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laughing gas-yeah, I've heard.
Point is, my earnest darling?"
"That Marconi's antennas had to be at least a fraction of the size of the
wavelengths he used. Or else they couldn't radiate very much-or receive much,
either."
"That was the best he could do?"
"Da
-and this is the best they can do."
"Who?" Julia was thinking about antennas, which she had worked with for
decades but had taken for granted.
"The whoever that sent these signals at frequencies of ten kilohertz. Maybe
they picked up our transmissions-God help us! Maybe all our radio and TV for
the last century. But can't reply at those frequencies. Because, see, at
normal radio wavelengths, we're talking antennas maybe a meter in size.
Way too small for them. Instead, they go for ten kilohertz-because that's a
wavelength they can manage."
She blinked. "Not a joke, right?"
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"Nope. Divide the speed of light by the frequency to get the wavelength and
therefore the antenna size.
Old stereo systems had three speakers: the smallest, the tweeter, for
high-pitched sounds; the big woofer was for bass notes-down to low-frequency
rumbles."
Most of this was new to her, but she got the principle. "The thing that sent
us these messages-the ones the Wiseguy codes are grinding away at right
now-is-"
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He grinned. "Really big woofer-at least thirty kilometers across. Aliens are
giants."
2
THE TOWERING ICE
SHANNA SETTLED DOWN INTO her smart couch and went through the setup protocols.
Showtime!
Every time she went on watch, Shanna knew she was born to do this. From the
beginning of this long mission she had found her hours on watch the most
exciting she had ever known. Even after years on the mission, whose goals had
veered radically as they learned more, her pulse raced when she went on duty.
Being captain helped.
Telepresence duty was the absolute best. Boldly exploring, while sipping
aromatic Colombian. In the 3-
D environment she saw the Pluto landscape in sharp detail merely by turning
her head. No sensation of movement, or of cold, but sounds came aplenty: the
slow sigh of breezes, the crawler's clanking, the crunch of ice, a crisp fizz
of vapor boiling off, which was a lot like bacon frying.
It had been weeks since she had actually been on the surface, and that was the
crash. So this was the next best thing: phony Pluto. Digital discovery.
Earthside was superworried about safety after that crash-the
Chicken Little culture was quite frustrating. Politicians actually said, about
every activity, even exploration, that safety was always the number one
consideration.
Imagine human history if we had always felt that way, she thought. If it kept
on like this at ISA, nobody on
Proserpina might ever get to go back down to the surface. Come billions of
kilometers and stop a few hundred klicks short... crazy.
She peered at the landscape steadily, letting detail sharpen. Stark shadows
cut across the dirty gray plain, and the sun was a glaring point. Under
Charon's gloomy crescent the thin methane atmosphere scattered little light.
Darkly twisted, tortured sculptures jutted from the ice sheet. The slow-motion
weather here had worked on them for eons on the somber, sleeping plain. The
moon loomed huge and ominous above a sharp horizon.
It held a certain austere beauty, but the mere landscape told nothing of its
incredible cold. They had been
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here by the unexplained growing warmth of this place-yet "warmth" was the
wrong word. That grim, dismal view was only 120 degrees above absolute zero.
Compared with Pluto's temperature measured Earthside back in the twencen, a
brisk 42 absolute, this was Florida. A moment's exposure would not merely
freeze her; it would snap her bones into confetti from thermal stresses.
Yet here life stirred. Incredibly. She had been down there twice, and it was
still hard to believe.
Life on Pluto. Amazing enough by itself. Not just the simple legged forms that
crawled and walked these bitter, barren hills recent discoveries, thanks to
telepresence, letting her drive the crawler from orbit.
-
Or the flyers, angular or bulbous. No there were others who descended from the
sky, those from even
-
farther out, beyond Pluto: the Darksider machines.
Nobody, not even the most extreme exobiologists, could have guessed.
Shanna resisted a morbid feeling: that the fragments of crumpled metal she and
Jordin had picked up, mingled with those ice chunks, were actually scraps
of... well, flesh.
By now she knew better. Not flesh, but once living-if machines could truly
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live, even very smart machines like the Darksiders. But emotion yields slowly
to reason; she still thought of the Darksiders as autonomous intelligences.
Even after their captive onboard turned out to be a robot of sorts, able to
carry out instructions well but incapable of original action.
She inched her crawler forward. Working in a comfy work pod, directing the
crawler with telepresence gloves, she had to be careful not to alarm her prey.
Ahead, the gunmetal-blue, oblong Darksider didn't seem to notice. Maybe it was
recovering from its landing. Or playing possum.
Remember, you're the new kid out here. Maybe we don't know all that lurks in
these shadows. You might look like an intriguing new kind of lunch.
She moved her hands in their command gloves and made the crawler grind forward
another meter, crunching ice. Her low crawler was creeping on treads up to the
Darksider at a shadowy angle. In the incredible cold here slow was always a
good idea. Parts froze up without notice. Circuitry went dead, and even an
emergency warm-up couldn't revive it. When the crawler stopped or pivoted, she
sent a surge of electricity through it just to keep it warm. Moving here had
an ominous, ponderous feel that got on her nerves.
Another sluggish move, then a wait. The Darksider didn't seem to mind.
Scavenging for Darksider remains had turned out to be easier than skystone
hunting. Earthside wanted more parts, to better understand the different
Darksider designs. Skystones, a rather poetic name for the rain of incoming
meteors. She had come to like the whispery acoustic language of the zand, and
their name fit, a combination of "zany" and "grand." They were both, speaking
in long, wispy chords that
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great distances through the thin nitrogen-methane air. Chilled words, pealing
out with a rolling rhythm that reminded her of whale song. But unlike the
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