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Broadly speaking, Earth looked much as it did from modern space photos: a blue ball covered with twists of cottony whiteness. My eyes finally got used to the scale of the planet and began to make sense of the partially obscured continents. Their shapes had changed over the mille
Christ.
Jesus Christ.
"Klicks!" I shouted.
"What?" said his voice.
"Look at the Gulf of Mexico!"
"Yeah?"
"Look at it!"
"I don’t—"
"It’s all on dry land," I said, "not half-submerged as it will be in our time, but, look — it’s already there."
"What are you ta — oh. Oh, my God…" Klicks’s voice was full of astonishment.
"Het!" I called out, wishing I had a name to use. "Het! Any Het!"
"Yes?" came the emaciated voice of a brachiator.
"How long has that crater been there?"
"Which crater?"
"The one on the rim of that large gulf at the southern end of the landmass we took off from. See it? It’s about a hundred and fifty kilometers in diameter…" I wasn’t that good at estimating distances from this high up, but I knew how big it had to be.
"Oh, that crater," said the voice, each word a distinct, separate sound. "It formed about ninety of our years ago — two hundred or so of yours."
"You’re sure?" asked Klicks’s voice.
"We had tracked the asteroid that made that crater. For a brief time we thought it might pass near Mars; as you may know, our two moons were once asteroids, captured by our gravity. But it did not come particularly close to us; instead, it struck your planet. The explosion was visually spectacular."
"But … but…" Klicks was trying to make sense of it. "But the impact that made that crater is what we’d thought had killed off the dinosaurs."
"An incorrect assumption," said the Martian, simply. "After all, the dinosaurs live on."
The best resolution in the geologic record this far back was maybe ten thousand years, and that only under extraordinary circumstances; a hundred thousand was much more common. Events that had occurred centuries or even mille
"The impact must have had a big effect on the biosphere, though," said Klicks, a note of desperation in his voice. I felt myself gri
"Not really," said the Het. "Those plants and animals at the crater site were destroyed, of course, but the worldwide effect was negligible." It paused. "Your people and mine inhabit the same messy solar system. Impacts happen — surely you know that. But life goes on."
I wished I could see the look on Klicks’s face — but all I could see was the glorious planet below. We were whisking back toward the night, the terminator hurrying toward us. Our view swung back up to look at the stars. There were so many that discerning any pattern, anything that one might call a constellation, seemed impossible. I enjoyed the spectacle; Klicks had been in line to possibly go to Mars, but I’d never dreamed that I would see the stars from space. The sight was magnificent, breathtaking, truly the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and -
"What’s that?" Klicks’s voice intruded again from the outside world.
I sca
"What is that?" Klicks said again.
"What" "is" "what?" The reedy voice of the brachiator.
"That cluster of lights," said Klicks. "What is it?"
"We do not speak of it."
"You must know what it is."
"We do not."
"Is it in this solar system?"
"No. It is some three-to-the-fifth light-years away. Clarification: Martian light-years, and two hundred forty-three of them in your counting. About double that in Earth light-years."
"Then what is it?"
"It’s a beacon, isn’t it?" I said, surprising myself. "A visual signal to the rest of the galaxy that there’s intelligent life there." The rosette was beautiful, with mathematically precise construction. "Look at it: the points are arranged in a geodesic. It’d look like a sphere from any angle. It has to be artificial."
I’d read about a similar idea years before, but on a much smaller scale. Some astronomer had suggested planting crops in giant geometric patterns across the face of Africa in hopes of signaling the presence of intelligence to anyone looking at Earth through a telescope. But this was so much more! A civilization that could arrange suns into patterns — it was mind-boggling. The rosette of lights would have been clearly visible from anywhere in Earth’s southern hemisphere, or Mars’s for that matter.
"It must have been wonderful having your society grow up with that in the sky," I said to the brachiator. "Incontrovertible proof that you weren’t alone, that there are other, more advanced civilizations out there." I shook my head, the jelly co
"It galls us."
"But—"
Everything went black again. The Het oozed out of my neck. We returned to the ground in silence. I thought about the rosette of lights; about the Hets; about troodons, dinosaurs that might be on the way to developing intelligence of their own. It seemed that humanity had missed the heyday of sapient life in the galaxy by 60 or so million years. It was only because the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinctions wiped out the great reptiles that the second-string team, the mammals, had an opportunity to rise to the level of conscious thought, but by the time we did, the Milky Way was a much less crowded place. How could the Hets not be thrilled by the mere knowledge of the rosette-makers being out there somewhere?
I guess I’d offended them. Without a further word, they dumped us back at our campsite, now almost completely dark, our campfire having decayed to a few glowing coals. We watched from the ground as their pulsing sphere silently made its way off to the west, then we clambered in the darkness up the crater wall and went back into the Sternberger.
The sky was completely covered with clouds. Probably just as well. Now that we’d seen the heavens from above the obscuring cloak of Earth’s atmosphere, the view from the ground — breathtaking though it had seemed last night — would pale in comparison. My only regret, though, was that the rosette would never be visible in this hemisphere. I’d love to have gotten a picture of it.
"Brandy," said Klicks, unbuttoning his shirt, "what do you know about how the Huang Effect works?"
I was gathering up my pajamas; I’d wanted to gloat a bit about the discovery that the Chicxulub crater predated the end of the dinosaurs, and wasn’t surprised that Klicks was avoiding the topic, but, now that he mentioned it…