Which ripped the fabric of the star apart, generating an explosion releasing more energy than a billion suns.
The shock wave would have continued outward and outward across space, carrying debris from the exploded star with it, and interstellar gas that the debris had swept up. A fierce sleet of radiation would have been riding on that wave, too: cosmic rays, X-rays, radio waves, gamma rays, everything, all up and down the spectrum. If the sun that had gone supernova had had planets close by, they would have been vaporized immediately. Outlying worlds of that system might merely have been fried.
The people of the world of the tunnels, forty light-years distant, must have known nothing of the great explosion for a full generation after it had happened. But, all that while, the light of that shattered star was traveling towards them at a speed of 300,000 kilometers per second, and one night its frightful baleful unexpected glare must have burst suddenly into their sky in the most terrifying way. And almost in that same moment—for the deadly cosmic rays thrown off by the explosion move nearly at the speed of light—the killing blast of hard radiation would have arrived. And so these people and all else that lived on their world perished in terror and light.
All this took place a thousand light-years from Earth: that surging burst of radiation will need another six centuries to complete its journey towards our home world. At that distance, the cosmic rays will do us little or no harm. But for a time that long-dead star will shine in our skies so brilliantly that it will be visible by day, and by night it will cast deep shadows, longer than those of the Moon.
That’s still in Earth’s future. Here the fatal supernova, and the second one that must have happened not long afterwards, were some four hundred years in the past. What we had here now was a neutron star left over from one cataclysm and a black hole left over from the other. Plus the pathetic remains of a great civilization on a scorched planet orbiting a neighboring star. And now a ship from some alien culture. A busy corner of the galaxy, this one. A busy time for the crew of the IBM/Toshiba hyperspace ship Ben-wah Maru.
I was still going over the reports that had piled up at my station during my sleep period—mass-and-output readings on the neutron star, progress bulletins on the setup procedures for the neutronium scoop, and other routine stuff of that nature—when the communicator cone in front of me started to glow. I flipped it on. Cal Bjornsen, our communications guru, was calling from Brain Central downstairs.
Bjornsen is mostly black African with some Viking genes salted in. The whole left side of his face is cyborg, the result of some extreme bit of teenage carelessness. The story is that he was gravity-vaulting and lost polarity at sixty meters. The mix of ebony skin, blue eyes, blond hair, and sculpted titanium is an odd one, but I’ve seen a lot of faces less friendly than Cal’s. He’s a good man with anything electronic.
He said, “I think they’re finally trying to send us messages, Tom.”
I sat up fast. “What’s that?”
“We’ve been pulling in signals of some sort for the past ninety minutes that didn’t look random, but we weren’t sure about it. A dozen or so different frequencies all up and down the line, mostly in the radio band, but we’re also getting what seem to be infra-red pulses, and something flashing in the ultraviolet range. A kind of scattershot noise effect, only it isn’t noise.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“The computer’s still chewing on it,” Bjornsen said. The fingers of his right hand glided nervously up and down his smooth metal cheek. “But we can see already that there are clumps of repetitive patterns.”
“Coming from them? How do you know?”
“We didn’t, at first. But the transmissions conked out when we lost line-of-sight with them, and started up again when they came back into view.”
“I’ll be right down,” I said.
Bjornsen is normally a calm man, but he was running in frantic circles when I reached Brain Central three or four minutes later. There was stuff dancing on all the walls: sine waves, mainly, but plenty of other patterns jumping around on the monitors. He had already pulled in specialists from practically every department—the whole astronomy staff, two of the math guys, a couple from the external maintenance team, and somebody from engines. I felt preempted. Who was CEO on this ship, anyway? They were all babbling at once. “Fourier series,” someone said, and someone yelled back, “Dirichlet factor,” and someone else said, “Gibbs phenomenon!” I heard Angie Seraphin insisting vehemently, “—continuous except possibly for a finite number of finite discontinuities in the interval—pi to pi—”
“Hold it,” I said, “What’s going on?”
More babble, more gibberish. I got them quiet again and repeated my question, aiming it this time at Bjornsen.
“We have the analysis now,” he said.
“So?”
“You understand that it’s only guesswork, but Brain Central gives good guess. The way it looks, they seem to want us to broadcast a carrier wave they can tune in on, and just talk to them while they lock in with some sort of word-to-word translating device of theirs.”
“That’s what Brain Central thinks they’re saying?”
“It’s the most plausible semantic content of the patterns they’re transmitting,” Bjornsen answered.
I felt a chill. The aliens had word-to-word translating devices? That was a lot more than we could claim. Brain Central is one very smart computer, and if it thought that it had correctly deciphered the message coming in, them in all likelihood it had. An astonishing accomplishment, taking a bunch of ones and zeros put together by an alien mind and culling some sense out of them.
But even Brain Central wasn’t capable of word-to-word translation out of some unknown language. Nothing in our technology is. The alien message had been designed to be easy: put together, most likely, in a careful high-redundancy manner, the computer equivalent of picture-writing. Any race able to undertake interstellar travel ought to have a computer powerful enough to sweat the essential meaning out of a message like that, and we did. We couldn’t go farther than that though. Let the entropy of that message—that is, the unexpectedness of it, the unpredictability of its semantic content—rise just a little beyond the picture-writing level, and Brain Central would be lost. A computer that knows French should be able to puzzle out Spanish, and maybe even Greek. But Chinese? A tough proposition. And an alien language? Languages may start out logical, but they don’t stay that way. And when its underlying grammatical assumptions were put together in the first place by beings with nervous systems that were wired up in ways entirely different from our own, well, the notion of instantaneous decoding becomes hopeless.
Yet our computer said that their computer could do word-to-word. That was scary.
On the other hand, if we couldn’t talk to them, we wouldn’t begin to find out what they were doing here and what threat, if any, they might pose to us. By revealing our language to them we might be handing them some sort of advantage, but I couldn’t be sure of that, and it seemed to me we had to take the risk.
It struck me as a good idea to get some backing for that decision, though. After a dozen years as CEO aboard various corporate ships I knew the protocols. You did what you thought was right, but you didn’t go all the way out on the limb by yourself if you could help it.