Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [202]
“At least,” said Paul, “we know now we’re not alone.”
“Maybe it’s just as well if we don’t find them,” said Maurie.
The remark brought frowns from everyone.
“Why would you say that?” asked Gil.
“How old would you guess their civilization is?”
Matt let his impatience show. “We’ve no way of knowing,” he said.
“They could easily be a million. Six million. What’s a civilization that’s been around that long going to look like? Do we really want to talk to them?”
“Why not?”
Maurie took a deep breath. “What could we possibly have to say to them that they’d be interested in?”
Kim was playing chess with Mona when AH buzzed her. “Please come up for a minute.”
She left the game and climbed the stairs to the top floor. When she walked into the pilot’s room, he was wearing a strange expression. “We’re being scanned,” he said.
“By whom?”
He shrugged. “No idea.”
“Where are they?”
“Don’t know that either. We can’t track it back. But somebody’s keeping an eye on us.”
“You think the fleet has arrived?”
“Maybe. But I doubt it’s any of our people. If it is, they’re pretty good. The scopes don’t show anything out there.”
The screens were blank. “So what are we saying? That we’ve found what we came for?”
“I’m only saying that the technology behind the scan is of a very high order.”
“Marvelous,” she said, clapping him on the back. “What can they learn about us?”
Ali propped his jaw in his palm. “Which way we’re headed, of course. What kind of engines we have. Maybe they’re able to do an analysis of light leakage. Hard to know what their limits might be. If it’s really celestial. This is where it would have been helpful to have dissected the microship.”
Kim ignored the implication. “Is there a chance they can see into the ship?”
“I don’t think anything we have, or anything anybody could devise, could penetrate this kind of hull. Mac’s hull. It’s designed to survive in high-energy environments. We could take her in pretty close to Alnitak, if we wanted, without frying the help. So no, they wouldn’t very likely be able to do that. But they’re probably able to get a sense of our electronic capabilities, of armaments or lack thereof, of engine architecture, that sort of thing.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Anything else?”
He shrugged. “Listen, don’t get so carried away with this that you forget they have a tendency to bite. Okay?”
She returned to the mission center, called everybody in, and passed the news. Somebody’s watching us. The reaction was mixed, a sense of exhilaration combined with a dash of disquiet. Paul recommended they begin broadcasting the second-phase package. The others agreed and Kim passed the instruction to Ali. A minute later he reported that transmission was underway.
The second-phase package contained a vocabulary list with pictures and pronunciations of 166 objects that the team hoped would be common to the experience of both species. They included words like “star,” “planet,” “cloud,” “river,” “ship,” “rain,” “forest,” “lamp.” Eric, who claimed to have gone to acting school and in any case had exquisite diction, had provided the voice.
They’d also included linking verbs with examples of their usage, a few personal pronouns, and the interrogatives who, what, where, when, and why. Eric maintained that the explanations of the latter, which were elaborated by pictures of sample cases, probably would not be understood, but the terms would be so helpful that it seemed worth the effort.
The package was transmitted realtime rather than compacted, on the theory that celestial technology might not be compatible. It was fifty-six minutes long, and would be repeated every hour.
Ali called down early during the first broadcast with the news that the scan had stopped. Its total duration had been roughly seventeen and a half minutes.