Lissa studied hard during the next three months, reading every assigned text well ahead of the schedule. Dr. Shastri lectured on the history of the project, but he was at the school for only ten days out of every month, so they often had to hear him as a hologram recording. Max thought it the height of humor to walk through the 3-D image in the middle of a lecture.
Lissa saw Alek at meals and in the social room, but they were never alone for long. She woke up one morning and realized that she was afraid of him. He could take away everything she was and wanted to be and make her into someone else—and she might even like it. Love, at last, her mother would say, in a daughter who had been oblivious to puppy love and had never had a crush. I’m weird, Lissa thought one afternoon as she sat at her desk. Definitely weird. That was okay, in a way; everyone here was weird. Emily showed her imaginative menus that she had made up and asked if they looked delicious. Max asked everyone to tell him the color of his eyes once a week, as if he were working hard to change his shade of gray. Susan always looked guilty of something. Louis built toy houses out of toothpicks, which angered the chef. Cyril’s love was staring at 3-D slides of butterflies in his spare time, but he never talked about his hobby. It seemed clear that Max had found a girl friend in the village, because he disappeared regularly every Friday evening; but he never brought her up the trail to the Institute. All the students except Lissa were from Earth. I’m the only offworlder, she thought, so that makes me weird in their eyes, as well as for other reasons.
Only Alek seemed normal, even ordinary. Why was he here? The strangest thing he did was hike down to the village and come right back, for the exercise. Sometimes he would ask her to come, but she never accepted. What did he feel for the alien signal? Maybe he just couldn’t show it, and behind that wonderful smile lurked a brain more alien than the aliens who had sent the signal.
Her door chirped. She got up, went over, and opened it.
“Hi,” Alek said, smiling as if he had been reading her thoughts.
“What is it?” she asked firmly.
He frowned. “Well, I just can’t get enough of you at lunch or the social area. I think you’re avoiding me.”
“I am busy.”
“So are we all.”
“I should hope so,” she said.
He was smiling again, trying to break her control. “Aren’t you going to ask me in?”
She shrugged finally. “Okay, for a few minutes.” She went back to her desk. He came in and sat down in her armchair.
“So what do you think of this place by now?” he asked, putting one leg over the armrest and still managing to look serious.
“I don’t know,” she said, relaxing in her swivel chair. “We get to work on our own a lot.”
He nodded. “But we could do the reading anywhere. And it’s strange in the signal room, watching that dancing line and not being able to do anything about it. I think Institute people are watching us to see how we react. We’re just test subjects to them. I know I haven’t had any bright ideas about the message, and probably won’t for a long time. Have you?”
“No,” Lissa replied, watching him warily.
“It’s as if there’s nothing at all to do here, and there never was.”
“It’s too early,” Lissa said impatiently.
“Could be,” he said slowly, looking at her. “I’ve been thinking about you.…”
“What?” she asked, annoyed by his steady gaze.
“You, Lissa, you. Don’t you see, don’t you feel?” He put his foot back down on the floor and sat forward. His eyes were soft and caring, his voice low and rumbly. She tensed.
“What are you saying, Alek?”
“I’m attracted to you. I like you lots, but you haven’t given me a chance to know you at all. You’ve been avoiding me.”
“No, I’m busy, as you should be.” She swallowed hard, knowing that it was a sign of weakness.
“Come on, Lissa,” he said, leaning back, “what are you afraid of?”
She was silent, even though she had wanted him to notice her.
“You’re blushing,” he said.
She stood up. “You’d better go.”
He got to his feet and stepped toward her. “You’re afraid of me, aren’t you?”
“No …” she started to say as he leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.
“There,” he said. “Am I such a monster?”
“I never said—” she began, but the picture of Susan Falleta coming out of his room weeks ago now flashed through her mind.
Alek was turning to leave. Lissa hated herself, but she said nothing as he went out the door and it slid shut behind him. She sat down in the armchair and took a deep breath, wondering at how Alek had stirred her up inside. What am I? What is a human being, she asked herself, and why is so much of ourselves hidden? Talking to Alek had been like sleepwalking.
Then, as she breathed more evenly, she admitted that she was fearful of falling in love with Alek, or with anyone.
She got up and went to the door. It opened, and she peered cautiously out into the hall to see if it was empty. Then she hurried toward the exit and stepped out into the sunny courtyard.
The wind was cool, as usual. She crossed to the main wing, went inside, and took the elevator down into the mountain. The doors opened, and she walked down the corridor and entered the viewing room.
The place was often empty during late afternoon. It was her favorite time to watch the dancing signal on the big screen.
But she thought of Alek as she sat down in one of the empty chairs. She would have to make a decision about him and stick to it.
The signal danced on the screen, loosening and tightening as if being stretched between the ends of the screen, forming jagged triangles, deformed circles, and ovoids. It was an infinite string having a nervous breakdown, crying out silently …
Lissa got up and went over to one of the work terminals. The console lit up as she sat down. She punched up a review of past approaches to deciphering the signal. She had done so before, each time hoping to see more by standing on the shoulders of those who had worked in this field. The small screen ran the review at the scanning speed to which she had become actually accustomed:
The earliest efforts to decipher the signal were based on the study of Earth’s dead languages. Researchers looked to see if the signal was being repeated in different ways, hoping to establish at least the possible existence of an interstellar Rosetta stone (the original presented texts in Egyptian hieroglyphic and demotic characters and in Greek side by side, all saying the same thing). No such suggestion of a repetition was found; but even if it had been found, it would have been a small gain, since there is no alien language known to us that could have been used as a guide.
Lissa ran the text forward past the more familiar material, hoping to find a point she had overlooked:
SOME RESEARCHERS ASSUMED THAT A MESSAGE FROM AN ADVANCED CIVILIZATION WOULD BE MADE INTENTIONALLY EASY TO DECIPHER, BUT THIS IDEA ALSO PROVED FRUITLESS. EITHER THE POINT OF THE MESSAGE WAS TO SIMPLY ANNOUNCE THE EXISTENCE OF A SENDER, OR THE MESSAGE WAS NOT AIMED AT US OR ANY EMERGING CIVILIZATION. IT WAS A COMMUNICATION ABOVE OUR HEADS, BETWEEN SUPERIOR CULTURES, AND WE HAD PICKED IT UP BY ACCIDENT.
STILL ANOTHER APPROACH INVOLVED RUNNING ANALYSIS (USING ADVANCED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCES) OF THE MESSAGE ACCORDING TO ALL KNOWN CODES. THIS WAS THE SIMPLEST APPROACH, SINCE COMPUTER MINDS COULD COMPLETE THESE OPERATIONS IN A MATTER OF MINUTES. BUT THE MESSAGE MATCHED NO KNOWN CODES, PAST OR PRESENT. THERE WERE A FEW ACCIDENTAL MATCHINGS, IN WHICH THE MESSAGE SUDDENLY SEEMED TO MAKE A STRANGE KIND OF SENSE, BUT THIS HAD BEEN FORESEEN AND THE RESULTS HAD TO BE DISCOUNTED. THE PICTORIAL APPROACH—ATTEMPTS TO MAKE PICTURES FROM THE MESSAGE—ALSO YIELDED MERELY FORTUITOUS RESULTS. PICTURES EMERGED THAT SEEMED TO MAKE SENSE, BUT WHICH ON CLOSER EXAMINATION WERE SEEN TO BE CLEARLY IMPOSSIBLE. BUT THIS APPROACH IS BEING CONTINUED, SINCE AI MINDS MAY STILL FIND A MATCH SOMEWHERE IN THEIR VAST LIBRARIES OF ASTRONOMICAL RECORDS …
Lissa ran the material on fast forward, bypassing a mass of illustrative material.
ANOTHER ATTEMPT WAS MADE FROM THE VIEWPOINT OF EXOBIOLOGY AND ITS BRANCH EXOPSYCHOLOGY. WITH AI ASSISTANCE, COUNTLESS BIOPSYCHOLOGICAL MODELS OF POSSIBLE INTELLIGENT LIFE-FORMS WERE CONSTRUCTED, IN AN OPEN-ENDED RUN, BASED ON THE ASSUMPTION OF EVER-EXPANDING INITIAL CONDITIONS OF EVOLUTION AND BASIC LIFE MATERIALS, WITH A VIEW TO DERIVING NEW LANGUAGE POSSIBILITIES. BUT NO MATCH WITH ANY PART OF THE SIGNAL HAS EVER EMERGED FROM THIS OVERLY AMBITIOUS APPROACH, ALTHOUGH THE ATTEMPT IS STILL CONTINUING. THE CRITICAL OBJECTION TO THIS APPROACH IS THAT WE CAN NEVER HAVE ENOUGH DATA TO MAKE IT WORK, EXCEPT AFTER THE FACT. WE DO NOT KNOW THE SPECIFIC LOCAL PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS THAT WOULD LEAD TO THE EMERGENCE OF AN ALIEN LANGUAGE; SUCH LANGUAGES MUST EMERGE IN BASICALLY UNPREDICTABLE WAYS. INITIAL CONDITIONS AND BASIC LIFE MATERIALS CARRY NO UNIQUE POSSIBILITIES, BUT COME TOGETHER IN AN ENVIRONMENT TO PRODUCE NEW PROPERTIES THAT ARE NOT FORESEEABLE IN THE BASIC MATERIALS. WE COULD NOT PREDICT, FOR EXAMPLE, THE GROWTH OF A NATION’S SOCIAL HISTORY FROM KNOWING HOW COMPLEX MOLECULES COMBINED TO FORM THE FIRST LIVING CREATURES ON EARTH. STILL, THIS APPROACH, ASSISTED BY THE VAST SEARCHING AND RELATIONSHIP-FORMING CAPACITIES OF AI MINDS, MIGHT HELP US GUESS SOMETHING. THERE IS A SLIGHT CHANCE THAT SOME KIND OF CORRELATION MIGHT EMERGE FROM COMPARING OUR PROGRAM RESULTS WITH THE CONTINUING ALIEN MESSAGE.
Reviewing this material always made Lissa impatient. Even her own ideas had been thought of by someone else:
ANOTHER APPROACH IS NOT BASED ON DIRECT THOUGHT, BUT ON A LONG-TERM FAMILIARITY WITH ALL THE ABOVE APPROACHES AND THE HOPE THAT SOME INTUITIVE LEAP OR SUDDEN SIMPLIFYING INSIGHT MAY OCCUR IN THE MIND OF A RESEARCHER NOT YET OVERCOME WITH THE WEIGHT OF FAILURE IN THIS FIELD. BUT THIS IS PROPERLY VIEWED AS A LONG SHOT.
FINALLY, IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOME PART OF THE MESSAGE MAY BE DIRECTED AT US SPECIFICALLY AND THAT THIS WILL BECOME CLEAR TO US IN TIME.
Lissa sighed as the review ended. She had run her own exploratory queries into each of these approaches, hoping to glimpse some mistake, or something that had been overlooked. But she had Lissa sighed as the review ended. She had run her own exploratory queries into each of these approaches, hoping to glimpse some mistake, or something that had been overlooked. But she had merely repeated what had been tried by countless questioners. The massive record of how human
beings and Artificial Intelligences had struggled to understand the alien signal, without seeing in it only what they wanted to see, seemed a hopeless jungle of blind alleys. Perhaps only a direct revelation, preferably in some Earth language, would be enough to break the message; but that would be asking for a miracle. She concluded that the best possibility now seemed to be in the area of picture assembly. Somewhere among the millions of star photos and spectrum mappings there might be one that would match one received from processing the signal. Such a match would demonstrate that it was not some chance assembly of information, but a picture that might reveal something, say something so clearly that it would be worth a million words.…
She looked up at the large screen. The signal continued its endless dance.
What are you, she demanded silently. What are you saying? Why play charades with us?
Suddenly she yearned to be taken inside an alien mind and shown around. She wanted to see thoughts that were not human but just as good in a very different way. She closed her eyes and imagined those thoughts as winged creatures of light fluttering inside an alien skull.…
“Lissa?”
She opened her eyes and saw Dr. Shastri smiling at her.
“Yes?” she heard herself say in a wavering voice.
Dr. Shastri sat down in the chair at her right. “You come here often,” he stated, “to commune with our stubborn mystery.”
“Yes” she repeated.
“It appears to me,” he continued, “that you may be ready to take the next step.”
Suddenly she was curious. “What do you mean?”
He smiled sourly. “You know that this place is a selecting stage, and that more advanced work is being done elsewhere.”
“Yes,” she said again. “And I know that you don’t just recruit people from here, but from everywhere you can. This place isn’t very important, is it?”
He looked up at the signal. “Do you really think it’s saying anything?”
She swallowed hard. “Well.…”
“I want your honest reaction, what you feel most.”
Lissa thought again of what her father would say, and in a way he was right. “It isn’t about anything.”
“Go on.”
Lissa tensed. “I’m not sure. It’s just a feeling.”
“Don’t worry, think. Why would they want only to catch our attention?”
“To accustom us to the idea of their existence.”
“Yes, you’ve said that before, but there’s more, isn’t there?” His eyes sparkled. “Think carefully.”
Lissa’s mind leaped. She knew, but held back.
“You’ve guessed it,” Dr. Shastri said.
“I have?”
“It’s not so difficult. Many of us have had the same suspicion for quite a few years. It makes a good test for those who go on to the next stage.”
Lissa took a deep breath, and she realized that all thoughts of Alek had left her mind. She felt a bit guilty about it.
“Well?” Dr. Shastri demanded sternly. “What is your insight?”
“They’ve gotten our attention with this signal, but the real communication is still to come, in some other way.”
“Why?”
“Well, that fits with my idea that a signal need not contain a message of any kind. It may be intended to get the receiver to think about why and by whom it’s been sent. Anyway, that’s my idea. Not so good, huh?”
“It’s very good,” Dr. Shastri replied, crossing his legs. She noticed his gray slacks and old-fashioned jacket. Only his collarless white shirt seemed at all fashionable. “Can you be more specific?”
“What do you mean?” she asked, suddenly feeling stupid.
“How
else
would they be signaling us?” Dr. Shastri asked insistently. “Assuming, of course, that this is only the preliminary signal.”