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Read an Excerpt From Singer Distance

The odds of the planet next door hosting intelligent life are—that’s not luck. That’s a miracle. It means something.

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Published on October 11, 2022

The odds of the planet next door hosting intelligent life are—that’s not luck. That’s a miracle. It means something.

We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Singer Distance by Ethan Chatagnier, a novel about how far we’re willing to go to communicate with a distant civilization, and the great lengths we’ll travel to connect with each other here on Earth—out from Tin House Books on October 18th.

In December 1960, Crystal Singer, her boyfriend Rick, and three other MIT grad students take a cross-country road trip from Boston to Arizona to paint a message in the desert. Mars has been silent for thirty years, since the last time Earth solved one of the mathematical proofs the Martian civilization carved onto its surface. The latest proof, which seems to assert contradictory truths about distance, has resisted human understanding for decades. Crystal thinks she’s solved it, and Rick is intent on putting her answer to the test—if he can keep her from cracking under the pressure on the way. But Crystal’s disappearance after the experiment will set him on a different path than he expected, forever changing the distance between them.


 

 

Our operating theory was that if there were watchers on Mars, if there were still citizens of that place who believed we were worth a second look, the place they were most likely to have their gaze trained was the last place humans had passed their test. We drove a mile north of the road, not wanting travelers—or, mostly, cops—to stop and ask what we were doing. No one was going to bother too much with dots in the distance from the highway. If you were on this road, you were going a long way. No one would want a detour.

We had thirty-two characters to write. Crystal’s whole proof was two pages, but she said there was one line we could write that would demonstrate our understanding beyond a doubt. It was the one she had said was the line, the one I didn’t understand. The one that understood distance in a way that, as far as we knew, only one person on Earth could.

Funnily enough, our first step was to measure the distances we’d be writing on. We could proceed well enough on the part of it we grasped. We were Newtonian mechanics in the age of relativity. I had bought four tellurometers, state-of-the-art surveying equipment, the fanciest ingredient in the recipe. Mapping out the spaces right when you’re working in two dimensions but exist in only one of them, in terms of relative size, is both more important and more difficult than most people realize. Ronnie wondered at one point whether we could wing it. I asked him to imagine driving his car into a cornfield and writing a legible sentence with it.

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Singer Distance

Singer Distance

Working in two teams, we first measured the bottom rail that would connect the numerals of her proof, planting flags at each corner. We divided that into thirty-two segments to account for all the characters we needed to draw. Then we measured, very carefully—I checked and rechecked our right angles maniacally, exasperating everyone—fifty kilometers, a little over thirty miles, west of the rail. Our sentence ran north-south, the only way to fit it between two ridges of mountains. We planted a small flag every kilometer of the way, and a large flag on a ten-foot post at the corners of each of the thirty-two rectangles we created.

That took us into the midafternoon. After we broke for lunch, Ronnie and Otis took over the tellurometers and worked to plant flags at the corners of each square kilometer within the rectangles, turning the field into a grid. A grid that corresponded to the graph paper in Crystal’s notebooks. While they took off in the van to measure it out, Crystal, Priya, and I readied the agricultural equipment we’d be using as our pen. This was a territory more familiar to me. We had a center-pivot irrigation system—thank you, Frank Zybach—rigged up for lateral movement. It was basically a long array of sprinklers on a rail with a wheel system on both ends. That was the modification. Center-pivots have wheels only on the circumference end, like the pencil end of a drafting compass. I checked the welds on the modified side. They looked solid. Assembly was required though. The whole array was a kilometer wide, divided into one hundred ten-meter segments to fit in the trailer. We had to fit and fasten them all together and then wind the irrigation lines around it.

Everything I saw so far was making me happy except the cloud cover.

The clouds hadn’t split open but they hadn’t scattered either.

We’d tow the rig with the water truck at one end and the moving truck at the other. The big hassle would be driving the water truck back and forth to the well pump every kilometer or so, but there was no chance of keeping enough hose to cover the distance from the well to the top of the letters. When Otis and Ronnie returned from gridding the first rectangle, they helped me dump the first fifty-five-gallon drum of our additive into the water tank. I used an aerator to circulate the water. The water in the tank turned the color of lapis lazuli.

Priya and Crystal took the van to start gridding out the next rectangle, while Otis and Ronnie got ready to drive the two trucks. I manned the machinery and coordinated the trucks, walking backwards in front of them, waving them faster or slower to keep their pace parallel. We started with the rail of the equation, the bottom line. We needed a stroke width of seven kilometers to be sure our writing was legible from Mars, which meant we had to snake our irrigation rig back and forth seven times to create one line, but at least for this first one it was straight forward and straight back. We had to fill the tank ten times to make the seven passes, but that was a better rate than I’d estimated. More happy news.

The sun was a few hours from setting when we started the rail and an hour from the horizon when we finished, but the desert light wouldn’t empty out much until the horizon snuffed it out in a flash. We ate dinner around a campfire before that happened, our bodies aching from the labor. We’d forgotten it was Christmas. Forgotten it was anything but the day our work began. Truth be told, I’d been worrying about the way the solution was soaking into the dirt, a low-blue tint that looked dirty. It looked more like a stain on a shirt than a pen on paper. But as we were setting up our tents in the last of the day, the light draining swiftly when the sun touched the horizon, we saw the glow effect take over: the solution springing to life with the comforting warmth of a night-light. By the time we’d set up camp, nightfall was complete, and the blue glow a blaze stretching miles off into the distance like a runway to heaven.

The five of us gathered to stare. Like the Richter Site, it felt monumental. It felt beyond the human, and particularly beyond anything five math students could put together in a day. I can’t deny that I felt a certain smug satisfaction about pulling it together. That didn’t stop me from thinking what the others were thinking: They have to notice this. There’s no way they can fail to notice this.

Ronnie said he wasn’t sure he’d be able to sleep, given how bright the glow was. I reminded him he’d been sleeping two feet away from Otis’s irregular snoring for five days. He could sleep through anything. He and Otis had a tent. Crystal and I had a tent. Priya had her own. She was probably happy for the independent sleeping space, but I felt bad for her. Not bad enough to share, though. Not bad enough to ask Crystal if she wanted to bunk with her roommate.

I was still greedy for her. I wanted to lie next to her and, if I’m being honest, to hear some compliments on how my plans were coming together. It would have to wait until the morning, though. When I got into the tent, she was already asleep, dozing under the Mexican blanket. I curled up behind her, and soon I was too.

***

Thunder woke us. Morning light illuminated the tent walls. Crystal stepped outside the tent to scan for more lightning. It was a favorite phenomenon of hers: its unpredictability, its power and echo. I was more worried about where the storm system was. I poked my head out of the tent flap. We still had cloud cover, but it looked to be the lighter tail end of it. The thunderheads had passed southeast. There was a chance they were snowing on Flagstaff right then. Another bolt. Crystal and I both caught it. She started her count, and this time I let her. Seven miles. I could live with that.

 

Priya was working her way out of her tent. Ronnie was up, wrapped in a blanket but starting a fire and gathering breakfast. Otis, of course, slept away, the only one of us immune to thunderclaps. It was Boxing Day, Priya said. Then she had to explain what that was. We ate. Ronnie jostled Otis awake for some lukewarm oatmeal. Then we got to work. We had to draw eight characters a day or the equation would be incomplete at the moment of opposition.

I’ve always enjoyed work. Despite all the bellyaching when I was a kid, I loved when my dad wrangled me into his projects. I mourned them when he stopped inviting me. He was of the generation that never said I love you, but the love was in those projects. The projects were our relationship. And the problems, the things that disrupted the projects, those were what gave them the purpose. The troubleshooting was what gave them meaning. Painting a house wasn’t that interesting. Nothing went wrong.

I had to say, though, our smooth sailing so far was one of the best feelings I’d ever experienced. I’d never enjoyed work as much as this. I didn’t know if the others had grown up the way I had. Crystal was the most self-propelled student I’d ever seen, but in terms of labor, I’d never seen her pick up a wrench. But the four of them seemed as tuned to it as I was—to the art of figuring out what needed to be done and doing it. Otis was happy as hell in the cab of the moving truck. The clouds cleared midmorning and the sun warmed us up, even if the temperature was mild. Ronnie, Otis, and I tied our T-shirts around our heads. Priya drove the water truck to the pump and came back with her hair soaked.

We were as dirty as beggars but we were grinning. We lunched when we got hungry, got back to work, and stopped for dinner when we were hungry again. We finished ten characters the first day after the rail, nine the next. Traffic on the highway picked up. We could see cars slow down as they passed our stretch, their drivers presumably looking out our way and wondering who the hell was watering the desert. In a week they’ll know, Crystal said. We didn’t fiddle or dance. No one wanted the spectacle of Holladay’s event anymore. That taste had turned sour. But the intimacy here could kill you—an individual achievement composed, somehow, of five. Once again, genius or madness was a secret we held close. Crystal wasn’t fraying now. She was joyous. The others weren’t worried about her anymore. Priya kept glancing at her, but even if she hadn’t suspended her concerns, she’d put a pause on them for now.

On the third evening, Ronnie took the van out to Peach Springs and came back with two chickens from the market. We roasted them over the campfire and ate them with our hands, pulling the quarters apart. With her nerves resolved, and the rumble of van travel absent, Crystal was ravenous. She seemed to be making up for all the food she’d thrown up or avoided eating along the way. Otis claimed the necks and gnawed on them a long time. We washed our hands from the water tank and climbed to the top of the moving truck to get a better view of the work we’d done. The angle was still shallow; we couldn’t read it, per se, but we could see that it snaked and turned like some kind of capillary system, that it branched into the distance like a vein of glowing ore in a mine. Crystal brought her notebook up there, comparing her designs to what we’d drawn.

Crystal and I made love in the tent. We both smelled like chicken skin. The next day we had four characters to write, half a day’s work. It was the day before the opposition. We emerged in the morning to a new storm system blowing in. It wasn’t over us yet, and it was a pale silver, but it was headed our way. Despite the risk it posed, I was half happy to see it. We’d worked the last two and a half days in full sun. We were all peeling somewhere or another.

By noon, when we finished, the clouds were overhead. They didn’t look that threatening, and even if they were, my fear of the rain had been replaced by a faith in the five of us. We could do it again if we had to. We’d find the money. We’d get the equipment. We already had the plans. From the top of the moving truck, we looked out over one thousand square kilometers of painted desert. It was less impressive in the bright wash of day, but the numerals still glowed with a faint warmth under the cloud cover.

I told them anyone who wanted to could nap. The women, before they napped, drove the van back across the highway to bathe at the Richter Site pump. Ronnie and I took the trucks and the irrigation rig to go back over the numerals we did the first day after the rail, to make sure their glow wouldn’t fade. Crystal, Priya, and Otis were all asleep in separate tents when Ronnie and I returned at 5:15, the sky just beginning to go pink.

I woke the three of them and pulled us all to the top of the moving truck. Otis grumbled and Priya asked what the rush was. I didn’t tell them, but they saw me grin when we heard a buzz approaching from the east. This was my tour de force, scheduled for 5:40 pm, when the last lick of daylight would be just enough to make out the hulking moving truck and five figures standing on top of it. We waved as the little Cessna did its first flyby. I saw it bank a little to get a camera angle on us. It circled around to a higher altitude, halfway between the ground and the clouds, to catch a picture of our writing. Then it pulled around again, much higher and farther out, apparently needing more distance to capture the full scope of what we’d done.

“Jesus, Rick,” Crystal said. “How much did you pay for that?”

“It’s worth it,” I told her. “It’s for posterity.”

I was telling all of them, really. I wanted Ronnie, Priya, and Otis to feel the weight of what we’d done here. I felt like the three of them only half got it, mostly because I myself had been able to hold the magnitude in my head only in rare moments. If Crystal’s math was right, we’d just changed the course of human history.

 

Excerpted from Singer Distance by Ethan Chatagnier. Published with permission from Tin House. Copyright © 2022 by Ethan Chatagnier.

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Ethan Chatagnier

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