Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [207]
Neither did she.
“We’re getting an anomalous reading,” said Ali. “Configuration keeps shifting. I don’t think it’s a ship.”
“What else could it be?” Sandra’s voice.
Kim’s pulse began to pick up. “Not shape-changing?” she asked.
“Dauntless is on the circuit, Kim. I think they’re getting a little excited over there.”
“How far is it? The thing with the shifting configuration?”
“About eight kilometers. And closing. I can’t understand how it could have gotten so close without our picking it up earlier.”
“Kim.” Eric’s voice. “We’re getting a visual.”
“Text message,” said Paul. And then he let out a shriek. “It’s from them.”
And Maurie: “You sure? That’s English.”
Kim heard applause, but it quickly died away.
Eric again: “I don’t know what they’re talking about.”
“Uh-oh,” said Mona.
“What does it say?” demanded Kim.
“It says, Where are they?”
“Where are who!” asked Matt.
A chill felt its way up Kim’s spine. “I think,” she said, “they want to know what happened to the crew of the Valiant.”
“Kim.” Ali’s voice. “That thing out there does look like a cloud. It’s coherent. Moving with purpose.”
“I hear you.”
“I think it’s another shroud. You better get inside.”
“Matt,” she said. “You go. Close the air lock and do not open it unless I tell you to.”
“Not a good idea,” said Terri.
“Kim, I want you both inside. And hurry it up. It’s only a couple of minutes away.”
Matt went quickly to the air lock and stood in the patch of light, waiting for her. She looked down at the Valiant and out off the starboard side, about a third of the way up the sky. And saw nothing.
“Come on, Kim,” Matt said. “We can’t do anything out here except get ourselves killed.”
“Kim.” It was Maurie. “I think you’re right. They want to know about the crew. What do we tell them?”
Crunch time. “Tell them they’re dead. We’re sorry, but they were killed. Accidentally.”
“We do not have ‘dead’ or ‘killed’ in the vocabulary. Or ‘accident.’”
Ali again, his voice a command: “Kim, get inside. We’re out of time.”
“Matt—”
Matt shook his head no and pushed the door shut. Then he turned and came back across the roof.
“That was dumb,” she said.
“I won’t leave you out here alone.”
She was trying to recall the vocabulary. They had lots of words like stone and grass, tree and leaf, water and earth, light and dark. They had cloud and sun, starship and engine. They even had colors. How to convey death?
“Tell them ‘Their engines are stopped. They have gone dark.’”
“You sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure, Maurie.”
“Okay. Doing it now.”
“We need a way to express regret. Anybody have any ideas?”
Mona said: “‘We wish it had not been.’”
“We have,” said Gil, “no word for ‘wish.’ Or for syntactical complexities.”
Kim had not taken her eyes off the patch of sky from which the shroud was approaching.
The debate over how to address the celestials descended into a frustrated silence. “Defective vocabulary,” said Terri.
“We did what we could,” replied Eric. “You have to get the fundamentals down before you can do philosophy.”
The sky rippled. Several stars disappeared.
“It’s here,” Kim said.
“Kim.” Ali sounded angry. “Why are you still out there?”
“Eric.” Sandra was speaking. “Try ‘The leaves on our trees fall to the ground.’”
“Yes,” said Kim. “That’s good.”
“We should have brought a writer,” said Paul.
She could see the cloud approaching, could see stars through its veils.
“How about, ‘Our plants become dry’?”
“Yes. Good. Send it too. Can’t have too much regret at a time like this.”
Kim and Matt stood side by side, not moving. The shroud looked very much like the creature from Severin, except that this one seemed to be smaller. “Same basic model,” she told Matt.
But no eyes this time.
Nevertheless she knew it could see her. Or was aware of her in some manner that did not involve visuals.
“‘Our life is now dark,’” she told Maurie while she resisted an urge to back away. Matt, to her surprise and his credit, stayed with her.
“We don’t have any way of expressing time, Kim. No word for ‘now.’”
“Send it without the ‘now,’ Maurie.