The New Space Opera 2 by Gardner Dozois Read Free Book Online

he’s met during those sparse decades: does he know Ishmael or Connie? Does he know if Sanchez got over his brush with immortality?
    I wonder, but I don’t ask. There are rules.
    I look around. “We’re it?”
    Dix nods. “For now. Bring back more if we need them. But…” His voice trails off.
    â€œYes?”
    â€œNothing.”
    I join him at the Tank. Diaphanous veils hang within like frozen, color-coded smoke. We’re on the edge of a molecular dust cloud. Warm, semiorganic, lots of raw materials. Formaldehyde, ethylene glycol, the usual prebiotics. A good spot for a quick build. A red dwarf glowers dimly at the center of the Tank: the chimp has named it DHF428, for reasons I’ve long since forgotten to care about.
    â€œSo fill me in,” I say.
    His glance is impatient, even irritated. “You too?”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œLike the others. On the other builds. Chimp can just squirt the specs, but they want to talk all the time.”
    Shit, his link’s still active. He’s online .
    I force a smile. “Just a—a cultural tradition, I guess. We talk about a lot of things, it helps us—reconnect. After being down for so long.”
    â€œBut it’s slow ,” Dix complains.
    He doesn’t know. Why doesn’t he know?
    â€œWe’ve got half a light-year,” I point out. “There’s some rush?”
    The corner of his mouth twitches. “Vons went out on schedule.” On cue, a cluster of violet pinpricks sparkle in the Tank, five trillion klicks ahead of us. “Still sucking dust mostly, but got lucky with a couple of big asteroids, and the refineries came online early. First components alreadyextruded. Then Chimp sees these fluctuations in solar output—mainly infra, but extends into visible.” The Tank blinks at us: the dwarf goes into time-lapse.
    Sure enough, it’s flickering .
    â€œNon-random, I take it.”
    Dix inclines his head a little to the side, not quite nodding.
    â€œPlot the time-series.” I’ve never been able to break the habit of raising my voice, just a bit, when addressing the chimp. Obediently ( obediently —now there’s a laugh and a half), the AI wipes the spacescape and replaces it with
    â€œRepeating sequence,” Dix tells me. “Blips don’t change, but spacing’s a log-linear increase cycling every 92.5 corsecs.. Each cycle starts at 13.2 clicks/corsec, degrades over time.”
    â€œNo chance this could be natural? A little black hole wobbling around in the center of the star, something like that?”
    Dix shakes his head, or something like that: a diagonal dip of the chin that somehow conveys the negative. “But way too simple to contain much info. Not like an actual conversation. More—well, a shout.”
    He’s partly right. There may not be much information, but there’s enough. We’re here. We’re smart. We’re powerful enough to hook a whole damn star up to a dimmer switch .
    Maybe not such a good spot for a build after all.
    I purse my lips. “The sun’s hailing us. That’s what you’re saying.”
    â€œMaybe. Hailing someone . But too simple for a rosetta signal. It’s not an archive, can’t self-extract. Not a bonferroni or fibonacci seq, not pi. Not even a multiplication table. Nothing to base a pidgin on.”
    Still. An intelligent signal.
    â€œNeed more info,” Dix says, proving himself master of the blindingly obvious.
    I nod. “The vons.”
    â€œUh, what about them?”
    â€œWe set up an array. Use a bunch of bad eyes to fake a good one. It’d be faster than high-geeing an observatory from this end or retooling one of the on-site factories.”
    His eyes go wide. For a moment, he almost looks frightened for some reason. But the moment passes and he does that weird head-shake thing again. “Bleed too many resources away from the