There were wry chuckles and someone heckled, ‘Speak up, we can’t hear you!’
Harrison Muthika smiled. ‘This signal spanned the electromagnetic spectrum between the centimetre and metre bands and lasted for two hours, three minutes and twenty seconds. The power of the signal has been estimated at one hundred and fifty megawatts.’
Murmurs. ‘How was the power generated?’ a voice with a French accent shouted. Harrison Muthika held up his hand.
‘Please. There will be an opportunity for questions at the end. This enormous burst of radio energy swamped broadcasting in the East African, Indian Ocean and Southeast Asian areas: all communications in those frequencies were silenced. The disruption to cellular networks alone has cost at least twelve billion dollars in disrupted business, not to mention feedback damage to data storage systems. Television and navigation systems went down, contact was lost with several thousand ship and aircraft, as well as the failure of air-traffic control throughout the region. It is only by the grace of God that a major air disaster was averted, though we do not yet have a complete picture: outlying sections of the East Pacific net are only now coming back on line.
‘You may be interested to know that the anonymous NASA wit behind the names “BDO” and “Tolkien” has christened this event “The Scream”.’
‘It’s Carl Sagan, isn’t it?’ an American-accented voice shouted.
‘I can’t confirm that, and I must once again ask you to keep your questions for the end. The transmission has been analysed and has been shown to consist of one hundred and eighty-seven signals, each carrying a data- transfer code at a rate of one and a quarter megabytes per second.’
Gaby did sums on her PDU. The average whodunit could fit on a floppy disc, about one and a quarter megabytes. One hundred and eighty whodunits per second, times one hundred and twenty-three minutes times sixty seconds, that’s seven three eight oh seconds equals one million three hundred and eight thousand and sixty plus an extra five hundred and sixty-one for those last three seconds and that’s an entire library of Murders in the Ballroom and Bodies in the Library.
‘We were only able to capture the last one hour and five minutes of the transmission,’ Harrison Muthika continued. ‘Neural network analysis is still coming through – the code is unlike anything we have yet encountered – but we think we have enough of a recognizable pattern to be able to extrapolate.’ A liquid crystal overhead projector threw an image on to the dance floor video screen. The swoop through the arrayed molecules would not have looked out of place in the psychotropic dance videos that usually played there. Gaby recognized the intertwined spiral staircases at once. Dance to your own DNA. ‘This is not, of course, what would have been received, it’s an approximation by our analysts. The transmitted information consisted of a three-dimension matrix of data, expressed in terms of the atomic specifications of its components.’ Molecules coiled behind Harrison Muthika like serpents mating in a baobob, the tree where man was born. ‘The DNA model is only a small part of the transmission. The remainder is fragmentary, but if we are correct, it is of enormous significance. It seems to be a complete map of the human genome.’
Hands shot up. Harrison Muthika sat down and looked to Mariko Uchida. The UNECT
‘You’ve probably guessed that the target of the transmission was the Hyperion Object, or BDO as we like to call it. Why the genetic code was transmitted to Saturn space is something we’ll probably only find out when the BDO gets here. However, an hour after the end of the Scream, our Miyama orbital telescope took this CCD image of the Hyperion Object.’
It looked like any grainy, blurry charge-coupled device photograph to Gaby. The universe as seen through serial-killer’s night-vision goggles. An ellipse of grey on darker grey, pierced by the burnt-out crucifixes of over- exposed stars.
‘I’ll enhance the image,’ Mariko Uchida said. It was still a light grey shape against a dark background to Gaby, but was there something about the edges? ‘Here are the images the Miyama telescope took over the subsequent five hours.’ The picture parade was like a sequence of pages torn from a badly drawn cartoon flicker book. ‘The object keeps the same face to the sun; we assume that the systems of organization there require energy to operate. I’d call them “life”, except that they’re existing in pretty hard vacuum. Note the curvature of the rim.’ The laser pointer jumped from frame to frame as the AV computer flashed up all the images in array. The edge of the disc was folding upward, like flat clay on a potter’s wheel being drawn into a wide, shallow bowl. ‘The increase in curvature is very slight, less than one per cent, but when you consider the size of the object and that this happened over a period of five hours with the BDO about sixty-five light minutes away, you can begin to imagine the scale of the forces at work here.’
She loves them, Gaby thought, these mighty forces. That smile is not part of the architecture now. She loves being dominated by the powers in the sky. She is getting soft and wet on that platform thinking about forces beyond imagining. Whoever is with her will get it good in bed tonight.
‘The changes must have started the moment the first signal of the Scream was received from Foa Mulaku. We’ve had our own extrapolations done of what the BDO might look like when it arrives in earth space.’ A sequence showed a creakily animated BDO pucker up around its rim into a conic parabola and stretch. The animation ran twice. The first time the BDO stretched into a great cosmic egg. The second time it rolled into a cylinder five hundred kilometres long, one hundred and fifty across its flats. ‘The probabilities for the second, cylindrical form are higher; fifty-eight per cent against thirty-nine per cent for the ovoid. The other percentages are covered by wild speculations from perfect cubes to space-faring Cadillacs to old men with long white beards. The cylinder model rates higher because it is a well-established format for a deep space habitat. Given that the axial rotation will increase as the BDO pulls in on itself, like an ice-skater speeding up her spin by drawing in her arms, we estimate that the internal rotational gravity will maximize to point six of a gee, which seems consistent with an internal planet-like environment. This may just be human chauvinism however; the Chaga-makers have yet to show any anthropomorphic tendencies; there is no reason why they should need to create a biosphere inside the BDO. However, the content of the Foa Mulaku transmission is significant in this context.’
‘You think the BDO is being converted into a self-contained Earth-like environment as a kind of alien embassy?’ Gaby interrupted. She heard murmuring. She heard whispers and sniggers.
‘I do,’ the Japanese woman said. ‘I believe the Hyperion Object as we see it is a universal form that has been employed many times before by the Chaga-makers in their migrations and contacts with extra-terrestrial environments. There is no evidence that humanity is a particular end-point on their journey: they may well have left the mechanisms that turned Iapetus black and produced both the biological packages and the BDO many thousand or even millions of years ago and moved on to other star systems. It is quite possible that the system was programmed to wait until intelligence was highly developed enough to stimulate it, which we have done with our probes to the outer planets.’
Peter Werther had said it knows us of old, Gaby thought. Perhaps that is why it transmitted the DNA code and the map of the human genome; to let whatever is out there know that there is still life on Planet Three, and how much the smart apes have changed since last we met.
R.M. Srivapanda was on his feet now. He waved down the raised hands with his one good hand.
‘Please, ladies and gentlemen, questions later. There is more.’ He waited for quiet. ‘For the one hundred and nine hours prior to emergence, the Maldives Ridge Object has been emitting a series of high volume, long- time base, low-amplitude sounds. We have been recording these on hydrophones; phase-shifted and compressed, this is what they sound like.’
The night club sound system was very good. It played the recording without any hiss or distortion or growl of overload. It must be great to dance to, Gaby thought. The sound started as a high-pitched musical twittering that plummeted in a deafening howl of bass notes that made Gaby think of Portuguese
‘It has been known for some time that whales use cold currents as waveguides along which song-cycles can be directed over several thousand miles. The Maldive Ridge Object seems to be using the mid-ocean drift to the same effect. Tracking of tagged blue whales in the Indian ocean basin has revealed a strange pattern.’ He nodded to the technician behind the mixing desk. A map of the ocean basin appeared on the screen, marked with
