Analog Science Fiction and Fact - June 2013

sleep in the command couch. The ship’s systems
tickle my mind as I dream, the weird disturbing
visions the price I pay for the
occasional astonishing insight.
The ship and I are one, in this as in so many
things. The ship does not even have a name;
my own name, Kell, is what appears in dock
registries and bills of lading when I am in port.
“How’s it going?” I ask after a while.
“Eh?” He does not look up.
“Your diagnostic. Will it be finished soon?
I’d like to get back to work, if I may.”
Now he does look up, his gaze flicking
across my hairless scalp, the glossy metal
plates at crown and temples and nape, before
settling on my eyes. I know the plates disquiet
him; on Svyataya Kirill what I’ve done to myself
for my studies is illegal. Even in the wider
human community, few are willing to undergo
the surgeries, the therapies, the learning to
walk all over again. Augments like me are a curiosity
to many, monstrous to some. Defiant, I
go bare-headed in public. “Half hour,” he says.
“Have you found any problems so far?”
“No, no, no. Is very good. See?” He turns his
screen to me, showing a twitching chart. It is
meaningless to me; how can I understand
something I can’t touch? “Excellent sensitivity,”
he explains, pointing to a peak on the
graph. He smiles, the charts and numbers
bringing his face alive for the first time. “Better
than expected.”
“I’m pleased,” I say, and I really am. The
frigid box of barely-tested hardware welded to
my ship’s core makes me uneasy, but I salivate
at the promised results. “I can’t wait to try it.”
“You will like.” Evon turns his shoulders to
face me, politeness winning out over his habitual
reticence, though his eyes still dart to
the screen at intervals. “What do you hope to
find,” he says, “with new detector?”
My area of study, I explain, is the Showa period
of the Nihon culture: a single century in a
single culture of the Late Telegraphic and Early
Broadcast strata. Despite its obscurity, I believe
this period is a key hinge-point between
the pre-electromagnetic culture of ancient Nihon
and the daikeiretsu governments that
dominated the planet in the twenty-second
century and pioneered the industrialization of
space. Somewhere in the vast middens of
noise and garble that form the electromagnetic
landscape of the Tojo Shogunate, I am con-
WAVEFRONTS OF HISTORY AND MEMORY
JUNE 2013
vinced, can be found the seeds of the
Kikkasho Efflorescence that birthed our modern
world.
But it’s a hard period to study, a deep deep
layer of the fuzziest, most tenuous signals. The
radioartifacts of the Late Telegraphic were indistinct,
weak, and drowned in noise even
when they originated; today they are smeared
across the outermost surface—the bottom, in
radioarchaeologists’ upside-down traditional
terminology—of a sphere nine thousand years
in radius that expands further each day. Torn
by dust clouds, punctured by stars, and dispersed
by nebulae, most of this enormous
spherical surface is useless; the areas of good
seeing are rare and eagerly sought. We have
come to one such location because of its unparalleled
view of Nihon in years 16 through
19 of the Showa period, or 1941 through
1944 in the anno domini system also in use at
the time.
“It was during that period,” I tell Evon, “that
the baryonic energy technologies that eventually
both powered humanity’s expansion into
space and demolished the Earth made their
first crude weaponized appearances. It’s well
known that Nihon was the first Earth culture
to feel the impact of these weapons, at the
end of the Second Global War, and that attack
had a profound impact on the culture’s development
and attitudes toward those technologies
in the following centuries. But the
reasons Nihon was attacked are unclear; even
the identity of the attacker is disputed. I hope
to unearth radioartifacts of the Tojo Shogunate
to definitively answer this question.”
“What kind signal strengths, these artifacts?”
“Four point three femtojanskys.” Numbers
are not my forte, but this cruel figure is etched
on my heart. “No more.”
Evon’s lips purse in concentration. His eyes
had wandered during my discussion of history
and culture, but this statistic is something he
can get his hands around. “Is very weak, yes.
But new detector can do, I think.” He nods, as
though to reassure himself. “Yes. Can do.”
I can’t help but recall my last dig at this site.
Aleá had squealed in delight as the first signals
had come through. “My God!” she said. “Listen
to this!” She pulled the headphones from
her ears and jammed them down on my head.
Through hiss and whine I heard a voice in
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