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  Novels by Jack McDevitt

  ANCIENT SHORES

  ETERNITY ROAD

  MOONFALL

  INFINITY BEACH

  The Academy (Priscilla Hutchins) Novels

  THE ENGINES OF GOD

  DEEPSIX

  CHINDI

  OMEGA

  ODYSSEY

  CAULDRON

  The Alex Benedict Novels

  A TALENT FOR WAR

  POLARIS

  SEEKER

  THE DEVIL’S EYE

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  OUTBOUND

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books LId., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters. places. and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  CAULDRON

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with Cryptic, Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Ace hardcover edition / November 2007

  Ace mass-market edition / November 2008

  Copyright © 2007 by Cryptic, Inc.

  Star chart by Curtis Square-Briggs.

  Cover art by Larry Price.

  Cover design by Rita Frangie.

  Interior text design by Kristin del Rosario.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group.

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-0-441-01650-1

  ACE

  Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, NewYork 10014.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRlNTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was repurted as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for the “stripped book.”

  Acknowledgments

  I’m indebted for advice and technical assistance to David DeGraff of Alfred University; Michael Shara of the American Museum of Natural History; and Michael Fossel, author of Cells, Aging, and Human Disease. Walter Cuirle and Travis Taylor helped out at the galactic core. Thanks also to Ralph Vicinanza, for his continuing support. To Maureen McDevitt, for her comments on an early version of the manuscript. And to my editor, Ginjer Buchanan. Star chart by Curtis Square-Briggs.

  Dedication

  For Jamie Bishop

  Out of the night they come,

  Raining fire and rock,

  Raking the cities of man*,

  Living storms,

  Shaped in the Devil’s Cauldron.

  —Sigma Hotel Book

  (Translated by Phyl)

  CONTENTS

  prologue

  PART ONE: prometheus

  chapter 1

  chapter 2

  chapter 3

  chapter 4

  chapter 5

  chapter 6

  chapter 7

  PART TWO: locarno

  chapter 8

  chapter 9

  chapter 10

  chapter 11

  chapter 12

  chapter 13

  chapter 14

  chapter 15

  chapter 16

  chapter 17

  chapter 18

  chapter 19

  chapter 20

  PART THREE: outbound

  chapter 21

  chapter 22

  chapter 23

  chapter 24

  chapter 25

  chapter 26

  chapter 27

  chapter 28

  chapter 29

  chapter 30

  chapter 31

  PART FOUR: mordecai zone

  chapter 32

  chapter 33

  chapter 34

  chapter 35

  chapter 36

  chapter 37

  chapter 38

  chapter 39

  epilogue

  prologue

  Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

  December 16, 2185.

  THE CALL CAME, as such things always seemed to, in the middle of the night. “Jason?” Lucy’s voice on the other end. Tense. Excited. But she was trying to sound professional. Unemotional.

  Jason Hutchins’s first thought was that Lucy’s mother had suffered another breakdown. The woman was apparently given to nervous collapses, and the family always called Lucy. Teresa, also awakened by the call, raised an arm in protest, then pulled a pillow over her head. “Yes, Lucy? What’s the problem?”

  “We have a hit!”

  That brought him fully alert.

  It had happened before. Periodically they got a signal that had set off alarms. Usually it vanished within minutes and was never heard again. Occasionally, it was a human transmission bouncing around. Never during the two and a half centuries of the search had they gotten a legitimate strike. A demonstrably artificial transmission that could be confirmed. Not once. And he knew as he rolled out of bed, as he grumbled to Teresa that no there wasn’t a problem, that he’d be back in an hour or so, he knew that this would be no different.

  It was at times like this, when he conceded that SETI was essentially a religious exercise, that it took a leap of faith to sit down each day in front of the screens and pretend something might actually happen, that he wondered why he hadn’t looked for a career that would provide at least the opportunity for an occasional breakthrough. Whole generations of true believers had manned the radio telescopes, some in orbit, some on the back side of the moon, a few on mountaintops, waiting for the transmission that never came. They joked about it. Waiting for Godot. I know when it happens, I’ll be at lunch.

  “I do it for the money,” he told people when they asked.

  A LOT HAD changed since the early days of the project. The technology, of course, had improved exponentially. There were starships now. It was possible to go out and actually look at the worlds orbiting Alpha Centauri and 36 Ophiuchi and other reasonably nearby stars. We knew now that life existed elsewhere, even that intell
igent life had flourished in a few places. But only one extant technological world was known, and that was a savage place, its nation-states constantly at war, too busy exhausting their natural resources and killing on a massive scale to advance beyond an early-twentieth-century level.

  So yes, there were other places. Or at least there was one other place. And we knew there had been others. But they were in ruins, lost in time, and the evidence suggested that once you entered an industrial phase, you began a countdown and survived only a few more centuries.

  But maybe not. Maybe somewhere out there, there was the kind of place you read about in novels. A place that had stabilized its environment, that had conquered its own worst instincts, and gone on to create a true civilization.

  He wore a resigned smile as he left the house. It was a clear, moonless night. The skies were brighter, less polluted, than they had been when he was young. They were beginning to win that battle, at least. And, if there were still occasional armed arguments between local warlords, they’d gotten through the era of big wars and rampant terrorism.

  With starflight, the future looked promising. He wondered what his daughter, Prissy, who’d still be young at the dawn of the new century, would live to see. Maybe one day she’d shake the mandible of a genuine alien. Or visit a black hole. At the moment, anything seemed possible.

  He climbed into the flyer. “Where to, Jason?” it asked.

  LUCY WAS SO excited when he walked in she could barely contain herself. “It’s still coming, Jason,” she said.

  “What are we listening to tonight?” He’d been gone several days, at a conference, and had lost track of the schedule.

  “Sigma 2711,” she said. It was an old class-G located out beyond NCG6440, roughly halfway to the galactic core. Fourteen thousand light-years. If it turned out to be legitimate, it wasn’t going to be somebody with whom they could hold a conversation.

  Lucy was a postdoc, from Princeton. She was energetic, driven, maybe a little too enthusiastic. Marcel Cormley, her mentor, didn’t approve of her assignment to the Drake Center. She was too talented to waste her time on what he perceived as a crank operation. He hadn’t said that to Hutchins’s face, of course, but he’d made no secret to his colleagues about his feelings. Hutchins wasn’t entirely sure he was wrong. Moreover, he suspected Lucy had come to the Center primarily because Cormley had opposed it. However that might be, she had thrown herself into the work, and he could ask no more than that. In fact, enthusiasm was probably a drawback in a field that, generation after generation, showed no results. Still, she was getting experience in astronomical fundamentals.

  “Does it still look good, Tommy?” he asked the AI.

  Tommy, who was named for Thomas Petrocelli, the designer of the first officially designated AI, took a moment to consider. “This one might be a genuine hit,” he said.

  “Let me see it.” Jason sat down in front of a monitor.

  “It repeats every seventeen minutes and eleven seconds,” said Lucy. Light bars flickered across the screen. “The sequence is simple.” Four. Then two clusters of four. Then four clusters. Then four clusters of eight. And eight of eight.

  “It keeps doubling,” he said.

  “Up to 256. Then it runs backward.”

  “Okay. What else is there?”

  “You get about two minutes of the pattern. Then it goes away, and we get this.” A long, apparently arbitrary, sequence began. He watched it for several minutes before turning aside. “Tommy,” he said, “are we making any progress?”

  “It has markers. But ask me later.”

  Lucy stood off to one side, her gaze tracking between him and the AI’s speaker. She looked as if she were praying. Yes, Lord, let it be so. She was blond, a bit on the heavy side, although she never seemed to lack for boyfriends. They were always picking her up and dropping her off.

  Jason pushed back in his chair. He wasn’t going to allow himself to believe it was actually happening. Not after all this time. It couldn’t just drop in his lap like this. It had to be a system bug. Or a hoax.

  Lucy, apparently finished with her entreaties to the spiritual world, returned to her chair, pressed her hands together, and stared at the screen. “I wonder what they’re saying.”

  Jason looked around for coffee. Lucy used only soft drinks, so there was none available.

  She read his mind, had the grace to look guilty, but said nothing. Had the evening been quiet, she’d have offered to make it.

  He sat down in front of one of the displays and brought up Sigma 2711. It was seven billion years old, give or take a few hundred million. Maybe a quarter more massive than the sun. At fourteen thousand light-years, it was far beyond the range of the superluminals. But there was evidence of a planetary system, though nothing had been sighted directly.

  If the transmission got a confirmation, he could probably arrange to have the Van Entel take a look. The giant telescope would have no problem picking up planets at Sigma, if they existed.

  “What do you think, Jason?” she asked.

  The first streaks of gray were appearing in the east. “It’s possible,” he said. “Tommy, get me somebody at Kitt Peak.”

  Lucy broke into a huge smile, the kind that says Do with me as you will, my life is complete. “And they told me,” she said, “nothing ever happens over here.”

  “Kitt Peak,” said a woman’s voice. She seemed oddly cheerful, considering the hour.

  “This is Jason Hutchins,” he said. “At Drake. We need confirmation on a signal.”

  “You got a hot one, Jason?” He recognized Ginny Madison on the other end. They’d been together at Moonbase once, long ago.

  “Hi, Ginny. Yes. We have a possible. I’d be grateful if you’d check it for us.”

  “Give me the numbers.”

  “I HAVE A partial translation,” said Tommy.

  “On-screen.”

  “Much of the text is an instructional segment, providing clues how to penetrate the message.”

  “Okay.”

  “Here are the opening lines.”

  GREETINGS TO OUR (unknown) ACROSS THE (unknown). THE INHABITANTS OF SIGMA 2711 SEND THIS TRANS MISSION IN THE HOPE THAT COMMUNION(?) WITH ANOTHER (unknown) WILL OCCUR. KNOW THAT WE WISH YOU (unknown). THIS IS OUR FIRST ATTEMPT TO COMMUNICATE BEYOND OUR REALM. WE WILL LISTEN ON THIS FREQUENCY. RESPOND IF YOU ARE ABLE. OR BLINK YOUR LIGHTS(?).

  “I took the liberty of substituting the name of their star. And, of course, I did some interpolation.”

  “Thank you, Tommy.”

  “Considering their desire to strike up a conversation, it’s unlikely they expected their message to be received so far away. This was probably aimed at a nearby system.”

  “Yeah. I expect so.”

  “Jason,” said Lucy, “what do you make of the last line?”

  “‘Blink your lights’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Metaphorical. If you can’t answer, wave.” He stared at the screen. “The frequency: I assume it’s 1662.”

  “On the button.” The first hydroxyl line. It was where they’d always expected it would happen. The ideal frequency.

  GINNY WAS BACK within the hour. “Looks legitimate,” she said. “As far as we can tell. We’ve got confirmations through Lowell and Packer. We also ran it through ComData. They say it’s not ours, and we can’t find a bounce.” Another broad smile. “I think you’ve got one, Jason. Congratulations.”

  WORD GOT AROUND quickly. People began calling minutes after Ginny had confirmed. Has it really happened? Congratulations. What have you got? We hear you’ve been able to read some of it? These were the same people who’d passed him politely in the astronomical corridors, tolerating him, the guy whose imagination had run past his common sense, who’d wasted what might have been a promising career hunting for the LGMs that even the starships couldn’t find.

  But he was well beyond starship country now.

  Within a few hours Tommy had more of the text. It included a ph
ysical description of the senders. They had four limbs and stood upright, but they were leaner than humans. Their heads were insectile, with large oval eyes. Bat ears rose off the skull, and they had antennas. No sign of an olfactory system. No indication of an expression, or even if the face was capable of one. “Are the features flexible?” he asked Tommy. It was an odd question, but he couldn’t resist.

  “Information not provided, Jason.”

  “How big are they?”

  “No way to know. We share no measurement system.”

  That brought Lucy into the conversation. “You’re saying they could be an inch tall?”

  “It’s possible.”

  Jason propped his head on his hands and stared at the image. “Judging from the relative size of the eyes, it looks as if they live in a darker environment than we do.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Tommy. “The smaller a creature is, the larger its eyes should be relative to body size. They have to be big enough to gather a minimum amount of light.”

  There was more. Details of the home world: broad seas, vast vegetative entanglements, which eventually got translated as jungles.

  And shining cities. They seemed to be either along coastlines or bordering rivers.

  “There are large sections of the transmission I still cannot read,” said Tommy. “Some aspects of the arrangement suggest they may be sound patterns. Speeches, perhaps.”

  “Or music,” said Lucy.

  “It is possible.”

  “Translate that,” she continued, “and you could have a hell of a concert.”

  Descriptions of architecture. Jason got the impression the aliens were big on architecture.

  Accounts of cropped fields, purpose unknown, possibly intended as vegetative art.

  “They’re poetic,” said Lucy.

  “You think? Simply because they like to design buildings and grow flowers?”

  “That, too.”

  “What else?”

  “Mostly, that they’re putting a bottle out into the dark.”

  JASON CALLED HOME to tell Teresa the news. She congratulated him and carried on about what a wonderful night it was, but the enthusiasm had a false note. She didn’t really grasp the significance of the event. She was happy because he was happy. Well, it was okay. He hadn’t married her for her brains. She was a charmer, and she tried to be a good wife, so he really couldn’t ask more than that.