by Julia Keller
“Cool job,” Rachel broke in. This time, she was oblivious to Rez’s cold stare. Instinctively, Violet’s eyes glanced at the crook of Rachel’s elbow. She saw a small blue flash. Proof positive of just how excited the little girl was at the thought of Mars.
“I read,” Rachel said, “that there’s evidence of a lost civilization there. An underground colony, maybe, that disappeared billions of years ago, in the same way that the dinosaurs had vanished from Old Earth a long, long time before human beings showed up.”
“That whole Martian colony business—it’s pure speculation,” Rez said. His tone had a kind of sneering dismissal in it. From anybody else, the tone would’ve seemed mean, but they knew it was just Rez being Rez. He was focused, and a focused Rez was a formidable force. He wanted to get back to the rock. “So what do we know for sure?”
Violet replied, “Well, we know that somebody at the museum really, really wants to keep the rock a secret. But why?”
“Right—why?” Shura said. “I mean, trawlers bring minerals back from Mars all the time. Tons and tons of them. Why the fuss over this little thing?”
Rez summed it up. “Yeah. What’s the big deal about one rock?”
Danny stared at the rusty red object in the center of his coffee table. The markings covered every inch of it, traveling up and down and sideways. They looked as if they were trying to say something.
“It can’t be just the rock,” he said. “It’s gotta be what’s on the rock.”
* * *
They spent the rest of the morning trying to decipher the message. Using the TranslatePro app that Rez had created the year before for their wrist consoles, they ran the markings through every language database they could find. There were 26,347 languages and dialects available on the app. The languages came from the misty history of Old Earth as well as from the quirky new languages created in the early years of New Earth, including exotic computer codes.
Nothing worked.
The markings were not part of any known system of communication.
At noon they decided to take a break. They were tired and frustrated. Violet carefully placed the rock in her backpack, and she and Rez left for Protocol Hall. They stopped on their way to deposit Rachel at school. Rez’s story about a delayed tram transfer seemed to satisfy Rachel’s teachers, but the truth was, the teachers didn’t ask too many questions—probably because Rez was still admired at the school as the smartest student they’d ever had, with Rachel now running a close second, and the teachers still called him when they had technical issues with their consoles. Shura finally answered her mother’s texts and headed home. And Danny left his apartment right behind them. A mandatory meeting for all hands had been called at the police station.
It was night now. Violet had walked home from Protocol Hall through the dark, warm streets of New Earth. Her backpack, slung across one shoulder, had thumped rhythmically against her hip the whole way, keeping time with her steps. She had felt the rock’s presence close to her, buried securely in the backpack. She had stopped only once, to pick up a rock she saw by the side of the street. She looked at it, and she thought about the vast difference between this average, ordinary rock in her hand and the one in her backpack that had come all the way from Mars.
She and Rez hadn’t talked about the rock during their shift that afternoon. They needed to focus on their jobs. But they had all agreed to meet again tomorrow morning and bring any new ideas.
Violet stepped into the front hall of the apartment she shared with her father. She realized she had a choice to make. She hesitated in the threshold, fingering the strap of her backpack where it looped over her shoulder.
Should she tell him about what had happened at the museum?
Ogden Crowley shifted in his chair. He hadn’t heard her come in—his work always took his total attention—but all at once he sensed her presence. He looked up, turning his head so that he could see her.
“Violet—hello, sweetheart. How was work?” That was always the first thing he said.
“It was okay.” That was what she always said back to him.
And in the next instant, she made her decision. She wouldn’t tell her father about the rock. The omission created a sort of queasiness inside her. She wasn’t lying, exactly, but neither was she telling him the truth. Which was a kind of lie.
Wasn’t it?
If her mother were still alive, it would all be different. She could tell her mother the truth about anything. Her mother would understand. Lucretia Crowley had been a rebel, too. She’d followed her conscience, even when that decision took her away from her family—and even, Violet thought, as the familiar lump formed in her throat, when it caused her mother’s death.
“Violet? You’re frowning, sweetheart. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, Dad. Just tired. Long day at work.”
“Okay,” her father said. “Well, get a good night’s sleep.” He held up a sheaf of papers and rattled it. “I’ll be working for a few more hours.”
Violet knew from experience that “a few more hours” really meant “all night.” He hardly ever slept these days.
“Good night, Dad.”
* * *
Before she got in bed, Violet checked her console one last time. There was a message from Shura, telling her about a new painting she had started working on that night, and messages from two other friends, minor ones, passing along small tidbits of gossip: a breakup, a new job, an argument with parents that resulted in a weeklong grounding. Violet didn’t bother to answer those. Shura, Rez, and Danny were her core friends. Other people came and went in her life. And gossip bored her, especially when she had a delicious mystery to solve.
There was no message from Danny. Disappointing, but not surprising. You never get the message you are hoping for the most.
The most? The thought took Violet by surprise. A more intense version of her feelings for Danny had sort of sneaked up on her. She dared herself to check the crook of her left elbow.
And there it was: a very tiny, very brief, but still visible flash of blue.
I’m in trouble now, Violet thought. But the notion wasn’t altogether unpleasant. She had no idea what to do about it, and so she switched off the lamp next to her bed and turned on her side and scrunched up the pillow under her ear.
She didn’t close her eyes right away. At night her room glowed, but not from lamps. It glowed with the power of Shura’s paintings, six of which Violet had arranged around the edges of the room, leaning against the walls. Shura had given them to Violet as birthday and Christmas gifts over the years.
She couldn’t see the paintings, because there was no light, but she could feel them. And feeling, Violet had come to learn ever since she’d started living with her best friend’s art, was another kind of seeing.
Her thoughts returned to the rock, to those bizarre marks that didn’t match any existing language. Part of her wondered if maybe the marks meant nothing at all. Maybe it was just gibberish.
Maybe there really had been a civilization on Mars. And maybe a kid who lived there—somebody like me, Violet thought—had been bored one day, just as bored as she and Shura were last night. And so to pass the time, maybe this Martian kid had sat down and carved a bunch of nonsense syllables on the side of a rock. Maybe that was it. And now, a few billion years later, Violet and her friends were trying to figure out something that couldn’t be figured out because it was … nothing. Some long-dead Martian kid’s idea of a joke.
She turned over on her other side and brought her knees up to her chest, trying to find a comfortable position so that sleep would come.
Somehow the Martian-kid-with-a-chisel-and-a-lousy-sense-of-humor theory didn’t sound right. The writing on the rock had to have a meaning. It just had to.
She flopped onto her back again. She couldn’t settle down. Her thoughts were spinning too quickly.
She’d checked her console earlier, and found out that Mars might have had an atmosphere four billion yea
rs ago, give or take a few million years. An atmosphere could mean life. And life could mean—people. But if it was a four-billion-year-old language, how would she and her friends ever be able to translate the—
Her console beeped.
She sat up in bed and snatched it off her nightstand. Maybe it’s Danny, she thought. The excitement made her feel like she’d swallowed a hyperactive butterfly.
Her heart sank a little when she saw the caller ID:
It was Rez.
“Hey,” Violet said.
He didn’t bother with a greeting, which was Pure Rez. Greetings were for lesser minds.
“She did it.”
“What?”
“She did it.” Rez was practically shouting. Violet turned down the volume level on her console. She didn’t want her father to know she was still up.
“Who did what?” Violet said.
“Rachel. She solved it. She knows what the rock is all about.”
“What? How did a kid—”
“I don’t know. But she did it. She cracked the code.”
“So what do the marks mean?”
“I don’t know that, either.”
“You don’t—”
“I said I don’t know!” Rez’s voice sounded hoarse with frustration. “She won’t tell me.”
Now Violet was thoroughly confused, but she was still elated. Somebody had translated the writing on the rock—even if it was a seven-year-old.
Wait. A seven-year-old?
“Um, Rez?” Violet said, trying to keep the skepticism out of her tone. “How do you know if—well, if Rachel is telling you the truth? I mean—kids lie sometimes. And this is pretty farfetched. How do you know she really did it?”
Rez snorted into the phone. “Because,” he said, “she’s my sister. And that means she’s brilliant.”
Pure Rez.
But he had a point.
“So what do we do?” she asked. “How do we get Rachel to talk?”
“Oh, she’ll talk. Just not to me.” Rez sighed deeply. “She says she’ll only tell one person.”
“Who?”
“You.”
“Why me?” Violet said.
“She said you were nice to her this morning. When we were at Danny’s. Nice.” He made a noise in the back of his throat, scoffing at the word.
“And she won’t change her mind.”
Rez laughed. He didn’t laugh often—Violet could only recall two other times when he’d done so much as chuckle—and it surprised her. She liked his laugh.
“Hey—one more time, she’s my sister. Given that fact, what do you think the chances are she’ll change her mind?”
“Zero.”
“Bingo.”
“So what do we do next?”
“There’s no ‘we’ here, Violet. Rachel wants to meet with you alone. Can I bring her over to your place?”
“Your parents are okay with you taking her out this late?”
“They’re not home. I’m in charge. My dad’s got a big project over in L’Engletown. And my mom’s doing site work for a new tower in Mendeleev Crossing.”
“Okay,” Violet said. “I’ll think of something to tell my dad. Come on over.”
“He’s still up? It’s almost midnight.”
“Oh, yeah.” She could see, in the line under her closed bedroom door, the light from the living room lamp. “He’s up. Like always.”
* * *
“So—Dad,” Violet said. “Rez and his little sister need a place to hang out for a few hours. There’s a lot of noise in their building. That’s okay, right?”
Her father murmured an affirmative. He didn’t look up from the massive pile of papers in his lap. Violet could’ve told him that aliens from a zombie planet were making peanut-butter-and-brain sandwiches in the kitchen and he would’ve muttered, Okay, sweetheart, sounds good.
A few minutes later Rez and Rachel arrived. They’d had to get through the gauntlet of guards that protected the presidential residence, an experience that left Rez irked. Violet shrugged. Nothing she could do about it. She led Rez into her father’s library and patted the seat of a big comfy armchair. Rez had already summoned a book on his console and in two seconds was deep into his reading.
Violet and Rachel settled down in Violet’s bedroom. They sat on the bed, in the middle of the messed-up sheets, facing each other with the rock between them. Rachel was in her pajamas; Rez had simply bundled her up in a jacket and hustled her out of their apartment.
“So,” Violet said. She pointed to the rock. “You figured out the message.”
Rachel nodded. Her hair was matted on one side. There was a dried cereal stain on the sleeve of her pajamas. She was clearly tired, but her eyes, while ringed with dark circles, were still bright.
“What I don’t understand,” Violet added, gently probing, “is how you did that without looking at the rock again. I’ve had it since we left Danny’s apartment.”
“Yeah,” Rachel said. “But I’d already seen it.”
“Once.”
“That’s all I needed.”
Right, Violet thought. She’s Rez’s sister. An eidetic memory was a given.
Violet was trying to be patient, but she felt as if she was going to burst wide open unless she got right to it. “Okay, Rachel. So what do the words on the rock mean?”
“They’re not words.”
“They’re not?”
“Nope.” Rachel had pulled up one leg of her pajamas, exposing her knee. She started to pick at a scab there.
Violet could barely contain herself. “If they’re not words—then what are they? And what does the message mean?”
“They’re musical notes. And lyrics. It’s not a message—it’s a song.”
* * *
Later, Violet would be struck by the exquisite simplicity of it. And by the fact that when you think you know what you’re looking for—like a message made purely out of words—you’re pretty much guaranteed not to find it. You have to look without expectations. And with new eyes.
The eyes of a seven-year-old.
“When I first went to bed tonight,” Rachel said, “I couldn’t sleep. I kept picturing the rock. It was like those markings were stamped on my brain. And then I realized that there were twelve unique symbols—and another twelve that seemed to be slight variations of the original twelve. These twenty-four marks were arranged in different patterns across the rock.
“Twelve and twenty-four. Twelve and twenty-four.” Rachel’s eyes were bright. “The numbers sort of danced around in my head. I knew them from somewhere. I was sure of it. And then it hit me. There are twelve musical notes—A, B, C, D, E, F, G and then five sharps and flats that fit between the five. That makes twelve. You add the minor scale—twelve plus twelve—and that makes twenty-four. Those are the building blocks of all music. It’s the alphabet of song. I don’t know what instrument a Martian would’ve played it on—but it’s a song. Music is music. Notes are notes. Sounds are sounds. Doesn’t matter if they were written down a few billion years ago or last week. Doesn’t matter if they come from Mars or Neptune or Pluto. A song is a song.”
“So it’s just a melody,” Violet said. She was disappointed. “No words.”
Rachel gave her a puzzled frown. “Of course there are words. I’ve been singing the song in my head the whole way over here.”
Violet was now excited beyond belief. She didn’t need to look down at her own left arm to see the quick blue flash. She felt the hot crackle.
“How’d you translate it?” she asked Rachel eagerly. “How’d you figure out what the words mean?”
“The same way people have been cracking codes forever,” Rachel replied. Unlike Rez, she didn’t sound snobby and superior. She sounded earnest. “You look for patterns. Repetitions. For instance, if you see a certain symbol showing up in a certain spot more often than other symbols—and if it’s followed by another symbol more often than by any other symbol, you can start to make words. Deduce m
eanings. The truth is,” she said, somewhat sheepishly, “code-breaking isn’t really about breaking codes. It’s about probability theory.”
“Not following,” Violet admitted.
“Okay. Let’s take the English language. Once you know the probability of each letter being used in a sentence, you can break pretty much any code. ‘E’ is the letter used most often. So you look for a symbol that’s used a lot. Chances are, it’s an ‘E.’ Then you start factoring in the probabilities of which letters would follow an ‘E.’ And you go from there.”
“But this isn’t English. It’s Martian.”
Rachel shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Math is math. Probability is probability. Clusters and juxtapositions of symbols, points and counterpoints—it all started to make sense. I got the chorus first and then the verses. There are a ton of verses.” She sighed. “If I’d had a computer handy I could’ve figured it out much faster. But my mom doesn’t let me take a computer to bed. She says I won’t be able to settle down. So I had to run the numbers in my head. Thousands of calculations. It took me over an hour.”
“A whole hour? What a slacker.” Violet grinned. Then she picked up the rock. Back to work. “Show me.”
Rachel pointed to a squiggle. “This is the title. Now, it would’ve been easier if she’d just called it ‘The Song of Scaptur,’ but they didn’t call their songs ‘songs.’ They called them ‘tablets.’ She called this one ‘The Tablet of Scaptur.’”
“‘She’?”
“Scaptur. I think she was a kid. She lived on Mars four billion years ago. That’s the date on the songbook—four billion years ago. She liked to solve puzzles just like me. It’s all there on the Tablet. She has a little section at the beginning where she sings about herself. And after that,” Rachel said, frowning, “the song gets really serious. I think that doctor at the museum knew what the song said. The one who gave you the rock. The scientist. But she probably made a mistake—she told the other people at her workplace. And they wanted to take the rock from her. So she ran. They caught her—but not before she gave it to you.”