The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [47]
"Metallurgy," Jimmy said. "You wouldn’t start with radio, right? You’d work metal for other stuff first. Jewelry, weapons, metal tools."
"All possible," George said. He laughed and shook his head, still stunned. "Well, chalk one up for the Principle of Mediocrity, boys and girls." Sofia raised her brows in question, so George explained. "That’s the idea that Earth is nothing special, DNA is a pretty easy molecule to make and life is fairly abundant in the universe."
"My goodness," Anne sighed, "what a fall. We thought we were the center of the universe and now look! Just another bunch of sentients. Hohum." Her face changed and she leaned over to hug Emilio with wicked glee. "Whom do you suppose God loves best, Father? Ooh, there’s a nasty little idea. Sentient rivalries! Think of the theology, Emilio!"
Emilio, who had played the music again and again, catching more of it each time, finding a pattern or two, suddenly sat very still. But before he could say anything, Anne spoke up again. "Jim, you said this was Alpha Centauri. What’s the system like?"
"Pretty complicated. Three suns. A yellow one that’s a lot like Sol and two others, red and orange. People have thought for years that the system was a good candidate for having planets. But it isn’t easy to sort things out when you’ve got three stars to contend with, so I guess it never seemed worth the effort. Jeez, it’s going to be a hot prospect now."
The discussion went on for some time, with George, Anne and Jimmy extrapolating, deducing and arguing. Emilio, thoughtful, went back to the music again, playing it through softly once more, but then he turned the playback off.
Sofia alone had neither comment on the music itself nor any speculation about the singers, but when the talk finally slowed to a halt, she asked, "Mr. Quinn, how did you decide to run the signal through an audio output?"
In the excitement, Jimmy had forgotten the embarrassment of the previous evening, and now he was feeling too good to care. "Well, there was all the music last night," he said evenly. "And when I was in school, I had a part-time job cleaning up old recordings from a Soviet archive for digitizing. The signal just looked like music to me. So I decided to give it a try."
"It would be fair to say that you used your intuition."
"I guess so. It was a hunch."
"Would another astronomer have known what a musical signal looks like and come to the same conclusion?"
"Hard to say. Probably. Sure—somebody would have thought of it eventually. "
"Would it ever have occurred to you, do you think, to suggest to me that the AI system wash all signals through an audio output to screen for transmissions such as this?"
"Only to eliminate them as ETs," Jimmy admitted. "See, we always expected a string of primes, some kind of mathematical sequence. I think I’d have suggested that anything that looked like music was definitely not ET. Remember? Yesterday?" He yawned enormously and stood to stretch, which required Anne to duck out of his way and George to move into a corner. "Day before yesterday, now. I sort of recognized that the signal was music then, so I assumed it was local. If I’d been sure it was ET, I might never have considered music. I don’t know why but I always thought it was either music or ET, but not both."
"Yes. Odd, isn’t it. That would have been my assumption as well," she said without emotion, but she was twisting the metal bracelet around and around. Triple time. She’d be perhaps thirty-seven or thirty-eight. Not forever. Hubris, to have made the wager. "Mr. Quinn, your job is secure. My system would not have picked this up. I will recommend that the project be scaled back. I can automate the request-and-return segments of the work. And coordination of scheduling. That could be finished in one or two months."
"We could go, couldn’t we ... if we wanted to?" Emilio said in the silence that followed her remarks. "I mean, there’d be a way to get there, if we decided to try."
The others looked at him blankly, still thinking about Sofia’s unenviable position.
"We could use a meteor