JULIE STONE CHECKED her suit monitors one last time, and stepped cautiously around the barricades that blocked off the inner cavern. The ice floor gleamed in her suit headlight. Ahead of her, the translator squirmed and twisted in its own faint radiance. "All systems normal," she murmured into her helmet comm.
"Telemetry looks good," said Georgia Patwell. Julie's friend's voice could have been coming from light-years away, or inches. She was stationed across the cavern floor, monitoring remote sensors and comm, ready to send in assistance if necessary. Realistically, of course, if the translator did anything that would require her to need help, what were any of them going to be able to do?
"Mass readings are unchanged," Julie reported. "I feel nothing unusual."
"No? Then why the hell is your heart pounding so loud I can hear it without the comm?"
Julie chuckled. "Just trying to keep you folks interested, is all."
The translator was a stark shape against the blue-white frozen nitrogen walls of the cavern. Its black and iridescent globes spun ceaselessly, like turbulent soap bubbles clustered together in the shape of a large top, passing through one another in endless motion, the whole array balanced upon a single black globe. Julie wondered if it had ever tipped over, and what would happen if it did.
Why had the translator ignored all efforts at communication by the exoarch and technology transfer teams? And why had it resisted being moved? One month and twenty million dollars worth of ruined equipment later, Julie Stone had been sent to find out.
So far it was showing no sign of noticing her presence.
"Okay, Jul'—Kim says you're cleared to approach the translator." Georgia's voice was calm but dead serious.
Making a conscious effort to breathe slowly and evenly, Julie stepped closer to the translator, until she could almost have reached out and touched the thing. She began to raise a hand but stopped, fearful. She knew what had happened to all those pieces of equipment, melted and vaporized. She stood gazing at the translator, thinking, Who are you really, and what are you doing here? Then she felt it tingling at the edges of her mind. Hello? she thought. Are you there?
*We are here.*
Startled, she cleared her throat, trying to quell a tremble that was beginning somewhere in the middle of her spine, and radiating outward. You are here. Where? In my head?
*Please focus your thoughts.*
Focus my thoughts? Julie hesitated, trying to decide what that meant. Then she recalled a neurolink technique that John had described to her once, and she frowned, trying to produce the kind of inward direction of her thoughts that people used in the neuro. /Is this what you mean?/ she asked silently.
*Better.*
She waited, wondering if the translator would say more.
Instead, it silently reached into her mind and began to blow her thoughts around, like a rising autumn wind stirring up dry leaves. Within moments, her mind was filled with a whirlwind of activity. She froze in place, bewildered, as the wind grew to a cyclone. She felt no pain. She teetered, but did not lose her balance, or consciousness. /What are you doing?/ she whispered. And it answered:
*Preparing.*
She blinked. /Yes . . . but preparing what?/
*Preparing to give you . . . the tools that you will need.*
And then her consciousness did flicker, just for an instant, as if she'd nodded off and caught herself. And when she blinked back from it, she had the oddest sense that an array of glittering points of light had danced around her in the ghostly cavern, speaking to her, and then had vanished before she could ask them who or what they were.
*
"Jul', are you okay? Talk to me, hon'." Georgia was calling insistently—not in a panicky or distraught way, but over and over so as to get her attention.
"Huh? Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine," she murmured, stepping back a little from the translator. Wait a minute—wasn't she supposed to be approaching the thing? What had just happened here?
"What are you doing now, Julie? Tell us what you saw. Did you hear anything? Talk to me, Julie, talk to me."
"Uh, yeah. I . . . sensed it. I felt its presence. I know it was aware of me." She felt as if she had dozed off there for a second. That seemed impossible, with the adrenaline she had rushing through her veins.
"What, exactly, did you sense, Julie? Are you stepping away from it now? Keep talking. Don't drift out on me."
"What do you mean?" She shook her head. Something was happening in her mind; she couldn't quite tell what.
"Your heart-rate spiked, then took a big drop for a couple of seconds. Now it's climbing again. Did you lose consciousness?"
"I'm . . . not sure."
"Well, I think you did. And I think maybe you should come on out," Georgia said, her voice tinged with worry. "And I think you should tell me everything you remember, and everything that even crosses your mind, before you lose it."
"Okay."
"What happened when you first sensed it?"
Julie blinked hard. Looking at the translator she felt that there was some kind of impenetrable barrier between her and it now. It didn't want her to approach.
*Take time for acclimation,* said a voice, soft but deep in her mind.
"Okay," she murmured, half to the voice and half to Georgia. "It spoke. But it's not as if I understand exactly . . ." Her voice faltered. There was still a voice in her head. She thought she had broken contact with the translator. John had spoken in his letter of an alien intelligence that had somehow come to reside with him, in his mind. Was this one of those?
*We are not the quarx. There is only one quarx, and it lives with John.*
Lives with John? She blinked, wondering if she had heard that right. Lives? She shook her head. /If you are not a . . . quarx, then who are you? If you are not the translator . . ./
*We are the daughter-stones. We are of the translator.*
/Daughter-stones?/ She shook her head, peering out through her suit helmet at all the lights glaring off the translucent cavern walls, glaring in her eyes. Was she imagining all this? She felt a sudden slight sting, like an electrical tingle, in both of her wrists. She raised her gloved hands—and her arms, encased in the tough, insulated fabric of the pressure suit. For an instant, she had the illusion that she could look right through her suited arms and see her bare wrists—and what she saw, embedded in each wrist, was a pulsing bead of light. Daughter-stones . . .
The voice spoke again, as she drew a frightened breath.
*There is no need to fear us. There is much that we must tell you.*
/Tell me—?/
"Julie?" called Georgia. "Julie, keep talking, girl. Kim, I think you'd better get in there right away—"
*You must decide for yourself whether to trust us. But we have a journey to take together. And the first place we must travel is to your homeworld . . .*