Starplex

“Rhombus,” Keith said, “scan it for anything untoward. If it’s clean, use a tractor beam to haul it into docking bay six.”

“Scanning… no obvious problems. Locking on tractor beam.”

“Keep it isolated inside a forcefield once you get it aboard.”

“Will do, with respect.”

“I wish it had arrived last week,” said Azmi.

“Why?” Rissa asked.

“It would have saved us all the work of building it.”

Rissa laughed.

“Shanu, Hek, shall we repair to bay six?” Keith said.

“I’d like to have a look, too,” said Rissa.

Keith smiled. “By all means.”

The four made their way to the docking bay. There, they stood behind a forcefield curtain, Hek about two meters to Keith’s right, Azmi just behind him, and Rissa so close to her husband’s left side that their elbows lightly touched. The cube was maneuvered into the bay by a series of invisible beams. Once it was set down, a force bubble was erected around it, and the space door slid down from the ceiling. They waited until the bay was pressurized, then went out to look at the cube.

It had weathered the eons well. Its surface looked like it had been scoured with steel wool, but all the incised markings showing the sample questions on top were quite legible. It turned out that Rhombus had maneuvered the cube in so that the face with the answer was the one the cube was sitting on.

“PHANTOM,” Keith said, “flip the cube a quarter turn so that the bottom face is visible.”

Tractor beams manipulated the time capsule. In the space that had been left for the answer, black symbols stood out against a white background that had somehow been fused to the cube’s surface.

“Gods,” said Hek.

Rissa’s jaw dropped.

Keith stood immobile.

At the top of the answer space was a string of Arabic numerals:

10-646-397-281

And beneath it, in English, was:

“Pushing back the stars is necessary, and not a threat. It will benefit us all. Don’t be afraid.”

Underneath all that, in somewhat smaller type, it said:

“Keith Lansing.”

“I don’t believe this,” Keith said.

“Hey, look at this,” barked Hek, leaning closer. “That isn’t how one makes that character, is it?”

Keith peered at it. The serif on each lowercase u was on the left side of the letter instead of the right. “And the apostrophe in ‘don’t’ is backward, too,” said Keith.

“And what’s that series of numbers at the top?” asked Pdssa.

“It looks like a citizenship number,” Keith said.

“No—a mathematical expression,” said Hek. “It is—it is—Central Computer?”

“Negative one thousand three hundred and fourteen,” said PHANTOM’s voice.

“No, it’s not that,” said Rissa, shaking her head slowly. “When humans write a letter, that’s where they put the date.”

“So what’s the format?” asked Hek. “Hour, then day, then month, then year? That doesn’t work. How about the other way around? The tenth year, the six hundred and forty-sixth day. That makes no sense either, since they’re only four hundred or so days in a Terran year.”

“No,” said Rissa. “No, it’s not that. It’s the year—the whole thing is the year. Ten billion, six hundred and forty-six million, three hundred and ninety-seven thousand, two hundred and eighty-one.”

“The year?” said Hek.

“The year,” said Rissa. “The Earth year. Anno Domini—after the birth of Christ, a prophet.”

“But I’ve seen lots of human numbering before,” said Hek. “Yes, you separate big numbers into thousands groups—my people do it into ten thousands. But I thought you used—what do you call them?—those subscripted curlicues?”

“Commas,” said Rissa. “We do use commas, or spaces.” She seemed to be having trouble keeping her balance; she moved over to the docking-bay wall and leaned against it. “But… but imagine a time so far in the future that English isn’t used anymore… a time in which it’s been millions or billions of years since—” she pointed at Keith “—since anyone has used English. They might indeed misremember the convention for writing big numbers, or how to make an apostrophe, or where the little extra doodad on a u went.”

“It’s got to be a fake,” Keith said, shaking his head.

“If it is, it’s a perfect one,” said Azmi, waving a hand scanner. “We built some very long half-life radioactives into the cube’s construction. The cube is now ten billion Earth years old plus or minus nine hundred million. The only way to fake that kind of dating would be to manufacture a counterfeit cube using the correct ratio of isotopes to give that apparent age. But even to the smallest detail this one matches our original—except for the radioactive decay and the surface scouring.”

“But to have it signed with my name,” said Keith. “Surely that’s a mistake?”

“Perhaps somehow your name has come to be associated with Starplex,” said Hek. “You are its first director, after all, and, frankly, we Waldahudin always thought you took too much of the credit. Maybe that was not a signature. Maybe it was the address, or the salutation, or—”