The Ophiuchi Hotline

"I will warn you once," Vaffa said. "I won't listen to jokes about the Boss." She glared from Cathay to Lilo, and back again. Lilo looked helplessly at Cathay, wanting to tell him what form the second warning would take. To her surprise, he seemed to understand. He gave her an almost imperceptible nod, and sat back in his chair.

"Okay. Go on. It's about the Hotline, isn't it? What else could it be? The Boss is scared, and I don't blame him."

"You are aware of the content of the message?" Vaffa asked, half rising from her seat. "I think I would have been told if you were authorized to read it."

"Well, I don't know if I was authorized or not," he said. "But it was already translated when I got it. Did the Boss tell you my source is in the translation department? I can't get the raw data."

Vaffa relaxed a little. "Yes, he did say that. But you shouldn't have read it. Your function is to pass it on to the Boss."

Cathay shrugged. "I had to encode it to send it to him, and I'm as curious as the next fellow. No one told me to forget what I'd read. But I'll bear it in mind. What I still can't understand is what you're here for. I don't know what the Boss thinks you can do that I can't do better. I have contacts out here. I know my way around. You... well, you're muscle, I know that. Does he plan to have you bully the Hotline into a deadline extension?"

Lilo shifted nervously in her chair, but apparently Vaffa was not insulted.

"No. Our mission will be simple. You said the Boss is scared. That isn't quite right, but it's fair to say he is concerned. The message seems to be quite important, and potentially dangerous."

Lilo couldn't help laughing. "I guess you might say that. It's got to make you wonder, if nothing else."

"The way I read it," Cathay said, seriously, "is that we've been presented with a phone bill."

"But we never subscribed," Vaffa pointed out.

"That's an evasion," Cathay said. "It's true we never asked for the service. But we used it. We've been using it for centuries, and as far as I know no one has ever tried to send anything back in return."

"The costs..."

"That's beside the point. I've been thinking about this ever since I saw the message. What amazes me now is that no one ever saw this possibility. We've treated the Hotline as a natural resource, like vacuum. We wondered what the Ophiuchites might be like, but when they didn't volunteer anything about themselves I guess we just wanted to believe it was a... a sort of interstellar welfare program."

"When it was really more like cultural exchange?" Lilo suggested.

"Maybe. If that's it, they must be insulted that we never sent them anything."

"But what do we have that they could want?" Lilo asked. "They're so far ahead of us."

"Who knows? Listen, they probably asked themselves the same question. And what they did, apparently, was to send everything. We've used the new inventions, the biological engineering techniques and so forth. But we still can't tell what ninety percent of it is. Maybe it's art, or philosophy. Or gossip. Or nine billion Ophiuchites advertising for sex partners. But I don't really think the Hotline is cultural exchange. I think it's just what the message implies; it's a commercial venture. We're expected to pay for what we get, value given for value received. I wish I knew what the 'extreme penalties' business is all about, though."

Vaffa's brow had wrinkled as she followed Cathay's reasoning. Now her face smoothed as she got back on more familiar ground.

"We've drifted away from the subject," she said. "We were talking about our mission, why Lilo and I were sent to join you. It's simple. In a matter as potentially serious as this, the Boss feels the need of further information. It's impossible to know how to meet this on the information we have so far. Since it is impossible to ask the Ophiuchites the questions he must find answers for, we must try our best to find them in the original message."

"That makes sense," Lilo said. Vaffa looked at her, and Lilo knew Vaffa was grateful to hear that. It had not made much sense to Vaffa. She had been accepting the Boss's judgment of the situation largely on faith.

"What I mean," Lilo went on, "is that it's hard to imagine they wouldn't have put everything we need to know into the message. Even if we could ask them questions, it would take thirty-four years for a reply."

"Exactly. You notice the message contains many words which are assigned a translation probability."

"That's normal in Hotline data," Cathay put in.

"So I understand. But all we have to go on is the translated message you obtained. What we need is the raw data. The Boss wishes to have it so he can analyze it independently."

Cathay frowned. "That's not going to be easy. In fact, it's not possible."

"Explain that, please."

"Well, I... all right. My source works in the translation department of StarLine. She... you know how they get their data?" He looked at the two women, nodded, and went on. "StarLine has a station out in the zone of maximum signal strength of the Hotline. There used to be several other stations out there. Now Star-Line has a monopoly charter from the Pluto government. Luna's challenged it a couple times... but I guess the political situation isn't important to this. Practically, Pluto controls everything outside its orbit.

"The people on the station don't broadcast anything back to Pluto because the signal could be pirated. They record everything that comes over the Line, and send it in drone rockets, high-gee jobs, that are retrieved here under tight security.

"Back when there was competition, they had some extremely fast drones. The people at the station acted as filters. When they saw something in the preliminary computer translation that might be valuable, they put it in one of these rockets to try and edge out the competition in patents, marketing, so forth. That doesn't matter now, but they still had one of the special delivery rockets. When they got this message, they used it. My contact told me how it came in, and that she didn't think she could get this one to me. I applied all the pressure I could, and she managed it. But she says that's strictly it. Security's so tight on this thing that no printout exists of the original data. It's stored in StarLine's computer, and if you think you can break in there and rob the memory, good luck."

Vaffa frowned. "No, that's out. The Boss explored that avenue before he dispatched us to Pluto. He's still working on an information raid, but the defense programs are formidable."

"The best on Pluto," Cathay said. "I don't know what you have on Luna."

"What about having your contact do the raid for us, from the inside?"

Cathay considered it. "This is restricted to the top four or five people. Only about twenty even know of the existence of the message. She wouldn't be given the top-rated access codes, and would have no way to get them."

"What is your means of pressuring this woman?"

"I... uh, her child is one of my students. She got herself in a bind, like that woman who was just here. Pregnant, and no teacher lined up. She came to me, and I cleared it with the Boss. Also, and I guess this is pretty important, I had to give her a lot of Tweed's money this time, for this message. In addition to threatening... well, to telling her I'd walk out on her child." He looked away from them. Lilo was embarrassed for him. The only acceptable reason for abandoning a child in the middle of the educational process was the death of the teacher.

Vaffa seemed not to have noticed. "Why won't that work again?"

"She made enough money last time to hire a licensed teacher, under the table. It can be done, no matter what the EA tells you."

"Still, you'd better explore it with her."