Canticle Blue

60. Beacon

For years after the loss of Havel, the Bryn Colonists tried to come to terms with what it meant to be alone in the solar system. Some of them built probes to explore its deepest reaches, and others piloted missions to Nantis' moons to look for candidates for possible habitation.

Grahmen Ravi, Aedh, and their volunteers made many trips to Havel in the Hedra, often returning with so much damage to their vessel that it looked like a ghost ship. Several times it required complete hull resurfacing, and once even returned with nothing but a liana covering a breach. The liana itself was beyond repair. The crew occasionally sighted small fires or possible cultivation areas on the planet's surface but either could not land or found them to be naturally caused. They found no one, but with each trip they amassed more information about orbiting debris, radiation levels, and relatively safe landing sites.

One group of Colonists took an interest in radio astronomy. It included Maire Gan- Meid, who was now a young woman, and Ip. Their leader and instructor was Cian Dhalen. Development teams from both habitat ships used Ark module technology to build them a well-crafted radio telescope, with crew quarters for up to thirty people. At the time of its completion, student proficiency had reached the point where they could travel to the telescope for weeks of hands-on experience. During one such excursion, as Cian was aiming the antenna at a well known pulsar, she detected interference. With a noticeable amount of excitement in her voice, she told her students, "There are two signals here. The frequency of the new one is so close to the pulsar that our filters didn't drop it." As she fine-tuned the filters to examine it, she suddenly looked at Ip and exclaimed, "It's a beacon transmitting a repeating Per'sa letter! Is it the lost comet piece?"

Ip answered, "No, it is not."

Maire teased her. "Ip, you know everything."

"Yes," she replied, "but not all in one place."

Maire didn't press for clearer meaning. By now she treasured the ambiguity.

Ip continued, "Maire, I know what you are not asking me and why. The Per'sa script is not the same."

Cian looked at the display matrix and was shocked. "She's right!" While she was
trying to find a staff-level C-link channel to share the information, she encouraged her students to look at the signal display. Finally she asked, "Maire, I can't find the right manual for the high-priority com. channels. Could you call your dad for us?"

Her call caught Havilan at home. "Daddy, we've a got a beacon signal out here. It's like the ones we used for the comet, but different. I have a list of things to read to you, plus we're sending a frame of the character matrix because Ip says the script is different too. So...here goes: 'The signal frequency is the same as the one we were using, but much cleaner. It transmits every five seconds; with our beacon, it was ten. It's stronger than it should be, if it were our missing beacon. And it's coming from the direction of the RS 219 pulsar, so it's not where the comet fragment would be. Also, please tell the astrophysics group that we are not seeing a measurable Doppler effect in the signal. It must be somehow synched with our position, or local, which could indicate that whoever, or whatever, is sending it knows we're here.' And, Cian says it's using very comparable C-waves. Also, she wants to know how someone could know about our telescope, since it's a passive antenna. She's getting all the data from the telescope to send to you now. She says the signal should be strong enough to pick up from the Terreska or Picarin. It is actually a bit stronger than the one from the pulsar."

Havilan was astonished. "Thank you, Maire! I'll get the word out to everyone. The com. guys here want to tell you that this channel, and four others, are now reserved exclusively for your group."