Lights in the Deep (14 page)

Hopefully they’d figure out what to do until I got back.

If
I got back.

Those lights, they’d vanished over the hill towards Andy’s.

And all was strangely quiet.

The Camaro rolled crunchingly across the gravel as I left the station, wondering if I’d ever see my baby again. The AR15 was in the passenger seat, chamber cleared but magazine loaded and ready. Andy hadn’t lied, there were at least five hundred rounds of standard ball in the trunk, with several gallons of water and some MREs. I didn’t have a license for the rifle and hoped to hell I didn’t get pulled over by the Utah Highway Patrol, or there’d be some questions that would need answering.

As to where I’d go, that seemed pretty obvious. Andy’d had the foresight to put a hitch ball on the back of the Camaro, and I’d stuck my trailer on it.

It was time to hit the lake. Lose myself up one of the canyons, out of sight and out of the way.

My boat was a far cry from one of Andy’s deluxe cabin cruisers: an abused aluminum hull that normally sat under a tarp out in back of the double-wide. When I had first come to Powell I had bought the thing second-hand, believing that only a fool would live so close to the water and never need a boat.

In the boat I’d put a tent, a sleeping bag, a rod with reel, my tackle box, a cooler full of perishables, two milk crates filled with dry goods, and utensils for cooking and eating.

I was in the water before seven, and headed south. With a little luck I’d be turning up the San Juan before lunch. It would be a week or more before I’d have to put in at Dangling Rope or Wahweap.

And so I fished, and ate, and relaxed, pulling into the shore as mood, the call of nature, and the onset of evening dictated. My skin burnt badly the first day, then burnt again the second, peeled for three days, and by the sixth I had a nice brown tan for the first time in ages. I swam whenever the boat was on the bank, enjoying the cool water and marveling at the assortment of crappies and blue-gills and other fish which swarmed the shallows. When I got tired of the pre-packaged stuff, I caught a big striper and filleted it, roasting slabs of juicy bass meat on a grill over an open fire.

And at night, I watched the stars.

The undisturbed, pure blackness of the southern Utah sky really is a sight for which there are no words. Surrounded by modern civilization, one forgets that, for most of human history, men were privy to that view.

Little did we know it did not belong to us alone.

▼ ▲ ▼ ▲ ▼

Community and public radio have figured large in my life. I’ve worked or volunteered at three different stations in two different states. In 1992 I got a chance to write some scripts for a science fiction serial being broadcast on KRCL-FM, and in 1993 I was behind the mic doing an early-morning pastiche music program dubbed Eclexia. I met my (soon to be) wife Annie while we were both volunteering at the very same station, and we eventually went on to do student program work for KSVR-FM, the station attached to Skagit Valley College in Mount Vernon, Washington State.

Thus I’d always wanted to write a story using my radio experience.

Veteran community radio volunteers will probably recognize bits and pieces of “The Bullfrog Radio Astronomy Project.” A community radio station—at least the ones I’ve experienced—is a lot like a potluck: everyone brings what they can to the mix, and if it all works out right, hopefully you have a nice potpourri of styles, to suit all manner of tastes.

I wondered what might happen if some enterprising soul with money to burn decided that the best way to find the aliens we’re supposedly always listening for—with our various SETI programs—would be to announce our presence to the universe with an interstellar community radio broadcast? Kind of like those gold records that went out with the Voyager spacecraft, only this time being blasted into the cosmos with a supertransmitter.

The Federal Communications Commission is somewhat infamous in community radio circles. When I was student program director for KSVR-FM, we actually had an FCC guy show up—flashing badge and all—to warn us that our hot transmitter signal was kerflunky, and if we didn’t want our license stripped and/or the school to get fined, we’d better scratch up some cash for new equipment.

Suppose now that there is an interstellar or intergalactic equivalent of the FCC, carefully keeping primitive civilizations like ours from polluting the interstellar or intergalactic airwaves? What happens when a rogue human operator breaks the rules?

“The Bullfrog Radio Astronomy Project” is a somewhat humorous story as a result, but there’s some real questions lurking underneath. Our civilization has been shooting radio and television broadcasts into space for roughly one hundred years now. Long enough for our broadcasts to have potentially reached most of the nearest stars. What might our potential interstellar neighbors think of us as a result?

I was tickled pink when Stan Schmidt bought it for
Analog
, and compared it favorably to another
Analog
story from years earlier, titled, “The Ears Have It.” Fellow
Analog
author Martin L. Shoemaker continues to demand that I write a sequel to “The Bullfrog Radio Astronomy Project.” I have a title in mind. I think I will do it.

Exiles of Eden

She was gorgeous, and didn’t look a day over twenty-five. Her honey-blonde hair fanned about her head as she lay beside me on the limestone sand of the beach. Two suns—one white and the other orange—baked our bellies. Occasionally a bubbling wave of warm seltzer water rushed in from the lifeless sea, coating us pleasantly. Her deep blue eyes blinked as I adjusted my position and gazed at her.

The blonde’s smile was fixed, like the Cheshire Cat’s. She looked and felt almost as good as I remembered a real woman should.
Almost
. I wondered if I’d ever get the algorithms just right—hers or mine.

A set of bare white feet suddenly appeared, just at the edge of my peripheral vision.

I froze—so far as I knew, I was the only person on the planet.

What the…?

I rolled onto all fours and looked up.

It was another woman. I knew her.
Wanda
. She stood four meters further up the beach. She smiled down at me, her brown hair cut short, just like I remembered it. She had on a pair of black short-shorts and a white tank top which hugged her athletic figure. Why hadn’t I detected her coming into orbit? I smiled sheepishly at my old friend.

“Nice toy you built for yourself,” Wanda said.

“How did you find me, Wanda? I didn’t sense your ship coming in.”

“One can never be too careful, Rordy. You should know that. Lucky for me I remembered you telling me once that you’d discovered a fantastic piece of beach circling a binary. You even gave me the rough coordinates. I gotta say, you were right—this really is excellent real estate.”

“Just wait until I’ve finished seeding the tidal regions with xenophytoplankton,” I said. “That rust color in the sky will be blue within a thousand years. Then all this place will need are palm trees.”

“Sounds perfect,” Wanda said, surveying the carbon dioxide horizon.

“Interested in a swim?” I said. I looked down at the blonde I had built, then back up at Wanda. “Sorry I can’t offer you equivalent companionship.”

“Not a problem. I’m not here to relax. Something has happened, something important. I had to tell you.”

“What?” I said.

“There are still people in this galaxy.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You, me, Ormond, Bana—”

“No, Rordy. I mean
real people
.”

I forgot the blonde.

“That’s not possible,” I said, standing up.

“I’ve been to their planet. I’ve seen them for myself.”

“Where?”

“About 3,500 light-years further out along the Sagittarius arm from here.”

I walked slowly—not caring about my nudity—until I was face to face with Wanda. Like me, her body was a mechanical illusion, something she’d constructed to look like her former self, using the universal factories onboard her ship. Some of the others had taken great liberties when building their simulated bodies. Wanda and me—we’d kept it real.

“I can’t believe it,” I said.

“I didn’t want to either,” she admitted, throwing her arms out in a gesture of resignation. “When Carlos found me slow-coasting through the Perseus arm, he had to argue hard to get me to take his claim seriously. But he and the others were right—there are humans on Eden.”

“Eden?” I said.

“That’s what the others call it. It seemed like an appropriate name.”

I stared, not sure I could let myself believe what I was hearing. The blonde had picked herself up and wandered to my side, glancing briefly at Wanda before looping her arm through mine. The three of us began walking.

“It’s a wonder the Swarmers haven’t jumped on this before now,” I said.

“We can’t really be sure what the Swarmers know,” Wanda said. “But we’re gathering—everyone who can be found—to make sure Eden has a proper defense. Because if we know anything about the Swarmers, it’s that they’ll find Eden eventually.”

“What about these humans, aren’t they armed?”

“The inhabitants of Eden are in no condition to fight.”

“What do you mean?”

“Easier if you see for yourself,” she said.

• • •

Almost four thousand light-years later Wanda and I stood on an altogether different beach, along with a few of the other two dozen who had answered the call. Our mechanical eyes gazed across the white-capped expanse of a kilometers-wide bay, to the tiny collection of bodies moving on the other side. If the natives of Eden could see us, they didn’t show it. They were naked and mocha-colored with proud long faces like Native Americans and hair so light it was almost white. Even the children. The men had beards and the women were pregnant. They appeared to be collecting nets and baskets filled with some sort of sea life, all from the prows of dugout canoes.

“How many are there?” I asked.

“Taking a planetary census wasn’t easy, but they appear to number several hundred thousand strong, scattered in tribes across every continent and most of the islands.”

“Tribes,” I said. “Is that your way of saying
all
of these people have reverted to a pre-technological state?”

“I don’t know if reversion is the right word, Rordy. There is every indication from the archeological sites we’ve looked at that these humans have been on Eden for a very long time, and have never risen much beyond a stone-age level of sophistication.”

“They’re mystics,” said Bana, whose artificial body mimicked a Hindu painting: blue skin and multiple arms, an androgynous face and no external genitalia. “They have no use for science.”

“What about medicine?” I said.

“There isn’t a single terrestrial virus or microbe on this planet,” Ormond said. When biologically alive, he’d been a research physician—a smallish white man condemned by age to a wheelchair. Now he possessed a towering three-meter frame and skin like brushed copper. “These people live at least a hundred or more of our years before even beginning to show signs of geriatric disability. Whatever force brought them here, it did them a favor in the process.”

“So they are truly human?” I said.

“DNA shows a bit of cleaning up,” Ormond said, “but yes, they’re human. Enough so that if any of us were still biologically intact, we could breed with them.”

“But how?” I asked, sweeping my arm towards the far side of the lagoon. “None of the colonies survived. Earth? Gone. Everywhere humans put down roots, the Swarmers located and destroyed them.”

“Like I said,” Wanda repeated, “evidence indicates that these people have been here for a very, very long time. Someone—something—brought them here.”

I wondered who could have survived an era of interstellar flight long enough to avoid annihilation at the hands of the Swarmers, much less discovered humans and gone to the trouble of seeding us on a world so wonderfully and rarely like our own; before it too was destroyed.

The Swarmers hated all intelligent life that was not their own. I knew first-hand. I’d found the nebular remnants of the other systems the Swarmers had obliterated—inspected the crude probes those vanished races had flung into the void, unaware that their end was near.

If your radio broadcasts didn’t tattle on you, eventual discovery of the transluminal Link would. Earth and her colonies had discovered this the hard way.

“So what are we doing about early warning?” I asked.

“We’re synthesizing a series of passive transluminal event detectors in this system’s Kuiper region,” Carlos said. He looked mostly like his original self, though he’d opted for skin black as midnight. “We also need to think about re-seeding some of these people to other worlds while we have the opportunity.”

“Earth tried that,” I said. “The Swarmers found all our Easter eggs, and smashed them.”

“The colonies,” Carlos replied, “were not aware of the Swarmers until it was too late.”

“They also retained Earth-level technology,” Wanda said, “including constant Link to Sol. They’d have survived longer if the Link hadn’t pointed the Swarmers to every world.”

“Which explains why Eden has survived unmolested for so long,” I said. “If these people have remained at this basic level for the entirety of their existence, it’s kept the Swarmers blissfully ignorant of their presence.”

Wanda simply nodded.

I watched the Eden humans move their baskets up the beach, and into the trees. There was a village set back, away from the shoreline, and several tiny columns of smoke began to curl up into the breezy tropical air. Cooking fires? How long had it been since I’d eaten meat from a barbecue? The very thought gave me memory pangs of my last trip home to see my sister’s family. Her husband had broiled New York strip steaks in the back yard—the glorious smell of beef wafting in through the open kitchen window….

Damn, it seemed just like yesterday.

Only now there were no more cows. Not even cow DNA from which to synthesize a new breed. The supernovas created by the Swarmers had taken care of that.