Television, thought Horrocks Mathematical. Like almost everyone else on the ship, he gazed transfixed at the images of the planet’s nightside, the coastlines and some of the interior spaces of its continents pricked out by light. Unlike anyone else, he jumped to a swift conclusion as to the nature of the enigmatic signals that had been troubling him for months.
Television. That was what it was.
Not the kind of television that gave him pictures in his head, but something quite other and more primitive. But the pictures in his head gave him access to and an interface with the processing power that could reconstruct that suspected source. He plunged into its depths, brushing aside all the confuted hypotheses about codes and encryption, and insisting instead on the command to turn the signal into lines: a few hundred at the most, each at most a few hundred pixels across.
The answer came back in less than a second.
Bat-like beings flew behind his eyes. He closed his eyes, but still they were there, in fuzzy black and white. The flurry settled, dark smudges whirled like snow, and an image stabilised: of one of these beings behind a desk, reading aloud from a sheaf of paper. He heard the voice in his head. Fluctuating from a chirp to a deeper, more measured pitch, it intoned a sequence of phonemes that, even across the gulfs of space and species and speech, sounded like statistics.
It seemed fitting that the first words to be heard might be the names of numbers. That could be a meaty bone for some ravenous heuristic. Horrocks had only a vague idea of what kind of programs would be needed to begin to pick away at interpreting the language, let alone what kind of human skills would be needed. In the population of the ship and in the vaster virtual space of the ship’s intelligence repertoire, such programs and skills were certain to be found.
He released the images he’d reconstructed into the ship’s nets, with a priority attention override that few people ever cared or dared to use in all their long life-spans. It seemed that he heard a sound like an intense gust, the sound of a million indrawn breaths, but that might just have been his imagination.
He turned off most of his own input channels and continued to watch the pictures. After a few minutes the alien laid down the sheaf of paper, said something, and stood up. It came out from behind the desk. For the first time it was visible at full length. With its wings folded it looked like a human being with a furled umbrella tucked under each elbow and angled up behind each shoulder. Its gait was steady, its feet peculiar. Its eyes and ears were prominent, giving it a sharp triangular face. The sole garment it wore was a belt around the hips, laden with scabbards and boxy pouches. Fur, varied in length and shade, covered the rest of its body.
The alien stopped in front of the camera. A hand with three fingers and a thumb loomed; then one of the fingers reached forward and out of shot. The image dwindled to a dot and vanished.
Another image replaced it, not from the alien transmission. Horrocks had never seen Constantine before, but he recognised him.
“I should have you shot,” the Oldest Man said. “For endangering the ship and everyone on it.”
“How did I do that?” Horrocks asked.
“You sent images from an unknown source to the brains and screens and contacts of everyone on this ship,” said Constantine. “You released it into the ship’s intelligence. Do you have any idea how dangerous that could be?”
“No,” said Horrocks. “I’m sorry, but I don’t. It’s obviously a very primitive transmission.”
Constantine passed a hand across his eyes, rubbing his eyebrows with thumb and forefinger. “That’s exactly the problem,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
“No,” said Constantine. “You don’t.” He glared at Horrocks for a few seconds, then smiled. “Don’t do it again.”
14 365:01:13 20:19
Well, that’s it settled. Aliens.
What a day. There’s nothing to say that doesn’t sound banal. Is it always like this, on days when the world changes? Did people who wrote, assuming people did write, have this stupid gnawing feeling all the way back to the Moon Caves and before, that your words are inadequate to the events and that anything you say now will shame you in days to come with its inadequacy? What was it like to react to the first starship launch? The first extrasolar colony? The first news of a fast burn?
This changes the world more than any of these. I see from some of the comments I’ve received that some people don’t grasp this at all. They think intelligent aliens are just one more interesting thing out there, like any new biosphere, or a new stellar process, but more exciting and of more immediate import. Quote from D — :
Isn’t this cool? We’ll be able to settle the new system with help from an intelligence native to the system. Nobody’s ever done that before!
And so on. Lots more like that — check them out.
Look, dear readers: all of that is a possibility. What relations, if any, we establish with the natives of Destiny II is a very serious question and the one that’s raging through the air and airwaves as I write. All the boards and committees and juries are in permanent emergency session and everybody has suddenly got an opinion on it and it’s driving me crazy.
Because it’s not the most important question.
The most important question is this: what does the existence of other intelligent life tell us about the kind of universe we are in?
Yesterday we were in a universe that included us and lots of cool stuff: stars, galaxies, plasmas, cometary bodies, planets, and cows and giraffes and AIs and blue-green algae and lichen and microorganisms.
Today we are in a universe that contains us and lots of cool stuff and alien space bats.
That’s a different universe.
A universe with a different history, different potentialities, different future from the universe we thought we lived in. We are not living in the universe we thought we lived in yesterday.
We have to start learning the world all over again.
Awlin Halegap entertained in the grand manner. As a speculator, it was expected of him. For the occasion he’d hired a spherical space about a hundred metres in diameter. Horrocks presumed that its shape was why it was called a ballroom. He thrust in, snagged a drink-bulb from a drifting cluster, and floated a few metres away from the entrance, taking stock. The entire inner surface of the sphere was an image of the sky, with the planet Destiny II filling most of one side of it. The planetarium effect was illusory — you looked at the planet’s dayside, but if you glanced over your shoulder you found that the sun wasn’t there or had been edited out — but impressive. Horrocks guessed that it was patched together from the ship’s outside view, and the incoming data stream from the fast probe, whose arrival in planetary orbit the occasion celebrated. Almost everyone on the ship would be watching this, with outer or inner eye, but none, Horrocks guessed, would have so spectacular a view.
Hundreds of people floated and drifted in the frosty light. Crows hung, wings steady but for the occasional pinion flick, watched for food scraps and tattled amongst themselves. Hummingbirds, less sentient but more colourful, sipped from the tips of discarded drink-bulbs, and jinked about. Trays of food covered by elastic netting and propelled by tiny electric fan-jets drifted through the crowd, following simple algorithms of approach and avoidance. Clusters of drink-bulbs were plucked from and shoved away.
In the two weeks since Horrocks had cracked the television transmissions he had become famous, and the ship had become febrile. Its nets buzzed with debate. Factions had formed. In the crew areas of the forward and rearward cones, fashions: almost everyone was wearing things like wings, clever pleated contrivances that fanned out between their arms and their sides, or simpler rigid structures of cloth or paper. The big free-fall room looked like a butterfly house.