MARCIA KHATAMI: Give us an example, Doctor?
DR. SPEARPATH: Sure. Ancient Egypt. When they built the pyramids in a pattern that mimicked the constellation Orion, their prodigious size sent a visual message-both through time and to the god-observers they thought to dwell above-saying “Look! We’re intelligent and we’re here!”
PROFESSOR NOOZONE: That “Orion theory” is disputed-
DR. SPEARPATH: True. What’s not disputed is this. The Old Kingdom pharaohs poured monumental resources into the effort, without heed to “conflicting interests.” They simply did the biggest, most noticeable thing possible.
MARCIA KHATAMI: So… if I am following you… and I hope that I am not… it seems you’re saying… that your SETI search strategy expects to find prodigious beacons, transmitted continuously and in all directions… altruistically… by civilizations that don’t feel any need to do it efficiently… because they…
PROFESSOR NOOZONE:… because they practice some superadvanced equivalent of tyranny. A universal downpression?… or slavery?
Yeyewata. My eyes fill wit’ tears as I say… wicked… You caught me in a lapse of imagination this time, Hannah. I-and-I truly never thought of that before.
15.
“There’s a leak.”
Not a phrase that any astronaut likes to hear. Not in space, where precious air might spill away in seconds. Or during reentry, when the same gases turn from friend to fiery foe-searing, etching, and screaming just beyond your fragile heat shield, seeking a way in.
But no, Gerald knew that Akana Hideoshi meant another kind of leak. One that bureaucrats took even more seriously. The brigadier’s grimace flickered and rippled on a flat viewscreen, despite heavy image enhancement, with her crackling words barely audible over a deafening roar, as the tiny capsule bore Gerald homeward. Still, her vexation came through, loud and clear.
“Somebody tattled about our little find. Rumors have taken off, in all ten estates. During the last hour, I’ve had calls from five senators, four tribunes, a dozen news agencies, and God knows how many top-rated amazones…”
Her face wavered onscreen, almost vanishing as the return craft bucked and rattled, turning its sharp nose for a cross-range correction.
“We’ve narrowed… possibilities down to a blabbermouth… at Marshall, a possible lurker daemon in… NASA-Havana mainframe… and that zillionaire tourist you folks were hosting up there. Now that’s gratitu…”
Akana’s image now crackled away completely, disappearing under static, as the capsule stole ai-resources from communication and transferred them to navigation. Still, in the old days, there would be no contact at all, during this phase of descent, when ionized flame surrounded you like the halo of a righteous saint. Or the nimbus of a falling angel.
Or a starry messenger, bearing something luminous and tantalizing. A harbinger of good news, perhaps. Or bad.
Violating several rules, he had taken the Artifact from its foam case, to hold on his lap like an infant during this wild ride. From the moment the hatch closed, sealing his departure from the station, and all through a sequence of short impulses that pushed the return capsule onto its homeward path, he kept turning the glossy cylinder in gloved hands, inspecting it from many angles, applying every augmented sense available to his spacesuit. Each glint and complex glimmer was recorded-though what it all meant…
Anyway, studying this thing beat the alternative-listening to superheated plasma whine and howl as it began scraping the capsule’s skin. Never a favorite part of this job-entrusting his life to a “reentry vehicle” that had been inflated from a two meter cube, and that weighed little more than he did. Astronauts used to rate higher-class accommodations. But, then, astronauts used to be heroes.
Abruptly, the general’s voice and image returned.
“… summoned to the White House! And what can I say? That we’ve recorded a hundred and twenty previously unknown alphabets and symbolic systems? And glimpsed a few dozen tantalizing, hazy globes, that might be other worlds? That shadowy figures keep rising toward the surface and then sinking again, like the cryptic answers in a toy eight ball?”
“Well, yes, you could start with all that,” he mumbled, knowing that his words went nowhere. Only a ground-based laser could punch through the ionization shell. For now, communication was one-way.
As it was, so far, with the Artifact. For days, he and Saleh had presented it with a long series of “SETI messages,” prepared by enthusiasts across six decades, ranging from simple, mathematical pulse codes all the way to animated slide shows, cleverly designed to illustrate laws of scale. Laws of physics and chemistry. Laws of nature and laws of humanity. Frustrated by the murky response-a swirl of ambiguous symbologies-they had moved on to basic tutorial programs. The kind made for children learning a second language…
… when, abruptly, a command came for Gerald to come down. To bring the object home for study in proper facilities.
Fine, terrific. Except for the accompanying gag order.
Ganesh had complained: “There are international protocols on this very subject. There must be open sharing of all discoveries that might deal with life and intelligence beyond the Earth. It is a treaty.”
To which a NASA attorney replied-“There is no obligation to go public with a hoax.”
Which it could be, after all. There was even a betting pool, among the members of General Hideoshi’s team. Top wager? That Carlos Ventana, the Peruvian industrialist, living aboard the station as a paid guest, might have smuggled the thing in his private luggage and somehow released it overboard, for Gerald to “discover.” Ventana certainly had access to world-class gimmickry, and was well-known for a puckish personality.
But no. The Artifact couldn’t have simply been tossed overboard. Its glitter had been on debris monitors for months, orbiting more than a thousand klicks higher, where only the tether-grabber could reach. A hoax? Maybe. But someone else, with bountiful ingenuity and prodigious resources, would have to sneak the thing into a steep trajectory, in some unknown way. Maybe years ago.
“We’ve done a simulation, using one of the big mainds at Plexco,” Akana continued, when the static let up briefly. “So far, the object has displayed two traits that can’t be mimicked with known technology-the lack of a clear power source… and that layered optical effect. The illusion of infinite depth from any angle. If it weren’t for that…”
Akana’s voice crackled away for the last time as Gerald’s reentry capsule passed through MDL-maximum dynamical load-an especially gut-wrenching phase. Just to his left, on a nearby data display, the capsule’s ai blithely recalculated a low-but-significant chance of catastrophic failure. Better, far better, to seek distraction. With his teeth rattling, Gerald subvocalized a command.
“Music! Theme based on something by Elfman. Free-improv modulo, matching tempo to ambient sonic rhythms.”
A blare of horns and thumping of percussion suddenly pealed forth, interwoven with wild violin sweeps, taken from the composer’s 2025 theme score of Mars Needs Women, but ai-libbed in order to crescendo with the capsule’s reverberations. You could only do this with a few human composers. Anyway, if you have to live for a while inside a beating drum…
That helped a bit, letting Gerald turn his attention away from the hot plasma, centimeters from his head, and back onto the Artifact in his lap. An array of swirling vortices appeared to descend into its milky depths, underlapping and dividing endlessly into a quasi-fractal abyss.