Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

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?”

“Go ahead.” I’m not sure what I expected. I kept thinking about conditions in M-82, an entire galaxy caught in an eon-long catastrophe. The band on the Titanic . Nearer My God To Thee.

“Tell me about the place where they live.” She touched a presspad. “What do you know?”

“I think it would be fair to say that, wherever they are in M-82, the sky is on fire.”

“Okay,” she said. “Maybe that fits.”

Lights faded. I listened again to Al Redwood’s music. It was more liquid now, distant, delivered by strings rather than the electronic burble of a Cray. There was a sense of misgiving in the cadences. Or maybe in my own mind: I thought about Al, fleeing down the years with his burden. There must have been moments when he doubted himself, suspected Gelman had been right all along. And then,Chopsticks—.

Thoughts of North Dakota at night. I was six years old, under a blazing vault of stars, standing out behind the farmhouse while the earth turned beneath my feet. It was a time when the world was full of wonder.

But the music crowded out all sense of loss.

Without warning, it roared. Lightning ripped through it, and stars thundered along their courses. White light blazed across iron battlements. Oceans turned to steam, worlds drifted into the dark, suns dissolved.

The music filled with rage. Death rode the skies, driving the stars on and on, exploding finally in a torrent of sheer irresistible power.

The mood changed, and I recalled how Honolulu looks at night from the air. And Gus Evans’ 24-Hour Gas Station and Diner, in its warm circle of light halfway up a Colorado mountainside. A coyote bayed outside the McDonald Observatory at Fort Davis. Ginny lived again.

And I remembered Tom Hicks. At Wesleyan, when he won his Nobel, and we lifted glasses and laughed into the dawn.

“But that’s you ,” I said afterward. “That’s not what was on the CD.”

She shook her head. “Maybe my imagination got caught up in it a little, Nick. This is not an exact science. But this is close to what they were trying to send.”

“Then why didn’t they send it?”

“I don’t know the physics. But it might not have been possible to transmit anything other than the basic melody. They left the rest of it to us. Listen: I can run it through again, change some of the parameters, and things will be different. But not the essentials. They’ve provided the architecture. All we’re adding is marble and sunlight.”

I stared at her, trying to take it all in.

“They’ve allowed us to collaborate with them,” she said. No smile. Not this time.

“I’ve got to find Al. Hell, this is exactly what he was looking for.”

“Probably.”

“Something else: these people are winning , Jean. Whatever it is they’re dealing with out there, they’re winning.”

“Maybe.” She ejected the disk, handed it to me, returned the original, and gave me a second copy. “For Redwood, when you find him.”

“Why ‘maybe’?”

She was shutting down the equipment. “Did you catch the sense of wistfulness? It runs through everything, even the most turbulent sections. I think they’re like your friend.”

“How do you mean?”

“Whistling past the graveyard.”