“And they’ll be skittish and cautious.”
“I have confronted him only once since. There was that feeling to him. If he’d kept all that evidence, fine— but to face them again? No.”
There was a muffled thumping at the foot of the door. Nikka leaped up like a coiled wire and flung it open. Nigel paused in midkick, balanced on one foot and with an armload of chopped wood. He clomped into the room, tilted slightly back to take the weight of his load.
“Good job you laid that tarp over the woodpile,” he grunted. “Some snow’s starting to melt. Would be a pity to muck this old wood up—it’s bone dry.”
“I took it from the shacks in the woods around here,” Mr. Ichino said. “This was a retreat during the crisis years.”
“Ah.”
Nigel dumped the wood into its hopper and brushed his sleeves free of fragments of bark. Nikka looked at him questioningly and then turned back to the table, where she spread open the map of the area they had used to find the cabin. She took out a pencil and studied the territory that stretched northward toward Wasco. “You believe they came into this valley because it was a natural route away from the blast?” she said to Mr. Ichino, who nodded.
Nigel smiled.
Too casually she interested herself in the details of geography. He watched her in the growing silence of the cabin as she tucked a strand of her polished black hair back, forming a new layer in the polished cap that was secured at the nape of her neck. With an elegant touch of her middle finger she pushed the pencil deep into the bun of strands, distracted. At this absentminded gesture Nigel’s heart leaped into a high new place.
He arched a speculative eyebrow at Mr. Ichino, who sat with hands folded on the table.
“You can talk to me about it, too,” Nigel said with a warm amusement.
Mr. Ichino said uncertainly, “Ah…I…”
“What happened, I mean.”
“I heard nothing in the news.”
“Infinitesimal chance you would.”
“The NSF hasn’t decided how to handle it,” Nikka said. She folded the map and tucked it away.
“I’ve made it quite precisely clear that they can rumi-nate on handling data, but they can’t handle me,” Nigel said. He put one boot on the table’s bench and leaned on it, arm resting on his raised knee.
“Perhaps because it is so unclear,” Mr. Ichino said delicately.
“True enough.” Nigel smiled. “How did it…”
“Feel?”
“Yes. I suppose that is what I wish to know.”
“At first there was a, a sensation of going away.”
“To something new.”
“In a sense.”
“But now you are back.”
“No. I never have come back.”
“Then you …” Mr. Ichino stopped, puzzled.
“What I knew is scrambled. Or thought I knew.” “And …” Mr. Ichino struggled with some inner inhibition. “… what did you come away with that”—he added hurriedly—“that you can tell us?”
“Oh. You mean facts?” He wiped his hands on his rough trousers and stood erect, leaning backward, peering at the roofbeams and the vaulted space of the cabin above them, at the shadows there. “Delicious facts.”
“Tell him about the aliens,” Nikka said. She had been sitting perfectly still at the table and he saw in her absolute lack of motion a tension she would have to grow through, a private set of concerns he saw now as totally transparent but, for her, entirely necessary, a web of concern for him that, cast wide, enfolded more than she needed to and more than she understood. But that, too, would evaporate with time and leave her bare, the old Nikka, the brisk and urbane, her conversations a smart rattle of wry insights, insider’s jargon, an occasional epigram. The slim and springy Nikka, as he sometimes remembered her, standing in muted phosphor light, hipshot, the cradle of her abdomen tilted, jaunty.
“The aliens,” Nigel said, as if to refresh himself, return himself to this linear world.
“You’ve targeted their origin, I gather,” Mr. Ichino said, prompting, and Nigel wondered at the choice of words. Targeted? That word? For things gone and dead and vacant? He remembered Evers and that fellow, Lewis, with their phrases like combat mission and their ultimately absurd sense of the reality of things, the trunk of departing missiles, the oddly soundless crump as the orange blossom was born, behind the poor puzzled fleeing Snark.
Targeted?
Alien. So alien.
“I found their home star,” he said.
“By figuring out their coordinate system?”
“Yes.”
“How did they find us?”
“A survey craft, I suppose. Automated. They were casting about at random.”
“They couldn’t find anything in the radio spectrum? The same as with us?”
