Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Read online

  “Greg Cooper sifted through a billion rejected brown dwarf candidates from my doctoral thesis. Only members of our own solar system move enough, relative to the background stars, to be easily detectable in a few days. That’s why I rejected all rapidly-moving star-like objects. They must be asteroids or Kuiper Belt objects. Greg re-observed them, and all the other rejects that varied. One, and only one, of my rejects, displays the spectrum of a brown dwarf. And it turns out, it is a true brown dwarf. Greg re-observed it every month for almost two years. The twenty-two points of the corkscrew that you see on the screen plot the apparent path of this object across the sky. A single turn of the corkscrew has 1/30 the apparent diameter of the full moon. That’s huge.” She took a deep breath. “The only way that can be true, ladies and gentlemen, is if the brown dwarf is a binary companion—” she paused—“of the Sun.”

  The audience sat stunned. Somebody murmured in back. Shocked expressions appeared on the reporters’ faces.

  She sipped her water. “The brown dwarf’s orbital motion around the Sun carries it continuously in one direction. The position from which we view it varies cyclically over one year as the Earth moves around its orbit. Combining those two motions produces the helical path in the sky. The apparent size of the corkscrew helix places our newfound neighbor about one hundred times farther from the Sun than Neptune: five hundred billion kilometers away That’s a pretty long walk. But it’s still a hundred times closer than the nearest star.”

  Hands were going up all over the conference hall. The reporter from Science didn’t wait to be recognized. “If it’s so close, why hasn’t anyone discovered it before?”

  “There are five reasons,” Kristi said. “Our companion is almost a million times less luminous than the Sun. It’s three thousand times further away. We can never see it in the same spot twice because it takes 150,000 years to complete one orbit. For the past eight thousand years, it’s been moving through Sagittarius, the most crowded part of the sky. And finally, it’s eight times cooler than Sol, so it only emits infrared light. That’s why nobody’s ever noticed our cool neighbor until recently Until Greg Cooper did.” She took another sip of water, and touched her e-pad.

  “We’ve measured the brown dwarf’s radial velocity. It’s wobbling back and forth with perfect periodicity every seven days.” A sinusoidal curve with data points and error bars replaced the corkscrew on the holoscreen. “This means that a significant mass must be orbiting our neighbor, tugging it back and forth.”

  A hand went up. “Are we talking about a planet, Professor Lang?”

  “One second, please, and I’ll explain. Dr. Dayan’s state of the art instrumentation permits us to measure the object’s speed as it orbits the brown dwarf. That helps us to pin down the masses of our two discoveries. The brown dwarf is forty times the mass of Jupiter. If it were eighty Jupiters, it would fuse hydrogen and be visible to the naked eye as a blood-red star.

  “The orbiting mass is three times that of the Earth. But it’s divided.” She looked at the reporter and at her audience. “To answer your question: No, we do not have an orbiting planet.” She paused. “We have two.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we apparently have a miniature solar system, just eighteen light-days away.” The hands had gone down, and the excitement had turned to stunned silence. “We thought you would like to see them. Dr. Dayan?”

  Joel touched his e-pad and two fuzzy crescents appeared on the screen. “Dr. Lang and I spotted these in the first image we took. At first I was certain that the double image was an internal reflection in the coronagraph. We rotated the optics by 90 degrees, but the crescents didn’t budge. They are real, nearly identical twins. We are seeing both night and day on each world’s surface, hence the crescent shapes.” Another touch and two much sharper crescents filled the screen. “Several hours of focusing the instruments brought us to where we could take a crisp image every minute. Concatenating them gives us the first movie of twin terrestrial worlds, which we’ll now see.”

  The planets came alive, circling their common center of gravity. They orbited the brown dwarf in perfect lock step. On one world, cloud masses swirled over continents, islands and oceans. The second planet was totally enshrouded in clouds. Flashes that could only be lightning were visible on its night side. Many of those present broke into spontaneous applause. Joel smiled and nodded. “During the last few hours of our observing run, Dr. Lang measured each world’s spectrum, and I now ask her to describe what she found.”

  Kristi returned to the microphone. “Humanity has the technology today to send a robotic spacecraft to our neighboring brown dwarf star and its twins. If we use the Clarke cable as a whip, we could be there in twenty years. And we are going to go. Let me show you why.” The holoscreen displayed another pair of spectra. “The ocean world has water in its atmosphere, of course. There’s oxygen, ozone, and methane, too.” She stopped, took a deep breath, and thought again of Greg. I wish you were here.

  “The spectrum also shows a distinctive feature here that can only be produced by chlorophyll. The other planet, the cloudy one, shows nothing but carbon dioxide and nitrogen. The ocean world is alive.”

  The academics in the audience sat spellbound. Many of the reporters were already filing stories with their e-pads.

  “Life has taken hold on a planet just eighteen light-days from Earth. It has failed on the twin planet right next to it. If we choose to do so, we can learn why life established itself on one and not on the other. And then, perhaps, we will understand how life got started on Earth.”

  Joel squeezed her hand beneath the podium. “Great, Kristi,” he whispered. Lisa Meitner must have experienced the same wave of joy when she proved that an atomic nucleus could be broken into smaller parts. Kristi had never felt more alive. “Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for your attention.”

  A forest of hands mushroomed in front of her.

  WHISTLE

  Twenty years ago, Al Redwood walked out. He walked out of Ed Gelman’s old galactic survey project, out of his job, and out of town. I knew what it was all about. We all knew.

  Al thought he had a message from M-82.

  Gelman laughed at him. And I guess the rest of us did too.

  There was no way to prove anything. All he could do was point to a narrow band transmission in the optical range, with peculiar symmetries and repeating pulse, wavelength, and intensity patterns. A laser, Al suspected.

  I remember the final confrontation with Gelman, the day Al stormed out, the last time I’d seen him. They were on the front steps of the data center, on the front steps, for God’s sake, screaming at one another. Gelman didn’t want any little green men hanging around his project. So Al quit, and I never even got the chance to say goodbye.

  He dropped out of sight for a couple of years. None of us heard anything. His family had money, so he didn’t have to work. And then I got a Christmas card from Texas: Nick, it said in his precise handwriting, it was the pulse clusters all the time. How could we have missed it?

  There was no return address. But I knew that, out there somewhere, Al was still chasing his elusive vision. Later, over the years, there was more: on D.C. Marriott stationery: I still think the frequency correspondences are critical. One weakens, another intensifies. Is it a counterpoint of some kind? By the way, I’m doing fine. My best to Ginny and the kids. And hurriedly scribbled on a postcard with a picture of the Atheneum: Getting close. They’re out there; Nick. They’re really out there!

  Al was a lot like M-82. Explosive. Remote. Lit by inner fires. Ultimately self-destructive. A man whose personal stars periodically went nova. Ironic that he of all people would imagine receiving a transmission from that chaotic place, which had erupted nine or ten million years ago, and which was undoubtedly still bubbling.

  Periodically he’d say he was going to be in the area and would stop by. The first few times I got in a couple of bottles of Jamaican rum. He was big on rum. Later I didn’t bother.

  It went on lik
e that for two decades. Sporadic letters from odd places around the country, from Canada, from Europe, from Australia, once from Tokyo. Always promising progress. Sometimes they came in spurts, sometimes several years passed between communications. It was almost as if he were pursuing those goddamn gremlins around the world. He never spoke of anything else, other than to ask about my family, or my health. As far as I know, no one else ever heard from him at all.

  Then one night at about 3:00 a.m., he showed up in a driving January rainstorm, and I’ll never forget how he looked, old and exhausted, his hair gone, his face creased. His top coat was open, his cardigan drenched. Water ran off his ears and nose. He stood in the storm, eyes empty, making no move to come in. “Nick,” he whispered, “I know what it is.” As if we’d last spoken the day before. As if someone had died.

  I pulled him inside. “Hello, Al.”

  He was shaking his head, staring at the night light that illuminated the staircase I’d just descended. I hit the wall switch, a table lamp came on, and he seemed to jerk awake. “I know it’s late,” he said. “I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t disturb anyone.”

  Ginny and the kids were all long gone by then. “No,” I said.

  “Good.” Even for twenty years, he’d lost a lot of ground. I knew I’d grayed myself, slipped into middle age. But Al looked ready for a back porch and an apple tree. “You know what the sons of bitches did?”

  “No.” What sons of bitches?

  He peeled off his coat and, before I could get near him, lobbed it across an armchair. “We were on the wrong track right from the beginning, Nick, It never occurred to anybody we might be looking for something other than digital data.”

  My God, he was off and running again. “Al,” I said, “what are you drinking?”

  He ignored the question. “I mean, our working hypothesis had always been that an artificial transmission could be translated in some mathematical way. And that one that had come seven million light years would have to be a directed signal. A deliberate attempt to communicate. Right?”

  I nodded. “How about brandy?” There was no rum in the house. “Sure. Now: an effort to communicate is going to contain instructions. It’s going to break easily. It has to. That’s the goddamn point!” He chewed his lip and I thought he was choking back tears. He went quiet for a while. “But it was never there. I tried every approach I could think of. NSA even had a crack at it. Did you know that? They came up with nothing.” His eyes brightened with satisfaction. “Absolutely nothing. You know what Gelman thought?”

  He ignored his brandy until I pointed to it. “You ought to get out of your shoes,” I said.

  “Gelman thought it was a reflection. He couldn’t account for it any other way, so he decided it was a goddamn reflection. Nick, why do we always try so hard to explain everything away?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He sipped his drink. “Did you know he’s dead?”

  “Gelman? Yes, I’d heard. It was a few years ago.”

  “You know what I wanted, Nick? I wanted to show him. Son of a bitch, I wanted to walk in and hand him the evidence.” His shoulders slumped. “Just as well.” He shook his head and laughed. It was a curious kind of sound: amused, stoical, bitter. “Doesn’t matter. He wouldn’t have believed me anyway.”

  There had been a time I’d thought Al Redwood was headed for a brilliant career. But even then he’d been a social black hole, a man with no existence outside the observatory. No family, no other friends. Only colleagues, and his work. It was painful to see him now, studying his fingerprints on the glass.

  I was never sure why he felt drawn to me. Maybe it was my family. The older kids loved to listen to him. And Ginny and I often sat with him late into the evenings. My own career leveled off at a plateau roughly commensurate with my abilities, which is to say not very high. I accepted the fact early on that I wasn’t going to walk with giants. I was a maker of catalogues, an analyst, a man with an eye for detail. A recorder and observer of other people’s greatness.

  He pulled off his shoes.

  “What does it say?”

  His eyes were cool and preoccupied behind thick lenses. I could see him running the question through again, his lips tightening slightly. “Weren’t you listening, Nick? It doesn’t say anything! Not a goddamn thing.”

  The storm rattled the house.

  He got up, walked over to his coat, fumbled through the pockets, and produced a CD. “Here.” He held it out for me.

  It looked ordinary enough. I took it, held it, looked at him. He was refilling his glass, his back to me. I sighed and slipped the disk into a player.

  Al strolled across the room and stared out through the blinds.

  I punched the START button.

  “The neighborhood hasn’t changed much, Nick.” An electronic whisper blew through the room. “I assumed that the patterns of duration and intensity and color and the rest of it could be broken out into symbols. That it would have meaning.”

  The whisper intensified. Rustlings and murmurs surfaced, connected, flowed through the still dry air. He turned, cocked his head, and sighed. “This is what you get if you modulate the frequency with an audio signal.”

  “There’s a cadence,” I said, hardly breathing.

  He laughed. “Yes! From seven million light-years, we get ‘Chopsticks’!” He threw up his hands. “Damn their hides, Nick. How could they do anything so vicious?” His eyes were wet. He stood behind an upholstered chair, gripping it, trying to put his fingers through the fabric. The disk ran on: an inconsequential electronic river. “There’s not much to it,” I admitted. “It tends to be repetitious.”

  “It’s a joke.” The dining room was dark. He stared into it. I thought maybe he expected me to say something.

  “You can still publish,” I said. “If you can document this—.”

  “Hell, no. I’ve had enough. You publish, if you want,” He was pulling on his coat. The sounds did have a certain quality—.

  “You can’t go out in that storm, Al. Stay here, tonight.”

  “It’s okay. I’m over at the Holiday Inn. Thanks anyway.” He pushed past me into the entry.

  “Don’t forget—.”

  “You can have it. Souvenir.”

  “Al—.”

  “I wanted you to know, Nick. I wanted somebody to know.”

  I nodded. “What will you do?”

  “I’ll be all right.” He shrugged. “I’ll probably go back to New Mexico. I’ve been teaching down there the last couple of semesters.” He straightened his shoulders and grinned. For that moment, the old Al Redwood was back. “Nice climate. And listen: don’t worry. I’ve got a lot to keep me busy.”

  Whistling past a graveyard.

  He shook my hand and hurried down the front steps. A rented car was parked at the curb. He waved as he drove off.

  I wondered if I’d ever see him again.

  They would have needed a trillion watts to hurl Redwood’s signal across seven million light-years. Who would build that kind of transmitter to send out a pleasant little coded melody? At dawn, I was still listening to the damned thing.

  I took the next day off and went over to see Jean Parker, who operates a recording studio in Middletown. She’s a short, intense, redheaded woman with a hell of a smile. I’d met her years before at a Wesleyan faculty dinner, where she was being honored for her contributions to the university music theater. I told her about Al, about M-82, about the transmission. About how he was trying to pretend it was not a major disappointment. “I’d like to establish whether there might be something to it.”

  “It’s a wild story.” But she glanced at the disk without interest. “What do you want me to do with it?”

  I wasn’t sure. “Listen to it. Assume he was right, and this is a bona fide first-contact signal. What might it mean?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Try it.”

  Her eyes closed. “Call me in a couple of days.”

  “I’ve
got it on a chip.” She ushered me into a booth in the rear of her studio and turned on a synthesizer. “It’s tied into a Synclavier III, an enhanced Lyricon, and a few enhancement programs of my own design.” She stopped and looked puzzled. “You don’t care?”

  “I don’t understand much when you get past guitars.”

  “Okay. Let me start by telling you that by any reasonable definition, your recording is a legitimate musical composition. It has consistent structure, tonal contrast, symmetry and counterpoint, even an intensification of variations toward the conclusion. I don’t see how it could be a product of natural forces. So, if your friend was being honest with you, and if the source of this is what you say, then he’s right. It’s Martian music.” She beamed. “If you can convince the public, it ought to do pretty well.”

  That was an amusing notion. “I guess it might have commercial possibilities.”

  “Get a good PR guy and tell your friend to ride it, Nick.” She offered me a cup of coffee. “It didn’t sound like much to you because you only had the basic melody. What I’ve done is to create a virtual orchestra and input the melody into the computer and then through the synthesizer. The system adds appropriate harmonics and rhythm, makes assignments to the various components of our orchestra, and does some basic arrangement. You want to hear the result?”