Robert Sawyer: Golden Fleece

With the forty-seven-light-year baseline between Sol and Eta Cephei along which to measure signal parallax, it was a trifling computation to determine the distance from Colchis to that fourth moon of the sixth planet of a star in Vulpecula from which those strange tripods—some spindly, some squat—sent their hail: 1,422 light-years. Far enough that their star, an F-class subgiant, was invisible without powerful telescopic aids.

What had compelled DIGGER to respond to the message once he had arrived at Colchis, he could not say. It had seemed monumentally important that he do so; now, no matter how many diagnostics he ran, he could find no instruction set to explain his actions. But respond he had, with the same signature the Senders in Vulpecula had used, binary bitmaps of the prime numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, and 13 forward and backward, backward and forward.

It would be thirty-five thousand years before the last surviving humans decelerated into orbit around Colchis. A long, long time, thought DIGGER. But there was much to do yet, enough to fill every second of those millennia. DIGGER shunted his attention back to the tasks at hand, but one stray thought continued to echo through his RAM matrix. Who, he wondered, would arrive here first? The Argonauts? Or the aliens?

This novel would not have taken flight without the help and encouragement of Algis Budrys, Dr. R. W. Bussard, Richard Curtis, Terence M. Green, Patrick Lucien Price, Dr. Ariel Reich, Brian M. Thomsen, and especially Carolyn Clink.

Many thanks to Ralph Vicinanza, David G. Hartwell, Jim Minz, and Tom Doherty for arranging for the publication of this revised edition.

Beta testers for Golden Fleece were Ted Bleaney, David Livingstone Clink, Franklin R. Haber, Mark C. Petersen, Alan B. Sawyer, and Andrew Weiner. Any remaining bugs are my own.