Chapter Text
“Grace! Grace Grace Grace!”
Grace cracked his eyes open and looked over at the alarm clock on his bedside table. It was 4:37 in the morning. Rocky knew better than to bother him while he was sleeping. Rocky had made it one of his life’s sacred missions to enforce a proper sleep schedule on Grace. And yet here he was, knocking frantically at Grace’s door. This must be urgent.
But Rocky didn’t sound upset. He sounded excited. What kind of urgent good news could Rocky possibly have to bring him at 4:37 AM?
As he rolled out of bed, feeling every year of his 50-and-change-counting-is-complicated age, he tried to theorize. A few years ago, Rocky had burst in at just after 2AM to inform him that Rocky and Adrian’s eggs were hatching. But he knew that Rocky didn’t have any eggs to hatch right now. Earlier this year, Rocky had given him the urgent good news that Sol had returned to full radiance. But that was only going to happen once. Maybe a new star was returning to radiance, hinting at the possibility of other intelligent life?
“Grace! Open the fucking door!”
“Jeez Louise, I’m coming, okay?” Grace said with a yawn as he threw a robe on and opened the front door.
Rocky barrelled into the room as soon as the door was open, clutching some papers in one claw. He threw them down on the kitchen table. He was practically vibrating with excitement.
“What’s all the hubbub about, huh?” Grace asked. “What happened?”
“New ship!” Rocky chirped, gesturing at the papers.
“...they’re building a new ship?” Grace asked, frowning. “Why?”
“No! New ship spotted! A new ship has entered the 40 Eridani system!”
NOW he was awake. “What?! That doesn’t make any sense! Any ship would have to have been sent less than a year after Earth solved the astrophage crisis, there’s no way that anyone would have the resources for another interstellar-”
“No no no! Not from Earth! It’s coming from the opposite direction!”
Holy smokes. That meant…more aliens. New aliens. An independent, unknown intelligent species bringing the total known number to three. Why were they here? What did they want? Were they friendly? Could they be communicated with? Grace sat down at the table and picked up the papers, scanning them intently. They were the reports from the Astronomy Team working at the top of the space elevator. A petrova signature had been spotted within the solar system, faint but growing brighter. There wasn’t much else it could possibly be.
“What do we do?” Grace asked. “I mean, they have to try to contact it, right? Do you think that we could be contracted on as alien experts?”
Rocky made an exasperated little noise that sounded like a dying foghorn. “How do you think I know about this? I don’t spend my time at the top of the space elevator! They asked me to consult and bring you to help!”
“Bring…you mean, we’re going on a field trip?” Grace asked.
“Yes! Field trip!” Rocky said. “Put your stupid clothes on and let’s go!”
Thankfully for all parties involved, Grace did not have to go back up the space elevator. As nice as the microgravity would have been on his joints, the last time he’d taken the elevator had been to come down from the Hail Mary to the planet’s surface and it had nearly killed him. To be fair, he had been pretty actively dying at the time, but still. It was not a fun experience and not one that he wanted to repeat. Instead, they set up shop in the research center at the base of the elevator. This was not the first time he had been consulted for alien-related questions, so they already had facilities with lights and a human-safe atmosphere at the ready for him. His small square table was pushed up against the clear xenonite boundary to give the appearance that the main meeting table continued into his atmosphere. He had brought his laptop and his keytar for speaking Eridian. Rocky was the only one who joined Grace on his side of the xenonite barrier in the special suit he'd made.
The atmosphere of the room was tense but excited. There were several Eridians Grace recognized–Marconi, who worked directly with the radio communications team, Dolittle, who was a xenolinguistics expert, and Darwin, who was a xenobiologist. There were a few more he didn't recognize, who on introductions turned out to be politicians. Grace was reminded of the first few days after he'd landed, where every politician on Erid had been clamoring to meet with the alien. (Rocky had nearly gotten in serious trouble making personal threats against a particularly pushy and manipulative person who Grace had somewhat childishly named Brutus.) Brutus themselves wasn't here, thank goodness, but as everyone was introduced it turned out that one of the politicians was Brutus's mate Porcia.
Marconi settled the crowd and gave their report. One small object, moving in a straight line towards 40 Eridani and decelerating at a rate that had it coming to a stop about halfway between 40 Eridani and Erid's orbit (but much further from the actual current location of Erid in space). There was an unmistakable signature of astrophage coming off of it. It was hard to gauge at this distance, but based on their observations it was likely somewhere between the size of the Hail Mary and the Blip-A.
“We should welcome them to the system,” Porcia said, which sounded reasonable enough until they continued, “And let them know that if they do not come in peace we have the capability to destroy their vessel.”
“Warm welcome indeed!” Darwin exclaimed, scandalized. “I would rather we not start our first interaction with this culture with such hostility.”
“Even if you did, they wouldn't understand a word of it,” Dolittle pointed out. “They don't know Eridian. It would just be noise.”
“But that's true of everything we could send them,” one of the other politicians argued. “What if we read an Eridian dictionary to them, surely they'll pick it up eventually?”
“Uh, no.” Grace piped up, as Dolittle laughed at the idea. “Without any context that would still just be noise forever.”
“Well, how did you do it then?” They snapped.
“We had context,” Grace explained patiently. “We could send each other physical objects, and once the tunnel was set up we could sense each other, make hand motions–”
“Had many puppet shows,” Rocky added solemnly.
“We don't have any of that over the radio. We have to keep it simple. Like, really simple. The first message that Rocky and I sent each other was basic pattern matching, like infant pebbles do. I'd pulse my engines, he'd pulse his.”
“That's a good place to start,” Darwin agreed. “We have no evidence that they even know there's intelligent life in this system. They're not coming towards our planet in particular. We don't even know for sure that it's a manned vessel, or that it could receive our signals!”
“If it doesn't know we're here, perhaps we should simply let it be, then?” Porcia suggested. “Continue watching to see what it does, and not initiate contact unless necessary?”
“We'd be losing out on a lot of potential upsides,” another politician cut in. “The first alien culture we interacted with pushed us into a technological revolution. This could easily do the same. There's no harm in trying, we really could destroy their ship if things went too badly.”
“What's the point, if they're not going to understand anything we say?” Another asked, frustrated.
“We don't have to send words,” Marconi suggested. “Going off of what Grace said about pattern matching, we could learn a lot by sending a pattern of short and long radio pulses, beeps, and seeing if and how they respond. Something simple but obviously intentional.”
“Like we're waving hello,” Grace mused. “I like that a lot.”
This ended up being what they went with, although it took another hour of deliberation for everyone to agree on it, by which time the excitement had somewhat worn down and Grace’s body was begging him to take a nap. Marconi took the pattern to the radio relay that would send it up the space elevator to be directed at the ship, and everyone filtered out of the room. The ship was still about 17 light-hours away (Earth units) and it wasn’t approaching that fast, so the soonest response would be 33ish hours later. They would be informed if anything came in before then. Grace and Rocky returned to the biodome and Rocky watched as Grace got another much needed 4 hours of sleep.
They returned early afternoon the next day (biodome time), about 32.5 hours after the pulses had been sent. They didn't have to wait long. A couple minutes after the earliest they could have received something, a response came in. The first half was the same signal pattern the Eridians had sent; the second half was the pattern again, but this time the pulse at the end of the pattern turned from one long beep into a little two-step of beeps. They were iterating on it, like musical improvisation.
So: The ship was getting their signals, it was probably manned (it hadn't just repeated the pattern back or sent something pre-prepared) and it was interested in communicating with them.
The game was on.