The Choice

Kwan came to the bridge at 0600 and found Mira at the console with three days of coffee cups and a look that Kwan, to her credit, recognized immediately as the look of someone who had found something significant.

"Show me," Kwan said.

Mira showed her.

Kwan was a good scientist. She sat with it. She asked the right questions. She ran the calculations herself, checked Mira's translation methodology, found one error in layer eight and corrected it and found that the corrected version said the same thing the original had said, which was its own kind of confirmation.

Then she said: "This goes to the division under Sovereign Protocol. Everything you have."

"The transmission window from the structure closes in forty-eight hours," Mira said. "I haven't decoded layers nine through eleven. If we leave—"

"We're not equipped for extended analysis. The division has the resources. We leave in eighteen hours."

"They chose to contact me specifically," Mira said. She hadn't planned to say it that way. But it was the fact she kept returning to. "Not a mission crew. Not a first-contact protocol team. A solo survey cartographer who left her hydrophone running and stayed awake too late reading. They chose the person who was paying attention."

Kwan looked at her steadily. "The division will pay attention."

She left. Mira sat at the console.

She had been a survey cartographer for eleven years. She mapped things and filed the maps and the maps went into the division database and became part of the record and she moved on to the next survey. She had never in eleven years deviated from a mission directive. She had never had reason to.

She thought about the forty-seven species in the beings' catalog. Forty-three end dates. She thought about the species that had reached threshold and made a choice — the wrong one, or the one that felt safer — and seven hundred years later were an end date.

She thought about what it meant to be chosen by something four billion years old. Something that had watched civilizations arrive and end across the full span of the universe's working life. Something that had decided, out of forty-seven chances, that this was the moment to transmit the full message — not because we were the most advanced or the most promising but because we were approaching threshold and the window was closing.

She picked up her recorder. She put on her EVA suit. She climbed into the maintenance skiff for the second time.

The structure was dark. It had been dark for six days.

But at the threshold of what had been the aperture, a faint light still held. Cold now, where it had been warm. Patient, the way a door held open is patient.

She crossed the three minutes of space between the Parallax and the structure. She came to rest at the threshold.

The aperture opened.

She looked inside.

The sky was gone. The alien world she had glimpsed was gone. What was inside now was dark — deep, absolute, the kind of dark that has dimensions — and far down in that dark, something was moving toward her.