by Bill Napier
They reel’d, they set, they cross’d, they
cleekit…’
BANG!
Rattling windows; a flash of light penetrating his eyelids. Petrie wakened with a gasp, staring into the dark. Heavy rain was battering on his window.
Impossible! Utterly impossible!
He threw back the blankets, groped for a light and dressed quickly. Shaking, he went out into the darkened corridor and felt his way along it. He could just make out the top of the marble stairs. Another flash momentarily lit them up and he descended cautiously, his eyes adapting to the dark. The headache had gone.
He hurried along to the theological library and groped for light switches. There were three of them and he switched them all on. He realised that he had left his computer running. To his relief, as he tapped at the keyboard, he found that the thunderstorm hadn’t affected it.
He looked again at the particle storm on his screen. Parallel lines, and yet, not just parallel lines. The particles didn’t like to crowd too close together. Petrie thought this might be down to their physics: maybe they repelled each other at short range or whatever. Nothing to do with aliens or similar rubbish.
There had always been a slightly mad streak running through Russian science. The Tunguska meteorite was a crashed flying saucer, or the innermost satellite of Mars was an ancient space station, crap like that. Maybe Shtyrkov was part of that tradition.
And in any case, order could be created out of chaos. Petrie thought there were maybe complicated force laws between the particles and that these forces had generated patterns during the long interstellar journey.
He rubbed his face with his hands and groaned with tiredness. Belousov and Zhabotinskii, more damned Russians. They’d mixed citric and sulphuric acids, added salts and chemicals, and within the mixture, as by a miracle, wonderful red-blue pulsations had appeared, and circular waves had come and gone, and spiral patterns had chased each other around the mixture. And it had all grown just from chaos, from the disequilibrium of the chemical mixture. They’d been beaten to their discovery by forty years, by William Bray, but his contemporaries hadn’t believed you could get chemical reactions to oscillate, hadn’t bothered to follow it up, and the man had died in obscurity, the Russians now collecting the kudos denied Bray by the idiocy of his colleagues.
Instead of looking at an indecipherable mass of lines, why not reduce each particle to a point? Imagine a flat surface, face-on to the flow, and record each particle’s point of intersection with the plate. Like a telescope pointing to the signal source.
That would take programming. Hell, the Earth’s rotation.
Svetlana!
He ran back through the corridors and up the stairs. One, two … seven doors along. He knocked sharply. The sound of a body stirring within. ‘Svetlana!’
A light switched on. Svetlana appeared, wearing an ankle-length yellow gown, curiosity and tiredness on her face.
‘I need help.’
‘What’s the time?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
She disappeared and reappeared in a moment, wearing sandals and putting her arms into the sleeves of a long, red cotton dressing gown. ‘It’s nearly two o’clock.’
He explained as they went. ‘The flow of particles. I need to see them face-on.’
‘You mean turn the trajectories into points?’
‘Yes. Can you do that?’
She slipped a hand under her gown and scratched her shoulder. ‘You’re in luck, Tom. I can swivel the lake around.’
She took the stairs two at a time, leaving a faint trail of perfume. Or was it hair shampoo? In the computer room she fired up, typed, and over her shoulder Petrie saw an erratic, roughly oval blue shape appear on her screen. She flicked her hair back and traced the shape out on the computer terminal with a red-painted fingernail. ‘That’s the lake looking straight down from a great height. And you can spin it so that it’s face-on to the particle flow. Look.’
A single frame appeared on the screen, the lake penetrated by thousands of straight lines. She clicked on a little icon and the picture tumbled and the lines shrank until Petrie found himself looking, not at a confusing jumble of lines, but at a pattern of dots.
Svetlana scribbled a few lines in a spiral notebook and tore the sheet out. ‘Here are the instructions. You can take it a frame at a time, freeze it, run it forwards or backwards at any speed and so on, just like a video recorder.’ She pressed the return key and a little cluster of dots appeared near the edge of the lake. In the next frame they had vanished, but a second cluster had appeared, near the far end of the lake. ‘And here’s the disk, you can copy it over.’
‘Svetlana, I’ll buy you summer roses.’
She screwed up her nose.
In the library, Petrie started again, but this time with dots rather than lines; and this time the patterns showed up with great clarity. He ran the frames like a slow-motion movie. Clusters of dots waltzed slowly around each other; but frame by frame, the number of dots in each cluster changed.
Then nothing – the particle flow had stopped – and then another sequence of changing patterns, looking completely different from the last.
He went back to the previous batch, the one with the waltzing clusters. And the thing which had been trying to crawl up out of his unconscious mind began to surface. A thing even crazier than Shtyrkov’s rantings.
He put it aside, didn’t dare to think of it.
He zoomed into the clusters. At higher magnification there were clusters within clusters: in each cluster in each frame, the particles were grouped. But one level of clustering was different; at this level, there were never more than four dots together. Sometimes a particle was solitary, sometimes it had a single companion or two or three, sometimes there were two pairs. But never more than four.
He wrote down the pattern on Svetlana’s spiral notebook, and saw for the first time that his hand was trembling. He put them in order:
1, 2, 3, 1, 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, 2, 2-1, 2-2, 2-3, 3, 3-1, 3-2 …
Drop the dashes. Put them into an array:
1
2
3
1
11
12
13
2
21
22
23
3
31
32
33
What about zero? How would zero particles be recorded? Without worrying about that, Petrie put in zeros where they seemed to make sense:
00
01
02
03
10
11
12
13
20
21
22
23
30
31
32
33
He said, ‘Oh God!’ aloud.
Four-base arithmetic. A counting system. The one we’d have developed if we’d had only four fingers. Converted to the familiar ten-base, the same numbers read by a ten-fingered creature were:
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
He went back to the spirals. Here the signallers were counting up to three, no further. Here, if anywhere, he was going to crack the code – if there was a code.
He took a pulse at random, 7.34159 seconds into the particle blast. They had tracked across the lake in two counter-rotating spirals, a fact which he ignored. He counted the little clumps along one of the spirals, a frame at a time, converting them to four-base arithmetic: 210333223132212310 …
For the hell of it, he put A = 0, B = 1 and so on: CBADDDCCDBDCCBCDBA …
There were no E’s or F’s. It looked utterly random. All he could say was that they were using a four-letter
alphabet.
A four-letter alphabet.
They.
Petrie had come across a four-letter alphabet before. His mouth was dry.
He went to the second spiral of particles, the one which had waltzed with the first one. The particles here too were bunched in little groups of up to four. He did the same letter substitution and asked the computer to line up the letters from each spiral, in two long columns.
A pattern.
The two columns were thousands of rows long, each one looked totally random, and yet no two rows had the same letter. In fact, A in column one was invariably matched by B in two. B in one was matched by A in two and so on. He wrote:
A
B
B
A
C
D
D
C
He glanced at the computer clock for the first time in hours. It was five past four. And now the excitement which had been growing inside him was at the point where he felt himself going faint.
He stacked the movie frames one on top of the other, starting at the beginning of the blizzard. The program took an hour to put together. He kept making elementary blunders and knew he could have done the job in a third of the time had he been fresh. Finally he had something cobbled together. The clock said 5.40 a.m.; it would soon be dawn. He was light-headed with exhaustion.
He stacked the frames into a solid, three-dimensional shape. He made the shape tumble slowly on the screen.
And he felt something like fear.
Now, at last, he took the time to sum up his night’s work.
There were the rotating spirals: the double helix, now slowly tumbling on his screen, joined by rungs.
There was the four-lettered alphabet which ran through the rungs of the spiral ladders.
There was the complementarity, each letter on one half of the rung being matched by a consistent, different letter on the other half.
ABCD, an arbitrary choice of letters. Replace by AGCT.
Adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine.
The building blocks of DNA.
9
Genome
Gibson spotted Petrie a couple of hundred metres away. The mathematician was wandering down the long path outside the castle; his head was bowed and he seemed to be muttering. His hands were waving as if he was addressing an imaginary audience. The path went towards the village but Gibson suspected the young man didn’t know where he was going.
A light mist was clearing from the trees and the early morning sky was blue, but there was ice in the wind.
Gibson took a short cut over the snow and caught up with Petrie at the church. The mathematician’s eyes were bloodshot and he had an overnight stubble. His face was drawn, almost as if he was in pain. He looked at Gibson vaguely, as if he didn’t recognise the man.
‘For Christ’s sake, Tom, look at you. Get to bed.’
‘What about the others?’ Petrie asked. The words came out slurred.
‘They flaked out hours ago.’
‘What about Freya?’ Petrie didn’t know why he’d asked that; it just came out.
‘She’s up early, like me. She’s reading a ton of downloads in the computer room.’
‘Has she made progress?’
Gibson made a so-so facial gesture. He was now pacing alongside Petrie; they turned left along a quiet road. A middle-aged man was sitting humped forwards on a hay-cart pulled by a small horse, sacking over his head and shoulders to protect him from the cold. There was an exchange of ‘Dobryden’, and then the horse had clip-clopped past them. The smell of hay and horse lingered in the cold morning air.
‘What about you?’
Petrie gave Gibson a strange look. He said, ‘I have something to announce.’
Gibson stopped. ‘Well?’
‘Get them out of bed, Charlie. I want everyone to hear this together.’
‘I run this outfit. Tell me what you’ve got.’
‘This is for your team to hear.’
‘Tom!’
Petrie relented; the man was like a starved dog waiting for a biscuit. He said, ‘Okay, I tell the team but you get the preview. The signal is intelligent.’
For some seconds Gibson could have been a statue. He peered into Petrie’s eyes, looking for clues. Then he gave a sort of moan, like a man in a trance. He performed a brief Zorba the Greek dance on the road, clicking his fingers and laughing. Finally his eyes widened, he shouted, ‘God in heaven!’ and sprinted back along the road, passing the hay-cart and swerving right up the hill towards the castle. Petrie carried on walking, humming to himself.
In a minute Petrie heard running footsteps. He turned. Gibson had reappeared at speed, arms waving to keep balance on the slippery road. His mood had swung from beatitude to desperate anxiety. He stopped at Petrie, his chest heaving with the sprint. ‘Pulsars. Fucking pulsars. Bleep bleep bleep in the Cambridge radio telescope. A secretive lot, that group, they sat on it for six months because they thought they were detecting little green men only it turned out they weren’t little green men, they were spinning neutron stars.’ He glared fiercely at Petrie, looking for reassurance.
‘Charlie, pattern recognition is my business. It’s why you asked me here, remember? No natural process could produce what you detected. That signal is the product of a mind.’
Charlie smiled again, an enraptured saint. ‘The discovery of all time. The Nobel for sure.’
‘A Nobel Prize, Charlie, but that’s the least of it. Think about it. We’re not alone. There are thinking beings out there. What effect is this going to have on society?’
‘Who cares? The effect on me is a Nobel Prize.’ Then: ‘The pattern really is intelligent? You’re absolutely sure?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘You said a mind? A signal?’ Gibson’s face was distorted by a ferocious intensity. ‘Are you saying it’s a message?’
‘I don’t know what it is.’
Gibson took Petrie by the arm and they reversed direction, back towards the castle and the receding hay-cart. His eyes were lit with an evangelical gleam and his words came out rapidly, almost staccato. ‘I’m very concerned about you, Tom, you need sleep, then you can waken up nice and fresh and crack the code, you’ll do that, won’t you, Tom? You’ll wake up nice and fresh and crack the code? Then we’ll all get big juicy Nobel Prizes, you for cracking the code and me for being the big cheese and we’ll all be famous just so long as you get some sleep and then wake up and crack the fucking code for Christ’s sake, please, just as quick as you can.’
10
Poet’s Dream
After the penetrating cold, the warmth of the castle hit Petrie like a sleeping pill. Gibson, however, was in a high state of excitement. He now decided that the young mathematician could endure a little more sleep deprivation in the name of science. He took Petrie by the elbow, guided him upstairs to the common room, propped him in a chair and bustled through to the kitchen. Presently he came back with a mug of strong, sweet, black coffee. ‘The cleaners turn up about eight,’ he said for no obvious reason. Then he vanished, singing loudly and tunelessly.
Freya and Svetlana were first to appear, Svetlana in black jeans and sweater, Freya in the same long skirt and red blouse she had worn in the BMW. ‘Good morning, Tom,’ Freya said. ‘You look terrible.’
‘Like death warmed up,’ Svetlana added, flopping into a couch. ‘My great-aunt was a better cook than Vashislav’s and she taught me how to make pyzy which have been known to revive frozen corpses.’
‘Later,’ Gibson said curtly. He popped out of the door impatiently, popped in again, and repeated the cycle twice before Shtyrkov arrived. The Russian sat down heavily on the couch next to Svetlana; the armchairs looked as if they would be too tight a fit. He grinned expectantly at Petrie.
‘Tom has something to announce,’ Gibson said triumphantly.
Petrie sipped at the over-sweet coffee. Exhaustion was blurring his words. ‘Vashislav’s suspicions were right. The sig
nal can’t be caused by any natural phenomenon. It’s coming from an intelligent source.’
Freya gasped briefly, and then there was a long, stunned silence.
Shtyrkov muttered something in Russian, under his breath. Then Svetlana began to laugh and cry and Shtyrkov patted her shoulder. ‘Stay calm, child.’
Svetlana produced a paper handkerchief, blew her nose and smiled sheepishly. ‘I suppose the first thing is to be sure that Tom is right.’
‘I can prove it. But the proof involves a bigger shock. I warn you, it’ll blow your mind.’
‘A bigger shock? Bigger than ET?’ Alarm and greed mingled in Gibson’s pale face.
Petrie put the mug on a table. ‘Come through to the office.’
The office smelled slightly of stale sweat. Petrie threw up the cartoon picture of the lake and rotated it to orient his little audience in three dimensions. Then he fired particles through the lake, tapping at the keyboard to progressively slow down the flow. As the movie slowed, the stream appeared at first like a blizzard sweeping through the lake at a shallow angle. And then, with further slowing, individual trajectories became distinguishable, patterns began to appear, complicated and swirling, with blank periods in between.
And then Petrie explained about turning the lake so that it was face-on to the flow, and replacing each particle track by a point so that at any instant the lake was covered by a pattern of dots. And then he zoomed in on some of the fine structure and explained about the four-base arithmetic. And then he told them how he had stacked the microseconds of time on top of each other so that each slice of time became a thin slice in a jelly, so that the stacked slices defined a solid, three-dimensional structure. And then a century passed while Petrie tapped in a final set of instructions until, on the screen, slowly rotating and beyond any possibility of mistake or misinterpretation, was the double helix of DNA.
Shtyrkov sang, quietly. Gibson said, ‘Oh man.’
Petrie left it on the screen, tumbling slowly, hypnotising them; even menacing them. He felt his limbs covered with goosepimples. ‘I don’t know whether it’s even remotely human, but it’s surely biological.’
