Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 95

G.o.d or not, he had a nice smile, full lips behind the fringe of beard curving crookedly. "It did make a meal of the rest."

She felt her own frown. Felt the hand clutching the phone drop to her side. "You're left-handed."

"Where I'm from," he said, "no one is left-handed. But I learned."

"So why didn't you give the wolf your left hand?"

He shrugged, eyebrows drawing together over the bridge of a slightly crooked nose.

In the face of his silence, she fidgeted. "It would have been the sensible choice."

"But not the grand one. It doesn't pay to be stingy with wolves, Sorensdotter."

Her hands clenched. One around the phone, one pressing fresh blood from a wound. "You said helskor, before. What are helskor?"

"h.e.l.l shoes." He jerked his stump back at the steep and slick descent. "The road to the underworld is strewn with thorns; the river the dead must wade is thick with knives. Even well-shod, I see you have your injuries."

"I'm not dead," Dagmar said.

"Dead enough to shed your blood on the path to Hel's domain. Dead enough to have been seeking Niflheim these past months, whether or not you knew it."

With his taken breath and the lift of his chin, Tr gave himself away. He gestured to her dripping hand and said what he meant to say anyway. "When you put your hand in a wolf's mouth, you must understand that you have already made the decision to sacrifice it."

"I didn't know it was a wolf," she said. "I thought it was a marriage."

"They are not," Tr says, "dissimilar. Are you going to stand there forever?"

Dagmar raises her left hand. Blood smears it already, the slit in her palm deeper than it had seemed. Still welling.

It palls the diamond in crimson, so no fire reflects. It clots in the s.p.a.ces in the band's filigree.

She says, "I didn't want to waste it. I wanted to save it for something else."

"A sacrifice," the G.o.d says, "is not a waste."

He does not say: What you try to salvage will drag you down instead.

He does not say: You cannot cut your losses until you are willing to admit that you have lost.

He does not need to.

How bad can it be? Dagmar wonders.

She puts her b.l.o.o.d.y finger in her mouth and hooks her teeth behind the ring.

d.a.m.n you, she thinks. I want to live. Even with failure.

Bit by bit, sc.r.a.ping skin with her teeth, she drags the ring along her finger. The pain brings sharp water to her eyes. The taste of blood-fresh and clotted-gags her. The diamond sc.r.a.pes her gums. Flesh bunches against her knuckle.

I don't think I can do this.

"This has already happened," the G.o.d says in her ear. "This is always happening."

I don't think I can not.

When she pulls once more, harder, her knuckle rips, skins off, burns raw. With a fresh well of blood that tastes like seaweed, the ring slides free, loose in her mouth, nearly choking her.

Dagmar spits it on the sand and screams.

The G.o.d has left her.

Dagmar stands on the strand under the bright sun, her left hand cradled against her chest, and watches the long indigo breakers combing the hammered sea. Red runs down her arm, drips from her elbow, falls and spatters into the shallow play of the ocean's edge. Overhead wheel crows, murders and covenants of them, driving even the boldest seagulls away.

She holds the ring in her right hand. Her fingers clutch; she raises her fist. One sharp jerk, and the ocean can have it. One- She turns back and draws her arm down, and instead tosses the bright b.l.o.o.d.y thing flas.h.i.+ng into the sky. Round and round, spinning, tumbling, pretty in the sun until the dark wings of carrion birds sweep toward it.

She does not see which claims it-banded or bare-just the chase as all the others follow, proclaiming their greed and outrage, sweeping away from her along the endless empty river of the sky.

"Thank you," she whispers after them.

In a moment, they are gone.

-for SL The Death of Terrestrial Radio The first word was meant to be spoken quietly, if it should ever be spoken at all. A dribble of signal. An echo. A ghost. A coded trickle, something some PC running SETI-at-home would pick out of the background noise, flag, and return silently to the great database in the sky, the machine's owner innocent of her role in making history.

I am one of the few who is old enough to remember what we got. Something as subtle as a solid whack across the nose with a cricket bat. We couldn't believe it at first, but there it was, interfering with transmissions on all frequencies, cluttering our signals with static ghosts.

Television had largely abandoned the airwaves by then, so the transmissions that came to houses and offices over fiber optic cable were unperturbed. Dueling experts opined with telegenic confidence that the suggestive sequence of blips was some natural, cosmological phenomenon-and not somebody broadcasting to the whole world, simultaneously, intentionally.

That lasted all of about three hours before the first cable news channel produced an elderly man, liver-spotted scalp clearly visible between the thinning strands of his hair. He was a ham radio operator, a lifetime wireless hobbyist who folded his hands before his chest and closed his eyes to listen to those noises straight out of an old movie-exactly like the chatter of a wireless telegraph.

He let his lids crack open again, "It's Morse code; of course I recognize it. It might be the most famous Marconi transmission in history."

He quoted, as if reciting a familiar poem, "CQD CQD SOS t.i.tanic Position 41.44 N 50.24 W. Require immediate a.s.sistance. Come at once. We struck an iceberg. Sinking."

I was in my office at the ALMA site, surrounded by coworkers, and you could have heard a pin drop. We hadn't exactly gotten the jump on this one-not when the signal was interfering with people's baby monitors. But we had been engaged in trying to track it.

A simple task, given the strength of the signal. It originated in Taurus, and exhibited measurable parallax over the course of a couple of days. Not only was it loud, in other words-but it was close, and moving fast.

A few weeks later, we found the second one. Suddenly, radio signals were blossoming all over the sky. Our own dead signals, our own dead voices-ham radio, The Shadow, coded signals from World War I-spoken back to us.

And then they stopped.

When I was fifteen years old, other girls wanted to be doctors and actors and politicians. They played soccer and softball, went to Girls State, marched in band.

I ran SETI and stayed late at school for Math League and Physics Club. Almost n.o.body really believed in aliens, but I wanted to talk to them so badly I didn't even have words for the feeling, the cravings that welled up inside me.

Other girls and boys-even other geeks-dated. And I guess I tried, sort of. But the people around me never seemed as entrancing as the numbers in my head. I wanted to like them-loneliness was certainly an issue-but the gap between wanting and being able seemed unbridgeable.

In retrospect, what I sought refuge in was not too dissimilar from the age-old fantasy that one is adopted, that one's real family will come along someday and rescue one from these weirdos one's been left with. Except I felt so weird I turned to aliens. Maybe someone out there would be like me. Certainly, it seemed like I had nothing in common with anybody else on this planet.

Sooner or later, you put aside childish things-or risk being labeled a crackpot. By the time I turned twenty-seven, I had two grad degrees and a tenure-track job at a major research university. I'd gotten time on the VLA and was mining the research for my dis towards further publications.

Radio astronomers get drunk and speculate about extraterrestrial life ... I'd say "like anybody else," but I guess most people don't actually do that. The difference is, we know on a visceral level how prohibitive the distances and timescales are, how cold the math.

We really didn't expect to hear from anybody.

Maybe it's like falling in love. You have to truly stop expecting something to happen before it will.

You talk about things that change the world. Usually, it's in hindsight. Usually you don't notice them when they're happening.

Ah, but sometimes. Sometimes there's no way you could have missed it unless you were in a vegetative state.

It's hard to remember now, but we didn't know, then, what the Echoes were or what they wanted. It could have been a pa.s.sing alien s.h.i.+p, psychological warfare from inbound would-be conquerors (Stephen Hawking would have been vindicated!), or some previously unsuspected cosmological phenomena.

There were new cults; a few suicides. The occasional marriage selfdestructed, and I confess I was naively surprised at the number of people who joined or left religions, apparently at random.

I'd never been much of a joiner, myself.

Six months later, our own voices echoed back to us again. This time it was War of the Worlds and Radio Free Europe.

With those two datapoints, we could figure out where they were, and how far away, and how fast they were moving.

By the third round, n.o.body was surprised to receive the signals of early broadcast television-and some clever souls even filtered the signals and recovered fragments of our own lost history: early live episodes of The Avengers and destroyed episodes of Doctor Who. So much entertainment used to be broadcast, carried over public airwaves that now mostly used for cellular calls and more practical things-where great swaths of them are not simply abandoned.

The idea of a cosmological explanation had always been farfetched. Now it seemed laughable. Somebody was bouncing our own words back to us. A means of communication, certainly ... but a threat or a rea.s.surance? Psychological warfare or reaching out?

How do you know for sure?

It's a little disconcerting to have your cell calls to your place of business interrupted by Jackie Gleason threatening his fictional wife with domestic violence.

Suddenly, after decades of neglect, a new s.p.a.ce race rose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of exploration. Except this time we weren't racing other nation-states, but rather the slow motion tumble of what might turn out to be a hammer from the sky.

They were slowing down. And by the fourth round, we managed to spot their lightsails-their parachutes-and now we could watch as well as hear them come. Hailing them produced more echoes, and as we sent them new, specific signals they stopped reproducing our old ones.

The sources further away from Earth were braking harder; some had paused entirely (not that anything really pauses in s.p.a.ce, but allow me the conceit) and at least one-the initial signal, the strongest Echo-seemed likely to pa.s.s very close indeed. We had a betting pool. My money had it making orbit.

I figured they weren't here to blow up the planet, enslave us, or kidnap our nubile young men away to Mercury. For one thing, if they were hostile, the easiest thing in the world-out of the world-would have been for them to sneak up on us and drop a rock on our heads from orbit, which would pretty much soften up any useful resistance right then and there. Alien invasion movies aren't usually written by physicists. For another thing, sending back our own voices ... it seemed kind of friendly, somehow.

My work friend Carl pointed out that it was something bullies did, too, mocking what you said by repeating it. I looked across a plate of gyros at him and replied, "They do it in funny voices."

The constellation of radio sources strung out against the sky seemed to me to be relay stations, signal boosters. I guessed they were sending messages home.

I won the betting pool, which was a strange sensation. Carl, who shares my office and sits at the desk next to mine, knew better than to tease me about it. He'd tried when we were first thrown together, but I think he caught on that I was faking engagement with his jokes.

Rather than being offended, though, he just backed off of them. Carl was a good guy, even if he wasn't funny. I was so young then; it was so amazingly long ago. Sixty-three years: a human's productive lifetime, under pretty good circ.u.mstances.

He was also the guy who thought enough of me to forward me the links to the breaking news articles on China's emergency manned mission to the Echo.

"c.r.a.p," I said.

"Easy, Courtney," he responded, without looking up from the rows of numbers scrolling his desktop. "We've still got their trail to chase back up the sky."

I was still frowning. He was still looking at me.

He said, "Look, it's seven. Let's get some dinner and you can vent all you want."

"Thanks," I said. "But I need to work tonight."

The U.S.A. was outraged, and loudly said so to everyone, whether they would listen or not. But there wasn't much America could do about it, having sacrificed our s.p.a.ce program on the altars of economic necessity and eternal war. I found the prospect of China getting first crack at the Echo frustrating mostly because it meant that my odds of getting near it were exponentially smaller. And if I could have itched-I mean physically itched-with desire ...

But as it turned out, we didn't have to go to the Echo.

The Echo came to us.

It separated into a dozen identical-we later learned-components, which settled themselves near population centers scattered around the globe. China got one; so did India.

It will surprise no one that I read a lot of science fiction. Read and read-one spelling, two p.r.o.nunciations, two tenses. There's a subset of the genre that fans call the "big dumb object" plot: basically, 2001. Intrepid human explorers meet up with an abandoned alien artifact-a probe, a relic-and have to decide what to make of it.

This wasn't a single big dumb object so much as a web of little ones. I spent some time thinking about it-well, who didn't?-and what I realized was that whoever built it had allowed for the fact that it might make landfall at a world where the sentient life forms had not yet achieved s.p.a.ce flight. If we couldn't come to them, they would have to come to us.

The component that drifted down in New York City wound up at JPL, and a number of xenologists-a new specialty pretty much as of that morning-were invited to examine it.

And so I became one of the vanis.h.i.+ngly small percentage of humans privileged to hold in my hands a disc of metal originated on another world. It was pristine, a perfect circle electroplated with gold, the surface etched with symbols and diagrams I forced myself not to try to interpret, just yet.

Carl leaned over my shoulder. He put his hand on it and gave me an excited squeeze. "d.a.m.n," he said. "It's just like Voyager."

"I guess good ideas tend to reoccur." Through the nitrile gloves, I felt the slight irregularities of its surface. "You don't suppose this one is a phonograph record too?"

To human ears, their voices sound like the layered keening of gulls.

You know who I am because I'm the one who found their star. It's a small, cool red sun about 31.5 light years away.

If you can name something that already belongs to someone else, I named it Hui Zhong, for my grandmother.

We've never actually seen Hui Zhong-it's too small, too cool, and washed out behind a brighter neighbor-but we know where it has to be. Hui Zhong burns at about 3000 degrees Kelvin-half the temperature of Earth's own sun. It's a Population II star, and poor in heavy elements. Its spectrum is recorded on the discs, and so we know that it is a first generation star, one of the early citizens of the thirteen-and-three-quarters billion-year-old universe.

Hui Zhong is nearly immortal. The convective structure of such dwarf stars offers them stability, constant luminosity, and a lifespan in the hundreds of billions of years. Our own Sun, by contrast, is only some four and a half billion years old-and in about that same amount of time, will become a red giant as its nuclear furnaces inevitably begin to fail.

We'll die with it, unless we find someplace else to go.

One of the tracks on the record the Echoes sent us is a voice counting, and one of the diagrams on its surface is of a planet and primary-so we have a sense of their homeworld's...o...b..tal period-a mere fourteen Earth days or so ...

The Echoes, in other words, could have been planning their approach to other civilizations and sending out probes in likely directions for a very, very long time. The probe was a sublight vehicle; we couldn't know exactly how long it had taken us to reach us ... but "millennia" wasn't out of the question.

We returned the call.

Not as one strong, unified signal, but as an erratic series of blips and dashes-governments and corporations and research inst.i.tutions. There was an X-Prize. Groups and mavericks, answering the stars.

And we kept answering. We've been answering for almost seventy years now. I've gone from hot young Turk to eminence gris in that time, from sought-after expert to forgotten emeritus. For sixty-five of those years, I think I must have been holding my breath. Waiting for the word across the void. Waiting for these people who reached out from their ancient world, circling their ancient, stable star, to hear our reply and start a slow, painstaking dialogue.