A Passing Star
A short story about interstellar communication
[Ed. Note: this is a rough draft]
Aris loved when she was on duty for the evening tours scheduled to come through the control center. The kids were always so excited. There was always something exciting coming across fifteen light hours of space from Aerchar, or rather its fourth planet, Sylraan. She hadn’t been around when her planet had learned what the Sylraanni looked like. She hadn’t been around when her planet learned that’s what they called their star, called their planet, and called their people. Those were major events — but the control center hadn’t started public tours those decades ago.
She had been around when they had transmitted the process for growing organic solar cells. She had been around when the Sylraanni received the first signals from the Messenger probe, halfway on its fifty year journey, with their giant radio telescopes.
The tours were timed to coincide with the beginning of the first receiving half of the six hour communication window. The executive summary would always contain some fascinating detail of these distant aliens who had rapidly become close friends. Aris checked the systems — clear channel, no interference detected. Right on time the tone sounded and the first blips of the preamble were processed. It’d be ten or so minutes before that summary would be available. Also right on time — the tour.
“Welcome to the Interstellar Network command center!”
Command center. How grandiose, Aris thought, looking around at the updated computers that took up a tiny fraction of the space of the original network technology. The tour guide ushered in about twenty junior school kids staring up in awe at the large screens showing a representation of the two nearby planetary systems along with the estimated location of the incoming data stream traveling at the speed of light. At three light hours out, the tail end of it was still well past the outermost planet of their system.
“How many of you have heard of Aerchar?” The tour guide was a graduate student from the local university — and took his job very seriously.
Every student raised their hand.
“How many of you have heard of Kattellix?”
Many hands went down.
“That’s what our ancestors used to call the bright star that lights up the night half the year. It should have been visible to our ancestors even before they invented writing. As far as recorded information goes it would just be an ordinary, if very bright, star. For a couple thousand years they didn’t even realize it was getting brighter. Then a couple thousand years ago, Etrionis was copying a bunch of astronomy scrolls to preserve them — and noticed across the centuries not only did Kattellix move relative to the brighter stars, but the dimmer stars disappeared. She determined for the first time that Kattellix was getting closer to our sun. Yes — a question?”
One of the children had raised their hand. “Can we talk to the Sylraanni?”
Aris tensed, and went back to monitoring the transmission quality as she knew the tour guide was about to disappoint a child.
“Not like we’re talking right now — it takes fifteen hours for radio waves to travel between us and Sylraan and fifteen hours to travel back. It only takes a few milliseconds for the sound from my mouth to reach your ear. Imagine how hard it would be to talk if it took thousands of times longer!”
The child was unimpressed by the analogy. Needless to say, these kids were not here for the technological and social achievement of establishing communications between two alien races. They wanted to see aliens. They wanted to be among the first to hear something no one else had heard. They wanted Aris’s job.
Or at least what they thought Aris’s job was. A lot of her job consisted of maintaining the radio telescope. There was the constant task of scheduling maintenance and communication windows so they didn’t interfere with each other. Six nines availability. Still, once a day for the six or so months of the year when neither the sun nor Aerchar obscured the line of sight and her hemisphere was pointed toward Sylraan, her job was to communicate with aliens.
The first five hundred characters of the executive summary was the Comm Situation Update. It was a free-form message between the two beings operating the giant radio dishes pointed at each other — or rather, pointed at where each other would be fifteen hours later — across two solar systems. The update was already available on her end.
Received and verified the comm window schedule. Your computers are so amazing. Looks like your dish will be talking to my dish for the next six rondos based on the alignment. There are no critical comm updates from our end. I’ll be talking to you if you have regular staffing. I always feel the sessions can be so impersonal, so I wanted to say ‘ai’. I’ve been learning to speak your language and would like to practice. The ‘th’ and ‘sh’ sounds are so hard to make! Anyway my name is Jakhs. Talk soon?
Aris was bemused. Pleasantly bemused, but bemused. The CSU was informal, but hadn’t ever been this informal. She smiled and pulled up her CSU, pre-populated with boilerplate, and began to edit. Before she could finish, she heard her name.
“Hey, Aris,” the tour guide said again with a raised voice.
“Oh sorry,” Aris replied, “I was just going over the CSU.”
Aris looked at the kids. “The Comm Situation Update. It has information operators like me and my counterpart on Sylraan — uh, Jakhs — need to make sure the signals get through.”
“They told you their name?” the tour guide asked.
“Sometimes when everything is running smoothly, like today, there’s a little bit of extra space in the message and the operators can put whatever they want in it.”
This was probably the best line of advertising for her job she could have possibly delivered to the junior school students. They exploded with questions.
“Are you going to tell them your name?”
“Is it a boy or a girl?”
“Or neither?”
“Can you ask them if they have any pets?”
“How old are they?”
“Like two hundred years?”
“Three hundred?”
“Can you ask what it feels like to be nine feet tall?”
“What is their favorite food?”
“What do you do with the extra four hours everyday?”
The grad student tried to reimpose order, but Aris was more successful. “How about you all write down your questions on one of the question forms and we’ll try to get as many as we can into the transmission.”
The question form was in fact a regular part of the tour — the messages between the worlds often contained a cultural exchange section. One of the frequent items in that section were questions from the children of one world and replies to the children of the other. The children were enthralled and ran to the kiosk with the question forms.
“Don’t you want to hear …” the tour guide trailed off.
Aris laughed and said “I saw part of the exec summary — no big items. The orbital observation updates are probably the most exciting part.” That was indeed a low bar — compared to a string of numbers almost anything would be more exciting for kids.
“I’m excited about that. I run the orbital simulations and produce the ephemeris back at the university.”
“I’ll send them over when I get the full data block. It looks like a large portion of the main message was dedicated to those observations.”
“Thanks!”
With that, Aris was again alone in the control center. She went back to the CSU file on her computer. She clipped most of the information out of the draft CSU leaving only a few important phrases, and adding her own.
Confirm that alignment. It will be my shift and my dish for the next three months on window one. Planned waveguide calibration event has been rescheduled so will not interfere with comm. Hi Jakhs. Or should I say Ai? My name is Aris. Should be easier for you to pronounce. Ha ha.
Aris stopped. Would Jax understand “ha ha”? She pulled up the language guide. Nothing. She pulled up the protocol guide. Sylraanni humor is generally dark, frequently the subject of death is met with the most amusement. However their culture is not monolithic as far as we can determine but our encounters appear to be only with a subset of their population. Possibly a single nation state? [Open question in interstellar relations.]
She thought about it for a second, and decided to go for it. Jax was informal with her, she’d be informal back. The direct connection between conscious beings was the goal of the enormous radio dish, not something filtered through pages of protocol. She added a couple more lines:
We had a tour of schoolchildren today. They are so excited to learn about Sylraan and your people. You have probably seen the questions they send in the cultural exchange section in each message. Looking forward to your next message.
Aris ran the autoencoder, saved the file, and attached it to today’s transmission — additional orbital simulations in this one. The Sylraanni hadn’t yet developed advanced enough computers to do complex calculations, so the local university did any necessary processing. They’d been sent information on transistor technology, but it was slow progress. The scientists on her planet were puzzled about the inability of their flip flops to hold a state for more than a few minutes.
Because they didn’t have computers, the messages could only have the simplest error correction — and no compression. Aris imagined a room full of people meticulously reading the voltages and transcribing them into characters. Maybe she’d ask in the next message?
Aris didn’t know that much about the orbital observations, but she compressed the received data and sent it off to the university — copying the grad student, Tiral, as promised.
The next evening, Aris had woken up more excited than usual to go to work. There was the slowest conversation she’d ever been a part of to look forward to. The commute from the on-campus housing to the one hundred foot parabolic dish was just a few minutes by speeder. The comm window wouldn’t open for another hour, but she was spending some time making a list of things to talk about.
Questions about biology would be weird, huh? she thought. The Sylraanni were elegant beings. There was a flurry of fantastical science fiction novels a decade ago when the nuclear propulsion program was just starting entertaining the idea of interplanetary romance. Aris had read a couple growing up. They were very tall, thin, and skin varying from a deep indigo to a sky blue. Their planet was lower mass, and so the trees that covered it grew in complex shapes. Nearly the entire surface was shallow ocean — the only terrestrial creatures were in fact arboreal. Their faces were dominated by large golden eyes, with only a tiny snout for ingesting food. They wore form-fitting bodysuits that enabled them to more easily navigate their environment. A definite contrast to the flowing garments that for some reason dominated fashion in every country on her planet for centuries. Maybe that was part of the Sylraanni allure. Aris had once as a teenager dressed up as a Sylraanni for a school project and it was a family scandal for years.
This was the stuff of encyclopedias. What were Jakhs hopes and dreams? What did they do for fun? Aris jotted down some notes, but left room for answers to their questions. The tone sounded, and data from ten billion miles away started to be converted into a readable format.
Comm situation nominal. Ai Aris. Such a nice name. I think I understand ha ha — expelling air from your big mouths describing the functioning of laughter. Do you laugh because you find my difficulty with ‘th’ sounds humorous? My companions find it humorous. They say I sound like I am dying. Ha ha. Or I guess hoo hoo? Onomatopoeia. Many of us think it is nice how much you involve the children of your world in everything and it has encouraged us to adopt the practice. Look forward to your next message.
Aris felt terrible — she also had to figure out how to explain that laughter can mean so many different things in less than five hundred characters. It would have to wait. The executive summary had some urgent metallurgical information for the nuclear propulsion program. There were a significant number of observations again as well. Aris forwarded the information as the files were completed, and flagged them as urgent.
Maybe this was the breakthrough the program was looking for? It had been stalled for several years. Nuclear power was probably the only energy source that could provide the necessary acceleration — and deceleration! — to make the journey to Aerchar in less than a lifetime. But lifting a nuclear reactor off the planet would take a rocket ten times bigger than any they’d built before.
Aris started to compose her message.
Comm nominal. Hi Jakhs. I wasn’t laughing at you; we use laughter to say a lot of things. That time was because what I wrote might have sounded rude but didn’t have any ill intent. We sometimes make fun to develop social bonds. Sometimes we laugh when we are nervous. I’m enjoying our chats. Is your comm duty a career or do you plan to do other things eventually? I have a degree in radio technology and communication theory. I think I’d like to teach at a university in the future. How about you?
There was a buzzing from her pad, and Aris answered the voice chat.
“Hi Tiral”
“Uh, hi, uh Aris. Um … are you sure there weren’t any errors in those observations from Sylraan?”
“Redundancy covered all the bit errors, why?”
“Well the comm window simulation is giving strange results — an abnormal number of long periods on a single antenna. Like the one we’re getting now. It’s just weird.”
“That is weird. Maybe ask your advisor?”
“Yeah, I will. She’s been busy with another project all week but maybe I can get a few minutes.”
“Let me know what you find out.”
Aris was awoken at dawn by notifications from her pad. Barely an hour of sleep. Her friend that worked on the nuclear propulsion program had been sending her a bunch of messages.
What was in last night’s message?
They redirected all my funding towards the metallurgy projects this morning.
Is it the breakthrough — low density tungsten-titanium alloy?
Aris grabbed her speeder and headed up to the dish, still groggy. She fumbled with her keycard at the door to the control center. She opened her computer and forwarded the research to her friend. She replied:
This is incomplete. It’s like a progress report. And some raw data.
Aris typed out a reply on her pad that she didn’t have anything more.
Well — looks like I’m out of a job for a little while. Sorry for the message overload. Want to grab dinner (breakfast for you haha) when you get up?
Aris agreed, and bleary-eyed made her way back down the hill to her bed.
‘Breakfast’ consisted of several different sources of vegetable protein fried and set on top of a salad. In college, Aris had given up animal proteins — partially because of ethics, partially because of the metallic taste. She looked up to recognize her friend entering the restaurant.
“Ellis, over here,” Aris called to her as she was scanning in vain.
“Sorry I’m late — you can imagine all the calls I was making today.”
“Yeah — I went ahead and ordered so I could make it to the dish a little early.”
“Early?”
Aris debated telling Ellis about Jakhs.
“Yeah, the day crew noticed a calibration anomaly. Nothing serious.”
This was true. Deferred maintenance on the waveguide would manifest from time to time as a need to turn a tuning screw. The day crew had sent a message about the adjustment. She didn’t really need to be early for that, though. She wanted to spend some time thinking of what to say to Jakhs.
“Well, I found a temporary job at the university helping with the orbital simulations.”
“Say hi to Tiral for me.”
“Who’s Tiral? Someone special?”
Aris had learned to take Ellis’s concern for her love life as a sign she cared so just let it pass. “He’s the grad student who conducts the tours of the control room. He also works on orbital calculations — for the comm windows.”
“I’ll be working on the long run sims — for the future mission.”
“Yeah, you don’t want to travel ten billion miles in ten years and discover Sylraan is not where you thought it would be.”
“Indeed.”
Aris reconsidered discussing Jakhs. “So … since the antennas have been working without issues …the Sylraanni comm operator started including some informal chat in the CSU.”
”Oh no Aris — not your exoromance fetish again.”
“Hey, you read those books too.”
Aris could see Ellis blush beneath her older dermal layer. Aris leaned in closer across the table — “are you sure it’s not you that’s feeling a little curious right now?”
The two women laughed. Ellis flagged down one of the waitstaff and ordered an assortment of fried animal proteins.
“So, what has this comm operator been saying?”
“We only get five hundred characters per message, so given two messages not much so far. He’s learning our language. Has a hard time with ‘th’. Likes children.”
“Wait, you already got to talking about children?”
“I told him about the school group that came through on a tour when his message arrived.”
“How do you know it’s a ‘him’?”
Aris didn’t immediately know how she knew. The Sylraanni switch genders a few times during their long lives, though they’d developed therapies that would delay or even prevent a change. It was the basis of a famous work of literature on their world. The novel was written around the time communication was first established between the two systems. First contact had led to a major political realignment and the shedding of the more conservative elements of the three dominant ideologies. The concept of a world where a being would remain a single gender their entire life associated with a single identity — and choose its path through life — was a revelation. Of course, not everyone on Sylraan wanted to try it out, but tolerance of others’ choices became the norm.
“Oh right — Jakhs — that’s a typical male phase name,” Aris suddenly remembered out loud.
“His name is Jakhs? Sounds like a female name.”
“They don’t have the same language structure we do, Ellis.”
“I know. It just sounds … girly.”
“Anyway,” Aris said, raising her voice, “back to Tiral — he noticed something strange with the new comm window predictions based on the recent observations from Sylraan. Too many alignments with a single antenna. Mine for several months — and then the antipode for several months.”
“Sounds like tidal locking, but that usually applies to objects in orbit around each other — not planets in different systems.”
“Maybe you can look into it.”
“Definitely — I am desperately hoping to find a research topic and avoid the mind-numbing production of estimate after estimate.”
“I have to go — but send a note to my pad if you find anything.”
Aris packed up the remains of her ‘breakfast’ in its container to be eaten later that night. She jumped on her speeder and headed for the dish.
Comm nominal. Ai Aris. Not offended by your ‘ha ha’ — I’d laugh too if I wasn’t too busy practicing my ‘th’. You would be right at home among my companions. It’s so interesting that you want to change jobs. I thought all your people did the same thing their whole lives. I guess that was me being narrow minded. I feel I am learning so much from you already. In a few thousand rondos I’ll probably have children, but right now most of my time is spent decoding your transmissions! Do you like music?
The Sylraanni had sent a confusing string of hexadecimal numbers fifty years before Aris was born. Scientists were baffled for a generation before an amateur Aerchar-watcher had figured out that they were, adjusting for the density of Sylraan’s atmosphere, a list of audio frequencies that produced the most haunting melody her planet had ever heard. Their music became a sensation — sparking its own genre and a myriad of imitators. The chance to be in the room when a new song came over the radio was one of the reasons she went into this field.
She thought about sending the tones for one of her own imitations she made back in junior school. The thought was accompanied by an immediate visceral reaction and an involuntary grimace. No. No way. That would be so embarrassing. Aris started tapping out her message.
Comm nominal. Hi Jakhs. I love music. Do the songs your people sent have titles? We just call them ‘Composition 6’ or some other number based on when they were received. My favorite is Composition 33. I tried to write my own song when I was a kid. It wasn’t very good. I didn’t realize you were decoding these messages yourself. I hope it is not too tedious. Is it just you? Do you have help? A computer translates the messages from the radio waves for me. It can also decode songs into sound.
Hopefully Jakhs would get the hint.
There wasn’t much for Aris to do that evening except monitor the transmission. She looked up at the system status screen and watched the representation of the ribbon of information encoded in electric waves thread its way to Sylraan fifteen light hours away. Keeping one eye on the screen, she heated up her leftovers from breakfast, and hummed Composition 33 alone in the control room.
The transmission complete, all there was left to do was run a system check and attenuate the reactions in the nuclear power generators. The Sylraanni dish was relatively small so the power-aperture had to be made up on their end. Ellis was probably not awake yet. The mystery festered in her mind.
Tiral, like Aris, was working in exocommunication. He was midway through graduate school, so had also shifted his schedule to evenings. He was probably just finishing for the day as well. She thought she’d message him in case he was still up.
Hey Tiral. My friend Ellis said she would check on the orbits. Did you find anything from your advisor?
A message popped back almost instantly.
Unfortunately, no. She’s too busy.
Aris replied with gratitude, and grabbed a sleep aid. She may have been operating on this flipped schedule for a few years, but sometimes she knew when a night was going to be hard. Especially since there seemed to be something strange going on. Reassignments. Advisors too busy for their students. Large segments of the radio messages devoted to observations. She passed out despite her anxiety fighting the medication.
Aris woke up through the remains of a chemical haze and checked her pad. Nothing. She thought there was a chance to hear something from Ellis — she would have been at work all day. She decided to usher things along a little, sending a message herself.
Hey — do you want to get dinner / breakfast?
The reply was quick — as was the rest of the exchange.
Yes — just let’s not talk about work.
Oh no! Hope the new position is going ok. You know I am here if / when you do want to talk about it.
It’s fine. You know. Stress at a new job. Kinda want to escape.
Same place?
Same place.
Ellis had spoken only two words to the waitstaff bringing her total word count to four including her interaction with Aris. Neither of their plates of food were far from their initial conditions.
“Look, Ellis, I know there’s something wrong. I’m not going to pry, but just know I’m your friend.”
Ellis smiled, but her eyes communicated something else — something … sad.
“I want to tell you. But we’re not allowed.”
“Your classified research, huh?”
“I guess you could say that. I don’t want to talk about work.”
In the past, Ellis had talked around some of her more interesting projects, but the emotions were always excitement or frustration. It was never sadness. Aris followed her signals and changed the subject.
“I hinted that maybe Jakhs could encode some of his music in the CSU.”
Ellis looked up and then her eyes darted to her bag. She began rooting around for her pad. Pulling it out, she made a couple taps. “Ah, no. Have to go back to work. Overnight processing task had an error. Sorry — hey you can take my leftovers up to the dish tonight.”
Aris didn’t understand, but whatever was happening was creating an abnormal atmosphere of urgency. They had been friends since they were podlings and there were strata of trust between them laid down over years of shared experiences. Whatever was happening, it shouldn’t drive a wedge between them — so Aris wouldn’t let it.
Carrying an awkwardly large bag of takeaway, Aris steered her speeder with one hand. Grateful the path up to the dish was invariably empty, she drove distracted by what happened at the restaurant. She hadn’t heard Ellis’ pad chirp, but the place was noisy. What about the mission simulations would even be classified?
Sitting at her desk, Aris began to charge the capacitors and prepared the data for transmission. A massive amount of simulation data in this packet. She didn’t have the software in the command center to translate the encoding intended for the Sylraanni. Her computer system was just supposed to be a temporary waypoint for the outgoing information. Only the messages from the other world were readable.
On the status screen the rivulet of information began to touch her world and the characters dripped out a few at a time.
Comm: replacing vacuum tube on amplifier, so if there’s no message tomorrow that’d be why. Yes, it is just me. And it’s not tedious — it’s so exciting to tease each letter of yours from the electro-magnetic fields. We have a saying in our world: if your song comes from inside, then it cannot be bad. At least that’s the best translation I could write. I would love to hear it (it will only be me decoding it). I will see if I can fit one of my songs in the CSU next time (if the tube change goes well).
Aris’ mood shifted from pensive to ecstatic so fast she let out a squeak. A Sylraanni song intended just for her. It felt as if she’d found a lost scroll of Kappal’s containing an unknown symphony — and it was dedicated to her. Her fingers were vibrating as she tapped out her reply. She re-read it and deleted it. That’s too much. She toned it down for the second draft. As she was writing, the mystery began to creep into her thoughts. Maybe Jakhs knows something? She composed her fifth draft.
Comm nominal. I will think about translating my song for a message. That’s a lovely saying. I am thrilled by the idea of you sending me one of your songs. Since you said only you see the CSU, I have a question: is there some unusual behavior among your astronomers? There have been some strange reactions among our scientists to the past several messages from your world. My friend is not allowed to tell me what is happening. I have a terrible feeling about it.
As far as the mystery went, this was not going to be enough. She did have some level of authority when it came to the comm window calculations. Maybe she could ask Tiral to show her the full simulations — not just the comm schedules, but the underlying variables and interim results. Maybe there was something in there. She picked up her pad and started a voice chat that Tiral answered after a few buzzes.
“Tiral. Can you get up early to run a couple comm window sims for me?”
“Early? How early?”
“Like noon?”
“Oh man — how about 4pm?”
“2pm and I’ll buy you breakfast.”
“Ugh. Fine.”
Aris entered the computer lab to see Tiral munching on fried spheres of protein picked one by one from a greasy bag. She proffered her healthier option — a hot cup of sea vegetable soup. “Oh, yeah.” Tiral grabbed it, opened the lid, and sniffed before setting it at the furthest edge of his desk. Aris sipped on hers.
“So — can you run the sims?”
“Yeah — got it set up and running already.” A barrage of numbers in columns streamed across the larger screen after Tiral tapped on his pad.
Aris studied the numbers, doing her best to compute the differences at each time step in her head. It was starting to become a blur when she caught a difference standing out.
“That’s strange. There’s an increase in SNR despite Sylraan reaching perigee.”
“It’s not a big change. Could it be atmospheric loss — higher elevation angle maybe? See there …”
Tiral’s greasy finger touched the screen leaving a mark.
“Best not to make guesses. Can you output the other variables? The ones that aren’t usually included?”
“Anything specific?”
“Range, atmospheric loss estimate.”
“Range to Sylraan?”
“You have more than one range?”
“The simulation includes their entire solar system since the alignment of the dishes has to be extremely precise. The thickness of a leaf …”
“... at a million miles away.” Aris remembered the unhelpful analogy used in the tour script. She didn’t know what she was looking for. “Yeah, include them all.”
Tiral tapped out some commands on his pad, and a giant list of numbers began to fill the screen.
“Any way you could plot this out?” Aris asked.
“Sure thing.”
A few more taps from Tiral, and a graphic appeared with the orbits of the planets. The two sat silent as the traces of the planet’s paths propagated through accelerated time.
“That can’t be right. Wait. This comm estimation propagator is supposed to only be accurate for a year at most. We don’t have the racks of computers mission planning has, so this is probably just an error.”
Aris and Tiral were watching the screen showing the path of Sylraan transition to a hyperbolic orbit, destabilized by another, larger planet’s orbit becoming more elliptical around Aerchar.
“The initial conditions are based on the observations from Sylraan. That gas giant, Saulweh, starts way too close to Aerchar. It’s already in an elliptical orbit. The simulation doesn’t matter.” Aris bent over in her chair, head in her hands. Tiral pulled up the simulation code and started scrolling through it. She put her hand on his shoulder.
“Tiral. The sim is working as it should.”
He stopped scrolling and sat silent. Aris stood up and walked out of the lab.
The university campus was beautiful on summer nights. The giant crimson tendrils hung from the cyan canopies of the euloe trees, nearly touching the ground. The sweet, woody scent filled the air. Clusters of pale white centiflies drifted like eddies of smoke to feed on the nectar. Aris felt it was a moral duty to appreciate her planet — one that wasn’t a year away from being ejected from her solar system. She was tired from the lack of sleep. She was aching from the inevitability of loss. She looked at her speeder powering up as she approached. She turned it off with a tap on her pad. The hill up to the dish was dotted with pink translucent bubbles among the fuzzy blue green mat of vegetation hiding the creatures producing a barely audible peeping.
All of this glowed as Aerchar was rising above the horizon, banishing the night for twilight until the sun would rise the next morning. You can sometimes make out Saulweh with the unaided eye when it is in the right phase. However, according to Tiral’s simulations, it was currently plunging towards Aerchar — its opposite hemisphere illuminated.
The control center felt like a hospital waiting room. The terminally ill patient was just at the other end of a two billion mile long train of electromagnetic radiation approaching at the speed of light — and hadn’t heard the news. Aris activated the receiver and began powering up the nuclear reactor for the transmission. What would she say? The CSU message from Jakhs began to flow across her screen.
Tube replacement success. I have not noticed, but I do not talk directly to the astronomers. I’ll investigate. As promised here’s a song: e43161db37ba53738fa3a0d202d2f008
8d66107e4f83ada200859686153fd117
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33860ff50454d588ae2fc8690b013234
b0a75c7fcfbfb97dd44357aa54755ee4
906c08ecc8ce3cb4530f659042838e34
386faa08105383946afa9b55db59088f
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d16e8fd574846c7673fe5d1731528c9d
223179214b8c434b5e63d16690844830
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The computer had already run the algorithm from over a half century ago and cued up the song. Aris turned up the volume on her computer, sat back in her chair, and pressed play. She was taken to another world. It was beautiful. She began to cry. The tears turned to wracking sobs.
It was nearly an hour before she stopped. What do I send? Do I tell Jakhs? Aris was too tired and too emotionally drained to properly debate philosophy. It is not my place. What if Tiral’s simulations are wrong?
Aris convinced herself there would be more messages. Let’s have this message be one more nice message. That’s something I can give Jakhs. Another day without the prospect of certain doom. What do I send? She closed her eyes. My song. She realized she had spent an hour in existential tears and an hour in philosophical doubt — only one more remained before transmission started. She set about encoding her song. It had to be done by hand since the systems were only set up to receive music.
Comm nominal. I hope my song can bring you some joy.
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503e59453a239ffbb7b100a5d6426967
ef2dd4affdf49fa2f2b8647ec2b451d2
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a4a99adbf448d10e3c42134892f815da
ef98907514948dffc28eace8914112c6
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e703d4a24dcd48a1f4c201b6dae7ab69
43d35d550aab88b0582d317bbbd68034
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Aris appended the CSU to the message and cued it for transmission. She watched as the systems began coding the radio waves for reception on Sylraan. Up on the status screen, a wisp of information began flowing across billions of miles. Aris crashed out — her head in her arms, sliding down to the desk.
Aris awoke to an alarm: reactor temperature warning. The indicators showed the transmission capacitors were full, so she flicked the attenuators to three quarters. She hadn’t shut the reactor down after the transmission. Well — guess we're ready to transmit. Dark humor seemed appropriate. The message from Sylraan would arrive soon. She plugged in the latest simulations, and the giant dish began to rotate into position. The CSU popped up on her screen.
Comm nominal. I talked to the astronomers. We as a people see death as the fundamental absurdity of life. There was never much of a debate on our planet as there seems to have been on yours per the messages from your astronomers. Once they were sure the observations and the simulations were correct they sent out a message to every sentient species on Sylraan. There is some debate as to what to do with the thirty to fifty rondos. But I was glad I could decode and sing your song. Thank you Aris.
There had to be something her planet could do. We could send them the technology for our latest rockets. Maybe they could get fusion to work in time to replace the energy from their sun. Aris knew this was futile. Her sun had done enough, passing too close to a neighboring star that had been gently drifting through the galaxy minding its own business for billions of years. She looked up to the status screen, its background of fixed stars in contrast to the two in the foreground shifting in an uncertain gravitational field. It was ironic. That background was actually just a static image produced from a survey of nearby stars. How many of those had life? According to a probability estimate by a famous physicist on her planet — almost all of them. The only two solar systems the people of her planet had evidence of had not just life, but intelligent life. At least for another year.
What should I say? Aris hadn’t had much experience talking to someone who had found out they were going to die. Her own father passed away without warning while on a trip to another province when she was young. As an archeologist, he was always traveling. So many of her memories of him were voice chats. She wondered what he would want to say to the lost civilizations he studied if he had had the chance.
Aris began to compose her message.
Ai Jakhs. Your song brought me solace after finding out. I’ve never been religious. I’ve only lost one person I was close to. I consider you a friend, and I will remember you for the rest of my life. I imagined meeting you some day after they’d figured out nuclear propulsion — I would have grown old relative to you. I am so grateful for this relationship even if it is to be cut short. Instead of teaching communication, I am now planning to teach your culture to our children so it won’t be lost.
The comm status itself was a waste of connection. ‘Comm nominal’ were twelve useless characters. Aris added her message to the rest of the data, and set the antenna to transmit. She tapped out another message on her pad to Ellis; she had a newfound appreciation for the social ties carried on sound waves.
The setting sun bathed the campus euloe trees in a golden light that enhanced the red of their tendrils. Ellis walked up to Aris lying on the blue green grass, staring up at the ombré of approaching night.
“So you know.”
Aris closed her eyes to hold back tears.
“It seems we’re going to go receive-only so they can transmit as much of their culture as they can before …” Ellis trailed off.
“Before they freeze to death.”
Ellis sat down in the grass next to Aris, and put her hand on her shoulder.
“A billion people,” Aris said as she grabbed Ellis’ hand. She felt guilty she was thinking of just one.
“The planetary council is going to make an announcement on the news tonight.”
“How do you think people will take it? It’s like losing half your family. They’ve been around, circling their star, since the dawn of our civilization.”
“I don’t know. Sorry I couldn’t tell you before.”
“I understand.”
“I know. Still have to say I’m sorry.”
Ellis looked at the horizon. Aerchar was beginning to rise.
“Don’t you have to get going?”
“Soon. I don’t have to charge the capacitors anymore. I don’t want to be in that room any more than I have to.”
“Your job is so much more important now. You’re preserving the memory of an entire civilization.”
“I feel like I’m planning a funeral.”
“I feel like I’m planning an autopsy. The mission parameters have changed. There’s a high probability Sylraan will be captured by Surax.”
Aris imagined an icy world preserved for a billion years in orbit around the gas giant in their solar system. She’d imagined as a kid she might get the chance to see Sylraan one day, but not like this. The cold that dominated the universe began to sink into her heart. Not like this.
Aris stood up as the last red rays of their sun dipped below the horizon — the blue night now belonged to Aerchar. She jumped on her speeder and made a direct path to the dish.
When she arrived, she deactivated the reaction attenuators out of habit. She slipped them back on and engaged the capacitor bleed channel. The comm simulations controlled the antenna, angling it towards Aerchar. Out the window, Aris could see the white light of the star fill the dish. The CSU appeared on her computer.
Comm nominal. Switching to transmit only. One last CSU before it’s used for other data. A song I call Aris. Be well.
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Aris pressed play, and tended to the reception of a civilization’s dying words.
© Jason Smith