The Lure

12 Icosahedron

‘It must be their home planet.’ Svetlana was waving them over impatiently, her face lined with excitement.

There was a rush to her terminal, and a collective gasp. Shtyrkov laughed, shouted ‘Ne figa sebe!’ and clapped his hands. Petrie, looking over her shoulder at the image, shouted, ‘Wow! Wow! Wow!’

The image was roughly spherical, like a dimpled ball. It was made up of thousands of tiny spheres touching each other. The little spheres were red, yellow or blue. Two enormous blue starry eyes stared at them, along with a big round blue mouth. The spherelets lining the eyes and mouth were yellow, making the face look as if it had yellow eyeshadow and lipstick.

‘It’s like the Man in the Moon,’ Svetlana said. She pressed some keys and the round head shook slowly from side to side, then nodded up and down. Finally it turned slowly through a full rotation, showing an upside-down face on the far hemisphere.

The terrain was deeply sculptured with canyons and mountains, the cavities being filled with the blue spherelets, the mountain peaks the red ones; the little yellow spheres occupied the middle heights.

‘How did you do this?’

‘I just ran your program. I stacked the time slices as far as the next big gap in the flow.’

‘The little balls — are these my dots?’

‘No, Tom, it’s more complicated than that. There are hundreds of your dots inside each ball. But they were combined in just four basic ways, four patterns. So to simplify things, to get an image we could visualise, I replaced each pattern by a ball. Four patterns, four colours. I chose red, yellow, green and blue at random, and I expanded the balls until they touched and that’s what I got.’

‘Not bad for a wiring technician, Svetlana.’

She smiled happily.

‘But there were four colours, you said. Where’s the fourth? The green?’

‘Inside the planet. You can’t see the green spheres.’

‘A planet with life needs water,’ Gibson asserted. ‘So the low areas are probably oceans. Blue was a lucky choice.’

Petrie said, ‘Six oceans, regularly spaced, all the same size. It seems artificial somehow.’

‘They’ve terraformed their planet,’ Gibson suggested.

‘Can you zoom in on it?’ Petrie asked. ‘Anywhere on the surface.’

A little wedge of lip grew until it filled the screen: a mass of coloured ping-pong balls.

‘Now can you do a contour map on that? They must have given us a graph-drawing package.’

Svetlana created a fresh window on the screen and threw up a long list of programs. ‘I don’t recognise anything there.’

‘Mathematica. I can work it.’ Svetlana vacated her chair, which creaked slightly as Shtyrkov sat on it. He typed at the keyboard for a minute, then redisplayed the wedge of planet. Now the ping-pong balls disappeared and were swiftly replaced by an irregular, contoured surface.

‘It’s amazingly mountainous,’ Svetlana said. ‘Look at those cliffs.’

‘Where is this planet?’ Gibson wanted to know.

Freya moved back to her terminal. ‘The zones are still narrowing down. At the moment they’re constellation-sized. Okay, if the particles came through the lake from above, their source is somewhere in Ursa Major. If they came up from below, it’s in maybe Tucana or Phoenix.’

‘How long before you get a definite answer?’

‘A couple of hours, Charlie.’

‘Two hours?’

‘It’s a big job.’

‘Is there anything interesting in the two zones so far?’

‘Plenty. The Whirlpool galaxy, the 47 Tucanae cluster, Nubecula Minor…’

‘I mean from the ET point of view, as well you know.’

‘Charlie, I can’t rule out anything right now.’

‘Guess, will you?’ Gibson’s tone was exasperated.

‘I suppose there’s 47 Ursa Majoris,’ Freya said doubtfully.

‘Which is?’

She spoke while she typed. ‘It’s a G1 main sequence star, like the Sun only slightly hotter. It has two known planets around it. Too far away to see directly and we only know they’re there because they make the star wobble. But the planets are gas giants, bigger than Jupiter, and they certainly won’t look like that.’

‘It could have other planets?’

‘Yes, Charlie, but so could millions of other stars in the zones.’

‘How far away is it?’

‘Let me see.’ A slender finger skimmed down the screen. ‘Forty-six light years. Not too distant.’

‘47 Ursa Majoris,’ Gibson said. ‘It sounds good. I have a gut feeling about it.’

‘My gut is bigger than yours,’ Shtyrkov said. ‘And it tells me the odds are against this star.’

‘Before I contact the government I want a positive identification of this planet.’

‘And you’ll want it for the press release,’ Shtyrkov suggested. ‘It will enhance the drama.’

‘The press release, yes. I must put something together.’ Gibson scurried towards a corner desk, leaving Petrie to wonder if the Russian had cunningly manoeuvred Gibson out of their hair.

Petrie sat at a terminal and hacked into the enormous file, randomly entering about halfway through. He ran the movie briefly; more swirling dots appeared, but now he knew, if not the mind of the signallers, at least the way they dumbed the message down. He sliced time, stacked it and this time it didn’t work; there was no picture, no pleasing shape, just a haphazard swarm of dots.

‘They’re sending a different sort of message.’ Shtyrkov was leaning over his shoulder.

‘I think so, Vash. Something that doesn’t lend itself to geometric visualisation.’

‘Like something in four or more dimensions?’

‘Maybe.’

The Russian laid a sympathetic hand on Petrie’s shoulder. ‘Back to the theological library, young man.’

‘To hell with the theological library.’ Petrie started to hack randomly into other points in the file, a small boy lost in an Aladdin’s cave of mysteries.

After an hour he rubbed his face, stretched, and went out to the castle grounds. The sky was blue. Icicles of lethal size were hanging down from the high rooftops and he wondered idly if the warming air would send them hurtling down. He wandered across to the parapet, looked out over the countryside and almost immediately had a disturbing thought. He turned smartly back into the office. Gibson was scribbling; the others were doing their things at terminals and there was an air of quiet concentration.

‘Svetlana, can you throw up those canyons and mountains again?’

She obliged.

‘The regularity’s amazing. Can you go back to the full view now?’

The Man in the Moon reappeared.

‘Look at the edges. It’s not exactly spherical. There are flattish plains, like continental plates, as well as bumps all over.’

‘Obviously.’ Gibson had rejoined them. ‘It’s a very mountainous planet.’

‘There’s more to it than that,’ Petrie said.

Freya was looking at the screen with narrowed eyes. ‘I’ve been thinking that, too, Tom. In fact, I’m way ahead of you.’

Petrie said, ‘Yes! It’s bizarre.’

‘I don’t want to interrupt your private telepathy,’ Gibson said, ‘but would either of you people care to let me in on the secret?’

Freya unconsciously flipped her hair back over her shoulder. ‘Charlie, the Earth is eight thousand miles across and Mount Everest is six miles high. It’s a tiny blip on the surface. That’s because gravity is too strong to support a taller mountain. If Everest was pushed up much higher, the rock at its base would crumble.’ She pointed at a couple of places on the screen. ‘Look at the height of these mountains. They couldn’t exist on an Earth-sized planet.’

‘So gravity’s weaker there. It’s a small planet.’

‘Yes, a very small one. It couldn’t be more than a thousand kilometres across, say like a giant comet or an asteroid. That’s your reasoning, Tom?’

Petrie nodded.

Freya continued. ‘But an asteroid’s gravity is too weak to hold on to an atmosphere. Any body of liquid water would long since have been lost to space. And you’ve been telling us that water is essential for life.’

Svetlana looked meditatively at the screen. ‘How could any sentient being be content to live on a dry airless hunk of rock?’

Freya said, ‘It’s not a hunk of rock, Svetlana.’

Shtyrkov looked at the image, and then at Freya and Petrie. ‘Is it possible?’

‘Let me in on it,’ Gibson pleaded.

Petrie squeezed Svetlana’s shoulder. ‘Make it tumble.’

Svetlana typed a few symbols and the Man in the Moon, mouth agape, tilted and disappeared, reappearing from time to time in random orientations.

‘Look closely,’ Petrie said.

Svetlana said, ‘It’s not a sphere.’

‘No. It’s an icosahedron.’

‘A what?’ Gibson was looking blank.

‘It’s made up of twenty triangular plates joined together. Look at it. See how it keeps coming back to the same shape. That’s because it looks exactly the same from sixty different orientations. It’s one of the Platonic solids.’

‘Plato?’ Gibson repeated in exasperation. ‘Tom, are we on different planes of reality or what?’

‘Charlie, an icosahedron is one of the most beautifully symmetric solid forms. Plato wanted to understand the world in terms of mathematics and harmony. He believed that tetrahedron, cube, octahedron and icosahedron made up earth, air, fire and water. It’s all there in his Timaeus.’

‘So what are you saying? That the signallers have read Timaeus? That they’ve shaped their planet like a Platonic bloody solid?’

Petrie shook his head. ‘That’s not a planet, Charlie. It’s a virus.’