Clemantine experienced a surge of excitement, of anticipation—and fear too. Fear was necessary, caution essential, because it was impossible to know what they might find. Anything could be out there, from the unthinking residues of moldy life to godlike beings among the ruins—and maybe it would not be so easy to tell the difference?
But they would look. That was why they’d come: to discover what was here, what might remain—while doing all they could to survive first contact.
The radio signal was weak, too attenuated by distance for Dragon to detect it directly. Remote Fortuna had found it—the lead ship in the vanguard—and passed the record back through the fleet.
Clemantine transited to the library, manifesting there in a simulation of physical existence. Kona arrived alongside her.
Urban and Vytet were already present, studying a three-dimensional map showing Dragon’s position amid the nearest stars. The map’s colors were inverted: white background, black stars. Far ahead of the fleet and offset to the left of their trajectory, a small, curving swath of space glowed faintly blue. Sequences of monotone beeps played in soft rhythm, each set of beeps separated by a silence that lasted an equivalent time:
beep-beep-beep-beep
beep-beep-beep-beep-beep
beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep
An absurdly simple sequence, but Clemantine listened with an attentiveness she might have given to a complex symphony while the count continued to climb until it reached ten. Then with the next round the number of beeps commenced to drop, declining steadily toward one.
Urban indicated the blue glow. “We think the signal is originating from somewhere in this area,” he said, his voice taut with excitement. He turned to Clemantine, his expression bright with the flush of discovery, no trace of his usual cynicism in the tight curve of his smile. “It’s not Chenzeme,” he said. “At least, not like any Chenzeme signal we’ve ever heard before.”
“Human?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What is human?” Kona wondered. “The closer we get to the Hallowed Vasties, the more likely we’ll face that question.”
“This could be human,” someone said. An unfamiliar, childlike voice.
Clemantine’s head snapped around in surprise—though it had to be Vytet’s voice, spoken by a new aspect, updated since the last time they had been together. Doubtless Vytet had changed many times in the intervening years, but Clemantine’s daily inspections of the ship did not extend to an inspection of Dragon’s inhabitants.
In this version, Vytet had adopted pale blue skin, deep blue eyes, and a creamy white color for the pelt that covered her scalp. Finely sculpted facial features suggested a feminine nature, but the lack of both masculine weight or feminine curves on a body as thin as Clemantine had ever seen it, left gender open to question. Time would tell. Until then, Clemantine defaulted to the universal she.
Vytet continued to think out loud. “A simple signal,” she murmured, her voice possessing the sweet, high tone of a pre-adolescent child. “Certainly artificial—but not a language. The complexity of language isn’t there. It could be a new Chenzeme tactic. We don’t know—”
She broke off as the pulsing beeps dropped in number to one. They all listened to a single drawn-out tone that lasted several seconds. Then abruptly the signal changed to a complex series of swift beeps, suggesting some kind of code.
“It got our attention,” Clemantine said. “Now it’s telling us what it wants us to know.”
Kona looked up from the map, looked around. Impatiently: “Where are the Scholar and the Mathematician? We need them on deck to do the decoding.”
Both instantiated immediately, appearing within their frameless windows on opposite sides of the black-on-white starfield. The Scholar, with his mature countenance, wore formal blue. The Mathematician, Urban’s double, was dressed exactly like him, in a casual charcoal-gray pullover and snug black trousers.
Both Apparatchiks looked annoyed.
“They’re already working on it,” Urban explained. “My guess is that if we’re meant to understand the code, the solution will be easy.”
“We,” Clemantine mused. “Do you think it’s aware of us?”
Urban answered her question with one of his own: “How close is it? Close enough to resolve the light of our hull cells? Probably not.”
“It’s got to be a trap,” Kona said with a fierce scowl. “A lure to draw in the curious.”
Urban nodded reluctantly. “I agree it’s some kind of lure. It wants to be found. But that says nothing about its purpose.”
A trap.
Given the hostile nature of the Universe as Clemantine knew it, that made grim sense. Her perspective shifted, her first flush of enthusiasm cooled. She made herself listen, really listen, to the continuing sequence of arrhythmic beeps, striving to extract some meaning from them, though they remained meaningless to her ear.
She knew from the library that Urban had never encountered anything like this before. “If it is a lure,” she pointed out, “whoever or whatever is behind it doesn’t fear attention or discovery by the Chenzeme.”
“Then it must be Chenzeme,” Kona growled.
“Or a Chenzeme ally?” Vytet mused. “Is there such a thing?”
“Or some entity emigrating out of the Hallowed Vasties,” Clemantine suggested in a somber voice. “Those who built the Dyson swarms didn’t fear discovery either.”
Frontier civilizations had succumbed to the scourge of Chenzeme warships, but those ships had not caused the collapse of the Hallowed Vasties. The oldest cordons had fallen first, long before the Chenzeme ships could have reached them, most likely brought down by an inherent weakness or an enemy from within.
Again the long tone, bringing an end to what they assumed was a coded message. The original pattern replayed: pulses of sound in sets of one, two, then three, increasing to ten, then declining again. The long tone followed—clearly a separator—and then began a repetition of the complex code.
This time they listened in silence while the Scholar and the Mathematician stood in stillness within their windows—aspects left abandoned as they retreated to a deeper computational layer to decode and interpret the tonal sequence.
When the long tone sounded again, Vytet said, “That’s the full loop. It was exactly the same both times.”
“The patterned portion of the signal peaked at a count of ten,” Clemantine mused, holding up both hands, her fingers spread. “A common base number in human history.” She checked with a DI, confirming what she’d already guessed. “The separator lasts exactly ten seconds. Seconds are a human measure of time.”
Kona: “So it’s human, or it wants to appear as if it’s human, or it’s using these measures because it’s inherited them as artifacts from a human past.”
Clemantine sighed, aware of how much she wanted a connection with this thing, how much she wanted it to be proof that something of humanity remained alive here. But it could be anything.
Grimly: “Maybe it’s just a buoy set in the void, bleating a warning to anyone who will listen. Stay away! I can imagine hundreds of them out there. Thousands.”
Urban cocked an eyebrow as if amused by this show of bitter melodrama. “Let’s say this beacon is human. Then maybe it’s a warning to the Chenzeme… and a welcome to us.”