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.
