Ferris
27th of Fructidor
I worked in the garden this morning. Put my hands in the dirt, wanting to harvest. But I’m holding off. Ticking down the days or hours until the transmission from Alsafi arrives. When it comes, I’ll celebrate, pick the peas, chard and beets, enjoy them during the autumnal Feast Days next week, a bounty made all the sweeter for the waiting.
So instead I pulled weeds while the overcast sky sank low and dusty, and a rogue wave of San Francisco fog rolled over Oakland. Slow going, but I needed the time to clear my head. When my back was aching and my hands satisfied, I came in with anxious energy still to burn and picked up this housejournal, which I haven’t touched in years. I’ve got that impatient, behind-the-eyes fuzziness, like waiting for a crush to write back.
I expect we’ll hear from them today, tomorrow latest. The weather in our Oort Cloud isn’t as clear as we’d anticipated, but nothing major, nothing that should muddy the signal.
When it comes, this will be the fourth message received from Alsafi in my lifetime. Few have timed their career so fortuitously. The first came when I was a child. The second came just weeks after I joined the Intercivilizational Observatory’s San Francisco office, and I wormed my way onto the analysis team. The third came the year I met Cassio, and I was doubly lovestruck. Still, I was reading responses to questions another generation had asked. But now, a full 39-year round-trip after I began, I’ll finally get answers to my questions. Ones from my youth, maybe, but they’ll be mine. After all this time, I’ll finally be In Conversation.
Feast of Travails
Nothing yet. We’ve crept past the end of the official window. Wouldn’t be the first time they’ve missed us — or us them, for that matter. But it’s been a couple centuries since things have gone off schedule. I’m boggled, but everyone is looking to me for answers. Devin and Atul are the only ones keeping their heads. I might ask them to help me work the problem if we don’t hear something soon.
I was feeling caged by the impending equinox and my too-ancient house, so I walked down Peralta Street to the public farm, where I could get under the trees and not worry about the quiet sky. In the volunteer apple grove I bumped into Cassio. She hates Feast Week, so maybe she was escaping too. It’s been four years since we’ve talked much, outside chilly conversations in conference hallways. She seemed warmer today, not a word about our falling out, just an attentive smile and a sympathetic hand patting mine. I played it cool, but it was obvious that she’d heard about the lost window. Cass — ever the thoughtful astronomer — already had her own theories.
“Could be some dark planet wandered into the path at just the wrong time,” she said. “Our charts always have blind spots, you know. If we didn’t see it, it’s probably closer to their end, which means they’ll notice it quick and get something rough out to you soon.”
“Or they’ve been cooked by a solar flare,” I sulked. “Or they blew themselves up, or died in a plague, or suffered ecosystem collapse, or — ”
“Oh hush! Equipment failure is more likely. Maybe the problem is on our end, failed last transmission. Maybe they’ve been sitting there for decades worrying about us exactly like you’re worrying about them.”
“I like that thought even less,” I said.
“Didn’t you once tell me that people started theorizing about the emptiness of the cosmos after just a couple years of SETI listening?”
“They expected empires and megastructures,” I admitted. “They didn’t see any right away, so they figured no one was out there. That’s where the ‘Great Filter’ idea came from. It took us getting through our own Filter to realize that the universe was vast not just in space but in time.”
“Exactly. We had to listen for a long time to actually connect, and so did they. Which means we had to be sustainable, and so did they.” Cass made me look her in the eyes. “Which means if we’re fine, they’re probably fine too. We know they’re sustainable. Otherwise how could we have held down a Conversation for the last 900 years? A couple days’ tardiness doesn’t have to mean anything. Maybe years will go by, and then just like that you’ll hear from them. You’ll go back to talking like before, like nothing ever happened.”
Then she got on my shoulders and pruned a knotty, fruitless tree the neighborhood was neglecting. As she left, she said to say hi to the house, so here I am, diligently noting it in the housejournal. She said we could talk more sometime, about Alsafi, if I wanted. I think I’ll take her up on that.
16th of Vendémiaire
If things had gone as planned, I’d be releasing a new message to the world right now. Everyone is eager for these curated infusions of alien novelty — something to stir up our slow churning culture. Fashion houses and architects anticipate the fads for new Alsafi aesthetics. Philosophers await progress on the Shared Paradoxes, those questions both our worlds can make sense of but neither can answer.
We’ve been slowly spreading the word that nothing is coming, while preparing a longer study. Devin retasked our out-system equipment to get a better look at the weather in the interstellar medium. I’d like to tell the continuity councils something, but Atul says it might be a long time before we know anything new.
So, time to kill, I walked with Cassio from the Observatory out to Ocean Beach. It was chilly, so we huddled together and draped the beach blanket over our shoulders. We strolled along the surf, watching children play fetch with neighborhood dogs. Cows munching seaweed appeared out of the mist. The fog was so thick, Cass was inspired to lecture me about space.
“Say there’s a lighthouse out there.” She waved towards Marin. “It’s going to blink a message at you. What are all the things that have to go right for you to get that message?”
“You have to have line of sight,” I said. “And be looking in the right direction, at the right time. You have to be watching long enough to see the whole message, and you need a good enough memory to remember the pattern. Then you have to know how to decode it.”
“And,” Cass waved expansively, “it can’t be too foggy.”
“We’re pretty good at predicting the weather out there, you know.”
“I’ve never liked that metaphor. Tracking matter a dozen light-years away is nothing like watching for clouds on the horizon. It’s dark, and your model has to look decades ahead based on the thinnest flickers of shadow. Did you know they keep changing the estimates of how much dark matter there is in the universe?”
I did, but something about being there with her, on that beach, stirred a thought I hadn’t had before.
“In the histories the Alsafi used to wonder a lot why they never heard from anyone besides us,” I said. “They’ve always been more bullish about the chances of life in the universe.”
“You think if they got a transmission from someone else, they’d stop talking to us?” Cassio asked.
“A second contact changes everything about The Conversation. Do they tell us about them, or them about us? Whose permission do they need first? Who do they prioritize? It gets complicated.”
“Kind of like us,” Cass said.
She spoke low, barely louder than the surf. We let it hang there for a moment, the chimes of distant drift-ships rolling in and out of the Golden Gate.
“Kind of like us,” I agreed.
I expected her to bring up Katarina then, but she didn’t. The conversation turned back to work, to Devin’s concept sculpting and Atul’s mantra of patience. When we parted it was like the moment had never come up, like we were old colleagues whittling at a problem. More than I deserve, probably, but I’ll take it.
20th of Brumaire
The chatter stopped.
From time to time, as the weather out there allows, we pick up faint bits of Alsafi’s in-system communications, outside the transmission schedule. Nothing we can parse, usually; all noise, no signal. It fades in and out, and we’ve gotten used to paying it little mind.
Occasionally scholars or cranks will try to decode it, write a paper about some pattern noticed or a new sifting technique. Some dream of continuous contact, while others look to the chatter to confirm this fringe theory or that. But to me it’s always felt a bit like reading someone’s diary or snooping on private messages. It’s the things they say to us intentionally that matter. Otherwise, it’s not a Conversation.
But now that the chatter is all we have, we’ve been listening harder, and it’s just not there. No unscheduled distress call. No sudden wail of anguish. The last flicker arrived a couple years ago, which meant it departed Alsafi shortly after they received a transmission from us.
It really is a locked room. I feel sure the chatter is gone for good. Until we hear from them again, all we have to go on is what’s already been said. And so much has been said — 900 years of conversation! It’s time to start looking at the histories, see if we can’t find a clue, something that might indicate what was about to go wrong.
Cassio and I commuted back to Oakland together, taking the vineway from the Observatory back over the bay, between the skyscrapers, feeling the music of their wooden creaking disappearing into our bones. Today the timing was just right, and we passed over downtown right as the last red light of the west glanced off the windows. Glass flashed kaleidoscope brilliance down into the canals and canyon farms. For three precious minutes, San Francisco exploded with spectacle.
I felt Cass nudge against me then, and she kissed me. A dense kiss, filled with hope and desire, sadness and confusion, anger at all that had happened with Katarina, lust, triumph, forgiveness. Somehow I felt four years worth of heat in her breath.
Did she kiss like that before? I hadn’t realized I’d forgotten.
7th of Pluviôse
I’ve been spending more nights at Cassio’s place. The garden is going to rot. Cass says that if I can’t caretake properly, we should let the house go to someone else. Maybe find some less needy rooms together, closer to the Observatory. I can’t tell if things are moving very fast or very slow.
Why now? What opened up in me, or in her, that made that meeting in the apple grove different than all the other run-ins we had during those four years we were broken up?
In the meantime I feel well-chided about the garden, so this morning I did some late season planting. It felt good to clear away the weeds, get my hands dirty. My mind is jumbled from combing back through old messages, communing with the computationals to parsing the leaps and doubling-backs of raw Alsafi language.
There has to be something we missed. Hints of political instability? A question we misinterpreted? Some sign of ecological decay that might open the door to pandemic? Were they keeping something from us? Posturing as more sustainable than they really were? Could some cascade of fragility have been buried in their civilization, and if so, how could we find it when they didn’t? Then again, who else could? What if they need our help?
Cassio
24th of Prairial
Hello! We gave up the apartment search, but we were still getting the side-eye from the housing councils — cohabiting too much without putting our places back into circulation. So here I am, moving back in, sharing this housejournal once again! Honestly I’m surprised Ferris worked up the nerve to suggest it, but I’m not complaining.
I always loved this old logbook. No clue who started it, however many centuries ago, and looking it up would take away the mystery. But it’s part of the house now, as much as any wall. If you care for a home long enough, its trinkets and furnishings find a kind of elegant permanence. Just the right thing in just the right drawer. If we want something that isn’t here, we should probably ask ourselves if we really need it!
So after bouncing around unstable East Bay dorms for a few years, moving back in was a treat. Weird little antique house on a weird little antique street. All wood beams and pastel paint, devilishly complicated plumbing — 1,200 years old! Older than The Conversation. Every part has been replaced ten or twenty times, but still it remains itself. Like a civilization, I suppose, or a relationship. The good ones have a narrative, some line of continuity that stays true even as the people in them change. Growth, decay, collapse, renewal — the oldest story. Which reminds me: Ferris’s garden needs some help.
Ferris
Feast of Virtue
It’s Feast Week again, and at last I think I found something. An inconsistency in the codebase. It showed up six centuries ago, but I can’t find a record of the affirmed sign-off. It’s a tiny change, a slight tweak in how the algorithms flag and repair errors. Routine — or at least it should have been. Could such a little thing have bloomed into some deep misunderstanding without us noticing?
It’s shocking to find an error — even Atul agrees. The codebase is the greatest intellectual achievement in human or Alsafi history. It took a century and a half of confused cross-talk to co-create it. Not only did we need to learn each other’s languages — an enormous feat, given the utter alienness of our cultures — we had to build in layers of redundancy. Otherwise a stray cosmic ray or a mite of dust could scramble some crucial line of message. We learned from DNA how to write code that was both dense with information and self-repairing, while they taught us how to compress our data by hosting ideas within a web of interlaced probabilities.
Then we had to compare observations of the cosmos to find the years and trajectories where a clear signal could cross the gulf of space intact. Space is just so big, as Cass keeps reminding me. We are not stars; our strongest transmission is but a tiny ripple in the dirty darkness. We and the Alsafi stood on opposite sides of a lake, sending messages by skipping-stone. It took so much patience to begin that Conversation. And 600 years ago, we misspoke.
Cassio
Feast of Recompenses
Happy New Year! I’m toasting it alone. Ferris is down in Palo Alto, chasing his new lead, haranguing some Observatory computer boffin, poor Devin probably playing peacekeeper. I had wanted to get out of town, take an airship up to the Lost Coast, see some stars. I’m still trying to decide if I’m annoyed that he bailed or glad to be able to mope through on my own.
Feast Week is unlucky for me, unscientific as that is. My mom leaving, my first miscarriage, the falling out with Ferris over Katarina, Dad dying a year later. The normal travails of life, but they seem to accumulate in these last complementary days. Now every year I tense up, this weird pre-fight-or-flight paralysis.
But today, instead of waiting for disaster, I stole Ferris’s sunhat and did what I could for the garden. We’re in salvage mode now, I’m afraid! No wonder the neighbors looked relieved when I told them I’d moved back in! Only the potatoes made it; the squash and melons were strangled by grass Ferris should have been weeding.
I know the Alsafi thing is a distraction. “The Quiet” they call it now. What, like we’re getting the silent treatment? But the Alsafi don’t live here, and I do, which means I’m the only one getting punished if he lets the garden go fallow.
Ferris
1st of Germinal
First day of spring, and equinox upkeep won’t wait for my domestic slump to lift. I skipped it last year, distracted by the Quiet and having Cass back. So this year we dusted every corner, inspected every picture frame, took care of new nicks in the furniture. We tossed the plates and utensils that needed composting, pulled the linens and clothes that needed mending and set them out for return to the public laundry. We mucked out the lamps, scrubbed the toilet, went top to bottom wiping away the winter oils, even grouted the foundation, though that wasn’t due for a few years. I admit: together Cass and I were far more rigorous than I’d have been alone! Bachelors and civilizations — both half-feral without a partner.
Just like spring upkeep, the codebase is a form of unending maintenance, but out of sight, so we often forget that it's happening. I’d always assumed our messages would be translated faithfully, but now I see just how much the codebase shapes the message once it leaves the Observatory’s servers.
The codebase determines which sections to prioritize with which levels of redundancy. The idea that an algorithm would rank some parts of our message above others would surely shock some members of my team. Worse, the codebase automatically swaps certain sets of synonyms for one clear term that can be coded more easily. It’s a good corrective to verbose humans forgetting the limits of the Alsafi’s knowledge of our language. But still, I can’t count the number of times we argued over which overly-deft word to use in our message. How many of those nuances were lost?
Of course, we took everything we heard from Alsafi with a grain of salt, and hopefully vice versa. You don’t build a 900-year relationship by rushing to judgment, or by being too proud to articulate confusion. But if our best efforts still leave such ambiguity, how can we be sure we ever really understood each other in the first place?
I’m more convinced than ever that something went wrong long ago. It goes beyond the glitch — we have to totally rethink how our messages might have translated through all those layers of glass we’ve set up between us. The codebase is the mystery now, the enemy even. Atul will see that, even if Devin doesn’t. Even if Cass won’t.
Cassio
12th of Messidor
Ferris is gone to Portland this week. Fighting to keep computing power on his project. He’s right that it’s too soon by decades to give up, but more people are involved now that The Quiet is public. He can’t unilaterally order a shakedown of solar system infrastructure, no matter how much he feels like he owns the mystery.
So I walked up to Berkeley today to talk to Atul. We had lunch at this new cafe, tucked into the side of Atul’s squat dormitory. The meal was red lentils and fresh Bay arame. As we ate, Atul told me about Ferris’s latest angle. I hardly had to ask, Atul was so eager to vent to someone.
“He’s very dedicated to this ‘locked room’ approach of his,” Atul said. “It was an intriguing problem at first — ‘let us apply the greatest scrutiny to ourselves’ and all that.”
“Well, shouldn’t we?” I was surprised to find myself defending Ferris.
“He’s not wrong, but he’s upsetting people. He’s gone barging in on teams he doesn’t know, playing inquisitor. Very undiplomatic, and it reflects on the Observatory. I don’t know what to do with him.”
“What about the glitch he found? Are folks not taking it seriously?”
Atul looked surprised. “He didn’t tell you? There was no glitch, not really. The signoff was just misfiled in the records. Part of the switch from the Gregorian to the Republican calendar, long ago. It ended up buried in a heap of technical addendums to a very invigorating exchange about the mechanics of color. We found it a month ago, and good job to Ferris! But he’s still carrying on like this error in procedure amounts to an error in the code, and I’m afraid there’s not much support for that position.”
I had to think back on what Ferris had said about the glitch. I decided he hadn’t lied to me. Not exactly.
“What about you?” I said. “Any theories?”
“It hasn’t even been two years. There’s no point in getting upset until it’s been at least a decade. The lack of chatter is strange, but if you ask me that points to a physical blockage. That’s the simplest explanation, and it will be at least five more years before we can get a good enough scan to even begin to rule that out. Look — ”
Atul took my hand here, gently.
“It’s not about the Quiet. It’s about Ferris. The more I work with him, the more I think that he’s taking this all rather...personally. That’s why Devin basically quit, and I don’t blame her.”
“Conversation was his life’s ambition. To have that disappear right when...” I stopped. Atul’s tone made me realize he meant something else.
“I think he feels...spurned by Alsafi,” Atul said. “Deep down he doesn’t think The Quiet is technical, or astronomical, or anything like that. He thinks they decided to stop talking to us. To him. And he doesn’t know why, so he feels both responsible and victimized at the same time. Does that make any sense?”
It did, of course.
Maybe writing here, where Ferris will see, is passive aggressive. I don’t care.
Ferris, I’m sorry I left. And in a way, I’m sorry I came back the way I did. We’re all in a whirlpool. Even when we feel like we’re swimming, we’re not. We’re swept along. It’s all so much bigger than anyone. Even us.
Ferris
20th of Thermidor
They kicked me out of the Observatory. They were very polite about it — in fact they promoted me, asked me to take over a whole curriculum, teach the next generation about Alsafi ways of life and thought. As though any of that matters in The Quiet.
It was surreal leaving, taking the stairs for no reason at all, hoofing it out of the park, leaving my favorite bike. I hung limp on a trolley strap. In downtown, I sleepwalked into the water gardens, uncouthly swimming in all my clothes. I got concerned looks. I lay on my back, thinking about Alsafi canal computers, wishing I could wash out into the bay.
All this time chasing after a glitch, I’ve ignored that scary, simple question that came to me on the beach, in that unfocused first month of the Quiet: who else might the Alsafi have met? Those ancient fantasies about interstellar travel — how do we know it couldn’t be done? We gave up after, what, three tries? Content to stay by our own little star forever. Could other beings, with different biology, a different path of technology, have succeeded where we failed? Perhaps another post-Filter sustainable, like us, but more ambitious in their exploration. Or some kind of pre-Filter expansionary. Or something else — gods or monsters?
We could propel a probe — Cass told me the theory. A tiny wafer, lasers burning it through the murk of space all the way to Alsafi. The signal back would not be strong, but it would be our own observations, in our own language.
Yes, it would take decades, but how can we wait? Either someone convinced Alsafi to stop talking to us, or something made them stop talking to us. We have to find out which — not just for them, but for our own survival.
And if the Alsafi are still there, just stubbornly silent, we could ask them why, ask them what we said. Would they refuse to answer us then, to our face?
Cassio
26th of Fructidor
Ferris and I had a fight. A real one, with screaming and sobbing and hands trembling, me almost throwing a vase that must be 200 years old. Not since Katarina have I been so mad at him.
He'd asked me again to pitch his probe to my colleagues. And it’s not crazy, but the way he demands it, I feel hounded. I know that after this thing will be the next thing, and the next. When will he say, “I’ve done enough. Now I can settle down and wait”?
So finally we fought about it, and about everything, all the way back through 15 years, to when we first saw each other on that Observatory retreat — me the rookie stargazer, him the dashing intellectual, speaker of alien tongues, shouter across the void. We were in the shadow of the Bay Bridge, and he grinned at me and dived, leaving me sitting in my stupid kayak, waiting for his eyes to break water.
We fought about the house, his neglect, and about his year with Katarina, how it hurt me in ways I’m still ashamed of. And then he asked me what the point was, in me coming back. And I just couldn’t find a good answer for him.
The Conversation is an ache for Ferris, history tugging him one way, the boundless future another. But I love him because he pulls back so hard, seems to own all that time. And there are moments when he feels so there for me, when he’ll melt the scale away, just be present.
I wanted that again. But how could that be enough?
He asked me why I was at the public farm that night. Well, Ferris, the truth is I tracked you down. I’d heard about The Quiet, and I wanted to see what you were like without Alsafi. Maybe on some level I did want to see you denied your Conversation. I can hate you, when I want. But mostly I missed you.
So I went to the house in time to see you leave. I followed you, caught up with you in the apple grove. I talked you down from your panic, came back into your life, cleaned up after you when you let your home fall to ruin. I thought that maybe, without them, you’d finally need me.
But I’m just one more woman, coming and going from your life, playing at domesticity. Always hovering second in your thoughts, or third. You’ll never think about my feelings the way you scrutinize the motivations of unknowable aliens. I’ll never be that interesting to you. Maybe because I didn’t play hard enough to get.
After, I waited for you to leave, then crept downstairs, feeling the vibrations of our shouting match still thrumming in the walls. I wonder if the next people here might feel it. Our love and our anger, another blot in this palimpsest.
Ferris
Feast of the Filter
Cassio left last night. Again. Today the house feels misshapen. I keep bumping into furniture that hasn’t been moved in centuries. I go out to the garden, but I don’t want to touch the patch she planted.
She’s off to Baja in the morning, where most of the asteroid deflection planning happens. There’s a comet passing through in 170 years. Cass says she wants to set it into long-term parking around Saturn, save it for a rainy day.
She didn’t ask me to come with her.
Today is the last day of the year, that rare leap year festival. Cass hates feast days, except this one. Why is the saddest feast the one she’s drawn to? I wonder how she’s celebrating.
New Years Day, 1st of Vendémiaire
Eventually I got out of the house, felt like it let me go. I wandered down the neighborhood toward Lake Merritt, looking for Cass but dreading seeing her. Soon the revelers arrived, in masks and fresh-woven harvest cloth, and my search got worse, more panicked, until I abandoned it, numb and aching for her presence.
I got swept up in the celebrations, though for me they were a dirge. I danced and shook, waved candles and shouted songs with the crowd. When I got to Lake Merritt, I put my hand on the memorial wall, my fingertips captured by the carvings of species lost in the Filter. There were so many: leaf presses and insects drawn as in amber, mammals and birds playing little scenes. Should we add Alsafi to our wall of dead things? They talked to us for almost a thousand years. If we had really understood them, might things have turned out different?
The sun is coming up now. A new year. The third year of The Quiet, they’ll call it. The revelers have gone to bed. The air is still, the weather will be clear. It’s perfectly silent, but for the ringing in my ears.
I don’t remember how I got home, or when. Outside I see the garden. Some weeding might help my aching head. Instead I open the window and sit down to write.
Strange that I need to say it, but I do: it wasn’t my fault the Alsafi transmissions stopped. How arrogant of me to think it was! I can’t do anything about aliens 19 light-years away, any more than I can bring back those extinct creatures on the Lake Merritt wall.
Cassio leaving, though — that was my fault. This time and the last. There is no mystery to it. I neglected her love, chased either another woman or another species. I should have listened, when she told me that to my face.
I don’t deserve to get her back, but she deserves to have me try. I’ll get some sleep and pack a bag. Baja is closer than Alsafi. Maybe there’s nothing I can do, but Cass deserves a real conversation.
