“Well, I doubt an ETI is going to be interested in snazzy Web page design. The site is information-rich, though — you’re looking at the works of Chopin, here, rendered in compressed binary — and encoded in forms that ought to make it easy for the ETIs to pick up. Bait, you see. And if the ETIs do find my site -
look, this is a long shot, but it’s cheap to set up and maintain … and the payoff would be of incalculable value. Isn’t it worth trying? I’m not alone in this,” he said, a bit defensively. “There’s a network of researchers, mostly in the States …”
He told me something of a bizarre-sounding online community of like minds. “We call ourselves the Slan(t).” He had to write that down for me. “ Slan is an old science fiction reference — made up to date, you see … It sums up how we see ourselves. The Slan(t)ers are a new kind of community, a bunch of outsiders, the fringe united by new technology.”
“I bet there are a lot of Californians.”
He grinned. “As it happens, yeah. It was set up long before I joined.” He said there was no hierarchy to Slan(t); it was all “bottom-up.” “It’s a self-organizing community. The hardest thing to model online is social interaction — the kind of unconscious feedback we humans give each other face to face, feedback that moderates behavior. So we devised a system where we would moderate each other’s contributions to the clickstream. If you are uncivil, or just plain uninteresting, your scores go down, and everybody sees.”
“A bit like eBay.”
“Like that, yes.”
“Plenty of scope for bullying.”
“But that’s antisocial, too, and there are always plenty of people who would mark the bully down accordingly. It works. It is homeostatic — actually another example of feedback. But this time it’s negative feedback that tends to make a system stable, rather than drive it out of control.” He talked on, describing the Slan(t)ers’ projects.
I felt awkward. This was the kind of conversation we’d had as kids at school, or later as booze-fueled students: excitable, complex, full of ideas, the more outlandish the better. Peter had always been good at that, because he’d learned to be. Whereas other fat kids, it’s said, get a break from bullying by being funny, Peter’s defense was to have wilder ideas than anybody else. But now it wasn’t the same. We weren’t kids anymore.
And there was something else I couldn’t quite read in the way he spoke, this big, clumsy man with folded hands and his habit of adjusting invisible spectacles, talking earnestly. I had the impression of shadows, ranked behind him in the electronic dark, as if Peter was just a front for a whole network of densely interconnected, like-minded obsessives, all working for ends I didn’t understand.
Anyhow Slan(t) sounded like one giant computer game to me. “Interesting.”
“You don’t really think so,” he said. “But that’s okay.”
“But now,” I said, “perhaps we do see the aliens, in the Kuiper Anomaly. Isn’t that what you’ve been saying on TV?”
“That’s obviously a gross signature of something out there. Yes, it’s exciting.” His face was closed. “But I have a feeling that the origin of the Anomaly is going to turn out to be stranger than we think. And besides, it’s not the only bit of evidence we have.”
“It isn’t?”
“Perhaps there are traces out there, if you know how to look. Traces of life, of other minds at work. But they’re fragmentary, difficult for us to recognize and interpret. But I, well, as I told you I have this facility for pattern matching.”
I looked into my coffee cup, wondering how I could get out of the conversation politely.
But he had rotated his chair until he faced the desktop, and was briskly working a mouse. Images flickered over the screen. He settled on a star field — obviously color-enhanced — the stars were yellow, crimson, blue, against a purple-black background. Around a central orange-white pinpoint were two concentric rings, like smoke rings. The inner one was quite fine, but the outer, perhaps four times its diameter, was fatter, brighter. Both the rings were off-center, and ragged, lumpy, broken.
I searched for something to say. “It looks like a Fireball XL-Five end credit.”
Sometimes he lacked humor. “ Fireball was in black and white.”
“Tell me what I’m seeing, Peter.”
“It’s the center of the Galaxy,” he said. “Twenty-five thousand light-years away. A reconstruction, of course, from infrared, X-ray, gamma ray, radio images, and the like; the light from the center doesn’t reach us because of dust clouds. The sun is one of four hundred billion stars, stuck out in a small spiral arm — you know the Galaxy is a spiral. At the core, everything is much more crowded. And everything is big and bright. It’s Texas in there.” He pointed at the image. “Some of these ’stars’ are actually clusters. These rings are clouds of gas and dust; the outer one is maybe a hundred light-years across.”
“And the bright object at the center—”
“Another star cluster. Very dense. It’s thought there is a black hole in there, with the mass of a million suns.”
“I don’t see any aliens.”
He traced out the rings. “These rings are expanding. Hundreds of miles a second. And the less structured clouds are hot, turbulent. It’s thought that the big rings are debris from massive explosions in the core. There was a giant bang about a million years ago. The most recent eruption seems to have been twenty- seven thousand years ago. The light took twenty-five thousand years to get here — it arrived about two thousand years ago; the Romans might have seen something … If you look wider you can see the debris of more explosions, reaching much deeper back in time, some of them still more immense.”
“Explosions?”
“Nobody knows what causes them. Stars are simple objects, George, physically speaking. So are galaxies, even. Much simpler than bacteria, say. There really shouldn’t be such mysteries. I think it’s possible we’re seeing intelligence there — or rather stupidity.”
I laughed, but it was a laugh of wonder at the audacity of the idea. “The Galaxy center as a war zone?”
He didn’t laugh. “Why not?”
I felt chilled, but I had no clear idea why. “And how does Kuiper fit into this?”
“Well, I’ve no idea. Not yet.” He pulled up an image of his own face on CNN. “I’m hoping that if I can tap into the interest in Kuiper, I’ll get resources to push some of these questions farther. For instance, there may be links between the core explosions and Earth’s past.”
“Links?”
“Possibly the explosions tie in with extinction events, for instance.”
“I thought an asteroid impact killed off the dinosaurs.”
“That was a one-off. There have been eighteen other events. You can see it in the fossil record. Eighteen that we know of …”
I lifted my mug to my lips, but found it drained of coffee. I put the mug on the computer table and stood. “I ought to start my day.”
He looked at me doubtfully. “I’ve gone on too long. I’m sorry; I don’t get much chance to talk; most people wouldn’t listen at all … You think I’m a crank.”
“Not at all.”
“Of course you do.” He stood, looming over me, and grinned. Again there was that disarming self-
deprecation, and I sensed, uncomfortable again, that he really was glad to have renewed his connection with me, regardless of my reaction. “Maybe I am a crank. But that doesn’t mean the questions aren’t valid. Anyhow, you’re the one with the abducted sister.”
“That’s true. I ought to go.”
“Come back and tell me what you find.”
Chapter 7
Magnus sat cross-legged, hunched over the little wooden game board.