Outward Borne (6 page)

NorHan spent some time replaying
the signal from XK-47. It was not particularly interesting; however
there were some minor modulations, no obvious pattern, but it was
contained within a particularly narrow range of wavelengths that
had a somewhat unusual energy distribution. At least it was
different from radio-emitting galaxies. She had seen plenty of
those. NorHan refocused the telescope on XK-47. The signal was
still present. She saw hints of a pattern and some interesting low
frequency variations when she focused on a narrow wavelength band.
It was something, so she set off to alert her supervisor. It was a
twist of fate that her supervisor and the next two levels of
management were not in that day, and NorHan ended by taking her
discovery directly to the Institute’s director, Kel UnFel, much to
her personal discomfort and future fame.

The entire staff gathered around
NorHan’s station to examine the signal. The continuous record was
copied and parceled out and most of Institute spent the day double
checking the event and applying their best signal analysis tools to
the continuous beam to see if there was any hidden pattern, or
nonrandom elements, within the apparent noise. No one could be
sure, but variations over the next four days gradually convinced
them that the radio transmissions were the unintended result of
local telecommunications between the inhabitants of some
planet.

Kel Unfel announced that
Extraterrestrial Intelligence Branch’s NorHan NorBa had discovered
an unusual radio frequency signal from the vicinity of the star
XK-47. It was the Institutes’ belief, almost certainly, that the
signal was generated artificially by an advanced civilization.
NorHan NorBa, the discoverer of alien life, became famous. NorHan
did not react well to her sudden and time consuming fame. She felt
increasingly lonely while traveling and making presentations. She
was adrift without her family and familiar habits. NorHan wished
that she had not paid any attention to that silly
signal.

ObLa went on to discover, not at
all quickly, that technologically advanced civilizations were thin
in the heavens. Lapses of several decades occurred between new
leads, which turned out to have a natural origin, and centuries
passed before a truly purposeful extraterrestrial signal was
intercepted. Finally, a clear, information-rich radio transmission
was received from a star about twenty-one light years distant from
ObLa, practically a neighbor.

This civilization, which the
ObLaDas came to call the Primaforms, was an experienced
interstellar communicator. They broadcast a continuous a stream of
data designed to establish a language. Transmissions consisted of
beeps; beeps corresponded to numbers, mathematical operators,
mathematic and geometric equations, and formulas describing
physical and chemical principles that were common throughout the
universe. The Primaforms restated all these numbers and symbols in
written form to establish a vocabulary and grammar, which they
eventually used to express more conceptual ideas and provide
information about themselves. The Primaforms repeated this
searching message on a 10-year cycle. Unfortunately for ObLa, they
were over seven years into the message when it was first
discovered.

Contact with the Primaforms caused
a sensation on ObLa that was as great as MaxNi's discovery of the
universe and NorHan’s first contact with an alien planet. This time
it was not a shock, but an anticipated, even longed for connection
with a fellow society. The ObLaDas never harbored paranoid ideas of
alien space invaders – always-hostile species that were bent on
destroying life-as-we-know-it for no apparent reason. Rather, they
felt themselves alone in the galaxy and longed to be part of a
welcoming community. ObLaDas were forever uncomfortable being alone
and would never venture out by themselves when there was someone to
go with. Their long-held frustration and the endless speculation on
their inability to make contact with another civilization was
immediately replaced by a passion to learn every nuance of the
Primaform’s message.

The Primaforms conducted their
communications as an extended monologue. They operated on the
theory that if two people exchanged their autobiographies, they
would come to know a lot about each other without ever conducting a
conversation. The fact that ObLa had missed years of preliminary
information that established the common language, meant that the
message was a great puzzle, some kind of code to be broken and
sorted out. The interest level was so great that the full text of
every message was made available to the population and the ObLaDas
used their collective minds to translating the code. Clubs were
formed; some even recruited experts who could help in the job.
Although they didn't succeed in sorting out all the text, they made
surprising progress and, when the transmitting station was ready to
send a return message, they were able to do so in the Primaform’s
own language. The clubs worked on their own texts, so that
communication with the Primaforms became an ObLa-wide community
affair.

This time, someone, or something,
was already listening. The Primaforms had picked up sporadic radio
signals from the early days of ObLa satellite communication and had
been sending signals toward ObLa for twenty years. They were now
expecting something in return. The Primaforms had already
established communications with several distant civilizations and
were always keen on finding new contacts.

The Primaforms had never left the
surface of their own planet. They lacked the resources necessary to
travel to other stars, but they shared what they knew and that
enabled ObLa to begin interplanetary communications with all six of
their contacts. Immediately, minus a few decades of lag time, a
wave of knowledge and innovation swept over ObLa. Communications
with alien species, and the continued stream of information from
those distant life forms, held the interest of the ObLaDas for
centuries. Revelations about alien beings and their planets were
reported and followed with cult-like intensity. Through all of that
time ObLa, like the other communicators, continued to search for
new contacts.

There are three hundred billion
stars in our galaxy. The well-known assumptions about the number of
stable stars, the prevalence of planets around each star, the
fraction of planets that had a constant climate and abundant supply
of water, and the probability that life would spontaneously
originate given the right environment, all lead to the belief that
there should be a billion planets in the galaxy that could support
life and even civilizations.

In fact, knowledge of the six
known alien planets dramatically increased the estimated
probability, for they sprung from diverse origins and not some
highly specific or unusual condition that might be supposed. The
collected knowledge strongly supported the fact that planets are
common to the majority of stars and that water is also a common
commodity within most solar systems. The presence of a continuous
life-consistent climate over billions of years was rare, but some
evidence suggested that abundant life forms could help maintain the
required stability once they reached an adequate
density.

Still, amongst the rampant spawn
of life, there seemed to be remarkably few technologically advanced
civilizations, that is to say, ones capable of radio transmission.
There should be millions. Why then could they only find six planets
that could operate a radio? Radio transmission is not a
particularly challenging of technology, so this was a puzzle. Over
the centuries that followed, a few new contacts were made and the
network of advanced civilizations gradually increased, but that
increase was not without setbacks. Most troubling to the ObLaDas
were those planets that initiated communications, but within a few
centuries ceased to broadcast. The brief appearance then the sudden
or unexplained disappearance of advanced planets led some ObLaDa’s
to believe that technology might contribute to the self-destruction
of its own society. If the survival time of an advanced species
were a few thousand years, instead of the thirty million years
typical of most successful species, it would severely limit the
number of advanced societies that were active at any given time.
This question captivated the people of ObLa. Their interest in all
things space and natural drive to care for their fellow beings, led
the ObLaDas to build the machines that would take them from star to
star to encounter intelligent life throughout the
galaxy.

Chapter 6 The Outward
Voyager

Dead or undead, that was the
question? Robotic ships would be easier to construct and much, much
less expensive than any ‘manned’ craft. At the maximum theoretical
speed of their propulsion system, 0.217 LightSpeed, it would take
years to travel from star to star, and decades to find the next
life-harboring planet. An uninhabited ship could be shut down and
cruise those long times and immense distances with little cost, but
that was not an option, it would not be good enough.

The mission would be too complex.
There would be too many unknown and unpredictable problems to be
solved, and if aliens, wholly unknown beings, were to be brought on
board, they too would need to be maintained. Feeding, housing, and
sustaining unknown alien life forms would be challenging as well as
unpredictable. It was not something a robot could figure out. The
ship must be ‘manned’. The Voyager would be huge, but the cost must
be borne.

The ObLaDa’s envisioned a mission
that would seek out intelligent alien life wherever it may be
found. How they might deal with these societies was not always so
clear. Should they avoid highly advanced civilizations, should they
ever encounter one? They might be dangerous. It was undecided, but
promising beings could be captured and studied even if they did not
yet have a technologically advanced civilization. The ObLaDas would
try selective breeding, education, and training to prod their alien
beings to establish a society, master the sciences, or become more
technologically adept. If that were so, and they expected that it
was, there remained the question, the puzzle, of why so few
advanced societies existed. They hoped to find out.

Only a large craft could support a
crew for the indefinite length of time envisioned. Indeed, the
Outward Voyager would never return to ObLa. It would traverse the
galaxy for however many millennia it could survive.

The ObLaDas did not possess the
capacity to construct the Voyager. Interstellar space travel was a
hard game to play and ObLa found that it even lacked the capacity
required to invent and develop all of the specialized technologies,
machines, and engines that would be required. In the end, the
Outward Voyager was successfully completed only because their
planetary partners contributed greatly to the program. The
Primaforms did more than anyone. They designed and built four
hydrogen fusion propulsion systems and the robotic crafts that
delivered these units to the vicinity of ObLa. That alone was a
three hundred year operation.

Technical challenges were one
thing; raw expense was another. No matter how much help it would
receive, one planet must bear the majority of the cost of
fabricating components, lifting them into orbit, and assembling the
craft in space. That planet must possess a tremendous supply of
surplus energy, material resources, and wealth. Only the richest
planet could attempt such a feat. ObLa possessed these resources
only because its vast mineral capacity had never tapped by its
frugal population. Even so, the proposed project would consume the
entire economic productivity of the planet for an equivalent of
fifty years. A terrific cost! Should they do it? (The simple task
of lifting the Outward Voyager components and assembly facilities
into orbit would cost as much as 1,000 trillion dollars if they
matched the Earth’s current best estimated cost of
$9,000/kg.)

It is not a quest that would
appeal to the people of Earth, but then we do not view aliens as
members of our extended family, or even as our friends. The ObLaDas
were very different. Their biologically driven emotions sustained a
desire to make some connection with those beings that they believed
must exist. To date, ObLa remains the only planet in our galaxy
that is known to have successfully conducted a ‘manned’
interstellar space flight.

And so was born the Outward
Voyager. It was a gangly, unattractive collection of ill-matched
components, vast, empty connecting spaces, and fragile critical
structures, all held together by a maze of cables and struts. No
interstellar vessel could be stocked with all the food, air, water,
and supplies that its crew would ever need. Too heavy, too costly,
manifestly impractical. When launched, the Outward was an almost
empty shell, albeit a very large one. The ship must be equipped
with the capacity to collect space-borne matter during flight and
to convert those basic elements into all the food, fuel, and
material that its crew would need to survive. The collected
material must be sufficient for the construction of new facilities,
and to meet the needs of any alien beings that might be brought on
board.

Space is not empty. Whole stars
are blown to gas and dust. This refuse is scattered in thin clouds
across our galaxy and often collected into bands surrounding solar
systems or wandering streams between the stars. The space through
which the Outward Voyager would travel contains an immense quantity
of widely disbursed matter. The vessel would sustain itself by
continuously sweeping these diffuse clouds using its wide
collecting grids and deceleration fields to slowly accumulate the
water, hydrogen and less abundant heavy elements that it would
require.