Chapter 1

George walked out behind the house and down a path into the woods. The pond was only a few minutes walk. Since retiring, he had spent a lot of time down there. He had a white plastic lawn chair where he would sit and watch and think.

It was a hot summer day but the humidity was not too high, and there was a nice breeze. He sat in the shade, and the leaves above his head made a sound like a crowd in a theater.

He looked around. There were some woodland sunflowers growing near by. The sun was shining down into the pond. The water was brownish, but clear.

He saw some movement. Fish maybe? No, it was like a bunch of white berries washing around. He got up for a better look. There was some reddish water plant with white berries on the ends of fronds attached to flexible stems going down to the bottom. The white berries suddenly surfaced. George jumped back, startled.

He was not too in tune with the plant kingdom really. He had never discriminated much between the different varieties of plants. What others might call weeds in his yard, he called wildflowers, and left it at that. But one thing he didn’t expect was sudden movement from a plant in the water.

The white berries were floating on the water now. They were about half an inch across and seemed to have a filmy membrane. He got the distinct feeling of being stared at by fifty or so little eyes. But that was crazy.

The plant was still. It probably just came loose and floated up. It was still just floating there, so he sat back down and watched it for a while. Just some white berries floated there.

He looked around the pond and into the surrounding woods. Nothing else seemed different. Well, a little ways from the pond where some phone lines crossed his property, some reddish vines were growing up the poll, all the way to the wires. He hadn’t noticed that before. But who knows, it could have been there since spring.

After a while, his mind drifted off to other things. His daughter had just given birth, a few months ago. His wife Jen was over there helping out. He was thinking of the paper he had been working on when he retired. He probably would never finish it now. He was through with papers and teaching and academic politics.

He thought of Jim Ferris back at the college. He was a botanist. He jumped up and reached into the pond to try to tear off a clump of the plant. But unexpectedly he felt a sharp pain and yanked his hand out. A bit of skin had been scraped from a finger. It was a little sore, but not bleeding. The plant was just floating there like nothing had happened.

George sat back down and watched it warily for a while. It was not the first plant to sting him or prick him or give him a rash. So he just decided to leave the crazy thing alone.

Ruth was in a funk. She sat late at night at her computer, monitoring a thin slice of sky. She believed in SETI. She believed that if there were advanced civilizations out there, they must send out an electromagnetic signature. But what if civilizations were rare? What if they rose and died out over tens of thousands of years? What if there were huge gaps between them? What if she was living in such a gap?

She went through the motions of her work, questioning her choices. She was smart. She was determined. She was willing to take risks. But she had been working in this field for over ten years with no results. Well, she had discovered the odd pulsar. That was something.

Normally she was just grateful that her funding had not been pulled. And she was fascinated by even the mundane mechanics of her work, let alone the staggering consequences if she were ever successful. But tonight she was in a funk.

The night wore on. A few hours before the end of her shift, she got a routine alert for a signal with a pattern. She set up to record it. A fairly complex pattern was repeating itself every few minutes. She quickly notified other observatories around the world and they confirmed the signal.

Over the next several days it continued. Then longer patterns. They kept up the recording over several months. The final pattern repeated itself over several days. Then it all stopped. They didn’t know if something had come before since they had just started monitoring the source region.

Ruth was ecstatic and happily spent months trying to see if they had something. It definitely was a series of different patterns of greater and greater complexity repeating over longer intervals.

One hope is that a civilization would be deliberately trying to communicate with us and would build up some kind of syntax and semantics from universal physical constants, the structure of atoms, something we would have in common. But this signal seemed random except for the intervals that repeated.

It was almost as if the signal, if it was a signal, didn’t want to be deciphered. But why would a civilization send a signal that they didn’t want to be understood? Eventually the furor died down, interest waned and she could no longer justify spending more time on it, so she just saved her notes and speculations away with the raw signal capture and went on to another slice of sky.

Phil was boiling. His boss had chewed him out one more time, and he knew he had to put up with it. He had to maintain his professional façade. That was all that he really had. There was no one in his life. His wife had left him, claiming he was abusive. He never got the respect he deserved. He hated the world and everyone in it.

And here he was trudging home in this dismal neighborhood to his dingy little apartment, only time for a few beers because he had to get up early for that wonderful job of his. Damn them all, he snarled under his breath.

He cut through the park, and then he received the final insult. Here was this little guy sitting on a bench, looking so smug, so carefree. The little twerp. He looked around. He was aching for some violence.

“You don’t belong here, do you?” He moved close.

The little man didn’t move. He didn’t challenge Phil in any way, but he also didn’t appear to be at all afraid.

Phil looked at him in confusion. He wanted to beat the little leprechaun to a pulp, the arrogant little bastard, but he couldn’t seem to raise a hand against him. And in the air there was a smell faintly of cinnamon and oranges. Phil thought of his Aunt Jenny. She had really got him, the only one who did.

The little man looked at Phil intently, studying every expression, his breathing, the smells coming off of him, the degree of perspiration, the look of his eyes, his clothing, the texture of his skin.

“I am just passing through,” he said.

Phil snapped out of it.

“Well, you should get a job, you homeless little twit!”

The little man did not attempt to correct Phil, just let him rant. And in the air a small whiff of vanilla and sunshine.

Phil waved a dismissive arm, and went on his muttering way.

Joshua Green sampled the waves. Yes, Joshua Green, he thought. He was still absorbing, tasting the nuances of that identity.

The memesphere settled in on him as he allowed himself to open up to it, at least to its electromagnetic traces. The strangeness saturated him. He thought of home.

Our little planet is dense with meaning. We know it deeply, and we know each other. But the biosphere is thin and cold space presses in.

But these beings here. They seemed almost blind at times. Closed in. Limited to one or two threads. Exposed. Obvious. But no, he must not patronize. A classic mistake. He reconciled the mistake.

He looked up to the sky. There was much light pollution. He could barely see the stars, the cold dark of the void and the dust between them. So long out there, so long. But to him it had been like sleep.

Light limits us. The radiation of space kills us. Robots cannot be us. So we listen to the light. And on beams of light we spread.

He was feeling this body. Adapting it. The parallel systems dispersing out to virtual invisibility. Soon a hospital visit would be no problem for him.

He did not feel morally superior to them, just different. He must find his place soon. He sampled the waves for occupations, social roles, social locations, organizing principles.

He was by the sea. He could smell it. It was a pleasant smell to him. The air was blustery and warm. He could feel the molecules slide over his skin. He enjoyed it. Light was starting to glow pink on the horizon. A beautiful world really. He would be at home here. But eventually he would have been at home anywhere.

We hide, we learn, we blend, we defuse. And as the aggressive ones look placidly on, time and population do their remorseless work.

No, he did not feel morally superior to them.