Cynosure.X International: Cyno's Role-Play: Supplements: First Contact: Introduction

Cyno's Role-Play: Supplements: First Contact

Introduction

Since the discovery of their existence, that was the most urgent business of the Space Survey. It might well be the most important business of the human race--on which its survival or destruction would depend. Many Space Survey remodeled ships had gone out, and others would follow until the problem was solved.

Evidence

Cairns had been found on conspicuous landmarks on oxygen-type planets over a range of some twelve hundred light-years from Earth. These singular, conical, hollow-topped cairns sheltering silicon-bronze plates constituted the evidence that Plumies existed. By the vegetation about them, some were a century old. On the same evidence, others had been erected only months or weeks or even days before a human Space Survey ship arrived to discover them.

But the only fact known about the Plumie civilization came from the cairns and silicon-bronze inscribed tablets they'd left on oxygen-type worlds over a twelve-hundred-light-year range in space, and the only thing to be deduced about the Plumies themselves came from the decorative, formalized symbols like feathery plumes which were found on all their bronze tablets. The name "Plumies" came from that symbol.

Since the discovery of these cairns, the Space Survey agency started placing markers of their own next to the alien's cairns.

First Contact Policy

Survey ship orders were to make contact without discovery, if such a thing were possible. The ideal would be a Plumie ship or the Plumie civilization itself, located and subject to complete and overwhelming envelopment by human ships--before the Plumies knew they'd been discovered. And this would be the human ideal because humans have always had to consider that a stranger might be hostile, until he'd proven otherwise.

Upon discovery, survey ship is to attempt a contact to gather information. The survey ship must play a pre-recorded roll of tape to the alien race. The tape sends a series of cardinal numbers--one to five. Then an addition table, from one plus one to five plus five. Then a multiplication table up to five times five.

The reasoning behind the tape content is that a pattern of clickings, plainly artificial and plainly stating facts known to both races, would be the most reasonable way to attempt to open contact. It was not startlingly intellectual information to be sent out in tiny clicks ranging up and down the radio spectrum. The assumption was that any rational creature would grasp the idea that orderly signals were rational attempts to open communication.

Theta Gisol Solar System

Human's first contact with the Plumie occurred in the Theta Gisol solar system. However, this solar system is not the home of the Plumie civilization. There was no tuned radiation. There was no evidence of interplanetary travel--rockets would be more than obvious, and a magnetronic drive had a highly characteristic radiation-pattern.

The solar system is about fifty million miles long and forty million miles wide. There are a total of five planets in the Theta Gisol solar system. The one planet furtherest away is frozen. The planet closest to the sun is a gas giant with innumerable moonlets revolving gracefully about its bulk. Thisloxygen-atmosphere planet contains seas and islands and continents. Surrounding this planet are meteor swarms, so dense in appearance on a radar screen, yet so tenuous in reality.