Contact - Carl Sagan [144]
She turned around to look back at where they had emerged and saw a field of black-a circular blackness, blacker than velvet, blacker than the night sky. It eclipsed that leeward portion of the Vega ring system which was otherwise-where not obscured by this somber apparition-clearly visible. As she peered through the lens more closely, she thought she could see faint erratic flashes of light from its very center. Hawking radiation? No, its wavelength would be much too long. Or light from the planet Earth still rushing down the tube? On the other side of that blackness was Hokkaido.
Planets. Where were the planets? She scanned the ring plane with the long-focal-length lens, searching for embedded planets-or at least for the home of the beings who had broadcast the Message. In each break in the rings she looked for a shepherding world whose gravitational influence had cleared the lanes of dust. But she could find nothing.
"You can't find any planets?" Xi asked. "Nothing. There's a few big comets in close. I can see the tails. But nothing that looks like a planet. There must be thousands of separate rings. As far as I can tell, they're all made of debris. The black hole seems to have cleared out a big gap in the rings. That's where we are right now, slowly orbiting Vega. The system is very young-only a few hundred million years old-and some astronomers thought it was too soon for there to be planets. But then where did the transmission come from?"
"Maybe this isn't Vega," Vaygay offered. "Maybe our radio signal comes from Vega, but the tunnel goes to another star system."
"Maybe, but it's a funny coincidence that your other star should have roughly the same color temperature as Vega- look, yon can see it's bluish-and the same kind of debris system. It's true, I can't check this out from the constellations because of the glare. I'd still give you ten-to-one odds this is Vega."
"But then where are they?" Devi asked. Xi, whose eyesight was acute, was staring up-through the organosilicate matrix, out the transparent pentagonal panels, into the sky far above the ring plane. He said nothing, and Ellie followed his gaze. There was something there, all right, gloaming in the sunlight and with a perceptible angular size. She looked through the long lens. It was some vast irregular polyhedron, each of its faces covered with…a kind of circle? Disk? Dish? Bowl?
"Here, Qiaomu, look through here. Tell us what you see."
"Yes, I see. Your counterparts…radio telescopes. Thousands of them, I suppose, pointing in many directions. It is not a world. It is only a device."
They took turns using the long lens. She concealed her impatience to look again. The fundamental nature of a radio telescope was more or less specified by the physics of radio waves, but she found herself disappointed that a civilization able to make, or even just use, black holes for some kind of hyperrelativistic transport would still be using radio telescopes of recognizable design, no matter how massive the scale. It seemed backward of the Vegans… unimaginative. She understood the advantage of putting the telescopes in polar orbit around the star, safe except for twice each revolution from collisions with ring plane debris. But radio telescopes pointing all over the sky-thousands of them-suggested some comprehensive sky survey, an Argus in earnest. Innumerable candidate worlds were being watched for television transmission, military radar, and perhaps other varieties of early radio transmission