Fresco

Alastair Reynolds

On the day that the blue ones stopped transmitting, the caretaker was doing its rounds of the Eye, humming and pottering among the other, duller maintenance robots.

Then, when the news came in, it stopped humming. Near the heart of the Eye—the vast radio telescope floating beyond the orbit of Jupiter—was a gigantic spherical tank which had once been used to store the water the humans had needed during the construction. They had lived in it, too—dwelling in pressurized cabins surrounded by water, shielded from radiation.

Now they were gone—long gone—but the midnight blue tank remained. Like, the caretaker had thought one day, a huge blank canvas. III

Until the coming of the Eye, no radio telescope had been sensitive enough to pick out signals of intelligent origin from the mush of cosmic background noise. But then the feast had begun: a tsunami of knowledge almost beyond human comprehension. Yet the messages showed that humanity was still fundamentally alone. All the signals had originated in other galaxies, often at distances that bordered on the cosmological. They had been sent hundreds of millions of years ago, when the dinosaurs were still evolution’s cool new idea.

But there was a more disturbing thing even than the loneliness. At any one time the Eye was picking up the messages from about a hundred civilizations, but each only stayed active for a few centuries before falling silent. The net number stayed roughly constant because new species were always popping up and discovering radio astronomy, but they too would be doomed to spend only a relatively short amount of time among the hundred. For a few glorious centuries they would broadcast their cultural legacy into the sky; enriching the knowledge of the other listening cultures.

But then—it was often around the time they started discovering some of the more interesting things that could be done with subatomic particles—they would stop sending.

Usually without much warning.

III

It shouldn’t have bothered the caretaker.

But in tending the Eye it found that it became quite attached to some of those transmitting cultures. It became absorbed in their histories; fascinated by their biologies and outlooks.

It hummed their music and pondered their art.

And waited with deep, mounting sadness for the day it always knew would come; the sudden, roaring silence from that part of the sky. III

It moved to the part of the Fresco which recorded the senders in a distant galaxy in the constellation Sculptor.

The caretaker had marked the tank with faint lines of celestial latitude and longitude. At the precise co-ordinates of the transmitting civilization, it had painted a spiral galaxy much like our own; an impressionistic swirl of white and ochre. It was one of the first galaxies that the caretaker had painted, and while it had gained proficiency since—there were better ones dotted all around the Fresco—there was a certain charm to this effort which appealed to it.

Two thirds out from the core, the caretaker had marked the location of the transmitting culture’s solar system.

It thought of them: blue, tentacled aquatic beings with a reproductive system so intricate it had taken the caretaker decades to work out how many sexes they had. Their music had been even trickier; sounding at first pass like synchronized drowning. But the caretaker had persisted, and after a while it had even caught itself humming some of the more accessible bits.

But they were gone now.

Silent.

III

Nothing for it, then.

With sadness in its heart—but at the same time emboldened by the execution of a solemn task it knew must be done—the caretaker prepared the precise shade of midnight blue it needed. When it was ready, it carefully stippled the galaxy into oblivion, like a master picture restorer removing a blemish. The caretaker was very good at its work, and when it was done there was no sign that the galaxy had ever existed. The Fresco was up-to-date, but it would not be long before it had to be changed again.

Art is long, it thought. And life short.