Resplendent in a spatter-pattern robe, K'reediscranth turned two eyes and four ears heavenward. Two more eyes he pivoted toward the sacred text spread across the lectern against which he leaned. His remaining sense organs scanned randomly across the hushed multitudes far below.
It was his nineteenth Festival of Oneness, and yet the ceremony's majesty threatened to overwhelm him. To the horizon in every direction folk gathered in holy assembly. Myriads more waited beyond his sight. The folk only congregated in such multitudes on the Day of Oneness. Stray tendrils of thought reached him even here atop the holy obelisk.
As High Priest, K'reediscranth had long ago committed the liturgy to memory— the Rite must never vary. With all eyes now focused on The Book of Oneness, he intoned: "In the beginning, the folk were scattered and alone, little more than beasts . . ."
Carla Markson dug through the digital debris of a failed career for information that stubbornly refused to reveal itself. Her difficulty was hardly surprising. SETI observations were indexed by coordinates of the celestial sphere and time taken, but she was desperately searching for records of a scarcely remembered pattern she might have seen "about a year ago."
In offices, meeting rooms, and corridors all around, the farewell party had degenerated into a wake. SETI had lost government backing years ago. Now disheartened private patrons had withdrawn support. The funding officially ended at midnight.
"Carla?" an impatient voice called. "Dr. Markson? Everyone's gathering for a final toast in the cafeteria. Please join us."
"In a minute." Images flashed across her computer screen. Two images a second; 120 per minute. False-color coding now accentuated aspects to which no one had heretofore paid attention. Flash, flash, flash . . .
"Carla!"
She snapped out of a hypnotized funk. Annoyance became triumph: Had the director not barked at her, the graphic she had so urgently sought would have flickered past her unnoticed.
"Genie, halt," Carla commanded. "Backwards, ten seconds per frame." Data barely sensed returned to the screen. She examined frequency spikes, power densities, and modulation coefficients, all color-coded and textured for pattern recognition.
Two champagne glasses clutched precariously in one hand, Director Harold Flynn opened her office door. "It's over, Carla. Please join us."
Plucking the glasses from his grasp, she drained both in the time it took her computer to back up three images. "Genie, forward one frame and stop."
To her boss of the next seventeen minutes Carla said, "Hal, I have a counterproposal. The team should join me here— and bring more of the bubbly." She tapped the frozen graphic with a well-gnawed fingernail.
"I've found them."
In a pause between chapters, K'reediscranth raised his eyes from the sacred scroll. Gazing over the countless folk gathered for this, his thirtieth Festival of Oneness, he dared to hope: Maybe this year we will succeed.
Stretching his senses to their utmost, K'reediscranth detected the merest suggestion of an imbalance to the north. The holy assembly, in consonance with his will, shuffled until their aggregated thoughts subsided into a background murmur. He grimaced in concentration until their realignment was seemly.
He resumed reading. "After many an age, our forebears learned to live together as families, to harmonize their minds. The families were fruitful and spread across the face of our world. Individuality remained, but families could meld their thoughts upon need.
"In the fullness of time, families cooperated as clans, then tribes, then nations. Each step enriched the mentation of the folk." Three hands nervously stroked the fabric of his slick ceremonial gown —this festival season, an iridescent rainbow— as he kept his place in the liturgy with a fourth. "In the days of the prophet Holgor'roth, all nations merged into one commonwealth. Their power of thought again grew manyfold."
K'reediscranth bared his senses to all the merged minds roaring their yearnings. The slightest wavering of his concentration, the merest chance interruption of the crowd's careful symmetry around the ceremonial obelisk, and he was lost.
This was the very apex of the Rite.
"The folk strove to become yet greater, and they could not. They sought an even higher unity, but they were already as one. They bore sons and daughters and verblans until the world could feed no more. There seemed no path forward.
"And then Vrg'oq'lan the Prophet revealed a way —nay, the way— to the folk."
The man with whom Carla Markson amiably chatted was short, pudgy, bland— and the King of Sweden. Tomorrow he would present her with the Nobel Prize in Physics. She didn't exactly do physics; for her, the Nobel Foundation had chosen to bend their definitions.
Awarded just five years after her discovery, the prize was an unprecedented recognition. Carla's fellow laureates, likewise mingling with the Swedish aristocracy, were decades older than she.
"Tell me, please," the king said in his charmingly accented English, while nabbing a canapé from a passing waiter, "why you succeeded."
How to put her insight simply? Carla searched the ballroom for inspiration. She found it at the crystal-laden, forty-foot-long bar to which liveried servants ceaselessly returned.
She pointed. "Behold the watering hole."
The original figure of speech, of course, referred to a water hole —a literal pool of H2O in the African veldt— where lions and antelopes and whatnot came to drink. A woman's reach should exceed her grasp, else what's a meta for?
"Everyone meets at the watering hole. In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI, all species were presumed to meet at some celestial watering hole, discoursing over a natural radio frequency."
"Where is this watering hole?" The king nibbled on wafer-thin toast spread with foie gras, oblivious to the crumbs that dotted his cummerbund.
"There's the problem. People differed on the ideal frequency, but they always picked a characteristic frequency of some common molecule or element, like hydrogen. The argument ran that the frequency must be rational and universal, reflecting the analysis that any technological species would make."
"That's sensible— yet you looked elsewhere." Her royal companion frowned in concentration as he licked essence of hors d'oeuvre from his fingers. "Why?"
"SETI researchers scanned candidate watering-hole frequencies time and again. They heard nothing." Reliving her epiphany made Carla beam. "Their strategy contradicted the one fact we had."
"Which was?" the king asked.
"We consider ourselves a technologically capable intelligent species, yet humans don't broadcast on anyone's proposal for a watering-hole frequency. My colleagues had ignored their only data point."
K'reediscranth panted, feeling all his 140 years as High Priest. Next year, he vowed, he would graciously accept an acolyte's assistance to the top of the sacred, and exceedingly tall, obelisk.
He set The Book of Oneness upon the lectern before him. Once his breath returned, K'reediscranth unrolled the scroll and began to read.
Amid a crew of geniuses, people deferred to Carla. In her humbler moments she questioned their deference. True, she had discovered the civilization 124.6 light-years distant to which they would soon depart. Still, was that accomplishment greater than the invention of the FTL drive that made this mission possible?
Admiring herself in her stateroom mirror, snappy in a ship's jumpsuit, Carla decided that yes, just maybe, it was. She exchanged toothy grins with her reflection. Eagerness to meet her aliens had saved the FTL project. How much longer, and to what purpose, would star-drive research have continued . . . if she had not saved SETI?
Strident bleating shattered her reverie.
"All hands to departure stations. Repeat: All hands to departure stations. We leave Earth orbit in five minutes." The speaker above her stateroom door added, "We won't postpone our departure even for you, Dr. Markson."
Nor should they.
Once she found where to look, archives clearly showed that the aliens had signaled Earth every 302.8 days for as long as SETI had records. Like everyone she knew, Carla felt there was one perfect moment for the embassy ship to arrive. They must appear concurrent with, and as though in immediate reply to, the others' next —and now imminent— transmission.
She hurried to her place of honor on the bridge.
K'reediscranth poured his hearts and soul into the Assembly although, or perhaps because, those hearts still syncopated from scaling the obelisk. Beneath a fluorescent robe, sweat matted his thinning fur. One hundred forty-three years in service as High Priest . . . it was almost beyond precedent.
The so-familiar thoughts of the masses comforted him. He intoned the liturgy, countless minds melding as he read. "For Vrg'oq'lan the Prophet showed us the way. With the world united, more worlds, and their folk, must be brought into union."
"Let it be so," shouted the massed minds of the folk, a roar in his head.
With the flip of a switch and an instant of vertigo, the blue-and-white-and-brown globe shown on the bridge console transmuted from clearly Earth to clearly . . . someplace else. The color balance seemed off, consequence of the K-class orange sun. Sensor readings filled the environmental monitor: surface temperature; gravity; rotation; partial pressures of oxygen, nitrogen, and trace gases. All were Earth-like; all clearly not of Earth. Another screen spiked with the characteristic microwave signal that had brought them.
A terrestrial world and a new civilization: grand slam on humanity's first step out of its backyard.
In a flurry of activity the bridge crew put the ship into a synchronous orbit over the single landmass. All eyes then turned to Admiral Peltison. He faced the camera that would beam his words and visage to the planet below. The ETs would not understand his words at first, but surely they would record this momentous occasion. Mission Control had decided early on against beginning the interstellar visit with the universality of an arithmetic lesson. Pomp and circumstance first; language lessons later.
His posture manly but not militant and his voice firm, the commander of the mission from Earth spoke. "Fellow citizens of the galaxy, we come in . . ."
"And Vrg'oq'lan spake onto the folk, saying, 'Let a holy assembly be held on the first day of the first month of every year. Let all the world unite on that day. Let the folk reach out with its hearts and mind to what other worlds there may be. Let . . . let . . . '"
Psyches churned as K'reediscranth's concentration wavered. Damnation, he thought, striving with purity of spirit to ignore the sudden buzzing in his head. As an acolyte, he'd thought the old priests' complaints of interference absurd. Now he knew better: His mental and sensory acuity had never been stronger, even as this husk of a body failed him.
He swiveled two more eyes to the lectern, the better to concentrate. "Let the sacred assembly now extend itself to the other worlds."
At his priestly command, 1,354,876,202 of the folk, each spaced from his neighbors in multiples of quarter wavelengths, began to emit, in ten-watt pulses, their microwaved yearnings. His guidance, downward-directed from his perch atop the sacred obelisk, steered the resulting multigigawatt maser of prayers from star to star across the glorious reach of the One Heaven.
His voice resonating as the folk sang of unity, K'reediscranth assigned a third ear to the sporadic buzzing. Noise he could handle: He had not been High Priest so long for naught. Without interruption of his chanting, he snapped the focused voice of the folk's desire. As the venerable ones had taught, that quick flick always eliminated the noise.
Decorum restored, K'reediscranth completed the ceremony.
Creeping down the spiral staircase, his crumbling joints protesting each step, K'reediscranth could only wonder: Why, oh why, was the Assembly of Oneness always held in vain?
The fused and lifeless moonlet sailed majestically through the void, the too-orange sunlight glinting unevenly off its tumbling bulk. The only evident hazards to its future serenity came from the large number of like-sized recongealed masses that also orbited the blue-and-white-and-brown world with its single continent.
Little beyond stubborn traces of organic chemicals distinguished this satellite from its many neighbors. The solar wind soon dispersed even those vapors.
And then only scorched paint remained to identify the derelict as the spectacularly ill-named UN embassy starship Galactic Unity.
Edward M. Lerner is a physicist, computer scientist, and curmudgeon by training. Now writing full-time, he applies all three skill sets to his science fiction. His web site is www.sfwa.org/members/lerner/
Baen Books recently re-released MOONSTRUCK, a unique first-contact tale, in mass-market paperback.