“And I am the last” — he shrugged —”whatever it may be.”
Dayan became able to speak quietly. “Jean, though, what she was, her kind of spirit, can’t we hope it is still alive at home?”
“Thank you for saying that,” he gave her.
“Could we remember her tonight — just for a few minutes? — we two? It would help me.”
“You do me honor,” he replied.
The candle thew dim, shadow-flickery light up over crucified Christ. Nansen knelt and folded his hands in orison. She stood beside him and said Kaddish.
Cluttered, devoid of any outside view, the work center seemed closed off from the stars. But as Sundaram and Yu watched what appeared on a screen before them, awe reached in through metal and coursed through marrow.
“Already?” he wondered.
Those were no longer vague, short pulses. Sharp and clear, a curve undulated through changes of form while simple-looking symbols altered correspondingly but kept the same basic array. The adjacent screen showed its computer’s quick interpretations, equations rendered in Arabic numerals, Greek and Roman letters, international signs for mathematical operations. Through analytical geometry, a language was beginning to unfold.
“Yes,” Yu said hushedly, “I assumed they would need time to trace out our circuits. Now I think they can . . . move electrons, alter quantum states, directly” — and thus use the enormous bandwidth of the station’s transmitters to send pictures . . . and what else, later?
“Intelligence speaking to us. Out of where, out of what?”
“Surely not from the black hole or its immediate environs” — its hell. “But perhaps they . . . draw on those extreme conditions . . . somehow … to make something possible.”
“Something too strange for us to imagine.”
She touched his brow. “We will, in time. You will.”
“We shall want Hanny’s advice, above all, at this stage. How to interpret, how to respond. Later, as we grow beyond mathematics and physics, Simon’s. And at last, everyone aboard?”
From the ship’s data hoard Mokoena had summoned some of the music Kilbirnie loved. She was leaning back, eyes closed, listening to “The Flowers of the Forest” and trying to understand that idiom, when Zeyd entered her cabin. She heard, rose to greet him, and signaled the player for low volume. Pipes and drums became background, like wind wailing along a seacoast.
“You look grim,” she said.
Her tentative smile died before his face. “I feel grim,” he said. “I have been talking with Al Brent.”
“Must you?” She attempted a little humor. “I have learned to dodge aside when I see him coming.”
“Yes, he is obsessive. But what he has to say, right or wrong, we cannot continue hiding from.”
“I suppose not,” she said dully. “Hiding, that may be why the mess and the common room are so cheerless” — with strained silences broken by intermittent conversation about meaningless matters.
“Then should we not bring it into the open and have done?”
“Of course. It’s only — we’re afraid to. The wound is too fresh.”
“To stay here in spite of everything, or give it up and go home. A simple question.”
“It isn’t. Even between you and me.” This was in fact their first recent touching on it. “Scientific values versus — what?”
“Survival, perhaps. And the science isn’t yours or mine.”
She rallied from sadness. “How can you be sure? Those beings, or that being — not life as we know it, but. . . maybe we’ll learn things about our own kind of life, too, that we never knew.”
“And maybe not. In either case, there’ll be nothing for a chemist to do.”
Her eyes implored him. “How can you be certain? Besides, you’re more than a chemist, Selim. And as for going home, what does that mean any longer?”
“Enough,” he snapped. “You’re talking general principles again. We have been over that ground until it’s trampled bare.”
“But Jean’s death —”
“Yes, that has changed things.” Zeyd began to pace, up and down before her. The music ended. Without it, his tones sounded machinelike. “Doubtless this isn’t logical. But people aren’t. Al is right. We must meet soon and decide. I will put it to the captain.”