Analog, March 2002 by Dell Magazines

Author:Dell Magazines [Dell Magazines]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction/Fantasy
Publisher: www.Fictionwise.com
Published: 2001-04-16T22:00:00+00:00

Parchment in Glass by Ron Collins

It can be hard to distinguish between medium and message—or even messenger.

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Radio waves rose from the surface of a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, cutting through an atmosphere of oxygen and acid to break into the vacuum of space. Four years later the signals reached Martian highlands and fell upon a collection of listening dishes at Kochi Observatory.

At local noon, a program packaged the data and sent it on tight-beam laser to a satellite in near-earth orbit.

“I'm too old for this,” Torrance thought as he checked his sideburns’ trim. Lines and dry patches marred pebbled skin. His crew cut was graying to white. Extending a man's telomeres may double his life, but signs of age remained as obvious as rings on a tree stump.

Even his eyes were worn and faded.

It was just past five in the morning. Torrance was in the Kedra Hotel, a high rise that overlooked the western shore of the Potomac River in Crystal City, Virginia. Willim Pinot—the United Governments intelligence officer—expected him at 0700. He still hadn't had breakfast.

He sighed and ran a brush over his scalp.

The UGIO had been vague about the agenda, and no matter how often Torrance played the game, politics always left him uneasy.

He stepped back and yanked his blue dress jacket to the side. His buttons were aligned, his shoulders square. He was seventy-one—no longer the slender kid from Everguard—but he still presented the uniform with a bit of dignity. If he ever did decide to do something rash like retire, he would miss the uniform as much as anything else. He strapped his personal comm system over his forearm, punched up his temperature and blood sugar, and glanced at the time.

That was when he first noticed the red icon flashing.

* * *

The process ran every night.

It started at a Very Large Array spread over the three hundred square kilometers of Martian surface that comprised Kochi Observatory. Each day, Kochi compressed data and transmitted it to a receiver in Earth orbit, which then split the signal and forwarded it to several destinations—one being a computer in an office just north of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There, Torrance's program stored Kochi's data in overlapping fifteen-minute segments and compared these fresh radio emissions to stored files of noise Everguard had recorded during its last mission.

To Torrance, the Everguard files were important. They were hand-inked parchment in green bottles floating on the currents of the most massive sea known to man, words sent from unknown people who lived on Alpha Centauri A's second planet. No one else shared his opinion, of course. Eden—his compatriots pointed out—was a poisonous place where life could not exist, a fact proven by every remote study ever undertaken.

He was, of course, shackled by his reluctance to release the Everguard noise data. If it became known that the mission had launched wormhole pods despite the possibility that life might exist on the planet, the entire command structure would be exposed to executive review.

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