On board the al-Jahani, in hyperflight.

Tuesday, June 10.

THE NEWS OF Markover’s death had delivered a jolt, reminding everyone on board that the operation on which they were embarked had its unique dangers.

A few members of the research team had known him. Peggy Malachy had worked with him years earlier, and Jason Holder recollected signing a petition that Markover had sent around, though he could not recall the issue. Jean Dionne remembered him from a joint mission years before. “Good man,” she told Collingdale. “A bit stuffy, but you could depend on him.”

Collingdale had been on a weeklong flight with him once. He remembered Markover as aggressive, arrogant, irritating. Although he wouldn’t have admitted it even to himself, he was relieved he wouldn’t have to deal with him at Lookout.

THE LINGUISTS WERE getting torrents of raw data from the Jenkins. They’d broken into the language, and were in the process of constructing a vocabulary that by then numbered several hundred nouns and verbs. They understood the syntactical structure, which resembled Latin, verb first, noun/subject deeper in the sentence. They had the numeric system and most of its terms down. (Base twelve, undoubtedly a reflection of the fact that Goompahs had twelve digits.) They knew the names of about forty individuals.

The city that Markover had called Athens was Brackel in the language of its inhabitants.

Brackel.

Whatever else you could say for the Goompahs, they had tin ears.

The residents of Brackel were Brackum. Well, Collingdale thought, there you are.

Two other cities for which they had names were Roka and Sakmarung. The planet, their word for Earth, was Korbikkan, which (as at home) also meant ground. They lived in it, and not on it, implying they had no sense of the structure of things. Their name for the sea was bakka, which also meant that which is without limit.

They had a complex conjugal system of shared spouses, which Collingdale and his team of specialists hadn’t quite figured out yet. Brackel seemed to be home to approximately twenty-eight community groups. Spouses within a group had free access to each other, although it appeared they settled on a favorite or two, and only had relations with others to keep up appearances or morale or some such thing. It wasn’t an area in which Collingdale was interested, but some of his experts were already making lascivious jokes.

Offspring from one group could, on maturity, become a member by marriage of specified other groups. But the choices were limited to prevent genetic damage. It was a cumbersome system, which would, he suspected, eventually give way to monogamy. Holder wasn’t so sure, pointing out that similar systems were still in use in remote places at home.

They had not established whether the same system was in use in the other cities, although preliminary evidence suggested it was.

Life among the Goompahs seemed to be pretty good. Apparently, the crops all but grew themselves. Digger Dunn was still dithering about getting a reliable climate analysis, but it looked as if the temperatures ranged from cool to balmy.

The Goompahs talked a lot about politics, leading Holder to conclude that the general population participated in government. Whether the city was an aristocracy or a democracy, or some variant, was still impossible to say. Although some of Collingdale’s people were entranced at the prospect of finding out, it was not a detail that particularly concerned the director.

And that fact puzzled him. He’d thought that his reason for coming, aside from managing a rescue, was to learn about the Goompahs. But he’d lost interest. In fact, he’d begun to suspect that he’d never really cared all that much. He gradually began to realize that he’d come because of the cloud.

His xenologists had insisted from the beginning that he warn the Jenkins people not to establish contact with the natives under any circumstances. They all seemed to think nobody else should say hello, but that it was okay for them to do it because only they knew how to do it correctly.

He’d warned them that policy had not changed to the degree that they should expect to sit down over dinner with the natives. (They still hadn’t agreed on an appropriate term of reference for the aliens. Goompahs set his teeth on edge. Brackum was limited to the inhabitants of Brackel. Peggy Malachy liked to call them Wobblies. Collingdale began trying to encourage the use of Korbs.)

Shelley Baker invariably looked amused when they talked about limiting or barring communication. She said nothing in front of the others, but she’d told him privately that the omega made all the difference. “We’re going to have to talk with them,” she said. “If nothing else, we have to be able to tell them to get out of the cities.”

MARY SENT A message every couple of days. She kept them short, well within Academy guidelines. She’d tell him about a show she’d seen, or how she’d run into some old school friends downtown. Or how she still went to Chubby’s, but the sandwiches had tasted better when he was there.

He replied in kind. He was busy, and sometimes couldn’t think what he wanted to say. But he enjoyed switching on the system and imagining she was in the room with him. He told her about the work they were doing, how he’d been tweaking the visuals they were going to use to get rid of the cloud. And that he was trying to learn the Goompah language. “We can make the sounds,” he said. “Judy says we got lucky. Now it’s just a matter of doing the work.”

Seeing her, listening to her voice, sometimes happy, sometimes wistful, fed his hatred for the omega. He took to spending time in the VR tank, where he conjured up the view from Lookout, as it would be in late November, when the cloud would be prominent in the skies. Vast and ugly, torn by its own gee forces, it would be coming in over the western ocean, visible only at night, rising shortly after the sun went down, growing larger and more terrifying with the passage of time.

It was obvious Judy was worrying about him. She occasionally joined him in the tank, when she thought he was getting too moody. “The clouds aren’t personal,” she insisted. “Whoever, whatever, did this, it happened a long time ago. Who knows what the purpose was? But I’ll bet, when we find out, if we ever find out, we’ll discover it’s more stupidity than venom.”

“You’re kidding,” he told her, as they stood together on the shore near Brackel and looked up at the omega. He saw it as pure malice. And while he was not a violent man by nature, he would happily have taken the lives of the engineers that had put these things together.

But she was serious. “Whatever it was, it’s long dead. The machinery keeps working, keeps pumping them out, but the intelligence behind them is gone. And it couldn’t have hated us. It didn’t know us. It just—” She stopped. “I’m not sure I’m making sense.”

He gazed up at the cloud, quietly unfolding across the star fields. “Judy,” he said, “I don’t know how else to explain these things other than as an act of pure evil.”

“Well,” she said. “Maybe.” She shrugged and looked out to sea, and he thought how attractive she was. More so there on the beach than in the confines of the ship. He wondered at the capability of women to take on part of the beauty of their surroundings.

But he could not keep his eyes long off the cloud. He yearned to be able to reach up and strike the thing out of the sky.

JUDY WAS BARELY out of her twenties. She had a Ph.D. in anthropology, specializing in primitive religions, from the University of Jerusalem. Her reputation for linguistic capabilities had brought her to Hutch’s attention. Collingdale had heard she was also a pretty good equestrienne.

Her parents, she told him, had been horrified when she volunteered for the mission. Nobody else crazy enough to go. Get yourself killed. There’d been a pretty big blow-up, apparently.

At her worksite she’d mounted pictures of several of the Goompahs for which they had names. Goompahs used a string of names, of which two defined the conjugal group and the region of birth. The others appeared to be individual and arbitrary.

To Collingdale they all looked alike. But Judy laughed and said there were clear differences. This one had a large chin, that one a weak mouth. She even claimed she could distinguish personality traits and moods: Kolgar was gruff, while Bruk was amiable.

She’d mastered enough of the language to be able to carry on a respectable conversation, though not with Collingdale, who’d fallen far behind. He could commit some of the words to memory, and knew how to say hello, fish, cold, night, home, and another dozen or so terms. If he were stranded he might even have been able to ask for the local equivalent of coffee, which was a brewed hot drink called basho. Sounded Japanese to his ears.

But she encouraged him and told him he was doing fine. And he took pride in the fact he was light-years ahead of his peers. Bergen, Wally Glassner, and the others couldn’t have gotten the time of day.

They were still having trouble with the syntax. But there was plenty of time, and Judy was more than satisfied with their progress, so Collingdale was pleased.

They were at a point at which most of the data coming in from the Jenkins was repetitious, but Judy’s team was becoming more practiced at setting it aside, at finding the constructions that helped them solve the inner workings of the language.

There were all kinds of sites where they’d have liked to see pickups. But the quantity of units was limited. And they were all in Brackel. They had only verbal descriptions of the other cities.

Requests to Digger not only indicated target sites, but also designated which surveillance units could be moved elsewhere. A transmission still took several days to reach the Jenkins, and moving the pickups around took more time. It was cumbersome, but they were making progress.

There was no information yet about local religions. Collingdale had no idea how old the civilization on the isthmus was. Had it been preceded by something else? What did the Goompahs know about the rest of their world?

Digger wanted to know whether he should use his own judgment about the pickups. Plant them, let them sit for a bit, and then move them around rather than wait for instructions.

Yes, you nit. Do whatever you can to get as much coverage as possible.

But that didn’t work out either. A feed that had become interesting suddenly went dark and by the time they could direct him to get it back up and working, the line of inquiry had dried up.