“And therein lies an opportunity,” said Cantabrigia Five.
The producers of this spectacle had once again seized control of the povv and begun taking Kathree on a forced march up the length of the Gnomon, slowing down to linger on the good bits and zooming past what was repetitive. She got the idea, which was that it had a sort of carriage that could move north-south on a giant rail and connect with the ground along a range of latitudes. That it had its own internal train lines connecting residential pods, military installations, luxury resorts for the whole family, and so much more. It was obviously rendered—stuff that hadn’t actually been built yet. Her inability to control what the povv was doing made her a little queasy. She levered the earbuds up, closed her eyes, and carefully pulled the varp away from her face. Then she opened her eyes on reality: the beach, the islet, her two interlocutors. She handed the varp back. “What sort of opportunity?”
“If you are going to make first contact with an intelligent alien race,” said Cantabrigia Five, “dropping huge strip-mining robots into their homeland might not be your best move.”
Kathree pondered that one for a bit. “Ah,” she said.
“Yes.”
“So there’s a reason they were so keen to make nice with the Diggers.”
“Having fucked it up spectacularly with the Pingers. Yes.” Cantabrigia Five stared at her for a little while. Her silence and her gaze were impressive, yet Kathree did not feel wholly uncomfortable.
Finally she went on: “Actions taken here today will cast long shadows into the future of New Earth. With more resources here, we might have effected a more elaborate strategy, with less uncertainty. But the mere fact of having had more would have spoiled it.”
“HOW DID YOU GUYS COME UP WITH ALL THIS?” TY ASKED.
He was squatting on the islet next to the Cyc, who was still swaddled in sleeping bags, only her hands and head exposed. She was holding an instruction manual, angling it toward the light of the flynk chain. This was still illuminating the cove, but the crew of Ark Darwin had dimmed it so that people could sleep. She had to focus intensely to read the words, many of which must be unfamiliar to her. Her lips moved slightly as she parsed unfamiliar Cyrillic characters sprinkled through almost every word. Headphones buried her ears in great donuts of foam. She hadn’t heard Ty, didn’t know he was looking at her. So he had his fill of looking for a minute. She wasn’t his type, and anyway she was very young. But he was beginning to see what Einstein saw in her. Einstein had to know that there was nobody for him on his RIZ, no Indigen girl he could have an interesting conversation with. And yet if he were to somehow find his way to the habitat ring, he’d be looked on by all the smart girls there as a hillbilly.
The device in the box was a portable sonar rig. It was capable of sending out pings, but that wasn’t how they were using it. They were using it to listen. Sonar Taxlaw had virtually wrenched it from Ty’s grasp and mastered it. The arrival of Ark Darwin and the movements of the boats and the barge had caused her no end of annoyance, but with a little encouragement from Ty, she’d begun to see it as an interesting science experiment, a way of understanding what those technologies must sound like to Pingers and other mammals that frequented the deep.
Moving carefully on the steep, glassy surface of the islet, he edged into her peripheral vision and gave her a light tap on the shoulder. He hated to break her out of her reverie, but there were questions he needed answered. She was stunned for a moment, as if she’d just been teleported into this location from a thousand miles away, but rapidly she came around and pulled one of the headphones away from her ear. “Come again?”
“All of this.” Ty rested a hand on the battered plate atop the pipe, nodded toward the makeshift sledgehammer. “How did you come up with it? How do the Pingers know that when they want to talk to you they should build a cairn on the beach at such-and-such place?”
“We began sending out scout parties as soon as the atmosphere became breathable,” Sonar said.
“That’d be three hundred years ago,” Ty said.
“Two hundred and eighty-two.”
“Just making the point that this is old history.”
“Not that old.”
Ty heaved a sigh. “Not within living memory.”
“It is not merely an oral tradition, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Sonar said. “We maintain written records.”
“On one hundred percent cotton paper. Yes. Go on.”
“There was nothing for the scouts to eat, of course. So they could only range as far as they could go with food that they carried on their backs. But in time they discovered edible seaweed and bivalves along the coast.”