Side Bet

2036 December 10 (in standard of rest)
Interstellar space, 1.8 lightyears from Sol

Space is big. Not even that memorable passage by Douglas Adams conveys the true magnitude. But, even so, in the void floated an incomprehensibly small flake, two hundred kilometers wide and lightyears from anywhere. The Gamble had ridden a laser beam from the Pusher vulcanoid for the better part of a standard-of-rest year, until the stars were distorted into the marginally familiar relativistic mandala of .85 c, and it would still be nearly five subjective years until it arrived at Tau Ceti, even though the crew had stood eighteen months of Watches.

Not that they were always on duty. Vesna, lieutenant in Eufor, formerly astrophysicist from Chicago, Paris, Meridiani, and Phobos, and currently junior member of the 18th Watch, had only been conscious for 37 ship days. Before her awakening by the now-comatose 17th Watch, the last she remembered was being wired in a casket in the g-wheel at DA-1. While the Gamble was loaded, dropped towards the Sun and the hundred-and-eighty-kilometer lightsail unfurled a hundredth of an AU from the Pusher, while the laser array pushed it up to speed, and while the earlier watches had stood through the last 1.8 lightyears, Vesna had been unconscious. Her metabolic rate, like that of all but four of the two-hundred-person crew, had been kept at less than five percent normal by gas and carefully metered drugs. The medical officers had insured regular physical therapy and monitored the catheters and the drips, but when she’d been awakened her hair was a good three centimeters longer. The first thing she’d done after satisfying the Watch 17 medic of her mental status, even before taking a shower, was to very carefully trim her nails.

As seen by the Space Group that had launched the starship, the hierarchy of the Watches was straightforward: the longer-awake watch was senior. So Major Akutagawa, late of the Japanese and US militaries, had been Officer-of-the-Watch for the past 9 days, when the 17th watch was relieved and put back into suspend and the 19th awakened. In 18 more days, Kapitan “aviatsii” Leonov would take the position when the Major and Vesna went off-duty.

In practice, Akira and Vladimir, and Vesna herself, were all subservient to the nominally junior 19th Watcher. Zhang wei Zhai Shujing had done a three-month stint in the hibernation lab at Beijing and her job was paramount: the Gamble was, among other bets, counting on the medical crew having all necessary assistance. Five person-minutes per suspended crewmember and a minute per hibernated livestock animal every subjective day meant a little over four hours a day of work for the entire crew, especially since the suspended goats and calves tended to chew, very slowly, in their chemically-strengthened sleep.

Adding in two hours a day in the farm that occupied a third of this side of the g-centrifuge, harvesting the crops sown by the previous four watches and re-seeding the hydroponic beds; an hour of KP and another of PT; meals and rest and personal time, it was no wonder that discipline and protocol had been abandoned, or at least adjusted, in favor of having a little more time for work.

Brigadier General Noriega, Gamble’s overall commander, had started the process when she had had the leader of the 2nd Watch be on the same sleep schedule, so that they would both be awake for conferences with Sol, when the time delay was still in the range where that mattered. So now Akira and Vladimir shared shifts where the work time not spent on medical and support duties went to monitoring all the electrical and mechanical systems of Gamble and its asteroid mining packages and the four fission-rocket planetary shuttles. While they slept Vesna and Shujing did astrophysics and biology.

Vesna’s job was simple in its description. The Group had put a long list of observations into the ship’s schedule: stellar positions measured to a fraction of their diameters using the optical telescope between laser downlinks and uplinks from home, reconstructing nebulae in three dimensions, measuring the distances to galaxies directly using parallax, testing relativity and the forms of quantum cosmology to more decimal points. Currently, the schedule was fixed. She would observe Tau Ceti and several other nearby stars with the radio antennas spread across the lightsail struts and send the data back to Earth. Over three years, arrays on Earth would observe the targets at exactly the same source time, spread out to account for the travel time of light. Then the astronomers at home, and perhaps Vesna herself, would be able to reconstruct the structure of stellar flares and compare them to those of the Sun.

It was solitary work, but Vesna hadn’t been able to spend so much time thinking in a long time. Already a paper by V. Grohar for submission to the Astrophysical Journal, describing an occasion when the Sun had acted as a gravitational lens as observed from Gamble, was ten light-days behind them on its way home.

“Sequence advancing. Observations of Alpha Centauri completed. Shifting antennas to Tau Ceti. Spectral and temporal observations over 3 MHz to 300 GHz in local standard-of-rest, to last the next three local hours. Vesna, I’ve implemented your requested interest filters.” Gamble spoke to Vesna, in its carefully neutral English, as she and Shujing sipped miso soup at the galley table after a late lunch.

Through her display glasses, there was a projection of Alpha Centauri’s radio brightness, in a spectral cube. The three-dimensional displays were complex, but Vesna had long since learned how to read them. At the low-frequency end of the fractal antenna feeds’ frequency range, the stars of the binary were not separated while at the high end the disc of each star was resolved, along with the complex structure of their interacting stellar winds, but there was nothing that was terribly new as compared to earlier observations from Sol. The observations of Tau Ceti would be far more important, even if they were as expected. After all, it was their final destination.

“Nothing interesting?” Shujing had finished the day’s status reports on the crew, recording only that the General’s hair remained abnormally sensitive to cosmic ray hits, and was browsing the last uplink from Sol. Displays hovered around her: a grid of hovering hanzi denoted the different message streams, Earth news summaries in three languages floated between the empty salad bowls and the ceiling panels, a model showing that as of January 8 2035 the dust storm damage to the Mars colony had been repaired levitated next to the right side of the table, and a video from the Chung Yeung Festival in Hong Kong was mirror-inverted from Vesna’s perspective.

“Not in the radio anyway. Anything in the mail?”

The biologist’s data-gloved fingers moved in flickering patterns and the hanzi shuffled. “The last results are in from the Santiago Olympics, we have another shipment of the technical literature, Lissajous says the Pusher will remain offline until late 2038 for expansion … wait a moment. There’s a package for you, marked personal.” A display came up, a featureless cube representing an encrypted message. “I don’t think anyone’s gotten one on their watch yet. Any idea what it might be?”

“I can’t say.” Vesna’s own fingers moved the cube over to her side of the table with one hand and traced out her password under the tabletop with the other. Text appeared inside the cube, Slovenian spelling out the sender. “It’s from my brother, but I’d thought we’d said goodbye. How can you talk over lightyears?”

Shujing smiled sadly. “Perhaps he had something very important to tell you.”

Vesna smiled the same way herself, remembering the pain of leaving Janez and Kal at Edwards as she boarded the orbital shuttle. She had come back from the Group’s posting on Mars for their wedding. Then eight months later she’d had to leave for final preparations for the launch at DA-1. They’d all known that they’d never see each other again. Vesna would skip forward in time by fourteen years, from suspension and time dilation, working twelve-hour shifts in a tin can, while Janez and Kal raised their children at Oxford and dealt with the future of the human race. Gamble was strictly a one-way mission, and even if Vesna could come home, she would be almost young enough to be her brother’s daughter. Everyone in the crew had paid a similar price for reaching the stars, but that didn’t make the pain any less.

“I don’t know. Let me see.” As she shuffled out the different files, Gamble spoke again.

“Vesna, Tau Ceti is acting strangely. There is emission from 1421.5 to 1421.6 MHz in local standard-of-rest, currently modulated at three hundred Hz. This corresponds to no normal behavior. Standard system checks are nominal.” A new display appeared, occupying the only large open space above the table. It looked like a distant relative of the ancient distributed SETI program, and showed a spectrum over a few MHz of bandwidth for each thousandth of a second of data. And at 1421.5 MHz, Tau Ceti was flickering. The main modulation was indeed a beat every 1/300th of a second, but the pattern was like nothing Vesna had ever seen in an astronomical source: on 1 beat, off 1, on 1, off 3 beats, on 1, off 1, on 1, off 1, on 1, off 5 beats, on 1, off 1, on 3, off 1, on 3, off 3 beats; the emission was on or off for either one, three, or five times the beat, in a pattern that was neither random nor predictable.

“You wanted something interesting, Shujing?” The astronomer’s hands moved in all directions as she called up every relevant analysis routine she could recall, and started a check on the position of all the known neutron stars. It would be amusing, if not terribly important, to run into a beam not visible from Earth. But pulsars never emit only in a narrow band. Could one of the antenna feeds have cracked?

The biologist looked up, and squinted through her glasses, a reflex since the display’s resolution was constant. She copied it, separated out the frequency bin containing the flickering, and rotated it into a sensible orientation. She studied it for a moment, then “Gǒu pì. How did you trick Gamble into lying?”

“What? What are you talking about?” Vesna’s raised eyebrows were still visible through three displays.

“You didn’t put this here? It’s English Morse.” Shujing wiped the projection of the domes on Mars to make space and started to dig up the maintenance logs.

“Morse?” Her voice shifted into the accent she used for voice control. “Gamble: parse anomalous signal using English language Morse code and display as text. Who accessed the array’s programming last? I don’t like jokes like this.”

“A moment. I’m running a backway through the medical monitoring logs. Our prankster presumably doesn’t want to be recognized.” Shujing had cleared the rest of the Earth package from the displays, except for Janez’s message, to make room for maintenance reports.
“I’d like to stick whoever it was in extra-deep suspend for a century.” Vesna turned back to the display with the decoded message. She had stood up to see the maintenance logs. She suddenly sat down when she saw the display, a hip hitting one arm of her chair as she forgot to correct for Coriolois. Her face showed a terrible grief as she read the text, then it became a mask of anger.

… William Chamer, Screamer for Caltech, reporting on the twentieth local day of the Test. Yesterday evening, we celebrated the return of indoor water to the South Hovses. There will be fewer people on the early morning swims in the ocean now that we have a number of functioning, albeit usually cold, showers.

The iron mine prospecting is progressing well. Mina’s seismics show that the ore body is about fifty percent larger than we’d thought. She’ll be shifting over to the oil survey next, but we’ll probably need to go further …”

“Vlad and Akira did some re-programming a week ago. It’s all in the log.” Shujing pushed a block of projection across the table. At that point, Vesna hit the manual wakeup alarm on the wall and then collapsed back further into the chair, her eyes full of tears, hands knotting themselves together in front of her face.

“Vesna! What is it?!” Shujing tried to make herself heard over the blaring of the klaxon, then hurriedly turned it off. She moved next to Vesna and sat down, gently stopping her knuckles from locking using one hand. “Talk to me.”

A few deep breaths brought Vesna under enough control to speak. “Look at that message.” The word was a curse pungent enough to be heard through an inch of vacuum. “Mina was my older sister. She was … on her way back to California from New Zealand when … they vanished. Now someone puts this into my observations?!” She stopped again. “I even met William Chamer when we visited her in Pasadena. He was a friend she’d met in a class. They were probably dating. I wasn’t too clear on those things when I was ten.”

The thoughts ran through her head like wildfire, burning through synapses far faster than Vesna could speak. A summer vacation on an isolated Greek island the summer before Mina started grad school at Caltech, she dissecting the rocks with the skills she’d acquired at Cambridge while I set up that dinky little telescope and played astronomer and Janez kept getting scared by washed up jellyfish while he built sand castles on the beach. On board, only the General knows about this, and she’d never do something so juvenile. A virus in that package I got today? But Janez wouldn’t make that joke. He was hurt by losing her, not as much as I, and nowhere near as much as Matka and Otec, but he understands. Roswell Union? They’ve never targeted us before. And besides, those two computers never talk to each other. Could it be real? But what in the name of God is at Tau Ceti?

Akira and Vladimir came clambering down the ladder from the upper deck, half in suits and half in sleepwear. The Major wasn’t smiling. The general alarm was only to be used in the event of an emergency requiring the entire crew. Leonov was a little more calm, but had the system logs for the past half-hour in a mobile projection in front of him, even though he could have had his glasses on for less than thirty seconds.

Before Akira could start speaking, Shujing pointed at the transcribed message, which was now over a thousand words long, and said “If either of you is responsible for that, I’ll invoke the psychological reasons for removing a superior officer. If you can explain it without being responsible, I’ll let you drink that Cognac one of the 3rd Watch smuggled onboard.”

For five minutes, no one spoke, as more words accreted to the bottom of the message, faster than a human could read, and all four read the beginning of the message again. Then they got to a section entitled “Summary to date”. When she read that, Vesna started to smile through her tears. By the end of it, she had begun to laugh.

Akira said “Lieutenant, I’ve been reading the logs. I had thought you were playing a prank, but they are there. Now I think this entire Gamble is a very practical joke.”

Vladimir stared at the Major. “You believe this?” Turning to Vesna, “I’d like to believe it too. You lost a sister in the Vanishing. We all lost nine thousand very gifted people. But I can’t help believing this is a hack. The schedule was loaded at the beginning of the mission after all.”

“Check the backup antennas.” Akira meant the dipoles stitched across the lightsail fabric. “They see the emission, although they can’t pick up the modulation. And if this part of the message can be believed,” he pointed at a description of images to follow, “the emission will continue while the main array sees the Morse stop in favor of this binary code.”

The Russian started to check the backup antennas himself. “What did you mean about the Gamble being a very practical joke?”

“I think you understand.” Akira looked at Vesna.

Vesna’s eyes had started to dry, and she still smiled. “Gamble was built by Astral for the Group. The Group was founded because of the Vanishing: all of our militaries wanted to have infrastructure and humans as far dispersed as possible. These Examiners are good. You think they wouldn’t have foreseen this? Even if the Techers hadn’t discovered this negative matter, this was the probably the fastest way for humanity to fly to the stars. That we can no longer easily kill our entire species may be even more important than our passing their test.”

She gave Vladimir a twisted grin. “I don’t like the idea of all of us, and the generals of eight armies back home who twisted their loyalty oaths to allow this project, being unwitting pawns any more than you do. The Examiners may have twisted their brains to get them to trust each other, especially the US commanders. But that is past. Mina was alive ten years ago, and I will see her again when we get there. Fourteen years, twelve lightyears and three stellar systems, but we won’t be alone.”

Shujing had pulled up the power budget for the fission reactor. “I think we should let them know we’re coming. After all, they won’t be expecting us.”

“Will they be listening?” Vladimir wiped the backup antenna display as Akira started to display the images that Chamer had been screaming from a satellite dish on a four story building ten lightyears away. “They won’t expect a directed transmission so soon.”

“From what Chamer’s said about their equipment, they’d be able to detect leakage signals. They’ll be desperate for news. I say we transmit until we go out of their beam. We’d be in it all the way if we weren’t tacking by Bluv. I’ve got a lot I want to say to Mina.” Vesna looked at the power budget. “Lord knows we’ve got plenty of uranium. We could double our power consumption and still have ten years worth once we get there.”

Akira meditated for a moment, then said, “The Group would approve, considering the number of their citizens who are there. Gamble: as Officer-of-the-Watch, I redirect the radio array to continuous transmission towards Tau Ceti’s only habitable planet. Priority to custom message to be determined, rest of time with the Gamble mission statement, the crew roster, the Group charter, and the most recent encyclopedia. Transmit in English Morse at 2843 MHz, modulated at 300 Hz, both in receive frequency, transmit power 10 MW. Vesna, can you draft the messages to Tau and Sol?”

The computer brought up the first image Will had transmitted. It was a strange sight: a crew of sun-burned mechanical engineers being cheered for a polyvinyl chloride pipe crossing the Caltech Athenaeum parking lot by a crowd dressed variously in shorts and light shirts, hiking gear, hunting camouflage, and sleepwear. A young man was grinning as he was bodily carried into an improvised shower. Akira also smiled. “I’ll set a notice to all future Watches. And we had all thought we’d left everyone behind.”

As Vesna drafted her message to Tau, she remembered Janez’ package, which still floated among the displays. She opened the files, to find several images of an infant girl and a copy of a birth certificate: “Mina Sarswati-Grohar, born December 10, 2034, in Oxford Children’s Hospital.” Now she felt the grief again, at the same time as the joy. Her sister was in front of her, thought lost for over two-thirds of her life, but her niece behind, to be seen only when she was as old as Vesna was now, if ever.

Kal would see that Janez heard the messages from Tau and Gamble as soon as they reached Earth. Hopefully, Chamer would do the same for Mina, and she would know of her family well before she thought she would.

Two beams of photons shot out of Gamble: a radio beam to Tau, barely outpacing the spacecraft relative to the stars, to be received in ten years by those who had spent two decades in exile so that humanity might survive, and a tightbeam laser to Group receivers in the asteroid belt, which would arrive at Earth on the younger Mina’s fourth birthday, which said simply “We will help them”.

For the remaining seventeen days of her Watch, Vesna listened to the Screamers. The campuses were … had been … joined by a wireless Internet link, a survey team from MIT had found a swamp three hundred kilometers from campus that contained trees that were only slightly shorter than the towers of Dubai, and the stream south of Caltech had been dammed, at a point fit for a later hydroelectric power plant. Mina, who had of course aged hardly more than a month since the Vanishing, came back to campus for two days, leaving the iron mine, such as it was, to the site crew, who were camping out of heavily modified cars. Then she had gone again, with two vans and a crew of six, carrying a large share of the gasoline reserve and a mass of seismic charges made from the native vegetation cleared from the newly sown fields.

Vesna was amazed at the organization and level of activity. Granted, not all was roses: the medical reports recorded broken arms and torn tendons and one person killed by the cyanide bite of a four-meter insectoid, and there was mention of an attempted rape, but there was no widespread devastation, no gunman possessed by the blackness of final despair shooting everyone who lived. It was as if there were one or several Examiners watching, and subtly intervening, but they had said they would not do this. Of course, if Akira was right, the Exam might simply be the excuse to force survival and some level of unity out of humanity. Perhaps they didn’t intend for us to fail.

No matter. Mina had been alive, and by all signs had continued to. She would have passed twenty-one Earthly years before Vesna could greet her, coming out of the sky on the flames of one of the Gamble’s shuttles, but she would be there. Vesna went into suspend content, as her greeting to her sister, with the pictures of her now-toddler niece, to skip the flyby of the Bluv red dwarfs and a decade later tickle the electrons in any antennas the Techers had kept aimed towards Earth.

For years the message continued, while the Watches held vigil. They listened to the Screamers, slowly transmitted all of their knowledge, and kept emphasizing that they were on their way.