3
The Ghahari allowed Joan to fly her ship straight down to the surface. She wasn't sure if this was because they were more trusting, or if they were afraid that the Tirans might try to interfere if she lingered in orbit.
The landing site was a bare plain of chocolate colored sand. The air shimmered in the heat, the distortions intensified by the thickness of the atmosphere, making the horizon waver as if seen through molten glass. Joan waited in the cockpit as three trucks approached; they all came to a halt some twenty meters away. A voice over the radio instructed her to leave the ship; she complied, and after she'd stood in the open for a minute, a lone Noudah left one of the trucks and walked toward her.
"I'm Pirit," she said. "Welcome to Ghahar." Her gestures were courteous but restrained.
"I'm Joan. Thank you for your hospitality."
"Your impersonation of our biology is impeccable." There was a trace of skepticism in Pirit's tone; Joan had pointed the Ghahari to her own portrait being broadcast from the decoy node, but she had to admit that in the context her lack of exotic technology and traits would make it harder to accept the implications of that transmission.
"In my culture, it's a matter of courtesy to imitate one's hosts as closely as possible."
Pirit hesitated, as if pondering whether to debate the merits of such a custom, but then rather than quibbling over the niceties of interspecies etiquette she chose to confront the real issue head on. "If you're a Tiran spy, or a defector, the sooner you admit that the better."
"That's very sensible advice, but I'm neither."
The Noudah wore no clothing as such, but Pirit had a belt with a number of pouches. She took a hand-held scanner from one and ran it over Joan's body. Joan's briefing suggested that it was probably only checking for metal, volatile explosives and radiation; the technology to image her body or search for pathogens would not be so portable. In any case, she was a healthy, unarmed Noudah down to the molecular level.
Pirit escorted her to one of the trucks, and invited her to recline in a section at the back. Another Noudah drove while Pirit watched over Joan. They soon arrived at a small complex of buildings a couple of kilometers from where the ship had touched down. The walls, roofs and floors of the buildings were all made from the local sand, cemented with an adhesive that the Noudah secreted from their own bodies.
Inside, Joan was given a thorough medical examination, including three kinds of full-body scan. The Noudah who examined her treated her with a kind of detached efficiency devoid of any pleasantries; she wasn't sure if that was their standard bedside manner, or a kind of glazed shock at having been told of her claimed origins.
Pirit took her to an adjoining room and offered her a couch. The Noudah anatomy did not allow for sitting, but they liked to recline.
Pirit remained standing. "How did you come here?" she asked.
"You've seen my ship. I flew it from Baneth."
"And how did you reach Baneth?"
"I'm not free to discuss that," Joan replied cheerfully.
"Not free?" Pirit's face clouded with silver, as if she was genuinely perplexed.
Joan said, "You understand me perfectly. Please don't tell me there's nothing you're not free to discuss with me."
"You certainly didn't fly that ship twenty light years."
"No, I certainly didn't."
Pirit hesitated. "Did you come through the Cataract?" The Cataract was a black hole, a remote partner to the Noudah's sun; they orbited each other at a distance of about eighty billion kilometers. The name came from its telescopic appearance: a dark circle ringed by a distortion in the background of stars, like some kind of visual aberration. The Tirans and Ghahari were in a race to be the first to visit this extraordinary neighbor, but as yet neither of them were quite up to the task.
"Through the Cataract? I think your scientists have already proven that black holes aren't shortcuts to anywhere."
"Our scientists aren't always right."
"Neither are ours," Joan admitted, "but all the evidence points in one direction: black holes aren't doorways, they're shredding machines."
"So you traveled the whole twenty light years?"
"More than that," Joan said truthfully, "from my original home. I've spent half my life traveling."
"Faster than light?" Pirit suggested hopefully.
"No. That's impossible."
They circled around the question a dozen more times, before Pirit finally changed her tune from how to why?
"I'm a xenomathematician," Joan said. "I've come here in the hope of collaborating with your archaeologists in their study of Niah artifacts."
Pirit was stunned. "What do you know about the Niah?"
"Not as much as I'd like to." Joan gestured at her Noudah body. "As I'm sure you've already surmised, we've listened to your broadcasts for some time, so we know pretty much what an ordinary Noudah knows. That includes the basic facts about the Niah. Historically they've been referred to as your ancestors, though the latest studies suggest that you and they really just have an earlier common ancestor. They died out about a million years ago, but there's evidence that they might have had a sophisticated culture for as long as three million years. There's no indication that they ever developed space flight. Basically, once they achieved material comfort, they seem to have devoted themselves to various artforms, including mathematics."
"So you've traveled twenty light years just to look at Niah tablets?" Pirit was incredulous.
"Any culture that spent three million years doing mathematics must have something to teach us."
"Really?" Pirit's face became blue with disgust. "In the ten thousand years since we discovered the wheel, we've already reached halfway to the Cataract. They wasted their time on useless abstractions."
Joan said, "I come from a culture of spacefarers myself, so I respect your achievements. But I don't think anyone really knows what the Niah achieved. I'd like to find out, with the help of your people."
Pirit was silent for a while. "What if we say no?"
"Then I'll leave empty-handed."
"What if we insist that you remain with us?"
"Then I'll die here, empty-handed." On her command, this body would expire in an instant; she could not be held and tortured.
Pirit said angrily, "You must be willing to trade something for the privilege you're demanding!"
"Requesting, not demanding," Joan insisted gently. "And what I'm willing to offer is my own culture's perspective on Niah mathematics. If you ask your archaeologists and mathematicians, I'm sure they'll tell you that there are many things written in the Niah tablets that they don't yet understand. My colleague and I—" neither of them had mentioned Anne before, but Joan was sure that Pirit knew all about her "—simply want to shed as much light as we can on this subject."
Pirit said bitterly, "You won't even tell us how you came to our world. Why should we trust you to share whatever you discover about the Niah?"
"Interstellar travel is no great mystery," Joan countered. "You know all the basic science already; making it work is just a matter of persistence. If you're left to develop your own technology, you might even come up with better methods than we have."
"So we're expected to be patient, to discover these things for ourselves . . . but you can't wait a few centuries for us to decipher the Niah artifacts?"
Joan said bluntly, "The present Noudah culture, both here and in Tira, seems to hold the Niah in contempt. Dozens of partially excavated sites containing Niah artifacts are under threat from irrigation projects and other developments. That's the reason we couldn't wait. We needed to come here and offer our assistance, before the last traces of the Niah disappeared forever."
Pirit did not reply, but Joan hoped she knew what her interrogator was thinking: Nobody would cross twenty light years for a few worthless scribblings. Perhaps we've underestimated the Niah. Perhaps our ancestors have left us a great secret, a great legacy. And perhaps the fastest—perhaps the only—way to uncover it is to give this impertinent, irritating alien exactly what she wants.