The solicitous heptapods—not locals, but visitors from a world thirty light-years away who had nonetheless taken on some kind of innate duty of hospitality—seemed to show up whenever anyone was hungry. Leila tried to draw this second one into conversation, but it politely excused itself to rush off and feed someone else.
Leila said, “Maybe this is it. We’ll wait for the news from Massa, then celebrate for a while, then finish it.”
Jasim took her hand. “That feels right to me. I’m not certain, but I don’t think I’ll ever be.”
“Are you tired?” she said. “Bored?”
“Not at all,” he replied. “I feel satisfied. With what we’ve done, what we’ve seen. And I don’t want to dilute that. I don’t want to hang around forever, watching it fade, until we start to feel the way we did on Najib all over again.”
“No.”
They sat in the square until dusk, and watched the stars of the bulge come out. They’d seen this dazzling jewelled hub from every possible angle now, but Leila never grew tired of the sight.
Jasim gave an amused, exasperated sigh. “That beautiful, maddening, unreachable place. I think the whole Amalgam will be dead and gone without anyone setting foot inside it.”
Leila felt a sudden surge of irritation, which deepened into a sense of revulsion. “It’s a place, like any other place! Stars, gas, dust, planets. It’s not some metaphysical realm. It’s not even far away. Our own home world is twenty times more distant.”
“Our own home world doesn’t have an impregnable fence around it. If we really wanted to, we could go back there.”
Leila was defiant. “If we really wanted to, we could enter the bulge.”
Jasim laughed. “Have you read something in those messages that you didn’t tell me about? How to say ‘open sesame’ to the gatekeepers?”
Leila stood, and summoned a map of the Aloof’s network to superimpose across their vision, crisscrossing the sky with slender cones of violet light. One cone appeared head-on, as a tiny circle: the beam whose spillage came close to Tassef. She put her hand on Jasim’s shoulder, and zoomed in on that circle. It opened up before them like a beckoning tunnel.
She said, “We know where this beam is coming from. We don’t know for certain that the traffic between these particular nodes runs in both directions, but we’ve found plenty of examples where it does. If we aim a signal from here, back along the path of the spillage, and we make it wide enough, then we won’t just hit the sending node. We’ll hit the receiver as well.”
Jasim was silent.
“We know the data format,” she continued. “We know the routing information. We can address the data packets to a node on the other side of the bulge, one where the spillage comes out at Massa.”
Jasim said, “What makes you think they’ll accept the packets?”
“There’s nothing in the format we don’t understand, nothing we can’t write for ourselves.”
“Nothing in the unencrypted part. If there’s an authorization, even a checksum, in the encrypted part, then any packet without that will be tossed away as noise.”
“That’s true,” she conceded.
“Do you really want to do this?” he said. Her hand was still on his shoulder, she could feel his body growing tense.
“Absolutely.”
“We mail ourselves from here to Massa, as unencrypted, classical data that anyone can read, anyone can copy, anyone can alter or corrupt?”
“A moment ago you said they’d throw us away as noise.”
“That’s the least of our worries.”
“Maybe.”
Jasim shuddered, his body almost convulsing. He let out a string of obscenities, then made a choking sound. “What’s wrong with you? Is this some kind of test? If I call your bluff, will you admit that you’re joking.”
Leila shook her head. “And no, it’s not revenge for what you did on the way to Trident. This is our chance. This is what we were waiting to do—not the Eavesdropping, that’s nothing! The bulge is right here in front of us. The Aloof are in there, somewhere. We can’t force them to engage with us, but we can get closer to them than anyone has ever been before.”
“If we go in this way, they could do anything to us.”
“They’re not barbarians. They haven’t made war on us. Even the engineering spores come back unharmed.”
“If we infest their network, that’s worse than an engineering spore.”
“ ‘Infest’! None of these routes are crowded. A few exabytes passing through is nothing.”
“You have no idea how they’ll react.”
“No,” she confessed. “I don’t. But I’m ready to find out.”
Jasim stood. “We could send a test message first. Then go to Massa and see if it arrived safely.”
“We could do that,” Leila conceded. “That would be a sensible plan.”
“So you agree?” Jasim gave her a wary, frozen smile. “We’ll send a test message. Send an encyclopedia. Send greetings in some universal language.”
“Fine. We’ll send all of those things first. But I’m not waiting more than one day after that. I’m not going to Massa the long way. I’m taking the shortcut, I’m going through the bulge.”
8
The Amalgam had been so generous to Leila, and local interest in the Aloof so intense, that she had almost forgotten that she was not, in fact, entitled to a limitless and unconditional flow of resources, to be employed to any end that involved her obsession.
When she asked Tassef for the means to build a high-powered gamma-ray transmitter to aim into the bulge, it interrogated her for an hour, then replied that the matter would require a prolonged and extensive consultation. It was, she realized, no use protesting that compared to hosting a billion guests for a couple of centuries, the cost of this was nothing. The sticking point was not the energy use, or any other equally microscopic consequence for the comfort and amenity of the Tassef locals. The issue was whether her proposed actions might be seen as unwelcome and offensive by the Aloof, and whether that affront might in turn provoke some kind of retribution.
Countless probes and spores had been gently and patiently returned from the bulge unharmed, but they’d come blundering in at less than lightspeed. A flash of gamma rays could not be intercepted and returned before it struck its chosen target. Though it seemed to Leila that it would be a trivial matter for the network to choose to reject the data, it was not unreasonable to suppose that the Aloof’s sensibilities might differ on this point from her own.