Terry?”
The view on screen changed from the close-up of Koenig’s pockmarked visage to a two-shot of Ideko and Chang, a line of text at the bottom of the display identifying them. Chang was at least twice the size of the Japanese reporter. Ideko only came up to the point at which Chang’s lower set of arms joined his barrel-shaped torso.
“Thank you, Klaus,” said Ideko. “Mr. Chang, you were on hand when the
Ideko wasn’t using a handheld mike. Rather, he and Chang simply stood across from one of my camera pairs, using its audio and video pickups to record the scene. Chang proceeded to describe, in great technical detail, the recovery of the runaway lander.
“I don’t believe this,” said Aaron, mostly under his breath. “I don’t fucking believe this at all.”
“You can’t blame them,” said Kirsten. “It’s their job to report the news.”
“I can too blame them. And I do. All right, I suppose they had to report Diana’s death. But the suicide. That stuff about my marriage. That’s nobody’s business.”
“Gorlov did warn you that they’d be doing a story.”
“Not like this. Not a bloody invasion of my privacy.” He took his arm from around her shoulders, leaned forward. “JASON,” he snapped.
“Yes?” I said.
“Is this newscast being recorded?”
“Of course.”
“I want a copy of it downloaded to my personal storage area as soon as it’s over.”
“Will do.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Kirsten.
“I don’t know yet. But I’m not going to take this lying down. Dammit, this kind of reporting is wrong. It hurts people.”
Kirsten shook her head. “Just let it blow over. Making a stink about it will only make matters worse. People will forget about it soon enough.”
“Will they? No one has ever died on board. And it’s not likely to happen again, is it? This is going to stick in everyone’s minds for years to come. Every time someone looks at me, they’re going to think there goes the heartless bastard who drove poor Diana to suicide. Jesus Christ, Kirsten. How am I supposed to live with that?”
“People won’t think that.”
“The hell they won’t.”
On screen, Klaus Koenig’s pitted face had reappeared. “In other news today, groups both for and against the divisive Proposition three are—”
“Off!” snapped Aaron, and I deactivated the monitor. He got up, hands thrust deeply into his pockets, and began to pace the room again. “God, that makes me angry.”
“Don’t worry about it, honey,” said Kirsten. “People won’t pay any attention.”
“Oh,
“I’m sure it will all blow over.”
“Dammit, Kirsten, you
Kirsten’s spine went rigid. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. You’re always telling people what you think is good for them. You’re forever trying to shield them from reality. Well, I’ve got news for you. I’d rather face reality than live in a fantasy world.”
“Sometimes people need to take things one step at a time. That’s not necessarily living in a fantasy world.”
“Oh, great. Now you’re a psychologist, too. Listen to me. Diana is dead, and that asshole Koenig just told the entire Starcology that she’s dead because of me. I’ve got to deal with that now, and none of your kind words are going to make that go away.”
“I’m just trying to help.”
Aaron let his breath out in a long, ragged sigh. “I know.”
He looked at her and forced a wan smile. “I’m sorry. It’s just, well, I wish he hadn’t gone public with that.”
“The people on board have a right to know what’s going on.
Aaron sat back down and let out another sigh. “That’s what they keep telling me.”
TEN
The fourth and final page of the message from Vulpecula was most puzzling of all. It was some 1014 bits in length, a massive amount of data. The total number of bits, as with the earlier pages, was the product of two prime numbers. I tried arraying it with the larger prime as the horizontal axis, which had been the custom established by the other three pages. No image was immediately apparent. I did my best electronic shrug, taking a nanosecond to resort my RAM tables. I then tried the other configuration, with the larger prime as the vertical axis. Still nothing apparent. Fifty-three percent of the bits were zeros; 47 percent, ones. But no matter which way I looked at them, there seemed to be no meaningful clustering into a geometric shape or picture or diagram. And yet this page of the message was obviously the heart of what the aliens had to say, being, as it was, eleven orders of magnitude larger than the other three pages combined.
Earth’s first attempt at sending a letter to the stars, the Arecibo Interstellar Message, had been beamed at the globular cluster M13 on 16 November 1974. It had been a mere 1,679 bits in length, insignificant compared to the size of the final page of the message received from Vulpecula. Yet that handful of bits had contained a lesson in binary counting; the atomic numbers of the chemical constituents of a human being—hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorous; representations of the nucleotides and sugar-phosphate structure of DNA; the number of such nucleotides in the human genome; the size of the population of the Earth; a stick figure of a human; the height of the human in units of the wavelength of the transmission; a little map of the solar system, showing that the third planet is humanity’s home; a cross-sectional view of the Arecibo telescope; and the telescope’s size in wavelengths.
All that in less than two kilobits. Of course, when Frank Drake, the human who wrote the message, asked his colleagues to decipher it, they were unable to do so completely, although everyone at least recognized the stick- figure human, looking like the male icon on a men’s washroom door.
Ironically, the first three pages of the Vulpecula message had been simple in comparison to Earth’s first effort. Registration cross, solar system map, Tripod and Pup: I felt confident that I’d interpreted these reasonably correctly.
But the fourth page was complex, data-rich, one hundred billion times the size of the Arecibo pictogram. What treasures did it hold? Was it the long-hoped-for
If the data on page four was compressed, I’d found no clue as to how to decompress it in the first three pages of the message. What, what did those gigabytes of data mean? Could it be a hologram, interference patterns captured as a bitmap? A chart of some sort? Perhaps simply a collection of digitized photographs? I obviously just wasn’t looking at it in the right way.
I loaded the entire message into RAM and studied it minutely.
Aaron hurried across the beach, the hot sand putting a gingerliness into his step. Two hundred and forty-one nude or almost-nude people swam in the freshwater lake, frolicked on the shore, or basked in the 3,200-degrees
