Victoria headed for her couch. Before she relaxed into it. before the safety straps eased around her, she had already
begun the explorer's system checks.
As the systems signaled green and ready, the sensory overload of the last few chaotic hours flowed away, leaving Victoria physically drained but mentally hypersensitive.
Satoshi and Stephen Thomas and J-D. settled into their places in the circle. Zev drew himself into one of the places
STARFARERS 279
reserved for auxiliary, temporary members of the alien contact team, a place next to J.D.
Victoria glanced at each of her teammates in turn.
'Ready?'
'Let's go.'
At Victoria's signal, the observation ports cleared and the explorer moved smoothly out of its dock. Starfarer fell away, its sail illuminated and filled by the new starlight-
They all gazed at their first close-up view of an alien star system.
A display formed, mimicking the system but exaggerating the planets so they would appear larger than pinpoints. Victoria compared the display to the system before them and showed her teammates the tiny disks of the planets, one halffull, and the other, closer one a slender crescent accompanied by the smaller crescent of its satellite.
'Christ on a unicorn,' Stephen Thomas said.
'I'm recording now,' Victoria said, 'and transmitting back to Starfarer. We have not one but two terrestrial worlds— the second and third planets of the system—orbiting Tau Ceti. Starfarer entered the system midway between the two orbits.
A large moon, approaching lunar proportions, circles the inner terrestrial planet. The signal we are receiving emanates from that inner planet.'
'From its moon,' J.D- said hesitantly.
'You're right,' Victoria said, surprised.
Arachne's web remained unstable, inconsistent. Victoria created a display and routed the signal into it. A holographic image formed at the center of their circle.
'This beacon wasn't meant to reach outside the system,'
Victoria said. 'It's too weak. It was waiting. Waiting for us.'
J.D. suddenly giggled. 'Look at that.'
Acting as a two-dimensional screen, the hologram laid out the transmission a single picture element at a time, in a Sagan frame one prime number of pixels wide by a second, different prime number of pixels high. A handsbreadth of the image was already visible, some structure already detectable.
'This is incredible,' Victoria said. 'We're getting it right
the first time.'
'It'll be a map,' Satoshi said with a smile.
'Genetic structure,' Stephen Thomas said, joining in the 280 vonda N. Mcintyre
game they had often played, of trying lo decide how one alien intelligence would attempt its first communication with another.
'Uh-uh,' Victoria said. 'Electron orbitals.'
'It won't be any of those things,' J.D. said. 'I don't know what it will be, but it will be something different.'
'How will you reply?' Satoshi asked.
'Good question,' Stephen Thomas said. 'We've got a little explaining to do.'
They watched as the beacon built up another scan line of black or white dots. Victoria began to think she could make out the pattern that was forming to greet her.
'What can you say to an alien being,' she said, 'after you've announced yourself with a thermonuclear explosion? '
'I don't know yet.' Joy and excitement filled J.D.'s voice.
'I guess I'll just have to wing it.'
