Dark Star Calling

by Julia Keller

“Thicker.” Shura repeated the word.

  “Yeah,” Rez said.

  Kendall leaned forward. “Mind if I try something?” he asked. Nobody touched Rez’s keyboard without his permission.

  “Be my guest.” Rez tipped the joystick, moving his chair back and to the side about a fraction of an inch so that Kendall could have easier access to the control panel.

  Kendall’s fingers flew over the keyboard as he entered a series of commands.

  “Dammit,” Kendall said under his breath.

  Whatever was happening on the screen was still happening, despite his efforts. The letters continued to swell. They were almost unreadable now: The spaces between the H and E, and the L and P, had nearly vanished. The letters were so large that they constituted a single solid block.

  “You’re right, Rez,” Violet said. “It’s like the letters are out of control. But why? What’s going on?”

  The answer came a few seconds later, and when it did, it hailed from a most unexpected place.

  * * *

  Tin Man was probably the least likely person anywhere on New Earth—or Old Earth, too, for that matter—to solve a highly technical problem. Violet knew it, and she knew her friends knew it, too, including Tin Man himself. He’d had no formal education on Old Earth, unless you counted his rough life on the streets down there, when he ran with a cruel, ragtag gang that used violence to stay alive. Once he arrived on New Earth, he refused Violet’s offer to help get him into a school. He’d held up his fists and declared, “Got all the education I need right here.”

  But he was the one who figured out why the message was changing.

  “Can I suggest something?” he said.

  Rez ignored him, but the others didn’t.

  “Sure,” Kendall answered. “Whatcha got?”

  “Go for it,” Shura put in as Violet nodded.

  “Those letters,” Tin Man said, “remind me of a jacket I used to have back on Old Earth.”

  “A jacket.” Rez crammed a ton of disdain into his repetition of the word. “Right.”

  “Shut up,” Tin Man said. His voice was hoarse with suppressed anger.

  Shura touched Tin Man’s arm. “Hey. Come on.“She lightly tapped the top of Rez’s head. “Cut it out. Lose the attitude. Let him finish, okay?”

  Rez didn’t reply, but Violet could tell he was miffed. And she could tell, too, that Tin Man wasn’t feeling any more kindly toward Rez than Rez was feeling toward him. The reason for Rez’s petulance was obvious: He thought Tin Man was a dope.

  And the reason for Tin Man’s prickliness?

  Molly, Violet thought. When Tin Man talked about Old Earth, naturally he thought about Molly. He missed her fiercely. Grief gripped him and shook him and turned him into another kind of person. He had to fight to find his way back to who he truly was.

  Tin Man crossed his arms. He’d try again. “Yeah. A jacket. It was this old, dirty, smelly, torn-up thing. Just a rag, really, but it was all I had. I’d found it in a pile of junk in an alley. Wadded up in the corner. Covered with dirt and leaves and all kinds of crap. The best part was, it didn’t fit. It was way too big for me.”

  “And that was good because…?” Kendall tried to keep the impatience out of his tone. Violet could tell that he was edging over to Rez’s side: How was any of this relevant to the critical mystery that lay before them?

  “Because it meant I could carry a bunch of stuff under it,” Tin Man replied. “Stuff I didn’t want people to know about until I wanted them to know about it. Until I decided to show them.”

  Shura nodded vigorously. “I think I get what you’re saying. You mean the letters in the message are expanding because there’s something underneath them. Pushing them out. Something we weren’t supposed to know about until now. Now that whoever sent this message thinks we’re ready.”

  “Exactly.” Tin Man uncrossed his arms so he could give Shura a thumbs-up. “You got it.”

  “That could be right,” Kendall said. “Shura, Rez, Mickey, let’s unweave the signal, strand by strand. We can go back to the search for its origin later. Right now, we need to find out what’s beneath it. We’ll take turns at the keyboard so we can establish a rhythm. Violet, start a recording log, will you? So we won’t lose whatever pops up.”

  They crowded in closer around Rez’s chair.

  It was tedious, painstaking work that involved trial and error and bizarrely creative mashups of computer commands, but they systematically isolated the separate threads of the signal, picking them out one by one and setting them aside, relegating them to another part of the screen. Each time they removed a thread, whatever was behind the signal loomed a little bigger, throbbed a little brighter, became a bit more prominent, as if it could finally breathe.

  “There,” Kendall said. “Last one.” He punched in a flurry of numbers.

  “About time,” Shura added. She stood up straight again, releasing a long breath and shaking out her hands. “That was rough—coming up with commands so delicate that they could take apart something as thin and flimsy as that signal. It was like trying to floss a flea’s teeth.”

  “Yeah,” Rez said. He sat back in his chair, also weary from the effort. Too weary to make a crack about too many cooks spoiling a stew.

  “Fleas can’t floss,” Mickey piped up. “They don’t have teeth. Although it does make a great tongue twister. How many teeth can a fine flea floss?”

  “Shut up,” Rez said. “It was a metaphor.”

  “What’s a metaphor?” Mickey responded and then answered his own question. “It’s for whatever you want it to be for.”

  Rez groaned. “Would somebody pull his plug?”

  “Guys, guys,” Kendall said, trying to keep them focused on the business at hand. “Let’s see what we’ve got. Violet, would you please read us the log of what came up when we freed the hidden message?”

  Violet looked dubiously at her console. As each word had been released from beneath the HELP signal, she had recorded it on her console log. Her friends had been too focused on the torturously cumbersome task of signal separation to deal with the hidden letters they were liberating.

  Now they were ready to behold the wonders uncovered by their work.

  But there was a problem.

  “Um,” Violet said.

  “Come on. Tell us what was under the signal.” Shura’s impatience showed in her voice. She kept a hand on her lower back, which ached from the posture she’d been forced to maintain, bending over the keyboard.

  “Um,” Violet repeated.

  “Why are you stalling?” Kendall asked.

  “Because it’s gibberish. Nonsense words.” There. She’d said it. Their hard work didn’t matter, after all.

  “Really?” Rez asked. He’d been just as eager as the rest of them to find out the secondary message. “Are you sure?”

  Violet nodded glumly.

  “Well,” he said, “at least read the words aloud. Even if they don’t make any sense.”

  Kendall and Shura and Tin Man signaled their approval of that plan by creating a casual symphony of Yeah and Why not and Might as well and Got nothing to lose and then back around to Yeah.

  “Okay,” Violet said. She cleared her throat and spoke:

  “Trillum. Nogg. Waw.”

  She had pronounced the words as best she could. It was a guess. Just for good measure, to drive home the point that the words made no sense, she repeated the list, faster this time. “Trillum. Nogg. Waw.”

  Silence. They were nonsense syllables.

  From Shura came a bleak smile. “Maybe if you chanted that over a bubbling pot by the light of a full moon, some evil spirits would show up.”

  Nobody laughed. They were too frustrated.

  “So we’re back to square one,” Rez said. “We’ve got a signal that appears to be coming from Rachel’s Intercept chip from somewhere on the far edge of the galaxy. We’ve got three meaningless words embedded below the message. And the message itself, which appears to
be asking us for help—which we can’t respond to, mainly because we don’t know who sent it or why or from where.”

  The lab had gone silent again, aside from the faint hiss and gurgle of machinery.

  “Hold on.” Violet made some quick sketches on her console, using a light pink jewel to do so. “What if.”

  “What if … what?” Rez asked impatiently.

  Violet looked up from the jewel. The idea that had just come to her was thrilling.

  That, she decided, was the only word for it: thrilling.

  “What if,” she went on, “we’re not supposed to understand the words?”

  “Huh?” Shura said.

  “Yeah, I second that ‘huh,’” Tin Man put in.

  “Okay, listen,” Violet continued. The more she talked, the faster the words came to her. “When the Intercept was running, the chips collected emotions, right? It was data, sure, but the data came in the form of feelings. Memories of how you felt at a particular time in your life. Anger or sadness or happiness or regret or anxiety. Whatever. And back when we monitored Intercept feeds at Protocol Hall, we could see the source of those emotions—the specific incidents that prompted them.”

  “Right,” Kendall said. He had invented the Intercept and was still defensive about its operation. His motives had been pure. “It created a stockpile of weapons that the government could deploy against people who threatened the peace. The emotions gave the state leverage.”

  “So the Intercept relied upon emotions,” Violet said.

  Kendall nodded. “Exactly. What are you getting at? You know all of this, Violet. All of us do. The Intercept needed emotions.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Human emotions.”

  No one moved. No one spoke.

  Rez took the plunge. “Well, of course the Intercept used human emotions. What other kind of emotions could it have used?”

  Violet tried to keep the excitement out of her voice. “Alien emotions.”

  Her friends stared at her.

  Shura blinked several times. “At the risk of repeating myself—huh?”

  “What if an alien civilization found Rachel’s chip?” Violet said, her voice rising with excitement. “And figured out what it was for? And they’re trying to use it to communicate with us? They realized that the Intercept runs on emotions that it collects. Emotions like love and hate and fear. And they’re using Rachel’s chip to access their own emotions. But they call their emotions by different words—trillum and nogg and the other one.”

  Rez tilted forward in his red armchair. He didn’t look impressed. “Okay, right,” he said. “So where’s the revelation? An extraterrestrial species would have its own language. Naturally they wouldn’t have the same words for feelings that we do. I mean, jeez. Pretty obvious.”

  Violet waved her hands as if she were clearing a windshield. “No, no, no. You’re not getting it, Rez.”

  He frowned. She could guess his thoughts: Nobody told Steven Reznik that he wasn’t getting something. He always got everything, and usually long before anybody else got it. Or even knew there was anything to get.

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “I don’t mean just the words. I mean the emotions themselves.”

  Before Rez could respond, Shura made an mmmmm noise. It sounded to Violet like somebody enjoying an ice cream cone. Shura’s face seemed to grow brighter as she caught the essence of Violet’s idea.

  “So you’re saying,” Shura said, “that human emotions might not be the only ones in the universe. If life developed on other planets, those life-forms would have their own emotions. Different from ours. Our emotions—things like jealousy and joy and ambition and empathy—well, those might not even exist in other worlds. They could have whole new mixes of feelings. Like colors we’ve never seen before. Colors outside the visible spectrum. Our eyes don’t even have a means of seeing them.”

  Violet nodded. “Exactly. And these words—the ones they put underneath HELP, like a message in a bottle—are just attempts to use our language to capture their emotions. They’re not very good at it yet. They’ve got a long way to go. So we have no idea what these particular words mean because we don’t know what emotions they’re linked to.”

  “Wow,” Kendall said. “I never thought—” He was still trying to come to grips with Violet’s theory. “They may have tried to contact us before but didn’t know how. And then they found a chip—Rachel’s chip—floating in the stars. I bet they were ecstatic.” His voice was suffused with enthusiasm. “I mean, it must’ve been like having a raft wash up on a desert island where you’ve been marooned for years. And you’ve been desperate to communicate with other civilizations that you know—you just know—are out there, out past the horizon. And here’s a raft! Suddenly, you have this conduit. This vessel. You have a way of crossing the ocean of the galaxy if you can figure out how to use it.”

  “Except,” Rez said, breaking in, “we don’t have a friggin’ clue about what they’re trying to tell us. And no way to find out. At a minimum, they’re hundreds of millions of light-years away. We can’t get there, and they can’t get here. It’s hopeless.”

  A frustrated silence dropped like a big ugly rock in the middle of the room. He had made an excellent point.

  On Rez’s screen, the newly uncovered words—trillum, nogg, waw—pulsed and surged and wriggled in what looked like mute desperation as if trying frantically to explain themselves.

  Even with all the brainpower in this room, Violet realized, even with all the elite education and unprecedented brilliance and scintillating intuition, there were still vast secrets locked away in unknown corners of the universe, secrets that eluded their understanding. Of course she already knew that—it was a mighty big universe, after all—but never before had she been forced to really think about it.

  They were like little kids in a room where all the good and interesting stuff was stored on a high, high shelf. They could see it, but they couldn’t reach it. All they could do was get up on their tiptoes and reach and reach … and yearn.

  Rez fumed. Shura shook her head in frustration. If Kendall’s face were a painting, Violet thought, she would’ve titled it Defeat. He rubbed a palm across the top of his head. That was his tell; it meant he was fresh out of ideas.

  The only one who still seemed upbeat was Tin Man. He swept a meaty hand through the air, indicating the lab and its sleek array of blinking equipment. His gesture took in the wall of computers and the rows of monitors and the little red lights and the little blue lights and the bundled wires and the spinning gauges. It even included Mickey.

  “Hey,” Tin Man declared. “Come on. You’re smart people. Really, really smart. And you work damned hard. You may not know what those guys way out there are trying to tell us—for now. But I’d bet everything I have that you’re going to figure it out.”

  10

  Violet’s Idea

  “Fits great.”

  Violet lifted her arms straight out from her sides, the better to prove to Shura that the pink-and-aqua-striped pajamas she’d borrowed from her best friend would do just fine. Shura’s kitchen was tiny—barely bigger than the lab they’d just left, as well befit someone with no time or inclination to cook—and so when Violet lowered her arms with an equally dramatic gesture, she almost knocked over a stack of ReadyMeals on the counter.

  “Really?” Shura asked.

  “Really.”

  Never mind that the sleeves only reached to Violet’s elbows or that the buttons down the front were in imminent danger of popping off or that the simple act of raising her arms threatened to rip open a series of fragile, newly beleaguered seams.

  “If you say so.” Shura sounded dubious.

  “Let me put it the way a politician would. Ready? Okay, here goes: The top fits as well as the bottoms do.” Violet grinned and deftly executed a leg lift. The hem barely cleared the middle of her calf. She’d already uttered a silent prayer that the strained material across the backside wa
s up to the challenge.

  They laughed in unison. It really didn’t matter how Shura’s pajamas fit; Violet was too tired to care. Only a few hours remained until sunrise, when they’d have to get up, get dressed, and return to the lab to continue their work.

  Would they be able to fulfill Tin Man’s prophecy? Would they figure out the meaning of the message in Rachel’s chip?

  Violet didn’t know.

  All she did know was that she was completely exhausted. Her head felt too heavy for her neck. Her eyes burned. And so when Kendall had suggested that they break for the night and start fresh in the morning, Violet had pumped a fist in the air and said Yes! so fast that she cut off the end of his sentence.

  Shura’s apartment was much closer to the observatory. It made more sense for Violet to hang there for the next couple of hours than to go all the way back to her own apartment in Hawking. And there was, moreover, a pleasantly retro feel to the idea of a spontaneous sleepover at Shura’s. It stirred up good memories.

  When they were kids, and both of them still lived at home with their parents, Violet and Shura had spent the night together almost every weekend. They’d talk and laugh and listen to music on their consoles until late in the night. If they were at Shura’s house, Shura would sometimes show Violet a painting she was working on; Violet loved to see her work, especially a work in progress, but she never asked. She waited for Shura to offer. And then, lying side by side in Shura’s bed, they would discuss, hour after hour, how art was a way of stopping time, of lifting a moment from the ceaseless flow of eternity and setting it aside and sort of scribbling your name on it. Leaving your mark on the universe.

  They didn’t do that much anymore. In fact, Violet couldn’t remember the last time she had spent the night at Shura’s. They were both too busy. They had jobs now, and responsibilities, and other friends. Besides, they were adults now. Adults didn’t spend the night at each other’s houses, did they, giggling or listening to music or talking about eternity? Violet missed those weekends more than she could say, but like her desire to see Shura’s work, she wouldn’t bring it up first.