The New Space Opera 2 by Gardner Dozois

It’s intelligent.”
    â€œMost cyclic emanations from living sources are simple biorhythms,” the chimp points out. “Not intelligent signals.”
    I ignore it and turn to Dix. “Assume it’s a signal.”
    He frowns. “Chimp says—”
    â€œAssume. Use your imagination.”
    I’m not getting through to him. He looks nervous.
    He looks like that a lot, I realize.
    â€œIf someone were signaling you,” I say, “then what would you do?”
    â€œSignal…” Confusion on that face, and a fuzzy circuit closing somewhere “…back?”
    My son is an idiot.
    â€œAnd if the incoming signal takes the form of systematic changes in light intensity, how—”
    â€œUse the BI lasers, alternated to pulse between seven hundred and three thousand nanometers. Can boost an interlaced signal into the exawatt range without compromising our fenders; gives over a thousand watts per square meter after diffraction. Way past detection threshold for anything that can sense thermal output from a red dwarf. And content doesn’t matter if it’s just a shout. Shout back. Test for echo.”
    Okay, so my son is an idiot savant .
    And he still looks unhappy—“But Chimp, he says no real information there, right?”—and that whole other set of misgivings edges to the fore again: he.
    Dix takes my silence for amnesia. “Too simple, remember? Simple click train.”
    I shake my head. There’s more information in that signal than thechimp can imagine. There are so many things the chimp doesn’t know. And the last thing I need is for this, this child to start deferring to it, to start looking to it as an equal, or, God forbid, a mentor .
    Oh, it’s smart enough to steer us between the stars. Smart enough to calculate sixty-digit primes in the blink of an eye. Even smart enough for a little crude improvisation should the crew go too far off-mission.
    Not smart enough to know a distress call when it sees one.
    â€œIt’s a deceleration curve,” I tell them both. “It keeps slowing down. Over and over again. That’s the message.”
    Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.
    And I think it’s meant for no one but us.
    Â 
    We shout back. No reason not to. And now we die again, because what’s the point of staying up late? Whether or not this vast entity harbors real intelligence, our echo won’t reach it for ten million corsecs. Another seven million, at the earliest, before we receive any reply it might send.
    Might as well hit the crypt in the meantime. Shut down all desires and misgivings, conserve whatever life I have left for moments that matter. Remove myself from this sparse tactical intelligence, from this wet-eyed pup watching me as though I’m some kind of sorcerer about to vanish in a puff of smoke. He opens his mouth to speak, and I turn away and hurry down to oblivion.
    But I set my alarm to wake up alone.
    I linger in the coffin for a while, grateful for small and ancient victories. The chimp’s dead, blackened eye gazes down from the ceiling; in all these millions of years, nobody’s scrubbed off the carbon scoring. It’s a trophy of sorts, a memento from the early incendiary days of our Great Struggle.
    There’s still something—comforting, I guess—about that blind, endless stare. I’m reluctant to venture out where the chimp’s nerves have not been so thoroughly cauterized. Childish, I know. The damn thing already knows I’m up; it may be blind, deaf, and impotent in here, but there’s no way to mask the power the crypt sucks in during a thaw. And it’s not as though a bunch of club-wielding teleops are waiting to pounce on me the moment I step outside. These are the days of détente, after all. The struggle continues but the war has gone cold; we just go through the motions now, rattling our chains like an old married multiplet resigned to hating each