Analog SFF, October 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The experimental treatment had failed. But now, four decades on, its lingering effects were blocking another treatment, all—he swallowed hard—because of him.

  "Mr. Halifax?” said Ms. Hashimoto. “Are you still there?"

  Yes, he thought. Yes, I'm still here. And I'll still be here for years to come, long after Sarah's gone. “Yes."

  "I do understand that you're upset, and, believe me, my heart goes out to you. I'll flag this double-red. That's the best I can do. Hopefully someone will get back to you shortly."

  Just as he had all those many years ago, when Sarah had been trying to translate the first Dracon message, Don stopped by from time to time to see how she was faring with decrypting the current one. But instead of working at the university, she was struggling with this one in the study—the upstairs room that had once been Carl's.

  The Dracons’ original message, the one picked up in 2009, had been divided into two parts: a primer, explaining the symbolic language they were using, and the meat of the message—the MOM, as it rapidly came to be known—which used those symbols in baffling ways. But eventually Sarah had figured out the purpose of the MOM, and a reply had been sent.

  This second message from the aliens also had two parts. But in this case, the beginning was the explanation of how to decrypt the rest, assuming the right decryption key could be provided, and the rest, well, that was anybody's guess. Because it was encrypted, not even a single symbol that had been established in the original message was visible in the second part of this one.

  "Maybe the aliens are responding to one of the unofficial responses,” Don said, late one evening, leaning against the study's doorway, hands crossed in front of his chest. “I mean, even before you sent the official reply, didn't thousands of people send their own unofficial responses to the Dracons?"

  Sarah looked ancient, almost ghostly, in the glow from her magphotic monitor, her thin white hair backlit from his perspective. “Yes, they did,” she said.

  "So maybe the decryption key is something that was in one of those messages,” he said. “I mean, I know you worked very hard on it, but maybe the Dracons weren't interested in the official SETI-team response. Whoever they intended to have read their latest message might already have done so."

  Sarah shook her head. “No, no. The current Dracon message is a response to our official reply. I'm sure of it."

  "That might just be wishful thinking,” he said gently.

  "No, it's not. We put a special header at the top of the official reply—a long numeric string, to identify that message. That's one of the reasons we didn't post the entire reply we sent on the web. If we had, everyone would have the header, which would have defeated its purpose. The header was like an official letterhead, uniquely identifying the response we sent on behalf of the whole planet. And this reply to our response references that header."

  "You mean it quotes it?” he asked. “But, then, doesn't everybody have it now? Any Tom, Dick, or Harry could send a new message to the Dracons and have it look official."

  Her wrinkled features shifted in the cold glow as she spoke. “No. The Dracons understood that we were trying to provide a way to distinguish official responses from unofficial ones. They obviously grasped that we didn't want everyone who managed to detect their latest message to know what the header was. So the Dracons quoted every other digit from it, making clear to us that they were responding to the official reply, but without giving away what had distinguished the official reply in the first place."

  "Well, there's your answer,” Don said, quite pleased with himself. “The decryption key must be the other digits from the header, the ones the Dracons didn't echo back."

  Sarah smiled. “First thing we tried. It didn't work."

  "Oh,” he said. “It was just a thought. Are you coming to bed?"

  She looked at the clock. “No, I—” She stopped herself, and Don's stomach knotted. Perhaps she'd been about to say I don't have time to waste on sleeping. “I'm going to struggle with this some more,” she finished. “I'll be along in a bit. You go ahead."

  * * * *

  Don called McGavin's office four more times without any luck, but finally his datacom rang. His ring tone was the five notes from a forgotten film called Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the sort of aliens-come-to-Earth story that seemed quaintly passé now. He looked at the caller ID. It said “McGavin, Cody"—not “McGavin Robotics,” but the actual man's name.

  "Hello?” Don said eagerly, as soon as he'd flipped his datacom open.

  "Don!” said McGavin. He was somewhere noisy and was shouting. “Sorry to be so long getting back to you."

  "That's all right, Mr. McGavin. I need to talk to you about Sarah."

  "Yes,” said McGavin, still shouting. “I'm sorry, Don. I've been briefed on all this. It's just awful. How is Sarah holding up?"

  "Physically, she's okay. But it's tearing us both apart."

  His tone was as gentle as one's could be when shouting. “I'm sure."

  "I was hoping you could speak to the people at Rejuvenex."

  "I already have, repeatedly and at length. They tell me there's nothing that can be done."

  "But there must be. I mean, sure, Rejuvenex has tried all the standard things, but there's got to be a way to make the rollback work for Sarah if you—"

  He stopped talking, which was probably just as well. He'd been about to say, “if you just throw enough money at it.” But McGavin wasn't listening. Don could hear him saying something to someone else; from the sounds of it, he'd placed a fingertip over his datacom's mike and was talking to a flunky standing beside him. At last McGavin came back on. “They're working on it, Don, and I've told them to spare no expense. But they're totally stumped."

  "They thought maybe an experimental cancer drug was the culprit."

  "Yes, they told me that. I've authorized them to spend whatever is necessary to try to get hold of a supply of it, or to synthesize it from scratch. But the researchers I've spoken to think the damage is irreversible."

  "They've got to keep trying. They can't give up."

  "They won't, Don. Believe me, this is a huge problem for them. It's going to affect their stock price, if word gets out, unless they can find a solution."

  "If you hear anything,” Don said, “please, let me know at once."

  "Of course,” said McGavin. “But..."

  But don't have unrealistic hopes; that was the implicit comment. McGavin had probably seen only an executive summary of the longer report Don had now pried out of Rejuvenex, but the bottom line would have been the same: no solution likely in the near future.

  "Anyway,” continued McGavin, “if there's anything Sarah needs to help with the decryption work, or if there's anything either you or she needs for anything else, just let me know."

  "She needs to be rolled back."

  "I am sorry, Don,” McGavin said. “Look, I've got to get on a plane. But we'll keep in touch, okay?"

  * * * *

  Chapter 12

  Back in 2009, those who were part of the formal SETI endeavor had set up a newsgroup to share their progress in figuring out what the various parts of that first, original alien radio message said. It was rumored that the Vatican astronomers were working full-time on trying to translate the message, too, as was, supposedly, a team at the Pentagon. Hundreds of thousands of amateurs were taking a crack at it, as well.

  Besides the symbolic-math stuff, parts of the original message turned out to be bitmap diagrams; a researcher in Calcutta was the first to realize that. Someone in Tokyo chimed in shortly thereafter, demonstrating that many of the block-graphic diagrams were actually frames in short animated movies. A new symbol in the last frame of each movie was presumably the word to be used henceforth for the concept that had been illustrated: “growth,” “attraction,” and so on.

  The message also contained a lot about DNA—and, yes, there was no doubt that that was what it was, for its specific chemical formula was given. Apparently
it was also the hereditary molecule on Sigma Draconis II—which immediately revived old debates about panspermia, the notion that life on Earth had begun when microorganisms from outer space had chanced to land here. The Dracons, some said, might be our very distant cousins.

  The message also contained a discussion of chromosomes, although it took a biologist—in Beijing, as it happened—to recognize that that's what was being talked about, since the chromosomes were shown as rings, rather than long strings. Apparently, Sarah had learned, bacteria had circular chromosomes, and were essentially immortal, being able to divide forever. The innovation of breaking the circle to make shoelace-like chromosomes had led to the development, at least on Earth, of telomeres, the protective endcaps that diminished each time a cell divided, leading to programmed cell death. No one could say whether the senders had ringlike chromosomes themselves, or whether they were just depicting what they guessed to be either the universal ancestral or most-common kind. On Earth, in terms of biomass and number of individual organisms, chromosomal rings outnumbered the shoelace kind by orders of magnitude.

  Once that piece of the puzzle was solved, a bunch of people simultaneously posted that the next set of symbols outlined various stages of life: separate gametes, conception, pre-birth growth, birth, post-birth growth, sexual maturity, the end of reproductive capability, old age, and death.

  Lots of fascinating stuff, to be sure, but all of it seemed to be prologue, just a language lesson establishing a vocabulary. None of those early bits, except the tantalizing sample phrase that good was much greater than bad, seemed to actually say anything of substance.

  But there was lots of message left—the MOM, the meat of the message, a mishmash of symbols and concepts that had been established earlier, each one tagged with several numbers. Nobody could make sense of it.

  The breakthrough came on a Sunday evening. At Chez Halifax, Sunday nights were Scrabble nights, when Don and Sarah sat on opposites sides of the dining-room table, the fancy turntable set that Sarah had bought him many Christmases ago between them.

  Sarah didn't like the game nearly as much as Don did, but she played it to make him happy. He, meanwhile, had less fondness for bridge than she did—or, truth be told, for Julie and Howie Fein, who lived up the street—but he dutifully joined Sarah in a game with them once a week.

  They were getting near the end of the Scrabble match; fewer than a dozen tiles were left in the drawstring bag. Don, as always, was winning. He'd already managed a bingo—Scrabble-speak for playing all seven of one's letters in a single turn—making the improbable wanderoos by building on his previous de, one of the many two-letter combos that Scrabble accepted as a word but that Sarah, in all of her forty-eight years, had never seen anyone actually use as a word. Don was an expert in what she called Scrabble babble: he'd memorized endless lists of obscure words, without bothering to learn their meanings. She'd given up long ago challenging any string of letters he played. It was always in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, even if her trusty Canadian Oxford didn't have it. Still, it was bad enough when he played something like muzjik, as he had just now, with both a Z and a J, but to get it on a triple-word score, and—

  And suddenly Sarah was on her feet.

  "What?” said Don, indignant. “It's a word!"

  "It's not just the symbol, it's where it appears!” She was heading out of the dining room, through the kitchen, and into the living room.

  "What?” he said, getting up to follow her.

  "In the message! The part that doesn't make sense!” She was speaking as she moved. “The rest of the message defines an ... an idea-space, and the numbers are coordinates for where the symbols go within it. They're relating concepts to each other in some sort of three-dimensional array...” She was running down the stairs to the basement, where, back then, the family computer had been kept. He followed. Sixteen-year-old Carl was seated in front of the bulky CRT monitor, headphones on, playing one of those damned first-person-shooter games that Don so disapproved of. Ten-year-old Emily, meanwhile, was watching Desperate Housewives on TV.

  "Carl, I need the computer—"

  "In a bit, Mom. I'm at the tenth level—"

  "Now!"

  It was so rare for Sarah to yell that her son actually did get up, relinquishing the swivel chair. “How do you get out of this damn thing?” Sarah snapped, sitting down. Carl reached over his mother's shoulder and did something with the mouse. Don, meanwhile, turned down the volume on the TV, earning him a petulant “Hey!” from Emily.

  "It's an X-Y-Z grid,” Sarah said. She opened Firefox, and accessed one of the countless sites that had the Dracon message online. “I'm sure of it. They're defining the placement of terms."

  "On a map?” Don said.

  "What? No, no, no. Not on a map—in space! It's like a 3D page-description language. You know, like Postscript, but for documents that don't just have height and width but depth as well.” She was pounding rapidly at the keyboard. “If I can just figure out the parameters of the defined volume, and..."

  More keystrokes. Don and Carl stood by, watching in rapt attention. “Damn!” said Sarah. “It's not a cube ... that'd be too easy. A rectangular prism then. But what are the dimensions?"

  The mouse pointer was darting about the screen like a rocket piloted by a mad scientist. “Well,” she said, clearly just talking to herself now, “if they're not integers, they might be square roots..."

  "Daddy...?"

  He turned around. Emily was looking up at him with wide eyes. “Yes, sweetheart?"

  "What's Mommy doing?"

  He glanced back. Sarah had a graphing program running; he suspected she was now glad they'd sprung for the high-end video card that Carl had begged for so he could play his games.

  "I think,” Don said, turning back to his daughter, “that she's making history."

  To be continued.

  Copyright © 2006 Robert J. Sawyer

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  THE GREAT SUMATRAN EARTHQUAKES OF 2004-5 by Richard A. Lovett

  Each year, the world experiences about 1,700 earthquakes large enough to cause damage (magnitude 5.0 or greater). And thanks to global seismic networks and instant-news services, it's possible to hear about them all. This means that most people are at least passingly familiar with the earthquake-magnitude scale. But, while we know it's logarithmic, we don't easily realize how much that compresses the scale: only a few points spell the difference between the gurgling of lava beneath a volcano and a major catastrophe.

  Nowhere is this more obvious than with the approximately one-point range that differentiates really big earthquakes from truly colossal ones. Alaska's 2002 “Denali” quake, for example, was a 7.9 whose effects were felt as far away as California. But the world sees temblors of that magnitude about once every two years.[1]

  [1. From 1981 through 2005, there were eighteen temblors of magnitude 8.0 or greater.]

  Go just one more point up the scale, though, and quakes get rarer (thank goodness). So rare, in fact, that in the interval from 1960 to 2004, there had been only two. One (estimated at magnitude 9.5) was offshore from Chile in 1960. The other (officially estimated at 9.2, but now thought to have been bigger) was Alaska's 1964 “Good Friday” quake. Other than those two, there had been only one temblor bigger than 8.5.[2]

  [2. Even the great San Francisco quake of 1906 probably wasn't much bigger than about 8.0. See the U.S. Geological Survey's website, quake.wr.usgs.gov/info/1906/index.html.]

  Then in 2004, on the day after Christmas (a holiday known to the British as Boxing Day), the Indonesian island of Sumatra was hit by a quake nearly as large as Alaska's Good Friday mega-quake.

  Everyone knows the story. The offshore quake set up a tsunami that swept the Indian Ocean, killing 300,000 people and wreaking unimaginable damage. Lesser known is the fact that three months later, on March 28, 2005, the second-largest earthquake in 40 years (magnitude 8.6) hit another portion of the same fault zone. It failed t
o make major headlines only because this one did not create a substantial tsunami.

  The human story of the Boxing Day earthquake is well known. But the scientific story is just beginning to be revealed because the great quake of December 26 and its March 28 successor were the first mega-quakes to be studied with the tools of modern geophysics.

  * * * *

  Tiny Squiggles

  Seismometers have been around for a long time, but in the 1960s, their data were crude by present standards. When the Chilean and Alaskan quakes hit, you could tell that something major had happened, but many of the details were lost. “Today, you can see all the aftershocks,” says Jeffrey Park, a professor of geology and geophysics at Yale University.[3]

  [3. Park and others cited in this article discussed their findings at the 2005 spring meeting of the American Geophysical Union (held, ironically, in New Orleans, a few months before it suffered its own disaster). Some remarks are from press conferences and personal interviews. Others are from formal presentations for which abstracts are available at www.agu.org.]

  The problem was that early seismometer traces were made with mechanical styluses—and ink lines have finite width. Tiny vibrations merely make them slightly fuzzy.

  Today's instruments record their readings electronically, allowing researchers to see enormous detail. It's like using a mechanical stylus on a 600-foot-wide roll of paper. One newly discovered detail is that the Boxing Day quake made the Earth ring like a bell, with slowly dampening reverberations that continued for months.

  Other instruments revealed that the quake rearranged landmasses all over the globe (albeit by as little as 0.1 millimeters) and slightly altered the Earth's axis of rotation.

  It was also possible to watch the event from space.

  The earthquake itself wasn't visible, of course, but the tsunami was, from satellites that just happened to be passing overhead at the right time.