Bernard's Dream: A Hayden's World Novel (Hayden's World Origins Book 8)

by S. D. Falchetti

  Willow looks over at Lin, and the two of them shake their heads.

  “Coming up on waypoint,” Isaac says, ignoring them. “Distance to ring, five kilometers.”

  “Nice and easy,” James says.

  “Getting an increase in communication between the Stars,” Willow says.

  Isaac taps his panel. “Decelerating. Establishing parallel orbit.”

  “Contacts,” Beckman says. “We’ve got three Stars moving away from the ring on an intercept course.” The tactical display shows three arcs connecting the path of the Stars with the path of their drone.

  “Do you want to run the sequence?” Willow says.

  James shakes his head. “Hold. Let them have a look, first.”

  The Stars are quick, accelerating briskly and covering the distance faster than expected. James had forgotten how hard it was to get away from the one that pursued them over Janus. At first, it looks like the Stars will smash through the drone, but they just as sharply decelerate, circling the drone. Bright blue lights illuminate from their rods and bathe the drone in color.

  The drone is still live-streaming, and its view of the Stars is a bit frightening. They are four meter silver asterisks sprouting from a geosphere core with arms composed of stacked, sliding rods. Each group of rods ends in a cluster of pulsing lights, like eyestalks. James can’t tell if they look angry or curious.

  “Well, they haven’t smashed it yet. I guess that’s good,” Hitoshi says.

  “Okay, Willow,” James says. “Start the sequence.”

  “Transmitting,” Willow says.

  The bridge screen mirrors what the drone’s UV panel displays. The first sequence is a series of images — the ring, a Star, Promise, the Star’s ship. At first, each image is alone on the screen. After two cycles, words appear alongside the image from the Star’s U.V. light pulse dictionary that Ava and Willow have been compiling. These are the twenty-five most frequently spoken words between the Stars and the ring after the attack. Willow’s theory is that Silver Star, ring, Promise, or Silver Star’s ship appear there. If they get no reaction, the program will cycle to the next twenty-five most popular words. The next part relies on the Star’s intelligence.

  The Stars slow, the blue lights cycling to purple. The Star in the middle reconfigures its rods, sliding most of them inwards to half of their original length. It pulses there, nearly motionless, for a full minute as the program cycles through its pictures.

  James rubs his hands together, his breathing shallow.

  A brief chatter of light occurs between the Stars before the center Star extends its rods back to the spherical position and picks up rotational speed. The other two stars spin up like cogs in a machine, following its lead. Prismatic light trails carve arcs from its glowing eyes.

  “They’re going to jump,” James says. “Everyone, get ready if we need to move.”

  “Fractional jump ready,” Lin says.

  It’s something they figured out from their last encounter — seven seconds is an eternity for a near-lightspeed jump, so Lin proposed not doing a near-lightspeed jump. A one-percent lightspeed jump only takes a second and a half. Fractional jumps are a little trick they learned back during their Earth orbital battle against the Subversives.

  The three Stars burst in a scintillating flash and collapse in upon themselves.

  James waits, his hand on the Riggs controls. Two seconds elapse. Five seconds. Ten. Wherever they jumped to, it’s more than ten light-seconds away. He relaxes slightly.

  “Drone telemetry lost,” Isaac says. “They appear to have taken it with them.”

  “Okay,” James says, staring at the empty patch of space where their drone had been. “Let’s prep another care package in case they don’t return it. Ball’s in their court.”

  Three days of zero-gee is showing its effects on James. His nose is stuffed up like he has a minor cold and his arms and fingers feel puffy. The crew is so used to having their daily gravity times from burning off the Riggs boost that extended weightlessness feels foreign. He knows Julian is going to start pressuring him to put the ship under acceleration sometime in the next few days. Otherwise, people are going to have trouble adapting to when they actually need to use the engines. He already has slight vertigo from his inner ear no longer knowing which way is up.

  Ava lies next to him, her hand curled around her arm. They’ve tucked the bed’s blanket into its sides to form a bit of a tarp holding them against the mattress. They don’t really need a mattress in zero-gee, but being wrapped in one feels snug and comfortable, and it’s the best vantage point for the media screen. The movie is from the late 2050s and is a classic from their high school years. There’s something surreal about turning down their cabin lights, snuggling up, and enjoying a movie night while their ship is parked high above an alien world, as if they’ve finished a hard day of work, punched their timecards, and come home to kick back and relax. There is, however, nothing more to do tonight except to wait. It’s been six hours since the Stars took their drone someplace — they’re still not sure where because the drone is no longer talking to them — and now their sole purpose for remaining here in orbit is to wait and hope that the Stars want to speak. So, for tonight, the crew gets a much-needed break with a chance to rest and relax. For James, he gets some much-needed time with Ava, not talking about work, not being professionals — just being themselves, chatting about the silly things they did in high school, and enjoying a bit of shared nostalgia.

  Breakfast in the Canteen is cheerful. The crew’s back together, the Riggs drive is fixed, and the Stars haven’t tried to kill them for a few days. All-in-all, not too bad. It’s Hitoshi’s turn to pick the music, and the media screen streams a low-resolution video of Van Halen’s Jump. Like most of Hitoshi’s video choices, James isn’t sure what to make of it. The band is decked out in tattered primary-color clothing, jackets with zebra prints, with the lead singer crawling on the floor and hamming it up for the camera. However, James does have to admit that it is a bit catchy with its old, synthetic keyboard notes.

  Willow sips her orange juice. “So, Hitoshi, what is it that you love about this decade?”

  “Oh, wow. Our trip’s not long enough to answer that question,” Hitoshi says. “But seriously, it’s not just the eighties. It’s the whole second half of the twentieth century. We had this golden age of sci-fi with all these great, imaginative books and television shows. It was awesome. You know, the moon landing had happened, and everyone had dreams of us doing, well, what we’re doing right now. I’m always picking eighties music for the media screen because eighties music has videos. I mean, the seventies has some, and they kind of still made videos in the next few decades, but not like the ones from the eighties.”

  The song ends and transitions to another Van Halen song, Dreams. In it, six blue jet fighters take off and perform aerobatics. Oh yeah, James thinks, Douglas A-4 Skyhawks. Now, this I could get into.

  “How about you, Lin,” Willow says, “do you have a favorite decade?”

  Lin almost sings her response. “Sixties. The shows rock, but you know what was even cooler? NASA engineers. Dudes put people on another world using slide rules.” She holds up both hands for emphasis. “Slide rules! I’m geeking out just thinking about what sort of hardcore engineering must’ve happened.”

  Willow looks over at James. “How about you, James?”

  James scratches his chin. “Nineteen-forties. Aviation was stick-and-rudder, and everyone was breaking barriers. It’s easier to build on what others have started. Harder when you’re the first.”

  The Canteen’s slanted, virtual windows are over James’s shoulder, currently looking out at Sao and the orbital ring. A flash like an electrical short appears outside, fading instantly.

  “All crew to bridge,” Ananke says over the intercom.

  As James pushes up from the table, he looks out the window. A silver disk floats in the distance, pulsing blue. Everyone around him is also out of his seat and the
next minute is the flurry of a crowd pulling themselves weightlessly along hallways and speeding towards the bridge. James is first, slinging himself into his bridge seat and clicking into his harness. The silver disk magnified on the bridge screen is a Sunflower, unfurling its petals with each tip pulsing blue.

  Ananke’s console ripples with color. “Distance to the Silver Star is five hundred and eight meters. It is holding position.”

  James says, “Beckman, ready our care package.”

  “Roger,” Beckman says.

  The Sunflower rotates slowly counter-clockwise, a few blue bursts flickering from the cluster of eyes in its center. After a moment, it strobes a bright pattern, pauses, and strobes again.

  “Okay, I’ve got it,” Willow says. A frequency diagram of the strobe pops up. “What it just said was one of the words from our drone message. We’d splashed their top twenty-five words alongside images of Promise, Silver Star, Silver Star ship, and Sao. If they understood that we were trying to get them to pick the word that matched the image, then they might be saying Promise or Silver Star to us right now.”

  The Sunflower repeats the burst.

  “How should we respond?” James says.

  “We should repeat it,” Willow says.

  “Let’s do it.”

  Willow taps her panel, and Promise strobes a response from its forward floodlights. The Sunflower rotates slowly, silent a moment. After a few seconds, it strobes back.

  “It’s another word from our list,” Willow says. “I’m going to repeat it back.”

  The Sunflower responds with another word.

  “That one,” Willow says, “wasn’t on the list we sent them, but it is in our master list. We need a way to verify what words they’re using. We should send the care package.”

  James nods. “Agreed. Beckman, launch when ready.”

  “Opening drone bay doors,” Beckman says. “Bird is away. Proceeding directly to the Star.”

  The care package is just a multi-spectrum drone with a quantum computer and UV display secured to it, identical to the last package the Stars took. It glides around Promise’s nose and slows as it approaches a spot ten meters in front of the Sunflower.

  “Telemetry live,” Beckman. “We’re linked up to the computer. On your console, Willow,”

  “Thanks,” Willow says. “Let’s start with Promise and the first word it said.”

  The bridge screen has an inset of what the quantum computer is showing on the UV panel. A picture of Promise sits beside a strobing Star word. It’s the same word the Sunflower said to them when it just arrived. The Sunflower responds by repeating the word back to them.

  “Okay,” Willow says, “now we’ll try Silver Star.”

  When she broadcasts the Silver Star image and light pulse, the Sunflower repeats it.

  “Now, we’ll test it by swapping the pictures and the words.” Willow sends an image of Promise with the word for Silver Star. The Sunflower doesn’t repeat it but instead says a new word. Willow smiles, laughing nervously. “Oh, that’s good. It passed the test. Now we may have the words for Promise, Silver Star, and possibly incorrect.”

  “We have half of a conditional if we have incorrect,” Ava says.

  “Yes!” Willow says. She looks over at James. “Once we have words for true and false, we can build math tests and even have a structure for questions.”

  “How do you want to proceed?” James says.

  “Let’s see if they’ve really picked up on how this works. I’ll show them Sao and the twenty-five word list.”

  Sao fills the UV display, and the Sunflower says one of the twenty-five words.

  Ava is grinning now, too. James can see the excitement overbrimming from her.

  “Keep in mind,” Willow says, “we don’t know if they just said Sao or planet or round or home, but it’s something associated with the image. We can test it by showing them other planets in the system and seeing if they use a different word.”

  “Interstellar show-and-tell,” Hitoshi says.

  Willow nods. “Pretty much! We’ve got a long sequence of images to show them, and we’ll see if we can get them to say the word for each, then we’ll exclusion-test each word to narrow down the concept. Once we have a base of nouns, we’ll move on to actions. We’ll map it all to their recorded conversations, and that will give us insight into their syntax.” Willow’s face is aglow. “This is so exciting!”

  Goose pimples well up on James’s arms as his stomach tingles with anticipation. They’re really doing it, he thinks. The Stars finally want to talk. Now, the big question is what they have to say.

  24

  Star Talk

  Ananke’s screen swirls with color as she manages the drone link with the Sunflower. It’s been eight hours of presenting now after the crew realized she could handle the word-logic tests at quadruple the speed of Willow. The images and responses flash up on the bridge screen like a grad student speed-reading cards to cram for a final.

  Hitoshi watches the flashing images for a second, glancing at Lin. “You ever see Close Encounters of the Third Kind?”

  She sings the synthesized theme from the movie. “Do dee do doo doooo…”

  Hitoshi chuckles. “Yeah, it’s like the ending where they’re talking with the big light grid.”

  “Tosh, if I see you carving a mountain out of your mashed potatoes, I’ll know why.”

  On the bridge screen’s right, a live video streams from Promise’s Planetary Science Lab. Ava and Willow are huddled around computers that display branching hierarchies of words. Both are chattering and pointing at structures on their screens. They’re a great team, Hitoshi thinks. Ava’s the only person ever to have tried communicating with an alien species during her work on Enceladus, and Willow’s got the linguistics training to map out what the Stars are saying.

  “How many words are we up to?” James says.

  Ananke replies, “The answer is complex. I’ve classified words into confidence bands. Low-confidence words require further testing. We have four thousand two hundred and six total words mapped so far. Eight percent are high confidence, twenty-five percent are medium, and sixty-seven percent are low confidence. We’re identifying or reclassifying approximately five hundred words per hour.”

  “Do you think we have enough to talk with them?”

  “Possibly. It depends on the subject. High-confidence words are things we have in common. Us, them, celestial objects, mathematical and scientific concepts. Math and science words have been the easiest to confirm. Once we agreed on the word for atom, we talked electron and proton, and from there, we built element names such as hydrogen or oxygen and compounds, such as water. It’s interesting that simple verbs, such as run, are extremely difficult, but sub-atomic physics is easy.”

  Willow looks over at the camera from her video feed. “James, unless they try to initiate dialogue, we should continue collecting as much info as they’re willing to share. It’ll give us the best chance of not being misunderstood when we do speak.”

  “Roger,” James says. “What have you learned so far?”

  “They speak in sentences,” Willow says. “Most of our high-confidence words are nouns or verbs, but we think they have adjectives and modifiers. I think their sentences are constructed similarly to Japanese. In English, we speak in cause-and-effect. The dog chased the cat is different from the cat chased the dog, so we get our cues from word order. We have articles like the that tell us that the next word is a noun, but the is used for any noun and has nothing to do with whether it’s the subject. In Japanese, there is no the. Instead, they have particles like wa that tell you that the preceding word is the topic of conversation. It doesn’t really matter where in the sentence the preceding words appear. The Stars seem to speak like this.”

  “Oh, great,” Hitoshi says. “The Stars are Japanese. We can bond over Kaiju films and karaoke.”

  Ava joins the conversation, smiling. “So, what we’ve learned about them from their lang
uage is that they count in base twelve, they have similar science concepts to us, and they probably have a similar perception of linear time based on the object and action modifiers. Also, they’ve been playing along with our tests for eight hours now. They’re either very curious or very interested in communicating.”

  “They might just want to learn enough to say get out,” Beckman says.

  “Entirely possible,” Ava says, “but I’m a glass-half-full-kinda-gal.”

  “This is awesome work,” James says.

  “Yeah!” Ava says, her eyes sparkling. “It’s incredible to finally have a first contact. You know, we’re making history.”

  James looks up at the Sunflower pulsing its colorful conversation to the drone. “That we are.”

  After sixteen hours of word-mapping, the Sunflower spoke its first sentence before spinning up to speed and jumping back to the orbital ring. Ananke translated it as: Stars / (topic particle) / empty-null-zero / (status particle) / leave / (action particle). They’re not sure if the Stars sleep, eat, or need to be recharged, but its meaning seemed very human: It’s been a long day. See you tomorrow. James agreed and sent everyone to bed, leaving Ananke to summon them if the Sunflower returned.

  The next day, the Sunflower returns at the same time. Okay, James thinks, now we have a schedule. Two other identical Sunflowers flank it. The center one speaks: Promise / (topic particle) / Stars (recipient particle) / start (action particle).

  They think they understand the request, but decide to try a response. Willow sends: Query / (conditional) / drone / (topic particle) / show / (action particle).

  The Sunflower responds: Query (topic particle) / True-equivalent-affirm (status particle).

  James grins. They just had their first conversation with the Stars. He also gets how the particles work. The Star word for query was the same in both sentences, but the particle was different. In the first sentence, query was a punctuation mark. In the second, it was almost a phrase, such as In regard to your question.