Di’s apartment had seasonal carpeting, a gen-eng product that could be made to cycle through yellow, green, orange, and white during the course of a year. It was now ship’s October, and taking its cue from a slight electric signal that I had fed to it, the plush weave had taken on the appearance of a blanket of dead leaves, mottled ocher and amber and chocolate and beige. Aaron shuffled across it toward a storage unit, a simple brown panel set into the putty-colored wall. “Open this for me, please.”
I slid the cover up, the thrumming motors vibrating my cameras on the adjacent wall enough to make the room appear to jump up and down. I couldn’t see inside, but according to Argo’s plans, there should have been three adjustable shelves set in a cupboard thirty centimeters across, fifty high, and twenty deep.
Aaron slowly removed objects and examined them: two jeweled bracelets, a handful of golden ROM crystals, even a book version of the Bible, which surprised me. Last, he took out a golden disk, two centimeters in diameter, attached to a black leather band. There seemed to be writing engraved on one face, the one Aaron was looking at, but the typeface was ornate and there were many specular highlights making it impossible for me to read at that angle. “What’s that?” I asked.
“Another antique.”
After identifying the object—an old-fashioned wristwatch—I accessed the list of effects Di had applied for permission to bring on the voyage. The watch, of course, was not on it. “Each wrist medical implant contains a brand-new chronograph,” I said. “I’d hate to think Di wasted some of her personal mass allowance on something she didn’t need.”
“This had … sentimental value.”
“I never saw her wearing it.”
“No,” he said slowly and perhaps a little sadly. “No, she never did.”
“What does the inscription say?”
“Nothing.” He turned it over. For one instant the engraving was clear to me. Tooled in a script typeface was WE TAKE OUR ETERNAL LOVE TO THE STARS, AARON—and a date two days before our departure from Earth orbit. I consulted Aaron’s personnel file and found that he and Diana had been married jointly by a rabbi and a priest fifty-five hours before we had left.
“Say,” said Aaron, looking first at the antique’s round face then at the glowing ship’s-issue implant on the inside of his wrist, “this watch is wrong.”
“I imagine its battery is running down.”
“No. I put in a ten-year lithium cell before I gave it to Diana. It should be dead accurate.” He pushed a diamond stud on the watch’s edge, and the display flashed the date. “Christ! It’s off by over a month.”
“Fast or slow?”
“Fast.”
What to say? “They sure don’t make them like they used to.”
The aliens. That’s what I called the 1,711 bits of the third page of the message. In some ways its interpretation was much simpler than page two, the double row of ones and zeros that described the Vulpecula solar system. After all, this page did make a picture, and that picture did, indeed, seem to depict alien forms of life. Of course, I wasn’t sure that that was what the pattern of pixels represented, but the two objects looked more like creatures than they did like anything else I could think of. One of the aliens was tall and spindly; the other, tiny in comparison, was much more squat and compact. I designated them Tripod and Pup.
SEVEN
Tripod wasn’t humanoid, and yet he shared many of the characteristics of humans. He had what appeared to be limbs, although his numbered six, not four. He had a vertically held torso (assuming, of course, that I had oriented the message correctly), and he had protuberances from the top of the torso.
The more I looked at him, the more I thought I saw. He seemed to have three legs, and if I was interpreting the picture correctly, they were evenly spaced around the base of his torso. I noted that they ended in wide feet, with down-turned toes or claws. The left foot was not depicted as a mirror image of the right, and I assumed that rather than accurately depicting a real asymmetry, this was intended to show the feet as if seen from different perspectives. The legs were splayed out from the body, as were the three arms. The only apparent arm joints were at what one might as well call the elbows and the wrists. The hands had but two digits. However, given the low resolution of the image, and the Senders’s fondness for ratios, as evidenced from their solar-system diagram, I thought that perhaps the two fingers and three toes were simply meant to indicate that the ratio of hand digits to foot digits was 2:3, and that perhaps these beings had four fingers per hand and six toes per foot, or even six fingers and nine toes.
None of those combinations gave easy rise to hexadecimal counting, as had been used in the solar-system map, but, then, neither did the five-digits-per-hand biology of humans. The choice of hexadecimal, a natural extension of binary, suggested, perhaps, that these beings shared their world with electronic brains fashioned upon principles similar to those used by my brethren on Earth. Although binary, and then hexadecimal, weren’t the only ways to render counting electronically, they might indeed be the most likely to be adopted by engineers anywhere in the universe.
Anyway, to demonstrate the hand’s dexterity, each had its fingers held in a different configuration—or perhaps each hand was specialized for a different kind of grasping or manipulation.
Tripod’s torso was particularly interesting. It had four openings in it. Were these meant to indicate actual holes that went right through its body? Or were they orifices, one perhaps for ingestion, another for excretion, a third for respiration, and a fourth for procreation? Perhaps, yet if one were to follow the terrestrial model, the small projection from the bottom of Tripod’s torso would be the genitalia.
But if those openings in the chest were holes, then where did the creature keep its brain? The two structures extending from the top of the torso seemed too tiny to hold a significant brain case. Indeed, although they were the same size, each drawn with four pixels, they seemed to be oriented quite differently. Perhaps they were eye stalks or antennae or other sensory apparatus. Interesting that there were only two of them, not three. The creature obviously wasn’t slavish in its trilateral symmetry.
And the bumps off each side of the torso: were they ridges that ran all the way around the body, seen in cross-section? Perhaps the torso, with hollow spaces and reinforcing ridges, had evolved to absorb shocks. If so, maybe the three splayed legs were used for hopping about its home world, the torso actually compressing on impact. Or, given those arched foot phalanges, perhaps the creature simply danced around on tippy toes, like, like—popular-culture banks kicking in—like Fred Flintstone bowling.
Or perhaps the bumps represented discrete lumps, rather than continuous ridges. Were they breasts? On Earth, mammals tended to have a number of breasts equal to the average litter size plus one, rounded up to the next even number, if necessary to preserve bilateral symmetry. If these were breasts, Tripod appeared to have eight. Presumably a technological life-form could see its offspring through adolescence safely, and no creature could routinely increase its population base by a factor of six or seven with each generation without rapidly developing a severe population problem. I wonder how they dealt with it?
And what about the Pup? Was it a member of the same species? But of a different sex? Pronounced dimorphism, if that was the case. If the bumps on the large ones were breasts, then the Pup was the male. Of course, the concepts of male and female were probably meaningless to a totally alien form of life. Maybe it was a juvenile. The Tripod did look somewhat insectlike, and insects do undergo metamorphosis as they grow. More terrestrial models.
Or maybe the Pup was a depiction of the creature the Tripod had evolved from (or vice versa). Or perhaps they were two different sentient forms inhabiting a single world, much as humans and cetaceans shared the Earth. But the Pup seemed to have only legs and no arms, no manipulators of any kind. Could it be a nontechnological animal? If so, the natives of the Vulpecula world got along better than did primates and whales. I
noted that the Pup seemed to have identical sensory stalks to those on the Tripod, even articulated the same way. Did that imply synchronized communication? As for the small knob between the stalks on the Pup’s upper surface, I couldn’t say. It might represent a brain case, or a sex organ, or just a decorative ridge.
Or was the Pup just that, a pet? It would take an unusual psychology to display one’s pet in such a message. Unless … unless the pet was a symbiont, a necessary part of the owner’s life, perhaps as a seeing-eye dog.
The Senders were obligated to use a fifty-nine-bit line, since that was the smallest prime that would accommodate the 1,711 bits of the picture. But I noticed that two of the excess characters were put at each end of the lines, instead of used to further separate Tripod from the Pup. If I had wanted to convey that the two forms lived separately—one on land, one in the water, for instance—I would have put as much distance between them as possible in the frame. That the Senders did not do that implied to me that the two forms did live together.
I did a search of science-fiction literature and the speculative-science volumes on extraterrestrial life. A recurring theme was the idea that tall, spindly beings would be the denizens of low-gravity worlds and that squat ones would call a heavy planet home. It seemed too simplistic: Earth had given rise, after all, to Galapagos tortoises and giraffes, to alligators and brachiosaurs, to platypuses and ostriches. No, the orientation of the body seemed more a function of ecological niche than gravitational pull. What kind of niche would a giant hopping tripod evolve in? Perhaps it fed on fruit. The being’s right arm might be raised not in greeting, but to pluck dinner from a branch up above; the hopping legs might be used to leap up and grab even more distant fruit. Of course, there is a school of thought that says that no herbivore could develop a technological civilization, since toolmaking would only develop as a method of producing weapons for killing and cleaning prey.
Maddening not to know, not to be able to interpret categorically. And yet, parts of the message were even more elusive, more perplexing …
EIGHT
I do not pretend to understand what Kirsten was going through. I mean, here she was, back in the apartment she now shared with Aaron, trying to comfort her lover over the death of his ex-wife. That it was distressing her greatly was evident from her medical telemetry: her pulse was up, her EEG agitated, her breathing somewhat ragged. Although I had no way of measuring gastric acidity directly, she showed all the other signs of having a royal case of heartburn. Kirsten, tall and cool and reserved, wasn’t as demonstrative as Diana had been, but I knew, even if no one else did, that she was usually more sincere.
Aaron had been silent for three minutes, twenty-one seconds, sitting opposite Kirsten in his favorite chair, a bulky lander cockpit seat he had amateurishly reupholstered with tan corduroy. The last thing Kirsten had said was, “She didn’t seem like the type,” meaning, I presumed, that Diana apparently lacked the characteristics Kirsten associated with those who usually committed suicide. I’m sure Kirsten’s medical training had included lectures on this issue, so I didn’t doubt the validity of that observation. But, as I well knew, even the most logical minds, the least emotional souls, could end up killing themselves.
“It’s my fault,” Aaron said at last, his voice a hollow monotone.
“It is not your fault,” Kirsten replied at once, with the firmness Aaron had wished to hear from me earlier. “You can’t blame yourself for what happened.” Psychological counseling was a bit further removed from Kirsten’s field of expertise, and I wondered whether she was just winging it or if she actually knew what she was doing in trying to cheer Aaron. I accessed her academic records. She’d taken a psych elective while at the Sorbonne. One course, and only a C+ at that. “You can’t let this thing destroy you.”
Thing. Their favorite word, an all-purpose noun. Did it refer to Di’s apparent suicide? To Aaron’s insistence on blaming himself for it? Or something larger, less precise? Damn it, I wish they’d be more specific in their speech.
“She’d asked me—begged me—not to leave her,” Aaron said, his head bowed. From my vantage point, I couldn’t tell whether he was staring at the floor or had closed his eyes, the better to concentrate on the internal turmoil he was experiencing. Granted, it was true that Diana had not wanted her relationship with Aaron to end, but Aaron’s view of her actions had been colored by his feelings of guilt. Either that, or—a less charitable interpretation—he was deliberately lying to curry further sympathy from Kirsten. In any event, Diana hadn’t beseeched him to stay.
“Don’t blame yourself,” Kirsten said again, meaning, I supposed, that she had already used up all the psychological wisdom she could remember from that one class.
“I feel… empty. Helpless.”
“I know it hurts.”
Aaron fell quiet again. Finally, he said, “It does hurt. It hurts one whole hell of a lot.” He got up, hands thrust deep into his pockets, and tilted his head to look now at the constellations of holes in the acoustical tiles on the ceiling. “I thought she and I had parted friends. We’d loved each other— I really and truly did love her—but we’d grown apart. Distant. Different.” He shook his head slightly. “If I’d known she’d take it so hard, I never would have—”
“Never would have left her?” finished Kirsten, frowning. “You can’t be a prisoner of someone else’s emotions.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. You know, Diana and I were dating for close to a year before we got married. It wasn’t until just before the wedding that I told my mother about her; she never would have understood me being involved with a blonde shiksa. You have to take other people’s feelings into account.”
“Are you saying you would have stayed with Di if she had told you she’d kill herself if you left?”
“I—I don’t know.” Aaron began pacing the room, kicking the odd piece of clothing out of the way. “Perhaps.”
Kirsten’s voice grew hard. “And I suppose you were taking her feelings into account when you started seeing me.”
“I didn’t want to hurt her.”
“But you would have hurt me had you changed your mind and decided to stay with Diana.”
“I didn’t want to hurt you, either.”
“Somebody was bound to get hurt.”
Aaron had paced the room one and a half times now. He stood at the far end, facing the wall, putty-colored like in his old apartment. His back was to Kirsten as he whispered, “Apparently.”
“You did what you had to do.”
“No. I did what I wanted to do. There’s a world of difference.”
“Look,” said Kirsten. “It’s all moot. She didn’t tell you in advance that she’d kill herself if you left.” She rose from her chair and began to walk toward Aaron, long legs carrying her across the room quickly. But she stopped before she reached him. “Or did she tell you?”
Aaron swung to face her, two meters between them. “What? No, of course not. Christ, I would have handled things differently if she had.”
“Well, then, you can’t blame yourself.” She started to move again, to close the distance separating them, but seeing the hardness in Aaron’s face, stopped herself immediately. “These things happen,” she said at last.
“I’ve never known anyone who committed suicide before,” said Aaron.
“My grandfather did,” said Kirsten in a quiet voice. “He got old and sick and, well, he didn’t want to wait around to die.”
“But Diana had a lot to live for. She was young, healthy. She was healthy, wasn’t she?”
Kirsten frowned again. “Well, I hadn’t seen her since you and she broke up. Probably just as well. She would have been due for another physical in a few months; but according to her last one, she was fine. Oh, she showed the signs of likely developing adult-onset diabetes, so I was cloning a new pancreas for her in case we ever needed it, but other than that, nothing. And JASON tells me her medical telemetry had never shown anything noteworthy. It’s all not surpri
sing, really. After all, there’s no way she would have passed the physical for this mission if she had had anything seriously wrong. You’ve never seen a healthier bunch of people.”
“Then there’s no doubt.” Aaron’s hands, still deep in his pockets, clenched, the cotton weave of his trousers bulging to accommodate the fists. “She committed suicide because I left her.”
“We don’t know for sure that’s what Diana did. Maybe it was just an accident. Or maybe she had cracked up or was on something and didn’t know what she was doing.”
“She didn’t use drugs or current. She didn’t even drink— except one glass of champagne at our wedding.”
“Don’t blame yourself, Aaron. Without a suicide note, we can’t be sure of what happened.”
A note! I quickly accessed Diana’s writings—I was sorry now that I’d erased her latest working documents—and performed a lexicographic analysis to see if I could imitate her style. A Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 6, a score of 9 on Gunning’s Fog Index, average sentence length 11.0 words, average word length 4.18 letters, average number of syllables per word, 1.42. Despite a fondness for split infinitives and putting quotation marks around words for no good reason, Diana wrote clear and concise prose, particularly remarkable given that she was an academic—among the worst writers I’ve ever read—and given that she tended to be quite garrulous in person.
I set one of my subsystems to the task of composing an appropriate letter, but aborted the job before it was completed. All the word processors on board were peripheral to me. If a suicide note was to appear now, Mayor Gorlov would demand to know why I hadn’t summoned help as soon as I became aware of what Diana was contemplating.