If their voices were not what they had been, the Bach Choir’s musical inventiveness was as great as ever. And they had labored over this song like nothing they had ever written before.
“We are ready then.” He bobbed respect to the elderly delegation. “If you will excuse me I must join my choir.”
Still muttering dubiously about these new innovations, but sighing with relief, the elders slid down toward the cloud tops to join their pods.
“Show time,” Ensign sang quietly to his pod mates. “Let’s make it good.” The others bobbed agreement and clustered around Ensign, humming, buzzing, droning and chiming as they tested their many voices and tuned their membranes to each other. Underneath it all came Snow’s metronome beat, counting down to the moment of eclipse.
“Threetwoone NOW,” and with that the Bach Choir tightened their membranes and burst out in the “Welcoming Song For Moonshadow.”
The first three phrases were for the Choir alone. Then, exactly on cue, the multitude spread out below them belled up in their part of the song.
Wingtip to wingtip, singing for all they were worth, the Bach Choir turned as one and began to race along the shadow’s path just as the first bit of the Sun began to dim. Below, the massed High Folk added their part to the great welling of sound.
Melody and Snow wove over and under each other on the high parts. The Geek and Ensign took the middle registers. The effect was somewhat odd. Most choirs had twice as many members as were left to the Bach Choir and had a better balance of voices. The quartet was especially weak in the low registers, a fact which the chorus helped to mask. Still it was impressive. Ensign felt a thrill as they glided above the singing masses, listening to them add their weight to the song.
And the sky went BZZZHMMbeep-beepbeepbeep, chorused the rest of the Gathering.
And the sky went BZZZHMMbeep-beepbeepbeep.
Although the idea of “singing” with the tingle sense was completely unfamiliar to the High Folk, they picked it up readily, singing the part just as the remoras had given it to them, down to the modulations in the tingle sense. They were aided by the fact that the part for the tingle sense was extremely simple, just turning the signal on and off at intervals.
The High Folk were experts at synchronizing their actions, even over distances where time delays became perceptible. The resulting song wasn’t perfectly in step, but it wasn’t far off either.
Individually the High Folk could radiate very little energy, a fraction of a milliwatt each. But there were thousands of them all along the path of the eclipse in this band. Together it was enough.
The Bach Choir chased the moonshadow as far as they could, singing all the while. But eventually it outran them and left them in the clear sunlight, surrounded by a congratulatory mob of High Folk.
“Magnificent performance,” an elder bubbled, surprisingly strong in the high registers. “I’ve never heard anything like it.”
“It was the chorus,” Ensign thrummed modestly. “It was all the High Folk together”
The Geek sidled close through the congratulatory throng.
“Now what?” he asked on a high, tight beam that only Ensign could hear.
Ensign continued to respond to the flood of congratulations, but he bobbed his body so his main eyes were focused directly skyward. “Now,” he beamed to The Geek, “it is up to the others.” If there are others.
“Gary, this is Ed Steveberg at the VLA.”
“Hey, Ed, How’s life in New Mexico?” F Gary Rhine swung his feet up on the desk and switched the phone to his other ear.
He could almost hear the VLA radio engineer’s frown. “Interesting—as in the ancient Chinese curse.”
Rhine chuckled. “Yah, we still haven’t made any progress on the Probe. Still looks like it stopped moving downward and something blocked its signals.”
Steveberg’s laugh sounded more like a bark. “That’s last month’s mystery. I’ve got a new little mystery for you. We aimed the antenna array at the orbiter yesterday to get a precision Doppler hack on it before the next orbital change maneuver.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, we got two signals back!”
Rhine thought for a moment. “Multipath reflection of the Orbiter’s transmission off some intervening surface like Jupiter’s rings?”
“Our first thought, but the weaker signal isn’t from the Orbiter—it’s from the probe!”
Gary didn’t say anything for a moment. A long moment. “The probe— the atmospheric probe?”
“The one and only! It has the framing pattern of radio data transmissions.”
“Um, the batteries were only good for a couple of hours.”
“Yep. And it gets curiouser and curiouser. I took a Doppler reading on the probe frequency and, over a period of several minutes, looked at motion at right angles to the beam.”
Rhine warmed to the analysis, “You’re assuming that the signal originates at or near the cloud tops…”
“That’s where we left it. Anyway, I got an accurate solution and can you guess what happened at that latitude and longitude just about the time the signals started?”
“I bet I’m about to find out.”
“The largest and longest solar eclipse as seen from Jupiter by the Galilean Moon Europa was going on right there!”
“Um, Ed, is that supposed.to have some significance for me? I’m not much of a planetary scientist.”
Steveberg laughed. “No, I just thought I’d brighten your otherwise mundane existence with a Class One Enigma.”
Rhine shied away from the mysterious part of the problem and attacked the one area of his specialty, “Have you decoded the probe’s signals?”
“So far, all we went for were the Doppler and position. We’ll let you know as soon as we have something.”
“Well, don’t diddle around with channels. Shoot me something as soon as you’ve got it, OK?”
“E-mail coming up,” Steveberg promised and then hung up.
Rhine hung up the phone slowly. For a long time he sat staring into his desk blotter as if deciphering the random ink stains and doodles.
Steveberg was even better than his word. Two days later he flew in from New Mexico with an attache case stuffed with data disks and printouts. He, Rhine, and the other members of the communications team spent several days going over them.
Their conclusions were surprisingly inconclusive.
“You know what’s wrong with this mess?” Rhine asked Steveberg over coffee in the cafeteria late in the afternoon of the second day.
“Yeah, it’s a mess.”
“Bullshit,” Rhine said without heat. “It’s what’s here and what’s not here. What’s here is the framing for the probe signal. That’s dead-nuts perfect. But what’s inside those frames is gibberish.”
“You mean noise?”
“No, gibberish. Noise is random. This stuff isn’t random, it just doesn’t make any sense.”
At the next table Suzanne Quinlan concentrated on her diet soda and tried very hard not to listen in.
“Distortion?”
Rhine cocked an eyebrow. “Which leaves the framing untouched?”
“Maybe there’s some kind of delay line down in the atmosphere that’s kept the signal echoing all this time.”
The Rhino snorted.
“Think about it,” Steveberg persisted, “If that’s what s happening you’d expect the paits of the signal that are constant, the framing, to be the most perfect because it’s the most often repeated. The other stuff, the contents, is more variable so it would be more likely to be scrambled. If you look you’ll see even the framing is a little fuzzy.”