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At the Watering Hole

Written by Edward M. Lerner

Illustrated by R. Stephen Adams

Resplendent in a spatter-pattern robe, K'reediscranth turned two eyes and four ears heavenward. Two more eyes he pivoted toward the sacred text spread across the lectern against which he leaned. His remaining sense organs scanned randomly across the hushed multitudes far below.

It was his nineteenth Festival of Oneness, and yet the ceremony's majesty threatened to overwhelm him. To the horizon in every direction folk gathered in holy assembly. Myriads more waited beyond his sight. The folk only congregated in such multitudes on the Day of Oneness. Stray tendrils of thought reached him even here atop the holy obelisk.

As High Priest, K'reediscranth had long ago committed the liturgy to memory— the Rite must never vary. With all eyes now focused on The Book of Oneness, he intoned: "In the beginning, the folk were scattered and alone, little more than beasts …"

****

Carla Markson dug through the digital debris of a failed career for information that stubbornly refused to reveal itself. Her difficulty was hardly surprising. SETI observations were indexed by coordinates of the celestial sphere and time taken, but she was desperately searching for records of a scarcely remembered pattern she might have seen "about a year ago."

In offices, meeting rooms, and corridors all around, the farewell party had degenerated into a wake. SETI had lost government backing years ago. Now disheartened private patrons had withdrawn support. The funding officially ended at midnight.

"Carla?" an impatient voice called. "Dr. Markson? Everyone's gathering for a final toast in the cafeteria. Please join us."

"In a minute." Images flashed across her computer screen. Two images a second; 120 per minute. False-color coding now accentuated aspects to which no one had heretofore paid attention. Flash, flash, flash . . .

"Carla!"

She snapped out of a hypnotized funk. Annoyance became triumph: Had the director not barked at her, the graphic she had so urgently sought would have flickered past her unnoticed.

"Genie, halt," Carla commanded. "Backwards, ten seconds per frame." Data barely sensed returned to the screen. She examined frequency spikes, power densities, and modulation coefficients, all color-coded and textured for pattern recognition.

Two champagne glasses clutched precariously in one hand, Director Harold Flynn opened her office door. "It's over, Carla. Please join us."

Plucking the glasses from his grasp, she drained both in the time it took her computer to back up three images. "Genie, forward one frame and stop."

To her boss of the next seventeen minutes Carla said, "Hal, I have a counterproposal. The team should join me here— and bring more of the bubbly." She tapped the frozen graphic with a well-gnawed fingernail.

"I've found them."

****

In a pause between chapters, K'reediscranth raised his eyes from the sacred scroll. Gazing over the countless folk gathered for this, his thirtieth Festival of Oneness, he dared to hope: Maybe this year we will succeed.

Stretching his senses to their utmost, K'reediscranth detected the merest suggestion of an imbalance to the north. The holy assembly, in consonance with his will, shuffled until their aggregated thoughts subsided into a background murmur. He grimaced in concentration until their realignment was seemly.

He resumed reading. "After many an age, our forebears learned to live together as families, to harmonize their minds. The families were fruitful and spread across the face of our world. Individuality remained, but families could meld their thoughts upon need.

"In the fullness of time, families cooperated as clans, then tribes, then nations. Each step enriched the mentation of the folk." Three hands nervously stroked the fabric of his slick ceremonial gown —this festival season, an iridescent rainbow— as he kept his place in the liturgy with a fourth. "In the days of the prophet Holgor'roth, all nations merged into one commonwealth. Their power of thought again grew manyfold."

K'reediscranth bared his senses to all the merged minds roaring their yearnings. The slightest wavering of his concentration, the merest chance interruption of the crowd's careful symmetry around the ceremonial obelisk, and he was lost.

This was the very apex of the Rite.

"The folk strove to become yet greater, and they could not. They sought an even higher unity, but they were already as one. They bore sons and daughters and verblans until the world could feed no more. There seemed no path forward.

"And then Vrg'oq'lan the Prophet revealed a way —nay, the way— to the folk."

****

The man with whom Carla Markson amiably chatted was short, pudgy, bland— and the King of Sweden. Tomorrow he would present her with the Nobel Prize in Physics. She didn't exactly do physics; for her, the Nobel Foundation had chosen to bend their definitions.

Awarded just five years after her discovery, the prize was an unprecedented recognition. Carla's fellow laureates, likewise mingling with the Swedish aristocracy, were decades older than she.

"Tell me, please," the king said in his charmingly accented English, while nabbing a canapé from a passing waiter, "why you succeeded."

How to put her insight simply? Carla searched the ballroom for inspiration. She found it at the crystal-laden, forty-foot-long bar to which liveried servants ceaselessly returned.

She pointed. "Behold the watering hole."

The original figure of speech, of course, referred to a water hole —a literal pool of H2O in the African veldt— where lions and antelopes and whatnot came to drink. A woman's reach should exceed her grasp, else what's a meta for?

"Everyone meets at the watering hole. In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI, all species were presumed to meet at some celestial watering hole, discoursing over a natural radio frequency."

"Where is this watering hole?" The king nibbled on wafer-thin toast spread with foie gras, oblivious to the crumbs that dotted his cummerbund.

"There's the problem. People differed on the ideal frequency, but they always picked a characteristic frequency of some common molecule or element, like hydrogen. The argument ran that the frequency must be rational and universal, reflecting the analysis that any technological species would make."

"That's sensible— yet you looked elsewhere." Her royal companion frowned in concentration as he licked essence of hors d'oeuvre from his fingers. "Why?"

"SETI researchers scanned candidate watering-hole frequencies time and again. They heard nothing." Reliving her epiphany made Carla beam. "Their strategy contradicted the one