“I will if you will.”
“I guess I ought to,” Heather said.
When they returned to the living room, Thea had uncovered her contraption.
“Hi, Thea. How’s it going?”
“Oh, it’s nearly finished,” Thea said. “I’m checking the braces, to be sure it’ll fit into a raft. I’m going to try it out in a little while.”
“Hey, neat,” Heather said. “Can we help?”
“There’s not that much to do,” Thea said. “But sure, you’re welcome to come along when I take it out.”
Mick strolled over and climbed into her lap.
“Nice kitty,” Thea said, scratching him under the chin. “You are a nice kitty, but the last thing I need is cat hair in my lenses.”
Thea picked him up and offered him to Barbary, holding him behind the front legs so his paws stuck out in front of him. He bristled his whiskers and looked about to growl. Barbary rescued him.
“We’ll take him into our room with us,” she said. In a low voice, to Heather, she said, “Pretty soon you better show me how to keep track of him so I can let him out.”
“That’ll only take a second,” Heather said, delighted to have an excuse to put off her afternoon nap a few minutes longer. “Let’s do it right now!”
As she headed back to her computer, the call-signal chimed. Heather accepted the message:
“General announcement regarding the alien craft. Main meeting room. Immediately.”
“Wow!” Heather said. “Let’s go! Thea, did you hear? There’s an announcement about the alien ship!”
Thea looked up, frowning and startled.
“An announcement?”
“Yeah, down in the main meeting room. Want to come with us?”
Thea hesitated. “No,” she said. “I want to finish here. I’ll be along later.”
“Okay, bye, come on, Barbary!”
Heather headed for the door. Barbary took just enough time to put Mick in the bedroom.
“You be good,” she said. “When I come back, you can go out.” She hurried after Heather.
Chapter Eleven
People filled the hallways around the main meeting room. It was even more crowded than the reception for Jeanne. Barbary and Heather ducked around and between people, till they managed to get inside. They could not see anything, even standing on tiptoe, and though most of the adults around them gave them sympathetic looks, the crowd packed the room far too full for anyone to let them nearer the front.
“Thank you for coming.”
Jeanne Velory’s soft, powerful voice radiated from the speakers.
“Several hours ago, we detected a change in the alien ship’s path,” Jeanne said. “The change was the result of a deliberate application of acceleration.” She paused. “Soon thereafter, we received a radio transmission.”
The silence crumbled into chaos. Barbary imagined Jeanne at the front of the room, quiet and patient, not trying to speak above the clamor or shout anyone down, just waiting until the crowd fell silent.
“A transmission!” Heather shouted. “Holy cats, it’s aliens! Can you believe it?”
“She hasn’t said what it is we’re supposed to be believing, yet,” Barbary said.
Five minutes passed before the chaos settled enough for Jeanne to speak.
“The transmission is quite simple. It arrived in a large number of languages.”
She turned on a recording, and the words flowed over the crowd. Barbary did not understand the first language, nor the second, but quite a few other people did, because they began to murmur to each other.
The crystalline clarity of the voice made Barbary want to sob. She did not know why, except that it was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard in her life.
“Greetings,” it said, when it began speaking in English. “We come in peace to welcome you into civilization. Please do not approach us, but wait for our arrival.”
It changed languages still again. The voice’s beauty continued to increase, as if it were singing.
When the final translation ended, some of the people in the room were crying. Barbary let out the breath she had been holding.
“The alien ship has begun to decelerate,” Jeanne said, “at a rate that would be difficult for our technology to match or for humans to tolerate. It will not, as we previously believed, cross the earth’s orbit and pass us at high speed. Instead, if it continues decelerating, it will reach zero relative velocity a few thousand kilometers from Atlantis.”
The noise of everybody trying to speak made Barbary feel as if she were standing beside a buzz saw. Heather said something, an excited expression on her face, but Barbary could not hear her.
Barbary thought, But it could be an automatic response the alien ship gives every time it comes across some half-civilized bunch of people, like us, who’ve barely even made it into space.
And then she wondered, How could anything so beautiful be a voice from a machine?
Finally she thought, They’re aliens, they can travel to the stars. They can do anything.
The noise level dropped as people began to recover from the first shock of the communication. Barbary began to be able to pick out individual conversations and questions. Everyone was excited, but some were excited with joy, and others with fear. People discussed what the aliens might teach to human beings, or what harm they might cause. She heard several people quote a famous writer, whose theory was that any civilization so advanced it can travel to other stars ought to be too civilized to wage war; and she heard others reply “Hogwash!”
Heather touched Barbary’s arm. Barbary turned toward her sister.
Heather was very pale. Barbary grabbed her arm, afraid she might faint and be trampled. Barbary held her up, not absolutely sure that was what Heather wanted, but willing to risk her sister’s anger if she was mistaken. Barbary thought Heather was leaning on her, but she was so light that it was hard to tell. Barbary bent down, straining to hear.
“Can we get out of here, do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Barbary said. “But I’ll try.”
Supporting Heather, Barbary sidled through the crowd. People tried to make way for her, when they noticed her, but most of them remained deep in conversation. Suddenly the whole room quieted. Barbary spied a space and hurried through it before it disappeared. She only had to go about five more meters to reach the door. She wished the meeting were being held in zero g so she could sly around and between all the people in her way. She kept glancing at her sister. Heather gripped Barbary’s arm tight.
The meeting hall fell silent.
“Colleagues,” said the secretary-general of the United Nations, her voice a papery whisper. Her presence was so powerful that Barbary could feel it without even being able to see her, and everyone remained so quiet that they seemed to stop breathing.
Barbary plunged through the doorway, pulling Heather along behind her. Sweat ran down her face. She gasped a breath of the cooler air. Ambassador Begay was still speaking, but out here Barbary could only make out her voice, not her words.
“Are you okay?” she asked Heather.
Heather leaned against the wall.
“I think so,” she said. “Thanks for getting me out of there.
“You’re welcome. I’m kind of glad to be outside, too. Want to go home?”
“I think I better.”
They trudged up the corridor, boarded the elevator, and rode to the half-g level.
“Did you see Yoshi anyplace?”
“Uh-uh,” Barbary said.
“I guess he must still be in the library. When he’s writing he sometimes doesn’t even hear PA announcements.” Back in their home territory, Heather regained her strength. She grinned. “That means we’ll probably get to tell him about the aliens.”
They reached the apartment and went inside.
“I really am going to take a nap this time,” Heather said. “Wake me up when Yoshi gets back so we can both tell him, okay?”