When he had the time he used some of his precious store of wood, shaping and planing the boards until they had a satin finish. Sawdust exuded its sweet weight into the impersonal ship’s air. He scavenged some of the forced-growth cellulose stands from the greenhouses, and worked the soft chunks with earnest energy, hammering and planing and using the ripsaw for texture in the speckled grain. There was not much strength in the stuff but it would make furniture. It reminded him that he, too, was three-quarters water, rushing and subsiding according to the hollow knocking in his veins, a hydrostatic being. With a pinch of salt added, to signify his origin.
Every spring when he was a boy, Nigel remembered, he had gone for hikes in the wet meadows. There and in the roadside ditches he would hear a small, shrilling chorus which sounded for all the world like an endlessly repeated, “We’re here, we’re here, we’re here.” Frogs, confident little fellows, announcing their occupancy of that particular ecological niche. He suspected that now, to some greater ear than ours, man’s expanding bubble of radio babble must make a similar ringing that billowed but a short way into the night. Only when nearby would it be bothersome, when one could pick out one strident voice at a time.
From the heights of the nearby cloaked hills, the frogs blended, not too badly, with all the other ambitious voices that, in croaks and chirrups, were saying the same thing—We’re here, we’re here. A bicyclist, intent on his destination, might wheel through the frog chorus, sensing it was there but giving it no attention, not trying to make out the myriad voices. A truly advanced civilization in the galaxy would probably do the same thing to the soft buzz of radio, or to the occasional flyby probe humming, mosquitolike, past its ear.
Others might take a casual slap at such a passing irritant. Or even call for pest control.
Wolf 359 was a dim M8 star with only a tiny nearby volume capable of supporting life. Yet a world orbited there, one remarkably similar to the one around Epsilon Eridani: small, bleak, with a thin wisp of atmosphere. Not ancient, like the skyhook world, but there were signs that once it had been inhabited. No biosphere remained. The small lakes were drying up. The M-class stars are the longest lived of all, and the spectra of Wolf 359 said it was as old as the galaxy. There were aeons enough for life to arise beneath this lukewarm sun.
And time for it to die. The air and land carried traces of the chemical imbalances which are the very minimal definition of life. These signs were slowly ebbing away, but they argued for a biosphere that must have existed within the last few million years.
Around the small planet there were two moons. One was quite sizable, barely bound to its primary. The other was smaller, perhaps a few kilometers across. It had odd markings here and there, markings which might be natural results of meteorite bombardment over time, and then again might not. The probe caught only a fleeting glimpse of it as it arced around the brown and weathered world below, and then went on. It passed by a large gas giant planet on its way out of the system.
God this is really dog work, measuring this and analyzing that, all for the astro types the banded planet coming in from the left Yeah when you think about it what difference does it make, they’re summing the same data base back Earthside vast and yellow Keep totting it up, you never know a sprinkling of light in the plane of rotation Okay okay God Nigel just ’cause you’re team head doesn’t mean you can’t kid around a points of brilliance, some white and others ruddy with the reflected glow of the giant world Yeah I know her the probe swooping in for a boosting rendezvous Works in agro I think, bunks over in P4 on a timed flyby of two moons Not a looker but I hear falling powerless Ol Aarons said, Buck teeth? She could eat an apple through a tennis racket an’ the whole crowd they sipping of the stellar winds and calibrating particle energies, plasma density, UV flux Lavera you’re falling behind now closing on the first moon Funny getting a lot of backscattered light from the rotation plane an ice disk probably it’s pretty cold this far out grids deploying, lenses swinging to face the oncoming pocked and speckled face Hey I’ve resolved that so-called ice disk it’s not grains at all it’s a long string of stuff, pretty evenly spaced like beads on a string, pearls really ‘cause they’re pretty white an’ the radar says they’re smooth, no backscatter in the centimeter wavelengths deep rutted valleys cast long shadows at the blue terminator Lot of little sources in the plane, but only out from this moon, I mean there aren’t any farther in a crust of ice streaked black Probe’s passing close to one of ’em in few minutes no craters First flash looks like some structure kinda oblong must be an asteroid or maybe a broken-up moon tidal forces maybe pulled it apart and left all this crap drifting in toward the primary a gray dot of light like the others swelling I should think not elongated Yeah why? two blobs of lighter gray separate from the central image Why should debris of that type fetch up against this one moon? Seems some would get by it the two dollops now resolving into circles Damn funny formation the angle shifts as the probe moves, coming closer, focusing, and abruptly a brilliant flare burns in the field of view Whazzat so fast so that the probe stops down the input, applying polarizers and filters It’s reflection, reflected light from Wolf 359 until its motion carries it beyond and the light ebbs and it can see better the tiny control cabin at the exact point between the two huge sun sails Must be using them to get some push and behind it the dark mass of clotted ices and the restraining webbing that fixes this cargo in place Launching out from that moon, you think? the sails patiently catching the red photons of the distant sun and tilting so that the momentum they impart pushes the dusky ice gently out from the gas giant Lavera take a line of sight on these things, work out their trajectory assuming for simplicity that something’s putting them out at regular intervals from that moon for decades until the gravitional tug of the planet is balanced by the pull of the wan red star Yeah they’re winding out all-right, nice little spiral distant motes spread in a broad smooth curve Only it stops farther out and they kinda bunch up as they hesitate and then empty their small fuel reserves through low-thrust nozzles, outgassing vapor that has boiled from the surface of the ices they carry an’ looks like they peel off an’ come back in movin’ pretty slow though this time moving not in spirals but in long, low-energy hyperbolic orbits an’ they start spreadin’ out pickin’ up speed I guess plunging down in the grip of the banded orange-yellow world, past the roiling brown bands at a higher speed than they have ever known, correcting their courses under instructions from the distant ancient parent moon I’m losin’ them after that, guess they string out gettin’ too far away to pick them up but they’re not gravitationally bound anymore I can tell that falling free at last toward the inner world which began it all millions of years before I should think with that little thrust the voyage carrying valuable ice which will intersect the small planet’s orbit and plunge into the wisp of atmosphere Right Nigel I make it five, six hunnert years to get into the inner system looks like that terratype is the target, too, or close to it so that the sky begins to glow with a shower of small meteors, shedding vapor as they fall free All this just to move chunks of ice? the icebergs splitting into showers that sparkle in the night sky above an arid plain I make the rate maybe one a month the sky warms an’ at that rate it’d take forty forevers to sock in an ocean soft, moist breezes stir beneath a dim but perpetual sun Agreed, but that is precisely how long they may very well have the icebergs coming to aid a biosphere which is now long dead but can with the steady pressure of chemical laws begin again What’s more, you’ll note there were lakes back on that forlorn little speck the probe pivots and below a stark face rushes by Point is, what’s sending them? plains cut in rectangular blocks, antlike black forms moving on designated roads to pick up their loads of ice and rock and return to a central smudge of tread-churned brown Something that can use solar energy, must be to last this long vast shining screens, a sprawl of manufacturing plants, all ice-crusted The machines must be able to repair themselves by the same argument, build new ones like themselves when needed, guide the ones in flight slow and steady, chipping at blue-veined mountains, loading electromagnetic slingshot launchers Who’d set all this running? I mean what’s the point of the ice has wrenched and split under the changing forces which came as weight was removed and the moon is cracked, faulted, and pitted as it is eaten Whatever or whoever lived back there, on that planet, millions of years ago, and set this in motion the machines keep on, gnawing and dying and being replaced But they’re gone Nigel, the biosphere’s wiped the probe swings by the ice moon and arrows past the gas giant, changing its momentum to boost outward for the next star hanging a dozen light-years away Surely but those black specks don’t know that the ramscoop cuts in So they’re running on? Christ doesn’t make sense when whatever finished off a whole goddamn bio-sphere came through, I mean why not just knock off these little rumbling, the magnetic fields reach out and grasp ions to flavor the new fusion fire I’ll fancy we can’t say, from this trifling investment of fact but mind, there was a Watcher back there round that planet the gas giant is blurred in its exhaust Well might have been we didn’t get a good look an’ Landon says he doesn’t see that much similarity leaving Good enough, but how’s he to explain the other fact? the dead worlds far behind, the moon stirring What fact? I don’t outward That there was no Watcher round that moon
THREE
In 2045 Lancer had paused in its steady one-g acceleration out from Earth, long enough to deploy the largest telescope ever conceived. It was a gossamer-thin array of optical and microwave receivers, flung out like a fishing net. Nigel had worked for days helping to dispatch the sensors in the right order, avoiding the heavy work for fear it would show a spike of strain on his metabolic report.
Men and women cast their net to capture photons; the telescope itself was provided by the distant, white bright speck of their sun. Space is not flat, like the marble Italian foyers Galileo imagined, where his gliding blocks went on forever in ideal experiments carried out free of friction. The mass of those hypothetical blocks would stretch space itself, warp the obliging flat plane. Mass tugs at light. Forced into a curve, light will focus. The symmetry of three dimensions in turn shaped any sizable mass into a sphere, perfect for a lens. Each star was a huge refractor, a gravitational lens.
Lancer dropped sensor nets, starting three light-days out from Sol. The nets gathered in photons like a spring harvest, compiling sharp images of distant stars, resolving detail a mere ten kilometers across. For each star the focal distance from the sun was different, and so the webs had to tack against the wind of particles blowing out from the sun, using the magnetic fields beyond the planets to trim and guide their long scalloping orbits.
Lancer rumbled and forked a pure, blue-hot plasma arc, and pulled away from the gravitational lens that was its native star, leaving the colossal telescope behind. It would be six years before the first dim images would be finished. Ever since the sun had formed from infalling dust, pictures from worlds hundreds of parsecs away had been forming in the spaces far beyond the planets. Those focused stories, now forever lost, had run their courses on the gigantic hypothetical screen, the imaging plane. Through billions of years, until this moment, there had been no one in the theater to watch them.
Lancer’s destination was a mild red dot known in the catalog as Ross 128. It was the sun’s twelfth nearest neighbor, an unremarkable M-5 star. Toward the end of the twentieth century some X-ray astronomers had studied it briefly, comparing the hard radiation from it with our Sun’s. It was a little more active, but once the solar physicists on a NASA grant had milked it, they forgot it. So did everybody else.
The gravitational lens array showed a full-sized solar system, though: five gas giants plus two Earth-sized worlds. A robot probe had reached Ross 128 about the time Lancer went into orbit around Ra. Something had silenced its transmissions as it entered the system.
Lancer was “nearby.” It could study a system far better than any flyby could. Earthside thought that the death of the robot probe was worth a follow-up. Maybe it had smacked into a rock. Or maybe something wanted it to look that way.
Earthside’s strategy was to accumulate-astronomical information, fast, and stir it into the pot with data on the Swarmers and Skimmers. This was a compromise reached by the important space-faring nations, totally outside the aging carcass of the United Nations. The Asian faction wanted to push colonization of the nearby stars as soon as possible. That way, humanity would be dispersed. If the Swarmer-Skimmer fleet returned and destroyed humanity’s space resources, at least the race would be already spread among the stars, and relatively invulnerable.
The Europeans and Americans backed a pure exploratory program. Behind this was calculated advantage. The Asian economies were doing better at capitalism than the societies that had invented the notion in the first place. The Western economics were broke. If colonization started right away, the stars would belong to the short and slant-eyed.
Lancer was ordered to investigate Ross 128, then return home. But Ra was not finished with them. After a year of acceleration, Lancer leveled out at 0.98 light speed. When it damped its fusion plume, the plasma exhaust unfurling behind it dropped in density. The thinner the plasma, the easier radio waves can get through.
At 15:46 hours, June 11, shipboard antennas picked up an intense burst of microwave emission. It came from dead aft and lasted 73 seconds. After that, nothing.
No look I can’t break it down further like I was telling you the data’s all over the board
Dispersion in the pulse from all that crap we’re throwin’ behind us just plain messed up the signal
Not from the EMs though that’s not their frequency we never got anything from ’em up at ten GHz
Okay sure but Ted here wants to know if there’s any chance they sent it
Who can tell Christ no info in that burst at all
Yeah right but lookit the power man—I’d say doesn’t look like a solar flare or anything natural
Course not, too tight a band, and a little star like Ra can’t do much better than hunnert megahertz never make it up to ten gigs and you’re right about the power no way it can be those Ems
Ted I got the calibration on it and it’s a helluva shot of power innat burst doesn’t make sense
Too much power yeah I mean no artificial source would put out that much it’s crazy
Right, if you think they’re broadcasting in all directions, a spherical pulse, then it would take a bloody avalanche of power to register as much as we’re getting
Who’s ’at on the line
Walmsley sounds like, look Nigel, this’s just a tech-talk
Merely sitting in, don’t pay me any mind
Must be artificial though the burst’s so short
This is Ted I’m sure your results are right overall but honestly gentlemen and ladies I don’t believe we can reconcile a power level like that from the EMs or anyone else it must be Ra itself some sort of occasional outburst or
Nonsense, I say
Well Nigel I don’t see how you can simply brush aside
Interesting isn’t it that our exhaust plume distorts the signal enough so that we can’t read it? Decidedly convenient
Well sure but that’s just an accident of
In a seventy-three-second burst you can pack a lot
