“You’ve got a talented boy, all right,” Jao said. “Too bad he has no head for science.”
Bram laughed. “Are you trying to sound like Smeth?”
“I’d never say a thing like that,” Smeth protested indignantly. “I thought it was … very good.”
The applause rose, swelled. The other musicians were closing around Edard, clapping him on the back, grasping his hands. Edard looked no younger than the others, but Bram could not help reflecting on his age. What will he develop into, he thought, with all eternity ahead of him?
The audience had settled down again for the encore. Edard had wisely refrained from repeating his own music and was giving them the familiar slow movement of the Jupiter Symphony—deliberately inviting comparison, Bram thought, smiling at the arrogance of youth. He closed his eyes and listened as the long-drawn cello melody gravely climbed its steps while the violins scolded it. The audience held its breath. Even Smeth sat rapt and silent beside him.
There was a tap on his shoulder, and he turned toward the aisle to find Trist leaning apologetically toward him.
“I’m sorry,” Trist whispered, “but something’s come up. I think you’d better have a look at it. Jun Davd’s waiting for us.”
The violins had succeeded in wresting the theme back from the cellos. Bram looked longingly at the communing musicians on the platform. Mim and Edard would expect to see him backstage afterward. He gave a resigned shrug and eased his way out while people glared at him. He followed Trist up the aisle. The heavenly music floated after him. A backward glance had told him that Jao was trailing along behind, prodding a resisting Smeth.
“Now, what’s this about?” Bram said when they were out of the hall.
“We’re getting some very strange radio signals,” Trist said.
Bram stopped in his tracks. Smeth and Jao piled into him. “Intelligent?” he said.
“Let’s just say they’re nonnatural,” Trist said.
Jao’s big hand grabbed Trist by the shoulder and spun him around. “Where are they coming from?” he said hoarsely.
“From everywhere,” Trist said.
“What do you mean?” Bram said.
Trist bit his lip. “I mean from half the sky. From every star in a volume of space that—” He broke off. “Best come see for yourself.”
“But what kind of—”
“Jun Davd’s still sorting out the data the computer dumped,” Trist said. “He’ll probably have a simulation ready by the time we get there.”
And that was all they could get out of him during the trip to the Message center. It was a ride of over twenty minutes, even on the high-speed mag-lev tubeway that had finally replaced the outside slingshot pods on eight of the twelve major branches. Bram had to watch Smeth fidget and listen to Jao grumble all the way. He found it hard to contain his own curiosity, but he knew there was no point in pressing Trist.
The Message center had been gathering dust during the five centuries of coasting between galaxies, and had been reopened only in recent years, as an adjunct of the observatory. It had been thought worthwhile to begin searching for possible evidence of artificial signals as they approached the volume of space that once had held the civilization of Original Man—if they were going to have intelligent neighbors, they had better know about it—and the radio installation still held a lot of specialized equipment and the old programs that Trist had used in monitoring the Nar wavelengths on the way out of the Whirlpool galaxy. But the search program still took a back seat to the long-range radioastronomy programs that Jun Davd had set up using the Message center’s antenna ray, including the accreting computer model of Jao’s magnetic eight-spoke theory to account for the periodic extinctions of Earth’s life.
The tremendous cylindrical arcade was darkened and silent as they floated through it; with the fusion drive turned off, the tree was practicing a few small economies in its use of electric power. Far down an avenue of shadowy capacitors, Bram could see the bobbing lights of one of the skeleton maintenance crews that made periodic inspection tours here. Trist led the way in a series of shallow touchdowns. The gravity was almost nil this close to the tree’s center of rotation; they had to wait once for Smeth, who incautiously bounced too high and got himself captured by what had been the ceiling when the tree had been under acceleration.
“Here we are,” Trist said, letting them into his old office.
Jun Davd looked up at them from a jumble of printouts and scrawled summaries spread out around him on a variety of work surfaces. Screens and variously organized date windows were fine, but there was nothing like paper when you wanted to see everything at once.
“Ah, here you are,” he said. “Did you tell them?”
“Yes,” Trist said.
“Tell us?” Jao roared. “He told us nothing except that we’d better come have a look for ourselves.”
Jun Davd said imperturbably, “You know that we have a number of ingenious computer programs written by Trist, designed to search likely wavelengths for patterns of various types, with all sorts of Doppler compensations—for our motion, the motion of stars, the motions of presumed planets orbiting in a variety of presumed planes, shifts in limb brightness along the edges of the presumed planets as the planets themselves rotate around an infinite number of presumed axes … it’s all very complicated, particularly when we ourselves are moving.”
“Yes, yes,” Jao said impatiently.
“Some of the data goes back over a year—we’d already spotted the infrared emission of our invisible star and were decelerating toward it. But the computer never sounded the alarm. Neither did the technicians who conducted the occasional random sampling. But that’s not surprising. The data picture didn’t become really interesting till we came to rest.”
Seeing Jao redden toward explosion, Bram said. “Take pity on the man, Jun Davd.”
“Here it is translated into audio,” Jun Davd said. “With a little guesswork, of course.”
He flipped a switch, and the room was suddenly filled with clicks and snaps, as if a million demented children were all breaking twigs at once.
Bram felt ice down his spine. “What is it?” he said.
“It has no information-bearing content that we can see. On the other hand we can’t make it correspond to any natural radio phenomenon that we can imagine.”
Trist broke in. “So we decided it must be a by-product of some artificial process. Like back-lobe leakage from the space-based antennas of solar power satellites.”
“Then an analysis of the wave forms suggested strongly that the clicks were acoustic in nature,” Jun Davd said. “So we discarded the idea that they were some kind of static, either natural or artificial.”
Bram listened to the hard, dry snapping sounds for a moment. Regarded as actual physical noises, they were even more puzzling. “They’d have to be produced in a medium: solid, liquid, or gas,” he said.
“Ridiculous,” Smeth said. “There must be a natural explanation. Remember how pulsars fooled the early radio astronomers? It’s some property of the stars in this arm of the galaxy.”
Bram frowned. “Trist said that the signals come from everywhere. From the invisible star we’re orbiting too?”
“No. Everywhere but,” Trist volunteered.
“Now we come to the interesting part,” Jun Davd said. “Bear with me a moment. This is still very crude. But it will give you an idea.”
He fiddled with a console, and a holographic window lit up in the display board. It was a three-dimensional star map, reasonably realistic, with points of colored light scattered through the velvet darkness. A dull red bead began winking in a lower corner.