The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [41]
Emilio, when she asked him over for dinner on Saturday, had suggested with telling casualness that George might invite Jimmy Quinn and Sofia Mendes as well. Sure, Anne agreed, putting misgivings aside. The more, the merrier.
Emilio had not seen Sofia since Cleveland, and it was beginning to seem as though he was deliberately avoiding her, which was probably uncomfortably close to the truth. Well, Anne knew what it took to convert attraction to valued friendship and believed Emilio capable of it; she was willing to provide neutral ground for the task. And Sofia? An emotional anorexic, Anne diagnosed privately. That, perhaps, along with her beauty, was what drew men. Jimmy had long since confessed to his infatuation, unaware that Sofia’d had a similar effect on Emilio. And George, for that matter. And I’m in no position to complain, she thought. My God, all this misplaced sexual heat! The house is going to be flooded with pheromones tonight.
So, she decided, locking up the clinic on Saturday afternoon, my job is to make the evening feel like a family gathering, make the kids feel like cousins, maybe. Above all, she understood, it was necessary to avoid treating Emilio and Sofia, or even Jimmy and Sofia, as a couple. Keep it fun, she told herself firmly, and then keep out of it.
ON FRIDAY OF that week, Jimmy Quinn had begun explaining to Sofia the portion of his job involving the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
"The SETI work is similar to the rest of the observations but it’s on the back burner," he told her. Headsets and gloves on, they felt themselves to be sitting in front of an old-fashioned oscilloscope, some VR engineer’s idea of a joke. "When we aren’t using the dish for anything else, SETI does a systematic scan for radio signals from other planets. The program flags anything that looks like a possible ET message—any— thing with a constant frequency that’s not one of the known sources like registered radio broadcasts or military transmissions, things like that."
"I understand there are already very sophisticated pattern-recognition programs in place," Sofia said.
"Yeah. The SETI programs are old but they’re good, and ISAS updated the signal-processing equipment when they took Arecibo over. So the system already knows how to screen out junk signals from things we know are nonsentient sources like hydrogen atoms vibrating or stars making noise." He pulled up an example. "See how crazy this looks? This is a star’s radio signal. It’s completely irregular and it sounds like this in audio," he said, making a breathy crackly noise through his teeth. He pulled up a new display. "Okay. Radio used for communication uses a constant frequency carrier with some kind of amplitude modulation. See the difference?" Sofia nodded. "SETI scans over fourteen million separate channels, billions of signals, looking for patterns in the noise. When the system picks out something interesting, it logs the time, the date, the source location, the frequency and the duration of the signal. The problem is the backlog of transmissions the SETI tech has to look at."
"So your job is to disprove the standing hypothesis that a transmission is intelligent communication."
"Exactly."
"So—" Stylus raised, flipping up one eyepiece, she settled herself to take in the next load of information. Jimmy took off his headset and gazed at her, until she cleared her throat.
"Can I ask you something first? It’ll be quick," he assured her when she sighed. "Why do you take notes in longhand? Wouldn’t it be easier to record these sessions? Or to type directly into a file?"
It was the first time anyone had asked her about her own methods. "I don’t just transcribe what you tell me. I’m organizing the information as I listen. If I recorded the session, I’d have to take the same amount of time listening to it later as the original interview took. And over the years, I’ve developed a personal shorthand. I write faster