InterstellarNet: Origins (6 page)

“I predict,” and here Klein paused dramatically, “that by the time we have finished the processing of ET’s message, we will have discovered a request for information from us.” Dean silently mouthed the prediction—
his
prediction—along with the ambassador.

“I think we should keep an open mind about how, what, and when to answer ET. For surely if we do not reply, it will be
his
committees deciding not to throw good money after bad.”

Klein smiled at Bridget. “And then who can say what amazing knowledge we will have forfeited?”

7

The steerers were disinvited from day three of the hearing, at which COPUOS would decide the task force’s fate. Bridget and Dean sought distraction at the Statue of Liberty. She had never seen it; he had visited it at the age of eight.

“That is one handy connection you have with Alex Klein,” she offered on the return ferry. It was the first violation of a tacit no-business-talk policy.

“Oh?”

“I’ve been holding back, too. It appears you were right about ET requesting information.” She flinched as the ferry’s horn blasted. “Although it’s generally impractical to decode out of sequence, some analysts have scanned ahead in the message. They figured that a sneak preview might suggest in advance new technical specialties we should add to our staff.”

“So what lies ahead?”

“The message gets more and more complex. Most of what remains to decode looks like physics and electronics. Amid that technical detail, oddly, is a return to arithmetic. That’s followed by a brief return to chemistry. The arithmetic and the chemical reactions both use a symbol we don’t understand. Everyone assumes we’ll know what it means once we read the message in order. The puzzling thing is, that symbol doesn’t appear earlier.”

“Give me an example, Bridget?”

“Sure. Call the undecoded symbol ‘X.’ The math is trivial stuff, like 2+3=X and 7-1=X. The chemistry starts as similarly basic chemical reactions, with a reactant missing, replaced by X. Then X shows up in a lot of hairy chemistry material.”

A cloud drifted in front of the sun, turning the harbor breeze instantly chilly. Dean was too deep in thought to notice. “You didn’t pick ‘X’ at random. You’re thinking of everyone’s favorite algebra variable: X the unknown.”

“My mind’s been heading that way since the speech you put your ambassador up to.”

“Okay, let’s assume ‘X’
is
something to be solved for. ET used trivial arithmetic problems to introduce the symbol. He used simple chemistry problems to generalize the concept beyond math. And then…” Dean stopped, staring into space.

“And the remaining occurrences of X might just turn out to be ET’s shopping list.”

■□■

Dean’s cell phone warbled as the ferry docked. Chattering, jostling tourists almost drowned out Alex Klein’s news. By a 43-40 vote, COPUOS had narrowly reapproved the task force. Dean gave a thumbs-up to Bridget, now on her own phone.

The gesture was arguably too soon. Alex’s next words were less upbeat. “Winning this round took cashing in lots of favors owed the US. I expect Charise Ganes and her allies will try packing the committee with new, like-minded members before the next review. If that happens, I don’t see where the votes would come from to authorize a reply to ET.”

■□■

Bridget’s incoming call summoned her—and Dean—to see Kim. When Dean asked why, she only shrugged.

They took a cab from the dock to the UN. One short hour after the vote, hundreds of Earth Firsters were already demonstrating in front of the UN building.

Bridget excused herself when they arrived at the Undersecretary-General’s office, and Kim did not seem surprised. Dean wondered what the two of them had cooked up.

“Today’s vote was unpleasantly close,” said Kim, as Bridget closed the door behind herself. “We must do better next time.”

Dean nodded. Where was this going?

“Perhaps we need fresh thinking. The kind of insight that your ambassador showed yesterday…with your input. Dr. Satterswaithe also speaks highly of you.” Kim smiled. “Joining the Steering Committee would be so much more efficient than manipulating us.”

Dean didn’t bother to protest the insinuation, for there was more than a little truth to it. Coming from a career politician and diplomat, the remark was probably meant as a compliment.

Kim said, “Now assuming that you
will
join us, I suggest you plan to stay in New York an extra day. We will have a post-vote strategy session tomorrow.”

8

Dean’s prediction aboard the ferry turned out only half right.

At his suggestion, the Steering Committee strategy session began with an overview of the whole message. The head of the Analysis committee, Koji Matsumoto, gave the summary. Koji was an intense astrophysicist on loan from NASDA, the Japanese space agency.

Matsumoto opened a PowerPoint briefing. “This chart overviews the entire message and our progress in reading it. Message blocks flow from left to right and top to bottom. The ‘look at me’ pulses and earliest images are at the top left. You’ll recall that ET marks each image with the dimensionality and size of the next image. This lets us separate the message into its parts, although many of the later blocks don’t make sense yet.”

Dean studied the graphic. The first quarter was red, fading to orange. The middle half was yellow. The last fourth spanned the rest of the rainbow, in thin slices.

“The blocks we believe to be fully decoded appear in red. I expect everyone is familiar with that material. Orange shows blocks that are partially interpreted. Although the yellow region that follows has yet to be translated, cursory examination suggests that it is, like the orange, progressively more advanced mathematics, physics, and chemistry.”

Matsumoto waved his remote at the projector and a new slide appeared. “Here we see more detail about the end of the message. The thin green slice is only a few frames long. It is where ET introduces what we think is a question-mark symbol. The blue that follows is what Dean called the shopping list; we’ll return to that. The indigo area seems to be electronics schematics. Violet, the final section, appears to derive units of measure, such as time intervals, from fundamental physical constants.”

A new slide appeared, its blue border implying that it came from the shopping-list portion of the message. Dean saw a chemical reaction in which the presumed question-mark character represented a catalyst. Beneath the reaction was a line of three other symbols.

Matsumoto went on. “Here is a typical frame from the shopping list. It seems plausible that ET is asking if we can identify a catalyst for this chemical reaction. On the next line are the ‘us’ and ‘them’ symbols, Earth and ET, separated by something we did not recognize at first: a vector symbol from the early physics tutorial. We think the vector is used here simply to show direction.”

In short, the three symbols read: “Earth to ET.”

Flick. Another blue-bordered graphic appeared. It, too, showed a chemical reaction, seemingly for a fuel cell. A question mark again stood where a catalyst would be indicated. Beneath that were the symbols for us, to, and them—with one key difference. The direction of the vector had been reversed.

“In addition to what Dean calls ET’s shopping list,” Matsumoto said, “we think ET has sent us a catalogue.”

From the Earth First chat room:

All_Politics_Is_Local:
The $%^#!! UN is still moving toward a reply to ET. How can they be stopped?

Stop_World_Government:
See your verbs, dude? Passive voice! UR the problem. What can *you* do?

All_Politics_Is_Local:
I’ll bite. What can I do?

Radical_Dude:
Be in New York when COPUOS meets next. Earth First is organizing mass demonstrations, with support from around the world. If the UN doesn’t change course, we’ll show them that the Battle of Seattle was only a tea party. Earth’s precious resources are for Earth!

All_Politics_Is_Local:
I have been properly rebuked and reeducated. Earth First!

Radical_Dude:
Amen to that!

■□■

Call it barter, which sounded primitive, or trading intellectual property, or
very
long-distance e-business. By any name, the task force had finally answered the question, “What does ET want?”

He wants, it would seem, to learn useful things from us.

Though something similar had been suspected for days, since Dean and Bridget’s ferry ride, it was more persuasive in Matsumoto’s concise briefing. Consensus quickly jelled on the interstellar trading scenario. Speculation swirled about how the system could work. More heat than light was being generated.

Dean coughed for attention. “Koji, could you bring back your first chart?” The image returned. “I’m going to climb out on another limb.

“As we keep re-learning, ET is very systematic. So why do electronics reappear after the shopping list and catalogue? Koji, might the indigo area be a new tutorial or trade goods?”

“We see no new symbols in the indigo region, so I would not think it is tutorial. We also found none of the ‘us to them’ or ‘them to us’ phrases, so I do not think indigo relates to trading.”

“As I expected.” Dean slid back his chair, fighting the urge to stand and pace. “One of the few things ET already knows about us is that the signals we send, or, more truthfully, leak, are so weak he can barely hear us. That’s pretty clear from the time-lapsed replay of what he’s heard. Surely if ET had extracted any detailed information from Earth’s radio leakage, instead of just our dial tone, he would have sent back a bit of it to let us know.

“ET’s transmitter is far more powerful than anything on Earth, or it’s capable of incredibly focused beamcasting, or both. So, another speculation. I bet that the indigo material, the electronics, is a transmitter design. There’s no reason for ET to ask to trade until we learn to speak intelligibly.”

“Perhaps I can complete the decoding,” Matsumoto added. “If we grant Dean’s speculation, a meaning might also be placed on the last portion. At a high level, as I said, the part of the message coded in violet derives units of measure. This appears to include time intervals and a radio frequency.

“If Dean is correct, the last part of the message may be telling us when and where ET will be listening for our reply.”

9

Dean’s new assignment meant lots more time spent in New York. The Steering Committee met often and only the most remote members telecommuted. His houseplants took it hard, but otherwise it worked well enough, and it gave him opportunities to better bond with the other steerers. Morning jogs with Vladimir Antinov were pure bonus.

Pounding along a Central Park path, Dean saved his breath for keeping up. Antinov was fanatically fit and perfectly willing to do all the talking.

Today Vladimir mused aloud about the latest pronouncement from Dean’s former colleagues in the Media committee. The soldier’s perspective was always an eye opener, as different from Dean’s commercial frame of reference as Dean’s was from the academics and bureaucrats who dominated the task force.

“Good technique, my friend. Divide and conquer.” Vladimir did not appear to be sweating, or even winded. “Analyzing as much of the message at once as possible makes sense.”

“In my world,” Dean wheezed, “we call it parallel processing.”

“The labs back home say it is an interesting approach.” Vladimir referred to what had indeed proven to be a transmitter design.

Dean was reminded of his favorite evasion. As in: This casserole is interesting. “More surprising than interesting.” Pant, pant. “Curiously complex.”

“You should think like a Russian. Consider
Mir
. I loved seeing the faces on your astronauts when they first came aboard. They were in shock about
Mir
. So primitive. So klugged.”

“Kludged?”

“Yes, thanks. Kludged. Despite our kludging, or maybe because of it, USSR had a space station twelve years before a single piece was launched for a NASA space station.” Vladimir jogged in place at the crest of a low rise until Dean, huffing, caught up. “The best is the enemy of the good enough.”

“My brain…is not at its best when bouncing.”

“You Americans believe advanced capability requires advanced technology. You think ET’s solution must be simple and elegant.” They zigged off the path to pass some mere power walkers, then zagged back on. “You never think of
Mir
.”

“So.” Dean was out of breath and struggling to follow. “You’re…saying…brute force.”

“Perhaps. Of course, I would not know an elegant radio design if it shot at me. I only suggest that you consider it.”