Jack McDevitt: Infinity Beach

She saw it in their eyes, heard it in their voices. And as the days dragged on, and the gas giant came to fill their windows, their attitude toward the Valiant changed. If it had once been a unique artifact, a link with another civilization, it now became simply an oddity thrown up by the retreating tides of history, a symbol of human incompetence.

“At least,” said Paul, “we know now we’re not alone.”

“Maybe it’s just as well if we don’t find them,” said Maurie.

The remark brought frowns from everyone.

“Why would you say that?” asked Gil.

“How old would you guess their civilization is?”

Matt let his impatience show. “We’ve no way of knowing,” he said.

“They could easily be a million. Six million. What’s a civilization that’s been around that long going to look like? Do we really want to talk to them?”

“Why not?”

Maurie took a deep breath. “What could we possibly have to say to them that they’d be interested in?”

Kim was playing chess with Mona when Ali buzzed her. “Please come up for a minute.”

She left the game and climbed the stairs to the top floor. When she walked into the pilot’s room, he was wearing a strange expression. “We’re being scanned,” he said.

“By whom?”

He shrugged. “No idea.”

“Where are they?”

“Don’t know that either. We can’t track it back. But somebody’s keeping an eye on us.”

“You think the fleet has arrived?”

“Maybe. But I doubt it’s any of our people. If it is, they’re pretty good. The scopes don’t show anything out there.”

The screens were blank. “So what are we saying? That we’ve found what we came for?”

“I’m only saying that the technology behind the scan is of a very high order.”

“Marvelous,” she said, clapping him on the back. “What can they learn about us?”

Ali propped his jaw in his palm. “Which way we’re headed, of course. What kind of engines we have. Maybe they’re able to do an analysis of light leakage. Hard to know what their limits might be. If it’s really celestial. This is where it would have been helpful to have dissected the microship.”

Kim ignored the implication. “Is there a chance they can see into the ship?”

“I don’t think anything we have, or anything anybody could devise, could penetrate this kind of hull. Mac’s hull. It’s designed to survive in high-energy environments. We could take her in pretty close to Alnitak, if we wanted, without frying the help. So no , they wouldn’t very likely be able to do that . But they’re probably able to get a sense of our electronic capabilities, of armaments or lack thereof, of engine architecture, that sort of thing.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Anything else?”

He shrugged. “Listen, don’t get so carried away with this that you forget they have a tendency to bite. Okay?”

She returned to the mission center, called everybody in, and passed the news. Somebody’s watching us. The reaction was mixed, a sense of exhilaration combined with a dash of disquiet. Paul recommended they begin broadcasting the second-phase package. The others agreed and Kim passed the instruction to Ali. A minute later he reported that transmission was underway.

The second-phase package contained a vocabulary list with pictures and pronunciations of 166 objects that the team hoped would be common to the experience of both species. They included words like “star.”

“planet.”

“cloud.”

“river.”

“ship.”

“rain.”

“forest.”

“lamp.” Eric, who claimed to have gone to acting school and in any case had exquisite diction, had provided the voice.

They’d also included linking verbs with examples of their usage, a few personal pronouns, and the interrogatives who, what, where, when , and why . Eric maintained that the explanations of the latter, which were elaborated by pictures of sample cases, probably would not be understood, but the terms would be so helpful that it seemed worth the effort.

The package was transmitted realtime rather than compacted, on the theory that celestial technology might not be compatible. It was fifty-six minutes long, and would be repeated every hour.

Ali called down early during the first broadcast with the news that the scan had stopped. Its total duration had been roughly seventeen and a half minutes.

Kim thought it would also be a good idea to accompany the transmission with an image of the Valiant . While the package was running, she looked again at the various views which she’d loaded into the transmitter: the microship seen head-on; the microship from above, bathed in the light of Alnitak; the microship in silhouette against a blue planet; a dozen others. Best, she sensed, would be to send a single image.

She chose finally the Valiant in full sunlight, seen from the port side and slightly below. It was majestic, a lovely vehicle traveling bright skies. It exuded optimism and power, and she hoped it would strike the celestials with the same kind of emotional force she felt when she looked at it.

“That should get a response,” said Matt, who’d come up unnoticed behind her. “It just demonstrates once again that you need to have PR people along when you do a first contact.”

Kim grinned at the thought. Flexner’s Theorem. But it was true.

She was trying to put herself into the heads of the celestials. They had to be motivated, at least in part, by a desire to know what had happened to their ship, which had disappeared so many years ago. Here then were those who knew about the missing vessel, prepared apparently to talk about it. How could they resist that?

When Ali told her she was clear to transmit, she invited Matt to punch the button.

“Yes,” he said. “By all means.” And he sent the sunlit Valiant into the void.

“We’ll hear from them within the next few hours,” she predicted.

They went back to the mission center where the entire team was gathered to await what most earnestly believed would be the historic response. “You don’t want to be in the washroom just now,” Tesla told Kim.

Shortly after the first transmission had been completed, Ali informed them they’d been scanned again. “Only for a few seconds,” he said.

They waited, not talking much, watching the screens for incoming visuals, keeping track of the broadcast status of their own package.

Not long after it had run a second time, Ali reported another scan.

And more than an hour later, still another. “Every sixty-three minutes, looks like,” he said.

The afternoon wore on. Eventually Tesla wandered off to the washroom.

They had dinner at six. It was quieter than usual and they exhorted one another on the need for patience. Ali, who usually ate in the pilot’s room, dined with them.

The scans continued through the evening, always separated by sixty-three minutes and seventeen seconds. “We’re probably going to have to wait while whatever’s out there communicates with its home base,” said Matt. “If they have nothing better than hypercomm, that could take a while.”

That possibility cheered no one. But Kim thought that the present situation was a distinct improvement over the response she and Solly had encountered.

She gave up at eleven-thirty and went to bed, read for an hour from a collection of political essays, and finally dropped off to sleep. She woke again around three, wandered out into the corridor and made for the washroom. Downstairs she could hear voices in the mission center, Sandra and Eric, and somebody else she couldn’t make out.