Emprise by Michael P. Kube-McDowell

message from space?” asked William.
    “Yes—from the direction of the constellation Cassiopeia.”
    “There. What am I to do with you? You insist on making claims that are patently nonsense—except for the fact that it’s you who makes the claim.”
    “It wasn’t easy to convince myself. I spent many hours looking for less outrageous explanations.”
    “And because you failed to find one, you are scheduled to die next Tuesday in Old Bailey.”
    “They really will do that—for such a trivial offense?”
    “Haven’t you wondered why the prisons are so empty? In times such as these, there’s little support for feeding, clothing, and boarding the Crown’s enemies.”
    “And you are comfortable with that?”
    “Of course not. But neither is it something that I can change. What powers of review once resided with the House of Lords have fallen to me, and modest powers they are. I dare not give orders that might be refused. I do not believe that you and your party meant any threat to me. That was the product of a certain understandable oversensitivity. Nor do I believe your claim to have contacted aliens. As you know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”
    “We were prepared to offer it, and still are.”
    “Then do—now, to me. You have one hour to convince me. If you do, then there are some things I may be able to do for you. If not—”
    “How can I—if your mind is no more open than Smythe-White and the others.” William smiled. “But you’re in luck, because as it happens, I should like it very much if you were right. Please, begin.”
    One hour stretched into three, and then into dinner, served to them on silver trolleys by mute house servants. The session reminded Aikens of nothing so much as oral exams—except that for the first time in many years, it was Aikens who bore the burden of answering the jury’s interrogatives.
    The King questioned Aikens closely and knowledgeably. What steps had been taken to rule out the various sorts of interference which cropped up during such measures? Mightn’t the signal be some natural phenomenon creatively interpreted, much as when the first pulsar was tabbed “LGM” for “little green men”? What about Cepheid variables or natural masers or flare stars? How did he explain the fact that conscious searches conducted through the 1990’s in the Netherlands, U.S.S.R., and U.S.A. turned up no evidence of life elsewhere?
    Backtracking into space physics, electromagnetic theory, and biology, Aikens argued his case. The discovery of the Vegan halo in 1983 and the Beta Pictoris disk a year later proved at last that other solar systems existed, nay, were commonplace. Work in American laboratories had recreated elementary chemical evolution, through to the creation of the first simple self-replicating organismoids.
    With the general argument established to King William’s satisfaction, the questioning turned to the specific case. Here the monarch was less easily persuaded.
    “The original discoverer disappears. You did not collect the data yourself. The man who did does so in secret, so he says, and there are, of course, no witnesses. The signal is reportedly strong, yet you cannot tell me which of a dozen stars in that part of the sky is responsible. The message proves to be encrypted in English, which you can explain only by assuming they have received our own inadvertent signals.”
    “They say they did,” Aikens pointed out.
    “The translators say they say they did,” King William corrected. “Dr. Aikens, there is no good reason why a first contact should have to conform to the way we think it ought to happen. But—”
    “Would you believe it if you heard it yourself, from your own equipment with your own technicians supervising? Would that satisfy you that the message was only received here, not created here? Or would you think we had found some way of extending our fraud into deep space?”
    “How can that be done?”
    “Take us to any