Welcome Aboard Air Marineris
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Alien Hello

I got a call from Klara one morning. She broke in while I was working. It was right in the middle of a delicate maneuver, and I was a little annoyed. Usually, then, while I was working in the field, she left a voiceprint or a text so I could get back to her. Not this time.

“Linh called me. A radio transmission from afar. Can you guess? We’re the newest pen pals for the Cthaw. They’ve decided that we are another inhabited planet in this system. They may think that we are different creatures, and maybe they don’t. Whichever it is, they are willing to give us the benefit of the doubt. What about coming to a meeting tomorrow morning? I want to invite the others too. I don’t want to leave anyone out. There are many important decisions to be made quickly.

“Do you think Dini and Syd could close the clinic for a few hours? I want Lou and Chantelle, and Boris. Dieter and Hana should be there too. Later, we may want a general meeting. The more the better on something like this. It is a game changer for sure. Let’s make it in the cafeteria. That will draw a crowd. I don’t mind. If Starward still has it bugged, let them eat their hearts out. Serves them right. I think it’s shameful to try to keep a secret like this. And my suspicion is that the Cthaw agree.”

“I’ll call Dini. Boris and Lou and Chantelle are keyed in already. I connected them to the comm when you mentioned the radio transmission. Where else would it be from? And I know you wouldn’t want to keep this under wraps. For one thing, you called me over an open channel. If you had wanted to be covert about it you wouldn’t have done that. And you just said the other day you wanted to open things up wide.”

“I think that’s a complement, Mo. If it isn’t, it’s a very subtle way to manipulate me. If I weren’t as determined as you to make the most of this opportunity, I would be very wary of you. You’re right, of course. This will involve everyone. It’s a wonderful way to pull them all in. I did invite community-wide participation, but not everyone has responded to that. They will to this. Everyone will want a word. the implications are too important not to. See you tomorrow.”

I called Dini and broke into a consult. Not an operation at least. She was not at all annoyed at the interruption when she heard the subject.

“Dini, the Cthaw have called us. Linh monitors radio transmissions, and they came in. We are another planet to them. Klara wants to brief us on it tomorrow morning. Can you and Syd sit in? We think your input would be valuable. There are a number of the others on the list. We are holding in in the cafeteria, so there may be a lot of people attracted to the meet. That’s the intention. We think this is important. What about it?”

“I’m just going over to Syd’s office. I will tell him. We’ll get his answer.”

I waited a few minutes.

“Sure, we’ll come. All our patients will probably be there too. I would get up off my sickbed for this. Wow! We’re interstellar celebrities! Who would have guessed?”

“See you later, sweetie.”

Then, Bee.

“You were the first one from Mars at the party, Bee. Who do you think has called us?”

“From your tone, and the source, it must be Abner’s buds. I was wondering when they would figure out that everyone here isn’t crazy. They must have been pissed off when their big reveal was kept secret. They would have figured that out when they started to get the transmissions from us. But that would have taken another few years. They are six light years away. And, maybe, we’re not at the top of their dance card. There’s probably a better reason they’ve got the jump on this. Maybe they have put capabilities into the radio that they haven’t told us about. I think the prime radio is two-way, and they just haven’t told Earth about it. Maybe they were testing them. And Earth didn’t pass, so they moved on. Good news for us all. Maybe we can reverse some of the stupidity going on. Lots to discuss. When do we meet? Shall I tell Lou and Chantelle? “

“Where are you now?”

“I’m at work, of course. I can just tap them on the shoulder. You were at your workstation, totally absorbed, and you didn’t see me come in. This is very good news, Mo. It changes the balance of power a bit. We may be able to join the interstellar UN. Get out your aluminum foil. It’s alien time. I’m good for tomorrow morning. I’m always happy to goof around rather than work.”

I didn’t reply. When he gets like that, no reply at all is the best response. You just need to keep as dignified a silence as you can manage. I know it’s just because he’s nervous and can’t think what else to say. It’s his manly way of dealing with serious issues.

The next morning, we all gathered in the cafeteria. By what seemed common agreement, we sat right under the cam Starward had used to spy on us when I discussed the test with Bee. I guess it was a challenge. If they were still listening, and we had no reason to assume anything else, we were just as happy whether it was yes or no. They couldn’t do anything about whatever they heard from two hundred million miles any more than the Cthaw could do from six light years away. Distances that great gave virtually absolute protection.

As was now usual for these affairs, Klara was there already at the head of the table with her back to the autochefs. The sun on the valley displayscreen was low in the sky, just beginning its transit over the slash in Mars’ surface. Its low cast light lit the dust in the air and imparted the sense of a misty day, even though there could be no mist here. The miasma produced an unconnected mood in me. As if we were cut off somewhere. It put me on edge.

Klara had Linh at her side. Neither was conversing. They both sat there silent, waiting for us others to gather before starting. Bee came with Lou and Chantelle. They were equally silent and serious. Dieter, the environmental engineer, pale and slender, came in alone, as did Hana, our factory manager pirated from the Moon. Then we heard the door of the med clinic close. Syd pressed the display button by the door and a closed sign came up. Dini was beside him. She had gone into work early to wrap things up for a few hours. She was extremely conscientious, as usual.

In a familiar reprise, people coming in at the breakfast hour saw the group that included Klara and assumed something interesting would be happening.After three such meetings within several weeks’ time, it seemed a reasonable assumption. Klara wasn’t going to disappoint.

“Yesterday I got a call from Linh, here, that I did not expect. She told me that she had received a broadcast message that startled her too. It was from outside our system. Not from the Earth or the Moon. She’s very good at her work, you all know, and she checked. You all know that most radio signals are omnidirectional. This one wasn’t. She was receiving it on Mars, but the geosynchronous satellites weren’t receiving it. That meant it was somehow beamed right at her notwithstanding the relatively low frequency. As well, it had a measurable redshift. You wouldn’t get any detectable shift either from the Earth or from the Moon, even though they are light minutes away. The shift was appropriate for approximately six light years. No point in trying to go through the physics of superluminal transmission. No human would understand it anyway. They did it. It appears to be interstellar. I’ll let Linh explain further.”

Linh’s slight frame stood, and her delicate voice bit out the words. You could hear her clearly across the room. And you couldn’t forget what she said.

“Ditto on the physics from this ‘expert’. They call themselves the Cthaw. They say they live in the vicinity of Barnard’s Star, a small red dwarf six light years away. They want to correspond with us. They have sent us instructions on how to build one of the radios that were used in the trial by Starward. We will be consulting with some electronics engineers to build one as soon as possible. I will be reaching out to experts in communications research on the Earth to do that. That said, what to do with this knowledge is not for me alone to decide. I do need both theoretical and practical help to accomplish my task. My job is just to build the radios and collect the knowledge they impart.

“Another very interesting aspect of the Cthaw’s transmission is that there is no mention of messages being sent to Earth. They appear to be treating us as a separate species. That is the bare information. I think Klara wants to start on a discussion about what to do with this opportunity.”

She sat down and Klara stood up.

“So, what do we do with this? We know that the UN kept it secret to their own advantage. They would say they are trying to protect us delicate humans from an ego-crushing contact with a superior race. Is there an argument for us doing the same thing? Do we call them out on it now that we can prove that aliens are trying to contact us? Do we make it tough on them? Do we take it easy and back off the whole subject while revealing it ourselves? And what do we want to achieve with any action we take? There are a lot of big questions here. They will affect everyone in this community, not to speak of people insystem. Anyone want to start the massacre? Question one is whether we tell anyone. Do we try to keep it for ourselves like the UN did?”

The first one to respond was Dieter. It was almost as if he had been thinking about it all along.

“We can’t do that. Knowledge like this belongs to the world. Maybe someone else here has a reservoir of doubt that humanity will survive at all. Maybe I am alone in that. We aren’t out of the woods yet. Earth still contains the overwhelming mass of surviving humanity. You’ve heard the estimates. There could be another little gift on the way from the Oort Cloud. They were worried about that after the Impact. Centuries are less than seconds in astronomical time. It could still happen. Our off-world colonies are amazing achievements. But they are not yet genetically stable communities. It will be a hundred years before they are. The LEO colonies are the closest, but they are not there yet either.

“The point is that we cannot afford the foolish waste of resources. We need all the knowledge we can get as quick as we can get it to help save us all. That means sharing, that means stimulating all the minds we can. Every brain is precious. We are on our way to an open society. That’s why we cannot keep stupid secrets. I will tell you that I will never agree to cover this up, even if I can’t replace a rooftop to shout it from. That would put us in the same basket as those assholes at the UN. We tried that route in the past and it went badly for everyone. To take things for yourself is wrong. That’s one reason why the Cthaw distrust us. Our benefactors are obviously very patient. They are giving us another chance. Let’s vindicate ourselves. Like Dini says, let’s be real humans.”

Klara had been standing during Dieter’s address.

“Is there anyone here who has more to say on this?”

Not a word. No-one shifted to rise. Everyone agreed. It was out.

“Next question is whether we use this to extract something from Earth from pointing out how long they’ve been concealing this. What do you think on that?

Bee had something to say.

“I think we should stick it to them. We tried to get them to share the knowledge and we failed. They have just denied it all along. They turned off the radios and claimed we never had them. That was a real loss for us. People everywhere would be very angry if they found out their leaders were keeping this from them. It never hurts to knock the forces of authority down a peg. And I think it’s the only way we ensure they don’t change their minds and block us out again.”

I couldn’t restrain myself when I heard that.

“How come so fierce, brother? You’ve always told me to be wary of offending the mighty. They don’t like to be humiliated, you say, and they will replace a way to strike back. Why would we go out of our way to encourage that? What would a comeuppance like that do? Huh? What would it accomplish? We must still work with them. When we are revealing all, how could they conceal? We can always say that they kept the secret when we shared it. That won’t go away. They are still trying to keep it. I say, let them keep their foolish pride, and just mention that the Cthaw revealed themselves to us.

“We are not responsible for what the Earth does. We would be the newly chosen people, brother. These gods have selected us to receive another call. Again, with our own special commandments. Let them pretend they had a defensible reason. Maybe, if they come to regret their attempt to dismantle science, we could use their embarrassment to encourage them to improve conditions on Earth. Maybe we could make them stop using that perfidious mind bath. It must come from the Cthaw. And maybe we can show them that we can use the alien knowledge as inspiration and not dogma. Perhaps they’d bring back science. Certainly, when we continue on with the full resources of the Cthaw, they would be left behind. They won’t like that. Better to lead than to push.”

Then Dini wanted to say something again. She was become positively oratorical. Her shell had always been tight around her work and family, but then she was pushing out.

“I really don’t have much more to say than I said before. There is no point in trying to punish the people of Earth. When a patient comes into my office, I don’t ask why she got sick. It may have been folly that caused it, but that won’t help me in diagnosis. No point in blame. Why the UN withholds knowledge that could transform mankind is irrelevant. We don’t need to solve that. Monica is right. We need to do what we think is right and not worry about what others think. My opinion is that we spread the news of this amazing induction into the web of intelligent life and glory in it. That’s all I want to say.”

“Does anyone have anything else to say?

No one did. We seemed to have reached another consensus. I rather doubt that anyone else here wanted another conflict with the Earth. Bee was a different person than the rest of us. He had had frightening conflicts with them. He had reason to distrust them more than we did. Too bad for him. The rest of us just had the usual dumb resentment against intractable authority. Nothing personal. We were able to move beyond it. We would pull him along.

Klara put up her hand.

“If you don’t agree that we should announce this news and give Earth a pass on their prior knowledge hold up your hand. Nobody will think less of you if you have another opinion.”

Nobody held a hand up. Even Bee. He had changed his mind. He was not one to keep his opinions quiet. He stood up and grinned ruefully.

“I’m wrong. There’s nothing to be gained really. I shouldn’t be angry that they were trying to protect themselves and I got in the way. I survived and they failed. So what?”

Klara replied:

“Then it’s settled. Let’s get on to announcing it. We should involve the Lunar settlements and the Low Earth ones as well. I don’t think the Cthaw are going to mind if we share the news. I think this is going to need some kind of a news release, Linh. I had better get together with you to draft one up. And we need to include the news people. What kind of resources are you going to need? If the word we get from Boris is correct, we’re going to need someone full time to receive and classify the data. An electronics engineer should be in the mix too. This is going to be a big project. What do you need right away?”

“All they have sent is the announcement. Let’s involve as many of the Mars Explorer news-people as we can. Consider yourselves consigned to unpaid work like the rest of us. Brigid O’Brien, that means you. You’re the news hound. Can you help us prepare a release?”

She nodded without comment, uncharacteristic for her. She must have been as overwhelmed as most of the rest of us were.

Linh continued:

“They say they are going to send me plans. Right now, though, they are still repeating the ‘attention Martians’ broadcast. They may not have expected to raise our attention on the first pass. With my extra duties added on, I will not be able to keep up. Of course, I am recording everything on my own drives. I haven’t used the Cloud yet. I think the electronics engineer we mentioned would be a good bet. I can think of a few very good ones I knew on Earth. They are Chinese, though, and they have families. Subject to pressure, huh?”

“Since we are opening this up, who cares? They want to send it to some secret organization to ferret out secrets, the more the merrier. If they come up with something, more power to them. It’s obvious these aliens we are playing with are not just the ordinary aliens. They are sharp cookies. They weren’t fooled by Earth, and they won’t be fooled by us. We’re just going to play this straight. They are going to figure it out anyway. I had some worries before, but now I don’t. It’s going to work out.”

And that’s how it went. The word got around to the whole city, but no one voiced any opposition, We had all come to value openness. We didn’t like or trust secrets anymore. Even our own. Linh got an engineer several months later. She had recruited him through an acquaintance of hers from her PLA days. But it was not likely the guy was going to be sympathetic with the Chinese. He was a Uyghur. He was from one of the families that fled to Europe during the initial oppression. Even after a hundred years, those people don’t feel any affection for the Chinese government. There went any extra help we were going to get from the secret agents.

Linh and Yusup (that was his name) contacted several specialty electronics manufacturers in the LEO habs and asked them to help working out a way to build the radios. They would cooperate to build a small run of them. Everyone wanted them when they heard what they could do. They would take a lab to set up, but once they were paired, you didn’t need to do it again as long as they were powered. The ones we had seen had internal power cells that ensured a nominal charge, so you could take them away from a power source and they would still work. We planned to improve the reproduction by providing external inputs for specialized instruments. We had great hopes for them. They were going to allow us to share resources more efficiently. The UN could have gotten the credit for that, but they didn’t.They were too self-involved. Every organization ages to senescence eventually. The UN, in various incarnations, had been in existence almost two hundred years. Plenty of time to burn through the idealism of its founding.

I got back to work on the search for life and the search for resources. I liked that. I could use it as an excuse to cozy up with Dini. When our exobiologist arrived, she got together with him. He appreciated her medical knowledge and also her analytical equipment. Since the clinic was the only place machines like that could be had in Lowell, and since he insisted that she teach him everything she knew about them, she began to think it was a con to supplant her and grab her machines. She was even more wary of men than I was. I had cut lose early on.

When I first met her, and we were getting to know one another, we had traded war stories. She came from a family that was too close. I was fortunate not to have that kind of male relative. My mother and I were on our own. We had lots of other problems, but none of her kind. Maybe the good men do pay dearly for the bad ones. Yet I have a hard time feeling sorry for them from my flimsy perch.

On the first trek, the search for life was more hopeful than productive. We kept on discovering more methane sources, but my second trip back to that hole didn’t produce any more than I expected. The second ten meters didn’t come up with anything productive either. Oh, we got some of that tantalizing gas in the cap, but the core didn’t yield anything more than the first one did. Yusuf, our new expert, and the head of our new university department didn’t offer any more hope than I felt. He had come to my office to discuss it one day. He was a solid, sturdy guy. His skin had the same shade as mine. He had a strong nose and a heavy beard. He had a way of looking at you through low-lidded, calculating eyes. It distanced him and made him just a bit intimidating. Yet, he didn’t even seem to be aware of it. His manner was open and friendly.

“We’re not going to come up with it easily. On Earth those extremophiles come from the oddest places. The kind that are not easy to get to. They need the protection. Here, it comes from being deep underground. And the gas won’t come directly up, so drilling at its surface vent won’t necessarily be productive. We’re going to need to depend on strenuous efforts and a lot of luck.”

I kept my face poker straight. He didn’t need to come all the way from Earth to tell us that. It was obviously going to be an arduous search to replace life. There was no textbook on this in our library.

“Maybe our genuine aliens could help us with this. In their eons of civilization, they must have come across something like this. We may be able to access their advantage of experience. We now know that other life is possible, even though we don’t know what it is yet.”

He cocked his head. “That’ll work, Mo. they should be able to transmit. If you can receive, somebody must be able to send. For a communications radio it must be possible unless the radio is specifically throttled. It’s not unheard of. Ordinary consumer radios used to be for receiving only. But it doesn’t seem likely in this situation if they really want to communicate rather than just dictate. There’s not much of a relationship in that.”

That seemed pretty obvious to me, too. That mansplaining was very helpful.

“So, when will we be able to confirm this useful information? I didn’t think there was any doubt about it. Why manufacture a bunch of radios if they were all going to have the one function of listening to the Cthaw? I thought this was a new frontier in communications. Let’s replace out whether it is a two-way radio before we break the bank making a bunch of them, huh?

He was apologetic.

“We are still receiving the instructions, Mo. It’s a complicated business. They need to explain everything and we don’t even have the basics. It’s all new to us. It’s possible, but it isn’t easy. We don’t have the same resources they did on Earth. I’ll need to ask Linh if there is any outline of functions in the preamble to the instructions. That should tell us. Let me try to do that quick now.”

He texted Linh, asking her our question. She texted back that she believed they were two-way. Apparently, the Cthaw were half-way through telling us how to entangle cohesive groups of subatomic particles. That was a good indicator that it could embody full functions. There were many pieces of apparatus necessary to entangle the particles and attach them to a stable substrate. That was the hardest part of the process. The detectors to sense the changes in the particles and convert them into signals were much less complicated. She said once we had been able to figure that out, the rest would be easy. It would be much more along the lines of traditional radio reception. After all that explanation, she appended the answer, yes.

That’s the way it went on. In spite of the earlier portents of trouble and strife, it ended with a whimper. We continued on with the Marineris line, and the speed tests worked out perfectly with nary a crack. Hana pumped out the rails and pylons and we never ran out no matter how fast we were able to lay track. It was still going to take us years, but we were well on the way.

The factories proved very helpful for many other kinds of fabrication. We started making parts for ships and sections for new habitats in addition to our own supplies to sell them insystem. As long as we designed them for easy shipment, it was a cinch to send them for assembly by the web factories at the LEO habs around Earth. Sending stuff insystem was almost free. You would just launch them in the right direction and wait. The Sun’s gravity did the rest. LEO even specified the material for the pods and used them for materiel for their metal refining and alloy operations.

The agriculture was fabulously successful too. We could supply specialty products nobody else had. Rubin was closer, and grew many of the products we did, but they were more specialized in basic foodstuffs. The LEO markets, with their tens of thousands of consumers, needed lots of food, and would need more as time went on. They reached a critical mass, and soon many people wanted to go up there and avoid the generational wait for the return of normal conditions on Earth.

Every person who went to live there increased our chances to survive another Impact. It buoyed peoples hopes and lifted humanity’s eyes to survival and triumph over the destructive forces of the Universe. Living on a world where everything can be wiped out without a trace any moment makes everything you do seem pointless. It is bad enough to contemplate personal extinction, but to contemplate annihilation of every trace of what you know and love is almost intolerable. It was a weight on mankind that could only be removed by displacement of enough people to have other genetically viable communities. That would ensure humanity would survive anything but destruction of our star system.

We continued to work on the radios.The technology proved to pose problem after problem for our limited resources, but we still had their superluminal radio in our direction. We just couldn’t talk back responsively. The Cthaw, relieved of the guilt of working with monsters, turned out to be genuinely happy they found us. We were the second intelligence they had discovered.The first was already extinct when they detected them. They had despaired of ever replaceing another. They had waited for millennia to replace us. Imagine their disappointment in discovering that we were the kind of people who delighted in killing their own. At first, our accounts of killing and holocaust had repelled them enough to resolve to leave us entirely alone. Eventually, they decided that we needed some time to mature before allowing us to interact with them.

They conceived of a way to contain us until we did. They recognized a technological ability unbalanced by a reverence for life, and they determined to give us just enough to feed on. They recognized the negative implications of the UN’s refusal to share the information about them. They connected with them but muzzled the reciprocity of that connection. They got full cooperation on that from our fellows on Earth, who wanted to receive, but not to give. What it must have felt like to the Cthaw, whose only earlier communication was from an extinct species, did not seem to trouble them. To look so long and replace only a savage species like ours. It must have been bitter for them. In our better days, when we were not so concerned with survival at any price, there were those among us who yearned to reach other intelligences too.

When they detected us on Mars, they thought at first that we were a different species that had just arisen to communication, and they were pleased. Later they found out that they were mistaken, but since we were not sending blood and guts to them, they decided to give us another chance. Maybe the willing suspension of disbelief works for aliens too. That is why they beamed their message to us on Mars. I think they might have been right. We are different here. Maybe we are almost ready to interact with civilized people.

What we did in acknowledging the Cthaw and beginning the steps to converse with them did not change what the UN was doing. When we revealed the existence of the Cthaw, it created a firestorm of interest on Earth. It was viral all over the nets for weeks. It would have been simple for the UN to own up at that time and bury its embarrassment in the celebration of First Contact. But they didn’t. They let the whole thing wash over them. They didn’t change their handling of research either. They doubled down on that and announced that the salaries of the discharged academics would be terminated at the end of the year. That started a flood of applications to all the universities we had been starting. Everybody wanted to come on staff with us who was physically capable of moving up to space. The UN couldn’t have helped us more if they had specifically planned to. It was a rout for them and a triumph for us.

That move wiped out the sciences on Earth and made them dependent on us from then on. If they were expecting that they could retain the applied sciences and discard the expensive theoretical branch, they were wrong. Experiment and theory are interdependent, and you need them both to progress. Without them, the technology would eventually decline. Their encyclopedias wouldn’t help them.