The Long Sunset Read online

  “Professor Blanchard,” said the AI, “Union advises we slow down so they can get the two telescopes in sync.”

  “Do it, Ben. And let’s also increase magnification.”

  The sky was still moving sidewise when a vast cloud of stars began to edge in on the right side. Students gasped. Somebody asked whether anyone living out there would ever see night. Derek was ecstatic.

  A young man seated a few rows back jumped out of his seat and started jabbing his finger at the display. A planet had appeared in the foreground.

  It was, Derek thought, a rogue world. But it was hard to be certain, and before he could get a good look, it had gone off the edge of the screen. The infamous thirty-six-second delay. Still more stars were going off the side. Damn. Well, forget the planet. They had bigger things to think about.

  He wanted the cluster in the center of the display, but it was already almost halfway across the screen before he stopped gaping and gave the order to stop the rotation.

  It continued to drift while he waited. Finally it stopped and they had a near-perfect perspective. It was spectacular. As breathtaking as anything he’d ever seen. He would have liked to inform everyone what they were looking at. But he didn’t know anything more about the specifics of the cluster than his students. That was an issue with the giant telescopes: He could spend a substantial amount of time tracing star patterns, constellations, whatever, but when the telescope zeroed in, the patterns tended to disappear. He was simply, like everyone else, staring at a sky full of stars. And if he did recognize a group of stars, it became rapidly irrelevant because there was just too much to look at. Pity. It would have been nice to be able to show off a bit.

  Ben’s voice again: “Derek, we are getting a signal from the Hynds.”

  “They’ve picked up something?”

  “Yes. It appears to be a telecast. From the edge of the cluster.”

  “A telecast?”

  “That is correct. Do you wish it placed on the display?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  Derek had no idea what he expected. It would have to be a directional signal to make it this far. No standard telecast could come close to covering thousands of light-years. So it was probably what? A distress call? A mission report?

  Ben reduced the telescopic image to about a quarter of its size and moved it into a corner. Then he replaced it with a waterfall. “This,” he said, “is the telecast.”

  A waterfall?

  The audience froze and then broke into applause. Several wanted to know whether the system had gone off track somewhere. Linda reached over and grasped Derek’s arm. “At least it’s not Niagara.”

  It wasn’t an expansive waterfall, but it appeared to be extremely high, with water plummeting from a ridge deep into a canyon. He was just beginning to breathe normally again when he became aware of background music. It was a soft and gentle rhythm, in perfect harmony with the falling water.

  The applause faded and the room went silent, save for the music. Then suddenly everybody was talking. “What is that?”

  “Professor Blanchard, what’s going on?”

  Linda was looking at him and just shaking her head.

  “Ben,” he said, “is that the signal that’s coming in?” He adjusted the microphone so everyone could hear the answer. “Or have we picked up something local?”

  “It was forwarded by the Hynds unit. I have no way to determine its validity beyond that.”

  “It must be a transmission problem,” said Karl Michaels, the science department chairman.

  He had to be right. The system had gotten screwed up. “Ben,” said Derek, as the noise level began to rise again, “connect me with the Coordination unit.”

  People in the audience were getting out of their chairs. “That can’t be real.”

  “Where’s it coming from?”

  A woman behind him seized his shoulder. “Professor Blanchard, are we really seeing that?”

  Michaels was on his feet, staring at the waterfall. “Derek, any chance this is really happening?”

  “Anything’s possible, Karl.”

  A male voice came in over the circuit. “This is Coordination. You guys have a problem?”

  “Have you seen what’s coming in through the Hynds?”

  “I haven’t—” He broke off. “My God, that can’t be right. Hold on.” He broke away and Derek heard him talking in the background.

  The music played on. Derek’s feet pressed against the floor in a subconscious effort to stop it.

  A woman’s voice broke in. “Give us a minute. We’re checking on it now.” Then she was talking to someone else: “You have any idea where they are?”

  Derek couldn’t make out the response.

  “Professor Blanchard. I can’t explain this. We’re not showing any technical issues.”

  “Okay. Could you check it out? If you find anything, get back to me?”

  “Of course. The techs are looking at it now.”

  He signed off. “Ben, can you lock in on the star that’s closest to the source of this?” Water was still spilling serenely over the edge while the music continued. “Get me a catalog number.”

  “For the star?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Working on it.”

  Derek covered the microphone and tried to laugh everything off with his audience. “One of the reasons astronomy is such a pleasure,” he said. “You just never know.”

  Then Ben was back. “It’s KL37741.”

  “What can you tell me about it?”

  “It’s a class G yellow dwarf. Range is approximately 7,300 light-years.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I can give you spectroscopic details if you want. But nothing about them stands out.”

  “Can we get some additional magnification, Ben?”

  “Negative. We are at maximum now.”

  “Does it have a planet within the Goldilocks Zone?” In the area that would allow liquid water to exist.

  He needed several minutes to respond to that. Finally, he was back. “It’s too far to determine.”

  Linda was staring at the display. She looked gloriously happy. “Aliens?” she asked. “Derek, did we just discover aliens? Who play music?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The reporters were waving, trying to get their attention.

  “We don’t need a planet,” said Linda. “Somebody’s out there. That’s all that matters. But we need a name for the star. This is going to be fairly big news, and we can’t just run around, referring to it by a bunch of digits.”

  “I’m open to suggestions.”

  “I don’t know, Derek. How about Clemmy?”

  “That’s your cat’s name, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” She giggled. “You don’t like it?”

  He was groping for a quick answer. Something that sounded respectable. Derek’s cousin had just given birth to her first child. And the kid’s name, he decided, would be perfect. “Calliope, maybe?”

  “Okay. That’s not bad.”

  It even gave him a chance to show off a little. “It’s Greek origin. It means ‘beautiful voice.’ ”

  Then, as he was about to speak to the reporters, the waterfall faded and the music went silent.

  It didn’t come back. “Don’t know what happened, Derek,” the woman at the control unit told him. “If it was actually coming in from the target area, we should have been able to stay locked on to it. Best guess is that the source shut it down.”

  “Do we have any vehicles out in that general direction? Anybody who might have sent the signal?”

  “We’re checking on it. But there aren’t any I know of.”

  “We recorded that thing, right?”

  “Oh yes. We have the entire transmission.”

  As a precaution, Derek directed the AI to run the waterfall against every known cataract on Earth. There was no match.

  He reran the transmission several times. There was vegetatio
n around the edges. Ben could find nothing of a terrestrial origin to match it. A substantial number of the attendees stayed while they searched, and all were excited by the results. They were, in fact, delighted.

  And finally, it was time for lunch. Ordinarily, Derek would have picked up a snack at one of the vending machines on the first floor and returned to his office. He didn’t socialize much. But this time, he didn’t want to be alone with his thoughts. “Have you eaten yet, Linda?” he asked.

  They went across the campus to the college cafeteria. Rain was still falling, but it wasn’t much more than a drizzle now. They got in line, collected some food and Diet Cokes, and sat down at a table where everyone nearby seemed to be caught up in animated conversations. About Calliope. The aliens like the same kind of music we do. It was a good sign. Derek loved seeing students get excited about science. Even if this was a bit wild. And, of course, the fact that they’d been present at what everyone recognized as a historic occasion didn’t hurt. He signaled that he needed catsup for his meatloaf, and Linda passed the bottle over. Then she leaned forward and lowered her voice. “I guess it wasn’t such a good idea to bring everybody in.”

  Linda didn’t talk much. She was sedate, with animated eyes and a manner that left no doubt who was in charge. People always knew when she was in the room. She treated her subordinates well, enjoyed giving them credit when they’d performed appropriately, and showed no reluctance about taking responsibility herself when they hadn’t. She gave Derek credit with the bosses whenever she could, she always kept her word, she never hesitated to invite his opinion, and she was willing to change her mind when the evidence went in another direction. On this occasion, she looked amused.

  “What makes you say that?” he said.

  The amusement gave way to laughter. “Missed opportunities. If it had just been you and me in there, maybe we could have claimed the discovery for ourselves. We’d have been famous. Now we get to share it with a couple hundred people. Next time, when you’re planning to make a discovery that will go global, let me know in advance. Okay?” She raised a glass of water to him.

  NEWSDESK

  Monday, February 11, 2256

  MALAYSIAN FERRY RUNS AGROUND

  Coast Guard Gets Everyone Off Safely

  METEOR KILLS SIX IN VOLGOGRAD

  They Knew It Was Coming; Evacuation Failed

  POPE VISITS SYRIA

  Vatican Hopes to Calm Emotions Following Assassination of Al Kassam

  Hunt Continues for Killers

  MARKETS UP AROUND THE WORLD

  Rousing Start Continues Through Fifth Month

  EXTINCTION LEVELS DOWN

  Only Three Species Lost in Past Year

  The Bad News: Mongoose Among Them

  JAMIE COLBAN DEAD AT 162

  Passed Three Days After Joining Westboro Hall of Fame

  Four of His Albums Among All-Time Top Sellers

  MARIE BANNER RECEIVES PRESIDENTIAL CITATION

  Medal for Service to Humanity Presented During White House Ceremony

  Led Food and Water Operations into Baghdad at Height of Crisis

  CORAGIO, WITH 14 ALL-FEMALE CREW, WINS ROUND-THE-WORLD SAILING RACE

  Peggy Freeman, Skipper, Makes UK in 42 days, 11 Hours, 7 Minutes

  Receives Jules Verne Award

  EARLY BLIZZARDS BURY MAINE, QUEBEC, ONTARIO

  Schools, Roads Closed

  Authorities Urge Everyone to Stay Home

  Call 777 for Delivery of Emergency Rations

  SOUTH GEORGIA LEAGUE TO END FOOTBALL

  Last High Schools Abandon the Sport

  VAN ENTEL SUPERTELESCOPE MAY HAVE SIGHTED HIGH-TECH ALIENS

  Travel TV Show from World in Distant Star Cluster

  2.

  Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

  He stared at the Pacific — and all his men

  Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

  Silent upon a peak in Darien.

  —John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” 1816

  Priscilla, it’s good to see you again. I have to tell you, we don’t have a guest very often who’s been out to the middle of the galaxy.” Jack Crispee was a tall, likable guy who hosted one of the biggest news talk shows of the era.

  The studio could have been a lush living room. The Black Cat logo was centered on the wall directly behind Jack. Satin curtains hung at the windows, framed photos of major political celebrities decorated the walls, and the armchairs and coffee table would have fit perfectly in Jack’s Nantucket vacation home. No camera was visible. Hutch’s instructions were to talk directly to Jack, to keep focused on him, but be aware viewers would see her looking at them. Behind him, a green light on the wall would shut down when they went off camera. “Just relax and say whatever comes to mind,” one of the staff people had told her. “Don’t worry about where the lens is.”

  “Well, it’s a pleasure to be here, Jack,” she said. “Thanks for having me.”

  He smiled, and his eyes focused on her, somehow inducing a sense of being at home. Relax, he was suggesting. You’re among friends. “You’ve seen the waterfall, of course? The one in the intercepted transmission from the supertelescopes? What’s your reaction?”

  “It’s beautiful. And the music was right out of a Broadway concert.”

  “It was striking, wasn’t it? So, are there any plans to go out and take a look? They’re saying the source is pretty far. That the signal would have needed more than seven thousand years to get here.”

  “I haven’t heard a word, Jack. They’re pretty much closing everything down. We’ve been going in the wrong direction for years. My best guess is that the trend will continue and we’ll never find out about the waterfall.”

  He nodded, and for a moment Hutch saw that it wasn’t the answer he would have preferred. So he changed the subject. “What’s it feel like out there, Priscilla? Am I using the right name? Your colleagues all call you Hutch, right?”

  “Priscilla works fine.”

  “Okay. So, how’s it feel when you get so far from home? When you’re in territory nobody’s ever been near before?”

  “Mostly, it just feels empty.”

  “Is it the empty space? Or the planets where there’s nothing alive?”

  “Both, I guess. When you stop to look at individual worlds, places that are orbiting at just the right distance from their sun, where the temperatures are perfect, and they have oceans and a thick atmosphere, but there’s no one there, it’s kind of creepy. Some of them have molecular life, so if we go back in a billion years or so, we’ll probably see forests and squirrels and maybe even someone in a motorboat. But that doesn’t seem to matter. There’s almost never anybody there.”

  “But isn’t that a good thing?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “A substantial number of scientists, most recently Halley and Brackton and Margaret Evans, are saying that the safest situation for us would be if the universe was completely empty.”

  “That’s probably true, Jack. But an empty universe sounds pretty boring. And we know that’s not the case. It’s not empty; it’s just not crowded.”

  “I understand that, Priscilla. Still, I’m not sure we should be looking for excitement. How would a civilization, say, millions of years older than we are react to us if they found out we were here?”

  “They’d probably say hello.”

  “You really think that would be the case?”

  “Why not?”

  “What if they were hostile?”

  “What makes you think they would be? If they’ve been around a long time, they’re probably not dummies.”

  “You sound like the ultimate optimist, Priscilla.”

  “I guess anything’s possible. But it’s hard to imagine a highly evolved species picking fights with anyone who shows up.”

  “But we could get unlucky, right? Why are you smiling? Isn’t it a bit unsettling to think about what could happen if things didn’
t go well? Suppose we encounter a civilization that enjoys blowing up other worlds, and they’re much more technically advanced than we are. What kind of chance would we have to defend ourselves?”

  “Probably not much. And you could be right. But it’s just hard to believe that could happen. With all the stuff out there to look at, why would they want to waste their time fighting with neighbors?”

  “But we’re getting warnings from scientists.”

  “Well, maybe they’re right. Who really knows? I suspect, though, they’ve been watching too many science fiction movies. The members of a society that’s been around for a million years will probably have learned to get along with one another. And it’s hard to see how they could have done that without developing an ethical code that would prevent them from attacking other intelligent species for no reason.”

  “I hope you’re right, Priscilla. But, still, if we get it wrong, we’d have a terrible price to pay.” He sat back in his chair. “I have to tell you, you talk about how empty the universe is. For me, it’s not empty enough.”

  “I’m surprised to hear that, Jack. You don’t look to me like a guy who scares easily.”

  “Ouch. That hurts.”

  Hutch laughed. “That’s a natural reaction, I suppose. If there’d been Martians, they would probably have been scared of us.”

  “Well, let’s get serious for a moment. We’re into another election season, and the interstellars have already become a hot item. Proctor has said she’ll support the Centauri Initiative, the ban on interstellar travel. How do you think that’ll play out? If she gets reelected, will she follow through?”

  “I hope not. It’ll be a serious step backward.”

  • • •

  When they were off camera, Jack thanked her and shook her hand. “You’re a great guest, Priscilla.” He handed her his card with its Black Cat Network imprint. “In case you need to reach me. It’s my commlink. If you get out there again, and you get some pictures or whatever, send them along. We’ll be happy to see what you have. Anyhow, you’re welcome here anytime. If you want to talk about the shutdown effort, or if, as I hope, they decide to go with at least one more mission, we’d like very much to have you back on the show to talk about it. I’d love to find out who’s transmitting pictures of a waterfall.”