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Out in space, the relay satellites waited, holding their
positions in the
tracery of electrons like fat spiders waiting in a shining web,
binding the
Great Net. I know that whatever that is, it works like our black
dish on
the tower, but stretches across millions of kilometers of
emptiness,
sieving the ceaseless storm of star-born radio. Somewhere in that
is the
thin whisper from the starprobe a hundred light years away, and
somehow
it's caught and held and passed back to us mundane humans. A
gift.
We sat in the dark observatory, watching the screens. We took it
in turns
to give the commentary; he sat in his old chair, hands once again
on the
smooth machine as if the last ten years were just a daydream. We
didn't
mention him on air; we never had.
The time came, and for a second, two, there was nothing. Then the
screens
lit, and our starprobe slowly awoke. We'd stopped reminding the
audience
that this had all happened a century ago; for us, for everyone,
it was
happening now.
It was a white planet. Cold and huge, bigger than Earth but still
a rock
glazed with gas, we saw great drifts of brilliant cloud lit by
its distant
sun, smooth yet streaked with golden lines. It was placid, so far
away from
the warmth of the star that only a few huge whorls marked its
weather.
The starprobe swung around, crossing into night. It was still
practising
its ancient senses, and the cameras faded and brightened as it
struggled to
focus on the planet below. As it passed the terminator, the
weatherlines
mixed and curdled; something was happening there, but we had to
wait hours
before we could see it again. All the time we described what we
saw, what
the other readings were, and made wild guesses.
Then it came again, and this time the machinery was ready. A
thousand
pictures taken in a hundred different ways, at every wavelength
and every
depth. As the probe went into daylight, we began to understand.
It was
snow, boiling up from vast fields as the starlight warmed it and
cooling
out as it fell into night. An eternal blizzard: the first
snowstorm on
Earth in seven centuries.
The starprobe, so long ago, felt with other senses. What snow it
was, cold
chemicals that held the hint that once, an age ago, there had
been life on
the planet. It was no more than a hint; of something that had
passed long
before our rich and lively solar system had itself cooled like a
snowflake
out of the void.
Four times the starprobe let go tiny passengers, probes that
drifted slowly
down into the bleak sky below, tunnelling and tasting as they
fell through
the layers of cloud. We caught our first flake; big as a
peacock's tail and
lighter than a sparrow's feather. It was a beautiful thing,
complex and
fragile; it melted as the cameras tracked up and down. On top
were crystal
facets, clear layers that might almost have been water ice,
reflecting the
light from the probe; they were set in a mass of sparkling
needles that
oozed and combined as we watched. Beneath were regular patterns,
faint
colours, but they too vanished before we could see them properly.
As the probes descended, they caught marvellous sights; linked
spirals of a
thousand big flakes breaking up, recombining. One shattered into
a flurry
of tiny, glinting particles which scattered like fragments of a
glass as it
hits the floor; it was far away, and that was all we saw.
It was already thirty-six hours since we started, and I was
wondering how
much longer we could go on for. On the screens, the vast
structure of the
snowstorms was charted, as varied as a slice through a billion
years of
rock but dynamic, shifting, a most precise and random dance.
"Listen!"
We looked at each other, then at where he sat. He was motionless,
hands
still on the machine, but there was no doubt that he'd spoken. I
ran over,
and shook his shoulder; nothing. Then, from the speakers set into
the roof,
came a blast of noise, not pure like a waterfall, not distinct
like
birdsong, but as loud and insistent as both.
"Listen," he said again. "They're talking.
Radio."
He shuddered, and smiled. We looked at the screens; he was
listening to the
broad spectrum radio on the starprobe. We'd ignored it. The
pictures were
so beautiful, and the maps we drew so interesting, that we hadn't
even
known it was there.
"I can tune this," he said, "It's all in
layers"
The noise shifted; now a pattern of crashes, like slow waves on a
beach
heard from a distance, now a swiftly rising arpeggio that slipped
in and
out of time with the waves and was repeated and varied in a mass
of
variations, faint, loud, slower, faster, always with purpose.
"They're talking... about stars... they're watching
them..."
I tried to pull one of his hands away, worried. He stiffened, and
held on
with an animal strength. I looked at the others, and stood back.
Nobody was
talking on the radio; across the world the sounds of that ancient
planet
were playing.
"It's beautiful! I know what they're looking at..." He
turned and looked at
me; I knew he couldn't see the room, but I nearly screamed with
shock; his
face, so long slack and lifeless, was transformed, his eyes
alight with an
almost heavenly glee.
"Lover - listen to me" he said. "I'm nearly at the
edge. I'm not going to
break the link. They watch the stars too. They know so much. They
know
about the starprobe, they thought they were alone and now
they're... oh,
listen!"
The noise grew clearer. I recognised a spark of music, an echo of
his
glorious days, but it went beyond that. It was a symphony,
perfect, that
grew and flowered as unerringly as a rose. We stood there and
listened,
hardly breathing, caught in the theme, so much his style but
carrying a
message, vast, majestic, alive.
Beneath the starprobe, the snowflakes formed and were aware. They
caught
the light of the stars, and passed the news of each tiny snatch
of distant
light amongst themselves. A compound eye across quarter of the
planet,
formed in near-darkness, away from the blinding burn of the sun.
They
drifted down, changed, reformed, carrying the information,
analysing,
perceiving. Each snowflake died in hours, yet the snowstorm lived
and
thought for ever, watching the universe.
The music changed. It was not for ever. It knew how random it
was, and how
it would perish when the sun got a little brighter or a little
colder. It
could see such things, it knew so well how a star grew old when
its one
sure sense was an eye of such power. It thought, for so long,
that it was
alone.
The music changed. The starprobe had arrived. Whoever sent you,
the
snowstorm said, if you are still alive, you have a companion now.
Please
talk to me before I end. We must. If you understand me, come.
We understood through the music, a performance of virtuoso
improvisation
that left no room for doubt, that convinced utterly.
Come.
Then he gasped, aloud. The music vanished, for a moment the
cacophony
returned, then a thunderclap of pure, raw, unfeeling noise. We
should have
been watching the screens, but the music took us over so
completely that we
crossed the terminator into light, and the edge of the snowstorm
was caught
in a burning line of chaos. The scream of the tearing apart was
carried
into the observatory, into the machines, into the link.
He was dead.
We cannot know, now, whether what he told us was true. It's
unthinkable to
anyone who heard the music that he couldn't have believed it, but
whether
he was right nobody can say. The starprobe is still there; we
have all the
data we want but none of the insight. What he did, what he
thought, is
lost.
But we're coming. Perhaps we needed to rest and brood on our
mistakes,
perhaps we're wrong now to start again on a road that is so
dangerous. I
think we know enough, just about, to watch ourselves. This time.
Some of us
are working on the links, trying to find out what part of his
music was
genius, what part repeatable. Some of us are reaching out,
prodding at
those long hundred years between us and the planet; there are
ways, we
think, to make those years a blink of an eye, ways that the old
people
would never have thought of.
And now we understand what we must do again. We're coming.
(c) rg
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