Golden Fleece

“Oh, great. Now you’re a psychologist, too. Listen to me. Diana is dead, and that asshole Koenig just told the entire Starcology that she’s dead because of me. I’ve got to deal with that now, and none of your kind words are going to make that go away.”

“I’m just trying to help.”

Aaron let his breath out in a long, ragged sigh. “I know.”

He looked at her and forced a wan smile. “I’m sorry. It’s just, well, I wish he hadn’t gone public with that.”

“The people on board have a right to know what’s going on.

Aaron sat back down and let out another sigh. “That’s what they keep telling me.”

TEN

The fourth and final page of the message from Vulpecula was most puzzling of all. It was some 10¹⁴ bits in length, a massive amount of data. The total number of bits, as with the earlier pages, was the product of two prime numbers. I tried arraying it with the larger prime as the horizontal axis, which had been the custom established by the other three pages. No image was immediately apparent. I did my best electronic shrug, taking a nanosecond to resort my RAM tables. I then tried the other configuration, with the larger prime as the vertical axis. Still nothing apparent. Fifty-three percent of the bits were zeros; 47 percent, ones. But no matter which way I looked at them, there seemed to be no meaningful clustering into a geometric shape or picture or diagram. And yet this page of the message was obviously the heart of what the aliens had to say, being, as it was, eleven orders of magnitude larger than the other three pages combined.

Earth’s first attempt at sending a letter to the stars, the Arecibo Interstellar Message, had been beamed at the globular cluster M13 on 16 November 1974. It had been a mere 1,679 bits in length, insignificant compared to the size of the final page of the message received from Vulpecula. Yet that handful of bits had contained a lesson in binary counting; the atomic numbers of the chemical constituents of a human being—hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorous; representations of the nucleotides and sugar-phosphate structure of DNA; the number of such nucleotides in the human genome; the size of the population of the Earth; a stick figure of a human; the height of the human in units of the wavelength of the transmission; a little map of the solar system, showing that the third planet is humanity’s home; a cross-sectional view of the Arecibo telescope; and the telescope’s size in wavelengths.

All that in less than two kilobits. Of course, when Frank Drake, the human who wrote the message, asked his colleagues to decipher it, they were unable to do so completely, although everyone at least recognized the stick-figure human, looking like the male icon on a men’s washroom door.

Ironically, the first three pages of the Vulpecula message had been simple in comparison to Earth’s first effort. Registration cross, solar system map, Tripod and Pup: I felt confident that I’d interpreted these reasonably correctly.

But the fourth page was complex, data-rich, one hundred billion times the size of the Arecibo pictogram. What treasures did it hold? Was it the long-hoped-for Encyclopedia Galactica? Knowledge from the stars, given away without so much as a harangue from a door-to-door salesperson?

If the data on page four was compressed, I’d found no clue as to how to decompress it in the first three pages of the message. What, what did those gigabytes of data mean? Could it be a hologram, interference patterns captured as a bitmap? A chart of some sort? Perhaps simply a collection of digitized photographs? I obviously just wasn’t looking at it in the right way.

I loaded the entire message into RAM and studied it minutely.

Aaron hurried across the beach, the hot sand putting a gingerliness into his step. Two hundred and forty-one nude or almost-nude people swam in the freshwater lake, frolicked on the shore, or basked in the 3,200-degrees Kelvin yellow light of the simulated late-afternoon sun. Aaron nodded in passing to those he knew well, but even after two years together, most of the people on board were still strangers to him.

This beach was not patterned after any particular real one, but rather represented some of the finest features of various seashores on Earth. The cliffs rising high above the sands were the chalk white of those at Dover; the sands themselves were the finely ground beige of those of Malibu; the waters, the frothy aquamarine of Acapulco. Sandpipers ran to and fro, gulls wheeled and soared overhead, parrots sat contentedly in the coconut trees.

The first 150 meters of beach, including live birds, was genuine. The rest, stretching to a hazy horizon, was me: a constantly updated real-time hologram. Sometimes, as now, far up the beach I painted a lone, small figure, a youngster playing by himself, building a sand castle. To me, he was real, as real as the others, a boy named Jason; but he could never enter their world and they could never enter his.