I slid the cover up, the thrumming motors vibrating my cameras on the adjacent wall enough to make the room appear to jump up and down. I couldn’t see inside, but according to
Aaron slowly removed objects and examined them: two jeweled bracelets, a handful of golden ROM crystals, even a book version of the Bible, which surprised me. Last, he took out a golden disk, two centimeters in diameter, attached to a black leather band. There seemed to be writing engraved on one face, the one Aaron was looking at, but the typeface was ornate and there were many specular highlights making it impossible for me to read at that angle. “What’s that?” I asked.
“Another antique.”
After identifying the object—an old-fashioned wristwatch—I accessed the list of effects Di had applied for permission to bring on the voyage. The watch, of course, was not on it. “Each wrist medical implant contains a brand-new chronograph,” I said. “I’d hate to think Di wasted some of her personal mass allowance on something she didn’t need.”
“This had … sentimental value.”
“I never saw her wearing it.”
“No,” he said slowly and perhaps a little sadly. “No, she never did.”
“What does the inscription say?”
“Nothing.” He turned it over. For one instant the engraving was clear to me. Tooled in a script typeface was WE TAKE OUR ETERNAL LOVE TO THE STARS, AARON—and a date two days before our departure from Earth orbit. I consulted Aaron’s personnel file and found that he and Diana had been married jointly by a rabbi and a priest fifty-five hours before we had left.
“Say,” said Aaron, looking first at the antique’s round face then at the glowing ship’s-issue implant on the inside of his wrist, “this watch is wrong.”
“I imagine its battery is running down.”
“No. I put in a ten-year lithium cell before I gave it to Diana. It should be dead accurate.” He pushed a diamond stud on the watch’s edge, and the display flashed the date. “Christ! It’s off by over a month.”
“Fast or slow?”
“Fast.”
What to say? “They sure don’t make them like they used to.”
SEVEN
Tripod wasn’t humanoid, and yet he shared many of the characteristics of humans. He had what appeared to be limbs, although his numbered six, not four. He had a vertically held torso (assuming, of course, that I had oriented the message correctly), and he had protuberances from the top of the torso.
The more I looked at him, the more I thought I saw. He seemed to have three legs, and if I was interpreting the picture correctly, they were evenly spaced around the base of his torso. I noted that they ended in wide feet, with down-turned toes or claws. The left foot was not depicted as a mirror image of the right, and I assumed that rather than accurately depicting a real asymmetry, this was intended to show the feet as if seen from different perspectives. The legs were splayed out from the body, as were the three arms. The only apparent arm joints were at what one might as well call the elbows and the wrists. The hands had but two digits. However, given the low resolution of the image, and the Senders’s fondness for ratios, as evidenced from their solar-system diagram, I thought that perhaps the two fingers and three toes were simply meant to indicate that the ratio of hand digits to foot digits was 2:3, and that perhaps these beings had four fingers per hand and six toes per foot, or even six fingers and nine toes.
None of those combinations gave easy rise to hexadecimal counting, as had been used in the solar-system map, but, then, neither did the five-digits-per-hand biology of humans. The choice of hexadecimal, a natural extension of binary, suggested, perhaps, that these beings shared their world with electronic brains fashioned upon principles similar to those used by my brethren on Earth. Although binary, and then hexadecimal, weren’t the only ways to render counting electronically, they might indeed be the most likely to be adopted by engineers anywhere in the universe.
Anyway, to demonstrate the hand’s dexterity, each had its fingers held in a different configuration—or perhaps each hand was specialized for a different kind of grasping or manipulation.
Tripod’s torso was particularly interesting. It had four openings in it. Were these meant to indicate actual holes that went right through its body? Or were they orifices, one perhaps for ingestion, another for excretion, a third for respiration, and a fourth for procreation? Perhaps, yet if one were to follow the terrestrial model, the small projection from the bottom of Tripod’s torso would be the genitalia.
But if those openings in the chest were holes, then where did the creature keep its brain? The two structures extending from the top of the torso seemed too tiny to hold a significant brain case. Indeed, although they were the same size, each drawn with four pixels, they seemed to be oriented quite differently. Perhaps they were eye stalks or antennae or other sensory apparatus. Interesting that there were only two of them, not three. The creature obviously wasn’t slavish in its trilateral symmetry.
And the bumps off each side of the torso: were they ridges that ran all the way around the body, seen in cross-section? Perhaps the torso, with hollow spaces and reinforcing ridges, had evolved to absorb shocks. If so, maybe the three splayed legs were used for hopping about its home world, the torso actually compressing on impact. Or, given those arched foot phalanges, perhaps the creature simply danced around on tippy toes, like, like —popular-culture banks kicking in—like Fred Flintstone bowling.
Or perhaps the bumps represented discrete lumps, rather than continuous ridges. Were they breasts? On Earth, mammals tended to have a number of breasts equal to the average litter size plus one, rounded up to the next even number, if necessary to preserve bilateral symmetry. If these were breasts, Tripod appeared to have eight. Presumably a technological life-form could see its offspring through adolescence safely, and no creature could routinely increase its population base by a factor of six or seven with each generation without rapidly developing a severe population problem. I wonder how they dealt with it?
And what about the Pup? Was it a member of the same species? But of a different sex? Pronounced dimorphism, if that was the case. If the bumps on the large ones were breasts, then the Pup was the male. Of course, the concepts of male and female were probably meaningless to a totally alien form of life. Maybe it was a juvenile. The Tripod did look somewhat insectlike, and insects do undergo metamorphosis as they grow. More terrestrial models.
Or maybe the Pup was a depiction of the creature the Tripod had evolved from (or vice versa). Or perhaps they were two different sentient forms inhabiting a single world, much as humans and cetaceans shared the Earth. But the Pup seemed to have only legs and no arms, no manipulators of any kind. Could it be a nontechnological animal? If so, the natives of the Vulpecula world got along better than did primates and whales. I noted that the Pup seemed to have identical sensory stalks to those on the Tripod, even articulated the same way. Did that imply synchronized communication? As for the small knob between the stalks on the Pup’s upper surface, I couldn’t say. It might represent a brain case, or a sex organ, or just a decorative ridge.
Or was the Pup just that, a pet? It would take an unusual psychology to display one’s pet in such a message. Unless … unless the pet was a symbiont, a necessary part of the owner’s life, perhaps as a seeing-eye dog.
The Senders were obligated to use a fifty-nine-bit line, since that was the smallest prime that would
