The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [46]
"No, there’s something Jimmy Quinn wanted to show us and we figured it was better to come by when the place isn’t busy," George said. Anne, smiling innocently, handed the guard a couple of donuts on the way by.
Awake all night, Jimmy was bleary-eyed but too strung up on his nerves to notice he was tired. As they squeezed into his little cubicle, he grabbed the donut Anne held out to him and ate it in two bites, setting up the playback while he chewed.
It was vocal, mainly. There was a percussive underlayment and possibly wind instruments as well, but it was hard to tell about that—there was still a lot of noise, although Jimmy had already filtered some out. And it was unquestionably alien. The timbre of the voices, the harmonics were simply different, in some way that Jimmy couldn’t describe in words. "I can display sound signatures that would show the differences between their voices and ours graphically," he told them, "the way you can see that a violin sounds different from a trumpet. I don’t know how to say it."
"I know it’s not scientific, but you can just tell," Anne agreed, shrugging. "It’s like you could tell Aretha Franklin’s voice from anyone else’s, from a single note. It’s just different."
At first, they simply listened to the fragment of music over and over, each time groaning as the signal fell off to static just as the music began to build to something wonderful. Then, after the third hearing, Anne said, "Okay. What can we tell about them? They sing in groups, and there is a lead singer. So they have a social organization. Can we assume they breathe air because their music can be heard like this?"
"We can assume they have some kind of atmosphere that propagates sound waves," George said, "but not necessarily anything we could breathe."
"So they’ve got something like lungs and mouths and they can control expelled air, or whatever it is they breathe," Anne listed.
"And they can hear, or there’d be no point to singing, right?" said Jimmy.
"The language doesn’t sound tonal to me," Emilio said, "but it’s difficult to tell when people are singing. There is a sentence structure. There are consonants and vowels and something in the throat, like glottal stops." It didn’t occur to him to wonder if they had throats. "Jimmy, may I hear it again, please?"
Jimmy replayed it. Sitting at the edge of the group, almost in the hallway just beyond Jimmy’s little space, Sofia watched Sandoz, seeing in action the process she had abstracted while working for the Jesuits in Cleveland. He was already beginning to mouth a little of it, picking up phrases sung by the chorus, trying out phonemes. Without a word, she handed him her notebook and stylus. "I could learn this, I think," he said to no one in particular, distracted, half-convinced already. He began making notes. "Jimmy, may I?" Jimmy rolled his chair out of the way and let Emilio take the console.
"Jim, have you changed the frequency much?" George asked. "Is this what it really sounds like, or is it more like insects chirping or whales singing in real time?"
"No, as near as I can figure, this is what it sounds like. Of course, it would depend on the density of their atmosphere," Jimmy told him. He thought for a while. "Well. They’ve got radio. That implies vacuum tubes at least, right?"
"No," George disagreed. "Vacuum tubes were actually kind of a fluke. You could just as easily go straight to solid state. But they would have to understand electricity." There was a short pause, everyone chewing on the ideas, the only sound that of the music as Emilio slowed it down and repeated sections, correcting his notes. "And chemistry, for sure," George continued. "They’d have to know something about metals and nonmetals, conductors. Microphones need carbon or some kind of variable resistor. Batteries—zinc and lead."
"A theory of wave propagation," Jimmy said. "Radio implies a lot."
"Mass communications," Anne suggested. "And a segment of the population with the leisure to sit around thinking up wave theories. So: probably a stratified society with economic divisions."