The first time I heard the stars, I was kneeling in the wet sand of Long Island, my ear pressed against the warm glass of a vacuum tube, and I cried. Not from sadness. From joy. From the sheer impossible weight of knowing that I was not alone.

It was spring, 1924. The ocean was cold but the sun was warm, and the radio tower I had built with my own hands—soldered, wired, bolted to a wooden platform thirty feet above the beach—was humming with energy. I had spent ten years saving every penny from my salary at the Pennsylvania telegraph office. I had bought the parts from junkyards and surplus auctions and men who sold stolen government equipment in the back rooms of bars. I had built this tower alone, in secret, on land owned by a fisherman who thought I was a hobbyist.

I was not a hobbyist. I was a man who believed that the universe was speaking, and that it was time for us to speak back.

The signal came at 2:17 in the morning, local time. A repeating pulse, weak but clear, coming from somewhere beyond Jupiter. It was not natural. Natural signals were chaotic, irregular, the way a river sounds when it hits rocks. This was regular. Precise. A pattern embedded in noise, the way a word is embedded in static.

I recorded it on wax cylinder. I played it back seventeen times. Each time, the pattern was the same. Each time, I cried a little more.

I called it the Meridian Signal. Not because it came from the meridian—though it did, roughly, from the direction of the constellation Orion—but because it felt like a crossing. A threshold. The moment when humanity stopped being alone.

I told no one at first. What would I say? "Good morning, I have heard from the stars." They would put me in an asylum. Or worse—they would laugh.

But secrets are hard to keep when they are this big. When you hear a voice from beyond the solar system, you cannot keep it inside your chest. It expands. It pushes against your ribs. It demands to be let out.

I started small. I went to the jazz clubs in Coney Island and I told musicians. Musicians are used to believing in things that cannot be measured—rhythm, soul, the thing that makes a piano sound like a piano instead of a box of strings and wire. They listened. They nodded. One of them, a trumpet player named Willie, said, "If the stars are talking, Arthur, we should talk back. What should we say?"

I did not know. I thought about it for weeks.

What do you say to a civilization that may or may not exist, across a distance that may be infinite, using a technology that may be incomprehensible? Do you send mathematics? Do you send images? Do you send your name?

I decided to send music.

Not because music is universal—I do not know if it is. But because music is honest. Mathematics can be faked. Images can be manipulated. But a man playing a piano, playing from the heart, cannot lie. If there is someone out there listening, let them hear what we sound like when we are not trying to impress them. When we are just being ourselves.

I found a pianist. Her name was Clara Lin, and she played in a small club on 48th Street. She was Chinese-American, born in San Francisco, raised in Harlem. She played jazz, but she also played Chopin, and when she played Chopin, the club went silent. Not the silence of politeness. The silence of people who have forgotten they are in a bar.

I recorded her playing a Nocturne in E-flat major. I modified the tower to increase its power output, using parts I had bought from a Navy surplus store under a false name. I spent three nights aligning the antenna, calibrating the transmitter, testing the signal strength. By the fourth night, I was ready.

The night I sent it, the moon was full. The ocean was silver. The tower hummed. Clara's recording was loaded into the wax cylinder player, connected to the transmitter, pointed at Orion.

I started the machine.

The music left the tower at the speed of light. It passed the moon. It passed Mars. It passed Jupiter. It left the solar system and entered the space between stars, carrying with it the sound of a Chinese-American woman playing Chopin on a worn piano in a small club on 48th Street, while a Chinese-American man and an Irish-American man and a Black trumpet player and a Italian-American bartender and a Jewish telegraph operator and a Polish immigrant and a hundred other people who had gathered on the beach to listen stood in the moonlight and listened to the stars.

The music lasted four minutes and forty-seven seconds. Then the cylinder was done. Then the tower was silent.

Then the men in government suits arrived.

They came at dawn, two days later. Six of them, in dark coats and darker expressions. The leader was a man named Crosby, fifty-five years old, with a face like a clenched fist. He told me that my transmitter violated the Radio Act of 1912. He told me that unauthorized deep-space transmission was a federal offense. He told me that the tower would be dismantled.

I did not argue. I knew this would happen. I had known it since the first night I heard the stars.

But I had one more night.

That night, I did something foolish and beautiful. I cranked the transmitter to maximum power. I loaded a new cylinder—not Clara's Chopin, but a new recording. Willie on trumpet. A raw, bluesy improvisation, played with everything he had, played for no one and everyone.

Willie played for six minutes.

I watched the signal strength meter. The signal left the tower. It left the Earth. It left the solar system. It entered the dark.

Then Crosby's men cut the power. They dismantled the tower. They took the transmitter. They left me with nothing but the clothes on my back and a pocketful of coins and the memory of a trumpet player playing to an audience of stars.

I went back to Pennsylvania. I worked in a factory. I married Clare, the reporter who had written about me, who had said in her article that I was "a man who tried to talk to the stars, and in doing so, reminded the rest of us that talking is what we do."

Life was ordinary. Life was good.

Sometimes, at night, I would stand in the backyard and look up at the stars. I would think about Willie's trumpet. I would think about Clara's piano. I would think about the six minutes of music that were traveling through the dark at the speed of light, carrying with them the sound of human beings trying to say: we are here. We are not afraid. We are not alone.

I would never know if anyone heard it.

But sometimes, when I heard a star's voice in my dreams, I would smile. And I would think: maybe, somewhere out there, someone is listening. And maybe, just maybe, they are smiling too.