Analog SFF, April 2010 (23 page)

"An extrasolar Venus,” I said, which confirmed my suspicions.

"Indeed. I subtracted the blackbody spectra of this planet from that of our Venus. Within experimental error they match. It's incredible."

"But what about the extrasolar Earth and our Earth?” I asked.

"Ah.” She clicked a few things on her dock and pulled up the appropriate windows. “They're similar, but don't match. For example, we have more carbon dioxide and methane by several factors, but they seem to have more CFCs, nitrous oxides, and ozone. Our planet is warmer than theirs by a few degrees, nudging our blackbody spectrum down a little."

"The aliens are destroying their atmosphere too! Maybe we should send them warning signals."

"The Beast is now taking the blackbody spectra in more detail for every planet in EPH1889,” she said. “I'll soon do this analysis for them too! This is so juicy."

I returned to my desk with a grunt and found that the doomsday clock had gone into the negative. I clicked it shut furiously. My inbox was full of emails from people bursting to share the news or asking me to verify it. I ignored them, not wanting to deal with emotional non-scientists at the moment, and pulled up arXiv instead. There was something comforting in the crisp, clinical prose of research papers. Like my inbox, arXiv was flooded with everyone and their gerbil's theories on the BST's discovery. I cut out all the planetary stuff and instead skimmed the observational cosmology. It was guaranteed to be exo-planet-free and a topic I had long ignored, but now I needed escape.

Cosmologists enjoyed exploiting the likes of supernovae and other standard candles to probe every nook, wrinkle, and blip of space's curvature to map out the shape of our universe as far back in time as light could travel. Apparently there were extra spatial dimensions out there that astronomers had to account for when taking measurements at long distances. I had the luxury of treating space as flat because my observations only took me as far as the Milky Way and the rest of the Local Group.

Someone rapped on our door and I jumped. It was Dr. Onishi. She waved a piece of paper and said, “Good news, everyone. It seems that a certain two of my grad students will get time on the BST after all."

Ingrid turned to me with a grin. “It's your time to dream, Mei."

"We won't be here long,” I told the Cabal just as I finished unrolling Lisa and sticking her to the ceiling. Beside her, directly over my bed, was my mutilated Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, still with the holes. The room they had given me at the BST headquarters in Vancouver could have been more accurately described as a cell: cold, gray, and metallic. A Spartan would have been at home here.

It was too clean. I could not sleep in clean places, no matter how tightly I closed my eyes to pretend otherwise. I saw the bookshelf I had just spent several minutes sliding my books onto, considered it for a moment, and then threw all the books to the ground. I opened my suitcase and sprinkled my clothes everywhere, over the floor, on my bed, and tossed a few socks onto the bookshelves. Better.

Annie and Richard were arguing over solar interiors, but went quiet when my door was pushed open.

"What're you doing?” Shakir asked.

"Decorating,” I said.

He took a bottle from his pocket and held it toward me. “Anti-jetlag pills, calibrated for Pacific Time."

"Obeying time zones is for the weak."

He took it back. “They did give us the nine p.m. shift tomorrow."

"Do you think the food here is any good?"

By heading to the cafeteria, we experimentally verified that this was not the case. I had grabbed a heap of cardboard-flavored chili and a quivering tower of blue jelly, while Shakir did not fare so well with his lo mein and piece of guava pie. Perhaps when designing the meals, the chefs thought the Beast was not the telescope, but who they were supposed to be feeding.

We sat alone at our table while another group of astronomers were gathered around something I could not see. Shakir and I pulled out our papers, discussing the order in which we would view our four systems.

"You know,” he said at last, “this is the first time we've worked together on something."

"Keep that between us,” I said. “I don't want my reputation ruined."

He smiled. “I told you extrasolar Earths were more interesting than hot Jupiters."

"Shut up."

Groans erupted from the group. I rose from my seat and tapped the tall one on the shoulder. She turned to me, and I saw the source of their attention: the very small monitor of a palmtop displaying zigzag lines of black and white static.

"Catching the latest cosmic microwave background radiation?” I asked.

The astronomer stared at me down her long nose and flipped a length of curls over her shoulder. “You're the ones from
Toronto,
aren't you?” From the tone in her voice, she might as well have been asking if we were from a pigsty.

I glanced at her nametag. “At least we're not from
Newfoundland.
What're you watching?"

A few of them moved back so that Shakir and I could join in and get a good look at the palmtop.

"Every telescope in working order on Earth, around Earth, on the Moon and Mars is now pointed toward the alien-inhabited exoplanet in the EPH1889 system, naturally,” she said. “And I've clearance with several of those.” She put emphasis on this as if this made her more important than all the other astronomers around her. “We're watching live images as the Shirt tries to pick up signals in the television frequency from that very planet."

The Shirt was the SHRT—Sawyer Hogg Radio Telescope.

I stared at the static. Nothing was happening, and just as I turned to leave, someone gasped and was shushed.

The static had become an image of two aliens in conversation. I held my breath and absorbed everything before my eyes. The aliens were brown-skinned humanoids, with all the appropriate limbs and features and eyes etcetera that we had; only their foreheads were high and ridged. Both aliens had mangy black hair to their shoulders. Black suits were their chosen attire, with some sort of chain mail belt slung diagonally across their shoulders and torsos. They stood in a beige, well-lit room in front of metallic panels on which several yellow and red LEDs flashed.

"Turn it up,” one of the astronomers said.

The aliens spoke to one another in a harsh, halting language that I did not recognize as any on Earth. A pair of doors slid open then, and in walked a third humanoid. He was shorter, bald and might have resembled any ordinary white-skinned human wearing a red and black spandex bodysuit. A triangular swoosh-shaped metal pin was fastened over his left breast. In fact, except for the peculiar clothing I saw nothing alien about him.

Static overcame the scene and everyone in the cafeteria started cursing the palmtop.

"Hey!” Shakir said. “That's the best part of the episode. The Klingons were just about to capture Patrick Stewart."

"Who is Patrick Stewart and what do they want to cling on to him?” I asked.

"He was the star of a late-twentieth-century series called
Star Trek: The Next Generation,
in which he played the captain of a spaceship that explores the galaxy. Those ‘aliens’ were just humans in makeup."

"So the extraterrestrials are pirating our campy science fiction shows."

"It isn't campy."

"A prank.” The Newfie sniffed with distaste. “It has to be. I cannot accept that was truly the Shirt's transmission."

Eleven a.m.: Despite the complete mess in my cell, I was unable to sleep that morning. I tossed and threw my blankets off the bed, staring up at the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram stuck to the ceiling, feeling that somehow I had missed something. The pinholes nagged at me. I needed to get a new poster when I returned to Toronto.

Eight p.m.: Shakir and I went over our plan of attack once more together, and decided to look at our four exoplanets in order of the age of their stars, starting with the youngest. We would only take the spectra of the larger of the two extrasolar Earths, not having time for much else. Those were the ones most likely to have life. I was tired from little sleep, but the sheer adrenalin pushed me through. The hour of the BST was almost upon us.

Nine p.m.: “You have the coordinates, the information, everything ready?” I asked him as we took our seats at the BST's control computer. Our area, for visiting astronomers, was sectioned off from the main control room. Though we could see it from the glass, they would not be able to overhear us.

"Of course I do,” he said.

"I got the reading material.” I set down my pile of Post-It-note-marked textbooks on atmospheric physics and astronomy. I had come prepared to reference anything that might come up. Who knew what other chemicals aliens might produce?

"All right,” I said, “first the system TOB1546 with the T Tauri-type star. I don't expect aliens on this one.” T Tauris were young and violent stars, known for ejecting spurts of radiation into their systems. Both the youth of the system and the radiation were good reasons to doubt that they harbored life. “Well, aliens like us, anyway."

Shakir handed me the keyboard. “You take this one."

The BST's control program was familiar to me because I had been given practice sessions since we arrived at the Beast's headquarters yesterday. It was a simple matter of giving the Beast the proper coordinates and deciding on what type of exposures to take. I typed in the orders quickly. Though the coordinates required some adjustment and the first spectra did not turn out so well, in a matter of a few minutes I got it working.

With Ingrid's help before I left Toronto, we had been sure to verse ourselves well in the signatures of certain anthropogenic compounds in the blackbody spectra, and I saw none in TOB1546's extrasolar Earth.

"Mostly hydrogen and helium, two to one ratio,” I said. “Pretty pedestrian stuff. Makes sense that the primordial atmosphere of a terrestrial planet would resemble that of its sun. Next.” I passed him the keyboard.

The second system was that of a main sequence star, though one a few billion years younger than our sun. Calmer and older than the T Tauri, but still too young to support evolution as we knew it.

I was correct. This planet's atmosphere was mainly water vapor, carbon, and sulphur dioxide.

"Like the composition of volcano vomit,” I said, turning open the appropriate page in an atmospheric text.

"Bu no life still,” he said. “Your turn."

"No, you take this one too.” I thumbed through the book a little more to be sure.

"I can't believe this,” he said. “Mei giving up a turn at the controls?"

"I'll just take the last one,” I said, “the system with the main sequence star that's about to go red giant, SWH1942. Now that'll be interesting."

Our third solar system had a star that was just a hundred million years younger than our sun.

"If any of our four systems have aliens,” he said, “it should be this one."

He took the blackbody spectra, and we immediately began to flip through my atmospheric books to do a quick in situ analysis of the absorption lines. We saw water vapor and carbon dioxide and tantalizing traces of ozone, but nothing that could be described as anthropogenic.

Earth's atmosphere was composed mostly of diatomic oxygen and nitrogen, both of which were unreactive species and hard to see in absorption lines. Ozone, however, was the product of ultraviolet rays striking diatomic oxygen. Where there was ozone there was probably diatomic oxygen, and where there was diatomic oxygen there were probably:

"Plants,” Shakir said.

"We can't be sure,” I said. “I need to show these to Ingrid, maybe even a biologist or two."

"Earth's is the only stable atmosphere in our solar system that has more oxygen than carbon dioxide,” he said. “Why is that? Because of plants.” He grinned widely. “We've found our own aliens. Not industrialized, intelligent aliens. Brainless, plantlike things, but we have them!"

"Or they're smarter than us,” I said. “Perhaps they're industrialized, but don't crap in their atmosphere like we do. Great, so now you and I will go down in history as the second people to discover extraterrestrial life."

"But our aliens are better than the CFC makers on EPH1889. Our aliens are environmentally conscious
and
they don't pirate our television."

Suddenly, I remembered the pinholes in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram over my bed and it all made sense. “Many theories say that our sun was once a T Tauri star in its youth,” I found myself saying, pulse quickening, “and during that period the Earth's primordial atmosphere was made of hydrogen and helium before it all got blown away by the young sun's radiation. Then it was replaced by a second atmosphere spewed out from the Earth's interior. The suns in our five systems trace the evolution of our sun.” I seized his shoulder. “Shit. The aliens are us."

"How?"

"Those aren't other planets, but ours in the past, somehow, snapshots in time. They watch our classic television, pollute with our old chemicals, and their sun's younger.” I pointed to the T Tauri system TOB1546 with a shaking finger. “Primordial Earth, I'm sure of it.” I move my finger over the second system. “Earth before life begins.” And the third. “Time of the dinosaurs. As for EPH1889? Late twentieth century, maybe early twenty-first depending on how long your cling-on show aired."

"Are you sure?” His eyes widened. “This defies everything: string theory, high-energy physics, the whole of astrophysics! Is this from exotic worm holes, cosmic mirrors, what?"

"Yeah, something like that.” Reading over those cosmological papers before I had left Toronto was turning out to be useful after all. “You know how the universe is folded in on itself, that it isn't flat in space? Well, what if time isn't flat either? We could be observing the echoes of warped time that turn all of space into a crystal ball. It'd return images of ourselves at certain points in space."

"But we're no Einsteins,” he said.

"No, we're Michelson and Morley. Damn! There could be more systems out there than these five. There could be thousands, mapping out the entire course of our history to us like insects trapped in amber."