The Red Sox were going through their pregame warm-ups against Havana. Feyrouz gestured impatiently. No matter how the algorithm felt about it, she didn’t think that was news. The West Coast and New Texico had tightened their infoblockade against the United States. She gnawed on the inside of her lower lip. Colleagues in both countries had warned her that was likely. It didn’t make living in a data-driven world any easier, though.
Spokesfolk for the shah of Iran were denying that the outbreak of antibiotic-resistant plague in Kurdistan had anything to do with his government. Spokesfolk for the Kurdish prime minister said genetic work in their labs proved the shah was a lying Shiite dog. Feyrouz wondered whether the Middle East would ever know peace. It struck her as unlikely.
She waved away reports on the bribery scandal in Brussels, the data-access scandal in Washington, and the anti-Mormon riots in Sacramento (grainy video almost scrambled by the blockade). They were a fine basket of deplorables, but she couldn’t do anything about any of them. “Space news,” she told the AI.
A report that the planetary probe had gotten down safely on Faraday made her smile and nod. An atmosphere with 22 percent oxygen had already shown that Faraday held life. The crawler was starting to analyze it. Genetic material there seemed to use nineteen amino acids, seventeen of them among the twenty that terrestrial DNA employed. “The crawler appears to have landed in a forest, not far from the edge,” the voice-over said. “First pictures are expected in ten to twelve hours.”
Feyrouz sighed. The little pea brain inside the starship—the best they could do back in the twenty-first century, she reminded herself—would be crunching numbers as hard as it could, crunching them and putting them together to make images and beaming back across the light-years. Or rather, it would have been doing that almost forty years ago. Those images would have left TRAPPIST-1’s system when she was a college sophomore.
“Enough news,” she said when the starship report finished. It was a little past seven. If she wanted to, she could watch the Red Sox and the Cigarmakers bang heads. But she didn’t feel like it. New Haven lay almost on the border between Red Sox Nation and the dark kingdom of the Yankees farther west. She wasn’t tempted into rooting for the false gods in pinstripes, but her faith in Holy Fenway had weakened in recent years. A string of sorry Bosox finishes didn’t help, either.
She put on a pair of headphones, letting one rest a few centimeters above each eye. Then she asked for the immersives menu. She chose an adaptation of a classic, Mary Renault’s The Mask of Apollo. She’d been inside that one before; she knew it was good. Something familiar would help her wind down and get ready for bed.
Closing her eyes, she said, “Begin!”
By anything her brain could prove, she wasn’t a middle-aged woman in modern New Haven any more, but a child on a stage in Athens 2,600 years earlier. Everything Nikeratos, the main character, experienced or thought or felt, so did she. Part of her dimly realized she and the people around her were speaking English, not ancient Greek, but it didn’t matter.
When they came in a hundred years before, immersives had changed acting forever. You didn’t just have to sound and look convincing; you had to make the people who would be there with you—well, with the recording of you—believe that you were going through everything that happened in the story. There’d been a great shakeout of performers at the time, the way there had been when talkies conquered silents a couple of centuries earlier.
The only thing wrong with The Mask of Apollo she could see was that its ending was almost too painful to stand. But she found herself smiling anyway when she took off the headphones. Whenever she dipped into this immersive, she better understood—at least for a little while—what her son felt for his husband.
She was still smiling when she went to bed, and again when she got up the next morning. She fed Wilfrid and cuddled him and gave him fresh water, then ran him around with a laser pointer till his sides heaved. He wouldn’t have much excitement till she got home unless a fish jumped out of the tank. In that case, he’d have a snack, too.
After a quick shower, Feyrouz fixed her own breakfast: coffee, along with natto and green onions and mustard on top of leftover rice. The slimy fermented beans were better for her than bacon and eggs, and much easier on the ration book. She splurged every once in a while, but only every once in a while. A curator wasn’t made of money.
“News,” she said as she cleaned up and made herself a second cup of coffee so she’d be sure her heart would keep beating all morning. A moment later, she added, “Space news.”
“Here are some early images the Faraday crawler transmitted to the starship in the TRAPPIST-1 system,” the AI said. “You will see them two ways: first in the very red light the star actually emits, and then with processing to make the light peak appear yellow, as it would under our sunlight.”
The first photo that appeared in the air in front of Feyrouz was as murky as the newsbriefer had warned her it would be. The sky looked purplish; the dust was a deeper red than Mars, and the plants seemed a brownish-black mass, with few details visible no matter how she squinted.
The photoshopped version seemed magically better. The sky turned blue—not quite Earthly blue, but something closer to turquoise. The few clouds changed from the color of wet, bloody cement to grayish white. And the dirt looked like dirt, and the plants looked like plants.
Not quite like terrestrial plants, though. Despite image processing, their green wasn’t that of the green hills of Earth. The leaves didn’t look like any Feyrouz would see growing on campus—or in an arboretum, either.
In spite of their alienness, some of the plants in the image from the probe seemed oddly familiar to Feyrouz. Those blue flowery things with the golden oval central structures and the small leaves that looked like starfish with too many legs, the other blue growth that rose on a peppermint-striped stalk from something that resembled a pitcher plant…
“Where have I seen those before?” Feyrouz asked aloud. Like a lot of people living alone, she’d gotten used to talking to herself. Over the past century and a half or so, having an AI at one’s beck and call had given even more folks the habit.
This time, the AI didn’t respond. It couldn’t work out the association. For a little while, neither could she. She rubbed her chin, thinking hard. Was it in the small semitropical piece of Iran just south of the Caspian Sea, where she and her first husband went on their honeymoon? She frowned, shaking her head. She didn’t think so. If she’d seen those funny plants at all, if she wasn’t just imagining things, she’d come across them more recently and closer to home than that.
Closer to home? Her jaw dropped. Yes, one hell of a lot closer! She could have gotten the answer from the AI now that she had a clue, but she didn’t. She could do it at work. Oh, could she ever!
When she got to campus, the headline in the air in front of the Xenobiology Hall was INTELLIGENT LIFE ON FARADAY! The enormous image below it showed the ruins of a gray stone spa or swimming pool or fountain or something of that sort. It wasn’t full of water now, the way it was meant to be. Only a few scummy puddles lay on the bottom, with something like a bunny-eared rat lapping from one of them.
Feyrouz gave the photo no more than a passing glance. It came as no great surprise to her, no matter how gobsmacked the rest of the world might be right now. The rest of the world plainly hadn’t made the connection she had, though someone else in it was bound to before long.
She hurried into the Beinecke. Bland, cool, dry, air-conditioned air replaced the hot, sticky stuff outside. Tony Loquasto paused in sweeping the front hall to touch the edge of his hat and give her a polite nod.