A story where SETI finds a signal but it's just a boring philosophical treatise

Question

I read a short story where SETI researchers were able to identify and decipher a signal from the region of Cassiopeia, but when the alien language was decoded, it was just a long philosophical treatise entirely about trinary logic. It seemed that interstellar travel was impossible for both us and them, and they were unaware of any other civilizations, and also uninterested in discussing anything "practical". Most of Earth was disappointed and annoyed, but the story was about one philosopher in particular who got really into the alien logic system.

I read it around 2005 but it was in a compilation including past decades, similar to "The Road to Science Fiction". The stories were by multiple authors, over a dozen. I'm guessing this story was from about the 1980s based on what I recall of the writing style, but I don't want to guess at what other stories were in there, since I read several anthologies at that time.

Answer 1

This sounds like Valour by Chris Beckett. The date fits as it was published in 1999, but it wasn't in a compilation of fiction over the decades. The only multiple author anthology containing it is Year's Best SF 5. I read it in Chris Beckett's book The Turing Test.

The Cassiopeians' philosophy is called trialism and the philosopher is Gruber. The protagonist of the story is Vincent and Gruber describes trialism to him as :

“In answer to your question about trialism. The Cassiopeians organize the world in threes. They have three sexes, three states of matter, three dimensions of space, three modes of being…and above all, three great forces, struggling for dominance in the world: Valour, Gentleness and Evil.”

“Not Good and Evil?”

“No, no, no. They have no concept of ‘Good.’ It would seem quite incomprehensible to them that we could compound two such obviously unmixable essences as Valour and Gentleness into a single word. To the Cassiopeians, all three forces are equally incompatible. Gentleness tells us to do one thing, Evil tells us to do another, and Valour—it tells us to do another thing again.”

The story is set in near future where life is getting a bit grim. Not quite dystopic, but there is increasing violence and decreasing interest in intellectual activities like philosophy. Gruber complains to Vincent:

“The point about the Cassiopeians is that they are not afraid to think. They still trust themselves to do something more imaginative than count! As a result their ideas are beautiful and they know it, so they beam them out for anyone who wants to listen.”
He laughs angrily. “Which on this planet at least, sometimes seems to be about eight people among all the seven billion inhabitants!”