All earlier attempts had failed completely; the signal—if it was that—appeared to be unmodulated noise. Why the Sirians should bother to transmit pure noise was a puzzle that had spawned countless theories. The most popular one was that, like high-security messages sent in some encryption systems, it merely looked like noise. It could be an intelligence test, which only the Reborn had passed—if their claims were to be believed.
Yet noise of obviously artificial origin did convey one unmistakable message: “We are here.” Perhaps the Sirians were waiting for an acknowledgment—the “electronic handshake” required by many communications devices—before they started transmitting intelligence.
The Chrislamic zealots—the “Reborn” as they were later to call themselves—had a much more ingenious answer, though not an original one. In the early days of communications theory, it had been pointed out that “pure noise” could be considered not as meaningless garbage, but as the combined total of all possible messages. The Reborn had a neat analogy: imagine that all the poets, philosophers, and prophets of mankind were talking simultaneously. The result would be a totally indecipherable torrent of sound—yet it would contain the sum total of human wisdom.
So it was with the message from Sirius. It was nothing less than the Voice of God; and only the Faithful could understand it—with the help of elaborate decrypting equipment and abstruse algorithms. When they were asked exactly what God was saying, the Reborn replied, “We will tell you at the right time.”
The rest of the world laughed, of course—though there were some apprehensive grumbles when the Reborn built a kilometer-wide dish on the far side of the Moon in an attempt to start a dialogue with God—or whatever was at the other end of the circuit. None of the official space organizations had yet made such a move, because they had been unable to agree on a suitable answer. Indeed, many thought it would be best for the human race to remain silent—or simply to broadcast Bach.
Meanwhile, the Reborn, confident of their special relationship, beamed prayers and homage toward Sirius. They even claimed that because God created Einstein and not the other way around, they would not be limited by the velocity of light: their conversation would not be handicapped by seventeen-year time lags.
The detection of Kali had, for the Reborn, nothing less than the force of a revelation. Now they knew their destiny—and prepared to live up to their name.
For at least a century, few educated people had believed in Resurrection, and the Prophet Fatima Magdelene had wisely avoided the issue. Now, said the Reborn as the world was coming to an end, it was time to take the idea seriously. They could guarantee survival—at a price, of course.
Millions were already planning to emigrate to the Moon or Mars, but both destinations were already setting up quotas to prevent their limited resources from being overwhelmed. In any event, only a few percent of the human race would be able to take this escape route.
The Reborn offered something far more ambitious: not merely safety, but immortality.
They announced that they had attained one of Virtual Reality’s long-sought goals: they could record a complete human being—all the memories of a lifetime, and the current map of the body that had experienced them—in a modest ten to the fourteenth bits of storage space. However, the playback—the literal Resurrection—would still require decades of research. Even if there was any point in doing so, it could not possibly be completed before Kali arrived.
No problem: the Reborn had already received God’s assurance. All true believers could beam themselves toward Sirius, via the transmitter on Farside. Heaven was waiting for them at the other end.
This was the point at which most people’s lingering doubts about the Reborns’ sanity evaporated. Despite their undoubted technological sophistication, they were obviously as crazy as all the other Millennialists who, with monotonous regularity, had promised to save their particular disciples when the world came to an end next Tuesday.
From now on, the Reborn could be regarded as a rather sick joke; their antics were of no concern to a planet that had more serious matters to worry about.
It was an understandable mistake—and a disastrous one.
PART IV
21
VIGIL
DEIMOS DOCKS CLAIMED TO BUILD THEM BY THE KILOMETER, and let the customer saw off the length he needed. Certainly most of their products had a basic family likeness, and Goliath was no exception.
Its backbone was a single triangular spar, one hundred and fifty meters long and five meters across each side. It would have looked incredibly flimsy to any engineer born before the Twentieth Century, but the nano-technology that had built it up literally carbon atom by carbon atom had given it a strength fifty times greater than the finest steel.
Along this synthetic diamond spine were fixed the various modules—most of them readily interchangeable—that comprised Goliath. By far the largest items were the spherical hydrogen tanks ranged along the three sides of the spar, like peas on the outside of a pod. In comparison, the command, service, and residential modules at one end, and the power and propulsion units at the other, looked like afterthoughts.
When he had been assigned to command Goliath, Robert Singh had looked forward to a peaceful—if possible, even boring—few years of space duty before he retired on Mars. Although he was only seventy, he was definitely slowing down. Being stationed here at the T1 Trojan Point, sixty degrees ahead of Jupiter, should be almost a holiday. All that he had to do was to keep his astronomer and physicist passengers happy while they conducted their endless experiments.
For Goliath was classified as a research vessel, and had been funded accordingly by the Planetary Science Budget. So was Hercules, a billion and a quarter kilometers away at the T2 point. Together with the sun and Jupiter, the two ships defined an enormous diamond, which never changed its shape but revolved around the sun once in every Jovian year of 4333 Earth-days.
As the ships were linked by laser beams whose length was known with an accuracy of better than one centimeter, it was an ideal arrangement for many types of scientific work. Ripples in space-time caused by colliding black holes—feats of cosmic engineering by super-civilizations—and who knew what else—might be detected by the arrays of instruments aboard Goliath and Hercules. And as receivers on the two ships could be linked together to form a radio telescope effectively more than a billion kilometers across, they had already been able to map remote regions of the Universe with unprecedented accuracy.
Nor had the researchers aboard the Trojan Twins neglected the immediate neighborhood, where distances were measured in mere millions of kilometers. They had observed hundreds of the asteroids caught in this vast gravitational trap, and had made short excursions to visit many of the nearer ones. In a few years, more had been learned about the composition of these minor bodies than in the three centuries since they were first discovered.
The uneventful routine, broken only by changes of personnel and regular returns to Deimos for inspection and updating of equipment, had now lasted more than thirty years, and few people remembered the purpose for which Goliath and Hercules had been originally built. Even their crews seldom stopped to think that they were on sentry duty, like the watchers who had patrolled the windy walls of Troy three thousand years before. But they were waiting for an enemy that Homer could never have imagined.
22
ROUTINE
THOUGH CAPTAIN SINGH’S CURRENT ASSIGNMENT, EQUIDISTANT from the sun and Jupiter, had been called the loneliest job in the Solar System, he seldom felt lonely. He often contrasted his situation with that of the great navigators of the past, such as Cook and the unfairly maligned Bligh. They had been cut off from all communication with their home base and their families for months—sometimes years—and had been forced to live in crowded, unhygienic quarters in close contact with a handful of fellow officers and a larger number of ill-educated and frequently mutinous seamen. Even apart from such external dangers as storms, hidden shoals, enemy ac
tion, and hostile natives, shipboard life in the old days must have been a close approximation to Hell.
It was true that there was not much more living space aboard Goliath than there had been on Cook’s thirty-meter-long Endeavour—but the absence of gravity meant that it could be used far more effectively. And, of course, the amenities available to crew and passengers were incomparably superior. For entertainment, they had immediate access to everything that human art and culture had produced—up to a few minutes ago. The time lag to Earth was almost the only hardship they had to endure.
Every month there would be a fast shuttle from Mars or the Moon, bringing new faces and taking personnel home for vacation. The eagerly awaited arrival of the “Mail Boat” with items that could not be sent over radio or optical links was the only break in a now-well-established routine.
Not that shipboard life was by any means free from problems—technical and psychological, serious and trivial…
“Professor Jamieson?”
“Yes, skipper.”
“David has just drawn my attention to your exercise record. It seems that you have missed your last two sessions on the treadmill.”
“Er… there must be some mistake.”
“Undoubtedly. But whose? I’ll put you through to David.”
“Well, perhaps I did miss one—I’ve been very busy analyzing those samples they brought back from Achilles. I’ll make up for it tomorrow.”
“Be sure you do, Bill. I know it’s boring, but unless you crank up to half a gee when your schedule tells you to, you’ll never be able to walk on Mars again—let alone Earth. Captain out.”
“Message from Freyda, Captain. Toby’s giving a concert at the Smithsonian on the fifteenth—she says it will be quite an occasion. They’ve got hold of Brahms’s original concert grand: Toby’s playing one of his own compositions, and Rachmaninoff’s Paganini variations. Would you like complete coverage, or just the audio?”
“I’ll never have time to enjoy either—but I don’t want to hurt Toby’s feelings. Send my best wishes—and order the whole memnochip.”
“Dr. Jaworski?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“There’s an extraordinary smell coming from your lab. Several people have complained to me. The air filters don’t seem to be able to handle it.”
“Smell? Strange, I hadn’t noticed anything. But I’ll look into it immediately.”
“Captain, there was a message from Charmayne while you were sleeping. Not urgent, but your Martian citizenship will lapse in ten days unless you renew. Current transmission time to Mars is twenty-two minutes.”
“Thanks, David. I can’t deal with it now. Remind me this time tomorrow.”
“Captain Singh, research ship Goliath to Solar News Network. I received your report a couple of days ago but didn’t take it seriously: I’d no idea those lunatics were still around. No, we have not encountered any alien spacecraft. Be assured we’ll let you know when we do.”
“Sonny?”
“Here, Captain.”
“Congratulations on the table decorations last night. But my soap dispenser’s run out again. Can I have a refill—pine scent this time—I’m sick of lavender.”
By general consensus, Sonny was the second most important man on board; some considered him more important than the captain.
His official status as ship’s steward barely hinted at Sonny Gilbert’s role aboard Goliath. He was Mister Fixit par excellence, able to cope equally well with human and technical problems—at least on the general housekeeping level. The crankiest of cleaning robots started to behave when he was in the vicinity, and lovesick young scientists of all genders were more likely to confide in him than in the SHIPDOC-PSYCH program. (Rumors had reached Captain Singh that Sonny had a remarkable collection of sex aids, real and virtual; but there were some things that a wise commander preferred not to know.)
The fact that, by any standard of measurement, Sonny had the lowest intelligence quotient of anyone aboard ship was completely unimportant; his efficiency, good nature, and sheer kindness were all that mattered. When a famous visiting cosmologist, in a fit of pique, called him a moron, Captain Singh had given the man a tongue-lashing and told him to apologize. When he refused to do so, he was sent home by the next shuttle, despite vigorous protests from Earth.
Though this was an exceptional case, there was always a certain tension between Goliath’s crew and the scientific passengers. It was usually quite good-natured, and took the form of wisecracks and, sometimes, practical jokes. But when there were unusual challenges, everyone cooperated wholeheartedly, quite regardless of their official duties.
Since David kept an unsleeping eye on all Goliath’s operating systems, no round-the-clock watch was necessary. During the “day,” both the A and B crews were awake, though only one was on duty; then the whole ship closed down for eight hours. Should an emergency occur, David could react more swiftly than any human: indeed, if there was any situation that even he could not handle, it would probably be kinder to leave both crews sleeping for the few remaining seconds of their lives.
Ship’s day began at 06.00 universal time, but because the galley was too small to accommodate everyone, the crew that was first on duty had priority at the 06.30 breakfast. B crew ate at 07.00, and the scientist passengers had to wait until 07.30. However, as snacks were available at any time from the automat, no one ever had to suffer the pangs of hunger.
Promptly at 08.00, Captain Singh gave a summary of the day’s program and reported any important news. Then the A crew dispersed for duty, the scientists went to their labs and consoles, and the B crew disappeared into their small but luxurious cubicles to catch up on the overnight news videocasts, plug into the ship’s information and entertainment systems, do some studying, and otherwise occupy themselves until the switchover at 14.00 hours.
That was the nominal time-line, but it was subject to frequent perturbations, both planned and unplanned. The most interesting of these were occasional excursions to passing asteroids.
It was not true, as a blasé astronomer had remarked, “When you’ve seen one asteroid, you’ve seen them all.” (He was an expert on colliding galaxies, so his ignorance of such minor details could be excused.) In fact, asteroids came in almost as many varieties as sizes—from the thousand-kilometer Ceres down to nameless rocks the size of a small apartment building.
Most of them were, in fact, nothing but rock, of kinds perfectly familiar on Earth or the Moon—basalts and granites, the high-grade building materials specified by the original Architect of the Alps and the Himalayas.
Others were largely metal: iron, cobalt, and rarer elements, including gold and platinum. Some quite small asteroids would have been worth trillions of dollars in the days before commercial transmutation had made gold slightly cheaper than much more useful metals like copper or lead.
The asteroids that were of the greatest interest to science, however, were the ones containing large quantities of ice and carbon compounds. Some were extinct comets—or comets that were yet to be born when the shifting tides of gravity nudged them toward the generative fires of the sun.
The carbonaceous asteroids still held many mysteries. There were signs—though the evidence was still hotly disputed—that some of them had once been part of a much larger body, perhaps even a world big enough, and warm enough, to possess oceans. And if that were the case, why not life itself? Several paleontologists had damaged their reputations by claiming to have discovered fossils in asteroids, and although most of their colleagues pooh-poohed the idea, the jury was still out.
Whenever an interesting asteroid came within range, Goliath’s scientists were likely to become polarized into two groups: though they never actually came to blows, seating arrangements at meals were liable to undergo subtle changes. The astrogeologists wanted to move the ship—and all their laboratory equipment—to make a rendezvous with the target so that they could examine it at leisure. The cosmologists fought against this tooth and
nail; their carefully measured baselines would be altered, and all their interferometry ruined—just for a few miserable hunks of rock.
They had a point, and the geologists would eventually compromise with more or less good grace. The smaller passing asteroids could be visited by robot probes, able to pick up samples and carry out most basic surveying operations. This was better than nothing, but if the asteroid was more than a million kilometers away, the Goliath-probe-Goliath transmission lag became intolerable. “How would you like to swing a hammer,” one geologist had complained, “and have to wait for a minute before you knew you’d missed?”
So for really important passersby such as major Trojans like Patroclus or Achilles, the ship’s launch would be made available for the eager scientists. Not much larger than a family automobile, it could provide basic life support for pilot and three passengers for up to a week, allow them to do a fairly detailed examination of the virgin worldlet, and bring back a few hundred kilograms of well-documented samples.
On the average, Captain Singh had to arrange such expeditions every two or three months. He welcomed them, as they gave some variety to shipboard life. And it was noticeable that even the scientists who expressed the most disdain for such rock-grubbing watched the incoming videos as eagerly as anyone else.
They gave various excuses:
“Helps give me some of the feeling my great-great-grandparents must have had when they watched Armstrong and Aldrin first step on the Moon.”
“Gets at least three rockhounds out of the way for a week. More room at mealtimes too.”
“Don’t quote me on this, Captain, but if there ever have been any visitors to the Solar System, this is where they may have left some of their garbage. Or even a message for us to find, when we’re advanced enough to understand it.”