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because his compliments didn't seem a tad forced at all.
In cultural profile High Flyer 's crew was like hers. By no accident, most spacers were from North
America or Asia. Those were the cultures, mid-twenty-first century, where young people still asked
When can I do X? The Europeans usually said, with dread, How do we stop people from doing X?
And X could be just about anything technological. Genetically modified food, screening for future disease
risk, opening up the asteroids for mining of scarce metals, living longer through genetic tailoring, beaming
microwave power from space, living halftime in virtual villages, sending a beacon signal to the stars. You
name it, the Euros thought that Jeremiah was a serious, deep thinker, and in fact a cool guy. Whereas
Pollyanna was just a silly twit, with no knowledge of history. So the Euros didn't go into space you
could die! and were busy shoring up their aging societies with plentiful taxes and fearful politics.
They seated themselves around the ship's pedestal mess table, a polycarbon white circle. An awkward
moment. Everybody beamed, glad to see fresh faces, but nobody spoke. Then Piotr produced,
improbably, two bottles of champagne to mark the moment. That loosened everybody before lips
touched liquid.
Sure enough, the first socializing was about the latest Earthside news, most of it just the usual wrangling
and angling that passed for politics. That done, like dogs sniffing noses, they relaxed.
Tricia let the chatter run for about half an hour before saying, "What do you make of our . . . hosts?"
Piotr's face was veiled as he said, "You think the big things make the small things?"
"Somebody did," Tricia said. "We're not looking at natural evolution here, for sure."
Ellen's mouth tilted skeptically. "These zands of yours, how can something bigger than a barn make
them?"
"Not a clue," Tricia said. "But they didn't evolve on Pluto. That's not a biosphere back there, not a truly
integrated system. It's a base camp, getting by on energy rations."
"And run by electrical power that comes from 'way beyond," Franklin added.
Ellen's wary gaze did not alter. "No chance Pluto's been running that way for a long time?"
Franklin shook his head. "It looks . . . well, recent, contrived."
"By something really strange," Tricia said.
Piotr said, "So we invoke that rule, the knife something "
"Ockham's razor," Tricia said. "We've got two strange things; maybe one causes the other."
"Three strange things," Ellen said flatly. "You got the transmission Earthside sent forty-two hours ago?
They've decoded that low-frequency stuff that keeps washing over us."
Tricia raised eyebrows and nodded reluctantly. "I can't follow it all, but . . . okay, one more mystery."
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"Getting to be a lot out here," Piotr observed.
Hiroshi nodded. "I've been running codes, along with the Earthside spectral analysis. They're the big
things sending stuff in English, that's certain."
Ellen said, "They call themselves the Beings."
"Also the Diaphanous," Hiroshi added precisely.
Tricia hadn't heard that one. "Imagine what a vocabulary."
"I had to look it up," Piotr admitted. "And I'm human."
Ellen smiled at him. "Most of the time."
"They must've been listening to us to all Earthside a long time," Hiroshi said carefully. "It is the only
way to explain how it can "
"How they can," Franklin interjected.
"Right." Hiroshi nodded vigorously. "How they can know so much of our language. English, anyway,
though there were pieces in German Ich muss diese Frage verstehen,as I remember."
"Maybe they have only one language?" Tricia thought out loud. "So they eavesdrop on some Earthside
broadcasts and include it all, thinking it's just some English they don't understand?"
"Um." Hiroshi thought. "German's close enough to English, one of the two roots of it . . . maybe they can
see that? Incorporate the German?"
Piotr blinked. "What a mind."
"Minds," Franklin corrected him. "Earthside has clear conversations in every batch. Interplay. Talk.
We're overhearing them."
"But . . . they're sending to us in English, too." Piotr frowned.
"Earthside has cracked their code," Franklin said. "We can eavesdrop on them too, now."
"I am still amazed that anyone could figure out what so strange a thing was saying," Piotr said
disarmingly. He gazed at Franklin. "Can explain?"
This brought them a beaming smile. Tricia knew well by now that Franklin was a frustrated professor,
and would no doubt be a real one someday. For now he was stuck being a mere astronaut. "The key is
the chromatic scale. You know, the way notes are arranged on the piano. Our Western do-re-mi is a
subset of that. Turns out, people worldwide put ex tra em phasis on tones that correspond to the notes
of the scale. We like doing it. You record people talking, they put more energy into those special notes."
Ellen said, "Really? I never noticed."
"Nobody does, we think it's natural. And it is ! That's the breakthrough. Once we found this out, half a
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century or so ago, everybody thought it was a biological thing. Maybe we as primates heard birdsong,
invented some crude music, and after that learned to talk. Kept the same scale-note structure, see?"
Tricia had heard all this before but it was fun to see the others react. Sure, they'd gotten squirts from
Earthside about all this, but who had time or more important, given how badly written most of it was,
who had interest in making their way through it? The High Flyer crew was enthralled, champagne
forgotten except for Piotr, who sipped automatically. She would have to remember that. Maybe he
was the weak link in High Flyer.
"But for a long time," Franklin went on earnestly, "the math guys thought the scale itself came from
harmonics, the ratio of numbers, all that Pythagorean stuff. Ancient history! Only it turns out to be right.
See, the scale gives us pleasant harmony in music. That's why the twelve-tone garbage back in the
TwenCen was the end of classical music.
"They forgot the scale! And we like it have to! All of us."
Piotr scowled owlishly. "Am losing you."
"Oh. Sorry. Those low-frequency plasma waves we detected coming out? And turns out there were
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