Dark as Day (4 page)

Now there was no guaranteed signal, but in its place a near-infinity of possible ones. The distributed observing system around the L-4 Argus Station still explored the ancient water-hole of the early investigators, between the spectral lines of neutral hydrogen and the hydroxyl radical, and to that they had added the preferred zone of neutrino resonance capture, a region undreamed of in early SETI work.

The work took on new complexity when you could not be sure that a possible signal
was
a signal, and all the time the detection equipment became more sensitive and sophisticated.
Is something there?
That question was harder to answer than ever. Milly wondered about the comparison. Which was more difficult to decipher: A signal sent by humans to humans, deliberately obscure and challenging their ingenuity, but with a promise that it was a signal? Or a message from aliens, designed to be clear, struggling to be heard, wanting to be transparent in meaning, and sent to any life form who might be listening?

What would Frank Drake say now, if he could be here to regard his legacy? The original listening had been done for just two stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, on a minimum of radio frequencies, for a period that was no more than one tick on the great celestial clock. Drake would probably just shake his head and smile a secret little smile. He was a scientist and a realist, but he had an element of fey, deep inside, that led him to label his project
Ozma
, a name with more than a touch of magic and a hint of exotic mystery. Maybe more than surprised he would be disappointed, that they had looked so long and so hard and found nothing.

Nothing
yet. Where are they? Be patient, Frank, and old Enrico Fermi. They are there. We are going to find them
.

The smaller room beyond, in contrast to the one where Milly stood, was completely shielded from external signals. Within it the anomalies, the potential messages, the scores or hundreds daily culled from raw inputs, were sent to be analyzed. It is one of the curious results of information theory that the possible information carried within a signal is proportional to its randomness, to its
unpredictability
. If something is totally predictable, then by definition you know its content exactly and it can tell you nothing new. If the incoming signal is totally unpredictable, on the other hand, then in principle every single bit of data is a potential message. There had to be a fine line: enough regularities to announce intelligent design (a sequence of prime numbers, the Pythagorean theorem, a sequence of squares, the digits of pi), yet enough variation to offer information. How would an alien intelligence draw the line?

Milly crossed the big receiving chamber and stood on the threshold of the inner sanctum. Hannah had vanished. Milly had not been looking for her for minutes, and did not know where she had gone. That was all right. For the moment there was neither need nor desire for company. She was at a nexus, the focus of a torrent of information streaming in from every direction and distance in space, from everywhere in the galaxy and beyond it. The chamber was silent, but her inner ear discerned a mighty rushing river of data, rain-fed by the whole universe.

And the Ogre, with his insults and his coarse manners? Screw Jack Beston. She had not come here for him, she was here for
this
.

Milly was starting toward one of the work stations, where she could grab a batch of anomalies and analyze them to see if anything there spoke of purposive signal, when at that moment she saw him. He was standing in the center of the room, no more than ten meters away. Clearly, he had no idea that she was there. His head was tilted to one side, looking slightly up. The green eyes were slitted half shut. The expression on his face was nothing like the one she had seen and hated in the review meeting. It was rapt, it was concentrated, it was yearning.

Strangest of all, Milly could read that look. Jack Beston heard the cosmic roar of the swirling galaxy, beating in from all around them. But he was not listening for that. He was listening, with all his heart and soul, for something that he could not hear.
Within the whirlwind, a still small voice
.

Jack Beston wanted to hear the message, the one that would tell him that all this dedication of spirit and mighty labor was not in vain.

Milly could suddenly see inside him, as clearly as if Jack were lit from within by lightning. She looked, she understood, she yearned in just the same way to hear that same small voice. She felt
connected
.

And, like it or hate it, she felt a first faint stirring of sympathy for the Devil.

3

EARTH, YEAR 2097,

SEINE-DAY MINUS ONE

Seine-Day would be huge in the Jovian system, perhaps bigger yet at the L-4 and L-5 Trojan locations, and most important of all as a unifying influence on the expanding Outer System.

On Earth, however, huddled in close to the Sun and with old war wounds still unhealed even after thirty years, Seine-Day could not compete with other worries.

Worries such as the application. The written part had been submitted three weeks earlier. The oral examination would be held one hour from now, by an interviewer who had ridden a high-gee vessel all the way from Ganymede. Janeed Jannex stared east toward the rising sun and wondered if it would be worth showing up to meet the man. There must be tens or hundreds of thousands of applicants. Less than one thousand would pass the test and be allowed to head away from Earth for training in the Outer System. And most of those would be youngsters, early twenties or less, whereas Janeed and Sebastian were already well over thirty.

She was sitting at the extreme eastern edge of the GM platform, as far down its side as she could get without falling in. Her feet dangled in the cold salt water of the eastern Malvinas’ shelf. Behind her she could hear the gentle
thrum-thrum-thrum
of the great extractor. Its upper portion curved away to become a one-meter pipeline that headed arrow-straight south and west, past the Falkland Islands, across the full width of the Malvinas’ shelf, all the way to landfall at Punta Arenas.

The spine of the extractor plunged down through the middle of the Global Minerals’ platform and continued all the way to the seabed. Janeed and Sebastian were, according to their job description, “in charge” of the extractor operation during the remaining hour of the dawn shift. What that meant in practice was that any change in extractor performance, gas leak, or reduction in methane flow through the pipeline would be signaled by a klaxon loud enough to wake the dead. At that point the problem rose by definition above Jan and Sebastian’s authority and responsibility level. They would run at once to alert a more senior member of the GMS operations’ staff, assuming that by some miracle that person had slept through the din and was not already on deck.

The sun was well above the horizon, but here, in July at fifty degrees south, the wind off the winter ocean of the South Atlantic would remain brisk all day. Jan lifted her bare feet from the icy water, examined her long, near-prehensile toes that had chilled to a bluish-red, and dried them on the lower edge of her sweater. She had been sitting far too long, introspective and brooding in the glimmer of pre-dawn. She was supposed to be the optimist, the initiator, the “can-do” queen. But it was hard to be all those things when you felt sure that the next few hours would bring only disappointment. And if she reacted like this, how must Sebastian be feeling?

She put on her shoes, stood up stiffly, and climbed the ten-meter ladder to the main surface of the platform. Finding him should be no problem. He lacked her taste for minor masochism, and would be tucked in the warmest and most protected spot of the deck that still offered a broad-angled upward view.

This morning she found him on the western side of the extractor, well shielded from the breeze. He had spread an air mattress there—no hardships for Sebastian—and lay on his back, staring upward.

Janeed said, “Well?”

Without looking at her, or seeming in any way to acknowledge her presence, he said softly, “Formation to the northeast. Triple layer, alto-cumulus over strato-cumulus over cumulo-nimbus, all moving in different directions. Wind vectors different at each height. We’ll see rain within the hour, I’ll make bet.”

Jan didn’t want to bet, or look north-east or in any other direction. Clouds were clouds, and that was all. She moved to lean over him. “Not the
weather
, Sebastian. The
interview
.”

“What about the interview?”

“It’s less than an hour away. I’m nervous.”

He sat up, slowly. Sebastian did everything slowly, so slowly that Janeed often felt ready to scream at him. Sometimes she did. It made no difference.

“Jan, you’re nervous because you care.” His round moon face was smiling. “If we fail, we still have jobs.”

Jobs that could be done as well or better by machinery. Jobs that needed so little of your skills and energy that someone like Sebastian could spend all his days happily dreaming and staring at the ever-changing cloud formations of the South Atlantic, without any question from their superiors. Dead-end jobs for all of them, while the Outer System was desperately short of people, even if beyond the Belt they were so picky in their choosing from Earth that an applicant who lived here felt like a resident of an old leper colony applying for a position as a masseuse.

Jan didn’t say any of that. In fairness, she couldn’t. She had been the one who insisted, who did all the pushing and coaxing and persuading until Sebastian agreed that they would apply as a team. They were the same age, but ever since their rescue in the ruined northern hemisphere and transfer to a displaced persons’ camp, she had felt like his mother. Her chances would be better if she had applied alone, but she couldn’t do it. Who would look after Sebastian then? He was not stupid, no matter what others said, but he was undeniably strange. He had been rescued as a young child, and even at thirty-five he remained in many ways childlike.

She said carefully, “They’ll interview us together, as a team. Promise me one thing.”

“I promise.”

“You don’t know what it is yet. Promise me that you’ll
talk
. When we applied for these jobs you just sat there like a big dead fish.”

“But we got jobs.” He was smiling again, serene and gentle. “I’ll talk. Or try to.”

“Come on, then. Let’s at least try to make ourselves look presentable.” Janeed smiled back and reached out a hand to help him to his feet. She loved Sebastian, and she always would. Not in any sexual way, of course—she recoiled at the thought—but as the closest thing to family that she had ever known. Her parents, like Sebastian’s, were faceless and nameless, among the seventy percent of Earth’s eleven billion people who had died in the first few minutes of the Great War. Janeed should have been old enough to remember what her mother and father looked like, but her first memory was of a terrifying airplane ride followed by a hot meal at a displaced persons’ camp in Arenas. Before that: nothing.

*   *   *

The interviewer was a woman, not a man. She was a bone-thin redhead, with thin, tight lips. She wore the dark-green uniform of Outer System civilian government, and she appeared as confused by them as Janeed was nervous of her.

“Janeed Jannex and Sebastian Birch,” the interviewer said.
“Miners.”
She gave the word great emphasis. She frowned at the screen of her personal, and then peered around her at the hundred-meter floating platform of Global Minerals and the endless water beyond. She had chosen to sit out on deck for the interview, although the sky was growing darker and Sebastian’s prophecy of rain appeared more and more plausible. “You described your jobs as miners?”

“That’s right.” Janeed glared at Sebastian. Beyond a muttered greeting he had so far said not a word.

The woman, who had introduced herself as Dr. Valnia Bloom—Dr.
Director
Valnia Bloom, head of the Department of Scientific Research on Ganymede—said, “Would you care to explain that?”

“Certainly.” Jan looked at Sebastian, waiting. He said not a word, and finally she went on, “This will take a few minutes.”

Sebastian said, “It will rain hard in a few minutes.”

Valnia Bloom seemed skeptical, and looked up at the cloud-barred sky. Janeed wondered, had the woman ever seen rain? It certainly didn’t rain water on Ganymede, or anywhere else in the Outer System. On Venus it rained sulfuric acid, and on Titan it rained droplets of hydrocarbons. On Triton, Janeed had read, there were geysers of liquid nitrogen, but they hardly counted as rain. Sebastian was staring vacantly at Valnia Bloom, who finally said, “We’ll see about the rain. Go ahead. Keep it short.”

Jan stared daggers at Sebastian. Her look said,
Talk!
After a long silence, she felt that she had to go on. “Well, most of the onshore fossil fuels of Earth were always in the northern hemisphere, which is still uninhabitable. The coal under the Antarctic ice-cap is inaccessible, too. But the southern hemisphere is booming, and there’s a big need for energy and plastics, and no way to satisfy it.”

“I thought that Cyrus Mobarak had solved your energy problem, with the Moby Midget fusion reactors.”

“He did, for anything that can handle eight megawatts and up. But there’s a need all over the developing southern regions for small, portable units that generate only a few kilowatts. That’s what
that
provides.”

Jan gestured to the extractor, sticking up from the middle of the GM platform, and the pipeline running away to the southwest. Dr. Bloom stared at it uncomprehendingly.

“Methane,” Sebastian said, a split-second before Janeed felt she would be obliged to jump in again. Thank God, a word at last! But apparently that one word was all they would get. Jan finally added, “Methane down on the seabed. Trillions and trillions of tons of it.”

“But methane is lighter than water. In fact”—Valnia Bloom was frowning, in the effort of recollection—“the atmosphere of Earth is mainly oxygen and nitrogen. Methane is a lighter gas than either one of those. It can’t possibly be found down on your ocean floor.”