The Legend of Esile Ruf. by Phantomgraph o==~---------==/^\==---------~==o Alexi Marantz sighed deeply and rubbed his eye ridges before leaning back in his chair. It was already late and the tiredness of his body called him to his comfortable bed. He tried to focus his eyes on the distant wall and found himself with a slight headache. For three long and very exasperating years he had cursed and slaved over the strange silvery shards of polycarbonate. Alexi himself had managed to piece together nearly a dozen over the course of his masters dissertation. Like most xeno-archeology postgraduates he had hoped to unlock the perplexing enigma of the disks. What he met with instead was the same universal frustration everyone seemed to find when trying to unlock their mysteries. At a moments glance most of the disks appeared to be nothing more than a strange curiosity. Flat round chunks of primitive plastic that encased a simple layer of aluminum and a curious chemical cocktail. From time to time a disk would show up where the chemical layer would be nonexistent but the most prevalent artifacts contained the tell tail traces of a slightly post industrialized race. Alexi closed his eyes briefly and sighed wondering just what the inhabitance of the IR-GW986A system had been like. Were they biped, triped or something even more exotic. It was certain that they were tool builders. What were their family units like? Did they hatch their young like primitive creatures? What were their hopes and dreams? Alexi snorted, shook his head, rose and gathered his cloak to head home leaving the lights to extinguish themselves. The walk back to the dorm was cool and brusque. Alexi bundled the cloak around him to shield out the night air. He complained to himself about his lack of proper progress and about the weather. A slight drizzle fell from the sky, something nearly as alien to Alexi as the 'sacred disks' he had spent so long studying. His mind trundled over the same puzzle that had his entire field arguing for the last fifteen years. The dorm loomed out of the soggy night like a beacon. Alexi approached with his claws buried deep in his pockets his mind thousands of light years away on a cold gray dirtball that didn't even have a proper name. o==-------=^=-------==o Alexi woke with a start. A large tan furred lump weaved in and out of his blurry sleep choked eyes. "Come on lazy bones, time to get up!" the cry purred in his ear. Alexi pushed his dorm mate off him with a heave. "Blast you Niki! You know I despise it when you do that!" From a crouched position on the floor Nicoli Secoreski laughed in his usual hyperactive way. To Alexi, Nicoli had always been one of those types of gens that always had far too much energy and far too few outlets for it. Unfortunately for Alexi that meant frequent nights spent trying to sleep listening to Niki tapping madly away on his polaris instrument trying desperately to unlock the secrets of yet another pop song the Inet ground out every week. The feline bounced up off the floor and with feline reflexes held up a container of hot kaffa as a piece offering. Alexi sighed and after eying Nikki angrily for a moment he accepted the gift and sat up in bed to drink it. "What the galaxy time is it anyway?" he asked between sips of the thick hot liquid. "About half past too darn late." Niki replied cheerfully. Alexi translated this in his head to about an hour before breakfast. "Niki, you know I'm working late in the lab all this month. Why do you insist on waking me so blasting early?" "Aww, poor scaly-wailly grumpy wommpy in the morning." Niki shot back with his tongue sticking out. Alexi cuffed him on the head as hard as he could with one of his foam pillows. This had the desired effect of clapping the felines jaw down on his tongue. With a charismatic hurt dance the feline bounded around the room holding his damaged mouth. With a smug little happiness Alexi rose and ignored his roommate. He sat at the table and picked up the vid panel. While sipping more of his kaffa he logged into the university computer network and glanced summarily over his video mail. One message caught his eye, an announcement on the universities xeno-archaeology list. He opened it and read the brief at the top. Niki, finished with his theatrics leaned over Alexi's shoulder annoyingly close. "What's that?" he asked, pointing at the image on the panel, "One of them dusty old things your always poking at?" Alexi sighed. "Yea Niki it's a atomic imaging scan of one of the sacred disks." he said, tapping the image with his claw and flipping it around in three dimensions. "This is one of the few we have found that is one piece. We have been studying these things for years. We know their is some kind of information on them, but we don't know what it is or how to read it." Alexi tapped the screen and it zoomed in. "See along the edge here is like a path. The center of the path is relativity flat with odd broken walls. The walls are almost the same on both sides but not quite. We assume that some kind of reading device rotated around the thing starting at the edge and moved in." He signed again, instructing the image to 'fly' down the track as he did. "The weird thing is that we have run the patterns through the computers a million times and nothing comes up. Their IS a pattern in it. Several of them in fact, but the computers can't make heads or tails out of it. Their are hundreds of repeating patterns at multiple frequencies but every attempt to build an image out of it has turned up just noise." Niki's eyes narrowed in concentration watching the virtual image fly past him. "Are you sure it's supposed to be images?" Alexi shrugged. "We don't know what it is, that's the problem. It could be anything. We don't even know for sure what wavelengths of light they were responsive to or how to display it." "Hummm. Can I have a copy of that?" Niki asked without looking away. For a moment Alexi looked over his shoulder at the feline to see if he was serious. He watched Niki's face carefully then shrugged. "It's public information." he said flatly, tapped a few commands into the vid screen and gave up. o==-------=^=-------==o It was late at night. Alexi was already snoring softly in the bed on the other side of the room. The only light was comming from a tiny reading flood over Niki's bed, and the vid screen in front of him. Niki was talking to some long distance friends of his and listening to the latest pop music while piecing togeather some old encoding routines he had downloaded from Inet. Niki grew mindfull of the hours and of his class the following dawn, and ended his various discussions. With a yawn he applied the various programs to working on the simple data stream he had taken from the atomic scan of the sacred disk. In his ears a steady streem of soft static poped and crackeled as the elementry decoder transformed the path into some semblience of sounds. Niki suspended the vid screens automatic power off function, turned out the light and curled up in his bed. Oddly the sound of static seemed straingly soothing and he soon was drifting in and out of dream time. At some time in the early morning of what would later could be refered to as March 26, 18019, Nicoli Secoreski woke to a starteling cascade of harmonics. He fumbled for his vid screen and looked at it with dumbfounded awe, remembering only at the last moment to save the decoding program. Some say it was fate, some would call it destiny, others call it pure luck. Whatever one chooses to call it, the deaf son of a court musician became the first embasitor of the gens and their long since forgoten ansesters. Thus for the second time in history, the tranquil melody of "Fur Elise" spread across the sentient galaxy, even if it was backwards the second time. o==~---------==\^/==---------~==o