ONLY I CAN KILL CHAPTER 3 What the Sensors Recorded
The data arrived in seven volumes.
Nobody had asked for seven volumes. Senior Analyst Darro Fen — no relation to Consultant Fen from the Theology Division, a coincidence he had been correcting for three days — had submitted what he believed was a standard sensor analysis report. Forty pages. Maybe fifty. The kind of document that got read once, filed, and referenced occasionally in footnotes of other documents that also got read once and filed.
Instead he had produced, apparently without meaning to, the single largest analytical document in the Bureau of Unclassified Phenomena's two-hundred-and-forty-year history.
Seven volumes.
Four thousand, three hundred and twelve pages.
And a cover note that read, in Darro's characteristically precise handwriting: I am sorry. I kept trying to stop. The data would not let me.
Director Maev Sonn stood in the analysis room on the fourteenth floor and looked at the seven volumes stacked on the central table. They were bound in the Bureau's standard grey covers. Volume One was approximately the thickness of her fist. Volume Seven was approximately the thickness of her forearm.
Pol Dren stood beside her. He had arrived eight minutes after she sent the summons, which meant he had been in the building already, which meant he had been unable to sleep, which meant he was in the same condition she was.
"He's apologizing," Pol said, reading the cover note over her shoulder. "In a cover note. For doing his job too thoroughly."
"The data would not let him stop," Maev read again. "What does that mean?"
"I've been thinking about that since I read it twenty minutes ago." Pol pulled out the chair across from Volume One and sat down. "I think it means exactly what it says. I think he sat down to write a forty-page analysis and the data kept — generating implications. Each measurement led to another measurement. Each anomaly referenced another anomaly. He couldn't close it because every time he thought he'd reached the end, there was more."
"That doesn't happen with sensor data."
"No," Pol agreed. "It doesn't."
They looked at each other.
"Where's Darro now?" Maev asked.
"Sleeping. He's been awake for sixty-one hours. I sent him home at the fourteenth hour yesterday and he came back at the third hour this morning to add an appendix to Volume Six." Pol paused. "The appendix is longer than most full reports."
Maev sat down. She pulled Volume One toward her, opened it, and read the first line.
She read it three times.
Then she looked up at Pol. "He starts with the absence."
"I know."
"He spends the first forty pages on the fact that the sensors recorded nothing."
"I know."
"How do you spend forty pages on nothing?"
Pol had clearly been waiting for this question. He leaned forward, folded his hands on the table with the air of someone who had organized their thoughts and was not sure those thoughts were going to come out in any helpful order regardless. "Because it isn't nothing," he said. "That's the thing. That's what Darro figured out in the first forty pages and then spent the next four thousand pages following the implications of." He reached out and tapped the cover of Volume One. "When a sensor records empty space, it records a specific signature. A null signature. Every null recording in history has that signature — same pattern, same values, same everything, because empty space is empty space and it reads the same way whether you're scanning the Null Corridor or your own backyard."
"And?"
"And the null signature from that space — the space he occupied — is different." Pol opened Volume One to a page he had already bookmarked, turned it so Maev could read the comparison chart. Two columns of numbers. At a glance they looked identical. On closer inspection — and Darro had annotated the differences in red ink with the meticulous grief of a man who had wanted very badly for the numbers to match — they were not. "The standard null signature and the signature from his space differ in forty-seven distinct measurements. Small differences. Microscopic. The kind of differences that would never be caught in routine analysis." A pause. "Darro only caught them because he'd spent eleven days with nothing else to look at."
Maev studied the numbers. "What does the difference mean?"
"Volume Two is entirely about that question," Pol said. "The short version is: it means the space isn't empty. The space looks empty because whatever is in it is somehow — and Darro uses the phrase 'existing at a frequency that precedes the instrument's reference frame' — operating below the level that the instruments were built to measure. Not too large. Not too powerful. Too prior. Like trying to measure the age of a building with a tool that was built inside the building. The tool has no reference point old enough."
Maev set Volume One down very carefully, the way you set down something that has unexpectedly revealed itself to be heavier than it looks. "Too prior," she said.
"Too prior."
"That's what Consultant Fen said. Pre-substrate."
"Darro had apparently reached the same conclusion independently. He references Cohren Sev's paper in Volume Three. He'd clearly never read it before because his annotation in the margin says, and I'm quoting directly: 'Why did no one tell me about this paper. Why is this paper not mandatory reading for everyone in this building. Why is this paper not mandatory reading for everyone alive.'"
Despite everything, Maev almost smiled. "Volume Three," she said. "What's in Volume Three?"
Pol's almost-smile faded. He reached for Volume Three, opened it to a section marked with three bookmarks in different colors — his own organizational system, she had learned, color-coded by urgency. He had used a color she had never seen him use before on the third bookmark. She didn't ask what it meant. She looked at the page he had opened to instead.
It was a graph.
The x-axis was labeled Time — Observation Period (Days 1–11). The y-axis was labeled Null Signature Variance — Differential from Standard.
The line on the graph started near zero on day one. It climbed steadily through days two, three, four. By day six it had moved into a range Darro had shaded in yellow, labeled Anomalous. By day nine it had moved into a range shaded in orange, labeled Significantly Anomalous. On day eleven — the day he turned and looked at the star seventeen billion light years away — the line moved so sharply upward that it left the orange zone, passed through a range Darro had shaded in red, and disappeared off the top of the graph entirely.
Below the graph, Darro had written: The variance did not stop increasing. I have extended the y-axis three times. It continues to exceed the new ceiling. I do not know where it stops. I am not certain it stops.
"It was getting stronger," Maev said.
"Not stronger," Pol said. "More present. Darro's theory — and Volume Four is entirely devoted to this — is that it wasn't increasing in power. It was — he uses the phrase 'choosing to be more legible.' Like — like it was deciding, over eleven days, how much of itself to allow the instruments to see. And on day eleven, when it turned and looked at the star —" Pol tapped the graph, at the point where the line vanished off the top — "it stopped managing how legible it was. Just for a moment. Just for the smile. And what the instruments recorded in that moment was —"
He stopped.
"Was what?" Maev asked.
Pol closed Volume Three. He opened Volume Four instead, to the very first page, and turned it to face her.
The page contained a single number.
The number was so long it filled the entire page, top to bottom, margin to margin, in the smallest font the Bureau's document system permitted.
Maev looked at it for a long time.
"What is this?" she asked, very quietly.
"Darro's best estimate," Pol said, equally quietly, "of the lower bound of what the sensors recorded in that moment. Not the upper bound. The lower bound. The minimum." He paused. "He says in his note at the bottom of the page that this number is almost certainly wrong — that the actual value is higher — but that this is the largest number he could express using the Kerevath mathematical notation system and he didn't want to invent new notation in the middle of an official analysis report."
Maev stared at the page-length number.
"He didn't want to invent new notation," she repeated.
"He felt it would be unprofessional."
"Darro Fen," Maev said slowly, "produced four thousand three hundred and twelve pages of analysis, apologized for it in his cover note, cited a pre-Dominion paper he had never read before, and then declined to invent new mathematics because it would be unprofessional."
"Yes."
"I'm giving him a commendation."
"I've already drafted it."
Maev closed Volume Four. She sat back in her chair. She looked at the seven grey volumes on the table in front of her — this accidental monument to a man who had stared at impossible data for sixty-one hours because it would not let him stop. She thought about the number that filled the page. She thought about too prior and choosing to be legible and the smile aimed at a star seventeen billion light-years away.
"Volumes Five, Six, and Seven," she said.
Pol was quiet for a moment.
"Five is the cross-reference analysis," he said. "Darro pulled every sensor reading from the entire eleven-day observation period and cross-referenced each one against every other one, looking for patterns. He found —" A pause. "He found that the readings, taken together, form a structure. Not randomly. Not coincidentally. A deliberate, organized structure that Darro describes in Volume Five as —" He checked his notes — "'a form of encoding I cannot decrypt but can prove is intentional, because the probability of it arising from random sensor variance is approximately one in a number I have declined to write because it would require new notation.'"
Maev stared at him. "It was communicating."
"Or leaving a record," Pol said. "We don't know which. We don't know if the distinction matters." He paused. "Volume Six is the appendix he added this morning. It's an analysis of the structure in Volume Five. He's managed to partially decode it."
The air in the room seemed to change.
"Partially," Maev said.
"Partially."
"What has he decoded?"
Pol reached into his jacket and produced a single sheet of paper — separate from the volumes, folded once. He unfolded it and set it on the table between them.
It contained three lines.
Maev read them.
She read them again.
She looked up at Pol.
"And Volume Seven?" she asked. Her voice was very steady. She was proud of how steady it was.
"Volume Seven," Pol said, "is blank."
She blinked. "Blank."
"Every page. Four hundred and twelve pages, all blank. Darro's note at the beginning of Volume Seven says:" Pol unfolded a second piece of paper and read aloud. "'Volume Seven represents the portion of the encoded structure I was able to identify but not decode. I am leaving the pages blank rather than omitting them because I feel it is important to document the scale of what I do not understand. The blank pages are not empty. They are full of things I do not yet have the tools to read. I wanted there to be a record of that gap. I wanted it to take up space.'"
Silence.
Outside, the city went about its business.
Somewhere below them a transit line hummed past the spire.
"He wanted the not-knowing to take up space," Maev said softly.
"Yes."
She looked at the three lines on the sheet of paper between them. She looked at them for a long time.
"We need to reconvene the full team," she said. "Theology Division. The analysts. Watch Commander Rell. All of them."
"When?"
"Now." She stood. She picked up the sheet of paper. She folded it again, precisely, and placed it in her jacket pocket. "And Pol — "
"Yes?"
"Wake up Darro Fen."
Pol raised an eyebrow. "You said he needed to sleep."
"He did. Now he needs to be awake." She moved toward the door. "Because I have questions that only he can answer and they cannot wait." She paused at the threshold. "And because whatever he partially decoded — whatever those three lines say — I want him in the room when I ask the others what they mean."
She left.
Pol looked at the seven volumes on the table. At the page-filling number in Volume Four. At the four hundred and twelve blank pages of things no one yet had the tools to read.
He thought about Darro, who had sat for sixty-one hours with data that would not let him stop, who had apologized for thoroughness, who had left four hundred blank pages rather than pretend the gap wasn't there.
He thought about the smile on day eleven.
He thought about the star, seventeen billion light-years away.
He picked up his communication device and called Darro Fen.
It rang once.
Darro picked up immediately.
"I wasn't sleeping," Darro said, before Pol could speak.
"I know," Pol said.
"I was thinking about Volume Seven."
"I know."
A pause.
"She read it," Darro said. It wasn't a question.
"She read it."
"And the three lines?"
"She has them."
Another pause. Longer.
"Pol," Darro said, very quietly. "The three lines — I need you to understand, when I decoded them, I checked my work. I checked it eleven times. I used three different decryption frameworks. They all produced the same output."
"I know," Pol said.
"The structure in the sensor data — it wasn't a message for us. I don't think it even knew we were reading it. It was — it was thinking. Out loud. In a medium it didn't realize we could partially access. Those three lines are —" He stopped.
"Darro."
"They're a thought," Darro said. "Partial. Incomplete. Like catching three words of a sentence in a language you barely speak, spoken by someone who didn't know you were listening." He paused. "But those three words — Pol, those three words imply a sentence that I cannot — I have been trying to reconstruct what the full sentence might be for the last eight hours and every time I think I have it, it gets larger. Every time I think I understand the shape of it, there is more shape."
Pol said nothing.
"Come in," he said finally. "The Director wants you in the room."
"I'll be there in twenty minutes."
"Fifteen, if you can."
A brief pause.
"I'll be there in ten," Darro said.
He was there in eight.
The three lines on the sheet of paper, decoded from the structure in the sensor data, translated from a mathematical encoding into the nearest Kerevath linguistic equivalent, read as follows:
— still becoming —
— the question has not yet finished asking itself —
— I wonder if it knows I am watching it grow —
The third line had a word in it that Darro could not translate cleanly. The nearest equivalent he had found, after eight hours of searching the entire Kerevath linguistic archive, was a word that had been extinct for six hundred years — used only once, in a poem written by a philosopher who had died without disciples, about the specific feeling of watching something you love move toward its fullest possible form, knowing you will outlive the moment but cherishing it anyway.
The extinct word meant, approximately:
Proud.
End of Chapter 3
CHAPTER 4 Testimony of the Watch Commander
Watch Commander Issel Rell had testified in front of review boards, military tribunals, safety inquiries, and once — memorably, in the fourth year of her career — a court martial that had ultimately concluded in her favor, mostly because the alternative conclusion would have required the military to admit that the situation she had responded to made no rational sense and she had simply made the best decisions available to someone operating without rational sense to guide her.
She had testified clearly in all of those settings. Calmly. Precisely. She had a gift for formal statement — the ability to strip an experience down to its relevant components and present them in order, without editorializing, without emotional coloring, without the messy contextual debris that turned clear testimony into confused testimony.
She walked into the Bureau of Unclassified Phenomena's fourteenth-floor conference room and sat down across from Director Maev Sonn, Senior Archivist Pol Dren, Senior Analyst Darro Fen, Senior Theologian Arras, Junior Theologian Wess, and Consultant Fen — and for the first time in fifteen years of testimony, she felt the precise components of an experience resist being stripped into order.
Because some things, she was discovering, did not strip cleanly.
Some things left residue.
"Thank you for coming back, Commander," Director Sonn said.
"You didn't give me much choice," Issel said. Not rudely. Factually.
"No. I didn't." Maev folded her hands on the table. "Your initial testimony was thorough. We have questions that go beyond it."
"I assumed." Issel looked around the table. She recognized Pol from the initial debrief. She didn't know the others but she could categorize them — administrative, analytical, theological. The theological presence was new. She wasn't sure whether to find it reassuring or alarming. She settled on alarming. "What do you want to know?"
"Everything you didn't put in the initial report," Pol said.
Issel looked at him. "That's a broad mandate."
"We have time."
"Do we?" She glanced at the seven grey volumes stacked at the end of the table. "Is that the analysis?"
"Yes," Darro said. He had the look of someone who had been awake too long and had passed through tired into a state on the other side of tired that didn't have a clean name. "All four thousand three hundred and twelve pages."
Issel stared at the volumes. "For eleven days of data."
"The data was cooperative," Darro said, in a tone that suggested cooperative was not the word he actually wanted to use but was the most professional one available.
Issel looked back at Maev. "All right," she said. "What specifically are you asking about?"
"The moment of eye contact," Maev said.
The room became very still.
Issel had known this was coming. She had known it from the moment she submitted the initial report and left that detail in — had considered taking it out, had decided that omitting it would be professionally dishonest, had written it in the careful neutral language of official testimony and then spent three days wondering if she had made a mistake. "I documented that in section four of the initial report," she said.
"You documented the fact of it," Pol said. "Not the experience of it."
"The experience of it isn't relevant to —"
"Commander." Maev's voice was not unkind. "We have four thousand three hundred and twelve pages of sensor data that partially decoded into three lines suggesting that what you observed has been in existence since before this universe. We have a theological division that has formally concluded their framework is insufficient. We have a mathematician whose theoretical paper from three hundred years ago predicted the existence of exactly this kind of entity and died never knowing she was right." A pause. "The experience of it is relevant. Please."
Issel was quiet for a moment.
Outside, a transit line hummed past.
"Off the record?" she said.
"On the record," Maev said. "Everything. Please."
Another pause. Longer.
"All right," Issel said.
She folded her hands on the table. She had the posture of someone bracing, not for impact, but for the effort of accurate description.
"On day three," she said, "I increased the observation frequency. Standard protocol when an anomaly persists past forty-eight hours. We moved from passive scanning to active observation — which means a dedicated watch rotation, someone physically present at the sensor array at all times, rather than automated monitoring." She paused. "I took the first rotation myself. Four hours. I sat at the array and I watched the readings."
"What did the readings show?" Darro asked, leaning forward slightly.
"The same thing they showed on day one. Null signature. Empty space. Except —" She stopped.
"Except?" Pol prompted.
"Except on day one, the null signature felt like — like looking at a blank wall. Absence. Nothing there." She paused, choosing words with visible care. "On day three, the null signature felt like looking at a blank wall and understanding that something was on the other side of it. Not hearing it. Not seeing evidence of it. Just — knowing. The way you know sometimes, in a dark room, that you are not alone, before you hear or see anything that confirms it." She looked around the table. "I documented the readings. I did not document that distinction because I didn't think it belonged in an official sensor analysis."
"But you felt it," Consul Fen said.
"I felt it consistently, across every rotation I personally staffed, from day three onward." Issel paused. "And I wasn't the only one. I interviewed my rotation staff informally — off the books, I'll admit that now — and all seven of them reported the same thing. The sense of presence on the other side of the absence."
"You interviewed them off the books," Maev said.
"I didn't want to generate paperwork that I couldn't support with hard data," Issel said, with the tone of someone who was aware this was going to be a point of contention and had decided to address it directly. "A watch commander submitting a report that says my entire rotation staff felt something watching them through the null signature is not the kind of report that advances anyone's career."
"Fair," said Pol.
"Diplomatically put," said Wess, who clearly agreed but felt the need to be somewhat judicial about it.
"The eye contact," Maev said, returning. "Day eleven. Walk us through it."
Issel took a breath.
"I was on rotation. Hour two. The readings had been — different, that day. From the first hour of my rotation, the variance readings were elevated. Not dramatically. Not enough to trigger an automatic alert. But elevated from the baseline we'd established over the previous ten days." She looked at Darro. "That's in your data."
"Page two thousand and forty-one," Darro confirmed immediately, with the reflexive precision of someone who had lived inside four thousand pages long enough to have them memorized. "Day eleven, variance elevation began at approximately the start of your rotation. I noted it. I didn't know at the time that you were on rotation. That's — that's interesting."
"Is it?" Issel asked.
"It might mean it knew you were watching," Darro said, very carefully. "Specifically you."
Silence.
"Continue," Maev said quietly.
"Hour two," Issel said again, finding her place. "The readings spiked. Not gradually — suddenly. The null signature shifted from the pattern we'd established to something that Darro apparently spent several hundred pages analyzing and I can only describe as — the readings stopped looking like empty space and started looking like a door."
"A door," Wess repeated.
"I know how that sounds."
"No, I —" Wess glanced at Arras. "That's actually consistent with a classification in the theological literature. A threshold manifestation. When an entity of significant power chooses to make itself — accessible. It's described in three separate primary sources as feeling like the appearance of a door where there was previously a wall."
Issel stared at Wess. "I'm in the theological literature now?"
"Not you specifically," Arras said. "The phenomenon. But your description of it is — yes. Consistent."
"Wonderful," Issel said, flatly. "The readings looked like a door. I noted the spike. I was reaching for the alert panel — the variance had hit the level that required me to notify my superior officer — and I looked up from the panel to the observation window." She paused. "We had a direct observation window in addition to the sensor array. Standard installation. Most of the time it looks out at empty space, and the sensors are more useful than the window because there's nothing to see. But protocol says you maintain both."
"And through the window," Pol said.
"Through the window," Issel said, "I saw him."
The word him landed in the room differently than any of the preceding words had. Nobody moved.
"Not a reading," she continued. "Not a sensor interpretation. Not a variance on a graph. Through the physical observation window — through actual light arriving at actual eyes — I saw him. Standing in open space without a suit. Without anything." She paused. "He looked — I need to be precise here, because this matters —he looked like a person. Not like a cosmic entity. Not like a god. Not like a dimensional anomaly. He looked like a person standing very still in the middle of something enormous, the way a person stands in the middle of a vast landscape and is made small by it and also somehow remains themselves regardless." Another pause. "He was looking at something. Not at us. Not at the station. At something in the direction of —"
"The star," Darro said softly. "Seventeen billion light-years, bearing two-seven-seven by forty-one."
"I didn't know the bearing at the time. I only knew he was looking past us. Like we were — like we were in the frame of his vision but not the subject of it." She paused. "And then he turned."
"He turned toward you," Pol said.
"He turned," Issel said precisely, "and looked at the station. At the observation window. At —" She stopped. She recalibrated. "At me. I believe he looked at me specifically. I have no empirical data to support that. I have only the experience of it, which was —"
She stopped again.
The room waited.
"I have been trying to find language for this for three days," she said. "The experience of looking at the observation window and understanding that whatever was on the other side of it was looking back — not at the station, not at the species, not at the civilization — at me, specifically, as an individual — while simultaneously understanding that this was the least significant thing about the moment —" She shook her head. "I looked at something that had been alive since before this universe was a universe. Something that had watched three universes before ours begin and end. Something for which the entire span of Kerevath Dominion history — six thousand years, four billion people, everything we have ever built or thought or lost — is less than a single second of its attention." She looked at her hands. "And it looked at me. And the look was not contemptuous. Not threatening. Not — it didn't feel the way I would expect being observed by something infinitely more powerful to feel. It felt —" She found the word. She had been searching for it for three days and it arrived now, in this room, in the presence of six people who were watching her with complete stillness. "Gentle," she said. "The way you look at something small and real and specific that you find genuinely interesting. The way — the way a naturalist looks at something in the field that is behaving in an unexpected and delightful way." She paused. "It looked at me the way you look at something you are glad exists."
Nobody spoke.
Wess had stopped taking notes at some point. Arras was very still. Consultant Fen had her eyes closed, in the manner of someone listening with their entire body. Darro was looking at the table. Pol was looking at Issel. Maev was looking at the three lines on the sheet of paper she had placed face-down in front of her when the testimony began.
"And then?" Maev asked.
"And then it smiled," Issel said. "Not at me. Past me. At the star, I think, in retrospect. At whatever it saw in the direction of that star that we couldn't see. And the smile —" She paused one final time. "The smile was the worst part. Not because it was frightening. Because it was the most genuine thing I have ever seen on any face, in any circumstance, in fifteen years of service. Whatever it was looking at, in the direction of that star — it made something that has existed since before this universe felt something like — like the specific feeling of looking forward to something. Like anticipation." She looked up. "Something that old, and it was looking forward to something."
She sat back.
"That's everything I didn't put in the initial report," she said.
The room was very quiet for a long time.
Then Darro said, without looking up from the table: "The third line."
"What?" Issel asked.
Maev reached out and turned the sheet of paper face-up. Slid it across the table to Issel.
Issel read the three lines.
She read them again.
She looked at the third line for a long time.
— I wonder if it knows I am watching it grow —
"What is it watching grow?" she asked.
"We don't know," Maev said.
"The star?" Pol offered. "Whatever the star is becoming, in six million years?"
"Maybe," Darro said. "Or — or something smaller than a star. Something that requires watching at a different scale." He finally looked up. "In the observation record — Watch Commander, in your interview of your rotation staff. The ones you conducted off the books."
"Yes?"
"You said they all reported the sense of being watched through the null signature. All seven of them." He paused. "Did any of them report being looked at? Individually. The way you were?"
Issel was very still.
"One," she said. "My youngest officer. Second week of her posting. She didn't say anything to me directly — I found it in her personal log when I was reviewing station records after the incident. She wrote —" Issel paused, recalling precisely. "'I know this is not a professional observation but I looked at the observation window at the third hour today and I felt certain that whatever is in that space has noticed me. Not the station. Me. It knew my name. I don't know how I know this. I don't know why it would know my name. I don't know why knowing that it knows my name makes me feel less afraid rather than more afraid. I am going to not think about this too hard.'"
Darro nodded slowly. "She felt less afraid," he said.
"Yes."
"Not more afraid. Less."
"Yes."
He looked at the three lines again. At the third line. At the word grow.
"I think," he said, very slowly, "that it isn't watching the star."
Maev looked at him.
"I think it's watching us," he said.
"The Dominion?" Pol asked.
"No." Darro shook his head. "Not the Dominion. Not the civilization. Not —" He stopped. He started again. "The three lines together. Still becoming. The question has not yet finished asking itself. I wonder if it knows I am watching it grow." He paused. "What if the question that hasn't finished asking itself is — us? Sentient life. Consciousness. The entire project of a universe producing beings that can think and ask questions and file reports about things that exceed their framework." He looked at Issel. "What if it's been here this whole time — watching this universe, watching the life in it — because it finds the whole thing — the whole enormous messy project of us — worth watching?"
Silence.
"Worth watching," Maev repeated slowly.
"And the smile on day eleven," Darro said, "wasn't about the star. It was about something the star is going to produce. In six million years. Something — someone — in the direction of that star." He paused. "Something it's been waiting for. Something it's — proud of. Before it's even arrived."
Watch Commander Issel Rell looked at the three lines on the sheet of paper.
She thought about the smile.
About the gentleness of the look.
About her youngest officer, writing in her personal log that knowing she was seen made her less afraid.
About something that had existed since before this universe, looking past four billion people at one young officer on a fourteen-floor observation station, in a region of space that physics had quietly given up on — and finding them, specifically, individually, in all the vast indifferent darkness —
worth watching.
She sat with that for a moment.
Then she said, very quietly:
"I think I need to read those four thousand pages."
"I'll have a copy sent to your quarters," Darro said.
"All seven volumes?"
"All seven."
She nodded.
"Don't skip Volume Seven," Darro said.
"The blank one?"
"Especially the blank one."
The meeting ended two hours later.
They filed out in ones and twos — Wess already composing something on their tablet, Arras walking with the careful deliberateness of someone rethinking a framework they had spent decades building. Consultant Fen paused at the door and looked back at the seven grey volumes still on the table.
"Four thousand pages," she said to no one in particular. "And the most important thing in it is three lines."
"And four hundred blank pages," Pol said.
She looked at him.
"The things we don't know yet," he said.
She nodded once and left.
Pol gathered the volumes. Darro was still sitting at the table, looking at nothing, thinking with the intensity of someone who had decoded three lines of an ancient thought and spent eight hours reconstructing the sentence and was not done yet, would not be done for a long time, possibly not ever.
"Darro," Pol said.
"I know," Darro said. "I'm going home."
"Are you actually going home this time?"
A pause.
"I'm going somewhere with a desk," Darro said.
Pol nodded. Close enough.
He left Darro with his thoughts.
He left the conference room with the seven volumes.
He left the fourteenth floor of the Kerevath Administrative Spire with the sheet of paper in his pocket — three lines, and the word that meant proud, and the growing, quiet, enormous understanding that somewhere in this universe, something so vast it predated physics was watching the whole improbable project of sentient life with the patient, specific, gentle attention of someone who had been waiting a very long time to see how it turned out.
He stepped into the transit corridor.
He thought about the smile.
He thought about the star.
He thought about six million years, and what they might produce, and whether whatever arrived at the end of that span would know it was being watched.
Whether it would know it was being —
He stopped walking.
He stood very still in the middle of the transit corridor, people moving around him, the city humming outside the windows, four billion lives going about the business of not knowing.
He thought about the third line.
I wonder if it knows I am watching it grow.
He thought about the word that meant proud.
He thought: it already loves it.
Whatever is coming —
it already loves it.
He stood there for a long time.
Then he went back to his desk.
He had a great deal more work to do.