Golden Fleece

But it came back into favor early in the twenty-first century when it was shown that Pluto was an escaped Neptunian moon and that Neptune’s orbit and the Oort cloud had been radically perturbed by the close passage of a black hole some sixty-five million years in the past. The same event had knocked Uranus on its side.

It was soon discovered that the Titius-Bode law wasn’t just relevant to the Sol system. It also held true for nine of the eleven star systems UNSA had surveyed with crewless probes, the two exceptions being the o² Eridani system, with its complex dynamics of triple suns, and the BD+36°2147 system, which showed strong evidence of having had the orbits of its planets deliberately manipulated, what with worlds one, three, and five orbiting prograde and two, four, and six orbiting retrograde.

So: the zero bits were a scale of planetary distances for a system of eight worlds.

And the number of one bits? Relative planetary masses? Unlikely, given the range was only from one to sixteen decimal. In Sol system, the mass ratio of the heaviest planet to the lightest (discounting escaped-moon Pluto) is 57800:1; in the Eta Cephei system, it is 64200:1.

Ah, but what about equatorial diameters? Yes, for both the Sol and Eta Cephei systems, if you allowed even very tiny values to register as an integer one instead of integer zero, the order and sizing of the numbers would be just about right.

And that explained the first set of figures, the ones I’d discarded as anomalous: a single zero digit, to separate this part of the diagram from the ascending-prime-numbers page header, and 171 ones, representing the diameter of the star around which these worlds orbited, just about ten times that of the largest planet. What we had here was a slice through the ecliptic of an alien solar system.

The round numbers for the sixth planet—one hundred hex units from the star and ten hex units in diameter—meant it was likely the home world of the Senders. Of course, the scale used for planetary diameters and for orbital radii couldn’t be the same—the planets were vastly oversized in this representation. Ah, but by showing the one set of figures as relative to a value of one hundred hex and the other relative to a value of ten hex, the Senders were making clear that they were measured in a different order of magnitude.

But planet six was huge, meaning it likely was a gas giant, similar in composition to Sol’s Jupiter or to Athamas, the largest of the eleven worlds orbiting Eta Cephei. It was difficult to conceive of a form of technological life arising on a planet made of little more than swirling methane.

Page three hadn’t finished giving up all its secrets, though. There was still the second row of the message: a long string of zeros and ones laid out like this:

and then, as in the first row, enough extra zeros to pad out the line length.

Of course! The sixteen consecutive one bits represented the equatorial diameter of the sixth world, just as the sixteen one bits had in the slice through the solar system’s ecliptic. Following the model of that slice, the remaining zero bits likely represented orbital radii for the moons of the sixth world, and the one bits the tiny equatorial diameters of the moons themselves. The fourth moon, the one whose distance from the planet was shown as the attention-getting round figure of one hundred hex units, must be the alien’s home.

Fascinating. But what manner of creatures would live on the fourth moon of a distant Jovian-type planet? That’s what the third page of the message apparently told us.

FIVE

As mayor of Starcology Argo, Gennady Gorlov didn’t really have a whole lot to do. Terrestrial mayors always had to Ideal with garbage collection and zoning bylaws and municipal taxes and attracting business to their constituency and entertaining visiting VIPs.

Well, I took care of the garbage, we had no need for construction, there were no taxes to be paid—the members of the crew had left all their money back on Earth in 104-year guaranteed-investment certificates, and their salaries were supposed to be paid automatically into a trust fund—no commerce took place aboard ship, and I suspect everyone on board would be quite shocked if a visiting person showed up, regardless of whether or not he or she was deemed very important.

Mostly, Gorlov organized social events.

So it didn’t surprise me that Gorlov appeared to take a certain perverse pleasure in what had happened. We had no police to investigate the death of Diana Chandler, and, although there were trained mediators on board to settle domestic disputes, Gorlov considered himself to be the logical one to handle the inquest. And handling it he was, with typical aplomb.