Joe Haldeman - Marsbound

“I don’t think we have any organs that discriminate between regular light and coherent light,” Red said. “So how could that work?”

Ishan chewed his lip and nodded. “Well, just pursuing logic… you would never encounter such a strong burst of coherent light in the normal course of things. So you, or rather the yellow ones, could have such an organ and never know it.”

“But it wouldn’t have any useful function,” Oz said.

“Ha-ha. But it would. It would make you fall down and speak in tongues whenever somebody on Neptune, or Triton, wanted you to.”

That would turn out to be pretty accurate.

After the excitement died down, most of us went back to the mess and zapped up a meal. Dargo went off somewhere to stick pins in dolls.

I traded the lump of rice in my chicken for the pile of mashed potatoes that came with Oz’s meat loaf. He exercises as much as I do, as we all do, but he keeps putting on weight, while I lose it.

“I don’t get it,” Moonboy said. “If they wanted to send a dot-and-dash message, why be so roundabout? Why not just use the ruby laser itself?”

“For some reason they wanted the Martians involved,” I said. “One Martian, at least. What I want to know is how Fly-in-Amber got all that information out of the red light.” So far, all we’d gotten was on/off, on/off.

Oz nodded. “And what’s different about Fly-in-Amber, and those other yellow ones, that they were the only Martians affected by it? The anatomical scans we did on Mars didn’t show any significant differences between the various families, except for Red. With all his extra brain and nervous-system mass and complexity, I’d expect him to be the one singled out, if any.”

“He said he didn’t feel anything special,” Meryl said. “But he only looked at it for a couple of seconds. Then he was worrying over Fly-in-Amber.”

“I’ll do a high-resolution PET scan of all their eyes and brains,” Oz said. “See whether Fly-in-Amber has some anomaly.”

There was a pause, and Paul shook his head. “Triton? How could intelligent life evolve on Triton? How could anything complex?”

Oz studied his meat loaf for clues. “Well, it couldn’t be like Earth. A large variety of species competing for ecological niches. At least intuitively that doesn’t sound likely. If it’s like Red suggested, a quasi-organic chemistry based on silicon and liquid nitrogen, think of how slow chemical reactions would be.”

“And how little chemical variety,” Moonboy said, “with so little solar energy pumping it.”

“There’s also energy from radioactivity,” Paul pointed out, “and tidal friction from Neptune. I think that’s what causes the liquid nitrogen geysers they see.”

Moonboy persisted. “But it would never have anything like the variety and energy in the Earth’s primordial soup.”

“You’re all barking up the wrong tree,” I said. “If the signal really is coming from the Others, they didn’t evolve on Triton. The Martians’ tradition is that they live light-years away. So this laser thing could just be an automated device. It isn’t any more or less impossible than the Martian city. That was supposedly built by the Others, a zillion years ago.”

“Or twenty-seven thousand,” Oz said. “You’re right. But why did it start blinking exactly as soon as one of the yellow family reached Earth orbit? That would be some sophisticated automation.”

That gave me a little chill. “In other words… we’re being watched?”

He stroked his beard. “Give me another explanation.”

Over the next several days, scientists on Earth as well as here analyzed the signal from Neptune, which had stopped eight hours and twenty minutes after Fly-in-Amber’s condition had been broadcast to Earth. That was exactly twice the travel time of that broadcast to Neptune, which fact was an interesting piece of information in itself. Mission accomplished; turn it off.

The laser beam was apparently just that, a simple powerful beam of unmodulated coherent light, carrying no information other than the intriguing fact of its own existence.

There are some natural sources of cosmic radiation that produce coherent light, but nobody was pursuing that direction, since the timing of it would be an impossible coincidence. It was artificial, and in its way was as much a message as the Drake diagram that came out of the amplitude-modulation part of Fly-in-Amber’s utterances. The amount of power it was pumping was part of the message, a scary part.

It could destroy an approaching spaceship. Maybe it had, once.

The frequency-modulation part of the message resisted analysis.

Each of the ten iterations of the signal had different, and apparently random, patterns. The Martians here and on Mars listened to them and agreed that they sounded like Martian speech, albeit in monotone, but made absolutely no sense. Fly-in-Amber found it quite maddening. He said, “It sounds like a human idiot going ‘la la la la’ over and over.” Well, maybe. But sometimes the “la” became “la-a-a” or just “ll,” and sometimes it sounded like a pencil sharpener trying to say “la.”

Four or five days after the excitement, I was dragging my weary bones home after exercise and was surprised to meet Red at the end of the corridor. The Martians didn’t often wander over this way.

“Carmen. We always meet at my place. Could I have a look at yours?”

“Sure, why not?” It was a mess, but I doubted that Red would care. He’d learn more.

I thumbed the lock. “I normally take a shower after working out.”

“Your smell is not toxic.” I guess you take your compliments where you can find them.

He looked large in my small room, and strange, hemmed in by undersized furniture he couldn’t use. He wheeled the desk chair over in front of him.

“Could we have some music? Bach Concerto Number 1 in F Major?”

“ Brandenburg , sure.” Pretty loud. I asked the machine and it started.

“A little louder?” He gestured for me to sit in front of him. I did, and he leaned forward and spoke in a barely audible whisper.

“Everything I do in my quarters is recorded for science. But this must be a secret between you and me. No other humans; no other Martians.”

“All right. I promise.”

“When I listened to the frequency-modulation part, I understood it immediately. Only I could understand it.”

“Only you… It was in your private language? The leader language?”

He nodded. “Perhaps it is the real reason we have to learn the language. Because this was going to happen eventually.”

His voice became even lower, and I strained to hear. “It told me that we Martians are biological machines, developed for this purpose: to communicate with humans if and when they developed to this point, a time when flight to the stars became possible.”

“I thought it wasn’t, yet.”

“Within a few human life spans. The Others work slowly.”

“You mean the Others actually did evolve on Triton?”

“Not at all, no. They do come from a planet revolving around another star, some twenty light-years from here. It’s a cold planet, ancient, and its cryogenic kind of life has been there for literally millions of years.

“The one individual on Triton was especially engineered for its task, as were all of us Martians. We’re all here to keep an eye on you humans.

“The Others move very slowly; their metabolism is glacial. They think fast, faster than you and me, because their mental processes utilize superconductivity. But in physical manipulation of their environment… you would have to study one for hours to see that it had moved.