Archive of Our Own

“Yesterday afternoon, twelve mysterious floating objects appeared in seemingly random locations above various continents on Earth. Our correspondent Will Abbiati is in the field now, just outside the military perimeter, tracking this developing situation. How’re things looking out there, Will?”

A rumble of wind buffeted the microphone. “Not too bad, yet,” Abbiati said, looking back uneasily at the huge floating black monolith. “Things are a bit tense. Everyone is preparing for the worst. But the objects haven’t done anything yet at all, violent or otherwise.”

“So they’re definitely aliens.”

“Almost certainly. No government has stepped forward to claim the objects. The thing you don’t get from these news broadcasts is that these things are huge: nearly 1500 feet tall, or so I hear. You can just see the top of it, if I—” Abbiati ducked out of frame to show the smooth oval curve of the monolith, like a hole in the world. He came back in, a little shiver running across his face. “We don’t even know how they’re floating, or what they’re made of.”

“All right. Well, keep us updated.”

“You got it. Over to you, Paul.”

The TV went to a commercial break, showing a grainy but still colorful ad for paper towels. Professor Shang tapped their fingers against the arm of their armchair and said, “Do you know what this means?”

“Alien apocalypse?” asked River’s TA, a very young-looking masters student named Alheri.

“Grant funding,” Professor Shang said.

“Not for us, surely,” River said, wiping a fleck of red ink off their fountain pen with a tissue and then flicking it into the wastepaper basket. “This seems like business for the physicists, unless there really are aliens in there.”

“What if there are?”

“The army isn’t letting anyone within a mile of them, so it’ll be a while before we know,” River said.

Professor Shang nudged them gently. “Are you thinking about sneaking past the military perimeter to talk to the aliens?”

“We don’t even know if there are aliens, and I’d be shot immediately.”

“That was a yes or no question.”

“Yes, obviously I’m thinking about sneaking past the military parameter to talk to the aliens. But I won’t.”

“Shame.”

“You can’t have grant funding when you’re dead,” River said mildly.

“This person drew a picture of a cat instead of answering the question,” Alheri said. “Can I give them partial credit?”

“No,” River said.

“No federal crimes, no extra points for cat pictures. We never do anything fun,” Professor Shang said.

“Maybe next year I’ll add cat pictures for partial credit to the exam. For now, stick to the rubric,” River said.

River and Alheri were observing the once-a-semester tradition of locking themselves in an office and working until all the Intro to Applied Linguistics final exams had been graded. It sounded like a horrible grind until you actually did it. River had a pot of tea, a coffee machine, and a tray full of different kinds of senbei. They had gathered a stash of sandwiches from the café in the building across the quad, wrapped in crackly brown wax paper. The sandwiches were overpriced, but nice. Some of them had avocado in them.

Rain tapped its fingers against the window to the beat of some nonexistent music. It was darker than normal outside because of the storm, and it made the light inside the office seem like butter and honey. The wind crescendoed, making the audio on the TV cut out. River had inherited it from the person who’d had the office before them, and Professor Shang insisted on having it on to watch the weird alien monolith coverage.

Professor Shang was not part of Intro to Linguistics. They weren’t grading yet, because the exams for their graduate neuroscience courses weren’t until Thursday, and so they were haunting River’s office for reasons unclear. They said it was because River had better coffee than the university cafés, which probably wasn’t true. 

It might just have been the atmosphere—their lab was bigger than River’s office, but it had no windows, and it contained mostly computers and a few brand-new textbooks, all magazine-glossy.¹

River’s office was tiny, but cozy in a scruffy sort of way, with creaking shelves jam-packed with dictionaries, ranging from old and faded with fraying cotton binding to new and dense. It always smelled faintly of coffee, from the cherry-red drip coffee machine wedged into one of the shelves. It was for other people; River drank tea.

There was a sharp knock on the door. River got up and carefully maneuvered around the desk, stepping over Professor Shang’s knees, in order to open it. They were prepared to tell whatever anxious student was on the other side to go away, please, the grades would be out in a few days, so there was no point in worrying about them until then.

 It wasn’t a student. It was a soldier, the uniform looking fantastically out of place in the dim hallway. The fluorescent lights flickered: just a brief influx of shadow which never seemed to bother anyone else, the reason that River’s office was always lit by the green glass lamp on their desk.

They had spectacularly good posture, and they were easy with it in a way that few people were, not at all tense—like a dancer. For the first time in a while, River had to look up to meet their eyes. They had the look of someone who had been awake for too long dealing with a moderately boring crisis, but they wore it well.

“Are you Dr. River Gale-Zhou?” they said.

Their name was on the door, next to some printed-out XKCD comics.

“Yes,” River said.

“Colonel Liu,” they said, holding out a hand.

River had a brief flash of intuition that Colonel Liu would try to crush their hand, more out of habit than any real animosity, and decided to do it first. Surprise flickered near-invisibly across their face.

“Can I help you?” River said, straight-faced but trying not to shake out their hand behind their back. “It’s finals week—not really a good time.”

“We’ll see. Can I speak with you alone?”

A brief thrill of anticipation. “Yes, of course. Follow me, please. Alheri, I’ll be right back.”

They stepped out into the corridor. Shoes squeaked on the wet linoleum; people had been tracking rain in all day. River nearly reached out to direct Colonel Liu around a corner, and then stopped. They didn’t know each other. Something about them was a barrier against getting too close: the uniform, maybe, or the expression.

“It’s hard to find a place to talk in this building, but this is usually unlocked,” River said, trying a door. It opened into a janitorial closet. “Ah, here we go.”

It had a single lightbulb. They pulled the cord to turn it on.

“Why not just speak to me in your office?”

“We’re chronically underfunded,” River said. “Alheri is working unpaid overtime right now. When you grade exams written by undergraduates with handwriting roughly as comprehensible as Linear A² for six hours out of the kindness of your heart and a desire to help people learn, then I will toss other people out of my office for you, but not before.”

River had been expecting stony annoyance, but instead they looked as if they might be about to laugh. “That seems fair.”

“Doesn’t it?” River shut the closet door behind them. “What can I do for you, Colonel?”

They were back to business now, the faint trace of humor wiped away. “It’s about this.”

They pulled a sleek black smartphone out of a pocket and hit play. There was a brief moment of silence, and then an odd noise: somewhere between a low-frequency electronic hum and a howl, and then a grumble like retreating thunder. River shivered happily—they were one of the first human beings to hear this, ever, in a tiny broom closet. History must be made of moments like this.

The recording ended.

“Can you interpret that?” Colonel Liu said.

“No,” River said.

“Then we’ll have to find someone else.”

They moved to leave. River touched their elbow to stop them. They looked down at River’s hand on their sleeve, expressionlessly, and River was tempted to move, but they didn’t.

“One recording, in isolation, with no context or other cues? No one could. I can’t make any promises, but put me in the room with them, and then maybe we’ll have a chance.”

“That’s out of the question.”

“Put it in the question,” River said. “You can try to find another linguist, but if they’re not a total charlatan, they’ll tell you the same thing.”

“We haven’t allowed a single civilian within a mile radius of the monolith since it landed,” Colonel Liu said.

“You’ll have to start.”

“I’m not authorized to make that decision alone.”

“Ask, then. I’ll wait. But you should know that if you choose someone else, I’ll collapse to the ground weeping like a soap opera protagonist who’s been left at the altar, so factor that into your calculations,” River said.

They choked on nothing, although their expression didn’t change. “We can’t have that.”

“Exactly. Alheri and Shang already deal with enough, we can’t have me crying on their shoulders because I can’t talk to aliens while they’re trying to grade.”

“You do realize that you’re putting yourself into potentially mortal danger and a very tense political situation,” Colonel Liu said.

“Yes!” River said brightly. “Should be fun.”

Max’s mind swam as they exited the university and into the storm outside. They opened their umbrella and set off back to the helicopter, lightning forking overhead. For a brief, flaring moment, they hoped they would be struck, thereby foisting this whole damn thing onto someone else. But no—there were plenty of things taller than them in the area. They were in no danger. Still, stranger things had happened.

Stranger things, like alien life appearing on Earth. Like Max being tapped to head up the interface mission, despite the majority of their thirty-year service record indicating absolutely no experience in this area. Like the president of the United g-ddamn States sending them across the country to speak to a linguist. Good Lord, Max still couldn’t believe any of this was happening—they had only arrived stateside a couple days ago. 

They had only gotten thirty-six hours of peace before the call; before they were obliged to pull themself out of the nest of blankets they’d made on the sofa in the living room of their sibling’s Capitol Hill row house. Before they had picked up, and automatically snapped to attention when the President informed them that a national emergency had been declared, and could they please report to the White House as soon as humanly possible. Before they had ironed their uniform and re-packed their suitcase, headed for a too-short briefing before they were sent to the classified location where the alien monoliths had landed. 

If they stood still for a second, let themself stop and watch the patterns in the rain, they could forget it all was happening. Everything was alright. Life was quiet and ordinary, just for the moment. Max and their sibling had had tickets to see Swan Lake that weekend at the Kennedy Centre, they remembered with a jolt. January Stirling was in the principal role; he was meant to be wonderful. But all of that was long gone, now. 

Max wove a complicated path through the college town as they thought, making nonsensical turns and double-backs to shake off a tail that probably didn’t exist—after thirty years, the training had worked its way into their bones. Every bar in the city was playing the monolith coverage; they set their jaw and refused to look. It was just one more reason to handle this with the utmost consideration. 

When they hauled themself into the helicopter, the soldier in the pilot’s seat seemed surprised they had come back alone. “Are we waiting on someone else, sir?”

“No. We ought to go back to Washington as soon as possible—I need to consult with the President,” Max explained. The soldier raised their eyebrows, but started the helicopter without saying anything else.

Max watched the West Coast recede from view, eyes glued to the spot where they thought Dr. Gale’s university might be. They couldn’t help but imagine them, grading papers in that office filled with honey-gold light—it was a good image. Peaceful.

Speaking of Dr. Gale-Zhou, the President had given Max a copy of one of their papers to read. They had intended to look at it on the way over, but had gotten distracted—they removed it from their bag now.

Language, in its simplest definition, is a method of communicating thought, Max read. As we acquire new ways of expressing ourselves, the question must be asked; does the language in which one expresses a thought affect how we conceive of it in the first place? Should this turn out to be true, how can this lead to a deeper and more profound understanding of alternative viewpoints, especially as the world grows more connected?

Max had to stop for a moment, thrown. They had never thought of language in those terms before—it had always been nothing but a tool in their arsenal. Russian and English and Mandarin from the cradle, Arabic and Korean at the Naval Academy, French on NATO secondment. To hear Dr. Gale speak—write—of it, though, it sounded innate. As human an instinct as love. 

Now that Max knew what they were like in person, some of their voice came through in the paper, like sunlight through curtains. It was wonderful, and terrible; they could have been sitting in a bar together, half-debating linguistics over a beer. Without them there, though, Max couldn’t shake the feeling that they were violating Dr. Gale’s privacy; prying, as though Max was rummaging through Dr. Gale’s brain uninvited. But Max set their jaw and pushed the thought from their mind. Now wasn’t the time for scruples.

River Gale-Zhou was promising, yes, but promising didn’t count when one was staring down the barrel of a major geopolitical crisis. They certainly weren’t Max’s first pick—Max needed someone who could get the job done without asking too many questions, and unfortunately for all involved, Dr. Gale seemed like the questions type. Still—their arguments were marvellous. If the fate of the world didn’t hang in the balance, if nuclear war with China wasn’t on the table…

Max looked up as the helicopter touched down softly on the lawn; there had clearly been others there, marks from their skids carved directly into the grass. The groundskeeping staff must be going insane, Max thought, briefly and hysterically. The interior was even more of a mess. They had never seen this many people crammed into the White House before. Officials in rumpled suits filled the hallways—chattering into cell phones, looking over documents, sprinting to their next meeting. A small horde of people had congregated around an enormous coffee urn; Max longed for nothing more than to join them, but they had prior orders. 

Max made their way over to the Oval Office, dodging interns and running through their report to the President again and again in their mind. They had met her before, but only once at her inauguration. Giving them this assignment had been an act of trust. They couldn’t waste that.

When they got there, they found the door propped open with a chair, staffers rushing in and out as about a hundred other people attempted to talk to her already; like worker bees flocking around their queen. Max knocked on the doorframe—though she was deep in conversation with a member of her staff, she fell silent when she saw them. 

They snapped to attention. “Madam President, you asked to see me?”

“Yes, I did. Everyone out,” she commanded the room. Amazingly for something that had looked so disorganized, everyone listened. Max stood to one side as the myriad officials and staffers filtered out—instinctually, they retrieved the chair and let the door close in their wake as they made their way up to the president’s desk.

“At ease, soldier,” President Gray said wryly. She had snared one of the officials before they left—director of Something NatSec Related, though Max couldn’t remember what. “This is Colonel Liu; Colonel Liu, this is the director of the NSA. Liu’s running point on the Pacific operation.” she added—the NSA director’s eyebrows shot up.

“So, you spoke to Dr. Gale-Zhou?” President Gray inquired, leaning against the edge of her desk. “What’s your assessment?”

Max nodded, praying all the rehearsal would pay off. “I did. Madam President, your assessment was correct; Dr. Gale-Zhou is an extremely talented linguist. However, I have concerns about bringing a civilian on board—this is a delicate operation, and involving someone who’s not subject to military discipline and has no clearance would make a logistically complicated mission even more complex. As such, I’m recommending seconding a linguist from the NSA rather than looping in a civilian, with the understanding that in this time of international crisis, intelligence operations ought to be suspended.”

The president nodded. “Thank you. General?”

The director’s expression had hardened into annoyance. “Do you really think Russia and China will be suspending their intelligence operations? If you insist on co-opting NSA personnel, disallowing us from carrying out our exact purpose is laughable at best and dangerous at worst. The fact that the world is teetering on the edge of war makes surveillance of our enemies that much more necessary; we cannot ignore old threats merely because new ones have made themselves apparent. I also recommend sending an NSA linguist—however, I strongly disagree with the notion that intelligence activities ought to be suspended. In fact, I argue that it ought to be increased. This is a valuable opportunity; we ought to strike when our opponents’ guards are down.”

“Well, this has been enlightening.” President Gray regarded them both for a minute, glancing between the two of them. When her gaze finally landed on the director, Max couldn’t stop themself from feeling oddly relieved. “Jesus, don’t be a psychopath. Of course we’re not going to use this to get one over on Russia or China; we signed an agreement. If the world doesn’t end, it could help us normalize relations that much more, maybe help nudge those two in the direction of democracy. If it does—well. I’d like this country to show up to the Pearly Gates with its best foot forward, thanks.“

Max inclined their head. “Thank you, Madam President. I’ll have a list of personnel options on your desk by—”

“You,” she cut them off as she wheeled on them. “I understand your concerns, but we can’t afford to be precious about this. If River Gale-Zhou is the best, then we get them out there, everything else be damned. Understood, Colonel?”

Max nodded. “Understood.”

“Well, why the hell did you drag us into this if you weren’t going to listen to us?” the director barked, scowling.

President Gray glared at him. “I wanted some confirmation from the experts, there's no shame in that. Colonel, I’ll get State to fast-track Gale’s clearance; swing by the chief of staff’s desk before you leave, he’ll have the paperwork. Go back to the exclusion zone, your poor second’s probably losing their mind—I’ll send someone to pick Gale up.”

Max was used to making hard decisions; they were an officer, it was practically the whole job. But “hard decisions” were typically whether or not to act on the threat of the week, not whether or not to chuck someone Max personally liked into the centre of a geopolitical crisis. Probably good for my decision-making skills, they thought bitterly. Remember there’s real people behind every scenario, and all that.

“No need, Madam President. I’m the most up-to-date on the situation, and I’m headed out that way anyways—I’ll get them, and I can brief them on the way. Lieutenant Colonel Okafor can manage for another few hours.”

President Gray turned to look at Max, her expression unchanged. “If you’re sure, Colonel.” She clapped them on the shoulder; they got the vague impression that they’d passed some sort of test. Oddly enough, they weren’t entirely sure it was a good thing. 

The first thing River did on getting home, before taking their shoes off or their keys out of the door, was call Aubrey.

Aubrey was somewhere like Malibu or Paris or Tokyo, probably at a party, because their life was one long jet-setting sequence of rooftop parties in expensive cities, haphazardly strung together like pearls. They never told anyone where they were going, so River’s information was always two or three cities out of date.

They picked up on the third or fourth ring. River strained for background noises, trying to guess where they were. Then again, they didn’t really know what Malibu sounded like over a phone call.

“You?” Aubrey said, once they had heard the gist. “Talking to aliens? They’ve lost it. You can barely talk to other human beings.”

“I talk to people,” River said, defensively.

“Yeah, when they come to your office hours. Let’s face it, diplomacy’s not really your strong suit.”

River toed out of their shoes and put their keys in the bowl on the table. “You don’t know that.”

“Sure. Cheers,” Aubrey said, talking to someone else. “Look, River. If understanding other life-forms was as easy as understanding the ablative case, then maybe you’d have a prayer. As it is, when they choose someone else, it’ll probably be for the best.”

“Mm,” River said: neither an agreement nor a disagreement. They wondered why they’d bothered calling Aubrey, when they’d known it was going to be like this. An old habit, from when they would have been excited; even the Aubrey of just a few years ago would have been excited. “Stay safe. Air travel will probably be touch and go for a while. It wouldn’t be a surprise if some government decides to retract your visa because of this.”

“Yeah,” Aubrey said. “You too. Don’t do anything stupid.”

“When do I ever?”

Aubrey didn’t respond. On River’s end, there was a sound, slowly getting louder: a choppy, low-frequency hum. They felt it in their rib cage as it came closer, rattling the windows in their frames.

“What’s that?” Aubrey said.

It was a military helicopter. “Got to go,” River said. “Don’t do anything stupid either. Bye.”

They hung up on an annoyed Aubrey noise and went out to look. The helicopter had landed in the backyard, blasting the side of the house with white light and noise. Silver threads of rain occasionally flashed in the floodlights like lost tinsel.

The person leaning out the open door was Colonel Liu, haloed by the floodlights. There was something open about their expression.

“I’m in?” River called up to them, delighted.

“You’re in,” they said, significantly less delighted. “Welcome to the team.”

However they felt about that, they reached down to save River the awkward scramble up into the helicopter. River took their hand. Measured against the cold of the wind-driven rain, they were shockingly warm.

Colonel Liu settled into the seat facing River’s, which was a surprise. Somehow River had imagined them either piloting the helicopter or standing behind the pilot like a schoolteacher making sure no one took any shortcuts.

The rotors beat. Beneath them, lights gathered on the coastline, golden and transparent, like seed beads on the hem of a skirt. Colonel Liu casually took out a stack of papers: another surprise. When they saw River looking, they gestured to the headset on a hook behind them. River reached back and put it on.

“We can conclude that the specific language a person uses does not limit the way they think so much as it opens the doors towards specific possibilities for thought,” they said, reading aloud. “A new language involves additional ways of seeing the world, and therefore new ways of connecting with others. Thus is language the cornerstone of technology, and translation the cornerstone of science.”

“I wrote that,” River said. They could nearly hear Aubrey saying, what do you know about connecting with others?

Colonel Liu’s dark eyes flicked up to meet theirs in the blue half-light. It was startling, like they had reached out and touched them, closing the twelve-inch gap between their knees. “I know.”

“It’s from the conclusion to something, isn’t it? It sounds conclusion-y.”

“That’s not a word.”

“You understood what it meant, didn’t you? Just like conclusion-ish.”

“I’m starting to doubt your credentials as a linguist.”

“Please don’t boot me out of the helicopter,” River said, and then, more quietly, “Conclusion-esque.”

“I see you were born with a tragic allergy to the word conclusive,” Colonel Liu said.

“Yes, see, you can’t doubt my credentials because of a medical issue.”

 The soldier in the copilot’s seat snickered over the radio; without a single change in their expression, Colonel Liu reached back and gave them a playful shove. 

“Don’t tell me you skipped to the conclusion, though,” River said.

“No, I read the entire thing.”

Something shifted, although it could have only been turbulence. Thirty seconds ago, it had been impossible to picture Colonel Liu out of uniform, sitting near a lamp to read papers while rain pattered against a window. Now, it was hard not to.

“I can’t say for certain that I understood it,” they added.

This was familiar territory, although River couldn’t help but feel that they had just lost something. “You’re not required to, of course. That’s why you’re bringing me.”

Colonel Liu nodded, unreadably.

When someone was in training to be an astronaut, and also when the Air Force decided to use its multimillion-dollar equipment to haze people, they would take you up to the stratosphere in a fighter jet. There was a moment, just between switching from a climb to a dive, where a flight could perfectly simulate zero gravity.

Then, after that—if you were being hazed—there were a few barrel rolls, and a nosedive straight at the ground, and then the pilot would pull up and twist round in their seat to see if you’d thrown up yet, giggling. No sane and normal person should be able to giggle at that speed and altitude, but in Max’s opinion, sane and normal people didn’t join the Air Force. 

But if you were very lucky and you didn’t throw up, the moment where gravity seemed to change was a revelation. Something shifted, and suddenly solid things you had always relied on like up and down turned out to be irrelevant to most of the universe. There was a flash of blue horizon, and outside it, everything unknown. 

The inside of the monolith contained that moment in miniature. Inside it there was a tunnel, and inside that, gravity changed. It was a lot gentler than being hazed by the Air Force, but it was still unsettling; suddenly the direction that was down changed by about ninety degrees.

Max landed first and reached out, ready to catch Gale if they fell (or threw up), but they didn’t. They only stumbled a little, put their hand on the wall, and turned back around to make delighted conspiratorial are-you-seeing-this eye contact. Under their hazmat suit, a strand of glossy black hair had fallen out of their bun. Max looked away.

Behind a glasslike surface—glass? Crystal? Something else? They hadn’t wanted to risk trying to chip a piece off for testing—the swirling white fog was as eerie as ever. They waited in silence, except for the beep of electronics at regular intervals, and the rasp of Max’s own breath inside their hazmat suit.

The aliens emerged from the fog, slowly and gingerly, like things that knew their own weight. They were long-limbed and strange, like nothing else. There were two of them, slowly approaching the glass. Gale matched their pace, eyes wide, and stopped a few feet away. They turned around, backlit by sourceless white light, and said, “What now, Colonel Liu?”

“Now you do your job,” Max said.

Gale nodded once, turned back to the shifting white fog, and began.

Six hours later, they had made what looked to Max like zero progress. Max let people peel the hazmat suit off them and bundle it away for decontamination protocols, arms out, wishing it wasn’t unprofessional to take their hair down. It had been a tense six hours, trying to split their attention between equipment readouts and the strange-limbed things in the fog and Dr. Gale.

Gale was undergoing the same protocol, getting stripped of their hazmat suit.

“Thank you,” they said to the person holding their hazmat suit. Then, catching Max’s eye, “Am I fired?”

“Not yet,” Max said without thinking.

“Thank you, that’s very reassuring,” Gale said, with a hint of a sparkle.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Oh, no, Colonel, tell me what you really think, by all means.”

“Did you find anything out?”

“I don’t know,” Gale said. “I’ll have to review the recordings. Did you see what the left one did at the end, though?”

“No. What?”

“It lifted a leg, almost like it wanted us to stand closer together.”

“And?” Max said, hoping they would light up and explain.

“Across languages, nearly everyone gestures. People gesture on the telephone when the other person can’t see them. People born blind gesture. All that suggests that there’s something fundamentally human about it.”

“But if those things do it…”

“Right. It’s not just fundamentally human, it’s fundamental to language itself.”

Max wanted to spin the moment out, to keep them talking about it, to have a memory they could pull out later when things looked bleak. They couldn’t think of a way to, though.

“It’s not enough on its own, I know,” Gale said. “We’ll have to try something else.”

“Do you have any idea what?”

“No. I need some time to think,” they said.

“You have six hours.”

“Then what?” they said.

Max met their eyes. “Then we go back up.”

The trip up was easier the second time around. Now that River knew to expect the change in gravity, the transfer from the scissor lift to the stone corridor of the UFO was fascinating. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world, the whole universe rotating ninety degrees—if River had more time and an experienced physicist to work with, they would have conducted a study. But there were more important things currently at hand.

River clutched the whiteboard to their chest as they watched the marines set up their equipment—a camera on a massive tripod and the kind of microphones used on film sets. “It feels like I’m on one of those terrible reality shows,” they attempted to joke. Colonel Liu didn’t respond, regarding them dispassionately with eyes black as the void of space. They seemed nervous, the tips of their fingers tapping frenetically against the butt of their pistol. 

The marines continued messing with their equipment, chattering quietly to one of Colonel Liu’s lieutenants over the radio—River supposed they wanted a paper trail, in case something went wrong and the fluffy civilian linguist they were personally responsible for had to be carted out of here on a stretcher. Finally, Colonel Liu came around to check their work. “Maritime to Quebec, Maritime to Quebec. Equipment’s all set; confirm clear to proceed.”

“Clear to proceed, Maritime.”

Colonel Liu nodded at River. “Excellent. Romeo making contact now.”

“Romeo?” River inquired.

Colonel Liu shrugged. “I didn’t pick it. Just do what we came here to do, Dr. Gale.”

River turned around—and there the extraterrestrials were. They were just as eerily beautiful as the first time, dark shapes in the thick white fog, stretching up and up and up past River’s field of vision. Breathing shakily, they held up their whiteboard. “River,” they said to the extraterrestrials, placing a hand on their chest. “River.”

No answer came. River sighed, their breath fogging up the clear vinyl of the hazmat—they were close, they knew it, but close didn’t count. Not here. “River,” they tried again. One of the extraterrestrials floated closer, tilting forward as though trying to get a better look at them.

As though trying to get a better look at them… oh. Maybe—

River unzipped their hazmat suit and let their oxygen tank fall to the ground. The first breath of air was a relief, crisp and cool in River’s lungs—idly, they wondered what the extraterrestrials’ planet of origin was like, how hard it was to adjust the air to human respiratory systems.

“Dr. Gale!” one of the marines barked from behind them. “Dr. Gale, put the suit back on! We don’t know—Quebec! Quebec, Romeo’s taking off their suit! Advise?!”

“Stand down, Major Zhang.” Colonel Liu cut them off. River could feel Colonel Liu’s eyes boring a hole in the back of their head. River waited, in case they had more to say, but they were silent; they wanted to see what River would do.

River picked the whiteboard back up. “River,” they insisted; hoping, praying. One of the extraterrestrials had taken up that low hum again. River could feel it in their teeth, like the way whales communicated through sonar.

Before River could even stop to think about what they were doing, their hand was pressed against the barrier. The extraterrestrial did the same—a stelliform limb flat against the glass, perfect radial symmetry. River could count seven tendrils.

“They’re heptapods.” River marveled.³

It seemed more diplomatic than calling them “extraterrestrials,” anyway. As River watched, a black tendril—vapor? ink?—coalesced into a ring, smoking and writhing against the barrier. Writing! They couldn’t help but smile.

“Colonel Liu!” River called over their shoulder. “Care to come introduce yourself? Two of them, two of us—it’s the diplomatic thing.”

“If you consider it to be the most productive course of action.” Colonel Liu stepped forward. “For the advancement of science and the preservation of this country, mind you.” They divested themself of their hazmat with surprising readiness—removing their gun from its holster first, then their gloves from their hands, then the zipper closing the suit over their head. Under the layers of airtight vinyl and polyester, some of their hair had escaped their tight bun. It caught the light from the fog, shining like a halo. One stubborn flyaway curled softly over their forehead.

“Sir!” Okafor shouted from somewhere behind them. “Absolutely not! You could be exposing yourself to dangerous extraterrestrial bacteria—”

“Yes, and should the worst happen, I have full faith in you and the rest of my staff to carry out this mission as directed.”

Okafor sighed; they started to say something, but Zhang tugged them back.

Colonel Liu ignored the pair of them. “May I?” they inquired—River nodded, passing the whiteboard over. They erased River’s writing with the heel of their hand, scribbling something else down.

“Maksim,” Colonel Liu turned the whiteboard towards the heptapods, their hand flat against their sternum. Their cursive was messy and cramped, almost endearing.

The other heptapod hummed, forming a circle in that same black substance. It too coalesced into a ring, formed of swooping lines jutting out at angles.

“Is that…” Colonel Liu trailed off.

“A name,” River finished for them, mesmerized. “I wonder what it says.”⁴

In that instant, everything else fell away—there were no more soldiers observing them, no more cameras recording this for the Department of Homeland Security. River truly understood the vastness of the universe for the first time, understood the figures given in their textbooks; to take Fermi and the Rare Earth Hypothesis⁵ at their words, this was such a rare occurrence as to never be repeated in human history. How strange—how beautiful, to be standing here before the heptapods. How strange to speak to one another and be assured of one another’s intelligence.

Something beeped, breaking the spell. “Time’s up—they want us back in the quarantine zone.” Okafor explained apologetically. “Also, sir, the Secretary of Defense is on the line for you. What should I tell him?”

“Tell him to get in line,” Quebec scoffed over the radio.

Colonel Liu turned away from the barrier, the bridge of their nose pinched between their fingers as though warding off a headache. “Good Lord—don’t say that, Lieutenant Colonel Okafor. Tell him I’ll speak to him after I get out of decontam, all right?” They looked up, then, catching River’s eye. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or close the wall up with our English dead,”⁶ they intoned. Though River half-thought they were imagining it, the corner of their mouth twitched upwards.

Out of the monolith, the air was cool in River’s lungs. Someone with a megaphone instructed the personnel to continue to the decontamination chamber and do not remove your hazmat suits without the assistance of trained personnel. They obeyed, thinking of nothing more than all the paperwork they were probably going to have to fill out after this, when suddenly—

—watery sunlight through the window, glowing softly—

—like lightning, a sharp pain lanced through River’s head—

—a white puppy, pointy-eared and curly-tailed, shaking a sock like it had personally wronged her—

—and they stumbled, foot catching on a protruding rock—

—laughter, low and resonant as a viola given vocal cords—

—River tried to catch themself, but it was too late. Their head smacked against the ground, and everything went dark.

When they woke up again, they were flat on their back inside the medical tent in the military installation. On the ceiling, a fan rotated slowly, circulating air. It smelled like latex gloves and the rain, which was still tapping its fingers on the roof. River could see the shadows of the raindrops through the plastic canopy.

They sat up and looked, for some reason, for Colonel Liu. They weren’t there. River felt a faint pang—they felt abandoned, even though obviously Colonel Liu had better things to do. Instead there was someone in a white lab coat.

River immediately wished they were anywhere else. Of course they had been the one to collapse for no reason—now all the people who already thought they were a useless fluffy civilian also thought they needed babysitting, and—River ruthlessly crushed the part of them that had woken up feeling wistful—someone to sit by their bedside.

“I’m Dr Okonkwo,” they said. “You look awful, but there’s nothing obviously wrong with you. You hit your head, but you don’t have a concussion. For more information, we’d need an MRI. Of course, it’s possible you were just tired.”

The unspoken implication was that if River decided they needed an MRI, the entire project would stall out or worse, move on without them, and they’d have to be personally helicoptered back to a hospital in the city, which was stupid.

“I think that was probably it,” they said.

“We’ll keep you under observation. In the meantime, they’re connecting to the other teams, if you’d like to join.”

“Other teams?”

“Organized by other countries where the monoliths have landed.”

They’d phrased it like it was optional, but—for all English was the language of international scientific conferences—they could probably use a translator. River got up and brushed the wet pieces of grass off their clothes.

“Don’t forget to say thank you for carrying you indoors,” Dr Okonkwo said.

“Thank you.”

They said, “Thank Colonel Liu.”

Colonel Liu was sitting at the edge of the room, smoking, and apparently intent on something on their computer screen. River thought about thanking them, and then discarded it. They were busy. They didn’t want or need River to bother them.

The front of the room was a bank of blue-sheening computer monitors, showing views of similar rooms in China, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, the Philippines. There was a familiar face in the screen labeled Russia, who perked up immediately and said, “Oh! Dr Gale!”

“Dr Molotov, it’s been too long,” River said.

“Yes, definitely. Since—what, Yokohama?”

“Vienna,” River said. “There was the hotel with the broken showers and the pineapple juice at breakfast.”

“Vienna, how could I forget,” Dr Molotov said.

“How do you know each other?” Okafor said.

“Conferences mostly,” Dr Molotov said.

“I thought you were a physicist!”

“I am, I am, but Dr Gale turns up everywhere. We met because I smuggled them into a photovoltaics conference for free by telling everyone they were my sign language interpreter. Then I couldn’t respond to auditory stimuli for the entire rest of the conference.”

“I remember that,” River said. “And I had to actually interpret everything.”

“Those were the days.”

“Sorry, why did you need to be smuggled into a photovoltaics conference?”

“Because I wasn’t invited,” River said. “I’m a linguist.”

“But why were you trying to—never mind.”

“Anyway, it’s good to know the Americans finally have someone competent. We don’t know anything yet, we don’t even know how they’re floating, but if we find out quickly, we’ll tell you.”

“If you find out quickly?” River said.

They shifted uncomfortably. “Well, you know how military people are. Or, if this is your first military contract, maybe you don’t. They’re very focused on getting easy answers fast, before any other country, and the longer it takes, the more hysterical they get.”

“Hey,” Okafor said, looking genuinely hurt.

“We’re all interested in international cooperation now, when we might get something out of it,” Molotov said. “But if it takes too long, or if anyone thinks they’ve figured something out, this won’t last. The Chinese group is especially antsy. They’ve got General Song breathing down their necks. Dr Huang was telling me—”

Someone barked something at them offscreen. They looked wry. “There, you see? I’ll see you later, Dr Gale. Good luck.”

Lacking anything better to do, River settled into the unoccupied chair next to Colonel Liu. They had drifted off to sleep while River was speaking with Molotov; alarmed, River realised the cigarette in the Colonel’s hand was still lit. They reached out, ready to shake them awake, but Colonel Liu, even asleep, must have been able to sense them drawing close. Their eyes flew open, the cigarette hissing as it fell to the wet grass. 

“I’m sorry.” Colonel Liu said, pushing a hand over their face. 

“How long have you been awake?”

River watched their mouth move as they added up the numbers under their breath, their brow furrowing. “...sixty hours. Don’t—don’t do that math, please.”

“Too late.” 

Colonel Liu shook their head ruefully and fell silent. Sensing that they were finished with the conversation, River pulled out the sheaf of paperwork Lieutenant Colonel Okafor had left for them. It was thick with dense military language; River understood about one word in five as they scanned it. But it was something to do as their unconscious brain picked at the heptapods’… well, everything. Besides, it wouldn’t do itself.

River could once again feel Colonel Liu’s eyes on them as they pulled their pen from their breast pocket, uncapping it and setting to the morass before them. They waited for a moment, breath held static in their lungs, to see if it would go away—when it didn’t, they turned to look at the Colonel, raising their eyebrows only slightly. 

“What?” they inquired lightly; Colonel Liu started.

“Oh—sorry. Just… is that a fountain pen? Didn’t know they still made those.”

“You’d be surprised.” River had been using them their entire life; stolen from Kali’s desk at first, then their own once they had been deemed sufficiently responsible. Kali had used a garnet ink, one that River still liked for grading, but for day-to-day usage they favored a deep blue.

Colonel Liu blinked at them. “Why?” they asked, and they looked so genuinely earnest, not a hint of judgement in their voice, that River couldn’t help themself from laughing. 

“I suppose the real question is why not? Invite a little whimsy into your life, Colonel Liu; it’s not going to bite you.”

Apparently, they couldn’t argue with that. They inclined their head at River, an acknowledgment of the hit. 

The pair of them turned to their work in tandem, River filling out the veritable mountain of forms and Colonel Liu responding to the emails that had built up in their inbox. Every so often, they would look up to answer a question or define a word, their obsidian eyes flicking up from the screen, and River would have the powerful urge to change the subject and ask them about something inane. Now that they’d given them a piece of their life, they couldn’t help but want a little of Colonel Liu’s.

“Alright, your turn. Why do they call you Maritime?” they asked, when they finally couldn’t stand it any longer.

Colonel Liu’s face twitched. “It’s silly, but… I went with the American contingent to the first Cold Response, about a decade ago. I rescued a polar bear cub.”⁷

“Aren’t code names supposed to be something funny? That’s just idyllic.”

“Well, when one is sprinting across base, assault rifle in one hand and baby carnivore in the other, one’s superiors are going to have questions.”

“…fair enough.”

“And sometimes, when you’ve literally just been made major and your staff are still trying to get handle on you, and Kapoor conveniently managed to smuggle a camera into the base…” Colonel Liu was clearly trying to get the story out before they started laughing; the dropped articles, the ghosts of Russian grammar if River had to put money on it, were as endearing as they were surprising.

“Please tell me you still have a photo of that.”

“I was stopped about every twenty feet—of course I still have photos.”⁸

River couldn’t stop themself from giggling, and Colonel Liu smiled for real this time, tiny and sardonic.  “Could be worse, I suppose. Kapoor got theirs when they got so drunk in Quebec they couldn’t stand up.”

River’s eyebrows shot up. “Wonder what mine will be.”

“You’ll just have to fuck up, then we’ll see; I, for one, am waiting with bated breath.”

“Then I suppose we’ll never know.”

Colonel Liu raised their hand from the table for a brief moment, looking as though they were about to shove River playfully—then clearly thought better of it, balling it into a fist behind their back. Still, River could feel it in their mind, just enough force to nudge them in the other direction, and felt a little twitch in their heart.

On the table next to them, Colonel Liu’s phone lit up—another email, from the Secretary of State. They sighed. “We really ought to get to work. Let me know if you have any other questions.”

River inclined their head in acknowledgement, turning back to their own papers; the Colonel did the same. But the silence had taken on a new quality—the barrier between them was thinner now. One might even be able to talk through it.

From their vantage point high up on the balcony, above the noise and the crowds, River could see almost everyone at their wedding. Aubrey and Guang Song had ended up at the bar, debating something loudly in Mandarin; Shang and Molotov were dancing together—and, River suspected, talking about physics—attempting to skirt around the pair of Max’s staff officers currently crossing blades on the dance floor.

River laughed. Anyone who was eligible had worn dress uniform—it was requested on the invitation, and made Max’s choice to wear theirs seem less notable.⁹

River had forgotten, though, that the marines had swords—they supposed they should be grateful that Max’s staff officers were being careful. They were, after all, a pack of drunk twentysomethings; River could think of a million things they’d rather do than trust their students, even their masters’ students, with swords.

“Hello, you,” said a voice from over River’s shoulder, low and resonant. River turned; there, carrying a bottle of champagne and a pair of long-stemmed glasses, was River’s new spouse. 

Paradoxically, River loved Max in dress uniform; like this, all gleaming medals and spit-shine, they looked like the soldiers in the stories. Like a knight, who fought for justice and truth—but in blue wool instead of plate armor. 

River couldn’t help but smile. “Hi.” They gestured to the green bottle dangling from Max’s hand. “What’s that for?”

“You’ll see,” they said, the ghost of a laugh in their voice. They looped one arm around River’s waist and pulled them in to kiss their temple. “Hold these a second?”

River took the champagne glasses from Max, and watched as they turned the bottle over in their hands—looking for the seam, they assumed, as Max drew their sword.

“Someone showed me how to do this at Namina Gray’s first inauguration; it’ll be wonderful if it works.”

River held their breath as Max lined up their saber with the top of the champagne bottle; when they swung, it was clean. The cork rocketed off in a shower of green and gold. 

Max poured River’s glass first, the very picture of chivalry. They bowed a little when they presented it to River, as though swearing their loyalty.

“To the two of us,” River decided, raising their glass.

Max followed suit. “To laying the first bricks in the foundation of world peace.” 

“To the Department of Defense never losing you in Iraq ever again.”

“Cut them some slack, they found me eventually,” Max protested. “Besides, I knew where I was the whole time.”

“Not an excuse.” River reminded them. They thought for a moment, considering. “To building a life together.” 

“There it is.” When their glasses touched, the crystal chimed like a bell.

“And to think all it took was first contact with aliens,” Max continued, lacing their fingers through River’s. It was sweet how touchy they were with River in private, even as their military sensibilities refused even the smallest of intimacies in public. They still did a terrible job of hiding it, though; every time they looked at River the mask fell away, the ice in their eyes and the hardness in the set of their mouth melting to nothing.  

“And to think you introduced yourself to said aliens with your first name and not me.”

Max elbowed River gently, feigning exasperation. “Look me in the eyes and tell me you wanted to explain military titles to the heptapods.”

River couldn’t argue with that, opting to kiss Max instead; they were smiling when River pulled away.

The pair passed a few moments in amicable silence, observing the party below—Kapoor and Okafor were up against one another now. As River watched, Okafor locked blades with Kapoor and did something complicated with their hands; the sword was twisted out of Kapoor’s grip, skittering across the floor and coming to rest against the bar. 

Max grimaced when they noticed where River was looking. “Sorry about that. I can make them stop, if you want—“

“It’s alright, they haven’t broken anything yet. Besides, it’s fun to watch.”

“Well, so long as you’re sure. I may or may not have told Kapoor I’d try my hand against them next.” Max grinned, almost amused at their own antics; the soldier in River’s office, barely a year ago, never would have done any of this. 

That almost makes it better, River thought briefly, heart flaring with love. “Of course you did. Be careful, alright?”

“With my shield or on it.” Max mock-saluted and turned on their heel, walking back towards the staircase, sword swinging from their belt—and suddenly, River couldn’t let them go just yet. 

“Wait,” River said, catching Max by the edge of their sleeve and pulling them back in just for a moment. River tugged the ribbon holding back their hair out of its bow, letting it spill over their shoulders and down their spine. Carefully, they threaded the white ribbon under the gap between Max’s epaulette and their shoulder and tied it there.

“Oh?” Max raised an eyebrow, but didn’t finish the question, implicitly trusting.

“A favour,” River explained. “For my most loyal knight.” 

Max blushed, right up to their ears. “Oh.” A smile pulling at the edges of their mouth, they went down on one knee to kiss River’s hand; reverent and almost referential, as though they too were thinking of that night behind the perimeter, watching the Milky Way in the shadow of the heptapods’ ship.

River tilted Max’s head upwards to look them in the eye—Max took it as the cue that it was, rising to their feet. They tucked a strand of River’s hair behind their ear, eyes filled with all the tenderness in the world. 

River touched them on the shoulder—they weren’t sure how much time had passed, and they wanted Max to be able to enjoy the party if they wanted. “You promised Kapoor a fight,” they reminded them.

“That I did,” Max murmured. “Just… give me a minute. It’s like you always say—it’s only now once.”

When River woke up, the love they’d felt in the dream was a physical weight caught in their throat. They had never dreamed like that before: in exquisite logical detail, as if falling asleep had been stepping through a door to the future. Like Zhuang Zhou dreaming of being a butterfly, there was a brief moment where they weren’t sure which one was real.

This one, obviously. The creaking cot, the golden-beige canvas walls of the tent, the patter of rain outside, the ominously hovering alien monolith. They should tell Max, they thought, because Max would—

Think they were insane, actually. This Max didn’t know them.

They sat up in bed, running their hand through their hair, watching it immediately untwist itself. Loneliness crashed over them in waves with each additional revelation: they were alone in bed, in the room, in their life.

They weren’t seeing the real future. Stories didn’t go that way; people like Max were built for other, more important things than people like River. Anyway, it wasn’t possible. Max didn’t like them. That was changing, maybe, but not so fast that they would be married in a year.

Colonel Liu, they reminded themselves. Keep this up, and they would slip out loud eventually. After their wedding vows, though, the formality felt wrong.

They got up—there was no sleeping after that—and borrowed a broom from Okafor, who was on the night shift, and neatly swept their tiny quarters. Then they fetched their laptop and went back to work sorting heptapod symbols by similar elements and looking at histograms of character frequencies. They might be unable to sleep, but at least they’d have a clean floor and some progress to report in the morning.

The question now was whether the symbols had any auditory analogues at all. The frequencies were all wrong for a true abjad or alphabet, at least the human kind, so it was probably at least partially ideographic, but that didn’t mean there was no link to the phonetic part of the language, if it even existed.¹⁰ If the heptapods—

“Dr Gale?”

“Come in,” River said, clicking through inky rings. It came out as an order. They’d forgotten they weren’t in their office.

They waited to hear something along the lines of please can you regrade my homework? I’m two points away from an A-. Instead there was a velvety silence making a small space for itself inside a hush in the rain. They looked up and saw Max, wearing a thin T-shirt and their uniform pants, with their hair half-up in a claw clip.

“Good lord,” River said without thinking. That was a Max phrase. When had they picked it up? “What are you doing here? It’s three in the morning.”

“I sleep next door,” Max said.

River wished to God they hadn’t told them that. The walls were so thin that they could see shadows moving through them, like parchment paper.

“I saw the light on,” they added.

“And like a good handler, you came to tell me I have work in the morning,” River said. “Did I wake you? I’m sorry.”

Max blinked, wrong-footed somehow, as if they had lost their place in the script between them. The golden light of a bare lightbulb, dangling from the scaffolding that held up the canvas roof, turned wisps of their hair coppery and came through the tortoiseshell plastic of their claw clip. 

Of course, they’d always been like this—quiet when they were tired, with only enough bandwidth for the big practical things and not much left over for conversation. It was annoying until you loved them, and then you could see why they were doing it. They prioritized because they cared, deeply.

River caught themselves. They didn’t know them.

“I’ll go to sleep soon, don’t worry. I can turn the light off if it bothers you.”

Max shook their head. “Bad for your eyes. But you should sleep whenever you get the chance. If anything happens with the monolith, they’ll drag us all out of bed.”

“Which you have experience with,” River murmured.
They made a little late-night ghost of their ordinary smile. “Regrettably.”

“You live such an exciting life. Between this and the fact that you can open a bottle of champagne with a sword…”

“That’s not exciting, that’s completely normal—” They blinked. “How did you know about that?”

The world shifted slightly on its axis. River ran through their conversations and every joke they had overheard, trying to come up with an answer that wasn’t we talked about it at our wedding. Either there was something they had forgotten, and their subconscious mind was spinning out wistful false futures, or.

They had been quiet too long. “Okafor told me,” they lied.

Max sighed. “Of course they did. Tell them not to be so stupidly dramatic.”

“Roger that.”

“What are you working on?”

River searched their face, trying to figure out a way that could be code for please stop talking to me and let me go back to sleep. But there wasn’t a trace of insincerity. Of course; Max didn’t play those kinds of games.

“Come and see,” River said, motioning for them to look over River’s shoulder. “These are character frequency plots. You can usually tell whether a script is an alphabet, a syllabary, or ideographic based on how many unique characters there are and how frequently they appear.”

“What’s the difference?”

“In an alphabet, every character represents a single sound, more or less. Consonants and vowels. That’s English and Cyrillic. In a syllabary, every character represents a syllable, like Japanese hiragana. There tend to be more unique characters than in alphabets, because there are more combinations of sounds than there are sounds.”

A sleepy murmur of agreement. “That’s logical.”

“Right? And ideograms each represent a word or an idea, like hanzi, so there are many more of them. There are 26 different Latin letters, 48 hiragana, and tens of thousands of different hanzi, but only a few thousand of those are relevant to daily life.”

“How many heptapod ring elements are there?” Max said.

“We’ve identified and translated 354 of them,” River said. “But honestly, we don’t know if that means anything. When it comes to human languages, we can use the number of characters to take a guess at the type of script, because there are a limited number of sounds that human beings make. With heptapods, though, we don’t know what these characters are trying to transcribe. Maybe they can hear or make more sounds than we can. Maybe it’s something else entirely. Maybe there is no second modality, and their language is purely visual. We know their population is only slightly smaller than that of human beings. It’s highly unlikely that this is the only heptapod language. Are the others the same?”

“You could ask,” Max said, low and quiet behind them.

River elbowed them gently. “No, I can’t, because someone has cruelly set me the specific task of finding out whether or not they’re here to murder us.”

“That’s so unreasonable of them,” Max said.

“I know.” River yawned widely. Nearly four, and the exhaustion was finally starting to catch up.

Max said, hesitantly, “If you’re having nightmares about the monoliths—”

“I know you think every civilian is basically made out of dandelion fluff and cotton candy, but no, I am not having nightmares about the monoliths.”

“You are a terrible person. I’m trying to tell you it would be fine if you were.”

“Oh.”

“It would be fine if you were, you know.”

“I’m not, I’m not, I dreamed I was getting married.”

“Stress dreams can take many forms,” Max said.

“It wasn’t a stress dream. I was—happy,” River said. Had they made a noise when they woke up? They hoped to God they hadn’t said anything in their sleep. “I never thought I’d have someone like that.”

“Like what?”

“Interested,” River said. “Gracious and honorable, and capable of being annoyed, but tolerant of me. Clever.” They thought of the saber trick. “Dashing. Good to everyone under their care.” Unexpectedly speaks Russian, but that would make it obvious who they were talking about if they said it out loud. “Hidden playful sense of humor. Good in a crisis to the point of actual absurdity. But really it was that I started every morning looking forward to seeing them again, and that I liked who I was with them better than who I am on my own. And then I woke up.”

Max’s knuckles were white on the back of River’s chair, but their face gave nothing away.

This is such a farce, River thought suddenly, with a bitter internal laugh at themselves. Time to put an end to it.

“It’s late,” they said—a gentle dismissal, but still a dismissal.

Max understood it instantly. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

“Thank you,” River said, running their hand through their hair. “Goodnight, Max.”

Max straightened, fractionally surprised, and River realized an instant too late that it was the wrong name. Or it was the right name and the wrong time. Or it wasn’t wrong at all, but that was probably wishful thinking again.

Max opened their mouth, but it took them a long time to speak. When they did, they only said “Goodnight,” bowed slightly, and left.

They didn’t go far, though. River could see them in the next chamber over, silhouetted in silver by their phone flashlight and hear the rustle of cloth as they pulled their blanket back and unlaced their boots. The light vanished, leaving only blank golden canvas, but they were still separated only by a thin shivering film, like the present and the future.

Maybe the next time River saw them, Max would call them River.

They turned out the light.

River sighed, clicking through scan after scan of ringlike Heptapod B. It was another late night, incredibly so, but their brain still hadn’t quite gotten the memo; it ticked away, mulling the semisemasiographic characters over with or without their input, eventually leading them to throw in the towel and boot up their computer to take another crack at the excerpts. They prayed that something would come to them—that if they just stared at their laptop long enough, the doors would open and all would be revealed. The light was bright enough to sear their eyes, burning white-hot in the darkness of the tent.

Fuck this, River thought suddenly. Grabbing their phone so they could use the flashlight, they ventured out of their tent and into the cool, clear night. Without really meaning to, they set off in the direction of the spaceship—it was like a magnet, drawing River to it even while the door was closed to them.

Apparently, they weren’t the only one. There, in the shadow of the alien ship, was Max, smoking a cigarette and reading something off a clipboard. The ember flared orange when they inhaled, illuminating the new silver in their hair for just a moment—shining threads that matched River’s own. 

“Come here,” Max said quietly, and River obeyed. They settled in against Max in the hospital bed, a warped version of how they used to curl into one another at night; Max stroked River’s hair gently, as though they were afraid they would hurt them.

“I’m sorry.” River whispered. “It’s not fair—I ought to be the one comforting you.”

Max didn’t respond, opting instead to kiss River on their temple; a tacit act of forgiveness. “It’ll be alright. I promise.”

River shook their head as though to clear away the image. Just for a moment, there were two Maxes, overlaid in River’s mind: one gaunt and thin and looking at River with all the love in the world in their eyes, one stony and solid and avoiding eye contact almost deliberately.

River tried not to think about it. “Hey, you.” they said—less of a greeting and more of an indication that they were there, as to not startle them.

Max was as unreadable as ever; they inclined their head in acknowledgment. “Hey.”

“What’re you doing out here so late?”

“Hiding from the team. Poor bastards keep trying to corral me into a call with the Saudi Arabian director of operations—it’s too damn late at night to be conducting politically-significant discussion in one’s fourth language.” Max turned the page on whatever they were reading. “Speaking of language, are you—are you dreaming in Heptapod?” 

“Wh—no. Why, are you?”

“No.” A rare smile flickered across Max’s face, as though amused at the notion. “No, just… I heard it’s a sign of fluency, that’s all. I’ve been doing some reading on some of the concepts you’ve brought up.”

River arched a brow, intrigued and flattered. “And?”

“And I found a paper on this concept that says immersing oneself in a language can alter the way we think about some abstract concepts—color is an example that everyone likes to use because there’s so much variation, but they talk about time, too. I was just wondering if you’d noticed anything, that’s all.”

River couldn’t help but smile. “Yeah—the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.¹¹ There’s some evidence that Russian speakers with even basic knowledge still separate the color blue into two when thinking in English.” 

“Interesting. I wonder when it switches over.” 

“Not sure. Suppose it depends on all kinds of things—age, immersion, memory, mother tongue. Past skill with learning a language.” Max’s first language was Russian; River wondered if they split blue into голубой and синий or thought of them as one.

Suddenly, River knew—in that odd way that they tended to know things about Max without their ever saying it—that despite the years they’d spent thinking in English, they still made the distinction. Their parent’s favorite color had been голубой. “Like the sky,” River murmured without thinking.

“What?” Max turned to look at River. “Did you say something?”

Heat spread to River’s face from their neck and shoulders, right up to the tips of their ears. “No, just—the sky, that’s all.” 

Max flipped the paperwork on their clipboard over, raising their eyes to the stars above for the first time that night. “Oh.”

River followed suit. There, in the sky above their heads, arced the Milky Way; the stars spilled across the sky like scattered diamonds. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” River marveled. “I’ve never seen it before.”

“Me neither.”

Without stopping to think about it, River reached blindly for Max’s hand. For the first time River could remember, they didn’t pull away. They didn’t know how long the pair stood there, staring up at the sky—it could have been minutes, it could have been hours. River would have been happy for it never to end. 

“I’m grateful you’re here, you know.” Max said softly, cracking the silence that had fallen.

River couldn’t stop themself from smiling. “Of course I came—you’re letting me talk to aliens. Do you realise what this could do for my career?”

“Nevertheless, none of this could have been undertaken without your help. The government of the United States is in your debt.”

“And what about Max Liu?” River inquired. They could feel their heart in their throat, hammering against the backs of their molars. 

Max seemed almost surprised to be asked. “Personally?” They regarded River with their sky-black eyes, silent for a long time. When they finally spoke, their voice was low, smoking with an emotion that River couldn’t quite name. “You’ve opened my eyes. It’s all different now—it will be different for the rest of my life.”

Slowly, as though they were afraid of frightening River, Max raised the back of River’s hand to their mouth. Ever so gently, they brushed their lips against it; the ghost of a kiss. River’s whole body felt electrified, the world narrowing to just the pair of them, here on this spot in a military exclusion zone.

Max dropped their hand and stepped back—just like that, the spell was broken. “Good night, River.” Max said, a touch of laughter in their voice, as though amused at their own audacity. River watched them go, their own hand clutched to their chest as though they could keep Max’s kiss pinned down.

Little by little, life in the camp rolled on. Rain became snow, which melted—then once, memorably, froze again, turning the entire exclusion zone into an ice rink. River learned the names of every member of Max’s staff, plus most of Dr. Molotov’s; adjusted to eighteen-hour days as best they could; was slowly incorporated into the inside jokes and unvoiced thoughts that the 4th Clandestine shared amongst themselves. Things were even going well with Senescence and Heartfire; they had established an impressive amount of vocabulary, sheerly through casual conversation.

It was actually quite fun—River had learned to go in without an agenda for the meeting, letting the heptapods steer the conversation. They were curious about everything, from the camera equipment to River’s history of academic work. In return, they explained how such things worked on their own planet. The conversations easily filled the allotted two minutes; each answer sparked a dozen new questions as River took the heptapods through over 300,000 years of human social and technological development. Even Max got in on the action, at one point launching into a full lecture on the history of Anglo-French relations and why that meant English had multiple different words for the same concept. They’d had to give the whiteboards a reprise for that one.

“Why in the world are you telling them about the Hundred Years’ War?” the Secretary of State—entirely improbably, Max’s sibling—asked over video one day, pinching the bridge of their nose between their fingers as though they were trying to ward off a headache. They had ambushed River the first chance they got; Max had been called away, something about the armory. 

River shrugged. “They asked.”

“I find that highly unlikely.” 

“They did! It’s been proven that language learning is easier via casual conversation, so we’ve spent the last few communication windows letting them ask us questions. It’s improving both of our vocabularies fairly rapidly.”

“Please, Dr. Gale, impress upon me the importance of vocabulary, which I’m sure is far more consequential than us mere mortals could ever understand.” the Secretary of State snapped, as dryly as the Sahara. Somehow, they looked even less impressed than they did before. 

“Well, I can’t imagine it’s that important.” River didn’t let their tone change—the Secretary was dismissive of River, sure, but not usually this rude. Probably, they were just stressed. Everyone was; the fate of the world was at stake.

River pushed that line of thinking from their mind. “What it is good for, though, is getting them to understand the question once we actually ask them why they’re here, and understanding the heptapods’ response ourselves. We’re dealing with an entirely new civilization; the concept of “purpose,” the idea of “here,” the fact that we’re looking for a detailed response, those all need to be translated. The more we close the gap, the less likely we are to have a misunderstanding.”

River didn’t need to tell them that a misunderstanding here could be deadly. The Secretary of State didn’t respond with words, but they nodded, their face still as impassive as stone.

“Don’t be a bully, Nikola.” Max called from across the tent as they strode back in. “I’m telling them about Anglo-French relations because I’m trying not to reveal our current military capabilities.”

Now, the Secretary’s eyebrows shot up. “Don’t first-name me in front of your staff, Maksim—and stick to your remit, Dr. Gale. Get them to tell us why they’re here.” The video call closed with a beep.

Max was too well-controlled to really collapse into the chair next to River’s, but it was a near thing. “They’re just upset they didn’t think of that first.” they explained, a wry smile twisting their mouth—there and gone again, like a fork of lightning. “They’re not usually like that. The State Department is most of the way to mutiny, and the President’s being difficult besides—it’s not an excuse, but please don’t hold it against them.”

“Don’t worry. I used to teach university freshmen, it takes more than that to intimidate me. Where’d you go?” River asked, before they could lose their nerve.

Max sighed, running a hand through their hair, inky strands curling softly between their fingers. “Fifty pounds of plastic explosive vanished from the arsenal. We have no idea where it went. There’s no security footage and no record of it being used. Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.”

“No, it doesn’t.” River tried to catch their eye, see if they could get another one of those brief, brilliant smiles. “I’m sure it’ll be alright, though.”

“Perhaps.” Max’s voice was carefully neutral, giving no indication either way.

If Max noticed that River was thinking of more than just the explosive, they gave no indication. Perhaps they were trying not to think about it; River wouldn’t have blamed them. It didn’t change the thread of hope running through River’s every thought, however. Despite everything, if somebody had asked them then and there, River might’ve said that they could pull it off. That the world would make it out of this unscathed, and with some new intergalactic allies to boot. That everything would be alright.

Max didn’t even turn on their phone light when they woke, despite the pitch-thick darkness outside and their lack of a bunkmate;¹² the tent canvas was paper-thin, and Max despised the idea of waking up Dr. Gale. They were still asleep—if Max held still and listened closely, they could hear the soft, even rhythm of their breathing through the barrier of fabric. 

The pair of them lived life on the heptapods’ schedule now, after all, sleep and work squished into the intervals between the two-minute openings in the monolith—like being in the fucking Navy, Max thought wryly. As a consequence, they had long gotten used to pinning up their hair and going through the everyday morning admin in the dark, now including such things as “rolling out their aching muscles”—they had grown high-maintenance in their old age—and “checking their inbox before the unread emails hit triple digits.” It was easy, if Max just didn’t think about it. There was a lot that Max tried not to think about, these days.

Outside, the night shift was in full swing—the Pacific operation camp, as President Gray insisted on calling it, never really stopped, just slowed down for an hour or two at shift change. Up ahead, Max could see the headlights of the park rangers at the very edge of the perimeter. On any other morning, with less to do, they might have gone to see if Ranger Martinez was on duty.¹³ Right now, though, they had to go speak with the President. 

That was not going to be accomplished before coffee, though; they had time to swing by the canteen, if they were fast. Inside, they found Okafor at the immense carafe, staring sleepily into an empty mug. Tapping their shoulder to get their attention, Max knocked their clenched hand against Okafor’s; unspeaking, Okafor bobbed their fist. Once, twice, thrice, scissors to Max’s paper—once, twice, thrice, paper both. Once, twice, thrice, rock—Okafor smiled at Max, shyly triumphant. Max smacked them lightly on the arm, mock-upset, devoid of any real malice.

That seemed to bring Okafor back to themself, regaining their presence of mind enough to actually fill their mug with coffee. “Day’s shaping up to be uneventful,” they murmured, swift and businesslike. Max was grateful; they were both too exhausted for pleasantries.

“Anything that needs immediate attention?”

Okafor considered a moment before shaking their head. “Not really. No updates on the missing explosive, but you knew that. And those college kids are lurking around the border—still—as per Martinez.”

“Any trouble from them?”

“No, actually. They stayed just outside, like they said, and haven’t published anything particularly risky—they’re offering to drop off copies of the new issue, should we want it.”

“I’m inclined to take them up on that offer.” There was something very charming about a university newspaper being published near a military perimeter, for the benefit of nobody save the editorial team and the military personnel themselves.

“Will do.” Okafor saluted, soft smile dancing at the corners of their mouth, and strode off to meet their day head-on.

Max sighed, busying themself with their coffee. They watched the ribbon of milk dissolve in their mug; the filigree patterns, brown-on-white, had become comforting with the years. At a United Nations summit, a physicist had once informed Max offhandedly that everyone ought to put milk in their coffee; “always good to remember that fluid dynamics works the same in a mug as it does in the clouds of Jupiter. Reassuring, if you’re having a wobbly moment.” Max had been bewildered at the time, watching the little redhead flit away from the beverage station and back into the throng, but they had thought about the sentiment ever since. It was the sort of thing Dr Gale might like—

Max pulled the plug on that train of thought before it could trend towards the unprofessional as they exited the canteen. They didn’t understand what the problem was—they didn’t do this sort of thing. These were entirely foreign waters; they’d never had to keep their eyes trained carefully on the shower wall at the Naval Academy, never picked up a civilian in a shady bar, never pined hopelessly for one of their superiors. And yet, they could feel Dr. Gale’s influence rewiring their brain. Worse still, they weren’t sure they minded. 

Suddenly, their brain caught the thread of something else: a news broadcast, playing out loud from someone’s laptop. They followed the noise, its trajectory leading them back to the desk at the front of the enormous central tent—and Major Garcia.

“The fact of the matter is, we don’t know what they’re here for. Frankly, it was a mistake to start communication operations in the first place; the monoliths probably should have been blasted out of the sky before ever touching down on US soil. If this were any other circumstance, this behaviour would have been considered an act of war—”

Well, that was quite enough. Max tapped Garcia on the shoulder gently—light enough as to not scare them, but firm enough to get their attention. “I’d thank you to turn that off, Major.”

Garcia colored, slamming the lid on their laptop. “Yes, sir,” they said, their voice sharp and flinty as an arrowhead. 

“You’re not in trouble, calm down.” Despite the brusqueness of the words—Garcia responded best to a direct approach—some of the stiffness in Garcia’s shoulders eased to Max’s own relief. “But remember—we’re not here to start fights, yeah? Unless and until the Secretary of State says otherwise, we’re on functional diplomatic terms with the heptapods.”

Garcia regarded them with blank eyes for a heartbeat or two before they assented. Max worried for them, in the same parental way they worried about all their officers. They had been under rather a lot of pressure recently. Were most of the time, actually—Garcia’s family had a military tradition going back at least six generations. There had never been a choice for them.

Garcia wouldn’t thank Max for it, but Max thought briefly that they should check in on them at some point. Sit them down for coffee and listen to what was eating at them, how Max could help; maybe give them a week off, after this was all over. But that was Future Max’s problem. Present Max had a meeting with the president and her cabinet in less than five minutes.

“Any updates on the monolith?” Max inquired instead. 

Garcia shook their head. “Nothing yet. Next contact window is in—” checking their watch, calculating swiftly, “—two hours and four minutes. Take that sweater off before your meeting,” they added, which translated to sorry in Marine.

Max nodded, which changed depending on the context, but meant thank you here. They pulled off their white sweater, tossing it over the back of an unoccupied chair. 

 “Garcia,” Max started, and the major’s head snapped up; are you doing alright died in their throat as the audio system chimed, an alert popping  up on the central screen that the president’s office was calling. Max settled for “later,” as Major Garcia skittered out of the tent.

“Colonel Liu!” President Gray barked by way of greeting, sitting cross-legged on her desk in the Oval Office and not looking up from the paper she was reading. “It’s a five-word question, what’s taking so long over there?” Behind her, Niko raised an eyebrow, face inscrutable. 

Dr. Gale would have launched into an explanation of the linguistic complexity of the situation there and then; Garcia would have left it at have you been reading the countless reports we’ve sent you? Both options had their merits in Max’s eyes, but they opted for “it’s more difficult than you might imagine, Madam President. Dr. Gale has written quite a bit on the linguistic complexity of it all, but there’s other considerations as well.”

President Gray didn’t look quite convinced, but she laid aside the file and looked Max in the eyes. “And what considerations are those?”

“Diplomatic ones, Madam President.”

“Elaborate.”

“Diplomacy always necessitates seeing things from the other person’s point of view. The trick is, both participants need to be on board. Without buy-in from both sides, it doesn’t work.” Max made eye contact with Niko; they nodded, as if to say go on.

Max took a deep breath and continued. “So, we’re trying to make sure we fully understand the worldview of the heptapods, and that the heptapods fully understand ours.” Which, I’m sure you can imagine, is very difficult when you’re learning one another’s languages from first principles, Dr. Gale would have said. “This requires the utmost caution and consideration. Otherwise, this could lead to interplanetary war.”

Speaking of the president—Max watched her mull their words over, considering. “Then continue as you are,” she commanded finally. She paused, as though there was something else she wanted to say.

It was not Max’s place to make demands of the president. But if there was something else, something that could be a danger to the country… “Madam President?” they inquired, pressing that tiniest bit.

President Gray shook her head. “China is playing very stupid games at the moment, that’s all. Who knows what will come of it. I won’t make any dire pronouncements here and now, but keep your radio on—we’re just going to have to wait and see.”

Waiting and seeing seemed like one hell of a strategy when the planet was on the line. But Max was nothing if not good at following orders; they saluted, and tried not to feel too relieved when the line closed.

“Dr Gale?” a low voice inquired from outside the tent. River sighed, brushing the sleep from their eyes as they stumbled from bed; the light poking through the seams was still pale and watery, the birds singing outside. It would have been idyllic if River didn’t know where they were.

They yanked open the tent flap—and if they hadn’t been awake before, they were now. Max was standing a slight, calculated distance just beyond the threshold, presumably so that they wouldn’t get the mud from their boots on the floor of River’s quarters. Clearly, they’d been pulled from bed in a hurry too; they were in last night’s camouflage trousers, their hair curling soft and entirely unfettered around their shoulders. Capping off the image was the crew-neck they were wearing, blazoned with USNA Hockey. It was so saccharine, so endearing and improbable, that River almost couldn’t believe they were real; they could have been an image from any one of River’s dreams this past week. 

Maybe before, River would have asked them about it—stored whatever facts of Max’s life they could glean from the subsequent anecdote in the back of their mind like a dragon with its hoard. Somehow, there was a part of them that still wanted it, but Max wasn’t theirs and never would be. The sooner River made peace with that, the better.  

“Dr Gale,” Max started again, and River noted the twinge of disappointment low in their chest with shame. “I know it’s early, but there’s something you ought to see. As soon as you can.” It must have been serious, then. 

“Let me just get my shoes on,” River said. Max nodded, and stepped outside to wait. 

The walk over was silent, River noticed grimly—whatever was happening, Max was fixated on it to the exclusion of aught else, that coldly practical prioritization that made them such a good officer. Their hands were tight on the grip of their pistol; it remained in its holster, Max’s knuckles white against the black metal. 

Inside the enormous main tent, almost every screen was alight. The feeds ranged from video calls to news coverage to grainy, greyscale security footage. River noticed with a start that all four of Max’s staff officers were there, half of them in uniform and half in whatever they’d slept in. It truly was all hands on deck, then.

“The apocalypse must really be here,” River attempted to joke. Max remained stony-faced, just as they had that morning in the monolith—out of concern, River could tell. They hid it well enough, but they were frightened.

“Pull the video up, please,” Max instructed nobody in particular. The personnel in the general radius saluted, racing to carry out instructions. As though on autopilot, Max pulled a pack of cigarettes from their pocket, sticking one behind their ear and nearly moving to pass the box to somebody before they remembered River. “Do you want…?”

River demurred. “You’re going to give yourself lung cancer someday.” they said, still trying for levity.

Max didn’t even react, depositing the box into the hands of Major Garcia—they must have been used to this, their expression softening for a moment as they retrieved a cigarette of their own and handed the box to the person next to them—and set off further into the tent. Another oddly charming habit. 

“This came through from a Saudi Arabian surveillance satellite early this morning,” Max continued as they reached the front of the room. “Had a hell of a time getting our hands on it. I‘d appreciate a translation of what the Chinese team is saying, General Song especially—I have a few suspicions, but they’re—” Max cut themself off with a slight raise of their eyebrows. “Well. I’ll let you see for yourself.”

They handed River the headphones and stepped back; River let the video play.

They were shocked to hear, not the sonar hum and click of Heptapod, but crystalline Mandarin, as familiar to River as their own reflection. “They’re saying… each of the twelve sites are offering advanced technology,” River relayed. Max nodded, eyes wide.

River played the clip again, trying to hone in on what they missed trying to translate in real time—it was like trying to capture a sculpture in a sketch. Same outline, same features, but completely different textures; undeniably different objects. 

“And then—some of this is difficult to make out, there’s a lot of interference—they say that the science team is attempting to decode the sets. “Sets,” that could mean anything…” They went back another time, turning the few sentences they could parse through the static over and over in their mind. “Flowers, wind, honor—oh. Shit.”

They came to their conclusions simultaneously, two minds acting as one, without even so much as having to make eye contact. 

“Could we have the room, please?” River called out, surprised at their own audacity. Okafor startled, looking to Max; River was gratified when Max nodded, and the staff began the long process of exiting. Garcia gave Max and River a glare of such intensity that River was almost impressed—they’d never been able to hear the thoughts of another person so clearly before, especially not when those thoughts were obviously are you seeing this shit, Colonel.

“Mahjong,” River said. “They’re using mahjong to communicate with the heptapods.”

Max caught their meaning near-instantaneously. “Blue, like you told me.”

“Exactly. You can only talk about things you have the words for; if everything’s a competition, then every conversation has a winner and a loser. You’re not capable of meeting the other person on level ground. And when you only have a hammer—”

“Everything’s a nail.” Max finished.

River didn’t know how or when, but somehow, they’d taken Max’s hand; they squeezed it now to emphasize their point. Max squeezed back. They had settled in to that stony silence again, eyes fixed on some point in the middle distance; River desperately wanted to know what happened in that mind of theirs, what sort of calculations they were performing.

“Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep,”¹⁴ River quoted, praying Max recognized it. “Whatever you’re thinking…?”

Max didn’t quite smile, but it was close. “Мы вас похороним—does that mean anything to you?”

“Not exactly.”

”Nikita Khrushchev used that turn of phrase in a speech at the United Nations in 1956. It was translated as “we will bury you”—it nearly started a nuclear war. But that’s not what he meant, not at all.” Max’s face softened, defrosting to show the slightest bit of sadness in their expression. “We can’t afford to fuck this up. General Song might be mobilizing their forces, or so we think. If China’s mobilizing, so is Russia. We are balanced on a knife’s edge. If things go south…” They trailed off, pushing a hand over their face. “I suggest you get your affairs in order, Dr. Gale.” they grit out. “Linguistic and otherwise.”

In some instinct half-remembered from their dreams, River stroked the pad of their thumb over Max’s knuckle. They startled, pulling back as though from a hot stove; their hand twitched, involuntary to River’s eyes, just the barest flex of their fingers. Like they were trying to rid themself of the memory.

River’s face burnt with shame. There was so much they wanted to say, so much they wanted to ask—are you okay chief among them. But Max wouldn’t thank them for it, the past few days had proven that much. Envying the military’s use of salutes to signal the ends of terrible, uncomfortable conversations, they merely nodded sharply and strode out into the sunlight, leaving Max alone in the tent.

“Someone’s asking for you over in central command,” Kapoor informed River one bright, frigid afternoon, as casual as one could get on a military base; it took River a moment to realize they were being spoken to. They sighed, head too cluttered with ordinary tasks to really think things through—supposing that they weren’t going to have time for the paper that they’d wanted to read after all, and figuring they ought to go grab a lid for their cardboard cup of tea.

Okafor was with them, River noticed quietly, the whites of their ink-black eyes tinged red. “Aren’t you on night shift?” River inquired, cocking their head at them.

Okafor immediately redirected their gaze to the tarpaulin flooring of the mess tent. “Not relevant,” Kapoor said crisply. “It’s a member of the Russia team—a physicist. You should speak to them, it seems important.”

River got the message, gathering their papers into a neat pile. As they did, they noticed, out of the very corner of their eye, Kapoor just barely brushing Okafor’s hand with their own. 

“It’s alright,” Kapoor whispered gently. “None of it is your fault, they’re just uptight and think they know everything. Colonel Liu told me they’d have a conversation with them as soon as all of this is behind us. They can talk about how dangerous the heptapods are all they want, they’d never—“

River forced themself to stop listening. Not relevant, they reminded themself, forging through the biting wind to go see the Russia team.

“River!” Molotov called in English as soon as River came through the entrance of the command tent. “How are things over there?” They had timed it precisely right; everyone else running the command center had just gone on lunch break. The two of them were alone together, thousands of kilometers away.

“Much the same as they are with you, I imagine.” River fired back, smiling despite themself.

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. We’ve had a wretched shortage of translators—I’ve been pulled out of the lab all week. Nobody wants to risk their neck.” When Molotov smiled, it was weak and self-deprecating; nevertheless, River caught the hint.

“You sent for me?” River asked in Mandarin, and Molotov’s relief was almost palpable. 

“I did—I’m glad it was Okafor on duty, anyone else might not have taken me seriously. We’ve got something weird from our heptapods.”

River frowned. “Weird how?”

“See for yourself.” Molotov turned their attention to their desktop, pulling up the recording.

What is your purpose here? the linguist in the audio file asked, and it took a brief moment, like a transmission delay, before River realized with a shock they were good enough with Heptapod now to translate on the fly. 

Give weapon, the heptapod responded. 

River took a step back like they’d been hit, and Molotov’s face twisted wryly into a smile. “I did the same thing.”

“Yes, I can imagine why that might be alarming. Is Russia…?”

“Not mobilizing yet, but nearly—we’ve cut off all communication with the heptapods.”

“Ah. Hence your coming to me, rather than—” 

River cut themself off. Max had just blown in with a drift of the unseasonably late snow, ice crystals caught in their neat, regulation bun. 

Molotov hadn’t noticed them. “Talk to them. Ask what they mean, I’m begging you. This is too important to risk.”

“What the fuck are doing over there—” someone barked offscreen, and Molotov went sheet-pale.

“I have to go.” they whispered, panicked. “Good luck.”

“Promise me you’ll stay safe?” River stepped closer to the screen; they wished desperately that the two of them were in the same room. They wanted to take Molotov’s hands, clasp their shoulders, something to remind them both that Molotov wasn’t already doomed.

“I can’t promise that.” Molotov murmured.

“Molotov,” River pressed, but it was too late—the screen was already going dark.

River slumped forward, pressing the heels of their hands into their eyes. This was bad; all of President Gray’s nightmare imaginings rolled into one. China was already mobilizing troops, and they couldn’t imagine Russia not doing the same after that message—

“What was that?” Max—Colonel Liu, River should have been calling them Colonel Liu—asked softly. They hovered at River’s shoulder, just barely outside of their line of sight.

River’s blood ran cold. “The President can’t know.”

“What?” Max’s voice was gentle, soft and warm—like it had been that night below the Milky Way, like it had been at their wedding.

River didn’t look up at them. They couldn’t. “She can’t know. If Russia starts to rally their troops, so soon after China—well, you know.”

“I do know,” Max admitted. “Her strategy appears to be “wait and see;” it’s entirely possible that this could be the thing that pushes her over the edge.”

“And we can’t let it be. We’re so close—”

“I know,” Max cut them off.

Max took a knee then, dropping into River’s line of sight a careful three feet away. Do you trust me, River nearly asked them then, but closed their teeth over it; they couldn’t bear to find out the truth.

The corner of Max’s mouth twitched, inscrutable. “I won’t tell her—and I’ll ensure the rest of the camp gets the message as well.”

Relief hit River like a stone to the chest. “Thank you. Thank you—”

Max shrugged; one-shouldered, almost taken aback. “It had to be done.”

“It had to be done,” Max repeated, like they were trying to convince themself of it. None of their horror showed on their face; they were in full dress uniform, pressed and pin-neat, hat and gloves in their lap in deference.

The day was far too sunny, streaming in through the stained glass windows of the church and illuminating the silver strands in Max’s hair. In that instant, River realized that Max probably wouldn’t have had those if not for the events of the past year. There were futures where none of this had happened—futures where the two of them had probably never met. 

“I know,” River said softly, and laid an unobtrusive hand on their knee. Behind the pair of them, the opening strains of the funeral dirge began to play.

River’s breath caught in their throat. Above the massive banks of monitors, an alarm sounded, the tent suddenly bathed in red light—the communication window was going to open in ten minutes.

“You ready?” Max asked, like it would change anything if they weren’t. River grit their teeth and nodded.

The process of getting ready to speak with the heptapods was far less involved, now. It was almost a blessing to River’s overtaxed mind; they went through the last bits of paperwork and decontamination protocol practically subconsciously. Despite the foreign policy dilemma before them, they were almost looking forward to it. Heartfire and Senescence felt like old friends now.

Afterwards, River cursed themself—if they hadn’t been so distracted, lost in considerations of Max, Molotov, the United Nations, they might have seen it. Put the pieces together, averted tragedy by the skin of their teeth. But the future was like a boulder, rolling down a hill; at a certain point, there was just too much kinetic energy. At that moment, River signing off on the last document before setting out with Max to the monolith, the threshold was crossed, the future barrelling towards them..

A checkpoint had been set up, just before one passed into the shadow of the monolith; to keep watch or to prevent people from getting in unauthorized, River didn’t know. It was routine, at this point; go over what they were bringing in, what they were going to say,¹⁵ when the President could expect her next report. What was not routine, however, was who was doing the questioning.

“Afternoon, sir,” Major Garcia said briskly, not acknowledging River whatsoever. Their hair, cornsilk-pale, was spilling out of the beanie they had donned against the bitter wind; River had seen Okafor knitting it in their off-time.

Max blinked at them, surprised. “Major. You’re not meant to be out here.” It wasn’t a question.

“It’s just for a minute or two. Huang had to handle something.” Garcia’s tone was even, but then again they had always been a little inscrutable to River. Max seemed to think it was alright, though.

Garcia asked them all the standard questions and finally waved them through. When they stepped on to the scissor lift, Max extended a hand to River to help them up. Against River’s better judgement, they held it as the pair of them began rising towards the hole in the monolith. 

Down on the ground, something seemed to have gone wrong. Garcia was barking orders into their earpiece. River couldn’t help but catch Max’s eye—Max smiled sardonically, shaking their head.

“Have to wonder what—” River started, but they never got the chance to finish. A roar, a rush of sound and fury, and then all was silent.

River came to in the medical tent again, their head throbbing in time with their pulse. Sunlight shone through the plastic, illuminating the ghosts of the tree branches above. River squinted against the sudden bolt of pain it sent through their skull. They hoisted themself up onto their elbows, wondering how fast they could get to the centre of the camp—so much must have gone wrong for an explosion to even happen in the first place, they probably needed a translator—when suddenly, they stopped in their tracks.

Max was sitting by River’s bedside, clicking the safety of their sidearm off and on again as though they didn’t realize they were doing it. When their eyes rose to meet River’s, they abandoned it as they rose from their seat.

“How are you feeling?” they asked, voice soft as they knelt to meet River’s eyes.

Terrible, actually, but there was something pitiful and quiet in River’s chest that didn’t want to give Max cause to worry. “What happened?” River inquired instead, smiling despite themself. Max was here; they had waited for who knows how long, sat by River’s bedside until they woke up. Whatever Max had meant by it, the gesture was still something.

“There was a bomb; stolen explosives planted near the bottom of the monolith.” Max’s face was carefully blank, their tone controlled. “The perpetrators have been neutralized.”

Neutralized. That was military for shot, River knew that much. They thought suddenly of Garcia, all bleak humor and pale hair that never quite stayed up; Garcia outside the entrance to the monolith, waving River and Max through with their jaw set and eyes squinting against the sunlight. They would never get to know each other better, never share a joke or a smile across a crowded meeting. The thought left River oddly downcast. “Is everyone…?”

“No casualties.” Max confirmed, a muscle in their jaw twitching. River dropped it; there would be world enough and time to talk it through, someday when this was all behind them.

Max was silent again for a long, long time. When they finally spoke, their voice had just the slightest bit of a tremble to it—but River could hear it all the same. “I’m glad you’re alright, River.”

Just then, Kapoor burst through the entrance to the tent, and anything River had intended to say to that died in their throat. Max sprung to their feet; the loss of their proximity was knife-keen. 

“The President is considering ordering an evacuation,” Kapoor blurted out. “Okafor’s holding back the bastards for now, but I’m not sure how much longer they can stall—they look ready to start crying. Oh, damn and blast.” Only then did they remember to salute, Max returning the gesture with a wry smile that didn’t quite make it to their eyes. 

”We’re not evacuating,” River said before they could stop themself. “I have to go back in—Colonel Liu’s welcome to join me, if they’d like, but we need to explain that this wasn’t sanctioned by the United States.”

“Dr. Gale, I recognize that you feel as though you have a responsibility to this mission, but we can’t afford—”

“We have a responsibility to this mission. To the rest of Earth, even—and to the heptapods, as well.” River cut their eyes over to Max; trust me, they thought desperately, hoping beyond hope Max got the message. To River’s shock, Max inclined their head just a fraction of an inch, their face neutral and unreadable as a statue.

Kapoor grimaced, like they would rather be doing anything else. “It’s just not safe, I’m sorry. You’ve never re-entered during the contact window before.”

“They’ve not shown any inclinations towards violence in the past.”

“And now is far from the time to test that theory. We’re a fractured planet, a species with no one leader. It’s entirely possible the heptapods are planning to pit us against one another; let us fight it out and see who wins.” It didn’t sound like Kapoor—the inflection was wrong, like they were repeating something someone else had said. Max had caught it too, their brows furrowing just the slightest bit.

“There’s no evidence the heptapods even meant ‘weapon’ in the first place. Have you ever heard of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Lieutenant Colonel?”

“I have read your reports, thank you!” Frightened, not belligerent. 

Max held up a placating hand. “I’ll call the Secretary of State. The heptapods are technically a foreign power, it’s their jurisdiction. I have every faith in Lieutenant Colonel Okafor’s negotiating abilities.”

“Sir, Dr Gale—”

River was the first to notice it; the deep, seismic rumble, more sensation than sound. Whatever they were about to say died in their throat as they stopped to listen. Max and Kapoor heard it too, falling silent, the line to the Secretary of State closed with the tap of a thumb. With one mind, the three of them rushed outside—just in time to watch the monolith begin its ascent.

As with everything else that involved the heptapods, River had never seen anything like it before or since; it merely rose, seemingly borne entirely by its own power. The whole camp seemed to stop, watching in awe as the monolith swallowed the pale sun, hovering just out of the reach of humanity.

Before they could stop to think about it, River was already off, animated by some force past reason. When they stepped into the shadow of the monolith, the air was cool and damp. 

Max was only a few steps behind, catching the sleeve of River’s sweater between their fingers to get River’s attention. They faltered before the line of shade, but just for a moment.

River braced for whatever they were about to say—this was important, too important to be put off. But when Max spoke, it wasn’t to talk River down.

“They don’t seem to inspire a great deal of caution in you, do they.”

River smiled in spite of themself. “Caution didn’t win the Battle of Agincourt.”

“And rashness didn’t settle the Treaty of Versailles.” Something softened in the set of their mouth, though; they seemed like they were about to say more. Whatever it was, it was discarded as Max’s eyes widened. River turned back around.

Far above River and Max’s heads, something in the surface of the monolith had opened. As the pair of them watched, what looked like a transport pod made its long descent to the ground. Despite the gravity of the situation, River had to hold back a laugh. Science fiction had gotten one thing right, apparently.

The pod came to a gentle stop before River—it was that same odd, stonelike material as the monolith. When it unfolded, panels sliding away to reveal the interior, it was full of the same white, luminous mist.

Max let go of River’s sleeve and stepped back into the sun. “It appears your ride is here. Good luck, River.”

River chanced one last glance at them—tried to remember Max in this moment, just in case. Someone must have finally noticed what was happening, because members of staff were poking their heads out of tents all across the camp; Max nodded, signalling go, and River turned away.

 Trembling with anticipation, River stepped forward into the fog.

Inside the monolith, the air was cool against River’s skin. They felt nearly weightless, and it wasn’t just the adrenaline; their unbound hair was floating as though underwater, the black strands like ink or smoke. Up ahead, Senescence was waiting.

Like this, unburdened by the barrier, River realized the true scale of them with a rush of vertigo. They stretched up and up and up—a benevolent skyscraper, half-shrouded by the mist. The functional bits of River half-wondered about giant squid genomes and kraken myths, but wasn’t getting anywhere fast. As always, there were more important things.

“Hello, you.” River greeted them shakily, trying to hide their sudden fear; it wasn’t Senescence’s fault River found them intimidating. “Where’s your partner?”

Heartfire is death process, Senescence said, and grief came over River like a wave, so strong and so sudden they could taste it in the back of their throat. What a waste. What a horrible waste—all because the United States Marine Corps couldn’t be bothered to meet the heptapods where they were at. Мы вас похороним, indeed.

“I’m sorry—we’re sorry. It was never meant to happen like this.”

Maksim death process, too.

“No—no, they’re down below. Bureaucracy, you know how it is.” River forced a smile; humor had never quite worked with the heptapods, but it made them feel better. Besides, they were still holding out hope to learn some heptapod jokes before time was up. “Is there any chance you could get a message to the other sites?”

River has weapon.

“You keep saying that.”

River has weapon. Use it. 

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand. I just don’t. What’s—” River steeled themself. “What is your purpose here?”

To help humanity—to give weapon. In three thousand years, we need humanity’s help. It was perhaps the most Senescence had ever said at one time, and River’s already-overclocked mind scrambled to keep up.

“You know the future?”

Another sonar hum, a sudden flash—Max again, illuminated by the early-morning sunlight streaming in through the pair’s bedroom window. 

“I don’t understand!” River was desperate, now, their heart hammering in their ears. “You keep showing me Max—what does it mean?”

Senescence didn’t respond, merely humming louder and louder, a jet engine in River’s skull. They shut their eyes against the noise, putting all their concentration into their train of thought—and all at once, time opened for River like a flower in bloom.

Max got home before River the day they got the news—all the more unusual for the fact that River had been waylaid leaving the university by someone who wanted to talk about River’s book.¹⁶

“Sorry I’m late!” River called out as they slung their keys onto the hook and kicked off their shoes. “Dr Tesla cornered me on my way out—had some theories about Heptapod B being secretly phonetic-linked. They read one thing about language and suddenly think they’re a linguist.”

“I got the biopsy results back.” Max said neutrally. Sudden fear traced icy fingers down the back of River’s spine.

River had known this day would come. They had seen it in their nightmares for two years, noted the approaching date on the calendar with ever-present dread; even still, it didn’t seem like the sort of thing that could happen here. Not in this house, with its whitewashed walls and riot of green beyond the windowpanes—not in the life that Max and River had built themselves, suffused with the kind of quotidian happiness and love River never thought they would get. 

But that was stupid. The seed of the future had been planted a very long time ago; the roots of it were growing up through the floorboards now. Ever since Max and River met, Max’s lifespan had been measured in weeks. Knowing, though, never made it any easier to bear.

Max didn’t seem like the sort of person who played games, but they were gracious in defeat; even now, River could remember them trouncing Dr Shang at weiqi at some kind of faculty dinner party, Shang laughing at their own predictability while Max talked them through their mistakes for next time. They were gracious now—they would have been perfectly justified in coming apart at the seams, but the only indication that they were upset was their hands. With shaking fingers, they traced the interrupted loop of the Heptapod tattoo on the inside of their wrist over and over, voice steady as they talked River through logistics. 

It’s not going to help, River thought but didn’t say. Unheeding of anything Max was saying, they sank down on the arm of the sofa and pressed the crown of Max’s head to their mouth.

“I love you,” they murmured, and Max let themself relax into the embrace.

River sees future. Weapon opens time.

“Wait!” River cried—but just as suddenly as they had arrived in River’s life, Senescence disappeared in a flash of tentacles.

When River’s feet hit grass again, they stumbled; after so long in the monolith, trying to bear their own weight again was like lifting the world on their shoulders. 

Max was the one who stopped them from collapsing, just as they had all those weeks ago at the start of the project. Had it only been weeks? It felt like a lifetime—River certainly felt changed enough for one.

River let their head loll against Max’s chest, breathing in the smell of them—evergreen and cedar, like the plants around them. Fuck, they still couldn’t believe it; they were here, they were here, nothing from River’s future-hallucinations had yet come to pass, and Max was holding River close to take their weight.

“Are you alright?” Max inquired. Trying to arrange their thoughts was a struggle, but River prioritized; only one thing was important in this moment.

“My spouse,” they grit out through a layer of tears. “My spouse—they died.”

Max looked stricken. “I wasn’t aware you’d been married.”

“Colonel,” Okafor said over River’s head. “We really ought to go back—”

“With our luck, Song will have declared war on the heptapods while we’re all busy.” Kapoor cut in. Max nodded, emotionless veneer slamming back down over their expression, and River let themself be led back to the tent.

On the wall with the monitors showing where the other monoliths had landed, the gaps were spreading. Countries were, increasingly, cutting communications and going dark. Now half the wall was black, like gaps between teeth.

It didn’t seem to bother the soldiers—of course—but River felt it like an itch on the back of their neck. It felt like possibilities closing down, the chances that this was all going to end well disappearing one by one. Dr Molotov, who had once smuggled River into an international conference on photovoltaics, was gone now, and they hadn’t reappeared. People had been afraid when the heptapods had first touched down, but not, River thought, of the right things. This was what they should have been afraid of.

Someone was watching the news on their laptop with the speakers on. It was fuzzy drone footage of tanks rolling out, someone saying something about General Guang Song—

—who was handing River a glass of champagne, grinning like an old lion. Butter-colored light gleamed on the medals on their chest. 

“I’m sorry, by the way,” they said, nodding down at River’s hand. “They were a good soldier.”

“They were a good person,” River corrected, raising their glass to hide their expression.

“That too,” Song said—easily, cheerfully. “I’ve got something for you.”

“Is it horrible?”

“No, not this time. Open your hand. Here.”

River held out their free hand. Song stuffed a pile of money into it.

“There you are. Gong xi fa cai,” they said.

“What is this?”

“You won our bet,” Song said. “Congratulations. You were right.”

“There,” River said. “You finally said it. Was that so bad?”

“Nearly painless,” Song said. “Nearly. Now, I don’t entirely know how the thing works—that’s for our linguists to know, I never really had the head for it—but I think you’ll need this as well if you want to pull it off. I suppose it must have worked, or we wouldn’t be here.”

They put a little slip of paper in River’s palm, on top of the bet money. It had a phone number on it.

Back in the present, Max had left their phone sitting on their desk, face up. Shakily, River reached for it. It would be a betrayal, but it might buy them a few minutes, if whoever saw the call go out first had to stop to wonder if there was some authorized reason for it.

They thought of their wedding, all the borrowed happiness from a timeline they hadn’t yet lived through, and wondered if they were about to give that future up. 

They looked at the blackened screens. They picked up the phone and dialled.

Song picked up in two rings.

“Who is this?” they said, amused but dangerous. “Who gave you this number?”

“My name is Dr Gale,” River said, wondering if they knew the names of all their counterparts.

The amusement sharpened, or maybe the sense of danger did. “Is it.”

“Yes,” River said. “Would you like to make a bet?”

“On?”

“You’re making a mistake. A translation one and a military one, both at once,” River said. “What you’ve translated as ‘weapon’ really means ‘gift.’ The best course of action is to withdraw your troops immediately and resume collaboration with every other nation that has a heptapod monolith. It’s the only way to learn to use that gift.”

“And how do you know all this, Dr Gale?”

“Ask me again where I got this number,” they said.

“Alright. Where did you get it?”

“From the future where you listen to me,” River said. “And I’ll bet you five thousand yuan that it’s bright.”

Elsewhere in the tent, someone had scrambled back from their laptop and started to shout. River caught the words, but only some of them.

“—sending out a call to China!”

“Well, find them!”

River backed into the canvas wall, trying to angle themselves so that it wasn’t immediately obvious that they were on the phone. Max was looking at the laptop screen that had started tracking the call, but while River watched, they looked up. Their eyes met: River half-hidden in shadow, Max illuminated bright blue-white by the LCD screens, like a ghost. Understanding dawned.

River bolted. They weren’t sure where they were going, except that it had to be away. On the other end of the line, Song must have heard noises.

“Everything alright over there, Dr Gale?” they said, still amused.

“Perfectly fine,” River lied. “So?”

“It’s an interesting story. I’m not sure why I should believe you.”

River ducked into the decontamination chamber, hoping it had cell service. It did, but the downside was that they ran straight into Max, who must have guessed where they were going and taken the other way around.

River looked up at them. They were completely unreadable. It wasn’t the time, and Song was right there, but what River wanted to say was: I know. I’m sorry. We could have been really good.

This all could have been really good.

Everyone else was catching up, on the other side of the decontamination chamber. Max’s eyes flicked from River’s face to the spill of soldiers and scientists on the other side.

“Colonel Liu!” someone gasped, out of breath. “Stop them!”

River waited to be shot. Max reached, not for their gun, but for the door to the decontamination chamber. It hissed shut and locked itself from the inside.

“Carry on,” Max said.

“I—if the future where you give me this number exists, my plan must work, I must have won the bet,” River said.

“How do I know you can’t see any number of possible futures, all sorts of different branches that might or might not happen?” Song said, sounding like they were starting to enjoy themselves. “Try again.”

The radio on Max’s belt crackled. “Colonel Liu, what the fuck do you think you’re doing? If you keep this up, a court martial will be the least of our—”

The radio clicked faintly as Max turned it off. “Sorry,” they said, absurdly, as if they had been caught with their phone notifications on in a movie theater.

In the future, Song said, “Oh, right. You’ll also need this.”

They gripped River’s shoulder, like they were old friends, and leaned in to whisper in their ear.

“Do you remember what your first commander said to you on the day before she died?” River said.

“I do,” Song said. “I’m interested to know if you do.”

“She never said it to anyone else, but this is what it was. You’ve never forgotten.” They took a deep breath. “Battle isn’t the only thing that takes courage. Every decision you make has the potential to get someone killed. Where to put a supply line, whether to sail northeast or northwest in the night. Which word to choose in a translation. Translations take courage, because if you want to understand someone, one of you has to reach out.”

There was a long silence.

“I know all that, of course,” Song said. “It’s why I’ve made the decisions I’ve made. Someone had to.”

River kept quiet and waited.

Song sighed, staticky and tinned over the poor connection. “If it all goes to shit, I want my five thousand yuan,” they said.

The line went dead.

River slid down the wall, unsure whether they were collapsing with relief or just collapsing. After a moment’s thought, Max knelt down next to them, so that they would be on the same level.

“I’m sorry,” River said, handing their phone back. “I had to.”

“I know,” Max said.

River looked up at them. They looked like they really did know, like they weren’t just saying it. Their hair had come down out of its ponytail to give them a wispy halo in the wintery fluorescent light.

“...tanks withdrawn from the periphery of the Chinese monolith,” someone was saying on the news. “General Song has pledged their renewed commitment to deciphering the secrets of the alien language as a collaborative international effort.”

“What are the odds we won’t be arrested when someone gets that door open?” River said.

“Very, very low,” Max said. “But they’ll probably let us go.”

“I’m not telling you people shit about my findings until I see Dr River Gale-Zhou!” someone with a heavy Russian accent said in the teleconference room. “If you’ve done something with them—”

Dr Molotov was alright after all, then. It was so exactly what River would have said if the Russian side had come back online without them, possibly minus the swearing, that they laughed out loud. Max cracked a smile.

Someone had finally dug up the manual override key to the decontamination room. The door slid open, showing a disgruntled staff officer. Max and River looked up as one.

“You two are definitely under arrest. But if you could be under arrest in the teleconference room, Dr Gale, we’d really appreciate it. They won’t shut up.”

“If you insist,” River said, getting to their feet and offering Max a hand. “Shall we clean this mess up?”

“I think we probably ought to,” Max said, and took their hand.

It worked out in the end.

The heptapods left. No end of the world, no alien invasion, no strange alien weapon given to one country but not another. Things were trickling through to the public; the military was persuaded to make River’s database of heptapod characters open source and freely accessible; across the world, different departments were hashing out plans to study them together. International linguistics conferences next year promised to be really interesting.¹⁷

Max had been right. The army let them go, after grudgingly accepting that River had been right to call Song. President Gray had eventually come down on pretending that someone had ordered Max to do it.

People were packing up the tents. The weather had turned crisp and frost-edged. River could see their breath, and above them, there was a perfect sprinkling of stars.

Max came up next to them to watch the tents be packed away. Their arms almost brushed.

“I really hate to say this,” River said, “but am I expected to find my own way back? Seeing as you whisked me away from my day job in a helicopter.”

If they were expected to find their own way back, they might have to borrow money from Aubrey for a plane ticket. It would be the last time, though. For the first time in their life, River was about to be more famous than their sibling.

“Helicopters are for emergencies. But I’ll drive you,” Max said.

“Really? It’s quite a ways.”

“I don’t mind,” Max said.

“Can I confess something now that I’m on my deathbed?” Max said.

“What is it? If it’s about the sword slash in the living room, I know it was you and Okafor,” River said.

“No. Coming back from the heptapods, we could have gotten a helicopter.”

“What, so you just decided to drive twenty hours for fun?” River said, frowning at them.

Max shook their head. On the scratchy hospital pillow, their hair was an inverse halo. “I wanted to spend more time with you.”

They borrowed a truck. Just outside the old perimeter, there was a twenty-four hour diner, neon lights glowing red and pink and gold. Somehow, the gray-haired waitress in her frilled apron hadn’t fled.

“Knew it would work out,” she said, giving them both a gap-toothed grin and coffee to go for Max. Her name tag said Francine.

“Well,” Max said, taking the coffee and putting a twenty-dollar bill in the tip jar. “That makes one of us.”

“There’s a motel six hours out, if you’re up for that,” River said.

“Shouldn’t be a problem.”

“I knew it would probably end as soon as you went home. I’d never see you again,” Max said. “So I wanted to stretch it out as long as I could. Sorry. It was a very long drive.”

“It’s ending now,” said River, who could remember speaking to a lawyer about Max’s will from a flash-forward, and the type of headstone they would have.

Max shrugged. “Everything does.”

At the motel, they got separate twin beds in the same room. Max fell asleep nearly at once. River watched them, suddenly illuminated gold in the sweep of someone else’s headlights. They could remember what it would feel like to sleep safely in the circle of their arms, and what it would feel like to sleep alone on the first night after they were gone, somehow both at once.

If they let it end now, it would end neatly. If they didn’t, in a year they would be married, and in another year, Max would be dead. River closed their eyes and tried to sleep, without much success.

“What is that insufferable thing you always say?” Max said, weakly. “Right: ‘It’ll all work out in the end. And if it doesn’t work out, it isn’t the end.’”

“I don’t sound like that.”

“You do.”

“God, I’m sorry. That’s awful.”

“No,” Max said, tucking a strand of River’s hair behind their ear. “It’s fantastic.”

Back on the road again, they played the game where one person started with an animal, and the next person had to come up with an animal that started with the letter that the last one ended with, over and over. Beginning to end to beginning again, a perfect circle. Max didn’t look like the kind of person who played games, but of course, River had known for a long time that they did.

“Aardvark,” River said.

“Kangaroo,” Max said, without pulling a facial expression or taking their eyes off the road.

“Ocelot,” River said. “If you knew something was going to end, and end very badly, would you do it anyway?”

“Probably not,” Max said, glancing briefly over. “Why?

“No reason,” River said, slumping down in their seat. The rain was back, casting odd shadows on the dashboard and pattering on the windshield. “No reason at all.”

“If you thought it was going to end as soon as you took me home, why bother with the drive at all? We got stuck in traffic an hour from campus and the car heating broke. There are more pleasant ways to spend time with someone,” River said.

“Some things are worth it,” Max said.

They pulled into River’s driveway at last, two hours later than the navigation app had said they would. River looked at the familiar rhododendrons, still wet with rain, and the mailbox waving its red flag. It was exactly the same, as if nothing had happened at all.

“Well,” River said, over the intermittent tap of raindrops. “Thank you.”

“Anytime. This is goodbye, then?” Max said.

“I believe so.”

Their eyes crinkled at the corners. “Goodbye, Dr Gale.”

“Why did you do it,” Max said, “if you knew all along how it was going to end?”

“Some things are worth it,” River said out loud.

Max blinked. “What?”

Battle wasn’t the only thing that took courage, Song had said. So did translation, which was another word for reaching out. So was starting something, even though you knew the end, because you had decided it was worth it.

They weren’t sure, afterwards, if there was only one future. If it was a choice that they were making, or something they were destined to do. Maybe there was only one future because they would only ever make this one choice, so it was the only possibility. In the end, probably, it didn’t matter.

It happened at night, in the end, while River wasn’t in the hospital with them. They got a phone call. A night nurse, telling them it was over.

They knew, even as they reached out, that they were saying yes to all of it: the worst phone call of their life, sabres and champagne at the wedding, sunny afternoons spent grading papers with Max’s hand on their knee. It was frightening. But when they touched Max’s hand, the apprehension went away, and the future became a foreign country again.

Max blinked, eyes wide. The light was just bright enough to turn their eyes rust-brown instead of black. Surprise took years off them. When River leaned in, they leaned in too.

It wasn’t the most passionate kiss; it was careful, tender, tentative. Max’s lips were soft and their hands were rough. Their breath hitched. You didn’t have to see the future to tell it was the start of something.

“Actually,” River said, touching their cheek, “will you come in with me? Just for a little while.”

Max nodded almost imperceptibly. That was one thing that was easier because they knew the ending: understanding them, knowing their smallest expressions, all the little everyday acts of translation. River would have lived it all over again a thousand times, making the same choices, only for that. It was only the beginning. There was plenty ahead.

River opened the car door and let them out into the rain.

1. It had not yet occurred to River that Professor Shang might be in their office all the time because they liked River’s company. return to text

2. Undeciphered since its (re-)discovery in the year 1900 CE. Taking a hundred years to grade exams was generally discouraged. return to text

3. From the Greek—ἑπτᾰ́ (heptắ, “seven”) and πούς (poús, “foot”). return to text

4. These two were, River found out later, named things that translated roughly to Heartfire and Senescence. Heptapods named themselves after the manner of their deaths. It was a long time before River found out this was anything more than morbid pessimism. return to text

5. The Fermi paradox stated that, given the extremely large size of the universe and the number of planets the correct distance from their suns, the fact that no alien life had contacted Earth yet likely meant it didn’t exist. The Rare Earth Hypothesis sought to solve this paradox, positing that livable planets with all the right conditions—such as Earth—were extremely rare and therefore so was intelligent life. It was at this point that River had to readjust their worldview entirely, because what do you mean the Fermi Paradox had just been proven wrong. The things they would do to have a physicist with them… return to text

6. William Shakespeare, Henry V, III.i.1-3. return to text

7. Latin name Ursus maritimus. return to text

8. River wouldn’t find the photos until years later, but it was true. Cold Response 2006 had apparently been full of shenanigans, because they had also found a photo of Max posing outside in -40° weather, wearing nothing but their underwear—allegedly, “the Finnish ambassador said I wouldn’t! What was I supposed to do, prove her right?” return to text

9. Max wasn’t all the way out of the military yet; they were supposed to have been by now, but then the Department of Defense had “lost communication” with them while they were deployed in Iraq. It had been a complete mess—the Secretary had withheld any information they did have from River, since they technically weren’t legally kin. Quite possibly the only saving grace was the fact that it had finally convinced River and Max to make it legally official. return to text

10. Most hanzi were phono-semantic compounds, meaning that one component of the character had something to do with the meaning and another had something to do with the way it was supposed to sound. return to text

11. Technically, “Sapir-Whorf” was a misnomer; Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf never authored a paper together, but they had similar enough ideas that the broader linguistics world had squished them together into a kind of terrible academic get-along shirt. return to text

12. The reasons were twofold. Max was loath to make anyone share living space with their commanding officer, sure, but it also meant nobody could see Max when they couldn’t control themself. The last time Max had shared a room with a member of their staff, Okafor woke Max up because they’d been crying in their sleep. return to text

13. Sasha Martinez was a park ranger; they liked to feign annoyance at Max and the rest of the 4th Clandestine, but Max could tell they didn’t really mind. It was certainly better than chasing off nosy civilians. They were being awfully patient with the entire regiment, though, despite quite possibly having been cursed to live in a horror movie entitled Marines Infringing on Your Jurisdiction Specifically. If civilization survived the next month—if General Song didn’t start an interplanetary war—Max was going to have to get them some kind of thank-you gift. return to text

14. William Shakespeare, Henry VI, III.i.53. Max had a weakness for Shakespeare, especially the histories. return to text

15. River never stuck strictly to the agenda. Max’s superiors didn’t need to know that, though. return to text

16. River was asked to publish a book containing their observations on the Heptapod language; there had been papers, of course, but those were hastily typed up in between contact meetings and heavily censored by the military. The book was an opportunity to go slow and get it right—and to cross-reference with Max. 

The waylaying, meanwhile, was happening more and more often now. River didn’t know whether to be flattered or in shock—to think this many people cared about their work! return to text

17. River had given Heartfire and Senescence authorship credit on their papers; it only seemed right. return to text