplex’s mouthpiece: “Starplex moves toward green star.” Rissa then had Rhombus make the probe do precisely that.

Cat’s Eye understood at once, responding with the word for “correct.” He then sent his own sentence: “Cat’s Eye moves away from Starplex,” then turned word into deed. Rissa replied with “correct.”

When alpha shift was over, Keith went back to his apartment to shower and eat, but Rissa kept on long into ship’s night, building up a bigger and bigger vocabulary. Never once did Cat’s Eye show the slightest sign of impatience or fatigue. By the time gamma shift was coming on duty, Rissa herself was exhausted, and she turned the translation duties over to Hek. They worked for four days—sixteen shifts—slowly building up a darmat vocabulary. Cat’s Eye never let his attention falter. Finally, Rissa said, they could engage in a simple conversation. Keith, as director, would vet the questions, but Rissa would actually pose them.

“Ask him how long he’s been here,” said Keith.

Rissa leaned into the microphone stalk emerging from her console.

“How long have you been here?”

The answer came quickly: “Since the time we started talking, times one hundred times one hundred times one hundred times one hundred times one hundred times one hundred.”

PHANTOM’s voice came on, interpolating: “That is approximately four trillion days, or roughly ten billion years.”

“Of course,” said Rissa, “he could be speaking figuratively—just meaning to convey a very long time.”

“Ten billion years,” said Jag, “is, however, a rough approximation of the age of the universe.”

“Well, if you were ten billion years old, I suppose you’d have a lot of patience, too,” said Thor, chuckling.

“Maybe ask him a different way,” suggested Lianne.

“Is that how long all of you have been here?” said Rissa into the mike.

“This group that duration,” said the translated voice. “This one, duration since the time we started talking, times one hundred times one hundred times one hundred times fifty.”

“That translates to approximately five hundred thousand years,” said PHANTOM.

“Perhaps he’s saying this group of darmats is ten billion years old,” said Rissa, “but he’s only half a million himself.”

“ ‘Only,’ ” said Lianne.

“Now tell him how old we are,” said Keith.

“You mean Starplex’s age?” asked Rissa. “Or the age of the Commonwealth? Or the age of our species?”

“We’re comparing civilizations, I guess,” said Keith. “So the comparisons would be the oldest Commonwealth race.” He looked at his little hologram of Rhombus. “That’s the Ibs, who have existed in their current species form for about a million years, right?”

Rhombus’s web rippled in agreement.

Rissa nodded and keyed her mike. “We duration since the time we started talking times one hundred times one hundred times one hundred times one hundred. This one duration since the time we started talking times one hundred plus one hundred.” She touched the off switch. “I told him that as a civilization, we’re a million years old, but Starplex itself is just two years old.”

Cat’s Eye replied by reiterating the number for its own personal age, followed by the word for minus, then repeating the equation for Starplex’s tiny age, adding the word for “equals,” and then reiterating the same sequence it had used to express its own age. “Very loosely,” said Rissa, “I think he’s saying that our age is nothing compared to his.”

“Well, he’s right about that,” said Keith, laughing. “I wonder what it would feel like to be that old?”