The Ophiuchi Hotline by Varley John

Author:Varley, John [Varley, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101656143
Publisher: Ace
Published: 2006-04-24T22:00:00+00:00

Later, Vaffa turned to Lilo in the dim light of the sleeping room. Iphis was snoring.

“We’ve got to talk.” Lilo had been afraid Vaffa wanted to cop again. While Lilo got along well sexually with Iphis, Vaffa frightened her. They moved out into the tiny freefall gym.

“You should read this first.” Vaffa handed her a sheet of faxpaper. It was covered with code groups, and under them was a messy translation in Vaffa’s seismographic writing. Lilo noted the StarLine name, and the Topsecret, AAA rating.

“I don’t know where the Boss got it,” Vaffa volunteered. “He has his sources.”

Lilo read it through, then again, carefully. She was familiar with the weighting system used in decoding Hotline transmissions. Often the Hotline signal, after traveling seventeen light-years, was considerably garbled. But that couldn’t be the case here, not with thirty repeats. So the uncertainty attached to key words was the result of the computer’s lack of context for a good translation.

It did not surprise Lilo. She knew most people thought of Hotline transmissions as a sort of substitution code; when cracked, the result would be in good, grammatical System Speech.

But the data received over the Hotline was the result of alien thinking. As long as it stuck to data of a scientific nature, couched in mathematical terms, reasonable translations could be made. Even so, there were huge “gray areas” which were thought to be data but could not be interpreted by any computer programs yet devised. Lilo had her own opinions about the gray areas. Her research into them had put her in jail.

The few times messages had come through which the computers tagged as being something like language, the translations were hedged with uncertainties. The linguists were not surprised at this. Languages embody cultural assumptions, inconsistencies; even contradictions. Given a large body of transmissions, the computers could get closer and closer to the meanings of words. But the Ophiuchites had not shown much interest in talking about themselves, or in doing anything but sending oceans of engineering data. The few verbal messages could have been anything from commercials to religious evangelism, or something that had no human analogue at all.

Lilo read it a third time.

“What’s this blowout about accounts, and termination of service? and payment? What could they possibly want? What could we give them?”

“Maybe what they’re giving us. Information.” Vaffa shrugged.

“But we…what does it mean?”

“I’m assuming it means just what it says. This is a phone bill for four hundred years of service.”

“But…that’s crazy..”

“Is it? Why did we think the Hotline should just go on forever, without us giving anything in return? Why should we expect them to be any less mercenary than we are?”

Lilo calmed down and thought about it before she replied.

“Okay. I can see that. But what would we give them? And how? I guess we could build a big laser like they have—I’m not saying it’s within our power for sure, but we might—but what do we transmit? Everything we’ve gotten from the Hotline has been two or three thousand years beyond where our science was at the time.

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