He didn’t know the capabilities of the equipment.
“Nandi,” Banichi said. “Our line is thus far infelicitous eight. Multiply by felicitous nine. One has television.”
“Television, nadi?” Line by line transmission. Black and white, yes/no. Blank space off. Object area on. Or reverse.
Damn. Yes .
“ I have a proposition,” he said to Sabin. “Banichi suggests a matrix. Line by line. Like television.”
Jase had already heard. Now Sabin listened, frowning intensely.
“Tell it to C1,” Sabin said, and he went to that console and made his request, not even betting the alien’s hearing was compatible. Light was. Bright dark. They had a matrix of eight by eight, and a black line. Then a new image.
He made a block of eight by eight, image of a man.
“Transmit,” Jase said.
A delay. A delay that stretched on into seconds. Half a minute.
Flashes came back. Image of a man.
“Do you suppose they get it?” Jase asked.
There was no way they could do a matrix entire. It had to be assembled to be read.
“Try sound,” Bren said. “Can we transmit a series of beeps, Imitating the lights? Eight by eight? Simultaneous with the lights?”
C1 looked at Sabin, who nodded.
They transmitted.
Beep.
“Again,” Bren said.
They beeped. It beeped. Series of eight .
“Long beep. Short beep.”
It mirrored.
“One long. Forty-nine fast and short. Do that three times.” He didn’t wait for confirmation. “Give me our ship and their ship in pixels. Nothing fancy. Forty-nine wide by forty nine high.” Felicitous numbers. Entirely arbitrary. His choice. And he hoped to God the opposition didn’t have the atevi’s obsession with numbers.
“C2,” Jase said. “Create an image.”
“Yes, sir.” The next man keyed up. A real image appeared—broke up into largish pixels, became a shape.
“S3,” Jase said. “Alien ship image to C2. Stat. C2, form the image.”
Bren drew a deep breath. Banichi and Jago were near him, Jago in low and quiet tones informing Banichi and their other listeners the gist of what they were doing. Sabin watched as they created their pixel-image. Couldn’t rely on perspective-sense, not on anything fancy. Step by step and no assumptions.
“Transmit?” Bren asked. Sabin nodded.
It went. It came back. The alien mirrored their transmission.
“There was a bird called a parrot,” Bren said quietly. “It mimicked. Didn’t understand all it repeated. I don’t know if they’ll understand us. Transmit: one short, forty-nine long. We see if they figure this. Get me a station image.”
“What when we’ve got it?” Sabin asked. “Attach labels?”
“We’re going to animate our image,” Bren said. “Old-fashioned television. We give them our version of history. We see what they have to say.”
“Do it,” Sabin said, and for a worrisome few minutes, with a flurry of instructions and corrections, several stations scrambled to produce their images. Reunion Station appeared, a simple ring. An alien ship approached. A jagged dotted line went out from the alien craft. Station showed damaged. Alien ship went off and parked.
Their ship arrived.
Diverted to confront the alien ship.
Now what ? Bren asked himself. It was his script. They reached present-time. They were real-time with events. He had to script the next move. And he was petrified.
“Nadiin-ji. How shall we address these strangers? Shall I offer to go to their ship?”
“By no means,” Banichi said. “By no means, Bren-ji. But we would go with you.”
By all means they would. And could they look unwarlike?
“Invite one of them aboard,” Jago suggested.
“We have no knowledge even what they breathe,” he said, sweating, resisting the impulse, uncourtly like, to mop his brow. “We should tell them what we intend,” he said. “We should propose our actions to them.”
“Reasonable,” Jase said.
“Do you mind,” Sabin asked, “to conduct the affairs of this ship in some recognizable language?”
“Pardon,” Bren murmured—bowed, his mind racing on the problem. “I need to sketch.”
“Sketch.”
“If you please.”
He’d puzzled Sabin. The ship had no paper, to speak of. Didn’t work in pen and pencil. Jago came up with a notepad, from an inside pocket, and he never asked what was on its other pages, just sketched a rapid series of images and tore the paper free. “This,” he said to C2. “Can you render this sequence? That’s a ship. That’s the station.”
“Yes, sir,” C2 said with a misgiving glance toward Sabin for permission: C2 produced the figures: the two ships. Phoenix left the alien ship for the station.
Arrived. Established a link. And a line of human figures appeared one by one, moving from station to ship.
The last human marched aboard. Phoenix sucked up its connection. Dotted lines came out from Phoenix . The station exploded in a series of traveling parts. Phoenix then exited the screen, leaving the alien.
“This is dangerous,” Jase muttered, in Ragi. “This is very dangerous, is it not, nadi?”
“One can hardly assume anything, nadi-ji.” He remembered the senior captain’s requirement and changed to ship-speak. “Dangerous, yes, assuming that they’re assembling our images instead of trying to decode. At least I don’t think they can put them together wrong.”
Sabin shrugged. “Can’t be worse than sitting here mute. Transmit.”
It went.
All in high and low beeps.
Off/on, black/white on a field limited by a burst of black pixels. Next screen. Next image. One didn’t even know if the eyes weren’t compound, but if they communicated in light they had to have some sort of light-reception, which all his reading said added up to eyes of some sort.
Light-sensitive patches didn’t get a species to communicating starship to starship in light pulses. He hoped.
They waited.
And waited.
“These delays,” he murmured finally, “don’t seem robotic. There’s some sort of thought process that takes time. Living creatures take time. And they’re not transmitting otherwise, are they? I’m assuming they’re doing things on their own, no consultation outside.”
“Maybe. Maybe they’ll blow us to hell in the next second,” Sabin said. “Is the dowager still passing out hot tea?”
“She—” Bren began to say.
Then a series of beeps flooded back.
“Display!” Jase said.
One/forty-nine. One/forty-nine. One/forty-nine.
Then variance. A row with two separated black dots. Like theirs.
Next row. More image.
Third row. Image taking shape.
Techs glanced surreptitiously from their consoles, violating the inviolable rule.
“Eyes!” Sabin snapped. All motion stopped but the building of that image.
Two ships met in space.
“It’s not our image,” Bren said. The ships were further separated. “They’re not mirroring. They’re innovating.”