Golden Fleece Page 3

  The three remaining pages were all also the products of two prime numbers. For pages one and three, the correct array was obvious: assigning the larger prime to be the number of columns produced the meaningful image. Pages two and four were more difficult to immediately comprehend, but it seemed clear that this was the Senders’ convention for layout.

  After the descending 13, 11, 7, 5, 3, 1 footer for the first page, there had been a pause in the transmission of seventeen hours, eleven minutes. An identical pause was repeated between each of the remaining pages. This, one might assume, was the day length of the Senders’ home world.

  The next page was more complex. Its length was 4,502 bits, the product of the prime numbers 2 and 2,251. Just two rows of 2,251 columns? What could that mean? I had contemplated both rows together, found no meaningful correlations, then had considered each row separately, starting with the and then four extra zeros to pad out the line length.

  one that came out on top. It consisted of the following sequence of zero and one bits, reading left to right:

  Well, the seventh pair of numbers caught my eye, so to speak: 256 and 16. In hexadecimal, 100 and 10—the radix for that counting system squared, and the radix itself. Nice round numbers. Obviously the Senders wanted to draw attention to them, indicating, perhaps, that they were the baseline from which the other figures were produced.

  I crunched the data all sorts of ways. Nada. I then decided to discard the first row, a zero followed by 171 ones, since the large number of ones seemed anomalous. Still nothing. Next, I proceeded to look at the remaining numbers of consecutive zero bits separately: 20, 34, 49, 79, 138, 256, 492, and 965.

  Well, if 256 was indeed the base figure, then perhaps I should look at the other numbers as ratios to 256. That would be decimal 0.08, 0.13, 0.19, 0.31, 0.54, 1.00, 1.92, and 3.77. Hmm. Nothing obviously significant about those proportionalities.

  Ah, but maybe the choice of having the numbers relative to the sixth string of zeros was significant in a way I didn’t yet understand. What would happen if I performed the math to assign the base figure of 1.00 to the first string, then expressed all the other numbers as ratios to it? No, nothing significant there either.

  If I made them all ratios to the second string? Again, nothing significant.

  The third string? Ah, hah! Yes, those numbers I did recognize. Rounded to a single decimal place, they were 0.4, 0.7, 1.0, 1.6, 2.8, 5.2, 10.0, and 19.6, the values produced by the old Titius-Bode law, the ratio in astronomical units of the distances from the sun to the planets of Earth’s solar system. More generally, the progression

  D = 0.4 + 0.3 * 2n

  where n equals negative infinity for the first planet, zero for the second, one for the third, and so on.

  Formulated in 1766, the Titius-Bode law seemed to do a good job of conforming to the real mean orbital distances of the naked-eye solar planets and, indeed, had led to the discovery of Sol’s asteroid belt, exactly where the law predicted a planet between Mars and Jupiter should have existed.

  The law fell out of favor in the twentieth century, as the outer planets were discovered at positions that did not correspond to its predictions—the discrepancy for Neptune being 22 percent and for Pluto, 49 percent.

  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.

  “So what the fuck happened?” he demanded, his voice its usual stentorian bellow. The little man looked out over the group of people he had summoned to his office: Aaron Rossman, standing, hands in pockets; Kirsten Hoogenraad, seated in the chair in front of Aaron, lon
g legs crossed; I-Shin Chang, triple Gorlov’s size, a four-armed mountain of flesh with a chair hidden beneath it. Three others: Donald Mugabe, who was Gorlov’s assistant; Par Lindeland, a psychiatrist; and Pamela Thorogood, who had been Diana’s closest friend.

  “Medically, it’s pretty straightforward,” said Kirsten, after waiting to see if anyone else was going to speak first. “She entered the ramfield, which, of course, funnels hydrogen ions into our engines. The ions are moving at nearly the speed of light. She died, instantly I should think, of severe radiation exposure.”

  Gorlov nodded. “I saw the report on that. What’s this about the radiation levels being too high?”

  Kirsten shrugged. “I’m not sure. She seemed to be exposed to about two orders of magnitude more radioactivity than one might reasonably expect, given the circumstances. Of course, even the normal level of radioactivity would have been enough to kill her.”

  “And the excess means?”

  She shrugged again. “I don’t know.”

  “Great,” said Gorlov. “Anybody else?”

  Chang spoke up. “We’re working on that now. I’m assuming it’s an anomaly—a temporary aberration in the fuel flow. JASON is helping my people model it.”

  “Does it present a danger to the ship?”

  “No. The habitat torus is completely shielded, regardless, and all the diagnostics JASON has run show the Bussard ramjet to be operating exactly to specifications.”

  “Okay,” said Gorlov. “What else? I see here that Chandler had a nosebleed.”

  “That’s right,” said Kirsten. “A little one.”

  “Did she use cocaine? Slash? Any other stimulant that’s inhaled?”

  “No. There was no evidence of anything like that in her body.”

  “Then why the nosebleed?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Kirsten. “There’s no sign of an abrasion or contusion on her face, so it’s not the result of an impact. It could have been induced by stress.”

  “Or,” said Chang, “by a drop in pressure. The ionized hydrogen flow would have played havoc with Orpheus’s internal systems. Cabin-pressure control might have been lost, resulting in a sudden shift in pressure.”

  “Wouldn’t that have caused an oxygen mask to drop from the ceiling?”

  Chang sighed. “It’s not an airplane, Your Honor. Normally, passengers and crew would be wearing their own environmental suits and would have put on their helmets and used tanked air in such a circumstance. A warning bell should have sounded, but the flight recorder was wiped clean— apparently the systems overload triggered a reformatting of the optical platter—so we can’t tell whether it actually did or not.”

  “All right,” said Gorlov, “so we know how she died. I’m still waiting for someone to tell me why.”

  Par Lindeland had done his best to grow a Freud-like beard, but his follicles just weren’t up to the task. Instead, a blond wispiness ran along the angle of his jaw. Still, he stroked it in good psychiatrist fashion before he replied. “Obviously,” he said at last, “Dr. Chandler committed suicide.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Gorlov, irritated with the Swede. “But how could that be permitted to happen?” He looked up at my camera pair mounted on the far wall. “JASON, you should have prevented this.”

  I was prepared for such a statement, of course, but feigned surprise. “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “It’s your job to make sure everyone is safe at all times. How could you let this happen?”

  “I was deceived,” I said.

  “Deceived? How?”

  “Diana told me she wanted to look inside one of the landers to get, as she put it, a feel for its cockpit dimensions. I offered to provide her with blueprints, but she said it wasn’t the same thing. She said she was thinking of designing some astrophysical test equipment to be used once we arrived in orbit around Eta Cephei IV. That equipment was to be mounted in a lander cockpit.”

  “But the ship was powered up,” Gorlov snapped.

  “Of course. I had to turn on the interior lighting so she could see.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “I wasn’t really paying attention—you’ll recall, sir, that I was engaged in one of our late-night debates and that required my full concentration. I didn’t realize what was happening until she had actually fired the main engines.”

  The mayor’s voice was louder than normal. “But the hangar space door is under your control. I’ve checked with Bev Hooks: she tells me even the manual door system runs back through you, so you could have countermanded Dr. Chandler’s instructions.”

  “True,” I said. “But I had to make a split-second decision. If I hadn’t opened the door—”

  “You initiated the opening of the door? Not her?”

  “Yes, it was me. Please let me continue. If I hadn’t opened the door, and at double speed on emergency override, her lander would have plowed right into it. She might, indeed, have broken through the door, if she hit one of the seams between the metal plates. But at the very least she would have warped the door beyond my ability to slide it open in future, effectively putting an end to the scheduled planetary survey.” The room was silent, except for the susurrations of human respiration and mechanical air-conditioning. I let it remain silent until I saw from his telemetry that Gorlov was about to speak again. Just before he opened his mouth, I jumped in. “I believe I acted correctly.”

  Gorlov’s mouth did open for an instant, but then he closed it and looked at his feet. At last he nodded. “Of course. Of course you did, JASON.” His voice grew calmer, if no less voluminous. “I’m sorry if I implied otherwise.”

  “Apology accepted.”

  Gorlov turned away from my camera pair to look at the others in the room. “Par, how could this happen? Was she under any kind of psychiatric treatment?”

  Lindeland stroked his quasi-beard again. “Certainly not from me, and certainly nothing formal from anyone else. I’ve talked to the others on board who have psychological training and to Barry Delmonico—did you know he’s a Catholic priest?—to see if she had turned to anyone else for counseling. The answer seems to be no.”

  “Then why did she kill herself?” The mayor swung his chair around. “Pamela, you were her friend. Any ideas?” Pamela Thorogood looked up, her face taut. She had had the sclera and iris of each eye dyed black, so that her pupils were lost against the pitch background. It was impossible to tell at whom she was looking as she replied. “Of course I have an idea,” she said. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? She killed herself because of him.” She fairly spat the word as she pointed a long finger at Aaron.

  “That’s not fair!” protested Kirsten.

  Light played across the black orbs of Pamela’s eyes as they shifted. The slight bulging around the lens cast different highlights across the darkness, the only indication that she was now looking at Kirsten. “Of course you’d say that,” sneered Pamela. “You’re the other woman.”

  “What are you talking about?” demanded Gorlov.

  “Diana and him,” said Pamela, again indicating Aaron by the point of a finger.

  “What about them? Rossman, I called you here because the accident took place in your jurisdiction—”

  I-Shin Chang placed his upper right hand at the side of his mouth, cupping his words. He spoke softly, but in his usual crisp tones. “Diana and Aaron used to be married.”

  “Oh!” said Gorlov. “Oh. I see. Um, Rossman—I didn’t know. I mean, with ten thousand people on board, well, it’s hard to keep track. I’m sorry.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “You may leave if you want to.”

  Aaron’s tone was as restrained as his telemetry. “I’ll stay.”

  Gorlov swung to face my cameras again. “JASON, why didn’t you tell me about this?”

  “You asked me if Diana was married or had relatives on board. The answer to both those questions was no. You then asked me to whom Diana was closest. The answer to that was Pamela Thorogood.”

 
“They can only tell you what you ask them to,” said Chang with a self-indulgent little chuckle.

  Gorlov ignored him. “So this—this accident—had something to do with your marriage, Rossman?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so. We’d been married for two years. We split up. She—she took it harder than I’d thought she had, I guess.”

  Gorlov looked up at Par Lindeland. “And that’s it?”

  Par nodded slightly. “It does seem so.”

  Gorlov returned the nod, then looked at Aaron. “Rossman, you realize the entire Starcology is abuzz with word of the accident. The shipboard media will want to do a story on it.”

  “It’s nobody’s business,” said Aaron quietly.

  The mayor gave a sad smile. “People have a right to know what happened.”

  “No,” Aaron said. “No, they don’t. Diana was killed in an accident. Tell them that. But don’t stain her memory by telling people it was a suicide.”

  “And,” said Pamela, her voice icy, “don’t let the world know what a rat you were.”

  Aaron, I knew, had always thought of Pamela, and her husband Barney, as their friends—both his and Diana’s. It was now quite clear whose friend Pamela had been in reality. He stared directly into her solid black eyes. “Pam, believe me, I didn’t want to hurt Di.”

  “She had been so good to you.”

  Kirsten stood up. “Come on, Aaron. Let’s go.”

  Aaron’s hands moved from out of his pockets as he crossed his arms in front of his chest, but that was the only sign that Pam’s words were upsetting him. “No I want to hear Pam out.”