“A sound philosophy,” Macandal said, “but not too easy to put in practice when you aren’t a saint and your body never grows older. How well I know. We can’t have you racking yourself apart, Gnaeus. If I—“ She drew breath, then smiled. “We had some pretty good times in the past, you and I, didn’t we? It was long ago, but I’ve not forgotten.”
He stared. A minute passed before he could stammer, “You, you don’t really in-mean that. It is sweet of you, but no, really, not necessary.”
Calm had come upon her. “Don’t think ‘mercy hump.’ I like you. Well, no hurry. Best we take our time and see how things develop. Lord knows we have plenty of time, and if we haven’t learned a little patience by now, we might.as well open the airlocks. I mean all of us aboard.”
After a moment: “Too bad, isn’t it, that this tremendous quest of ours hasn’t made us worthy of itself. We’re the same limited, foolish, mixed-up, ridiculous primitives we always were. Today’s Earth people wouldn’t have our problems. But it is we, not they, who’ve gone out here.”
Pytheas flew onward. Another three and a half years passed inside the hull before the universe broke through, like a storm wave crashing over the rail of a Grecian ship.
20
It came as suddenly, through the musical robotic voice: “Attention! Attention! Instruments detect anomalous neutrino input. It appears to be coded.”
Hanno cried aloud, a seafaring oath not heard these past three millennia, and sprang from his bunk. “Light,” he ordered. Illumination filled the room. It glowed amber in Svoboda’s hair, the warmest color between the walls.
“From Earth?” she gasped, sitting straight. “Did they build a transmitter?”
He shivered. “I should think Pytheas would recognize—”
The answer interrupted him: “The direction of origin is becoming clear, somewhat forward of us, broadcast rather than beamcast. Modulation is of pulse, amplitude, and spin. I am still engaged in observation and analysis, to determine the velocity of the source and compensate for Doppler shift and time dilation. At present the pattern appears mathematically simple.”
“Yeah, start by making us aware it’s artificial.” Hanno’s finger stabbed the intercom touchdisc. “Has everybody heard? Meet in the saloon. I’ll report to you there as soon as possible.” Needlessly—or was it?—he reached for his clothes. “Want to come, Svoboda?”
Her grin was a hunter’s. “Try and stop me.”
Perhaps it was equally superfluous to seek the command room. It might even be unwise, to wait there amidst the terrible glory in the viewscreens. Too easily could that daunt the spirit and numb the mind. But sitting hand in hand, watching the numbers and graphic displays the ship generated for them, was like keeping a grip on a reality that otherwise would blow away into emptiness.
“Have you learned more?” Svoboda must ask.
“Give the computer a chance,” Hanno tried to laugh. “It’s only had a few minutes.”
“Every minute for us is—how much outside? An hour? How many millions of kilometers laid behind us?”
“I detect a similar source, much weaker but strengthening,” the ship told them. “It is on the opposite side of our projected course.”
Hanno stared a while into distorted heaven before he said slowly, “Yes, I think I understand. They know how we’re headed, more or less, and have sent ... messengers ... to intercept us. However, of course they can’t tell exactly— several different destinations may have looked possible to them, nor could they foresee factors like the boost we’d use—so they sent a number of messengers, pretty widely distributed, to lie radiating in the zone, or zones, we’d probably pass through.”
“They?” Svoboda asked.
“The Others. The aliens. Whoever and whatever they are. We’ve found a starfaring civilization at last. Or it’s found us.”
Her own gaze went outward, gone rapt. “They will rendezvous with us?”
He shook his head. “Not quite, I think. Given all the uncertainties, and the distances, and the long, unpredictable time out here till we might arrive—they’d not dispatch living crews. Those must be low-mass, high- thrust robot craft, maybe made for this one purpose.”
She was silent half a minute. When she spoke, it sounded almost annoyed. “How can you be so sure?”
“Why, it’s obvious,” he answered, surprised. “The radiation from our powerplant ran well ahead of us only during the first year, till we got close to light speed. That wouldn’t give them nearly enough warning, if they set out to meet us when they picked it up. They can’t live close by, or we’d have detected them from the Solar System.”
“Obvious, or smug?” she challenged. “How much do we know? We have barely begun our first tiny venture into deep space. How long have they been exploring? Thousands of years? Millions? What have they discovered, what can they do?”
His smile twisted. “I’m sorry. This is no moment to cast a shadow on.” He sighed. “But I’ve met a great many dreams over the centuries, and most of them turned out to be no more than that. It’s been quite some time since our physicists decided they’d found all the laws of nature, all the possibilities and impossibilities.” He lifted a hand. “I realize that’s a proposition that can never be proven. But the likelihood has come to seem very high, hasn’t it? I’d love to learn the aliens own magic carpets flitting faster than tight; but I don’t expect to.”
Reluctantly, she nodded. “At least, we roust reason on the basis of what we do know. I suspect that’s far less than you think, but— What shall we do?”
“Respond.”
“Of course! But how? I mean, we’re slowing down, but we’re still near light speed. By the tune the, tile machine, any of those machines up ahead receives our signal, won’t we be past it? Won’t its answer take ... years to overtake us?”
He squeezed her hand. “Smart girl. You always were.” To the ship: “We want to establish contact as soon as may be. What do you advise?”
The answer jarred them both into bolt uprightness. “That is contingent. The transmission has changed character. It has become considerably more complex.”
“You, you mean they know we’re here? Where are they, anyway?”
“I am refining those figures as I obtain more parallax. The nearest source is approximately a light-year off our path, approximately twice that distance vectorially.”
“Baal! Then they can detect us instantly?”
“No. No, wait, Hanno.” Svoboda’s words came a little unsteadily, but fast. “That needn’t be. Suppose the broadcast is automatic, a cycle. First a simple alert signal, then the message, then the alert signal again, over and over. The message alone—we might not have recognized it for what it is, supposed it was just some natural thing.”
“When I first acquired it,” Pytheas volunteered, “I assumed it was a fluctuation in the background noise, conceivably of interest to astrophysicists but irrelevant to this mission. It was Dopplered and otherwise warped out of identifiability. The low-information transmission that succeeded it made clear that here is no random flux. It also provided unambiguous data by which the warp functions could be determined. I am now compensating for them and thus reconstructing the message proper.”
Hanno sagged back. “How often have they done this,” he whispered, “with how many others?”
“The reconstruction is not yet perfect, but it continually improves as additional data come in,” Pytheas went on. “Since the cycle is short, in shipboard time, I should soon have good definition. The message itself must be fairly brief, with high redundancy, although I anticipate high resolution as well. This is a visual mapping.”
Darkness brimmed in a screen. Suddenly it was full of tiny light-points, uncountably numerous. Their blumness dissipated, they sharpened, minute by minute. Colors appeared in them, and with that help eyes began to make out three-dimensional shapes, self-recurrent in infinite complexity.
“Prime numbers define a coordinate space,” said the ship. “Digital impulses identify points within it, which hi
