“The work.”
“Oh. Yes. I suppose. But this has always been with me, right on from the first. When I was a little runt.”
“We’re trying to sense something new here. Something bigger…”
“Yes. Maybe that makes me feel this way.”
“What way?”
“There are times when I despair of ever knowing anything, anything at all, fundamentally.”
“Well,” Nikka said, clearly groping for words, “more study…”
“Hell. No, it’s … Nikka, the world is dense. There are layers. I keep feeling—and it’s not simply this bloody wreck, no, it’s everything, it’s life—I ought to be getting it. The grainy… grainy…”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know. I can’t say it.”
“In your society,” she said softly, “there are not many ways to approach this. In mine there are perhaps a few more.”
“Right.” He nodded, a faint flash of irritation crossing his face. “Look, I’m not getting very far, talking this way.”
“It is not a talking sort of thing.”
“No. And it keeps coming to mind while I work on these faxes.”
“The fact that we see so little.”
“We understand even less than we see. What can we assume we have in common with the builders of that smashed ship? The only similarity was our—to quote the Snark—animal nature.”
“I wonder if we, we animals, felt the same way about the others, then.”
“Others?” He raised an eyebrow. “The computer civilizations? The abacus superminds?”
“You always say that as though it were a joke.”
He shrugged. “Maybe it is.”
“Perhaps that is what we may all have in common.” “What?”
“Contempt for machines.”
“I suppose.” He became suddenly thoughtful. “We made them, after all, not the other way around.”
“Yet we are uncommon.”
“Unstable. Suicidal. We reach too far. And the god-damned desk calculators—”
“Outlast us.”
“Fair humbling, isn’t it? If we animals could only get ourselves in order…”
“And communicate …” Nikka smiled, leading him on. “Is that what you mean?”
“Something along those lines. Maybe these aliens came to find another intelligent organic life form. They had our limitations—mortality, war. But they came seeking.”
“Perhaps they wanted to tell us about something God-awful coming to get us from Aquila.”
“What good would that do? A million years ago we had no technology.”
“Then they could, well, give it to us.”
“They didn’t.”
“No. But maybe they tried to pass on something else.” “It must be that. They couldn’t get anything from a tribal society like ours.”
“Yes. Though they could get contact, of course. It must be damned lonely, being an animal in a galaxy of desk calculators.”
“Whatever they brought us, I can’t see that it’s done us a load of good.”
“Ummm. Plenty of technology, but we’re still suicidal. One war—”
“Bang.”
“Quite.”
“Then we must press on here. With the decoding.” Grimly: “Quite.”
