At 15:46 hours, June 11, shipboard antennas picked up an intense burst of microwave emission. It came from dead aft and lasted 73 seconds. After that, nothing.
No look I can’t break it down further like I was telling you the data’s all over the board
Dispersion in the pulse from all that crap we’re throwin’ behind us just plain messed up the signal
Not from the EMs though that’s not their frequency we never got anything from ’em up at ten GHz
Okay sure but Ted here wants to know if there’s any chance they sent it
Who can tell Christ no info in that burst at all
Yeah right but lookit the power man—I’d say doesn’t look like a solar flare or anything natural
Course not, too tight a band, and a little star like Ra can’t do much better than hunnert megahertz never make it up to ten gigs and you’re right about the power no way it can be those Ems
Ted I got the calibration on it and it’s a helluva shot of power innat burst doesn’t make sense
Too much power yeah I mean no artificial source would put out that much it’s crazy
Right, if you think they’re broadcasting in all directions, a spherical pulse, then it would take a bloody avalanche of power to register as much as we’re getting
Who’s ’at on the line
Walmsley sounds like, look Nigel, this’s just a tech-talk
Merely sitting in, don’t pay me any mind
Must be artificial though the burst’s so short
This is Ted I’m sure your results are right overall but honestly gentlemen and ladies I don’t believe we can reconcile a power level like that from the EMs or anyone else it must be Ra itself some sort of occasional outburst or
Nonsense, I say
Well Nigel I don’t see how you can simply brush aside
Interesting isn’t it that our exhaust plume distorts the signal enough so that we can’t read it? Decidedly convenient
Well sure but that’s just an accident of
In a seventy-three-second burst you can pack a lot
If there is information content sure but who says
Ted this is Nigel, if someone were to beam a tight-focused signal along our trajectory it would seem to have a huge power, because we’re analyzing it as though the emission was flooding out over all space, rather than being squeezed into a small angle
Well sure I guess but natural emissions from Ra oh I see
So this tells us somebody sent a message our way but pitched at a frequency that would get bloody well swallowed by our own exhaust so we couldn’t unscramble it
Well okay I mean that’s an alternate hypothesis
This is Ted give me the visual on that would you?—guess you’re right there’s no way to decode a mess like that but look Nigel I don’t buy that one I mean why would the EMs broadcast at that high frequency they can’t with their body structure and anybody who wanted to communicate would use something we could decode at least
Quite so, if they wanted us to
I don’t get
We’re on a line of sight from Ra remember
You mean if it wasn’t targeted for us at all but instead
Right we’re on a dead straight line and Ross 128 is another point on that line
Well we’ll take that under advisement Nigel thanks for sure yeah thanks
“Well, I, I don’t know,” Nigel said.
“Come now. You’re positively shy.” Nikka grinned.
“Dead right.” He liked her in this mood, but sometimes she was, well, too much. He was shy, and quite properly so. He looked around at the neat rows of improbably tall vegetables. “Rather public for my taste.”
Above he could see a distant figure working a wheat field on the other side of the slowly spinning cylinder. Along the axis a fleet of puffy clouds streamed, ships with a single destination. Nikka said, “Let’s go into those trees, there.”
Obediently he followed. “Won’t we embarrass God?”
“God? She tries to encourage this kind of thing.”
“Um.” Nigel appreciated her cajoling him into this; it was precisely the craziness of it that would draw him out of himself for a while. They entered a stand of birch. Above, fresh clouds dispersed a blue light. The engineers had rigged mirrors and lenses to bring the exhaust flame’s fierce luminosity into the life volume, where its glow brought an irridescent warmth to the air.
“Here,” Nikka said, and efficiently shucked her coverall. Underfoot, the earth cracked with a swelling of pseu-dospring, cradled by the microenviron mechanisms into fresh life. The pace of change was forced by fine-tuning at the molecular level. Still, as Nigel lay down he caught from afar the sodden autumnal ripeness of leaves, mingling with a crisp flavor of new shoots in the birches overhead, and underlying it all, a humid dry richness of the summer crops that blossomed across the axis, where harvesttime was soon to come. On tradition-minded Earth, one never walked amid such a cross-current of seasons.
Kneeling, he noted that they both had begun to sweat. He licked the rivulet between her breasts and found it lukewarm, salty. He encircled her, sipped at her, traced whirlpool wisps that left spittle shimmering in her pubic hair. The faintly violet shafts from a man-made sun shifted through branches and fell across lips, lurid as slices of salmon, as he lost himself in her; seeking some deeper taste, the swollen nerves beneath the moss. His hands traced the waist that billowed downward into an hourglass, and to where the flowing body forked. This portal of curls became the crux of her Euclidean theorem, a pivot where all lines must intersect and lemmas could be learned. She seemed to tumble out of the air to him in this trimmed gravity, breathing shallowly, heart tripping. He took her with the simplicity their years allowed. He clutched her wineglass center and cupped her to him. By easing steps he felt her widening sense of him. He closed his eyes. A breeze stirred boughs above them. Distant machines chugged. He opened his eyes as she gripped him and abstractly he studied her eyelids, veined in wriggles of purple, and beneath, a sly smile. A slick pace came upon her and a swirl of laughter welled out. He kissed her shoulder and felt it as round as a moon. Her face snapped sideways and lifted him so that he felt her to be a craft under him, running to its own currents, something vast from the natural darkness, and in that strange gulf he leaped, and leaped again, to join her. “Oh,” she said, and then again.
In a while he found he was on his back, solemnly studying the field tenders a kilometer away who labored upside down. She lay sprawled like a broken toy, accepting entirely the shafts like sunlight. Nigel watched a flock of chickens swim down the axis, out for their constitutional, following corn kernels. Here and there small globs fell from them. Dung, descending in straight lines. In his spinning frame the droppings curved in spirals, Newtonian whorls.
“You’re looking contented,” Nikka murmured.
“This was a bloody good idea.”
“Glad you approve. I was going to ask Carlotta to come also, but she has a shift now.”
“Just as well. She and I haven’t, well, been getting on lately.