Factoring Humanity

She lowered her hands, folding them on the table — and, just as unconsciously as her first act, she put the left hand on top. Heather looked down, saw the ring still prominently displayed, and allowed herself a minuscule shrug.

But it hadn’t been lost on Paul. “You’re married.” Heather found herself exhibiting the ring again as she lifted her hand. “For twenty-two years, but — ” She paused, wondering whether to say it. Then, after a moment’s internal struggle, she did. “But we’re separated.”

Paul’s eyebrows went up. “Children?”

“Two. We had two.”

He tipped his head at the odd phrasing. “Do you see them much?”

“One of them died a few years ago.”

“Oh, my. Oh, I’m sorry.”

He had the good taste not to ask how; he went up a couple of notches in Heather’s estimation. “What about you?”

“Divorced, long ago. One son; he lives in Santa Fe. I spend Christmases there with him and his wife and kids; it’s nice to get away from the cold.”

Heather rolled her eyes slightly, as if some of that cold would have been very welcome at this time of year.

“Your husband,” asked Paul, “what does he do?”

“He’s here at the university. Kyle Graves.”

Paul’s eyebrows went up. “Kyle Graves is your husband?”

“You know him?”

“He’s in computing, right? We were on a committee together a few years ago — establishing the Kelly Gotlieb Centre.”

“Oh, yeah. I remember when he was doing that.”

Paul looked at her, smiling, unblinking. “Kyle must be a fool, to let you get away.”

Heather opened her mouth to protest that she hadn’t got away, that it was only a temporary separation, that things were complex. But then she closed her mouth and tilted her head, accepting the compliment.

The server arrived.

“Would you like some wine with lunch?” asked Paul.

After lunch, while she was walking back alone to her office, Heather used her datapad to access her voice mail. There was a message from Kyle, saying he needed to talk to her about something important. Since she was only a short distance from Mullin Hall, she decided to simply drop by and see what he wanted.

“Oh, hi, Heather,” said Kyle, once the door to his lab had slid aside. “Thanks for stopping by. I need to talk to you. Have a seat.”

Heather was slightly woozy from the wine she’d had with lunch; having a seat sounded like a very good idea indeed. She sat down in front of Cheetah.

Kyle perched himself on the edge of a desk. “I need to talk to you about Josh Huneker.”

Heather stiffened. “What about him?”

“I’m sorry; I know you asked me never to mention him, but, well, his name came up today.”

Heather narrowed her eyes. “In what context?”

“Was there anything unusual about his death?”

“What do you mean ‘unusual’?”

“Well,” said Kyle, “they said he killed himself because he was gay.”

Heather nodded. “It was news to me, but, yeah, that’s what they said.” Then she shrugged a little, as if acknowledging how times had changed; she couldn’t imagine anyone killing themselves just because of that today.

“But you didn’t think he was gay?”

“Oh, Christ, Kyle, I don’t know. He seemed genuinely interested in me, but they said he had a sexual relationship with the guy I thought was just his roommate. What’s this all about?”

Kyle took a deep breath. “A woman came to see me today. She says she represents a consortium” — he’d gone back to the hard-T pronunciation — “that has a copy of a disk containing an alien radio message Huneker received just before he died.”

Heather nodded.

“You don’t look surprised.”

“Well, it’s not the first time I’ve heard the story that he detected a message. It’s a rumor that’s been kicking around for years in SETI circles. But, you know, it’s just a story.”

“It does seem a bit of a coincidence, doesn’t it?” said Kyle. “I mean, two messages, presumably from two different stars, so close together: whoever Huneker supposedly picked up in nineteen ninety-four, and then the sequence of messages from Alpha Centauri beginning thirteen years later.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Heather. “SETI researchers originally thought we would pick up far more messages than we already have by this point. By 1994, we’d only been listening for alien radio signals for thirty years; there could have been countless attempts to contact us before we had radio telescopes, and we could be due for another contact tomorrow — we just don’t know how often radio contact with another civilization should be expected.”

Kyle nodded. “They closed the Algonquin radio telescope shortly after Huneker supposedly detected his message.”

Heather smiled sadly. “You hardly need me to tell you about government cutbacks. Besides, if such a disk exists, why would someone come to you about it?”

“The woman said Huneker had encoded the message using RSA — that’s a system that employs the prime factors of very large numbers as the decryption key.”

“Were people doing things like that then?”