Still, this was not any other time; this was the period when, had they been back home, all three moons would have risen simultaneously, the harmonics of their vastly different orbital radii briefly synchronizing their movements. This was the time when the tides would be at their highest, when the jewelbugs would be taking to the air—and when the females of Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed’s kind would be in estrus.
Even aboard ship, the estrus cycle continued, never losing track of its schedule. Yes, despite his race’s hopes, even shielding females from the light and gravitational effects of the moons did nothing to end the recurring march. The cycle was so ingrained in physiology that it maintained its precision even in the absence of the stimuli that must surely have originally set its cadence.
Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed took one last look out his window at the distant yellow star. The planet they’d signaled was invisible without a telescope, although two of the gas giants—the fifth and sixth worlds—shone brightly enough to be seen with naked eyes, despite presenting only crescent faces from this distance.
The ship’s computer would flash a signal to alert Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed, of course, if any response were received. He set out to find his mate, to find his dear Fist-Held-Sideways.
Fist-Held-Sideways was in the forward mess hall when Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed caught up with her. Now that the Ineluctable’s great fusion motors were quiescent, the false sense of gravity had disappeared. Fist-Held-Sideways was floating freely, her gray tail with its blue mottling sticking up above her in a most appealing way.
Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed hovered in the doorway, not moving, just watching her as she ate. Her chest opened vertically, revealing the inside of her torso, the polished pointed tips of her ribs moving apart as she split herself wider and wider. Fist-Held-Sideways used the arm coming out of the left side of her head to swat a large melon that had been floating by, directing it into her belly. Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed watched as the tips of her ribs came together, crushing the melon, a few spherical drops of juice floating out of Fist-Held-Sideways’s torso before she closed the feeding slit. A small mechanical cleaner, moving about the room with the aid of a propeller, sucked the juice out of the air and then demurely retreated.
It wasn’t easy getting another ’s attention in zero gravity. On a planet’s surface, one might slap one’s tail against the floor hard enough so that the other would feel the vibrations through his or her own tail and feet. But when floating freely, that didn’t work; indeed, slapping a tail like that would send you shooting up toward the ceiling, banging your head.
Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed used the hand coming out of the right side of his head to push against the doorframe, propelling himself into the mess hall. As soon as he came within Fist-Held-Sideways’s field of view, she flared her nasal slits in greeting, welcoming his scent, then used both her hands to make signs. “Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed!” she exclaimed, hyperextending her fingers after finishing his namesign to convey her pleasant surprise. “Good to see you! No reply from the aliens yet?”
Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed balled his left hand in negation. “It’s still much too early. So far, I’ve just sent them one, four, nine, and sixteen over and over again; sort of a general hello, one sentient race to another. It’ll be some time before we receive any response.” He paused, seeing if his mate would pick up the hint.
And, of course, she did; Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed had heard from Palm-Down-Thumb-Extended, who had been Fist-Held-Sideways’s mate last breeding season, that she was wonderfully intuitive and empathetic—unusual, but very desirable, traits in a female. “Your quarters or mine?” signed Fist-Held-Sideways.
“Yours,” Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed signed back, flexing his wrist wryly. “Too many breakables in mine.”
The sex, as always, was athletic. Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed enjoyed the exercise, enjoyed the tumbling in zero-g, enjoyed the physical contact with Fist-Held-Sideways. But it was the actual consummation, of course, that he was waiting for. Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed was a biologist and, although he had indeed repeatedly taught students the precise biochemistry involved, it still fascinated the intellectual part of him every time it happened: when a male’s semen finally reached the female’s hexagon of egg-cells, a chemical reaction occurred producing a neurotransmitter that brought intense pleasure to both the female and the male, just as—
Yes, yes! Contact! The sensation washed over him, his tail going rigid in excitement, his twin hearts pounding out of synch, his rib points clamping together, as he was overcome by the joy, the joy, the joy…
Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed was a considerate enough lover to take additional pleasure from the writhing of Fist-Held-Sideways’s body. Fie squeezed her tighter, and they both relished the simultaneous climax of their intercourse. As they relaxed, floating in the room, the warm afterglow of the neurotransmitter washing over them, Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed thought that the Five Gods had indeed been wise. Only together could males and females experience such joy, and—oh, the gods had indeed been brilliant!—it happened simultaneously, compounds from his body mixing with chemicals from hers, producing the neurotransmitter. The simultaneity, the shared experience, was wonderful.
Of course, as usual, it would be a problem figuring out what to do with the new children. His race had been saddened indeed when it discovered that any process or barrier that prevented conception also prevented orgasm, and that, because of the neurological interdependence of the fetuses and their host, to terminate a pregnancy would kill the mother.
No, the only method to keep new children from being born was to avoid copulation altogether. And, well, when a female was in estrus, her pheromones—those wonderful, wonderful pheromones—were completely irresistible.
The had no choice. With an ever-expanding population, they had to find new worlds to colonize.
Darren’s next-door neighbor’s brother-in-law worked for Newsworld, the CBC’s all-news cable channel. He’d met the guy a couple of times at parties at Bernie’s place. Darren couldn’t recall exactly what the guy did. Director? Switcher? Some behind-the-scenes function, anyway; they’d had a fairly empty conversation last time, with Darren asking him if Wendy Mesley was as cute in real life as she looked on TV. Of course, at this time of night, he didn’t want to call Bernie and wake him up—“next door” was a bit of a misnomer; Bernie’s place was the better part of a kilometer up the country road.
But at that last party Bernie had held—back in June, it must have been—Bernie’s brother-in-law had had to leave early, to get down to Toronto and go to work. So he pulled the night shift at least some of the time, meaning there was a chance he might be at the CBC right now. But what the heck was the guy’s name? Carson? Carstone? Carstairs? Something like that…
Well, nothing to be lost by trying. He got the CBC number from Toronto directory assistance, dialed it, and was greeted by a bilingual computerized receptionist, which gave him the option of spelling out the last name of the person he wanted to speak to on his touch-tone phone. Fortunately, the system recognized the name by the time Darren had pressed the key corresponding to the fourth letter—the last name, as the system informed him, was in fact Carstairs, and the first name was Rory. Darren was transferred to the correct extension and, miracle of miracles, the actual, living Rory Carstairs answered the phone.
“Overnight,” said the voice. “Carstairs.”
“Hi, Rory. This is Darren Hamasaki—remember me? I live down the street from your brother-in-law Bernie. We met at a couple of his parties.” The words of the automated attendant echoed in Darren’s mind: Continue until recognized. “I’ve got one of those beards that a lot of people call a goatee, but it’s really a Vandyke, and—”
“Oh, sure,” said Carstairs. “The space buff, right? You were pointing out constellations to us in Bernie’s backyard. Say, not
hing’s happened to Bernie, has it?”
“No, he’s fine—at least, as far as I know. But—but I’ve got some news to report, and, well, I didn’t know who else to call.”
“I’m listening,” said Carstairs.
The carefully devised Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, issued by the International Academy of Astronautics in 1989, had been based on the assumption that governments would control access to the alien signals, that giant, multi-million-dollar radio telescopes would be required to pick up the messages.
But the signal Darren had detected was optical. Anyone with a decent backyard telescope had been able to pick it out, once he’d made known the celestial coordinates. And in all the places on Earth from which Groombridge 1618 could be seen at night, people were doing just that. Sales of telescopes were at an all-time high, exceeding even the boom during Hailey’s last visit.
Darren Hamasaki became a media celebrity, interviewed by TV programs from around the world. Of course, all the usual SETI pundits—Seth Shostak and Paul Shuch in the U.S., Robert Garrison in Canada, and Jun Jugaku in Japan—were also constantly being asked for comment. But when the mayor of Las Vegas decided to do something about the alien signal, it was indeed Darren that he called.
Darren had taken to letting his answering machine screen his calls; the phone rang incessantly now. He was leaning back in a leather chair, fingers interlaced behind his head, listening absently to the words coming from the machine’s tinny speaker: “Shoot, I’d hoped to catch you in. Mr. Hamasaki, my name is Rodney Rivers, and I’m the mayor of Las Vegas, Nevada. I’ve got an idea that—”
Intrigued, Darren picked up the phone’s handset. “Hello?”
“Mr. Hamasaki, is that you?”
“Speaking.”
“Well, looks like I hit the jackpot. Mr. Hamasaki, I’m the mayor of Las Vegas, and I’d like to have you come down here and join us for a little project we got in mind.”
“What’s that?”
“You ever been to Vegas, son?”
“No.”
“Seen pictures?”
“Of course.”
“We’re one brightly lit city at night, Mr. Hamasaki. So bright, the shuttle astronauts say they can easily see us from orbit. And, well, this is our off-season, you know—the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Don’t get enough tourist traffic, and it’s the tourists that drive our economy, sure enough. So me and some of the boys here, we had an idea.”
“Yes?”
“We’re goin’ to flash the lights of Las Vegas—every dang light in the blessed city—on and off in unison. Send a reply to them there aliens you found.”
Darren was momentarily stunned. “Really? Is that—I mean, can you do that? Are you allowed to?”
“This is the U.S. of A., son—freedom of speech and all that. Of course we’re allowed to.”
“What are you going to say?”
“That’s why I’m callin’ you, Mr. Hamasaki. We want you to help us work out what the reply should be. Any chance I could entice you down here with a free trip to Vegas? We’ll put you up at—”
“At the Hilton. Isn’t that the one with Star Trek: The Experience?”
The mayor laughed. “If that’s what you’d like. How soon could you get down here?”
Mayor Rivers was certainly savvy. Over one hundred thousand extra tourists came to Las Vegas to be part of the great signaling event; it was the best early-December business the city had ever had.
Darren Hamasaki’s first inclination had been to send a simple message in response. The aliens—whoever they might be—had signaled one flash, four flashes, nine flashes, and sixteen flashes, over and over again; those were the squares of one, two, three, and four. Darren thought the logical reply might be the cubes of the first four integers: one, eight, twenty-seven, and sixty-four. Not only would it make clear that the people of Earth understood the original message—which simply parroting it back wouldn’t necessarily have conveyed—but it would also indicate that they were ready for something more complex.
But Las Vegas was a city of spectacles; being that prosaic wouldn’t do. Darren spent a week devising a more content-rich message, using the form Frank Drake had worked out for Earth’s first attempt at communicating with aliens, back in 1974: an image made of a string of on/off bits, the length of the string being the product of two prime numbers—in this case 59 and 29.
Arranging the bits as a grid of 59 rows each 29 columns wide produced a crude picture. Darren coded in a simple diagram of a human being, and, because ever since he’d read Lilly in college, he’d believed dolphins were intelligent, a simple diagram of a bottle-nosed dolphin, too. He then put binary numbers underneath, expressing the total populations of the two species, and a crude diagram of the western hemisphere of the Earth, showing that the humans lived on the land and the dolphins in the ocean.
Media from all over the world came to cover the event. Mayor Rivers and Darren were invited to the master control room of the Clark County Power Authority. The entire power grid could be controlled from a single computer there. And, at precisely 10:00 p.m., the mayor pushed the key to start the program running. It began—and would end—with one solid minute of darkness, then a solid minute of light, and then another of darkness, to frame the message. Then the glowing marquee at Caesars Palace winked at the night sky, the floodlights at Luxor strobed against the blackness, the neon tubes at the MGM Grand flickered off and on. All along the Las Vegas strip, and in all the surrounding streets, the lights blinked the 1,711 bits of Darren’s reply.
Out front of Bally’s, surrounded by a huge crowd, a giant grid of lights—specially powered by gas generators—filled in with the pixels of the message, one after the other, line by line, from upper left to lower right, painting it as it was transmitted. The crowd cheered when the human figure was finished, thousands of people raising their right arms in the same salute of greeting portrayed in the message.
After the message had been completed, the mayor took to the podium and addressed the assembled mass, thanking them for their orderly conduct. Then His Honor invited Darren to say a few words.
Darren felt the need to put it all in perspective. “Of course, Groombridge 1618 is almost sixteen light-years from Earth,” he said into the mike, his voice reverberating off the canyon of hotels surrounding him. “That means it will take sixteen years for our signal to reach the aliens there, and another sixteen before any reply they might send could be received.” This being Las Vegas, there were already betting pools about what date the aliens might reply on, and what the content of their next message might be.
Darren refrained from remarking about how exceedingly unlikely it would be that the aliens would be able to detect one blinking city against the glare of Earths sun behind it; if humanity ever really wanted to seriously respond, it would likely need to build a massive laser to do so.
“Still,” said Darren, summing up, “we’ve had a lot of fun tonight, and we’ve certainly made history: humanity’s first response to an alien signal. Let’s hope that if a reply does come, thirty-odd years from now, we’ll have made new friends.”
The head of the power authority had the final words for the evening; the crowd was already dispersing by this point—heading back to the casinos, or the hotels, or the late Lance Burton show during which his assistants were topless, or any of the hundreds of other diversions Las Vegas offered at night.
Darren felt a twinge of sadness. He’d enjoyed his fifteen minutes of fame—but now, of course, the story would slip from public consciousness, and he’d go back to his quiet life in rural Ontario.
Or so he’d thought.
Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed had spent the entire night in Fist-Held-Sideways’s quarters but had left by the time ship’s morning had rolled around. He was one of ten males aboard the Ineluctable, and she, one of ten females. As on the homeworld, though, females were loners, while males—who in anc
ient times had watched over the clutches of six eggs laid then abandoned by each female—lived communally. The Ineluctable’s habitat was shaped like a giant wheel, with ten spokes, each one leading to a different female’s lair; the males lived together in the hub.
It was shortly after the fifth daypart when the computer turned on a bright light to get Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed’s attention. The digitized blue hands on the monitor screen signed the words with precise, unemotional movements. “A response has been received from the third planet.”
Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed gave himself a three-point launch down the corridor, pushing off the bulkhead with both feet and his broad, flat tail. He barreled into the communications room. Waiting there were three other males, plus one female, Captain Curling-Sixth-Finger herself, who had come into the hub from her command module at the end of spoke one.
“I see we’ve made contact,” signed Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed. “Has the reply been deciphered yet?”
“It seems pretty straightforward,” said Palm-Down-Thumb-Extended. “It’s a standard message grid, just like the ones we were planning to use for our later messages.” He made a couple of signs at the camera eye on the computer console, and a screen came to life, showing the message.
“The one on the left is the terrestrial form,” continued Palm-Down-Thumb-Extended. “The one on the right, the aquatic form. It was the terrestrial form that sent the message. See those strings beneath the character figures? We think those might be population tallies—meaning there are far, far more of the terrestrial form than of the aquatic one.”
“Interesting that a technological race is still subject to heavy predation or infant mortality,” signed Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed. “But it looks as though only a tiny fraction survive to metamorphose into the adult aquatic form.”