Dance celebration. Did
you see the preparations in town? Supposed to celebrate St Michael beating up
on the Devil - I wonder how appropriate that symbolism
is. Anyhow, this ought to be a fun day. Later there’ll be a barn dance.”
“Meryl thought it was safer to
take the kids to the beach. Just in case anything gets upsetting here - you
know.” That was most of the truth. There was a subtext that Meryl had never
much enjoyed being in the same room as my ex.
“Probably wise. Our British
Shouters are a mild bunch, but in rowdier parts of the world there has been
trouble.” The loose international coalition of groups called the Shouters was
paradoxically named, because they campaigned for silence; they argued that “shouting
in the jungle” by sending signals to the Incoming or the Venusians was taking
an irresponsible risk. Of course they could do nothing about the low-level
chatter that had been targeted at the Incoming since it had first been sighted,
nearly a year ago already. Edith waved a hand at Arthur. “If I were a Shouter,
I’d be here today. This will be by far the most powerful message sent from the
British Isles.”
I’d seen and heard roughs of
Edith’s message. In with a Carl Sagan-style prime number lexicon, there was
digitised music from Bach to Zulu chants, and art from cave paintings to
Warhol, and images of mankind featuring a lot of smiling children, and
astronauts on the Moon. There was even a copy of the old Pioneer spaceprobe
plaque from the seventies, with the smiling naked couple. At least, I thought
cynically, all that fluffy stuff would provide a counterpoint to the images of
war, murder, famine, plague and other sufferings that the Incoming had no doubt
sampled by now, if they’d chosen to.
I said, “But I get the feeling
they’re just not interested. Neither the Incoming nor the Venusians. Sorry to
rain on your parade.”
“I take it the cryptolinguists
aren’t getting anywhere decoding the signals?”
“They’re not so much ‘signals’ as
leakage from internal processes, we think. In both cases, the nucleus and the
Patch.” I rubbed my face; I was tired after the previous day’s long drive. “In
the case of the nucleus, some kind of organic chemistry seems to be mediating
powerful magnetic fields - and the Incoming seem to swarm within. I don’t think
we’ve really any idea what’s going on in there. We’re actually making more
progress with the science of the Venusian biosphere...”
If the arrival of the Incoming
had been astonishing, the evidence of intelligence on Venus, entirely
unexpected, was stunning. Nobody had expected the clouds to part right under
the orbiting Incoming nucleus - like a deep storm system, kilometres deep in
that thick ocean of an atmosphere - and nobody had expected to see the Patch
revealed, swirling mist banks where lights flickered tantalisingly, like
organised lightning.
“With retrospect, given the
results from the old space probes, we might have guessed there was something on
Venus - life, if not intelligent life. There were always unexplained
deficiencies and surpluses of various compounds. We think the Venusians live in
the clouds, far enough above the red-hot ground that the temperature is low
enough for liquid water to exist. They ingest carbon monoxide and excrete
sulphur compounds, living off the sun’s ultraviolet.”
“And they’re smart.”
“Oh, yes.” The astronomers,
already recording the complex signals coming out of the Incoming nucleus, had
started to discern rich patterns in the Venusian Patch too. “You can tell how
complicated a message is even if you don’t know anything about the content. You
measure entropy orders, which are like correlation measures, mapping structures
on various scales embedded in the transmission -”
“You don’t understand any of what
you just said, do you?”
I smiled. “Not a word. But I do
know this. Going by their data structures, the Venusians are smarter than us as
we
you see the preparations in town? Supposed to celebrate St Michael beating up
on the Devil - I wonder how appropriate that symbolism
is. Anyhow, this ought to be a fun day. Later there’ll be a barn dance.”
“Meryl thought it was safer to
take the kids to the beach. Just in case anything gets upsetting here - you
know.” That was most of the truth. There was a subtext that Meryl had never
much enjoyed being in the same room as my ex.
“Probably wise. Our British
Shouters are a mild bunch, but in rowdier parts of the world there has been
trouble.” The loose international coalition of groups called the Shouters was
paradoxically named, because they campaigned for silence; they argued that “shouting
in the jungle” by sending signals to the Incoming or the Venusians was taking
an irresponsible risk. Of course they could do nothing about the low-level
chatter that had been targeted at the Incoming since it had first been sighted,
nearly a year ago already. Edith waved a hand at Arthur. “If I were a Shouter,
I’d be here today. This will be by far the most powerful message sent from the
British Isles.”
I’d seen and heard roughs of
Edith’s message. In with a Carl Sagan-style prime number lexicon, there was
digitised music from Bach to Zulu chants, and art from cave paintings to
Warhol, and images of mankind featuring a lot of smiling children, and
astronauts on the Moon. There was even a copy of the old Pioneer spaceprobe
plaque from the seventies, with the smiling naked couple. At least, I thought
cynically, all that fluffy stuff would provide a counterpoint to the images of
war, murder, famine, plague and other sufferings that the Incoming had no doubt
sampled by now, if they’d chosen to.
I said, “But I get the feeling
they’re just not interested. Neither the Incoming nor the Venusians. Sorry to
rain on your parade.”
“I take it the cryptolinguists
aren’t getting anywhere decoding the signals?”
“They’re not so much ‘signals’ as
leakage from internal processes, we think. In both cases, the nucleus and the
Patch.” I rubbed my face; I was tired after the previous day’s long drive. “In
the case of the nucleus, some kind of organic chemistry seems to be mediating
powerful magnetic fields - and the Incoming seem to swarm within. I don’t think
we’ve really any idea what’s going on in there. We’re actually making more
progress with the science of the Venusian biosphere...”
If the arrival of the Incoming
had been astonishing, the evidence of intelligence on Venus, entirely
unexpected, was stunning. Nobody had expected the clouds to part right under
the orbiting Incoming nucleus - like a deep storm system, kilometres deep in
that thick ocean of an atmosphere - and nobody had expected to see the Patch
revealed, swirling mist banks where lights flickered tantalisingly, like
organised lightning.
“With retrospect, given the
results from the old space probes, we might have guessed there was something on
Venus - life, if not intelligent life. There were always unexplained
deficiencies and surpluses of various compounds. We think the Venusians live in
the clouds, far enough above the red-hot ground that the temperature is low
enough for liquid water to exist. They ingest carbon monoxide and excrete
sulphur compounds, living off the sun’s ultraviolet.”
“And they’re smart.”
“Oh, yes.” The astronomers,
already recording the complex signals coming out of the Incoming nucleus, had
started to discern rich patterns in the Venusian Patch too. “You can tell how
complicated a message is even if you don’t know anything about the content. You
measure entropy orders, which are like correlation measures, mapping structures
on various scales embedded in the transmission -”
“You don’t understand any of what
you just said, do you?”
I smiled. “Not a word. But I do
know this. Going by their data structures, the Venusians are smarter than us as
we
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