Message

2047 June 9 5:15 UT
Test Year 19, Day 111, 13:45 CST/21:45 MST
Tau, Caltech Screamer Lab
White Towers Observatory

Earth lit up. This was what the Screamer antennas and the two comsat relays saw at first. The sudden increase in flux was of course the message Vesna had sent from Gamble a little less than ten years before. But the only thing the Screamers had detected from the solar system so far was an occasional leaked radar pulse and one brief directed SETI message, so it took several minutes to figure out what they were seeing.

The response time was that low because Will had been in the Screamer Lab, testing Sarah on her construction of a spectral analyzer. When the radio flux of the Sun at 2838.6 MHz went up by a factor of a million as the White Towers antenna watched, an alarm went off. The computer had been programmed to automatically compute and plot a spectrum of the signal, taking out the frequency shift in software. When Will looked at the display, he was briefly puzzled. Then he shifted it in frequency slightly, and typed in commands for recording and transcription of the signal intensity every hundredth of a second, blessing remote observing and the finesse of programmers who’d been using the same systems for twenty years. The signal plotted up on the display, slowly creeping across. And Will could read it, because it was in the same Morse code he had set up for Screaming, just much slower than he’d expected for a beacon.

… speaking. Repeat: Space Group starship Gamble to Tau Ceti d. Lieut. Vesna Grohar speaking. Tell Mina that Janez is married and has a daughter who bears her name. We will arrive in the Tau Ceti system from the direction of BL & UV Ceti and will come into orbit on 2048 Nov 20. Map and detailed trajectory information to follow. Please acknowledge by transmitting along that vector. At the time of your receipt of this message, we will be roughly 2.25 lightyears from Tau Ceti, having passed Bluv and adjusted our course 0.9 lightyears ago. This introduction will repeat in six hours. Switching to Gamble description and crew roster.

Gamble: solar-sail spacecraft, capable of interstellar flight with laser-assisted launch. Width: 200 km. Length: 150 km. Mass: 10000 tons. Crew: 200 Commander: Brig. Gen. Christina Noriega, USAF detached service. Ship commissioned 2032 June 2, launched 2034 …

Will was already turning on his transmitter. Sarah got the rhythm and tapped out commands for the reworked version of Celestia that was used in introductory astronomy, to dig out the position of the red dwarf binary.

Fifteen minutes afterwards, the current version of the Screamer’s message was transmitting towards where the starship now was, and Will had gotten permission from Sakhar (who’d taken office as President of the Institutes only six months ago), Julian, and Delbert to be appointed the Techer Foreign Minister. In that capacity, he drafted a message to Gamble’s commander. Then he confirmed to Sarah that she had passed EE52 and left her to see that the transmitter kept running. He went to find Mina.

Sarah read the message from Gamble in fascination. She had still had lingering doubts about the old Techers’ stories. But now there was a signal coming down from the sky, through an antenna and receiver that she had helped to build. So she called Karen and Z and a half-dozen other friends, and they all piled into the Screamer Lab to watch the message from Earth. It was, after all, several years early. They got an extra ten minutes or so of lead by watching the live feed rather than reading it off of the system. First came the graphics of Gamble: light sail and gravity wheel, mining packages and zero gravity breeder reactor, the two fission-rocket tugs. They saw the crew cold in their suspended sleep. The girls cooed over the pictures of Mina the younger, then giggled when Karen remembered that her cousin was now almost thirteen.

Then there came the Space Group charter: the history of secret appropriations from the military, the asteroid mining, the deliberate collision to make the Pusher, the bases on Mars and throughout the asteroid belt, the massive solar power. And then the selection of material from Gamble’s reference library. Vesna had started with an updated astronomical database, which took three days to all arrive.

The message Will and Sarah had just started to transmit would reach the Gamble 1.216 years later, when they of course would be 1.216 light years out. Will observed that his first calculation of arrival times was only approximate – the errors would be roughly eight hours. So when the first data packets of Gambler astronomy arrived, Will began to correct his estimate for the length of the Test.

Gamble had provided incredibly good positions and proper motions on a large number of stars: with a baseline of almost two lightyears and a large optical telescope, they provided the position of Tau Ceti relative to Sol to roughly half the diameter of the star. Using this, Will worked out the length of the Test to the nearest second in the Tau standard of rest. Then he compared the Gamble ephemeris for all the other objects in the system.

With the microsats in orbit, and with twenty years of astronomical observations from the ground, the Techer information on Tau’s system was quite detailed. Even before the Failure War, Sturm had set up radar pings of the inner planets and a few scattered asteroids: the positions of the rocky spheres that were Shamu, Moby, and Tursopsis were known to 200 kilometers. Skana, at 10 AU out, was only known to 10000 kilometers, only about a factor of two better than Gamble’s absolute measurements.

But the astronomers went wild when they saw the rest of the Gamble data: the error in the position of stars was 1 astronomical unit at 100 parsecs. S Doradus’ distance to was given to 1 parsec out of 52000 and at Andromeda they had measured the proper motions of stars in the galaxy’s disc. For the Whirlpool Galaxy and in the Virgo and Fornax clusters, parallax values measured positions directly that had been estimated crudely by timing Cepheid variables. The implications of the data might all have been worked out on Earth five or ten years before, but the Techers were still glad to actually have serious data to work on again. Of course, once Gamble reached Tau, far better data would be available to the Techer astronomers well before it was available on Earth. Ideas flew for finding more Earthlike planets than the five that were in the Group’s catalog, incredibly stringent tests of universal curvature, locating the Examiners by searching for the topological defects of their wormholes.

Then there came the news from Earth. Only two other members of the crew, besides Vesna, had news of the families of the Techers, but everyone whirled under the onslaught of twenty years of history:

There had been constant warfare in the central African nations as they fought for the ability to exploit and sell the diminishing natural resources of the continent while dealing with the pressures of water shortages and mutations to corn rust and HIV, even as the last was first stopped in its spread and eventually cured. The message included the details of the complicated biochemical engineering of the cure, which the Techers could barely make. In any case, it had arrived fifteen years too late for the last of the fourteen patients whose records were now in the Techer morgues.

Climate change had continued, despite eventual cuts from the United States when the price of oil had gone so high as to nearly crash the economy during the interventionist period after the Vanishing. China’s industrialization had brought the total amount of carbon dioxide emissions up, although they too were shifting over to a more sustainable grid because no one could survive to a healthy old age in half of the cities any more. Weather patterns had shifted and forced the messy evacuation of several coastal zones and changed what crops were grown where. Emissions were just leveling off in the mid 2030’s.

Astral Mining’s near-monopoly on space industry, aided covertly by the Group’s generals, was the only thing that had kept a long-range space program functioning. The budgets of NASA and ESA and the Russian and Chinese programs had been slashed to almost nothing as their sponsors tried to fund a massive re-building of the power grid without raising taxes or decreasing military budgets.

There were also technological advances: the Group’s full design for the Gamble spacecraft and their launching lasers, their specifications for the nuclear-thermal rockets they had been flying since 2030, techniques of biotech that made the twenty-year old genetic engineering Sakhar still used seem archaic. Improved computers and algorithms: better ways to make circuitry, the specifications and operating systems for display goggles, the general-purpose AI that ran Gamble that was able to parse most English or Chinese sentences accurately. There had been no computational singularity. Gamble might be able to speak, but it lacked something of creativity.

All of the new toys would take a long time to develop with the Techer infrastructure. About the only thing they could do immediately was to reprogram Athena with a stripped-down version of the starship AI. Almost certainly, Gamble would be in orbit before Z could make it there as a Techer astronaut. But this merely encouraged Will’s son. He had recently developed an obsession with spaceflight, and had hoped to fly to orbit, but now he could hope to fly far further. Tau might be home, but he wanted to see the universe with his own eyes. So he started to plan it out.