Dark as Day

10

D-V-I. Detect, Verify, Interpret. Those were the three legs on which SETI rested. Without all three, any effort was flawed. Fail to detect, and you had nothing. Fail to verify what you thought you had found, and you still had nothing.

The most galling experience, however, would be success at detection and verification, followed by a long-term failure to interpret. You knew you had a signal, you knew it was artificial, you knew it came from far outside the solar system. But what, for Heaven’s sake, did it mean? If you couldn’t answer that question, you had better be ready for a lot of skepticism.

“We’ve detected a signal from the stars.”

“Really? What does it say?”

“We have no idea.”

“Oh. Thank you. Let us know when you do.”

That was interpretation, something far in the future. Milly, in her first rush of innocent enthusiasm, had believed that great future might not be far away, since detection was over and done with. Now she was learning the extent of her error.

Jack Beston had assembled five people for the meeting. One was the enigmatic Zetter, who as usual seemed to prefer silence to speech. Milly had seen the others around the L-4 Station, but had never been introduced to them. In fact, in her absorption with her own work she had barely noticed them. She was certainly noticing them now. She also wished that she had thought to go to the bathroom before the session started. Maybe it was nervousness, maybe it was anticipation, but she felt a growing internal discomfort.

“Salisbury.” Jack addressed a thin man with a black, drooping mustache and liquid dark eyes. “Is it there in the analog?”

The Ogre was more polite than Milly had ever seen him. He seemed cool, almost abstracted, until you noticed the left hand in the pocket and heard the constant jingle of keys or coins.

Salisbury nodded. “If it’s there in the digital, it’s there in the analog.”

That was a guarded, conservative answer. It represented an approach that Milly was learning to appreciate. The basic signals from space, either radio waves or neutrino pulses, arrived in analog form. They went through an analog-to-digital conversion before computer analysis and display. All the usual problems of A-to-D might be introduced in the process. You could get clipping effects from using an insufficient number of digital bits, or you could get aliasing, a frequency shift caused by the use of the wrong sampling rate. You could lose information, or you could create spurious “information” when none was present. Tim Salisbury was not saying there was or was not a signal — that was not his area of expertise. He was merely saying that the presence or absence of a signal was not the consequence of analog/digital conversion.

“Right.” Jack didn’t offer his usual third-degree interrogation, but turned to the woman on Milly’s right. “Tankard?”

Milly decided that rank had its privileges, even here. Hannah Krauss, Milly’s usual supervisor, was noticeable by her absence. These were Jack Beston’s most senior and trusted workers, and they looked like they didn’t take shit from anyone. As for Pat Tankard, if she had once been a vulnerable junior employee, Milly doubted that she had ever been troubled by the Ogre’s unwanted sexual advances. Tankard’s dark hair was cropped to less than an inch, she wore gold bands on the ring fingers of both hands, and her muscular left biceps carried a holographic tattoo that read from one angle, “Ellen,” and from another displayed the image of a slender long-haired blonde.

“If there are artifacts in the data, they are not the result of anything that Milly Wu did.” Pat Tankard smiled at Milly in a reassuring way. Her voice was a honeyed baritone, which Milly now realized she had heard in the shower rooms, crooning old-fashioned romantic ballads. Tankard went on, “I applied every operator in my own preferred order, which was generally not commutative with the order applied yesterday. If there was a signal, there is still a signal. Whatever was there, is there.”

The order in which you performed operations could generate the illusion of a meaningful signal. Something as simple as a change from Cartesian to polar coordinates in a two-D array might produce “meaningful” patterns that went away when you made the conversion at a different point in the processing.

It was one step nearer to detection. Milly ought to be feeling some reassurance. Instead she experienced a rising tension, and the pressure in her bladder was definitely uncomfortable. She also felt a queasiness, like that of the first few minutes in zero-gee, when the stomach rose to push up against the diaphragm. How much longer could she sit here in order to hear Jack Beston’s final decision?

Milly decided that before she would leave, she would sit until she threw up or her bladder burst. The precedent for the latter was not promising. Tycho Brahe, the last of the great pre-telescope astronomers, and an eccentric task-master far more formidable than Jack Beston, had been unable for reasons of protocol to rise and leave a court banquet before the duke did so. He had suffered a burst bladder as a result, and died a few days later.

“Kruskal?”

Jack’s voice broke into Milly’s thoughts. The woman across from her nodded. “If it derives from a process of natural origin, it is one unknown to science.” She was squat, olive-skinned, and plump, with an accent that suggested that she had arrived at the Jovian L-4 station from somewhere in the Inner System — probably Earth, and probably from one of the observatories still situated on the Andean cordillera.

Erma Kruskal went on, “Moreover, any natural process that generated such a signal would have to be, in most senses of the word, most unnatural. The entropy rises and falls, exactly as one would expect if a high-entropy repeated message were separated by long low-entropy start and stop pointers. Of course, this tells us nothing concerning verification and interpretation.”

Everyone was showing the same caution, bending over backwards to avoid too much optimism. Milly told herself that was the right way to do it — you mustn’t get too excited or too hopeful. All the same, she could feel her knees trembling. She pressed them tightly together.

Beston turned to the second man in the group. Arnold Rudolph was frail and tiny and looked older than God. Milly wasn’t sure of his actual age — neither Hannah nor anyone else seemed to know it — but there were rumors that he had been present at the closing of the great radio dish at Arecibo, and had been a major force in producing the first spaceborne SETI interferometric arrays.

Rudolph nodded amiably to Jack Beston, but he seemed in no hurry to begin. After a wait that brought Milly to the edge of her seat, he said, “The history of SETI goes back long before human space colonization, or even the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite. It is, of course, a history filled with false positives, which urges upon us extreme caution.” He didn’t look at Milly, which she read as a bad sign.

He went on, “The human mind has an incredible ability to detect patterns, or to impose patterns where none is present. Thousands of years ago, our earliest ancestors named the constellations because they saw patterns in the stars. More than two hundred years ago, Schiaparelli believed that he saw linear features on the surface of Mars, channels which Percival Lowell in turn interpreted as ‘canals’ and as evidence of intelligent life. With better images, channels and canals both vanished. Seventy years ago, the Hobart hoax fooled every SETI worker for more than a year.”

He paused. Milly wanted to scream, to shout at Arnold Rudolph, “Get on with it, we know all that.” No one moved or spoke, and Milly literally held her water.

“However.” Rudolph paused again, and stared around the little room that represented an antechamber to Jack Beston’s personal quarters. This time his look included Milly. “However, I do not believe that this anomaly is an example of spurious pattern recognition. Something is there. It would be premature to speculate on what that something might be, or even whether it will survive the necessary verification process. But something is there. The anomaly is real. It would be foolish of me to try to contain my own excitement at the possible significance of this discovery.”

His apparent lack of excitement was so obvious that Milly had to think twice before she realized what Rudolph was saying.

It was real! It was a signal! Jack Beston’s top assistants were convinced that this was a genuine discovery.

Jack himself, as calm as Arnold Rudolph, was nodding. “I think that takes us as far as we can go on detection. Let’s move on to verification. First, however, I have something else to report. Earlier today I prepared a message. On the basis of what I have heard, I propose to send it ciphered tight-beam to the Ganymede Office of Records, to be sealed there until we approve its release. The message announces the discovery of a signal, believed to be from an extra-solar source and of artificial rather than natural origin. It establishes our claim to precedence. The same message will be sent tight-beam to the Odin Project at Jovian L-5. Now, let’s get on to the preliminary stages of verification.” He turned to Zetter. “Your analysis?”

“The direction of origin of the potential signal is known to within five arc minutes.” Zetter spoke like a zombie, her voice a flat monotone. Milly wondered, nature or practice?

Zetter went on, “I have examined every possible signal source of human origin, past or present, to see if any lie within a cone of angle five arc minutes. The potential signal has been operating for at most three months. I allowed for our own motion during that period, adjusting for receiver parallax effects. My conclusion is that no known ship, with or without crew, can be the source of the potential signal. However.” At last, a word with some slight stress on it. “This does not rule out all possibilities. We could be receiving a signal from a residue.”

While the others nodded, Milly struggled to recall the briefing manuals. Was a residue the same as a remnant, some form of artifact left over from the Great War?

“To take one example,” Zetter continued, “consider a blinded Seeker, flying outward at maximum thrust until its fuel ran out and then coasting. In a third of a century it could be as much as half a light-year from Sol. No test made using data from this station’s receivers alone can distinguish such a source from one at true stellar distances.”

“Which is what I thought. We need extra-solar verification. That’s why I’m sending word to the Bastard. All right, everybody, meeting’s over.” Jack swung around to face Milly. “And you, get ready to travel. The two of us leave for Jovian L-5 and the Odin Station later today. Shall we say, two hours from now?” He turned away, to leave the antechamber and head for his own private quarters, then added casually over his shoulder, “By the way, the signal is identified in our announcements as the Wu-Beston anomaly.”

It took Milly a moment for that to sink in. The Wu-Beston anomaly. She was not only named, she was named first. In any major scientific discovery, it was traditional for the senior researcher or group to be listed before anyone else. The most famous case was the discovery of pulsars, the centuries-old case that had already reverberated in Milly’s mind during her earlier work looking for SETI signals. It was Jocelyn Bell, as a graduate student, who had noticed the telltale oddities of print-out that told of the existence of rotating neutron stars; however, it was Martin Ryle and Anthony Hewish, the senior members of the research team, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize for that work.

Jack Beston, in naming the anomaly in the way that he had, was guaranteeing that no such miscarriage of justice would occur in this case.

She gasped, “Thank you.” All the stress and nervousness and nausea of the past hour magically vanished. Her stomach and bladder felt fine.

“Thank you,” she said again. Those were the only words she seemed able to find. But Jack had already vanished and the door was closed.

The others stared at her. It was Pat Tankard who finally spoke. “Two thank-yous for the Ogre, that’s a record. But congratulations and a thank-you to you. You’ve made everything I’ve been doing for the past ten years worthwhile.” She flexed her arm, and the blonde on her biceps grinned. “And good luck. You’ll understand why I say that when you meet Philip the Bastard.”

One hour more, and they would be on their way. Jack Beston had given Milly two hours to get ready, but she had no idea where the first one had gone. She had wandered the Argus Station in a happy stupor, until Hannah Krauss tracked her down.

“Congratulations, Milly. The Wu-Beston anomaly. How about that?” The touch of envy in Hannah’s voice couldn’t be repressed, but it was only a touch. “Are you all ready to go? You certainly don’t look ready.”

“I haven’t even thought about it. What should I take?”

“Just personal stuff. Maybe a stiletto to keep Jack at a distance while you’re traveling? Relax, my dear, I’m just joking. But don’t bother to take any of your signal data, because we’ll send everything you need to Odin Station on tight secure beam.”

Maybe Hannah had been joking about keeping Jack at bay; but Milly, arriving at The Witch of Agnesi carrying just one light travel bag, was not so sure. She made it a point to be there well before Jack Beston, so that she could take a good look around before their departure from Argus Station. This ship was Jack Beston’s personal space-yacht, and she hoped it would tell her something about the man.

Her first impression of the ship told little about Jack, but it blew her away with the evidence of Beston wealth. The drive was of a type she had never seen before, permitting smooth changes of acceleration when and how you pleased. She would feel none of the jolts, jerks, and nauseating turns of a commercial vessel. The navigation system was totally automated. Jack Beston would not need to put a hand on it during the flight to Odin Station (which made Milly wary as to where he might try to put his hands). As for the interior, each fitting that she saw as she wandered from cabin to cabin was more than Milly could afford. The paintings looked like originals and the free-fall rails were of rare woods, all imported from Earth.

Jack Beston’s private suite, at which Milly took a swift and quite unauthorized peek, had a sitting-room, a kitchen containing the most advanced equipment that Milly had ever seen, and a large bedroom. The last contained a circular bed almost three meters across. Who was supposed to sleep there? Jack himself was skinny enough to become lost in its downy vastness.

Perhaps sudden, huge, and unexpected wealth would do that to anyone — especially if the ways that you could spend your money were strongly constrained.

The story as told to Milly by Hannah was sad, wonderful, or ludicrous, depending on your point of view.

Philip and Jack Beston had grown up together on Ganymede in moderate circumstances, neither poor enough to suffer hardship nor rich enough to be part of the jeunesse doree who felt that Ganymede and the whole System were theirs to play in and with. Philip and Jack knew that they came from a family that had once been loaded. That, however, was more than a century ago. Now they were just smart, ambitious, and competitive.

And until Philip’s sixteenth birthday that was enough. Three weeks after that day, the boys received a call while they were in school. They were asked to come, at their convenience but without telling anyone — anyone, which made it really interesting — to the offices of Branksome and Reid. Philip and Jack had never heard of Branksome or Reid, but the caller assured them they had been legal advisers to the Beston family for many generations.

The original Branksomes and Reids were all long-dead, explained Martha Sappho Reid, a woman in her late seventies. She sat Philip and Jack down in the poky little office on deliberately old-fashioned wing chairs. She gave them green tea in ancient porcelain cups, and began.

“I have rather a strange story to tell you. You have heard, perhaps, of Marcus Tullius Beston?”

Jack looked to his older brother for assistance. Philip said, tentatively, “Like, the great-great-grand-uncle?”

Martha Reid nodded. “Add one great, and you have it right. Marcus Tullius Beston trained the first generation of cetacean managers, and he made a gigantic fortune from the Terran sea-farms. However, he formed no permanent liaisons, and he died sine prole.”

She caught the exchange of glances, and added, “That means he died without children. Rather than handing his wealth on to siblings or nephews and nieces, which would commonly be a preferred solution, he followed a quite different path. He set up a trust, the original assets of which were his entire fortune. Furthermore, upon his death the assets of the trust were to be invested and managed, but otherwise remain untouched for a period of three-quarters of a century.

At that time, the heirs would inherit. Marcus Tullius Beston, however, was a man whom many would consider a little eccentric.”

She ignored Philip and Jack, who were looking at each other in a way that suggested they thought Marcus Beston was a total loon.

“Beston’s will decreed that the inheritance would be encumbered,” Martha continued. “Which is to say, it would go only to family members who satisfied certain criteria, and it could be spent only in certain ways. Those ways were rather tightly defined. Inherited wealth was not to be spent on pleasure. It was, rather, to be applied only to such enterprises as might significantly affect the future of the human race, and affect it in beneficial ways.

“In due course, Marcus Tullius Beston died. The first result of his death was perhaps entirely predictable. His will was contested by every living family member, all of whom had been in effect disinherited in favor of the far future. The will survived those challenges, and the trust was established. Perhaps you are beginning to guess the rest of the story.”

Jack looked to Philip for guidance. Philip said, “Er, the whole thing got wiped out in the Great War?”

“Indeed, no, though that is an intelligent surmise. The trust continued and its assets grew, through good times and bad, until the present day. And well before the Great War, the trust managers had the foresight to transfer a substantial fraction of the assets into investment in Outer System development. Now, however, we must come to the present day. It has been seventy-five years since Marcus Tullius Beston died. Today is, in fact, the exact anniversary of his death. The rules for the line of descent for his inheritors were complex, but well-defined. You, Philip Beston and Jack Beston, are his sole inheritors. You were bequeathed and will receive, in equal shares, the value of his estate.”

“You mean we’re going to get money?” The explanation had finally reached a point that Philip and Jack could understand.

“Eventually, but not for some years. The elder brother — that is you, Philip — will have to reach age twenty-three. Moreover, the assets may be used by each of you only in the manner originally described; namely, for such enterprises as will significantly and beneficially affect the future of the human race.”

“Do our parents know all this?”

“Not yet. Marcus Tullius Beston envisaged, and wished to avoid, any situation in which individuals might seek ways to leverage in advance a future bequest.”

Jack asked, “Do our parents have to know — ever?”

“I see that as inevitable. I do not see it as a problem.”

Jack said, “That’s because you don’t know what our stepmother is like.”

Philip said, “Oh shit. We’re not getting money. We’re getting trouble.”

“The way I’ve heard it,” Hannah went on, “Philip and Jack’s parents took their own shot at cracking the terms of the will, trying to get their hands on the kids’ money. They didn’t have any more success than the people seventy-five years earlier. They just made it so that Philip and Jack never wanted to speak to their stepmother ever again.

“Then Philip and Jack became old enough to inherit. They had a big problem. All that loot, more than they had ever dreamed of having, but they didn’t know how to get their hands on it. They suggested all sorts of things based on their own interests, but the trustees bounced every one. Martha Reid didn’t seem to see the value to humanity of Philip’s proposed hundred kilometer ice rink on Callisto, or Jack’s System-wide space race.

“Freedom to use the trust fund, but also to do something you’d like: that was the problem, and it was Jack who cracked it. He’d always been interested in the idea that there might be aliens, somewhere out there in space. If you could find some, there was no end to what humans might learn. So why not take the old ideas of listening for signals, and do it right? Propose a big, elaborate facility with the best possible equipment and people. And stick it far away from Ganymede, where Old Mother Reid couldn’t keep too close an eye on how you were spending the money.

“It was a great idea, and Martha Reid loved it. She agreed to approve it in a hot minute. Jack set to work, planning an L-5 Argus Station. And he was coming along fine, until he applied for permission to build.

“That’s when he found that there was already an application for a SETI station at Jovian L-5. Philip, without telling his brother, had decided that he would do the same thing, and do it first. Jack went nuts when he found out but there wasn’t much he could do — except win the race. They had always been competitive, now they would be super-competitive. He made his own application for a station at L-4, the other stable Lagrange point. He would do an all-sky survey, whereas Philip Beston was going to concentrate on selected target stars, but otherwise they’d be using the same sort of equipment and analysis methods.

“And there was one other thing, something that neither brother had expected. Once they got going, Jack and Philip discovered that they were fascinated by the SETI projects. The longer they worked, the more it became an obsession. They’ve being going head to head for the past twelve years, with neither one slowing down and neither showing an advantage — until now, with the Wu-Beston anomaly. You can imagine how Philip welcomed that message from the Ogre.

“Better be prepared when you reach Odin Station, Milly. It’s odds-on that the Bastard will have a reception planned for you. I wouldn’t like to guess what.”