“Yes.”
“How?”
“Easy. Once we find them.”
“Tell me how.”
“Just lean out the door and hand it to them.”
“Isn’t that dangerous? These are the same creatures who tried to kill you in the Severin Valley.”
“I think that was an anomaly. I think the thing that got stranded became deranged.”
“I hope they’re not all deranged.”
“They have to be rational, Ali. Or they wouldn’t be out here.”
She heard a sound deep in his throat. “Maybe,” he said. “But that sounds like an epitaph to me.”
They settled into a routine during the first few days, working on individual projects, watching the sensor screens. Maurie and Terri never tired of standing by the windows and looking out at the view. To Kim it seemed as if the emptiness looked back. Gradually the assumptions that had held sway throughout the flight—that contact was virtually inevitable, that the celestials would be waiting anxiously for the appearance of another giant ship—came to seem first unduly optimistic, then doubtful, and finally hopelessly naive. They began to speculate that the opportunity had been lost. Fumbled away by the clumsiness of the first expedition. Kim even overheard some comments that suggested she and Solly might have done better if they’d thought things out a bit.
The current situation, the silence that roared at them from the empty sky, was perceived as somehow her fault. If she had gone to them in January with what she knew instead of coming out here alone, they might have salvaged everything.
She saw it in their eyes, heard it in their voices. And as the days dragged on, and the gas giant came to fill their windows, their attitude toward the Valiant changed. If it had once been a unique artifact, a link with another civilization, it now became simply an oddity thrown up by the retreating tides of history, a symbol of human incompetence.
“At least,” said Paul, “we know now we’re not alone.”
“Maybe it’s just as well if we don’t find them,” said Maurie.
The remark brought frowns from everyone.
“Why would you say that?” asked Gil.
“How old would you guess their civilization is?”
Matt let his impatience show. “We’ve no way of knowing,” he said.
“They could easily be a million. Six million. What’s a civilization that’s been around that long going to look like? Do we really want to talk to them?”
“Why not?”
Maurie took a deep breath. “What could we possibly have to say to them that they’d be interested in?”
Kim was playing chess with Mona when Ali buzzed her. “Please come up for a minute.”
She left the game and climbed the stairs to the top floor. When she walked into the pilot’s room, he was wearing a strange expression. “We’re being scanned,” he said.
“By whom?”
He shrugged. “No idea.”
“Where are they?”
“Don’t know that either. We can’t track it back. But somebody’s keeping an eye on us.”
“You think the fleet has arrived?”
“Maybe. But I doubt it’s any of our people. If it is, they’re pretty good. The scopes don’t show anything out there.”
The screens were blank. “So what are we saying? That we’ve found what we came for?”
“I’m only saying that the technology behind the scan is of a very high order.”
“Marvelous,” she said, clapping him on the back. “What can they learn about us?”
Ali propped his jaw in his palm. “Which way we’re headed, of course. What kind of engines we have. Maybe they’re able to do an analysis of light leakage. Hard to know what their limits might be. If it’s really celestial. This is where it would have been helpful to have dissected the microship.”
Kim ignored the implication. “Is there a chance they can see into the ship?”
“I don’t think anything we have, or anything anybody could devise, could penetrate this kind of hull. Mac’s hull. It’s designed to survive in high-energy environments. We could take her in pretty close to Alnitak, if we wanted, without frying the help. So no, they wouldn’t very likely be able to do that. But they’re probably able to get a sense of our electronic capabilities, of armaments or lack thereof, of engine architecture, that sort of thing.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Anything else?”
He shrugged. “Listen, don’t get so carried away with this that you forget they have a tendency to bite. Okay?”
She returned to the mission center, called everybody in, and passed the news. Somebody’s watching us. The reaction was mixed, a sense of exhilaration combined with a dash of disquiet. Paul recommended they begin broadcasting the second-phase package. The others agreed and Kim passed the instruction to Ali. A minute later he reported that transmission was underway.
The second-phase package contained a vocabulary list with pictures and pronunciations of 166 objects that the team hoped would be common to the experience of both species. They included words like “star.”
“planet.”
“cloud.”
“river.”
“ship.”
“rain.”
“forest.”
“lamp.” Eric, who claimed to have gone to acting school and in any case had exquisite diction, had provided the voice.
They’d also included linking verbs with examples of their usage, a few personal pronouns, and the interrogatives who, what, where, when, and why. Eric maintained that the explanations of the latter, which were elaborated by pictures of sample cases, probably would not be understood, but the terms would be so helpful that it seemed worth the effort.
The package was transmitted realtime rather than compacted, on the theory that celestial technology might not be compatible. It was fifty-six minutes long, and would be repeated every hour.
Ali called down early during the first broadcast with the news that the scan had stopped. Its total duration had been roughly seventeen and a half minutes.
Kim thought it would also be a good idea to accompany the transmission with an image of the Valiant. While the package was running, she looked again at the various views which she’d loaded into the transmitter: the microship seen head-on; the microship from above, bathed in the light of Alnitak; the microship in silhouette against a blue planet; a dozen others. Best, she sensed, would be to send a single image.
She chose finally the Valiant in full sunlight, seen from the port side and slightly below. It was majestic, a lovely vehicle traveling bright skies. It exuded optimism and power, and she hoped it would strike the celestials with the same kind of emotional force she felt when she looked at it.
“That should get a response,” said Matt, who’d come up unnoticed behind her. “It just demonstrates once again that you need to have PR people along when you do a first contact.”
Kim grinned at the thought. Flexner’s Theorem. But it was true.
She was trying to put herself into the heads of the celestials. They had to be motivated, at least in part, by a desire to know what had happened to their ship, which had disappeared so many years ago. Here then were those who knew about the missing vessel, prepared apparently to talk about it. How could they resist that?
When Ali told her she was clear to transmit, she invited Matt to punch the button.
“Yes,” he said. “By all means.” And he sent the sunlit Valiant into the void.
“We’ll hear from them within the next few hours,” she predicted.
They went back to the mission center where the entire team was gathered to await what most earnestly believed would be the historic response. “You don’t want to be in the washroom just now,” Tesla told Kim.
Shortly after the first transmission had been completed, Ali informed them they’d been scanned again. “Only for a few seconds,” he said.