The panic had mostly passed, leaving in its wake a shivery, cold fear I did not know how to banish. I gently squeezed Baqir’s hand on my chest to tell him it was okay to let go. He did so, slowly. I yearned for the pressure of his arm around me the moment it was gone. I wanted to answer his reassurance, to tell him that I had a plan. But the others were listening, and we had a long way to go.

Transcript

SPEC RESEARCH—PRIMARY EDUCATION OUTREACH #98832-V

PUBLIC COMMUNICATION TRANSCRIPT (AUDIO/VIDEO)

Source: HOUSE OF WISDOM, SPEC RESEARCH

TimeDate: 10:01:34 07.14.392

TITLE: Voices from the Past—Deep Space Archaeology on HOUSE OF WISDOM

[CHIN, M. and LAGO, G. are standing together in a large, bright laboratory. Visible in the background is the tail end of UC33-X.]

CHIN: Good morning, everyone! My name is Dr. Ming-shu Chin, and this is my friend Dr. Gregory Lago. We’re scientists here on the research ship HOUSE OF WISDOM. I’m a geologist, and Dr. Lago is an archaeologist.

LAGO: You might be wondering why a geologist and an archaeologist would bother coming into space. After all, there isn’t any dirt for us to dig around in up here. Look, our hands are clean! Not a speck.

CHIN: But there is a lot we can learn in space, especially if we work together. What we’re learning right now is part of a story that began a very long time ago. Hundreds of years ago, people built very large ships to travel into space. They were looking for other planets that might be like Earth. They were hoping to find new places to live.

LAGO: We don’t know what became of most of those ships. They stopped sending messages back to Earth centuries ago. Space is very big, and space travel is very dangerous. But we do know where one of them ended up.

[CHIN and LAGO approach UC33-X.]

LAGO: You’re probably wondering what this thing is, and I don’t blame you. When astronomers first spotted it, they didn’t know either. They named it Unidentified Craft 33-X, which is a silly name, but it seems to have stuck. The astronomers didn’t even see it like we normally think of seeing things. They heard it instead, because it was sending out a radio signal. Have a listen.

[A woman’s voice speaks briefly in an archaic language.]

LAGO: If you listen carefully, you can probably recognize most of the words. The woman in this message is speaking a language we now call Archaic Mandarin Chinese, which is an old version of the same Chinese language you may be learning in school, along with your other language lessons. She recorded her words a very long time ago, very far away, and sent them back to us on this probe so we could hear them.

CHIN: We don’t know that woman’s name, but we know she lived aboard a ship called MOURNFUL EVENING SONG, which left Earth hundreds of years ago. She sent this spacecraft back to Earth to let us know about MOURNFUL EVENING SONG’s long journey. But there’s a problem. This little craft has been traveling through space for a very long time, through deep cold and powerful radiation and unpredictable magnetic fields. The data in this probe’s computers are very old and very badly damaged. That’s where my friend Dr. Lago comes in.

LAGO: Space archaeologists may not have dirt and ruins to dig around in, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have artifacts to study. To hear what the people who recorded these messages wanted to tell us, we have to understand the very old technology they were using as well as all the ways the message has been damaged by its time in space. We have a lot of special techniques for piecing together old data like this and listening to what they had to say.

CHIN: What is she saying, Dr. Lago?

LAGO: That’s a good question. Let’s play it again, only this time we’ll play the restored and repaired version.

[A woman’s voice speaks briefly in an archaic language.]

LAGO: What she’s saying is that the people aboard MOURNFUL EVENING SONG found a planet they wanted to explore.

CHIN: That’s astonishing!

LAGO: It is, and now it’s your turn to shine. Dr. Chin is what we call a planetary geologist. Planets and moons are her specialty.

CHIN: We don’t know yet how far this probe has traveled or what secrets it holds inside, but we do know what direction it came from. We can point our telescopes in the right direction to look for the planet MOURNFUL EVENING SONG might have found. From that we can learn a great deal about planets outside our solar system—and about what ancient humans were looking for when they launched their ships to find them.

LAGO: A long time ago, when the United Councils of Earth were brand-new, the founder Leung Ma-Lin said, “The past is a mirror, and only by examining it can we examine ourselves.” That is the lesson both geologists and archaeologists must remember every day.

CHIN: In the rest of this lesson, Dr. Lago and I are going to share with you what we hope to learn about this mysterious, distant world.