by Julia Keller
“I think I’ve got a bigger pair somewhere,” Shura said. “I’ll go look for them.”
“Don’t bother. Really, I’m fine.” If she did end up ripping a hole in the backside, Violet thought, Shura would probably just call it a ventilation panel. She once told Violet that there was no such thing as an unsuccessful experiment. Every experiment told you something new.
“Are you hungry?”
“Of course I’m hungry,” Violet replied. “Trouble is, though, I’m too tired to eat.”
“Me too.”
Shura’s bed was narrow—too narrow, really, for two people—but they made do. Violet could have slept on the couch, but this struck them both as a better idea.
Violet scrunched up on her left side, hoping she wasn’t crowding Shura. She could hear her friend’s breathing, a sound she knew as well as she knew the sound of her own. She’d forgotten how comforting that could be: that familiar rhythm, the soft rise and fall. The sound of somebody breathing was like the sound of the ocean. There weren’t any oceans on New Earth, just lakes and canals. But Violet knew about the oceans on Old Earth.
Humans arose from the oceans, she mused, her thoughts drifting like a ghost ship moving through the fog. She’d learned that in her biology classes. And her father had reminded her of it over the years. It was one of the reasons he insisted on locating the new civilization within sight of Earth, echoing Earth’s orbit and not migrating to another planet. We need to keep the oceans next to us, Violet, he’d said, his husky voice rising with the purity of his certitude. We need to stay attached to Earth.
Why, Daddy? That’s what she had asked him. She was a wide-eyed, eternally curious seven-year-old.
Because, Ogden Crowley answered, Earth is our home. And always will be.
What had made her remember that conversation? The sounds of Shura’s breathing, yes—but there was another reason, too. Maybe it had to do with the message they were trying to interpret. The one from deep space. From somebody else’s home.
Yeah. That made sense.
She lay there awhile longer, hoping to fall asleep. But as tired as she was, it didn’t happen.
Oh, great, Violet thought. What a terrific time to have insomnia. I’ve got a huge day ahead of me—we all do—and I’m going to be dragging. There’s not enough coffee on all of New Earth to keep me going when I’m this beat.
Dammit.
Well, stewing about it wasn’t going to get her anywhere. She could at least get up and read something on her console—but not in here, where the light from the dancing jewels might awaken Shura.
Carefully, trying very, very hard not to disturb her friend, Violet put a leg over the edge of the bed. Then the other leg. She stood up. Stepping slowly and gingerly, she moved from the tiny bedroom into the equally tiny living room.
And then she saw it.
In the frail, gray, predawn light that seeped in from the small window behind the couch, she found herself staring at the portraits that covered all four walls from baseboard to ceiling. She had seen the portraits before, of course. Many times, over the years. At first, Shura had been self-conscious about displaying only her own paintings. Violet had finally persuaded her that there was nothing wrong with living in the middle of her creations—that it was, in fact, incredibly cool and incredibly inspirational and incredibly right. It was one-of-a-kind décor. And so now Shura kept dozens of her pictures here in her home, rotating them each time she finished a new batch like a shifting kaleidoscope of scenes from her inner life.
Violet turned in a slow, mesmerized circle. The room was too dim to enable her to catch every nuance of every painting or to burrow into the rich heart of each color, but she was able to feel the grand sweep and theme of these works, to see the way that each brushstroke described a thought as well as outlined a shape.
There: That one was a portrait of an old woman whom Violet and Shura had seen in Perey Park, a yellow scarf tied around her head. From the sideways tilt of the old woman’s neck, from the apologetic hunch of her shoulders, from the unraveling hem of her scarf, Violet could sense how it would feel to be an old person in a young person’s world. You were forgotten.
And there: It was a landscape portrait of a high hill on the outskirts of L’Engletown, one of the least populated cities of New Earth, where the terrain was rugged, surprising you at every turn. Violet could almost feel the dizzy enthusiasm of the grass as it grew in wild profusion, or the stubbornness of the burly rocks as they brooded and lurked. In the meticulously planned world of New Earth, having a place like this—tricky, unpredictable—was exciting, a necessary contrast to all the smoothness and regularity.
And over there: It was an abstract painting, a series of black-and-white circles and squares and triangles and exclamation points that didn’t feel abstract at all, but instead reminded Violet of the way her mind leaped and sizzled when she suddenly got a mathematical concept that she’d been struggling with. The picture captured the joy of making connections in her brain, the snap of revelation.
She kept turning. A picture in the corner showed one of the massive turbines that powered New Earth; it spoke of power and ferocity, and the longer Violet studied it, the more aware she was of her own heartbeat, relentlessly pumping the blood through her body 24-7 with marvelous but unsung efficiency.
In another corner was a portrait of a big black dog running full speed through a meadow, ears pinned back, pink tongue flapping from the side of its mouth like a flag flying, its whole being aimed like an arrow at some distant point. The dog was pure purpose. She would’ve sworn that the wind ruffling the dog’s fur was moving along her own arms and that the dog’s sense of freedom and adventure stirred in her blood, too.
Shura’s paintings, she realized, were as much about feeling as they were about seeing.
Feeling …
In a flash, Violet was absolutely certain she had the answer. Yes! She knew how they could discover what that faraway civilization was trying to say to them.
11
Protons and Picasso
“You want to do what?”
Rez squinted and frowned, the better to make Violet feel as if her idea were the most ridiculous, asinine, outlandish, delusional, and downright cockamamie one ever concocted by a human being who wasn’t drunk, stoned, stupid, confused, depressed, distressed, hallucinating, or simply prone to making very bad jokes—in other words, a carbon-based version of Mickey.
“Hold on,” Kendall said, stepping between them. “Give her a chance.”
“Fine.” Rez rotated his chair and stood up. Now he faced Violet head-on, not at an angle.
She kind of wished he’d stayed sideways. And seated. This was a little intense.
Across the room, Tin Man was trading jokes with Mickey. He wasn’t paying attention to the argument. Shura, who stood just a little bit behind Violet, looked perplexed. Violet had explained the rudiments of the idea to her on their way back here, but Shura wasn’t clear on the particulars. That uncertainty showed up in her face. She wanted to be loyal to Violet, but then again, the idea was … strange.
Very, very strange.
It was also bold and quite possibly nuts.
But it has as good a chance of working as anything Rez has come up with so far, Violet thought, trying to psych herself up as she stared him down.
Seconds ago, she’d presented her brainstorm to him in a brief, four-sentence summary. “Let’s skip words altogether and rig up a Virtual Tether between Shura and the signal. She’ll have her brush and easel. She’ll be the conduit. She’ll paint the alien emotions.”
Virtual Tethers had been developed in the early 2260s. They were used to link computer systems by means of a signal far more durable than traditional Wi-Fi. Their roots lay in the cloud-computing concept of the early twenty-first century. They were also used for long-distance communications. The link was a form of bodiless teleportation, similar to a face appearing on a console screen.
But a Tether had never been attached dire
ctly to a human being.
“I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt, Violet,” Rez said, his tone drenched in skepticism. The frown dug even deeper. “I’ll assume you didn’t get much sleep during the break we just took. And you skipped breakfast. And that’s why you’re talking nonsense.” He peered at her. “Did you get any sleep?”
“As a matter of fact, no. No, I didn’t.” Violet knew she sounded defensive, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t let herself be intimidated by Rez. Her idea wasn’t crazy. It deserved a shot. “But that’s not the point. The point is—”
“The point is,” Rez broke in, “we’ve got a lot of work to do here. We don’t have time for your little schemes. So please, just let me and Shura and Kendall get back to work.” In other words: Let the smart people solve the problem.
Violet seethed. How could she ever have been attracted to this guy? What in the world had she ever seen in him? Yeah, maybe they’d had some fun times when they worked together at Protocol Hall, but there was such a thing as politeness, and there were such things as kindness and respect, and there was also such a thing as not making your friends feel like boneheaded fools when they were just trying to …
Wait.
Rez hasn’t always been like this, she reminded herself. Losing his sister in such an abrupt and violent way had changed him. Rez had always lacked social ease or personal warmth; the hi-how-are-you? part of life eluded him. But he’d never been this … well, this angry before. Preoccupied, yes; nasty, no. He was different now. Bitter, driven. When Rachel died, it was as if Rez lost his ability to care what anybody else thought of him. He was sad and lonely, and he’d built a hard shell around himself.
But that didn’t mean she had to take any crap from him.
“No way, Rez,” Violet snapped. “I will not stand down. Not until you listen to me.”
He made a show of sighing. “Okay. I’ve got a few more seconds before my coffee’s heated up and I can get back to my computer to do some real work. So go. Convince me.”
“Great.” She was up to the challenge. “First, we tried all the translation apps that we could get our hands on, right?”
Rez nodded. “Let’s see. The total we tried last night—and that includes languages that haven’t been spoken or written since Old Earth’s first century, plus all their dialects—was 481,467. Whatever the aliens are speaking, it’s not in our language database.”
“Right. So if we want to get to the bottom of their language, let’s forget about words.”
“Even though words are commonly understood to be that from which language is comprised.”
“Yeah. But they’re not the only things from which language is comprised. They’re not the only way we communicate,” Violet stated.
Rez’s attention was now officially snared. Kendall’s, too. Shura and Tin Man had moved closer.
“Explain,” Rez said.
“We don’t have any way of interpreting the alien language, but we know they found Rachel’s Intercept chip somewhere out in space and were intrigued by it. They must have realized that it collects and stores emotions. So this transmission from them—these words we don’t understand because we don’t have access to their language—is their way of trying to communicate their emotions to us.” Violet pointed toward Rez’s computer screen, where the words trillum, nogg, waw continued to pulse like an odd version of a screensaver. “They tried to use our language, our alphabet, but it’s not working. There’s no common point. No bridge.”
“So no matter how many words they send us,” Shura broke in, thinking out loud, “we don’t know what they’re really trying to say. And we can’t, because we don’t know what the individual words mean.”
“That’s the key,” Violet declared, growing more excited. “We don’t need to know their words. What they’re really trying to communicate aren’t their words at all but their emotions. So we let them.”
“How?” asked Tin Man, although Kendall, Rez, and Shura were only nanoseconds behind him, and so a series of Hows? seemed to ripple through the tiny room like a runaway echo.
“Through another conduit for emotions,” Violet said. “Something other than words.”
Kendall’s eyebrows rose as he posed the question. “Which is…?”
“Art.”
The expressions on her friends’ faces continued to reflect bafflement, so Violet went on, “Shura’s painting.”
“But how can we do that?” Kendall asked.
“It’s what I suggested to Rez right when we got here today,” Violet answered. “We use a Virtual Tether. We establish a link between the incoming signal and Shura’s consciousness. The aliens—whoever they are, wherever they’re from, whatever they’re trying to tell us—can communicate their emotions through Shura’s painting. She’ll be a sort of simultaneous translator. But she won’t be turning one language into another language; she’ll be turning one form of language into another form of language. She’ll be turning their words into her art—into the colors of emotion.”
A moment went by.
Rez said, “Wow.” His voice was softer than Violet could ever remember it being. And for a moment, he didn’t say anything else.
Tin Man scratched his ear and muttered, “Holy shit.”
Kendall’s face showed that he was thinking. He was thinking hard. And then slowly, slowly, he began to nod. He gave Violet a brief smile.
“That’s … that’s amazing,” he said to her.
Now he addressed Shura. “Before we go too far down the road with this idea,” he said, his voice grave, “it’s all up to you. You’re the only one with the artistic ability to pull this off, but it makes you a guinea pig. Are you willing to take the chance? I mean, we don’t know the full extent of the risks yet. We’ll be hooking you up to a foreign transmission. We don’t know where it’s coming from or why. Anything could happen. Including … well, you know.” He didn’t want to say the word death, but he didn’t need to; they all knew what he was getting at.
Shura nodded. She’d made her decision even before Kendall had outlined the stakes.
“You know what? When Violet first told me about this, my reaction was, ‘Nooooo way.’” Violet winced, and Shura gave her a light punch on the shoulder. “It’s true,” Shura continued. “No offense, buddy, but I sort of figured you’d gone batshit crazy. And then something occurred to me.” Deep breath. “Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been fighting a battle.”
“Against who?” asked Tin Man.
“Against myself. It’s like I’m two different people, okay? Half of me is a doctor. A scientist-inventor. These days, I lock myself up in my lab for days at a time, and I try to create new antibiotics and vaccines for jumping viruses. Or I try to design better HoverUps. Even when I leave the lab, I’m still thinking about viruses and vacuum tubes and vaccines.
“But I’ve got this other half, too. The half that loves to paint. To create pictures that make people feel. And see.” She looked at her friends one by one, starting with Violet and ending with Rez. “The problem is the art half of me. It’s easy for people to appreciate the science part; I mean, I’m saving lives. I’m easing pain and suffering. Who doesn’t understand that? But my paintings—those are important, too. Even more important, I think, than the science. But when I’m working on my art, I feel like I’m letting the world down. Like I’m playing instead of working.
“When Violet told me about this wild idea of hers”—Shura paused to smile at her friend—“I realized that it was the perfect way to put the two halves together. I’ll be using science and technology to figure out what the alien civilization wants from us, but I’ll also be doing it through my art. We’ll need computers and colors. Protons and Picasso. I’ll be translating new emotions—emotions we don’t even know about yet—through shapes and colors. So I won’t be divided anymore. I won’t have science on one side and art on the other side. For the first time in my life, I’ll be a whole person.”
Violet tried to swallo
w but found she had a big lump in her throat. She’d never understood just how conflicted Shura was about her art. To Violet, her friend’s blazing talent was wonderful, period; she had never considered the possibility that it also caused Shura some torment.
How could you not know such an important thing about your best friend?
To Violet’s surprise, the next person who spoke was Rez. “I think Rachel sort of felt that way, too,” he said. “She was really good at math, but it was the law she cared about. Some of her teachers were disappointed when she picked that. They didn’t understand her. Why can’t people be a lot of different things? Why do we have to choose?” He ran a finger across the bottom of his keyboard, buying time while he formulated his next sentence. “I’ll do whatever I can to help. In memory of Rachel.”
From across the room, Tin Man broke in grumpily. “Well, make up your mind, guys. We’re either going to do this or we’re not.” Violet had noticed something odd; when Rez mentioned Rachel’s name, Tin Man frowned. Maybe he was tired of hearing about the brilliant little girl. Or maybe he was just tired, period. They all were, even after the short break.
Kendall had already started punching buttons on his console. Violet could tell by the colors of the rising jewels—blue, black, gray—that he was doing high-level mathematical calculations.
He looked up. His eyes gleamed with excitement as he spoke.
“You know what, Violet? Your idea is completely original and totally ridiculous and makes no logical sense whatsoever, but that’s basically what people told me when I was creating the Intercept, too.” He grinned at her. “So it just might work.”
12
Countdown to Danger
“Receptors in place,” Kendall called out.
With a thumb and an index finger, he snatched up one of the wires leading from the tripod into the Signal Enhancer, tugging on it to make sure of the connection. The tugging was only for show, of course; the connection was secure. It had been secure the first dozen times he’d tested it after rigging up the tripod and placing it in the center of the lab, and nothing had come along since to dislodge it.