InterstellarNet: Origins (2 page)

Charise was one of the very few ambassadors in the task force, and she meant to look the part. Her light-blue pants suit was businesslike, when most delegates and accredited observers had opted for resort casual. In her mind’s eye she cut quite the distinguished figure: tall, poised, and well dressed, with a
café au lait
complexion and raven hair neatly knotted in a bun—

“Miss? Excuse me, miss?” She turned in surprise. A correspondent from a big American TV network was offering his business card. “Do me a favor, hon. My assistant disappeared, to the hotel bar if I had to guess. Get my paperwork for me.” She was still speechless when he added, walking away, “I’ll tell the hotel manager how much I appreciate the service.”

Mistaken for a maid! Cheeks burning, Charise could only hope her coloring hid her anger. She had not been so enraged since…it was a struggle to remember a time.

The Battle for Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization. She had been inside, a delegate—while in her heart she had been on the street among the protestors. But as passionate as she remained about the travesty of globalization,
this
was personal.

She was still steaming when she reached the front of the registration line and collected her credentials. The clerk handed her a name tag, and she noticed a red dot just below her ambassadorial title. “It will be explained inside,” was all the answer the registration clerk would provide.

The red dot related, she presumed, to the as-yet undefined committee structure of the task force. It did not surprise Charise that she had yet to recognize anyone else with a red-dot badge. That was the kind of dismissive treatment usually granted to Belize.

The auditorium doors finally opened, and the crowd surged inside. The Secretary-General of the UN gave the obligatory pep talk by satellite link. He introduced Kim Chun Ku, the Undersecretary-General for Administrative Affairs, as (the day’s first news) head of the new task force. The S-G was followed by Ambassador Juan Roderigo of Argentina, the current head of COPUOS, the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

Sherman Xu reprised his big announcement of two days before. The unexpected radio waves from a star Charise had never heard of: Lalande 21185. The carrier signal was at the hydrogen wavelength divided by pi, although why hydrogen
had
a wavelength, or what dividing it by pi might signify, eluded her. Like naturally occurring cosmic radio sources, the faint signal faded in and out. Evidently unlike natural sources the carrier was—in yet more meaningless jargon—modulated with a narrowband signal, less than 300 Hertz. About every 30 hours the signal included a sequence of pulses: pulse, pause, two pulses, pause, three pulses…up to 128 pulses. That pulse sequence was repeated once.

For thirty hours, a complex message followed the easy-to-recognize pulse sequences. The cycle then repeated, although that conclusion was tentative due to noise and signal fading. Xu’s team hoped to have recovered the full message from the many iterations within a week—if the signal persisted that long.

Leave it to a scientist to render stultifyingly boring the discovery of intelligent aliens. But interesting or boring, the news was surely irrelevant to daily life on Earth.

It was almost noon when Kim Chun Ku finally claimed his podium. Kim’s remarks confirmed what Charise already knew: He was an administrator. Passionless. Kim’s third viewgraph was an organization chart: five colored boxes. As one, the audience members checked out their name badges. Whispers erupted.

Kim rapped his mike until order returned, then confirmed widespread suspicions. The colored stickers denoted committee assignments. After lunch, at committee breakout sessions, the teams would convene for the first time.

The gold team, at the top of the chart, was the Steering Committee. Kim, of course, led the gold team. Its members were the leaders of the still undefined other teams, famous names from the SETI community, whatever SETI was, two assistants to ambassadors from COPUOS-participating countries, and a few UN agency heads like Bridget Satterswaithe. The leadership group, as far as Charise could tell, lacked representation from the less-developed countries.

Of course.

Blue team dealt with radio engineering, something about signal acquisition and recovery. They would work with the ITU on reducing Earth-originated interference in ET’s preferred frequencies. They would coordinate the efforts of radio observatories worldwide at monitoring ET’s signal. Blue team was mostly radio astronomers, including Sherman Xu, with some ITU staff thrown in.

The Green team’s job struck Charise as the part of the project most likely to be second-guessed: analysis. They were tasked with decoding and interpreting ET’s message. Membership included lots of strange folks: a codebreaker from the American National Security Agency, mathematicians, linguists, and more SETI specialists.

Gray team would ponder Earth’s possible response. Kim had, quite properly, decided that opening a dialogue with another civilization was not about science. With Security Council blessing he had staffed this committee entirely with diplomats. Linguists and mathematicians from Analysis would encode Earth’s message after a reply, if any, had been authorized. Studying gray team’s short list, Charise fumed: again, no representation from the developing countries.

And the red team? The best had
not
been saved for last.

Red denoted the Media & Education Committee. The group to which she had been relegated was to coordinate the release and spinning of everyone else’s work. Red team would also take questions and field unsolicited suggestions. Her committee mates were reporters—including the jerk who had just humiliated her, PR flacks, educators, a multicultural behavioral response team, and, oddly, an ITU-sponsored technocrat.

Dr. Dean Matthews, by happenstance, was seated a few seats to Charise’s left. She had noticed him in the lobby: tall, about 185 centimeters; fit, in a middle-aged, office-worker sort of way; with wavy black hair and pale blue eyes. The title line on his badge read
VP of Strategy and Technology,
above a company name that was unfamiliar to her. He kept frowning at his nametag as though it might, if sufficiently rebuked, somehow change its spot.

Charise shared Matthews’s disappointment, knowing no one would care. She was a credentialed ambassador, and this assignment was an affront. She had plenty of experience with such condescension, and with wringing every gram of possible advantage from others’ guilt. If they—a group of uncertain and fluid composition, but always including the United States government—believed she would quietly accept their “generosity” in being included in their task force, they would learn differently soon enough.

■□■

“And so,” Paul Ricard concluded, “our role is to package and control the Lalande information, in a manner respectful of the various cultural sensitivities.” He looked for approval to the woman glowering from front-and-center in the musty, overcrowded meeting room. “After a short break, I propose to discuss process concepts for that mission.”

Red team’s leader had spoken for twenty minutes, in all that time conveying no more than had been in his summation. All viewpoints are equally valid.

Such vapidity, alas, was what Dean expected from a PR flack—even one with a prestigious UN title. The sullen ambassador could not have helped.

So why am
I
here? Dean wondered. He cleared his throat.

“Dr. Matthews, have you something to add?”

“Yes, actually. I don’t think our charter, as you’ve spelled it out, is entirely realistic.”

“And why is that?” Ricard sniffed.

When the session had opened with brief introductions, Dean had wondered anew why he was there. He had a Ph.D. in physics, while no one else admitted to any background in a physical science. So give them the benefit of the doubt. They might honestly not understand.

Dean said, “Because we don’t have a monopoly on ET information.” (The media reps suddenly sat a bit straighter. The newsies had been quiet, as if from some misapprehension that task-force membership guaranteed them exclusive insights.) “If we withhold or spin any findings, we’ll discredit the whole task force.”

“I question the premise,” Ricard said. “We have brought into the task force the leadership of every major radio-astronomy observatory. Surely we can rely upon their cooperation in the responsible release of discoveries.”

Irrelevant even if it were true,
Dean thought. “In days, universities worldwide will be monitoring ET directly. They can easily build an adequate receiver from arrays of commercial satellite dishes. They know exactly where to point the antennas and the frequency to which to tune. And they will
all
be racing to post observations and interpretations to the ’net.”

Unhappy looks were traded across the room while Ricard found his voice. “How sure are you about this?”

“Very,” Dean said. “I’m on leave of absence from a satcom company, one of many such firms. Any of a dozen people from my former staff could do this.”

“Dr. Matthews?” asked Amreesh Shah, a psychologist from the behavioral-response group. “What would you propose?”

“Publish our observations, completely and without editing,” Dean answered. “Clearly mark as commentary or opinion any ‘adjustments’ we may choose to make.”
Not that we should make any.

“We won’t have a monopoly on the signal, but we do have resources far beyond those of other listeners. If our postings are prompt and objective, our interpretations insightful,
we
become the preferred source of ET data. If we hold back, however well-intentioned our reasons, the best we can hope for is marginalization by other news sources. At worst, who knows what motives will be ascribed to us? There’s no shortage of people who see conspiracies all around.”

Shah nodded. “Distrust is the result the task force can least afford.”

That was one point everyone in the committee could agree upon.

From the SETI Conspiracy chat room:

Suspect_Everyone:
Does it strike anyone else as suspicious that the UN is orchestrating the Lalande investigation?

UFO_believer:
Absolutely! And who’s behind this “International Academy of Astronautics?”

42_is_true:
I would sure like to see the ET message text from a reliable source, not the US government, and *certainly* not the UN.

Suspect_Everyone:
Does it strike anyone else as suspicious that it’s suddenly very hard to buy satellite dishes?

“Whatever is so fascinating?” Bridget Satterswaithe asked. She plopped her carryon bag onto a spare seat at Dean’s table.

Dean shut his laptop. He had been surprised but happy to discover the island’s single-runway airport had wireless access. Or maybe he was happy because this tiny airport bar stocked ale from the local microbrewery. “Just catching up.”

That was an easier answer than describing the intriguing new resource he had just run across: the Internetopedia. Maybe the web portal was the next big thing, and maybe it was only a marriage of desperation among dot-bomb media companies.

“Tropical punch,” Bridget told the approaching waiter. The terminal had a roof but no walls. The afternoon sea breeze riffled her hair as she took the remaining chair. To Dean she said, “Quite an event.”

He had run into her at banquets and between meetings, but always within a crowd. They hadn’t been alone together since that extraordinary, adrenaline-fueled night when they had learned about ET. He was no longer lobbying, but she could still make or break NetSat. He was a peon on the Lalande task force. She was among its leaders.

How exactly was he supposed to relate to her?

He had Googled all the ITU leadership before the WARC, not just Bridget. He knew she was an electrical engineer, with a Ph.D. from Oxford, and that she had gone straight from university to a British government research establishment. He knew that post had been her steppingstone to the ITU, which, after several promotions, she had come to lead.

Knowing her resume didn’t help here. What else? Along the way she had acquired patience with committees and bureaucracy that Dean could not fathom.

And, to be honest, he was attracted to her.

Dean slid a bowl of mixed nuts her way. “It turned out okay. Maybe I’ll cancel the mob contract I took out on you.”

“For accomplishing what you pleaded for?”

“Requested in a dignified manner.” He gestured for another ale. “No, for plunking me among the social scientists and spin doctors.”

And with a perpetually difficult ambassador. Why was Charise Ganes always so angry? Googling her had revealed that she was one of the youngest ambassadors ever accredited to the UN. Maybe that and ET were too much to handle.

That seemed like too much candor.

Dean continued, “I respect their sincerity and good intentions, but I’ve
never
met so many people who see the glass as half empty.”