Rollback

"Well," he said, "maybe Fraser’s right. I mean, the only thing SETI is good for is sending information of one sort or another, no?"

"Oh, I’m sure he is right," said Sarah. "But there’s nothing we can do about it.

People are going to send whatever they want to. It’s turned Carl Sagan’s old saying on its ear. He used to ask, ‘Who speaks for the Earth?’ The question really is, ‘Who doesn’t speak for the Earth?"

"That’s our number-one product these days, isn’t it?" said Don. "Spam."

He saw her nod ruefully. SETI, as he’d often heard Sarah say, was a mid-twentieth-century idea, given birth to by Morrison and Cocconi’s famous paper, and, as such, it carried a lot of quaint baggage. The notion that governments, hopefully cooperating internationally, would control the sending and receiving of signals was a fossil of an earlier age, before cheap, mass-produced satellite dishes became common, allowing everyone everywhere to watch ESPN and the Playboy channel.

No, these days anybody who wanted to cobble together the equipment from off-the-shelf parts could build their own radio-telescope array. Using home-computer astronomy software to drive them, consumer satellite dishes could easily track Sigma Draconis across the sky. Such dishes separated by wide distances could be linked via the Internet, and with the aid of error-correcting and noise-canceling software, groups of them effectively formed much bigger dishes.

The phrase "SETI@home" had taken on an all-new meaning.

Of course, the American FCC, and comparable bodies in other jurisdictions, had the authority to limit private radio broadcasting. At the urging of the SETI community, the FCC was trying to prosecute many of the individuals and groups that were beaming unofficial replies to Sigma Draconis. But those cases were almost certainly all going to be lost because of First Amendment challenges. No matter how powerful they were, tight-beam transmissions aimed at one tiny point in the sky had no impact on the normal use of the airwaves, and attempts to ban such narrowcasts were therefore an unwarranted infringement of free speech.

Don knew that some religious organizations, including a few new cults that had sprung up, had already built their own vast dishes, dedicated to beaming signals to Sigma Draconis. Some did it twenty-four hours a day; Sigma Drac never set in the sky for anyone whose latitude was greater than twenty degrees north.

And for those who just wanted to send one or two messages — crackpot theories, execrable poetry, political tracts — there were private-sector firms that had built dishes and offered various transmission plans. One of the best-known was Dracon Express, whose slogan was "When it absolutely, positively has to be there 18.8 years from now."

Nine-year-old Emily appeared, having come up from the basement. "Hi, sweetheart,"

Don said. "Just a few minutes to dinner. Set the table, will you?"

Emily looked petulant. "Do I have to?"

"Yes, dear, you do," he said.

She let out a theatrical sigh. "I have to do everything!"

"Yes, you do," Don said. "After dinner, you have to go out and plow the fields for a few hours. And when you’re done with that, you’ll need to sweep all the streets from here to Finch Avenue."

"Oh, Daddy!" But she was grinning now as she headed off into the kitchen. He turned back to his wife, who was visibly trying not to wince every time Emily banged the plates together.

"So," he said, "did your group figure out precisely why the aliens are interested in our morality?"

She shook her head. "Some paranoid types think we’re being tested, and, if found wanting, will be subject to retribution. Someone from France went so far as to suggest we were undergoing an evaluation by the Sigma Draconian equivalent of PETA, wanting to determine, before they came to eat us, whether we had the higher moral and cognitive standing of true intelligences, or were just dumb cattle."

"I thought it was an article of faith in SETI circles that aliens only communicated; they never actually go places."

"Apparently they didn’t get that memo in Paris," said Sarah. "Anyway, someone else suggested that we’re just one data point in some wider survey, the kind that would be summarized in multicolor pie charts in the Dracon counterpart of USA Today."

A timer sounded in the kitchen. Don patted her legs, indicating she should let him up. She did so, and he headed in. He rinsed his hands, then opened the stove, feeling a rush of hot air pouring out. "And what about orchestrating the replies?" he called out. "What did you guys decide about that?"

Sarah called back, "Hang on, I’m going to wash up."

He got the oven mitts and removed the pot, placing it on the stove top.

"Where are the napkins?" Emily asked.

"In that cupboard," he said, indicating it with a movement of his head. "Just like yesterday. And the day before."

"Stacie said she saw Mommy on TV," Emily said.