‘Do you remember it?’
‘I thought we lost them all.’
‘I found it, later, in the bag I had. I must have put it there to keep it safe. We used to watch it together, remember?’
‘He was my favourite.’
She laughs. ‘Mine was the fourteenth, but that’s because he was the first one I saw as a kid.’
He goes to hand the figure back but she lifts a hand to stop him.
‘Keep it. It’s yours.’ She sits forward. ‘Will you come again?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I have to go away.’
‘I understand,’ she says.
16
By the end of the third night Jin and Noah are exhausted, dispirited. Despite repeated surveys of the area they have found no evidence of a second transmission, nor has the signal been repeated. When they contact Karoo, Naledi appears on their screen, telling them she’s not confident they can devote more time to the search.
‘I’m not saying we won’t continue to look when we can,’ she says. ‘But for now we can’t hold up our other work any longer.’ She clears her throat. ‘I don’t want to be the one to say this, but have you considered the possibility that the first signal was a glitch of some sort? Or a natural phenomenon?’
‘We’ve checked and double-checked for glitches,’ Noah says. ‘And its structure is too regular to be natural, you know that as well as I do.’
‘Pulsars have structure.’
‘Not like this,’ he says.
‘Then maybe it’s not what we think it is,’ Naledi says. ‘Maybe it’s not a beacon. Or if it is, maybe it’s been running for so long that whoever set it up has forgotten about it, and whatever back end or second message it was supposed to point us to is no longer operational. Either way we don’t know when the signal will recur and we can’t keep looking endlessly until it does.’
Once she has gone Noah stands to leave.
‘Do you think she’s right?’ Jin asks.
‘No. It’s a signal,’ he says. ‘It has to be. But there’s something we’re not seeing.’
17
In the weeks and months after she disappeared it was as if he was coming apart, dissolving. The first days were spent with Adam, in transit to a crisis centre. In the beginning they travelled in a truck, crowded in with dozens of others, bouncing and thumping against one another; later they walked, stumbling through the destruction left by the flood. Everywhere refuse lay tumbled against trees and buildings; it was filthy, stinking. They came across bodies, animals mostly – cows and sheep caught in the branches of trees, dogs and badgers lying by the side of the road – but also humans, usually in plastic body bags tagged and piled on street corners, but sometimes exposed to the elements or half buried in the wreckage.
Noah was only dimly aware of Adam walking beside him, of his hand around his own. When he grew weary Adam lifted him onto his shoulders, and although his proximity, the sharp smell of his hair and body, made Noah uncomfortable, he was too tired to resist.
It was several days before he realised Summer was really gone. They were in the relocation camp by then, sleeping on mattresses in a sports hall.
‘When’s my mum coming back?’ he asked.
Adam fell still, one finger poised above his screen. Setting it down he came and sat next to Noah.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve been trying to find her.’
‘Can’t you call her?’
Adam shook his head. ‘She’s not answering.’
‘Perhaps she’s lost her phone?’
‘Perhaps,’ Adam said quietly.
‘Is she dead?’ Noah asked then, the words seeming to come from far away.
‘No,’ Adam said. ‘I don’t think so.’
Looking back Noah wonders when it was that Adam himself truly understood Summer had left them. Was it that first day, when they looked for her so frantically, or later, at the crisis centre? Or back in London, as they squatted in Adam’s hotel? Or was there no single moment when he knew, only a slow realisation seeping its way into his consciousness?
When they reached Australia it was like being five all over again, people and sounds and smells he did not recognise crowding in on him. It was so bright, so loud after the quiet of the fields. And through it all the absence of his mother like a hollow at the centre of him, the feeling so huge, so overwhelming, he was afraid to give into it.
18
Noah is alone in his room when the idea comes to him. For three days he has been listening to the signal over and over again. It is like an extended squawk, a cacophonous shriek that oscillates up and down, barely distinguishable from random noise. But as he directs the system to replay it to him yet again he suddenly recalls an article about research into the language of dolphins, the fact that the complex structure of the sounds they make only became apparent once their vocalisations were slowed down and reanalysed. A shiver running up his spine, he directs the system to slow the signal to one-hundredth of its current speed, and a moment later a sound fills the room.
At first he cannot fathom what he is hearing: it sounds like a Geiger counter, a series of clicks and whistles bouncing up and down in frequency, strange yet curiously beautiful, like whale song.
Legs shaking beneath him he runs to Jin’s room, pounds on the door. The instant Jin opens it he barges in. As the recording plays he sees the emotions move across Jin’s face, relief turning to amazement then exultation.
‘What do you think it is?’ Jin asks once it is finished.
‘I don’t know. Some kind of notation? Mathematics? A code?’
‘Play it again,’ Jin says. Noah directs the system and the wash of sound returns. But as it loops and overlays he remembers something else, and instructs the system to scan the signal. A moment later it returns a result.
‘It’s language,’ he says.
‘What?’ Jin laughs, his face still alight.
‘It’s not maths or numbers or code, it’s language.’
‘Really? How do you know?’
‘Language is like any information; even if you don’t understand it, you can break it down into its component elements and graph the frequency of those elements, plot a line from the most frequent to the least. If it’s just noise or babble, there’ll be lots of sounds and they’ll be distributed at random, so the line of the graph will be flat. But if it has structure, particular elements will recur more often than others, and the slope of the graph changes. It doesn’t matter what the language is – English, Mandarin, Kerala – that slope is always the same, it’s always -1.’
‘So?’ Jin says.
‘It’s the same with whales and dolphins. We can’t understand them, but because we can map the structure of the sounds they make, and because the graph shows the same slope of -1, we know the sounds they’re making are language.’
‘So you’re saying this . . . this sound . . . produces that same result?’
‘Exactly.’
‘But why?’ Jin asks. ‘Why send us something we can’t understand? And what are they saying?’
19
It cannot be kept secret, of course. Nothing is ever secret for long, not anymore. And so after discussions with the team it is decided to release the news in advance of publication. Jin is excited about this; it will mean fame for them. There is some difficulty to be negotiated around who will announce it, whether the honour should be handed to a politician or one of the international authorities, but in the end they defer to the protocols laid down a century before, agreeing that since it is a scientific matter, it should fall to Noah to make the announcement.
Noah keeps his distance from the political arguments, but the idea of getting up in front of the cameras terrifies him, although not as much as the thought of all the questions, everybody expecting him to answer them, wanting a piece of him.
20
As a child he spent many nights out in the garden of whichever house his mother was living in, looking at the stars with the t
elescope she’d bought him. They seemed so perfect, so still, their beauty disguising their unimaginable violence, the cataclysm of their birth and death. It was possible to be afraid of that but he was not; instead it seemed wondrous such violence could create such beauty, that the fragrant garden in which he stood, the fragile web of life around him, was tumbling through the vastness of space. Those gardens, those houses, the land that surrounded them are gone now, vanished beneath the sea, yet they still exist somewhere, in some possible world. As a scientist he knows that experience of time is an illusion, that all times exist equally, all possible worlds are present in every moment. That in another universe those gardens are still there, he is still there, that the past never ended.
21
On his last night at the array they hold a party for him and Jin, the technicians and the few postgraduates gathering in the rec room. There is music and dancing, and toasts to the two of them, a sense of shared excitement, but Noah, still exercised by the question of the signal and what it might mean, wanders out to stand in the desert under the stars.
The next morning he leaves early, heading west towards the ocean. Jin is to follow later. It has grown cooler overnight, a storm system feeding down from the north. Arranging his flight, he watched satellite images of it, the great bands of cloud and moisture, and was reminded of the way the land is never still, existing instead in a process of constant change: the movement of the weather, the march of the seasons, the long oscillation of climate systems, their cycles repeated over and over.
Outside, the desert moves by. The first time he came here the sheer emptiness of the landscape frightened him, but as the years have passed he has learned to appreciate the echoes of other ages contained within it, to love the frozen archaeology of the broken rock, the lifted plains, the dust. Now when he looks out at the desert he sees what he sees in the sky, the great depth of time, and silence.
22
The constellations have names they have borne for millennia. Each one a deep well of memory. The seven sisters, the dog, the hunter – these names recur in cultures across the world, suggesting they share a common ancestor, that the first humans bore them with them out of Africa.
It is remarkable to Noah that language should persist in this way, that it should have these deep origins: to him it has always seemed atomised, arbitrary, a collection of sounds the meanings of which might as well be accidental. But in reality it connects him, connects everybody, not just to each other but to the distant past.
Yet what of the future? What will be here eons from now? The ice is almost gone, but while it may take millions of years, there is little doubt that one day it will return, creeping back to cover the land, and the world will change once more, the turmoil and destruction of the past century being little more than a spasm, an interregnum in the great cycles of the planet’s existence. Perhaps there will still be humans then, men and women as different from him as he is from those ancient people on the plains of Africa; perhaps some of them will have spread outward, to the stars, borne there in great ships just as boats bore the first humans across Earth’s oceans. Either way they will carry within them the memory of this time, this past, like a stone borne in the mouth, just as he bears the memory of those ancient travellers in him.
23
He was not sure he would come until he was almost there, but now that he stands at the door he understands why he needed to.
She is lying on her back, her mouth open, her face so thin he thinks for a second she is dead. But then she takes a breath, the slow, shuddering sound startling him.
Drawing out a chair he sits. He had thought they might speak, that there might be things they could say to each other, the things left unsaid last time he came, but seeing her he knows that will not happen.
Remembering what people have said about voices, and the capacity for someone to hear even when seemingly unconscious, he knows he must speak, but he cannot decide what to say. Then he recalls Adam urging him not to be afraid, to just say anything, that it is the sound of his voice that matters, her knowing he is there. So he begins to talk to her about the project, about why he has been away. He tells her about the signal, about trying to decipher it, about all his time out in the desert.
‘We’ve found something,’ he says. ‘Something important. We don’t know what it is, what it’s saying, only that it’s artificial, that somebody is sending it.’
And as he speaks he suddenly understands. They have been worrying about what the signal says, what it means, but that’s not the point. Whoever they are, whatever they are, they have not chosen the language of numbers or mathematics, they have chosen words, and not in order to be understood, but merely to speak. Noah thinks they must be beings who are aware that what is said is less important than the act of speaking, letting people know they are there. Because whatever else it may say, the message says that. We are here. You are not alone.
Hello.
24
It is crowded in the conference room, media reps pushing this way and that. Panic gripping him, Noah wills himself to be calm. At the back of the room he sees Adam with Lijuan; beside them Ellie is talking to Amir and Lijuan’s husband, Dylan. His grandfather lifts a hand in greeting, but before Noah can respond the media officer who has been looking after him touches his arm and says in a whisper it is good there are so many here, that this means they know something big is up. But he cannot listen, cannot think. In front of him a woman appears, speaking to Jin but looking at him. One of the journalists, he realises.
‘This is Noah, is it?’ she asks, and the media officer smiles and tells her it is.
‘It’s all very mysterious,’ she says, ‘an astronomer in a global media conference.’
He opens his mouth to make an excuse, but before he can Jin is there, pulling him aside. Gratefully Noah lets him shuffle him away, out into the corridor.
‘Thank you,’ he says once they are clear of the crowd.
‘You didn’t look like you were enjoying yourself,’ Jin laughs. Reaching up he straightens Noah’s collar. ‘It’ll be okay, you know. You don’t have to say much.’
‘I know,’ Noah says. Further along the corridor he sees a door. Gesturing toward it he says, ‘I just need to be alone for a moment.’
Outside it is cooler, the stars unusually bright. Across the road, through the trees, he can see the lights of the city; closer in bats chitter and brawl in the foliage.
Behind the scenes the debate has already begun about how to respond to the signal. Although most of them are eager to send a reply, some of his colleagues are already anticipating public anxiety about attracting the attention of other species. Yet nobody seriously believes there will not be a response of some sort: once the location of the signal’s source is made public people all over the world will want to send signals of their own.
It is not a debate they need to resolve quickly, of course. Even once they do respond, it will be five hundred years before the message reaches SKA-2165, another five hundred before anyone hears back. He will be gone by then, as will Adam, Ellie, Lijuan, Dylan, Jin, Amir, all of them vanished into the distant past, their passage through the world remembered, if at all, by a handful of video recordings, a scattering of data traces.
Who will be here to receive the reply when it comes? What kind of world will they inhabit? Sometimes it is difficult for Noah to believe humanity will survive at all, so violent have the planet’s convulsions become. To the north the ice is gone, the Arctic a gleaming hump of water; to the south the Antarctic ice sheet is collapsing, faster every year; in South America the Amazon is burning. The planet’s crust is shifting, buckling and cracking as the weight of the ice recedes.
Behind him he hears Jin’s voice telling him it is time. Opening his hand he looks down at the figure, its features nearly rubbed away by the passage of time. And as he does he remembers, or thinks he does. Overhead the sky so deep he might fall, tumble upwards, lose himself in that immensity. The feeling like vertigo.
&
nbsp; Like flight.
It is Bo’s idea they go down to the water, just the four of them, join one of the parties out on the islands to celebrate Izzie’s birthday. Malla and Nam had other plans, Nam particularly, but when Bo suggests it Izzie knows immediately it is what she wants to do.
They ride the train as far as it will take them, crammed into the carriage with a handful of others bound for the party and with the last commuters, then they pile out onto the station. It is a warm night, the train lines throwing sparks in the darkness, and as they make their way down the stairs Bo loops his arm around her neck and leans in towards her. For the past few weeks he has been working on a reconstruction project, and although he has showered the smell of dust and solvents still lingers on his skin. She doesn’t care; she loves the way he smells, loves the strength of his arms, his easy manner.
Malla and Nam like him as well, although Izzie knows both of them are sometimes a little wary of him: in contrast to the three of them he was raised on a co-op, and as with a lot of people brought up like that he grew a little feral, his time spent working in the gardens or messing about with the other kids, meaning he has little interest in the hothouse world inhabited by Malla and Nam and, to a lesser extent, Izzie.
When they met it was exactly this that drew her to him: unlike most of her friends he had a reassuring solidity, a sense of who he was that was not hostage to what others thought of him. She knew even then that they were not suited in any long-term way, that the things she cares about are not the things he cares about, and so although he is attentive when she does, she tends not to speak about her plans for the future. Yet as the months have passed she has begun to feel guilty about this holding back, guilty she might be using him, because as much as she loves him now she knows this is not forever, that she will move on and leave him.
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