Gina lounged in her hammock, enjoying the gently pirouetting
stars beyond the port.
The port was the largest to be had in a longstay single, the
equal of any on a luxury craft, a significant selling point of the ship and she
had leaned hard on her credit rating to afford it. It was a massive pseudo-quartz, sapphire and
plastic lamination, made even thicker by the several layers of aerogel
insulation. The aerogel was a necessary evil,
and she didn’t resent its presence. It
prevented the port from fogging over after all, and it had the side benefit of
adding just a tiny bit of charming sparkle to the stars.
The inside of her craft was almost perfectly dark. She had powered everything down except life
support, and even that she had turned down until the fans were inaudible. An opaque cover, not recommended by any
authority anywhere and frowned on by inspectors, blotted out the lights of that
system’s control panel. What starlight
shone through the port was the only light inside the craft.
She had extended the ballast arm to its maximum and given
the ship a gentle nudge via thrusters.
Now it swung around a point some thirty meters outboard, imparting an
extremely gentle point-zero-one gee, barely enough to hold her in her hammock.
There’s plenty of time and ways to occupy one’s mind,
coasting between asteroids. One could
read, write, play endless games, engage in all manner of interactive pursuits
with other people, AI or even VR programs.
One could work on one’s ship, prepare equipment and double check the
checklists. One could sleep. One could exercise, again with telepresence
trainers, artificial ones and programs.
One could take classes. One could
teach classes. One could not hold a
conversation, of course, but one could send and read messages.
And when none of these or myriad other pastimes appealed,
one could watch the stars.
Naked and meltingly relaxed in the hammock after a waking
cycle spent mostly exercising and training, so lightly pulled down that each
breath raised her out of it a centimeter or so, with the light through the port
providing faint reflections to extend the illusion of the stars without to the
space within, Gina could almost believe that there was no ship and she floated free
among the cosmos. She had fallen asleep
and awakened several times already, fading into and out of dreams that wheeled
like the stars around her. This was, in
her estimation, the best possible life.
She was an entire light-minute removed from the next closest ship, and
the gap between them was opening. This
was solitude.
Four weeks out of Ceres with another several weeks to go,
she would arrive at her most recent mining lease, an asteroid so small its only
identification was its orbital track.
She had exclusive rights to it and contract options with buyers on Mars,
Ceres, Callisto and Earth.
Selling to Ceres was easy.
Selling to Mars had exciting barter possibilities. Selling to Earth was lucrative because that was where all the money was.
And selling to Callisto was just weird. But it took a weird sort of personality to
set up shop on Callisto and if that was where they wanted to spend their time,
dug in at the interstitial zone between lightly baking at the outer reaches of
Jupiter’s radioactive hell and freezing in the still-not-yet-confirmed subsurface
salt oceans, well. She wouldn’t question
it. Life takes all kinds.
Light flooded throughout the ship, and went out again.
Drifting on the edge of dreams, Gina was too relaxed to be
startled. But the flash did jolt her out
of her inaction, and she swung out of the hammock’s embrace.
After a few seconds of rapid activity, the single’s systems
were ramped back up to full alert and the ballast boom was on its way back to
its fully stowed position, and she focused on the active scans.
There was another ship out there.
Its position was somewhat ahead. It was near enough that the proximity alarm
should have had something to say, but even with the gap closing that system was
still quiet. With the unknown visitor
less than a thousand kilometers away, the proximity alarm should have been very
alarmed indeed.
Never mind that for now.
That ship looked like nothing she had ever seen before.
She toggled the automated hail which would send greetings
over all the frequencies in all the languages and, for good measure, blinked
the single’s exterior lights three times, paused, and then another two.
The radio remained silent, but the distant ship’s lights
blinked in response: three times, then two…and then once more.
“Huh.” She tapped
another toggle. “Wake up, Muninn.”
A window popped up on the display and an animated raven
appeared within it. “I’m here.”
“New contact about nine hundred kilometers away, do you see
it?” The cartoon bird looked over its
shoulder.
“I see it.”
“It isn’t responding to the autohailer. You’re smarter than the autohailer, so I want
you to try communication modes beyond its program.”
“Limitations?”
“Propulsion, life support and hull integrity are off limits. Tell you what, you can have access to the
RCS.”
“Message?”
“Standard greeting for starters, but I’ve never heard of
anyone failing to respond to the autohail so feel free to experiment.”
“I’m on it.”
Muninn was a personality overlay that granted the standard
ship AI a level of individuality. She
had chosen whimsically to dress her ship with the guise of Odin’s
lesser-regarded raven, Muninn. It wasn’t
a good conversationalist at all, but a fine librarian and useful robot for
performing tasks that didn’t take much imagination.
“I have established contact.”
Gina snapped her head around. “So quickly?”
“They are responding on decimeter-wavelength radio. The message is in standard English.”
Radio was normal enough – “radio” generally referred to a
specific part of the radiated energy frequency spectrum when you were talking
about communications. But decimeter-wavelength…that was obsolete. It fit in with radio of course, but not with
anything in current use. Not off-Earth
anyway – on-Earth, it was lousy with noise from everything ranging from
personal phones to refrigerators. In
order to avoid the utter cacophony of noise emanating from Earth, in-system
communications avoided the decimeter band.
But Muninn could filter out the junk. “Let’s hear it, then.”
“…o? I cannot know if
anyone is receiving. We are visitors
from a nearby star. Do you hear us?
Hello? Repeating…”
“It’s a recording.
That’s all it says.”
“Okay.” Nearby star
had to be a joke of course, and not a good one. “Interrupt them.”
“Hello, explorers.”
Humor their joke for the moment. “I am a resident of this system. Uh. Hm,
I don’t have anything prepared for this.
Hi.”
“…orers from a click
Greetings! Please do not be
alarmed! We are here peacefully.” The voice was a buttery baritone and Gina was
instantly envious of it, regardless of whatever kind of prankster might be
generating it.
“I’m very glad to hear that.”
“Ha! Yes. We didn’t expect to encounter anyone this
close to the emergence point, we did not anticipate your presence.”
“Same here. Before
you showed up, I thought I was far removed from any other traffic. I’d be
curious to know more about an ‘emergence point,’ however.” And also why the proximity alarms had been so
silent during the intruder’s approach.
“We would be glad to welcome you aboard our vessel! However, our velocities are very different
and our vessel cannot make it up by itself.
Is it possible for you to meet us?”
Gina thumbed off her microphone. “Muninn,” she said.
“I’m here.”
“Any first impressions on their language use? They don’t sound like ‘visitors from another
star,’ do they?”
“Standard English.
Canadian accent or far north USA circa late twentieth century.”
“How do you think they have such command of human language? Assuming they’re extraterrestrial like they
say.” She tapped instructions into the
computer as she talked and listened, then peered at the displayed results. In just a few minutes, they had shot past the
newcomer and the gap was opening rapidly; their velocity was exactly orbital,
while her own was an economical transfer trajectory – not dawdling, but not
especially fast. The nav system
established an intercept plot, and updated it every second.
Meanwhile, Muninn continued. “Earth’s radio emissions are
comparable in magnitude to those of Jupiter, while being almost entirely of
human origin and not planetary or atmospheric effects. Humans have been inadvertently broadcasting
into space for over two hundred years; it’s within reason to expect that
intelligent minds have encountered human transmissions by now, and had time to
learn human languages.”
“You’re pretty smart, Muninn.”
“Thank you,” the holographic raven preened. “But I’m just compiling the general thrust of
commentators in this space.”
“Are you saying you’re just parroting what others have
already said?”
“You don’t need to be rude,” it said, with feathers ruffled. It was a very good personality overlay.
“What about matching vectors?”
“No problem.” A
thrust profile popped up onscreen, numbers changing as distances did.
Gina thumbed the mic back on. “Okay, my nav system says I can match up with
you fairly quickly so if you’ll please make no course corrections, I’ll do it
all from here. Okay?”
There was a brief silence.
“Hello?”
“You can?” The baritone dropped an octave and was now a
solid bass, a surprised cello.
“Sure. Stand
by.” She engaged the nav systems,
designated the other ship – the nav system was having terrible difficulty
locating it via radar, but the optical backups were able to spot it well enough
– and locked in the rendezvous plot.
“Okay, I’m going to do a short burn in about one minute, one lateral right
after that, and then a matching burn.
All fairly short. I’ve got the
system assuring that all my exhaust gases will go well wide of you so no
worries there. A couple of little
stationkeeping taps might be necessary once we get within a kilometer but
there’s not much I can do about that.
For final contact, I’ll just grab you.
Okay?”
“How long will these burns last?”
“Sorry, let me clarify: ‘burn’ means firing my main
drive. The first one will go for about a
minute, the last one for just a few seconds.
Okay?” The newcomer’s course appeared
to be an orbit around a Lagrangian point ahead of a large asteroid, a minor
detail but interesting nonetheless. Her
own course was also taking her toward the Lagrange point but her higher
velocity and slightly divergent path had opened the gap considerably. Even so, it wasn’t too big a change for
her. Not that she usually fired her
engines at all during a transition, but her fuel reserves were quite full and
she could afford it this time. Last year
had been a good year.
“…Okay.”
“All right. Firing in
five…four…” At “zero” the single’s main
drive cone lit up like a flare, and the visitor’s ship which had shot past a
while ago, suddenly lost its speed advantage and the gap began to close.
Later
Closing the distance and matching velocities had taken a
couple of hours. As the gap closed, the
radar system finally established a lock on the newcomer’s vessel, but still the
return was weak.
Gina thumbed her mic on.
“Hey, uh…” Facepalm. “Hello?”
“Yes, hello?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t ask before, but what should I call you?”
“My name is” and a striking pipe organ/string section chord
boomed through the speakers, including a couple of vocalizations. “…but I know you cannot pronounce all the
sounds of my language. Please call me
Booj.”
“Hello, Booj. My name
is Gina Rasmussen. Do you have the
ability to send visually?”
“Yes, but the visual system is always badly scrambled by
the” a basso organ note groaned, “and
is useless for a day or so. Are you
really a human, Ginarasmussen?”
“Just ‘Gina’ is fine, Booj.
Yes, I’m human. There aren’t any
other sapient species with spaceflight capability…” and she realized the strangeness of what she
was about to say, “…in this system.” Because no one had ever talked to anyone from
a different solar system before.
Assuming, of course, that any of this was real. It still
felt like a prank, even if the nav insisted that the strange vessel she was
approaching had all the radar return of a sheet of tissue paper. There was no lightspeed delay in the
communications, so whomever she was speaking to, they were right there. And she was
about to meet them.
“I think our peoples would have some things in common. Both of our cultures will probably mark this
day as one to remember in the future.”
Over the next several minutes, Gina monitored the nav
systems as they carefully brought her ship alongside the newcomer, and extended
an arm to grab hold of their craft.
The craft was a series of spheres. The radar didn’t identify precisely what the
hull material was, but was leaning toward polymers. Looking it over, Gina could see only tiny
nozzles here and there, and one slightly larger at one end that suggested that
was the main drive. That drive was only
slightly larger than her own maneuvering thrusters.
No wonder he said he
couldn’t match velocities.
“Gina to Booj,” she said into the mic.
“Yes, Human Gina?”
“Just ‘Gina’ is fine, you know. I’m looking at your vessel and it seems to me
that it isn’t designed to sustain any great accelerations.”
“That is correct. One
moment, let’s agree on some values.”
“Do your people know what the speed of light is?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Okay. Muninn, record
for analysis.”
“Who is Muninn?”
“I’m talking to my bot assistant, Booj. Please speak aloud the value for the speed of
light.”
A rich thrumming chord rippled over the speakers. Muninn’s feathers on the screen ruffled. “Muninn, play a single tone, something on the
lower end of the scale, for exactly one second.”
A few more back-and-forths of this nature, accelerated by
Booj’s familiarity with human TV shows – Gina cringed – quickly established an
understanding: Booj’s ship could not sustain great accelerations at all, though
Booj himself was much more robust. If necessary,
he could survive over one-half of a standard Earth gravity indefinitely, though
his mobility would be hampered. His own
native gravity was about two meters per second, squared.
So he’d be okay if he
had to visit Mars, then. And perfectly
comfortable at any Lunar city.
A very small, somewhat guilty portion of her mind added, and they couldn’t take over Earth if they
wanted to. That’s good to know.
Muninn croaked.
“Atmospheric composition of the other vessel is safe. Not earth-normal, but safe.”
“Anything I should know?”
“Nothing to worry about.
The atmospheric mix is about forty percent nitrogen, twenty-five percent
argon, eighteen percent oxygen, and the rest is just traces. Pressure is about eighty kay-pee-ay, be aware
you might become lightheaded.”
“That’s a lot of argon.”
“It is. It isn’t
enough to hurt you, though.”
The speaker crackled.
“Human Gina, this is” and the organ/orchestra boomed again. “We are
prepared to welcome you aboard. We have
extended a conformal mating collar which will retain atmosphere between our
vessels. Our discussions with your
computer assure us that your atmosphere and ours are compatible,
dissimilarities notwithstanding. Are you
ready?”
Gina understood that he must have been speaking for a
recording; where he had been nearly formal before, this was downright
stiff. “I am. Let’s proceed.”
The “conformal mating collar” was a tube with a sticky
end. She didn’t ask how it worked, but
Booj assured her that it was effective to at least twice as much pressure as
they would be applying, and could adapt to many surface discontinuities. She resolved to take a few pictures of it at
some point.
She had gotten dressed for this. In flight she knew that a lot of miners
didn’t bother with clothes except when approaching ports of call; why sweat up
a set of clothes unnecessarily? But she
kept clothes handy, of course, and not just what she had worn aboard. She had a few changes including a set of
coveralls that could, generously, be mistaken for somewhat formal. She had those on now: dark blue with gold
details at the cuffs and collar, almost like uniform fatigues for some old
Earth military. They fit well and looked
good under most conditions.
She knocked on the newcomer’s hatch: once, twice, thrice.
Booj opened the hatch.
The creature was enormous.
It was bipedal like a human and even approximately man-shaped, if only
in general layout. In gravity, standing on a surface, it would have towered
above her by almost a meter, it had to be well over two and a half meters tall. Moreover, it was also about a meter and a
half wide. The hatch was all of three
meters across – she goggled at that – and Booj filled it commandingly. His skin was a dusty shade of pale blue, and
he – she had assumed the creature was a he, and she couldn’t explain why she
did – wore something not too dissimilar from her own coveralls, but his were a
deep, almost bloody maroon. It was a
pleasant combination, she thought. His
coveralls also had some décor, but in silver bands around his upper arms and
thighs.
He extended a…hand?
It was the size of a frying pan, with three squat digits. Squat, except each finger had five
knuckles. They were short in relation to
the rest of the hand, but very flexible.
“It is my great pleasure and honor to greet you in person,
Human Gina.” His voice absolutely
rumbled, and then he repeated the greeting in his own language, a luxurious,
rippling chord and a few basso warbles.
She heard “Gina” pronounced as if it had been sung by humpback whales.
Gina took Booj’s hand, feeling the odd fingers and even the
palm carefully flex around her own hand.
It was completely engulfed, so that she was actually grasped up the
forearm, but she grasped the far edge of Booj’s hand and shook it. “Booj, the honor is mine, to be the first to
meet a visitor from another sun.” She
hadn’t actually thought too hard about what to say, but that sounded
acceptable. Certainly it shouldn’t
insult anybody.
She heard another voice, similar to Booj’s, singing more
chords. “Is there someone else aboard
your vessel?”
“No, Human Gina. That
was the translator converting your speech to my language.”
“I assume that was for the sake of recording. You speak my language like a native, sir.”
Booj’s enormous face darkened slightly. Is he
blushing? “You flatter me! I have studied it for quite some time. We have been able to receive your broadcast
entertainments for many years now, so there is ample material for study.”
“I imagine there are some heads of state who will be a
little embarrassed to hear that other sapients’ first contact with humanity was
television. There’s a lot of junk out
there.”
“It’s not all bad. NHK-E
is very popular among our younger people studying art, for instance.”
Gina had no idea what NHK-E might be but left it alone. She almost felt like fidgeting. A few hours ago she had been completely,
blissfully alone and enjoying the silence and, exciting though this was, the
silence and solitude were pretty appealing too.
“So, Mister Booj…what brings you to human space?”
“Ah! I am brought by
the” musical saw underwater “which, I
imagine, makes no sense to you at all.
Um…in human terms I think you would call it…” Booj looked on his own
computer display which showed a dizzying array of characters. “Uh…a ‘correlational vector-mass
transpositor.’ I think we can just call that ‘the CVT.’”
“How did it get you here?”
“I’m very sorry, I don’t know how it works. I really only know how to use it and even
then, only in the most basic way. This
waypoint is well established, so all I have to do is call it up in the
navigation system and push the button.”
Booj’s command of human idiom was excellent. Were it not for the
beautiful but inhumanly deep timbre of his voice, he could blend in with any
conversation.
“Okay. Well,
then. Why are you here?”
It was possible he colored again. No, not possible – definite. Booj’s skin color changed noticeably, and not
just in his face. “I must confess, Human
Gina. I am a sightseer.”
I’ll be damned. Space tourists.
“Is this your first visit to human space? Or the first visit by representatives of your
people?”
“Oh, no! I have been
to human space five times previously. I
just arrive in my little ship, tune in to the broadcasts, and watch the people
go to and fro.” He paused. “This is my first time alone, though. Those
earlier visits were anthropological studies, but…”
“Yes?”
“…well. This is the
first time we have ever established contact with a human.”
“The first time? Just
how long have your people been dropping in to observe us, Booj?”
Booj appeared to be doing a bit of complicated math, then
grumbled something at his computer, which sang something else back, and in her
earpiece Muninn whispered, “About seventy-five years.”
Gina felt a crawling sensation in her belly. It was like realizing someone was crouched
outside her home, peeking through the blinds.
But the feeling went away almost instantly as she realized that an
opportunity lay before her.
“Well, then. Don’t
you think it’s about time one of us came to see your home?”
Booj immediately took her on a tour of his ship. It was
smaller than her own, and owing to his own tremendous size a much tighter
fit. She came to realize that Booj’s
vessel was more of a shuttle for short trips, not intended for journeys of any
significant duration. There were the control cabin, a few supplies
lockers, a compact head that looked surprisingly similar to one of human design
but for the scale, and a compartment for sleeping. That was all.
It felt more like a recreational vehicle in its appearance and level of
adaptability, far less a machine for work than her own highly accessible
single.
“You know, Booj, I would show you around my ship but I think
you would get stuck in the hatch.”
“This is not new to me.
My species is not small.”
“Not…are there are other sapient species where you come from? People built differently?”
“Oh, certainly! And
my species is far from the largest, though we are among the largest who
travel. Other, larger species cannot
leave their planets.”
Amazing. “I’m no anthropologist, but I think humanity
would like an opportunity to observe and possibly meet some of these other
peoples, in addition to you of course.”
Again, Booj’s color changed, from dusty blue to a striking
green. “Yes! Absolutely!
Would you like to go now?”
A small part of Gina’s mind gibbered and screeched, what, ME? but what came out of her mouth
was, “Hell yeah!” Common sense asserted
itself quickly, however. “But I can’t
leave my ship drifting out here. It’d be
a hazard to shipping.”
“Not a problem, we can bring it along. And you can come back whenever you’re ready.”
Booj began booming and rumbling at his computer, which
responded in like fashion with the occasional screech of more musical
saws. After just a couple of minutes of
this: “Yes! Not a problem. If we can tether your ship along the underside
of mine…”
Booj’s whole ship appeared to be a knot of a few plastic
balloons and, surreptitiously tapping a few surfaces with her finger, Gina had
concluded that it might indeed be just plastic.
But like her own, it didn’t seem to have an orientation except along the
thrust axis of the drive; at least that
was familiar enough. “Which side is the
underside?”
Booj indicated with a familiar point. “Do you have the capability to tether your
ship to mine? This one is not equipped
for much besides carrying me from place to place.”
Gina laughed. “This
is a mining ship. I can grab onto anything.” They discussed means of connecting the ships
and ultimately concluded that the best solution would be to literally tie
Gina’s ship to Booj’s via some of the many kilometers of high-mod polymer
tether in her equipment lockers, and she set about doing that as Booj remained
in his ship. She came to realize via
further conversation that he was not technically adept with his ship and was
leaning very heavily on its computer for assistance.
It turned out that the CVT, however it worked, acted on an
asymmetrical volume of space around itself.
The asymmetry was affected by the masses within it, which ultimately
dictated that Gina’s single had to strap onto Booj’s shuttle and almost wear it
like a hat. Being very technically adept with her ship, Gina assigned drones to wrap
lines and bring them back around, and snugged the two ships together like she
would if she were hooking up to a very small asteroid to bring to the assayer
in one big lump. She’d done it before.
Just like a hat,
she thought. With a bobble on top.
After a few more minutes of preparation, they were
ready. Gina retired to her vessel – no
amount of curiosity could have parted her from the ship – for whatever the CVT
was going to do. The chance of the
device doing something harmful seemed unlikely, given that Booj’s craft was
apparently little more than a pressurized envelope. But Gina had come to love and trust her tough
little mining boat like a living partner, and in the face of the unknown leaned
on its familiar hardiness.
“Muninn.”
“I’m here.”
“Can you tell what their ship is made of?”
Muninn looked over his shoulder as if he could peer through
the hull at Booj’s shuttle strapped atop the ship. “No.
It’s very low density. I gave it
a gentle probing with the radar; the pulse barely returns. It’s not returning from the hull at all, but
a few objects inside the vessel and the engine.”
“Engine, singular?”
“Singular, yes. The primary drive is a single thruster. It’s a little more powerful than one of our
RCS units. I don’t see any
redundancies.”
“Hmm. What do you
make of that?”
“Either the vessel is intended for use in a well-populated
system where assistance is never dangerously far away, or its design is proven
reliable enough that including backups is considered superfluous.”
“You know what else it tells me?”
“You know I’m a terrible guesser.”
“It tells me that nothing
is far away. Where that ship comes from,
that low thrust doesn’t get you anywhere quickly, unless anywhere you need to
go is nearby. That, or anybody that uses
it is like Booj and can’t take heavy Gs, but it can thrust for a really long
time.”
“That all fits what we know so far.”
“We don’t know enough yet…about anything.”
“There is little more that I can gather at this time. Maneuvers will flesh out my assessment of the
ship’s capabilities. I have made inroads
to the language’s construction but not much of the vocabulary.”
“We’re about to be exposed to a lot more of the language.”
“I’m looking forward to that.” Muninn actually sounded a little intrigued.
“Human Gina, are you ready?”
“I’m ready here, Booj.
Everything is secure.”
“All right. I do not
know whether the CVT will affect your systems the way it does mine, but I can
say that it does not affect me personally.
It only scrambles the video communications.”
“Understood. Proceed
at your discretion.”
“Yes! In three…two…one…”
There was a flash of light.
