"The other side has done this before."Dr Wanjiru Kamau, report on the Cirban contact, 15 October 2317
Dr Wanjiru Kamau was a xenologist of the Institute of Xenology and the science officer of the survey ship Grissom. She led humanity's first exchange with the Voor at Cirban in 2317, and her report on it became the founding document of contact xenology. She was a member of Halima Rahal's mission to Hiverion in 2318.
Early career
Kamau was born in 2279 at Nyeri, in East Africa, and trained in mathematics and linguistics at Nairobi before joining the Institute of Xenology at Magellan in 2309, the year after its founding. The Institute had been established by the Ancient Sites Act of 11 June 2308 to study the monuments of the Mardak Vol. Kamau spent 2316 on the lattice of the Yildun capsule, the craft the Grissom had found in 2307 with its long-dead pilot still in the chair. Her work on the lattice concerned how a record could be read when nothing was known of the mind that made it, and she joined the Grissom as science officer in 2316 for the ship's survey of the Gulf.
First contact
The Grissom was at Cirban's edge on 21 September 2317, charging for the jump home after two years' survey of the Gulf's far side, when it recorded a flash 60 astronomical units away. The flash was not a Pillai arrival. Over the next nine days a ship of 1,200 metres fell into the system at a steady 0.3 g and surveyed it by the Grissom's own method, a body at a time. On the tenth day it turned toward the Grissom. On 1 October 2317, at 20 million kilometres, it stopped and began to transmit.
The transmission was the prime numbers to a hundred, repeated. Kamau answered with the primes to two hundred. The Voor ship answered with the squares, and the Grissom with the cubes. By the end of the first day the two ships had established the integers, the four operations, equality and its negation, and a symbol each side used for yes. By the end of the first week they shared a notation for physical constants, and had established that both crews breathed oxygen and saw in the same band of light. The other side counted in base eight, which Kamau's team took to mean four fingers on each of two hands. When the humans saw the Voor, who have four fingers and a thumb, they took the guess to have been half right.
On 12 October the other ship sent its name, which the Grissom rendered Lorni Indur, its class, a survey cruiser, and its people's name, Voor. On 14 October it sent an invitation and a position, which Kamau's team took a week to be sure of: Haedus, one jump beyond Cirban, and a world of 200 million Voor. The Grissom's courier left for Sol on 15 October with everything. The Grissom jumped for Haedus on 20 October and spent November and December 2317 in orbit above Indata Mog as the Voor's guests.
The Kamau report
Kamau's report reached Sol on 28 November 2317 and was published, with the Grissom's pictures, on 9 December. It found that the Voor's opening sequence was a protocol and not an improvisation. Their side moved through the stages of the exchange with the rhythm of a procedure, and at several points it anticipated the Grissom's next step and supplied it. Its conclusion was that the Voor had met other minds before humanity and had a method for doing so. The Grissom's crew, who had been writing a method as they went, were the fourth or fifth species the Voor had taken through theirs.
The finding shaped the federation's response. It meant that the Voor were not only spacefaring but experienced, and that the federation would be dealing with a people who had done this before and knew what came next. The report's annex set out the stages of the Voor procedure as Kamau had observed them, numbered from the first pulse to the invitation. The Institute used the annex as the basis of its own first-contact procedure, adopted in 2321.
Mission to Hiverion
Kamau sailed with Rahal's party in the Asimov in March 2318. At Hiverion the talks ran from 2 May to 11 June. They began in the shared notation, and from the third week they ran in a spoken pidgin that the Institute's linguists and the Voor's built between them. Voor speech carries meaning in low tones that human ears catch as a hum under the words, and the pidgin lifted those tones into ranges both species could hear and say. Kamau led the human side of that work, with two of the party's six xenologists. The talks produced the Cirban Protocol of 11 June 2318.
The Institute's Voor section
The Asimov's crew came home with the material for the Institute's study of the Voor, published in 2320. The study ran to 400 pages, and the Navy carried it in every wardroom in the war of the 2330s. It held that every Voor engagement needed a General's sanction, and War Plan Purple rested on that observation. Kamau edited the study's chapters on Voor language and procedure, and from 2320 she headed the Institute's Voor section. The section supplied linguists to Rahal's embassy at Hiverion, and Kamau spent three periods at Hiverion between 2320 and 2328 working with the embassy staff on the Voor court's record.
Kamau took no part in the Navy's planning for the war, and she asked in 2333 to be left off the Institute's list of advisers to the Grand Armada. The section's later work, the interrogation of Voor prisoners after the Mog and the reading of the court's record after the surrender, was done by her staff. She retired from the Institute in 2341 and died at Magellan in 2351.
Legacy
Kamau's report of 2317 is the founding document of contact xenology. Its central finding, that the Voor had a method, set the terms of the federation's dealings with them from the first. It also suggested that the region held more minds than the Voor and the federation, a suggestion the Voor's own account of the Maweer and of the Gulf's extinct species confirmed in 2318.
BOOK SOURCES
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.3 "In the Shadow of Ancients: Mardak Vol Monuments"
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.6 "Alone No Longer: The Voor Confederacy"
- Solar Eternal, Part VIII, §8.4 "The Voor Legion"