Yellow. A dry, ancient yellow. Smooth sands of it, shimmering, flecked with tan ridges of weathered rock. The Eye peered at Ra, which hung forever directly overhead. Out from the hard-baked center, the subsolar point, swept winds heavy with pungent acid dust. Dunes marched before the winds in ranks a hundred kilometers long. Slowly they swerved as the air currents circled, following a trade-wind pattern, returning to the blistered pupil of the Eye, surging in a timeless cycle.
The Eye’s edge faded into russet, then into brown. A hint of moisture; scrub desert. Rumpled red hills built into a concentric ring of mountains: socket of the Eye. Snow dotted the peaks white. High valleys cupped cold air over the steel-blue sheen of lakes.
The steady rub of the Eye winds had smoothed the land. The breeze stirred up pink dust, thick sheets that poured over the high mountain slopes and down, out-ward from the Eye, filling the valleys with a roiling haze. Only in the shifting spots where neither clods nor dust lay upon the land could the distant telescopes see the dry plains and carved valleys of Isis.
The single, immense, concentric mountain range was intricate and fault cut. Muddy rivers ran down the broad slopes, away from the Eye, toward the planet-circling sea. Farther from the Eye, scrub desert yielded to matted vegetation. Brown grass. Something like trees. Shades of brown, of pinks and grays and pale orange.
A fine dust hung in the lower air, fuzzing optical images, stealing definition. Only in the infrared was the seeing good enough to distinguish objects in the five-meter scale range. Large flora. Bands of vegetation crowding the snaking rivers.
The IR peered down and picked out detail. Dark beds of plant life in the sea. Grasslands. And then, movement.
“ReppleDex, this is Command. You guys got that system up yet, or do we kick ass out there?”
We got good definition in the radio right now, Ted. Give it a—
“I’m looking at it, Alex. What we want is the interferometry—”
“They’re point sources, aren’t they?”
“Nigel, this is Ted. Get off the comm lines.”
“I’m a consultant, remember? Just eavesdropping, anyway.”
“Okay, so long as you don’t get in the way of—Hey, RD, when can we have—”
He’s right, Ted, we still can’t resolve the sources. They’re damned small. Any really big dish we could see at a range of one AU, so I’d think by now we shoulda picked up—
“Okay, okay, that’s interesting. But—”
—and the reason we’ve never been able to make sense out of the signals, we’ve got that figured now—
“Oh? What?”
There are these point sources, maybe a million of ’em, but they’re not transmitting together. I mean, they’re not in synch phase-locked. All the sources are trying to send the same stuff but they’re all a little behind or a little ahead of each other, so it gets muddied up.
“Beats the hell out of me, why somebody’d pick that way for interstellar communication.”
“Alex, what is the length over which the signals are correlated?”
“Nigel, I asked you—”
“Leave off a bit, eh? Alex?”
Well, lemme run this here … Yeah, the spatial correlation length is about thirty klicks, maybe a little more.
“How does it fit in with the topography?”
Here, plug me in on that multichannel, Ted, and—Yeah, there it is.
“Does it follow the valley profiles?”
Uh, yeah. Sort of. Sources are strung out along the valleys. Not many in the mountains.
“The valleys are where the best living is. The water. Over to you, Ted.”
“Many thanks, Nigel. It is nice to get a word in now and then. Let me get this straight, Alex. If you scan the interferometer across the valley, you find the signal is coherent. All the point sources are sending together?”
Correct.
“But if you go to the next valley, the sources are sending something slightly ahead or behind of the first valley?”
Yeah. That’s what’s so goddamn strange. The bit rate is still low, too. And the sources, they’re not steady.
“How so?”
Well, every few minutes one of ’em will drop out. A new one comes in every now and then, too, so the number is about constant.
“Huh. Look, Alex, I called to ask about the outflyer dish. You were going to have it on line by 1400 hours, and that’s come and gone. We need that bigger base line to get the definition we need, and we damn well need it now.”
“Give it a rest, Ted.”
“Nigel, I thought you—”
“Merely kibitzing, if you please. I’m sure Alex will have matters cleared up at his end if you cease ragging him about it. I wanted to take a moment to review all this, Ted. You’ve got the optical and IR profiles right in front of you, I’m sure.”
“Yeah, you can come down here to Command and see them if you want.”
“Already have. I’m sticking to this console, to use the self-programming capabilities. Anyway, Command is crowded.”
