Emprise

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  This time the smile snuck past Eddington’s defences. “That’s the Garden Room—the big one at the top of the stairs.”

  “That’s right. That’s the one.” Taking her suitcase in hand, she struggled toward the stairs. Eddington followed with the other bag.

  Swinging the bags onto the bed raised a small cloud of dust, and Eddington met Agatha’s intense look with an apologetic shrug. “I have some people downstairs that I need to get back to. Is there anything you’ll need tonight—besides a dust rag?”

  “I’ll clean up tomorrow,” she said. “Go on—go back to your friends.”

  “All right.” He hesitated at the door. “You won’t bother us now, will you?”

  Her sigh was exasperated. “I’m not five, Dad.”

  “There’s a good girl. I’ll see you in the morning.” He left feeling awkward, as he usually did the first few days. Part of being a forty-four-year-old father to a twelve-year-old daughter, he supposed.

  Agatha set aside the two suitcases and flung the quilted comforter to the foot of the bed. When she unlatched the larger case, she revealed a jumble of books, for the most part paperbacks and generally worn in appearance. Pulling one out, she bounced onto the wide bed and snuggled back into the pillows.

  / like it here, she thought, surveying the room. So much history in old houses—and a murder, in this very room. Just a simple crime of passion, of course—but you never know what I might find elsewhere. To think that I’ve never really explored this house! Surrounding herself with pillows, she began to read. But after a few pages, she set the book aside. I wonder who’s downstairs? she thought.

  Retrieving a notebook and pen from her smaller case, Agatha made her way downstairs. She circled the dining hall, seeking a spot from which she could see and hear without being noticed. The library seemed to provide what she wanted; it shared a wall and a door with the dining hall, but most important, it shared a large heating vent. Seated on the floor at the grating, she could see the better part of the room.

  “Before we go any farther I want to hear that we are in agreement on this,” her father was saying. “That this is not a natural phenomenon—that it may not be meant for us, but that it is of intelligent origin. If you don’t believe that, I’m not sure you should be here.”

  “The strength and coherency of the signal weigh the strongest with me, not the pattern,” said the old man beside her father. “I’ve been at this longer than anyone here. In addition to every species of astronomical radio source, I’ve seen about every kind of transient interference and spurious transmission you can name. All I can say is that an artificial origin seems to make more sense than anything else, and I never thought I’d hear myself saying that. I can hardly believe I just did.”

  “I’m sure you have everyone else persuaded, Josef. Get me two hours with the Mark la at Jodrell, and I’ll let you know my judgment.” That was the round-shouldered little man. “But I’ll play along, for now.”

  “We had better hope it is deliberate, or we haven’t a ghost of a chance of divining its meaning,” interjected the woman at the far end of the table.

  “We need some sort of cosmic Rosetta stone or some pure Yankee luck,” said her father. “My suggestion would be that we generate as many possible attacks on the message as we can, with each of us pursuing whatever strikes his fancy.”

  “I’ll write the list,” said the old man. “Drake picture, at the top. I don’t expect anything, though. Don’t think I’d believe the coincidence if it did prove out.”

  “It could be in the length of the tones—”

  “Or in the pattern of switching from one tone to another.”

  “I’d say look for basic physical constants—speed of light, charge of an electron. Their universe is the same as ours.”

  “Three hundred thirty-three,” pronounced the woman, looking up at last from the paper she had pored over since Agatha had settled in place.

  “Eh?”

  “That’s how many tones the message contains before it repeats. Who knows information theory?”

  “That’s base ten. Maybe there’s some clue to the pattern in another base.”

  Agatha nodded emphatically. She could hear them all perfectly, though beyond the fact that they were struggling with a mystery, she had no idea what they were talking about. But that would change. Opening her tablet, she began to take notes.

  The weeks of May slipped by, and the committee continued its meetings—nightly at first, then more fitfully. Agatha discerned their names and their problem the first night—break the code of the secret message. At least, it seemed to be secret. The night meetings behind closed doors and the occasional worried comment about others finding out sent a clear message to Agatha.

  Though they moved from room to room, she always found a place from which to listen—how the servants must have enjoyed eavesdropping in the old days!—and she recorded their growing frustration. Arguments became more frequent, more intense and less easily smoothed over, and at the end of May, the round-shouldered man—Winston—stopped coming.

  Josef Schmidt, though, took up residence with them, at her father’s insistence. He was as polite and unimposing a guest as Crown House had ever seen. Not only did he not disturb the rhythms of the household, his presence seemed to stabilize it. In him both Agatha and her father found an alternative to each other for company and conversation, and the soft-spoken German seemed equally at ease with either of them.

  School ended in mid-June. Agatha’s replanting in the Garden Room’s marble window boxes began to bear fruit—vegetables, actually—but the committee’s efforts did not. The more the solution resisted discovery, the more interested Agatha became in trying her hand at it herself. But the growing bundle of papers went into the antique but quite solid safe every night at the end of the meeting.

  That simply meant she had to find out where her father had written down the combination. Her mysteries had taught her that no one trusted memory enough not to write it down in some form, somewhere. “Somewhere” for her father turned out to be the underside of the felt lining in the knife section of the sterling drawer. She learned of it when two mid-June meetings were canceled, and memory failed him at the beginning of the third.

  That same night, Agatha crept downstairs, nearly overcome with anticipation, and spread the papers out on the library desk. She knew everything they had tried, even if she didn’t always understand why they had tried it. Now, it was hers—what should she do with it.

  Be logical, she commanded herself, echoing a favorite teacher’s dictate. If these people had really meant to send a message, how would they have started it? She began to make a list of possibilities.

  Just before dawn, she heard her father stirring, and hastily replaced the papers. She crept up a back stairway to avoid him and then ran to the safety of the Garden Room, where she burrowed under the blankets and curled up hugging a pillow.

  Thanks to the interruption, she had not finished, but she had made a beginning. One word, nine units of the message—but still more than the group had managed. She felt a pang of guilt at having meddled, but that faded quickly. The satisfied smile did not fade from her lips until she was asleep.

  But there was no sympathetic magic in Agatha’s touch, and the committee continued to be stymied. Agatha’s eagerness to see them repeat her discovery faded quickly as argument and recrimination continued to dominate their work sessions. The sight of her father becoming livid with little provocation made her uncomfortable enough to stop her spying, not wanting to bring his anger down on her.

  The end of June saw Schmidt return to Germany, ostensibly to retrieve some personal and professional effects for his indefinitely prolonged stay. Agatha thought perhaps the trip was also a way of relieving the tensions which had begun to carry over into Crown House’s daily rhythms. Her father used Schmidt’s absence as a reason to cancel all work sessions, which apparently met with the approval of rest of the committee. The safe remained locked and its contents
undisturbed. Even Agatha let it be, having nothing to prove and much to lose if her father discovered her.

  Yet in contrast to his treatment of the committee, Eddington was newly solicitous toward his daughter. He displayed a sudden interest in exploring the city with her, and on weekends, they pedaled out into the countryside. Agatha did not understand the new turn, but accepted it, and the two gained a closeness they had not formerly known.

  But Schmidt’s return in July brought a quick end to that pleasant interlude. Her father hastily scheduled a work session for that evening, and browbeat a travel-weary Schmidt into several hours of preparatory work on the safe’s contents. With the time that had passed and even Winston present, Agatha made an exception to her vow to leave the committee alone. Moments after the library door closed after them, she was settled in the dining hall with her notepad.

  Eddington had settled on the divan beside Anofi.

  “How was Germany, Josef? You know, I’m still hurt you didn’t take me with you,” she said playfully. Across the room Winston snorted.

  “Can we get on with this?” her father said crossly. “Of course, Larry,” Aikens said soothingly. “Go ahead. You called this meeting.”

  “It seems to me we’ve reached a turning point. If after reviewing what we’ve done, we can think of no new approaches or no tacks we’ve missed, then we must decide: were we wrong and searching for some meaning where there is none, or should we admit that the problem has bested us and look for other help?”

  “That makes more sense than what I was hearing at the last few meetings,” Anofi said, with a sharp look at Schmidt across the room.

  “I agree that we’re stalled,” said Aikens, and Schmidt nodded wordlessly.

  “I took the liberty of preparing something of an outline,”

  Eddington said, unfolding a paper from his breast pocket, “so if there’s no objection—”

  “Go ahead,” Winston said with a wave of the hand. He seemed bored.

  Eddington looked down. “There are 333 pulses in the message—though some of you have grown reluctant to call it that. Our recording includes two and a half repetitions of that sequence, with no indisputable beginning or end. Some of you suspect there are none. Considering both length and frequency as variables, the pulses are of twenty-two varieties—eleven at the higher frequency, and eleven at the lower. The shortest pulse is some 1/13 of a second, the longest exactly 1 second. All the others are multiples of the shortest pulse, which some of us have taken to mean that their basic time unit is 1/13 of a second.

  “The most common pulse is the one we call A5—the A wavelength, five times the basic duration. It occurs forty-five times. The least common is B11 , which appears only once. Though they would fit the pattern, there is no A10, A11, or B4 pulse. The sequence is 150 seconds long.

  “Those are the objective facts—and we knew them all by the end of the first week. Since then, we’ve detected no patterns or clues of any kind. None of the numbers seem to relate in any base up through base 20. The A pulses form no pattern; nor do the B’s; together they form a meaningless matrix in two or three dimensions—”

  “In short, we don’t know scheisse,” Schmidt interrupted politely.

  The giggle that threatened to overwhelm Agatha was a whopper. She eventually managed to stifle it through a combination of pinching and smothering it behind her hands, but not before her squirming inattention sent her pen careening through the grate and down the ductwork with a clattering sound. Her father might have ignored the sound—Crown House would have been populated by a dozen ghosts had the Eddingtons been more imaginative about its many noises—had the clatter not been followed by a perturbed, girlish, “Oh, bother-de-bother.”

  Agatha scrambled to her feet, but before she could flee the dining hall her father was standing at the library doorway.

  “Would you join us, Penny?” he asked with stiff politeness.

  “Agatha.”

  “Penny,” he said pointedly. “Please?”

  He stood aside to let her pass into the room, and plucked the notepad from her hand as she did. “That’s mine,” she said angrily, whirling around. “Private.” Eddington merely smiled a cold smile and shooed her into the room. “It seems we’ve had a committee of six all along,” he remarked to the others, opening the notebook. Taped onto the first page was a familiar square of white paper. “She even had her own invitation.”

  Aikens glowered at the child; the others seemed faintly amused. Eddington flipped the page and read aloud: “Terry Winston—grumpy, sloppy dresser, but pretty sharp.” He looked up. “She knows you.”

  There were accurate if unflattering descriptions of all the committee members—“Jeri Anofi—flirts like a teen”—accounts of arguments (with a scorecard showing wins, losses, and ties), and details of who had attempted what attack on the signal. Agatha’s side comments to herself dotted the otherwise objective record.

  “Very complete,” Eddington said, handing it back. “And very wrong of you.”

  “You only told me not to bother you,” she pointed out. “Nothing was said about listening.”

  “Nothing should have to be said. An Eddington does not snoop, nor split hairs to defend doing so.” He shook his head. “I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do about this. But there are two things I know—go upstairs and box up those books of yours. You’re done with them—you’ll read something of substance from here on in. And on your way up, throw your notebook in the fuel box—and any more, if you have them.”

  It was no less than she had expected, but more than she could take calmly. “Maybe I did snoop,” she snapped. “But at least I’m not so dumb that I can’t figure out a substitution cipher. You’ll be another ten years just figuring out the first word is ‘greetings.’ ”

  The room became crowded with laughter. Winston was so consumed by his own derisive variety that he began to cough. But Eddington knew his daughter better than the others did and did not join their laughter. “So—you think the first word is ‘greetings’? Show me,” he said softly.

  Agatha stepped to the desk and sorted through the stack of papers until she found the signal listing, then pointed out a nine-pulse segment. “Here.”

  “What makes you think that means ‘greetings’?”

  Agatha scrunched up her nose. “I broke the code.” She said it in the same tone another child might report, “I broke the vase”—apology implicit, “you couldn’t possibly blame me because I’m just a tyke.”

  The laughter had died out. Anofi was the first of the others to realize that the child was serious and that Eddington was taking her in that vein. She came to stand beside her. “What’s the code?”

  “I don’t understand,” Eddington said.

  Agatha pointed at the sequence again, written in the shorthand the committee had adopted: A7 B5 A5 A5 B7 A9 B1 A7 B6. “Greetings. G-R-E-E-T-I-N-G-S,” she said, tapping each symbol in turn.

  “A simple cipher?” Anofi was confused.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “When did you work this out?” Eddington demanded.

  “Weeks ago.” She cringed. “I opened your safe.”

  Aikens headed off any immediate recrimination. “Dear girl, why would you assume it would be in English?”

  It was Agatha’s turn to be surprised. “They sent it to us, didn’t they?”

  Anofi was frowning. “Look—the A9 B1 A7 sequence—that one that shows up several times. If that’s the suffix ‘ing’—”

  Winston seemed to explode out of his chair “Come, now! This has gone far enough and too far! I understand taking the feelings of a child into consideration, but this is buffoonery. This is even more insane than—”

  “Since your mind is closed, please close your mouth as well,” said Schmidt, bending across the table. “Agatha, what does the rest of it say?”

  Agatha smiled a small smile of thanks. “I didn’t translate it all. Dad got up, and after that, well, I felt bad about it. I never meant to let
you know.”

  “There,” Winston said, self-satisfied. “I’ll lay odds the rest of it will be unintelligible nonsense when you’ve decoded it. Pure coincidence.”

  “What is the code, Agatha?” asked Anofi.

  “Her name is Penny, damn it all,” Eddington said fiercely.

  Agatha pulled a tablet toward her. “Can I use somebody’s pen? I—lost mine.” Aikens provided her with one, and she began to write. “The A’s are the letters A through M, the B’s are the rest. It’s pretty simple, really—it was the way you wrote it down that confused me.”

  Eddington had stepped back, blinking rapidly, a cheek tic working. Anofi moved closer to the girl and reported to the others as she wrote. “The length of the tone is what makes it one letter or another—thirteen on each frequency. Wait, dear, there are only 22 varieties.” Then she stopped and straightened up. “Oh, this really can’t be.”

  Aikens, reading upside down, spoke quietly. “The three missing forms—A10, All—“

  “K and J,” Schmidt said. “And B4—Q. That’s twenty-five.”

  “Z,” Eddington said, seeming to have trouble with that simple utterance. “That would mean there are no K’s, J’s, Q’s, or Z’s in the message.”

  “Give it here,” said Schmidt as Agatha finished. He took the code and a transcription of the signal back to his chair.

  “This is impossible,” Winston insisted.

  “Why?” Aikens asked. “Because we never thought to try a cipher?”

  “We never tried it because it had no chance of being the right answer. Don’t you realize what you’re saying? That the code the aliens just happened to choose was English? Have you completely lost your minds?”

  “No—just keeping them open a few minutes longer,” Anofi said haughtily. Winston pointed a trembling finger at the intently working Schmidt. “If she’s right—if it is—you realize what it proves?”

  “That the message did have an intelligent origin. That it is in fact a message,” said Anofi.