Analog SFF, April 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

It was the loud, penetrating emergency signal. I got it untangled from my pile of clothes and punched NO VISION.

  Dargo's face, pale. “One of the new Martians is having some kind of seizure, in Mars side B. You'd better get over here. Bring Collins ... if you can find him,” she added with no inflection.

  We dressed hurriedly. “Were either of them sick on the way over?"

  He shook his head. “Who's ever seen one sick? How could you tell?"

  Mars side B was a conference room with Martian-city normal temperature and humidity, a little cold and dry for comfort. The wall was a three-dimensional representation of the Martians’ city from above, as seen from the curving ramp that led to the surface. The floor was a soft incongruous gray Astroturf, chosen by Red.

  Four humans and two Martians were bunched around Fly-in-Amber, who was lying on the floor, twitching. It was an unnatural sight, even for people used to seeing Martians, since they didn't lie down to rest. I remembered seeing a picture of a cow that some pranksters had tipped over on its side; he looked as odd as that.

  “How did he get like that?” I asked Red.

  “I've never seen it before, except as a joke.” He was sort of kneeling, bending one of Fly-in-Amber's legs. “It looked as if his two legs suddenly collapsed, and the other pair, at the same time, pushed hard, as if jumping.” He said something in Martian, loudly, but Fly-in-Amber didn't respond.

  “It isn't some kind of odd joke?” Oz asked. “A practical joke?"

  “I don't think so. It's childish. Fly-in-Amber is too stiff for that. Dignified.” Red faced Paul. “Did he act strangely during the crossing?"

  “Forgive me, Red,” Paul said, “but to me you all act strange, all the time."

  He made his little buzz sound. “You should talk, Two-legs. I mean, did his behavior or conversation suddenly change?"

  “He talked a lot more during the last couple of days, approaching Earth. But we were all excited, ready to get off the ship."

  “Of course. You were eager to mate with Carmen. Did that happen yet?"

  I had to smile. “It was fine, Red."

  “That's good. Green has gone to Mars C, to send a message to the other healers at home. She'd never seen this either."

  “Nor have I,” said Sunrise, who was the same saffron color as Fly-in-Amber. “And I don't forget."

  Red swiveled to regard him. “This is not something I would forget, either."

  “Should we pull him back upright?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” Red and Sunrise said at the same time. “Wait until we hear from—"

  Fly-in-Amber started talking, a quiet uninflected warble. Sunrise moved close to listen.

  “Is this being recorded?” Paul said.

  “Of course,” Dargo Solingen snapped.

  Red gestured at Sunrise. “Not really necessary. He'll have it all."

  “What is he saying?” I asked.

  “It sounds like nonsense to me.” Red shook his head, ponderously, a gesture that he'd learned to copy from us. “Perhaps code? I've never heard anything like it."

  “I have,” Sunrise said. “Not me directly, but one of the first rememberers."

  “Do you know—did he know what it was?” Oz said.

  “No. Or if he did, that part is lost. It was a long time ago."

  “Before the meteorite?” I asked. “Before 4,000 ares ago?"

  “Oh, long before. Long, long. One of the first."

  “Can you make any sense of it?"

  “No, not yet. But it doesn't seem ... it isn't random. He is saying something."

  Fly-in-Amber stopped with a noise like a sneeze. Then a long monotone, like a sung sigh. Sunrise said something in Martian, and after a pause Fly-in-Amber answered a couple of halting syllables.

  He started to rise but hesitated. Red and Sunrise helped him to his feet, Red chattering away. He answered, obviously faltering. Red made an odd fluting sound I didn't think I'd heard before. “Can you tell them in English?"

  Fly-in-Amber stepped around to face us. “I don't know what happened. Red says I fell down and spoke nonsense while my body shook.

  “To me, I was blind, but I felt the floor.” He gingerly patted his right arms with his main left hand. “Along here, that was strange. And I smelled things that have no name. At least that I've never smelled. And I felt cold, colder than home. Colder than Mars, outside.

  “But I don't remember talking. Red says I talked and talked. I heard something, but it didn't make any sense."

  “Maybe you heard what you were saying to us?” Sunrise said.

  “No, it wasn't words; nothing like words. It was like a machine sound, but it was like music, too, human music. A musical machine?"

  Dargo played back part of it. “Doesn't sound very musical."

  Fly-in-Amber tilted his head back, as if searching the ceiling and walls with potato eyes. “I mean something like ‘feeling.’ When you say music has feeling."

  “You mean emotion?” Oz said.

  “Not really. I understand that you humans have emotions when events or thoughts cause chemical changes in your blood. In your brains. We are similar, as you know. This is not ... not that real?"

  He swiveled toward me. “It's like when Carmen tried to tell me, at 20:17 last Sagan 20th, how she felt while reading the score of Beethoven's Eroica symphony. That seeing the dots on the screen made your brain remember the sound, and the feeling that the sound caused, even though you weren't hearing anything. Do you remember that?"

  “I guess.” If you say so, Dr. Memory.

  “It was that kind of, what would you say, distance? What you said about reading the score was that it was like a diagram of an emotion, an emotional state, but one you didn't have a word for."

  I did remember. “That's right. You can call it ‘joy’ or ‘hope’ or something, but nothing really precise."

  “So if someone couldn't read music and didn't know anything about how music is written down, still, they might see the score and recognize patterns, symmetries, as having beauty, or at least significance, without connecting them to sound at all."

  “I've seen something like that,” Oz said. “A system of notation that dancers use to record a performance. There's no way you could tell what it was without knowing. But there was symmetry and motion in it. I guess you could say it had intrinsic beauty."

  “Lebanotation,” Red said. “I saw it on the cube."

  Green had come back and listened silently for a minute. She let out a burst of rapid-fire French and then paused. “Fascinating. Save it for later. Fly-in-Amber is ill. I must take him away and look at him."

  Red said something in Martian and she answered with a short noise that I recognized as affirmation. She put a pair of arms around her patient and led him off to their living quarters.

  Red watched her go and made a human shrug. “She is the doctor, in a way. But I doubt that there is any treatment for this."

  “She talked to Mars,” I said, and checked my watch tattoo. “She might have heard by—” She came rushing immediately back, warbling and rasping at Red.

  “She says the same thing has happened on Mars, evidently at the same time. Most of the memory family fell down and started talking this nonsense."

  “It was temps du Mars 09:19 when it happened there. Seventeen Earth minutes after Fly-in-Amber."

  “As if they caught it from him,” I said.

  “Or it came from Earth,” Paul said.

  “Or outer space” Red gestured down the hall. “Anywhere out there."

  * * * *

  4. Puzzles

  The memory family had seventy eight members, less than one percent of the total Martian population. They were oddballs, but curiously uniform in their eccentricity. In human terms, they were vain, scolding, obsessive, and humorless. The other Martians enjoyed a whole class of jokes about them and didn't take them too seriously, since history was not a traditionally useful pursuit. And then this odd thing happened.

  In less than an hour,
it became obvious that “odd” only began to describe it.

  The people in New Mars would have decoded it soon, but they were beaten to the punch by a Chilean researcher, who idly fed a recording of the data through a reverse SETI algorithm—a program that looked for patterns like the ones we had been sending out for more than a century, trying to contact intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

  The dot-and-dash digital message was slightly obscured because it was mixed into a far more complex one, like a radio signal that carried both amplitude and frequency modulation. Filtering out the frequency modulation gave an unambiguous pattern of dots and dashes. There were 551 of them, and the same pattern was repeated ten times.

  The number 551 is interesting because it's the product of two prime numbers, 19 and 29. One of the most basic SETI maneuvers was to make up a message with (in this case) 551 ones and zeros, which you could transmit with dots and dashes, then represent them in a crossword-puzzle-style matrix, either 19 squares by 29 or 29 by 19, making a picture out of the black and white squares.

  The signal went like this:

  * * * *

  11110000111010110011001000010000 010101100100000100101001111110 0000010101000100000000111010100011 00000000000000000000000000000000 0000010000000001001000000 0000000000100100001001011100001111000 00000000000100100001001000000100100000 0000000000000000000110001000000000000011 0000000000000000000000001000000000001 100000000000000000110000000100000000000 00000000010101000110000000001010100000000 0000001111101011010111011111111110000000000 0111110100000001110010101000000000001001010 10001011100010000010000101010001000111 000010101000000010100001011100000001110100

  * * * *

  The first time the Chilean astronomer tried, he used the 19 by 29 matrix, and got nothing coherent. The 29 by 19 gave an interesting picture....

  Humans and Martians gathered together in front of the monitor as the Chilean's drawing came in.

  “In English?" Oz said. “What the hell is ‘O Sin'?"

  “I think it's some kind of human joke,” Sunrise said. “They said it was 551 ones and zeros?"

  “Correct,” Dargo said.

  “Unless it's a coincidence, unlikely, then it's a joke reference to the first example of trying to communicate this way. Frank Drake made it up in 1961, and it was widely broadcast. The O in the upper left corner would be the Sun, with the Solar System underneath it: four little planets, including yours and ours, then two big ones, and then two medium sized."

  “So what about sin?” Oz said.

  “I don't know,” Sunrise said. “I don't really understand human jokes. That corner of Drake's picture was a symbolic representation of the atoms of carbon and oxygen. Necessary for life."

  “Silicon and nitrogen,” Paul said. “Si and N. They're a silicon-based life-form?"

  “With six legs,” Oz said, “or eight, two of them small. There's a square next to the Earth, with a line pointing to a man-shaped diagram. Another square next to Mars, and one over Neptune, with lines toward the diagram of an eight-legged creature."

  “We don't look like that,” Sunrise said. “We don't have eight legs."

  “We have eight appendages.” Red tapped the screen. “There is a solid line from Neptune to the creature, but only a dotted line from Mars to it. That might mean something."

  “But hold it,” Oz said. “Nothing could live on Neptune. Eight legs or nine or whatever. It's a cryogenic hell."

  “No.” Red shook his huge head. “Ha, ha. I mean, yes, humans and Martians would freeze solid there in a matter of seconds. But there could be something like organic chemistry with silicon and nitrogen—liquid nitrogen being a solute, like water in our chemistry. You could have compounds analogous to amino acids and proteins. So complex life chemistry could be theoretically possible."

  “There's hardly any free nitrogen on Neptune,” Paul said. “Hydrogen, helium, a little methane for color."

  “Not Neptune itself.” Red drummed the fingers of his small hands together. “Its largest moon, Triton."

  Paul nodded slowly. “Yeah. Geysers of liquid nitrogen when it's warm enough."

  “We don't know much about it, do we?” Oz said.

  “Haven't been there since forever,” Paul said. “A flyby in the nineteen-eighties?"

  “In 1989,” Red said. “The Chinese-Japanese Outer Planets Initiative was launched in 2027 but went silent when it arrived in 2044. But there's been a lot of study from various hubbles. There are probably a hundred specialists about to start bouncing off the walls."

  “What about the number down in the corner?” I said.

  “Ten to the seventh,” Paul said; “ten million. And that looks like a ‘d’ after it. Ten million days?"

  Red and Snowbird translated it simultaneously. “27,378 years.” Snowbird added, “14,970 ares, in Martian sols."

  “I wonder if that's how long you've been on Mars,” I said. Red shrugged.

  “It's how long human beings have been all human,” Oz said, “in a manner of speaking. Interesting coincidence. The last Neanderthals died about 27,000 years ago. I guess Homo sapiens has been the dominant species ever since."

  “Having killed off the Neanderthals?” Moonboy said.

  Red gave his slightly maddening monotone laugh. “Ha ha. Nobody knows what became of them."

  “Homo sapiens invited them over for lunch,” Moonboy said, “and they turned out to be the main course.” Dargo shot him a look.

  Oz tapped the eight-legged figure. “These could be your Others. Who created you in their image, more or less."

  “Living that close.” Red shook his head. “And on so small a world? Triton isn't even as big as your Moon."

  “They might be like you,” I said. “You don't take up a lot of real estate."

  There was a double-ping signal and a familiar face appeared, superimposed over the Drake diagram. Ishan Jhangiani, Science Coordinator on the Earth side. “This is interesting. Some of the Martians were watching the broadcast, but only the yellow ones were affected. And the nine yellow ones who were doing something else were not affected.

  “I don't think we have any organs that discriminate between regular light and coherent light,” Red said. “So how could that work?"

  Ishan chewed his lip and nodded. “Well, just pursuing logic ... you would never encounter such a strong burst of coherent light in the normal course of things. So you, or rather the yellow ones, could have such an organ and never know it."

  “But it wouldn't have any useful function,” Oz said.

  “Ha ha. But it would. It would make you fall down and speak in tongues whenever somebody on Neptune, or Triton, wanted you to."

  That would turn out to be pretty accurate.

  * * * *

  5. Unveiled threat

  After the excitement died down, most of us went back to the mess and zapped up a meal. Dargo went off somewhere to stick pins in dolls.

  I traded the lump of rice in my chicken for the pile of mashed potatoes that came with Oz's meat loaf. He exercises as much as I do, as we all do, but he keeps putting on weight, while I lose it.

  “I don't get it,” Moonboy said. “If they wanted to send a dot-and-dash message, why be so roundabout? Why not just use the ruby laser itself?"

  “For some reason they wanted the Martians involved,” I said. “One Martian, at least. What I want to know is how Fly-in-Amber got all that information out of the red light.” So far, all we'd gotten was on/off, on/off.

  Oz nodded. “And what's different about Fly-in-Amber and those other yellow ones, that they were the only Martians affected by it? The anatomical scans we did on Mars didn't show any significant differences between the various families, except for Red. With all his extra brain and nervous system mass and complexity, I'd expect him to be the one singled out, if any."

  “He said he didn't feel anything special,” Meryl said. “But he only looked at it for a couple of seconds. Then he was worrying after Fly-in-Amber."

  “I'll do a high-resolution PET scan
of all their eyes and brains,” Oz said. “See whether Fly-in-Amber has some anomaly."

  There was a pause and Paul shook his head. “Triton? How could intelligent life evolve on Triton? How could anything complex?"

  Oz studied his meat loaf for clues. “Well, it couldn't be like Earth. A large variety of species competing for ecological niches. At least intuitively that doesn't sound likely. If it's like Red suggested, a quasi-organic chemistry based on silicon and liquid nitrogen, think of how slow chemical reactions would be."

  “And how little chemical variety,” Moonboy said, “with so little solar energy pumping it."

  “There's also energy from radioactivity,” Paul pointed out, “and tidal friction from Neptune. I think that's what causes the liquid nitrogen geysers they see."

  Moonboy persisted. “But it would never have anything like the variety and energy in the Earth's primordial soup."

  “You're all barking up the wrong tree,” I said. “If the signal really is coming from the Others, they didn't evolve on Triton. The Martians’ tradition is that they live light-years away. So this laser thing could just be an automated device. It isn't any more or less impossible than the Martian city. That was supposedly built by the Others, a zillion years ago."

  “Or 27,000,” Oz said. “You're right. But why did it start blinking exactly as soon as one of the yellow family reached Earth orbit? That would be some sophisticated automation."

  That gave me a little chill. “In other words ... we're being watched?"

  He stroked his beard. “Give me another explanation."

  * * * *

  Over the next several days, scientists on Earth as well as here analyzed the signal from Neptune, which had stopped eight hours and twenty minutes after Fly-in-Amber's condition had been broadcast to Earth. That was exactly twice the travel time of that broadcast to Neptune, which fact was an interesting piece of information in itself. Mission accomplished; turn it off.

  The laser beam was apparently just that, a simple powerful beam of unmodulated coherent light, carrying no information other than the intriguing fact of its own existence.

  There are some natural sources of cosmic radiation that produce coherent light, but nobody was pursuing that direction, since the timing of it would be an impossible coincidence. It was artificial, and in its way was as much a message as the Drake diagram that came out of the amplitude-modulation part of Fly-in-Amber's utterances. The amount of power it was pumping was part of the message, a scary part.