Three

In 2045 Lancer had paused in its steady one-g acceleration out from Earth, long enough to deploy the largest telescope ever conceived. It was a gossamer-thin array of optical and microwave receivers, flung out like a fishing net. Nigel had worked for days helping to dispatch the sensors in the right order, avoiding the heavy work for fear it would show a spike of strain on his metabolic report.

Men and women cast their net to capture photons; the telescope itself was provided by the distant, white bright speck of their sun. Space is not flat, like the marble Italian foyers Galileo imagined, where his gliding blocks went on forever in ideal experiments carried out free of friction. The mass of those hypothetical blocks would stretch space itself, warp the obliging flat plane. Mass tugs at light. Forced into a curve, light will focus. The symmetry of three dimensions in turn shaped any sizable mass into a sphere, perfect for a lens. Each star was a huge refractor, a gravitational lens.

Lancer dropped sensor nets, starting three light-days out from Sol. The nets gathered in photons like a spring harvest, compiling sharp images of distant stars, resolving detail a mere ten kilometers across. For each star the focal distance from the sun was different, and so the webs had to tack against the wind of particles blowing out from the sun, using the magnetic fields beyond the planets to trim and guide their long scalloping orbits.

Lancer rumbled and forked a pure, blue-hot plasma arc, and pulled away from the gravitational lens that was its native star, leaving the colossal telescope behind. It would be six years before the first dim images would be finished. Ever since the sun had formed from infalling dust, pictures from worlds hundreds of parsecs away had been forming in the spaces far beyond the planets. Those focused stories, now forever lost, had run their courses on the gigantic hypothetical screen, the imaging plane. Through billions of years, until this moment, there had been no one in the theater to watch them.

Lancer’s destination was a mild red dot known in the catalog as Ross 128. It was the sun’s twelfth nearest neighbor, an unremarkable M-5 star. Toward the end of the twentieth century some X-ray astronomers had studied it briefly, comparing the hard radiation from it with our Sun’s. It was a little more active, but once the solar physicists on a NASA grant had milked it, they forgot it. So did everybody else.

The gravitational lens array showed a full-sized solar system, though: five gas giants plus two Earth-sized worlds. A robot probe had reached Ross 128 about the time Lancer went into orbit around Ra. Something had silenced its transmissions as it entered the system.

Lancer was “nearby.” It could study a system far better than any flyby could. Earthside thought that the death of the robot probe was worth a follow-up. Maybe it had smacked into a rock. Or maybe something wanted it to look that way.

Earthside’s strategy was to accumulate-astronomical information, fast, and stir it into the pot with data on the Swarmers and Skimmers. This was a compromise reached by the important space-faring nations, totally outside the aging carcass of the United Nations. The Asian faction wanted to push colonization of the nearby stars as soon as possible. That way, humanity would be dispersed. If the Swarmer-Skimmer fleet returned and destroyed humanity’s space resources, at least the race would be already spread among the stars, and relatively invulnerable.

The Europeans and Americans backed a pure exploratory program. Behind this was calculated advantage. The Asian economies were doing better at capitalism than the societies that had invented the notion in the first place. The Western economics were broke. If colonization started right away, the stars would belong to the short and slant-eyed.

Lancer was ordered to investigate Ross 128, then return home. But Ra was not finished with them. After a year of acceleration, Lancer leveled out at 0.98 light speed. When it damped its fusion plume, the plasma exhaust unfurling behind it dropped in density. The thinner the plasma, the easier radio waves can get through.

At 15:46 hours, June 11, shipboard antennas picked up an intense burst of microwave emission. It came from dead aft and lasted 73 seconds. After that, nothing.

No look I can’t break it down further like I was telling you the data’s all over the board

Dispersion in the pulse from all that crap we’re throwin’ behind us just plain messed up the signal

Not from the EMs though that’s not their frequency we never got anything from ’em up at ten GHz

Okay sure but Ted here wants to know if there’s any chance they sent it

Who can tell Christ no info in that burst at all

Yeah right but lookit the power man—I’d say doesn’t look like a solar flare or anything natural

Course not, too tight a band, and a little star like Ra can’t do much better than hunnert megahertz never make it up to ten gigs and you’re right about the power no way it can be those Ems

Ted I got the calibration on it and it’s a helluva shot of power innat burst doesn’t make sense

Too much power yeah I mean no artificial source would put out that much it’s crazy

Right, if you think they’re broadcasting in all directions, a spherical pulse, then it would take a bloody avalanche of power to register as much as we’re getting

Who’s ’at on the line

Walmsley sounds like, look Nigel, this’s just a tech-talk

Merely sitting in, don’t pay me any mind

Must be artificial though the burst’s so short

This is Ted I’m sure your results are right overall but honestly gentlemen and ladies I don’t believe we can reconcile a power level like that from the EMs or anyone else it must be Ra itself some sort of occasional outburst or

Nonsense, I say

Well Nigel I don’t see how you can simply brush aside

Interesting isn’t it that our exhaust plume distorts the signal enough so that we can’t read it? Decidedly convenient

Well sure but that’s just an accident of

In a seventy-three-second burst you can pack a lot

If there is information content sure but who says

Ted this is Nigel, if someone were to beam a tight-focused signal along our trajectory it would seem to have a huge power, because we’re analyzing it as though the emission was flooding out over all space, rather than being squeezed into a small angle

Well sure I guess but natural emissions from Ra oh I see

So this tells us somebody sent a message our way but pitched at a frequency that would get bloody well swallowed by our own exhaust so we couldn’t unscramble it

Well okay I mean that’s an alternate hypothesis

This is Ted give me the visual on that would you?—guess you’re right there’s no way to decode a mess like that but look Nigel I don’t buy that one I mean why would the EMs broadcast at that high frequency they can’t with their body structure and anybody who wanted to communicate would use something we could decode at least

Quite so, if they wanted us to

I don’t get

We’re on a line of sight from Ra remember

You mean if it wasn’t targeted for us at all but instead

Right we’re on a dead straight line and Ross 128 is another point on that line

Well we’ll take that under advisement Nigel thanks for sure yeah thanks

“Well, I, I don’t know,” Nigel said.

“Come now. You’re positively shy.” Nikka grinned.

“Dead right.” He liked her in this mood, but sometimes she was, well, too much. He was shy, and quite properly so. He looked around at the neat rows of improbably tall vegetables. “Rather public for my taste.”