Starplex

Rissa nodded. “Darmats it is.” She addressed everyone in the room. “Well, as you all know, Hek has been cataloging the signal groups he’s picked up from the darmats. On the assumption that each group is a word, we’ve identified the single most commonly used one. For the first message, I’m going to send a looping repeat of that word. We assume it’s innocuous—the darmat equivalent of ‘the,’ or some such. Granted, the repetition will convey no meaningful information, but with luck the darmats will recognize it as an attempt to communicate.” She turned to Keith. “Permission to proceed, Director?”

Keith smiled. “Be my guest.”

Rissa touched a control. “Transmitting now.”

Lights flashed on Rhombus’s web. “Well, that certainly did something,” he said. “The conversation level has increased dramatically. All of them talking at once.”

Rissa nodded. “We’re hoping they’ll triangulate on the probe as the source.”

“I’d say they’ve figured it out,” said Thor, a moment later, pointing at the display. Five of the world-sized creatures had begun to move toward the probe.

“Now the tricky part begins,” said Rissa. “We’ve got their attention, but can we communicate with them?”

Keith knew that if anyone could pull it off, it would be his wife, who had been part of the team that had first communicated with the Ibs. That effort had started with a simple exchange of nouns—this pattern of lights meant “table,” that one meant “ground,” and so on. Even then, there had been difficulties. The Ib body was so different from the bipedal human design that for many concepts they had no terms: stand up, run, sit down, chair, clothing, male, female. And because they’d always lived under cloud cover, for countless other ideas—day, night, month, year, constellation—there were no common Ibese words. Meanwhile, the Ibs had been trying to convey concepts that were central to their lives: biological gestalt, all-encompassing vision, and the many metaphorical meanings for roll ahead and roll back.

But that exercise had been a piece of cake compared with communicating with world-sized beings. Indeed, the Ibs had had no trouble understanding that particular metaphor—enjoyable, nonnutritive food being equated with ease—just as humans had no difficulty with the Ibese expression for the same sentiment, “downward slope.” Communicating with aliens as big as Jupiter who might or might not be intelligent, might or might not be able to see, might or might not understand any principle of physics or mathematics, could prove impossible.

“The babble on all two hundred frequencies is continuing,” said Rhombus.

Rissa nodded. “But no way to tell if it’s chatter amongst the spheres, or responses aimed at us.” She touched another button. “I’m going to try again with a loop of a different, almost-as-common darmat word.”

This time, the radio cacophony was halted by one darmat who was apparently shushing the others. And then that darmat repeated a simple, three-word sentence over and over again.

“Time to play a hunch,” said Rissa.

“How so?” asked Keith.

“Well, the first question we would ask in a circumstance such as this would be ‘Who are you?’ ” Hek and I had PHANTOM sample all the darmat words, and devise a signal that followed the apparent rules for valid word construction but had not, as far as we’ve been able to detect, been used by the darmats. We hope they’ll take this signal to be Starplex’s name.”

Rissa broadcast the made-up word several times—and, at last, the first breakthrough: the same sphere that had shushed the others repeated the term back at the probe.

“The rain in Spain,” said Rissa, grinning, “falls mainly on the plain.”

“A thousand pardons,” said Rhombus. “My translator must be broken.”

Rissa was still grinning. “It’s not broken. It’s just that I think she’s got it—I think we’ve made contact.”

Keith gestured at the display. “Which one is talking to us?”

Ropes danced on Rhombus’s console. “That one,” he said as a blue halo appeared around one of the red circles. He operated his console some more. “Here, let me give you a better picture. Now that we’ve got the green star for light, I can get good views of the individual darmats.” The red circle disappeared, replaced with a gray-on-black rendering of the sphere.

“Can you increase the contrast?” asked Keith.

“A pleasure to do so.” The parts of the sphere that had been gray or smoky now showed in a much wider range of intensities, all the way through to pure white.

Keith regarded it. With the enhanced contrast, a pair of vertical white convection lines were visible going from pole to pole, flaring out at the equator. “A cat’s eye,” he said.