It was meaningless, and yet it meant everything.
Like a man who’d been slowly freezing to death, Solomon had gone numb to his own loneliness, unable to feel it until the temperature suddenly changed. He’d craved solitude, not total isolation, and somewhere in his adult life, one had given way to the other.
Jake made eye contact with him. It was a kindness to be checked on, one Solomon had never recognized before. He’d always resented being the object of people’s concern.
Jake didn’t look concerned. His expression was soft. Fond, maybe. Whatever it was, it was fleeting, gone when he glanced at Chávez and said, “You wanna talk about why you were waiting in here? Do your thing, I can tell you want to.”
Solomon couldn’t remember what Chávez’s “thing” was, and he braced himself to find out.
“I wanted to ask you about the sound,” Chávez said.
“I doubt I can provide you with a satisfactory explanation,” Solomon warned her.
“No, that’s fine, that’s not my question. Or that is my question, but in like, a less accusatory way. I believe you! I swear I’m not here to tell you you’re wrong. I just wanna talk about this because it is amazing. Anyway. It seems like we have two options here. Option one: the thing you’re hearing is a sound in the way that we all understand sound, but it’s outside the range of normal human hearing, so none of the rest of us can hear.”
“No,” Solomon said.
His blunt dismissal didn’t slow Chávez down. “Okay then, that brings me to option two: the thing you’re hearing is not a sound, not in the way we typically understand it, but your brain doesn’t have any other way of processing it. So you’re hearing it.”
“Yes,” Solomon said, impressed that she’d arrived at the same conclusion he had. “It’s only a small distinction from your first idea, but it’s an important one. This ’sound’ is outside human perception in a more fundamental way than simply being a frequency that’s too high or too low to hear.”
“Right! Oh my God this is so cool,” she said. All signs of fatigue were gone from her face. She made an excited gesture with her empty cup and paced back and forth. Her boots clicked as she did. “The human body has a limited number of senses, but our brains—your brain especially, maybe—are more adaptable, and after you spent all that time in the Nowhere, you came out with extra senses. And telekinesis, obviously, which maybe is connected, but right now let’s just focus on your new not-hearing sense, which is like, your brain having reprogrammed your ears for some new purpose.”
She beamed at him, and Solomon discovered that he could make that same expression. He liked Clara Chávez very much. It was as strange and novel an experience as hearing the breach and the alien.
“Is this your ‘thing’?” Solomon asked. “Cognition?”
“Oh, uh, not really? If you’re asking what I studied, the answer is a lot of things, mostly anthropology. Not the bones kind, though, the culture kind.” She bit her lip, perhaps in recognition that the old Solomon would have been rude about that. He’d made her doubt herself. When Solomon said nothing scornful, she shrugged one shoulder and tilted her head to the side and said, sheepish, “I’m actually here to make friends?”
Solomon couldn’t tell if he was meant to find that funny. When the silence lasted a moment too long, he said, “That falls far outside of my expertise.”
She rewarded him with a laugh. The nervous energy went out of her, and she stopped moving quite so much—though she didn’t stand still. “I know. You told me not to bother trying to be friends with you. I guess you don’t remember that.”
“I don’t, but I think it’s best forgotten. I’m sorry I said it.”
Jake, Solomon noticed, had his mouth half-open. As soon as he caught Solomon looking, he closed it.
“So you know about language,” Solomon continued, addressing Chávez.
“That’s too narrow a term,” she said, more confident now. “It suggests something far more systematic than what we’ll be able to achieve. We don’t even know if the alien can communicate. Maybe it’s sentient, maybe not.”
“And you want to make friends with it either way?” he asked, amused. She hadn’t been joking, he’d realized. Whatever her academic expertise was, it was only part of what made her suited to this role of interspecies diplomat.
“Making friends is better than making enemies,” she said. “Even Miriam agreed with me on that, and enemies is her area of expertise. Will you play me what you’re hearing?”
He nodded and picked up the guitar. “The loudest pitches are A flat and G. I suspect they emanate from the breach.” He demonstrated one, then the other, their sound overlapping.
Both Jake and Chávez considered the sounds. Chávez said, “I kind of like the two pitches together. It’s a little uncomfortable, but… shiny? Hard to describe.”
“I can also hear a C,” Solomon continued, playing it for them. “It’s not as loud, and my best guess is that it comes from the organism. With all three together, it sounds like this.”
“When we were over there,” Jake said, tilting his head toward the machine, “you were humming.”
“E flat,” Solomon said, demonstrating the pitch. “The chord is A flat major seventh.”
It filled the space around them, rich and resonant and shivering just a little. The interval of the breach was still at the heart of the sound, but it could be layered into something beautiful.
“Wow,” Chávez said.
She was so earnest that Solomon couldn’t look at her. The admiration on Jake’s face was also excessive. Solomon hadn’t even done anything. It was a chord, not a concerto.
“So that was your impulse?” Chávez asked. “You heard those three notes and you added one more to make that chord?”
Solomon nodded.
“Do you think maybe—” she started, and then stopped when Jake spoke.
“It seems like you two are good here, and I have wiring to fix, so I really should go,” he said. “Maybe in a few hours, you all won’t have to be doing this by flashlight.”
Solomon almost protested. But everything Jake had said was logical, so he realized as soon as he opened his mouth that his only objection was that he didn’t want Jake to go. He wanted to glance to the side every now and then and catch Jake smiling at him.
Abashed, Solomon only said, “Okay.” He wasn’t even sure why Jake had come with him to the lab.
“See you later,” Chávez said, and then shimmied her shoulders, unable to contain herself, and said to Solomon, “Let’s talk about why the organism might be making that sound.”
“Speculate wildly, you mean,” Solomon said.
“You know it.” Undeterred, she grinned at him and leaned conspiratorially close. “Come on, Lange, I know you want to.”
Jake was lingering in the doorway like he might need to step back into the room and intervene. He’d stayed to mediate, Solomon realized. He’d been worried that Chávez and Solomon wouldn’t get along—and Chávez was superhumanly warm and outgoing, so it wasn’t her behavior Jake feared.
“The game,” she said, counting off rules on her fingers, “is to start out with the most generous possible interpretation. Assume good intentions. Explain the alien.”
He could do that. Determined to ease Jake’s worries, Solomon looked Chávez in the eye and said everything he’d been mulling over all at once, despite a natural inclination to keep the ideas to himself until they’d solidified further.
“The first question is ‘why has nothing else come through?’ We’ve seen a very small amount of human traffic cross the breach—infinitesimal if we take the whole multiverse into account. Very few living things have access to the Nowhere, but that doesn’t account for the quiet. One.” He held up his index finger. “The breach is repellent to anything or anyone that can sense it.”
“Kit hates it, Lenny hates it,” she agreed. “You think it makes a weird noise.”
“Therefore anything that comes through the brea
ch is either unaffected by its repellent nature—or drawn to it. We know this organism isn’t unaffected. It’s producing a pitch in the same non-sound way that the breach is, suggesting that it can ‘hear’ the breach just as I can. Also, it’s growing on the remnants of the machine, right next to the breach, and since we suspect it can move, that represents a choice. Two.” Solomon lifted a second finger. “The organism didn’t simply come through the breach, it came to the breach. For the organism, the breach is not a form of transit, it’s a destination.”
“It’s not here by accident,” she said, barely breathing.
It was exhilarating, telling someone he hardly knew all the ideas he’d been tending in secret. This much sharing should have made him uncomfortable, but from the rapt way Chávez was nodding, he didn’t get the impression she was passing judgment. Normally, this much attention—positive or negative—would have made him say something mean just to get the other person to leave, but the urge didn’t arise.
Jake was still in the doorway, listening.
Solomon kept going. “The breach makes two continuous pitches, only a half-step apart. Perhaps when there was no rent in the fabric of reality, the Nowhere produced a single pitch. As I said, the organism is sensitive to the nature of the Nowhere. It can hear the breach—not just the sound, but the pitches. The pitch it’s producing is meant to harmonize.”
He took a deep breath and held up a third finger. “It’s trying to fix the breach.”
“Marry me,” Chávez said, and Solomon heard Jake snort as he finally turned and walked down the hallway, leaving the two of them to play.
Jake had sent Eliza back to his workspace last night, and he found himself absurdly relieved she hadn’t been in Lange’s room while they’d been having sex. She came rolling into the greenhouse now.
Thanks to the blinds over the windows, it was as red as ever in the space. With the valves shut off and the irrigation system not functioning, it was quiet, without even an occasional drip from the broken pipes to interrupt the silence. Whatever liquid remained inside the pipes was still there, sticking to the surface and to itself. A problem for later.
“We’re looking for broken wiring,” Jake told Eliza. She couldn’t understand that as a command, but it was nice to talk to someone. He sent her back up to the hole in the ceiling to investigate.
Eliza was too big to move through the walls. If he reworked one of the smaller robots, he could send it along the cables. Maybe he could even program it to splice the wiring back together. Messing around with the robot would take time, but it might ultimately save him a lot of work.
“Jake? You in there?”
Startled out of his reverie, Jake looked over his shoulder. “Hey, Dax.”
Dax walked into the greenhouse and craned their neck to observe Eliza on the ceiling. Their red hair, gravity-defying even in normal conditions, was in spectacular shape.
“Shouldn’t you be in the lab with Lange and Chávez where they’re tossing around the big ideas?” Jake asked.
“Ugh, I just woke up, it’s too early for big ideas,” Dax said. “Give me some pliers. Me and Eliza, we’ll be your assistants. Wait. Did you say Lange and Chávez? Is she in there talking to him about feelings?” At Jake’s look, they waved a hand in the air. “You know what I mean. Communication. Conflict resolution. Not physics.”
“Whatever they’re talking about, it’s definitely not physics,” Jake agreed.
“And he hasn’t ruthlessly stripped her of all her self-worth?”
“No, actually, they get along great,” Jake said, strangely proud. It wasn’t his accomplishment.
“Holy shit, Chávez has the magic touch,” Dax said. Their gaze slid toward Jake. “Or you do.”
“Uh,” Jake said. It would be nice if his body would calm the fuck down and not flush pink at the slightest hint that he had touched Lange. “Wanna build a robot?”
“Hell yes,” Dax said. “Lead the way.”
That was how he and Dax ended up in his workspace, reprogramming his smallest robot to detect broken wiring. Dax was easy to work with. Super smart, very focused, and not chatty, which Jake appreciated.
Dax had lifted a panel from the wall and set it aside, revealing a multicolored bundle of cables. Jake stuck in the probe, a flat, flexible polymer form no bigger than his palm. It clipped to the cables by way of three short, curved legs on either side, making it look a little like a robotic beetle. It would crawl down the bundle of cables until it found a break, at which point they’d open the wall or the ceiling and splice the wires back together. A more sophisticated robot would have done the repairs itself, but in the interest of time, Jake had decided to rely on the machinery he already had—his brain and his hands.
The little robot beeped as it burrowed into the wall and they followed its progress down the hall and into the darkened, silent kitchen, where it found the first chewed-up wiring.
“Should’ve made two of these,” Jake said, removing the wall panel and pulling out the two broken cable ends. “Then we could’ve split up and fixed twice as many.”
“We’re still technically supposed to stick together,” Dax said. “Didn’t you and Lange encounter some kind of alien ooze last night? Aren’t you worried it’s seeping through the walls right now?”
“I don’t think that thing wanted to touch me any more than I wanted to touch it,” Jake said.
“I’m entirely reassured,” Dax said dryly.
“It heated up on contact,” Jake said. “Didn’t really burn me since I was wearing gloves. I think it was a defense mechanism.”
“Like it was growling a warning at you.”
“Something like that, yeah. It was also kind of… shy, I guess? Looking back, I don’t think it was charging at me—I think it wanted to get away from me. It disappeared fast. We wouldn’t even really have gotten a look at it if Lange hadn’t pulled it out of the shadows.”
“He fought the alien?”
“Sort of. It resisted his telekinesis, that’s for sure.” Jake shook his head, remembering. He and Lange hadn’t discussed that moment, and he couldn’t make sense of it. “I still don’t know what he was thinking. I guess maybe he was imagining that he could get a hold of the thing and dump it back into the breach, even though that would’ve been almost impossible. We both know from experience how hard it is to get close to the breach.”
“Maybe he wasn’t thinking,” Dax said.
“Doesn’t sound like him.”
“He doesn’t sound much like himself lately,” Dax observed.
Their tone was neutral, but Jake felt like maybe there was a bundle of live wires buried behind it, so he didn’t touch that. He finished splicing the conductors together and set the little beetle probe moving through the wall again. The two of them followed its beeping out of the kitchen and into the hallway.
There was damage in the greenhouse, which wasn’t a surprise. They’d probably end up retracing the path Jake and Lange had taken yesterday when they’d found the hypergravity. For now, Jake lifted a panel in the greenhouse wall out of its track and set it on the floor.
“You wanna wait just a second to make sure the wall is empty?” Dax asked.
Jake shrugged, but he stepped back from the wall. “I’m not that worried about it. You should have heard Lange and Chávez bouncing ideas off each other this morning.”
“Yeah?”
Jake summarized, as best he could, the argument that the alien was not hostile, but might actually intend to fix the breach.
“But that’s the coral-like stuff growing on what remains of the machine,” Dax said. “The thing that might be slipping through the wall is different, right?”
“I think maybe the ooze is related to the coral-looking stuff in the lab,” Jake said. “They’re the same color, and if you zoom in on the photo, it looks like the coral is coated in something clear and gooey. I know that’s not rock-solid evidence or anything.”
“We have to start somewhere. So you think it can sol
idify itself? Or… deliquesce?”
“Gross,” Jake said, and was silent for a moment while he fiddled with the wire. “But yeah, that’s what I think. It can transform itself. Caterpillar, butterfly.”
“And back again, maybe,” Dax said. “It’s pretty cool. So do you think we’re dealing with two aliens? Or maybe it’s all the same organism. Coral’s like that—a colony.”
“Couldn’t say,” Jake said. He’d finished the splice, so he replaced the robot onto the bundled cables. “I doubt we’ll ever find out.”
Dax nodded. The two of them and Eliza left the greenhouse, following the robot in the wall. They stopped again in the hallway for another fix.
“Can I ask you something personal?” Dax said. “I’m sorry, I hate to pry and you don’t have to answer, it’s just so I’m clear on what’s happening. Am I making things up or are you and Lange—” there was a pause so long Jake thought Dax had just quit mid-sentence “—together?”
“It’s temporary,” Jake said. “Casual. Whatever. He practically made me sign a waiver to that effect.”
“Yeah, that sounds very casual.”
Jake was glad he couldn’t see the look on Dax’s face. Their tone said enough. “Look, I don’t know any more than you do, and I can’t talk about this and splice conductors at the same time.”
“I’m pretty sure you could fix wiring in a coma, but I’m also happy to stop talking about Lange. Sorry for bringing it up.”
“It’s fine, don’t worry about it. Honestly I’d like to know the answer, too.” Fuck, he did wish that. He also wished he hadn’t said it out loud. Fewer accidental confessions, more electrical work.
“Speaking of things we might never know, with the machine not functioning, our ability to measure the breach is hampered,” Dax said. “I’m not sure how we’ll know if the alien is affecting it—other than the obvious, undesirable method of getting too close for comfort.”
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